I’m conscious. Are you? (22.10.2024)

Like many people, I’m fascinated by the octopus. It’s such a bizarre, intelligent creature and yet it lacks a central nervous system and only lives a few years. As Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote in ‘Other Minds’, it is probably the closest we’ll ever get to an alien intelligence.

At its most fundamental, consciousness is about having experiences and being aware of them. The octopus has a ‘what-it-is-like’ to be an octopus, just as I have a ‘what-it-is-like’ to be me. When I stub my toe, I not only feel the pain but I knowthat I am in pain too.  This makes consciousness supremely subjective. I feel my pain but I can never feel yours. I recognise pain-behaviour when I see you grab your foot and hop about, and it’s reasonable for me to conclude that you’re in pain but – and this is the issue – you might be acting. After all, that is what actors do, they fake it.  In other words, I know that I’m conscious yet I don’t know that you are. I just assume it, but assumption is not the same as fact.

This is why the hard problem of consciousness doesn’t seem to go away. No one has offered a definite answer to the problem. And this should bother us because we extend ethical concerns to those creatures we believe are conscious. We worry about farming methods and we worry about AI, yet if we can’t decide what consciousness is then we’re going to get ourselves in a muddle and the impact on ethics, government and business will be enormous.

One possible solution is that consciousness requires a disembodied soul. If you don’t have a soul, you aren’t conscious.  This was Descartes’s argument. We’re composed of two substances, one physical and one immaterial. These interact in a living person, separating again at death. Initially attractive, this is an odd position. For one thing, how on earth does an immaterial substance (located nowhere in space) interact with a material substance located in space?

Most people today accept that we’re made of one substance, the physical. Yet, so are robots and most of us want to differentiate between the two. Perhaps consciousness is about organic matter only (Searle) or maybe consciousness emerges from a physical brain as something totally different; it is a by-product much like heaviness is a by-product of wet clothes. But this brings us back to the octopus: it doesn’t have a brain and yet it is manifestly conscious.

Some people argue that everything is conscious. The proton has its proton-like experience and the atom has its atom-like experience. As we move from the micro to the macro scale, sophisticated consciousness emerges.

There is a lot to be said for this position but I suspect we’ll never reach a definite answer. Either we don’t have the right physics to explain it or we expect too much of our intelligence (our brain is just an evolved organ after all). Or maybe Wittgenstein was right all along: just as the eye can’t see itself because it’s the means by which all things are seen, so consciousness can’t know itself because it’s the means by which all things are known. If you’re wondering what I mean, try and get your eye to see itself. It can’t; the mirror is just a reflection. Maybe the same holds for consciousness.