Philosophy of mind and the nature of consciousness 


The nature of mind, body, and the relationship between the two has been a favourite topic of philosophers for generations. In a previous essay I explored the nature of this relationship and concluded that both mental and physical properties were aspects of a single, integrated reality that combines elements of both. My most recent essay takes this one step further, examining the nature of this reality according to Bertrand Russell's theory of neutral monism (which basically means that everything is made of the same stuff, which is neither mental nor physical). Interestingly, Russell concludes that reality is actually temporal in nature; that is, the universe consists not of objects or things, but of processes or events, and he expands this definition to include both aspects of quantum physics and the nature of mind and consciousness.

This is a fascinating area of philosophy, and one that I am personally very interested in. In the course of writing this essay I had a number of thoughts that have substantially developed my own understanding of such matters, and I have attempted to summarise these below in the remainder of this entry. 

What is consciousness?

The fundamental question that underlies all study of the mind and consciousness is, quite simply, what is it? We talk about consciousness and mental phenomena as if we know exactly what we mean, and in a sense we do, but when we try to define them in a clear and consistent way, it is far from clear that this is in fact the case. Some philosophers maintain that what we call consciousness is merely a bundle of other properties—the ability to remember, be aware of oneself and one's environment, the ability to reason, and so on—that can each be understood separately, but without any one trait or ability corresponding to what we call 'consciousness'. Others suggest that mental phenomena are some kind of property of either minds or matter in the same way that size or extension are properties of physical objects, but again, it is unclear exactly what we should take this to mean. Such properties are sometimes thought to emerge only once an organism has reached a particular level of complexity, but how and why this occurs remains a mystery.

My own thoughts on the matter are that consciousness consists of essentially two things. Firstly, to be conscious of something is to stand in a particular relationship to it. That is, there is a three-way interaction between the object of consciousness, the subject (or observer), and some sort of structured context, such as the environment along with the subject's memories and experience of it. This relationship results in individual or continuous acts of observation, corresponding to what we would normally call thoughts, sensations and perceptions, depending upon what level of consciousness is involved. This three-way division is at the root of all conscious phenomena and leads ultimately to the formation of a distinct ego or self, which is conceived as being separate from or outside the world, looking in. Although this view is ultimately false, as the self is essentially an integrated part of the 'external' world, the distinction is necessary in order to support the functioning of intentional agents that are able to form their own internal representations of various aspects of their environment as a basis for action; i.e. sentient beings. (Here, 'intentional' simply means that the agent's knowledge is directed towards some other aspect of the world, in the sense that it's private knowledge and representation of its environment are about something. In another context, 'aboutness' might be a suitable adjective to substitute.)

This view leads on naturally to the second observation, which is that consciousness is not a thing or a property, it is a process. One of the reasons that it is so hard to analyse consciousness into its component parts is that it has none, or at least none that exist in space. However, it is possible that it can be broken down in time into finer and finer grained processes, until we reach the fundamental constituents of conscious experience. Another way of putting this might be that physical objects are extended in space, but thought is extended in time, and so any analysis of it must account for its temporal nature by analysing it in terms of the processes by which it is generated, which always take a finite amount of time. This is backed up by the intuition that it is impossible to imagine a conscious state that is entirely static or without change, and that the passing of time is fundamental to our experience of the world (even though it may have no objective basis other than as a measure of change, as I have discussed elsewhere). In a sense, life—that is, our conscious state of being—is made of time, and if we remove time from the picture then we are left with a dead and lifeless thing that is the physical body, but without anyone inhabiting it. No wonder, then, that we take time to be objectively real, as our whole existence depends on it.

To summarise: conscious awareness consists of standing in a particular relation to the world in the context of one's prior knowledge and experience, and consciousness itself is essentially a temporal or time-based phenomena. We could say that physical matter and energy exist in the 'vertical dimension' of space, whereas thought and consciousness exist in the 'horizontal dimension' of time. No wonder the two have proved hard to reconcile as they occupy perpendicular aspects of reality, so to speak, and so appear to constitute entirely different worlds which apparently never meet, and yet have a profound and constant affect upon one another. (Please note that I am using a spatial analogy here purely for illustrative purposes—for more reflection on the fact that time is not a dimension, please see here.)

What is reality?

As if the first question wasn't hard enough, we must now consider the even bigger question of what, at its most fundamental level, does reality actually consist? The intuitive answer—at least in the early part of the 21st Century—is that reality consists of matter and energy interacting in accordance with the laws of physics. However, the existence of such laws relies heavily upon the mechanism of causation, i.e. how one thing causes another, and this remains as mysterious to us now as it was to the philosopher David Hume in the mid-1600s. Even worse, our intuitive ideas about the solidity of matter and the 'solar system' model of the atom have given way to the peculiar laws of quantum mechanics and M-theory in which matter consists largely of empty space, and any apparent solidity or extension is due to billions of tiny quantum interactions between fundamental particles, which create the mere perception of apparently solid objects. On a purely physical level, it would seem that what goes to make up matter and energy is as mysterious and poorly understood as what goes to make up minds and consciousness, suggesting that there may be some deeper force at play. (Oh goodie, I hear you cry—I love it when there's a deeper force at play! ;-)

Enter the theory of neutral monism. To put it in a nutshell, Russell's theory of neutral monism—and I should stress that this is one among many such theories; Spinoza, for example, thought that the universe was the manifestation of God or Nature—suggests that the universe consists not of minds or physical stuff, but of events. By this he means certain mathematical relationships that exist between the various 'happenings' (my word, not his) in the universe, but is close enough to our everyday understanding of the term to make it a worthwhile analogy. Accordingly, both mental and physical phenomena are simply manifestations of certain sequences or groups of events, and their properties can be explained purely in these terms. The significance of what Russell is saying here cannot be underestimated. Any substantial object, right down to the level of fundamental particles such as photons and electrons, is merely a series of events that give rise to the perception of a solid object (e.g. photon or electron), even though no such object really exists. In other words, what we think of as 'things' are merely conjunctions of events; or to use John Stuart Mill's expression, they are what creates “the permanent possibility of sensation”.

To deny the primacy of physical matter is not to deny the existence of reality itself. It merely reformulates it in terms of a different underlying substance; in this case events, rather than objects. Similarly, the properties of mind may be seen as arising from the same basic substance, so that thoughts, perceptions and the like are seen as different relations or groupings of the same underlying events. In other words, both physical and mental phenomena are simply different descriptions or aspects of a single, integrated reality, which consists not of things, but of processes. This view resonates both with the discoveries of modern physics (that the supposedly real world is insubstantial and illusory) and neuroscience, which states that consciousness is not a property, but a process, as previously described. Seen in this way, the age old problem of mind and body simply goes away, and any apparently causal interactions between the two are easily explained in terms of changes in the underlying events becoming manifest as changes to the mind and physical body to which they give rise. Mind and matter are not two separate things, but two different aspects of the same underlying reality, and so of course act as an integrated whole, as we would expect from our own experience.

Miscellanea

Having solved the mind-body problem, Bertrand Russell goes on to discuss in greater detail how the various properties and combinations of events give rise to both physical and mental phenomena. I will not go into any of this here—partly because this entry is long enough already, and partly because I don't know enough about it to give an accurate summary anyway—but I did want to throw in a few other odds and ends that I came across while researching the above.

The first was that mental phenomena, as broadly defined, may not be limited to ourselves and other sentient creatures. The view known as panpsychism attributes such qualities in varying degrees to all things, which is something I actually argued for in my earlier essay. It may be that what we experience as thought, awareness and free will are actually possessed by everything, including inanimate objects and fundamental particles, to a tiny but measurable degree. Only by bringing these elements together in the correct arrangement—or perhaps amplifying them through the physical structure of the brain—can higher-order consciousness occur, and if this is so, it would appear that the very laws of the physics are, at a fundamental level, favourable to the emergence of life and self-awareness. This view is obviously open to criticism, but the basic premise is, I think, defensible, and is certainly compatible with the version of neutral monism described above.

The second, rather intriguing possibility is that consciousness itself may not be limited to within the confines of our own skull. If consciousness occurs as a result of the interaction of the various elements described in the initial section above, it effectively amounts the universe reflecting upon and interacting with itself. There is nothing to say that what we regard to as 'our own' consciousness does not extend right out into the external world; in other words, that the processes that make up conscious thought and awareness must take place entirely within our brains. If consciousness consists of a subject and an object, it may be that far from being a passive participant in the process, both subject and object are united in a single event that constitutes what we recognise as thought; i.e. thoughts and their objects may be one and the same thing. Just as the colour blue is as much a part of the object that we call 'the sky', a sensation within the mind of the observer, such as the thought of a nice cup of tea, is as much a property of the physical object as it is of our own consciousness. This takes the idea that human beings and other intelligent creatures use our physical environment to augment and increase our own intelligence one step further. Perhaps that very intelligence is a product of the physical environment acting in concert with self-awareness to produce what we recognise as intelligent behaviour.

Exploring this view in greater detail is well outside the scope of this blog, but it is an interesting thought that consciousness may not be located entirely inside our own heads (if indeed, it is located anywhere at all). The brain may turn out to be an incredibly sophisticated device that generates, harnesses or otherwise hooks into the 'intelligent' nature of the universe itself, and indeed, it may simply be a matter of perspective as to which one of these interpretations is correct. In any case, it is a complex and fascinating question as to how consciousness could possibly arise, and I hope that this brief introduction has given you an insight into some of the ways that philosophers have attempted to deal with the issue over the ages. 

Posted on Saturday - June 04, 2005 at 12:29 PM            

© 1995-2006