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(As-Is) Consciousness Science

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(As-Is) Consciousness Science Chapter 3 – The Troubles with (As-Is) Consciousness Science The story so far … Consciousness science done properly will take us to science 3.0, solve the science/post-Truth battle … and do a lot more. (See Part 5 for more on ‘a lot more’, on the science/post- Truth reconciliation, and on science 3.0!) I’ve said that the sort of consciousness science we need acutely is conscious-experiential science. In large part, that’s because the experience/world distinction is at the heart of a science/post-Truth fight. (But that’s not the only reason for the experience-focus. The stories we tell about conscious experience turn out to be pivotal in surprisingly many arenas.) In Chapter 2, I introduced angle-bracket symbols so we can get conscious experience into science, in a way that physics recognizes. And at the end of the last Chapter, I tiptoed into the issue at the very crux of all shifts and transformations discussed in this book. Is there any transfer of information from experience, into brain-dynamics? (I’ll ask this same question in different ways, throughout the book. Does experience couple with brain-activity? Does experience play a causal role in report of experience? These are all the same point.) If there isn’t information-transfer from brain-to-experience, we’re fooling ourselves when we talk, write and think about experience! (I’ll explain that more at great length, as we go.) Conscious- experiential science is then meaningless1. If there is information-transfer (and it’s ‘the right kind’), we can reliably talk, write and think about experience. We can do conscious-experiential science. So, which is it? Information transfer (of the right kind)? Or not? That’s what the One Experiment will tell us. And the data from that Experiment will set the direction for science 3.02. That would seem to make for a relatively-straightforward, mostly-descriptive, book. Say a bit more about the role of this ‘information transfer’, in ‘talking about experience’ and in doing consciousness science ‘properly’. Define the One Experiment. (But we already know it has to test for ‘information transfer of the right kind’.). Do a bit more explanation on how the Experiment’s results take us to the next stage of science. Link that next stage to societal, economic and existential benefits. Done! Except it’s not quite so straightforward (Figure 3.1). The academic study of consciousness is currently a fragmented and confused field. Science-as-a-whole also has a fraught relationship with the study of consciousness. (The academic study of consciousness and its scientific study are not one and the same thing! See Figure 3.1.) And there’s an existing sub- field that I call ‘mainstream conscious-experiential science’, which claims to be doing the science of conscious experience, already. It’s ignoring the ‘which is it’ fork-in-the-road I just pointed out. Specifically, it claims that it can do conscious-experiential science relative to an assumption of a standard physics, in which there’s no information-transfer from experience-to-brain. It claims to be doing good science without any need for the One Experiment! As I’ll show later3, this puts mainstream conscious-experiential science in logical contradiction – which is the opposite of rational, scientific, explanation! The Troubles with Consciousness Science Figure 3.1: A Cartoon Map of the Consciousness Science Terrain. Consciousness studies is a broad group of disciplines inside and outside science (green ellipse). Consciousness science is depicted as the part of consciousness studies that also recognizably lies within science (red ellipse). In principle, we could decompose consciousness science into mainstream (black ellipse) and non-mainstream components. (Non-mainstream consciousness science is shown here as the part of the red-green intersection that doesn’t lie inside the black ellipse. Mainstream/non-mainstream demarcations do not correspond to correct/incorrect, or scientific/non-scientific. For example, the work described in this book is non-mainstream but entirely scientific. One of its primary messages is that mainstream conscious-experiential ‘science’ is currently internally-contradictory and unscientific.) The most significant component of mainstream consciousness science is mainstream conscious-experiential science, the part that focuses on explaining the relationship between the brain and conscious experience (D1, Chapter 1). (See Figure 3.3 for a more-detailed picture of the internal components of mainstream consciousness science.) Uniquely, mainstream consciousness science (and conscious-experiential science in particular) has been subject to the criticism that it’s ‘not a real science’, from elsewhere in science (blue circle). 2 © Nicholas Rosseinsky, 2019 The Troubles with Consciousness Science The smokescreen of fragmentation, confusion, fraught-ness, and contradiction is an obstacle to getting the One Experiment done. Even if it were done tomorrow, that same smokescreen would prevent its results from gaining any traction in science as a whole. It would be relegated to the backwaters of some ‘fringe’ journal (if it could even get published at all). It wouldn’t lead to science-3.0. So, it would have no impact on the science/post-Truth debate. It wouldn’t create any of the other societal, economic, and existential impacts described later in this book. We need to clear up enough of the smokescreen that the Experiment can be done, and be understood. We need to create enough consensus and understanding in and around science, so that, once executed, the Experiment’s implications ripple out into human culture. This Chapter takes stock of the current state of play in a number of related fields: science-as-a-whole, consciousness studies, and mainstream consciousness science and mainstream conscious-experiential science (Figure 3.1). It identifies the main obstacles that we must overcome to get the Experiment done, and received. Our objective in this Chapter is to identify, in broad strokes, the intellectual strategy that will take us through this turbulent terrain, and to the One Experiment, and beyond. Parts 2 to 4 will then start to show how to execute this strategy in a bit more detail, which means how to marshal arguments that bring reason and coherence to the scientific study of consciousness. In Part 5, we will examine the fruits of strategic success – life after the One Experiment has been carried out, and once its implications have been broadcast and understood. 3.1 A Brief History of Consciousness Science To understand the current state of the academic study of consciousness (an understanding which will help us craft a science-3.0 strategy), we’ll need a little history. For much of the twentieth century, the study of consciousness in hard science (for example, biology) was pretty much forbidden. One recent review4 cites ‘ideological and methodological concerns’ as the reason for that stance. Essentially (at least on the methodological side), the issue was that ‘subjective’ things couldn’t seemingly be measured precisely and reliably. By definition, you can’t put a subjective thing directly in front of multiple people, as you can a weighing scale, say. So, the study of subjective consciousness appears to be radically different from the study of weight and mass. The latter can be scientific (allegedly-objective!), the former can’t (by definition!). (Of course, as we saw in the previous Chapters, the idea of excluding subjectivity from the study of weight and mass is poorly founded. The weighing scale you and I see occurs in our subjective experiences. Our assessments of the logical coherence of theories-of-mass occur in the privacy of our subjective minds. Although we can put reasons for our assessments into the public domain by talking, there’s always some background ‘sense of rightness’ (or wrongness!) that’s still private – and subjective! And so on. As I’ve pointed out, these issues have taken real-life significance in the post- Truth/‘fake news’ outpourings, which depend for their intellectual vigor on the denial of subjectivity issues by mainstream science, in part5.) In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a number of psychologists and scientists – prominent amongst them the Noble prize-winners Gerard Edelman6 and Francis Crick7 – started to investigate the science of consciousness. (Amongst others, the cognitive psychologist Bernard Baars8 also made notable contributions, around that time.) Undoubtedly, this renewed interest derived to a large degree from the successes of computational neuroscience9 in explaining the brain’s encoding of objects-in-the-world and bodily sensations, and its use of those encodings in decision-making processes, and motor- programs10. It seems a small step from explaining Enc[red] – my symbolism in this book for the 3 The Troubles with Consciousness Science encoding of a red stimulus in an experiencer’s visual surroundings – to explaining red: the first- person, subjective, conscious-experience of redness. Around the same time, Roger Penrose contributed a novel physics-based story about consciousness11. And the philosopher David Chalmers stated what he called ‘The Hard Problem of Consciousness’12 – essentially, ‘how can we fill that gap between Enc[red] and red?’. These heady, exciting times – the birth of modern consciousness science – saw the launch of the well-known and ongoing series of Tucson conferences13, and a great sense of possibility for the field. But what about that methodological issue – ‘how to do an objective science of the subjective’ – which kept consciousness out of science, before the 1990s? Well, here something very unfortunate happened, that’s never been set straight. Francis Crick (along with his collaborator Christof Koch) decided to set out with a ‘bootstrap’ approach14. (I mentioned this approach in Chapter 1. It’s exactly the right framework for a proto-science. And ‘proto-science’ which is exactly the right way to view consciousness ‘science’ before the One Experiment.) Partly to skirt some of the philosophical and methodological issues, perhaps, Crick and Koch decided to not really define the ‘consciousness’ they were studying.
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