Philosophy of Mind (Becoming, Part 3)
Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 03:32PM 
In the late 1920s, quantum physicist Neils Bohr, alongside some of his closest colleagues, helped to define what came to be called the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. It was developed at Bohr's institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, and was designed specifically to deal with the probabilistic and counterintuitive results from quantum experiments that had been performed throughout the Western world during the previous few decades. The goal of the Interpretation was to define, before the field went any further, how science was to digest such strange experimental results for the future of professional science. The Interpretation therefore dictated the removal of any and all speculation about the "reasons why" of QM, in the interest of "just getting down to the science of it." Observational data drawn from quantum experiments, however paradoxical, stood.
The methodology formulated at Copenhagen dealt the final blow to metaphysics' already weary relationship with modern science. From here on out philosophical discussions about the nature of quantum physics, outside of the principles laid out in Copenhagen, were considered a realm of trivial speculation, capable only of asking more questions and thereby suffocating any future scientific progress.
Nevertheless, many important questions remained, and needed to be answered. Though the quantum scientists at Copenhagen chose the path of "just so," such a declaration is wholly unsatisfying to the human mind. As the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle puts it, human beings "by nature" have an insatiable thirst to perceive and understand reality on a fundamental level. It's obvious if one views Aristotle's veritable library of written works, that he himself took this view very much to heart. So how can the Western world's 2300 year-old supposition that a logically discernible universe exists, hold up against a probabilistic, fundamental quantum reality?
Albert Einstein had many misgivings about the Copenhagen Interpretation, and in the interest of retaining a rational view of science, he independently continued to pursue his Theory of Everything- an ultimate set of unifying principles that could govern all matter in the universe, including quantum mechanics. In his final days, Einstein is said to have sat up all day in his hospital bed, scribbling scores of equations into notebooks. He died having left an indelible mark on the scientific world, but with his dream of a final theory left unrealized.
As I mentioned in my previous post, Einstein felt that quantum scientists must have been missing something critically important to yield such strange experimental results. As he famously put it, "God does not play dice." Furthermore, setting aside the fact that Copenhagen thoroughly accepted such probabilistic foundations, its definition of reality "as observed" by quantum experiments is even more troublesome. This view holds that the experiments alone and the observations they yield, are in themselves the true creators of reality. "If this is true," I wondered, "doesn't it completely undermine the possibility of an 'objective' reality? If reality is defined solely by user-subjective experiments and systems of measurement, doesn't it follow that the entire realm of scientific inquiry ceases to stand on solid ground?"
In order to continue my quest to understand the world around me on a more fundamental level, and more importantly to further define my harmonic experiences within that world, I felt that I needed to have at least a rough sense of what perception and consciousness are, and how they have been seen by scientists and philosophers throughout the ages. What do we mean when we talk about consciousness? Can it be studied objectively? If so, what have we discovered about consciousness thus far, and how does it relate to our understanding of the quantum world?
Rene Descartes was one of the most prominent French philosophers of mind during the scientific Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. Descartes held at the forefront of his philosophical and scientific canon something called mind-body dualism. This view assumes that human beings are made up of two different kinds of substances, one which is material- our organs, our skin, our blood and brains, and one that is immaterial and spiritual- our mind (or soul). This was not a new point of view by any means. In fact it dates back several thousand years, to Indian mythology. From India it weaved its way over to Ancient Greece, to Pythagoras and Socrates, and eventually reached Plato and Aristotle in the third century BCE, whose works lay nearly unchallenged until the European Enlightenment.
Unlike the majority of today's modern scientists, the scientists of the Enlightenment were at the time still generally religious individuals, so metaphysical discussions regarding the "souls" of men and the like were not yet off the table. To Descartes, the "mind" was a divine substance- one of pure rationality handed down to us from Above. As Descartes and many at the time saw it, the reason humans possessed their minds was simply that we were the only beings in existence deemed worthy of possessing them, and that through our minds we were directly connected to a supernatural, otherworldly realm.
Descartes expressed his first philosophy of mind in Meditations on First Philosophy, where he asked himself how he knew for sure that the day to day reality that he perceived existed at all. He mused that an evil demon could in fact be manipulating his perception, tricking him into seeing an entirely illusory reality. He found that he could in fact cast into doubt everything and everyone around him, even the existence of his own body- but because he could think and think about himself, it could not be denied that his mind, and thus his spiritual essence, existed. It was from this train of thought that the famous phrase emerged: "Cogito, ergo sum" or "I think, therefore I exist." (also "Je pense, donc je suis" in Descartes' own colloquial French)
Possibly the most important thing that Descartes accomplished was to identify the mind as synonymous with consciousness and self awareness, as well as connecting its operation to the physical brain, where he claimed the mind (or soul) was "seated". Before this, it was never considered that the mind had any relationship to the physical body, and further, that it could be studied scientifically. Despite his heavy reliance on pure rationality to develop his philosophies, spending countless hours in his bed pondering the nature of mind, he was no "armchair" philosopher. In fact he was an active empirical scientist and an adept mathematician. Herein he used his logic to expand the realms of mathematics (specifically geometry and optics), effectively becoming "the father of modern mathematics", and inspiring Sir Issac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, who among their own various Enlightenment era achievements, invented calculus.
In the course of his works however, Descartes was confronted with as many new problems as those he had figured out how to solve, philosophically speaking. Mind-body dualism since its inception has been labeled by many fellow thinkers of the Enlightenment as being logically flawed. Even if one accepts the religious origin of the mind as a soul or purely spiritual substance, there was always a question of how the mind actually connected to the body, which has come to be known as the mind-body problem.
During the span of his lifetime, Descartes was unable to answer this question satisfactorily. For example, in many of his writings, he suggested that the pineal gland, situated deep within the brain, was in fact the seat of the soul. Of course this has since been proven false from a functional perspective (the pineal gland is part of the endocrine system), but even the relatively primitive knowledge of the brain's architecture during the 17th century contradicted many of the functions of the pineal gland that Descartes described in his writings.
Despite dualism's shortcomings, Descartes had a strong following, and was a prominent figure in the budding scientific community of the Enlightenment. Naturally, it wasn't long before alternative philosophies of mind would rise up to meet him. The most prominent of these is monism, which postulates that everything in existence, whatever its role, body or mind, is made up of the same single substance. Monism was popular among the Ancient Greek Pre-Socratic philosophers, such as Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, and eventually Democritus, who predicted the existence of atoms.
Monism's most popular Enlightenment-era incarnation was called materialism, harbored in the mid 17th century by Thomas Hobbes, notorious for his landmark book Leviathan (in which he declared that life was "nasty, brutish and short"). He and Descartes volleyed refutations back and forth throughout their lifetimes. Hobbes's version of materialism leaves no place for the otherworldly or supernatural. In some of the more isolated passages of his work, Hobbes went as far as to say that God was also material (or "corporeal", as he put it).
Throughout the subsequent few hundred years, the basic forms of dualism and materialism would continue to smack up against each other. Those who became less adamant about the tenets of a pure Hobbesean-materialist perspective decided instead that the study of mind per Descartes was simply irrelevant- that there was no mind-body problem at all. To them it made no sense to even speak about the nature of mind within the hard empirical sciences.
Thus materialism was split into two camps, those who dealt with a purely mechanistic- biological study of the body, and a separate group of psychologists who formed the train of thought known as behaviorism, wherein the mind was seen as a sort of "black box"- solely analyzable based on reactions to stimuli, and whose physical workings had no impact on (or were simply irrelevant to) behavioral functions. Experiments by famed psychologist BF Skinner on the reward/punishment behavior of pigeons and rats reinforced this view. Skinner argued that these principles could also be applied to humans, but behaviorism has since been widely, if not universally, discredited.
Cartesian Dualism, the idea that mind and body are two separate substances, survives today in a slightly altered concept known as property dualism. The mind from a property-dualist perspective is essentially based in the material human brain, but instead of being an ethereal substance tethered to a gland deep within the brain, the mind is considered a mere property of the physical functions of the brain.
The most popular scientific and philosophical view of the mind today is called functionalism. It is conceptually neutral between dualism and materialism. Instead of dealing with the mental as a substance, it discusses mental "states" that don't depend upon the internal constitutions of brain cells or regions, but rather on the way that each part functions- in essence the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part. Mental states are therefore functional states of the entire organism. This view is along the lines of behaviorism, but unlike behaviorism it does not completely negate the importance of the physical systems underlying mental processes.
Now that the physical world is brought back into this pragmatic and materially agreeable functionalist perspective of mind, so return also the actual functions of the brain and nervous system. When the brain is analyzed closely, each of its neurons (component nerve cells) has a multitude of physical connections to one other via synapses, the structures that allow neurons to communicate with each other, electrically and chemically. During a human thought process or action these synaptic connections "fire" between neurons and form meaningful relationships. However, there are so many of these connections between the trillions of neurons in the human brain, that thought processes very quickly become too complex to follow. In fact, the number of possible neuronal connections in a single human brain comes out to something along the lines of 10 to the millionth power, outnumbering the atoms thought to exist in the known universe. So you can start to imagine how the daunting complexity of the brain might seem to a purely reductionist view of mind- an attempt to trace even the simplest of mental processes through its almost innumerable neuronal connections becomes extremely difficult.
Since the days of Ancient Greece, reductionism has been the dominant form of scientific inquiry. And understandably so- most things in nature can be better functionally understood by breaking them down and analyzing their component parts.
For instance, a tree can be better understood by dividing into its roots, its leaves, its trunk, its bark, etc. Each of these components plays a different role in the functions of a tree, all of which are indispensable to the tree's function as a whole. Organisms in general, whether they are plants or animals can be better understood by categorizing them into smaller groups, such as mammals and reptiles, grasses and trees, etc. Water can be better understood by its molecular components-chemical/electromagnetic bonds, that are reducible even further to hydrogen and oxygen atoms.
However, as I outlined in my previous post, we run into trouble when we reach the quantum (subatomic) level. Relationships between particles at this level are probabilistic and unpredictable. And while we've managed to harness a fair amount of quantum mechanics within our modern technology (and continue to do so), our understanding of it remains a relatively ineffective way to examine macroscopic natural phenomena.
Consciousness is no different in this respect. A purely reductionist view of consciousness at the outset would attempt to confine thoughts and actions to single neurons, or at least to certain parts of the brain that are designated for specific processes. However, recent experiments, involving the analysis of blood flow throughout the brain, have shown us that mental activity, even for the most mundane human tasks, tends to spread its patterned neural firings out into completely different parts of the brain, simultaneously. In light of these findings, it would be difficult to paint a picture of mind that consists of a one-action-per-brain-region, or a one-thought-per-neuron relationship. Mental processes are far too complex to isolate in such a way.
As if attempting to trace mental processes through the trillions of neurons in the brain weren't difficult enough- on the subatomic level, were we to attempt to follow such processes through dense clouds of unpredictable quantum particle strangeness, the complexity of interactions within a quantum system would become overwhelming just to think about, let alone study empirically.
An alternative to the reductionist method of understanding consciousness is to flip the switch the other way. The "emergent" view of consciousness, examines the patterns that emerge from component interactions instead of the properties of the components on their own. These dynamical patterns of interaction give way to entirely new, novel mental properties. Within the context of the brain these are known as emergent properties of higher brain functions. Consciousness can be seen as such a property, as it emerges fully-formed from the neural activity in the brain.
Proponents of the emergent view of consciousness tend to hold in common a "layered" conception of nature. On a base fundamental level they see the world as physical, followed by chemical, biological, and eventually psychological and social. This means that though human beings are essentially a pile of atoms, they are also a swathe of chemicals, as well as a barrage of biological fluids and organs, eventually "emerging" as a human being. If this concept is taken further, it can be used to compose even higher layers (or levels) of complexity, analyzing a human being's self-consciousness and its relationships with others like itself. All of these various layers are a valid view of what a person is, but the layer upon which she is understood plays into how we interact with her and how she interacts with the world.
This understanding can be effectively applied to any complex system. Going back to our previous analogy, a tree is a great big pile of atoms, but it is also a collection of chemicals, wood and water, branches, bark and leaves, all of which eventually emerge as a tree, a forest, etc. Systems emerge from one another, creating new overarching layers of complexity. The most important difference here is that emergentism is interested in the interactive relationships between the different layers of complexity and the dynamical patterns that result, not simply that they "make up" each superseding layer.
This vision of reality firmly separates the emergent view from the reductive materialist view. Emergence is a study of relationships, whereas reductive materialism is a study of mechanics. This disagreement in method is why the pure material sciences have traditionally split off from studies of human consciousness- a division that had been rationalized by the scientific community because reductive materialism offers no effective means to understand such a complex phenomenon. Instead, studies of consciousness are generally thrown into the "less serious" realms of psychological and philosophical speculation.
As I came to more fully understand the historical banishment of consciousness studies from hard empirical science, I couldn't help but find it ironic. If our conscious minds are the most important component in the quantum experimental loop, why then do we know next to nothing about it? We generally know how to use it in terms of a quantum experiment, as defined by the Copenhagen Interpretation, and perhaps that's enough. But it's not very encouraging to conceive of the fact that, despite our exhaustive studies of celestial orbits throughout history, our creation of new chemical compounds, our classification of organisms and the studies of their behaviors- that we still have yet to understand the most basic, everyday workings in the universe- not only on the paradoxical, counter-intuitive subatomic level, but also how any part of the universe (on its various levels) is perceived- through our conscious interaction with it.
By the end of May 2009, though I had barely scratched the surface of the vast and varied landscape of the Philosophy of Mind, I still had managed to grasp its lengthy historical development- from its earliest ancient conceptions, to its modern interpretations. Along the way, I'd witnessed from a brand new perspective, the beginnings of science's formal break from metaphysics during the Enlightenment, to the final showdown during the quantum revolution. Perhaps most importantly I came to understand the abject failure of a purely reductive materialist mindset to describe the most important component of the quantum process: human consciousness.
At first I felt my journey had reached a dead end- that even a scant explanation of my harmonic experience seemed far out of reach. But eventually I began to see the true value of this part of the journey. My further studies of emergent phenomena heralded my inexorable return to the science of complexity.
When I brushed up against complexity before, it was while I was studying chaos theory back in October of 2008, but at that point I'd viewed it as a mere withered extension of an idea that could only ever amount to a very limited description of reality. It seemed a halfhearted philosophy, designed to over-simplify what should be seen as a completely humbling, massively complex universe. As it turned out, I was completely wrong. The science of complex systems is in fact a burgeoning field, with growing popularity and relevance, and as I came to realize, clearly deserved a thorough second look...
Bibliography:
Bedau, Mark "Downward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergence" from Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science, MIT Press, 2008
Chalmers, David "Strong vs. Weak Emergence" Paper online at author's own Consc.net
Hofstadter, Douglas R. "I Am A Strange Loop" Basic Books, 2008
McLaughlin, Brian "The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism"
Rosenblum, Bruce and Fred Kuttner "The Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness", Oxford University Press 2008
Searle, John "Reductionism and the Irreducibility of Consciousness" from Chapter 5 of The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press 1992
From The Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Robinson, H "Dualism"
Smith, Kurt "Descartes Life and Works"
O'Connor, Timothy and Wong, Hong Yu "Emergent Properties"
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