(As-Is) Consciousness Science

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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

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. The sense was ‘we’ll take a look in the general area, loosely defined, and then assess, report back, and launch a next-stage – if that seems to be feasible’. That approach – properly executed – is completely fine. Likely, it was necessary to be loose, to get the science moving against decades of resistance. But if science starts loosely, it must tighten up at some point, to justify the claim to being science. And that tightening up never happened, for consciousness science.

As we’ll see, there’s an acute tension between definition (what does ‘consciousness’ mean?), methodology (can we do ‘objective’ science on ‘subjective’ experience?), and standard-physics. Pretty much everyone in that 1990s ‘Big Bang’ of modern consciousness science took without question the assumption of a standard-physics setting. After all, modern science is more-or-less built on standard physics. A science of anything (‘X’, say) is currently taken to mean ‘the ability to explain X relative to the fundamental entities of standard physics’15. (And the only people who are allowed to change the list of fundamental entities, or how they behave, are those working in high-energy physics.) But the 1990s left this question unanswered: if we define consciousness as including (subjective!) conscious experience, and if we assume standard-physics, can we construct a scientifically-reliable methodology?

This enquiry never really happened. Essentially, this book is a call for remedial action, to make up this missing homework! In fact, the answer to the stated question is ‘no’ – we can’t have a standard-physics scientifically-reliable study of subjective experience. But the right question, the important question, the vital question, is this: Do we live in a Universe with the sort of (necessarily non-standard) physics that does support a reliable science-of-subjectivity? It’s this question that the One Experiment asks – and will answer.

3.2 The Splits In and Around the Field The pioneers of the 1990s did great things. They launched a field, from scratch. And those who are working in the field today have done great things, too. Amidst a general absence of interest from funding agencies, they’ve managed to progress the field. They’ve fought their individual corners, and kept their theories alive. They’ve brought consciousness science to the edge of an explosion into prominence.

But if consciousness science with its foundational problems unfixed were indeed ‘to explode into prominence’, it would be a disaster. Not only would we delay or even lose science-3.0, we’d also create and install an incredibly destructive meta-narrative in the human culture16. Fixing basic methodological

4 © Nicholas Rosseinsky, 2019 The Troubles with Consciousness Science problems in consciousness science isn’t easy, though. Not so much because the issues are incredibly complex. (They’re complicated, for sure. But not beyond the reach of a motivated layperson – as I hope to demonstrate with this work!) More because of the division and confusion in and around the field of consciousness studies.

3.2.1 The Silo-fication of Human Knowledge and the Call for the Deeply-Interdisciplinary Briefly, the splits I’m about to sketch out run far deeper than just the study of consciousness. Humankind has made scientific disciplines more and more specialized. It’s often difficult to even initiate communication between an expert in one sub-field in physics and another in some sub-field in biology, say. Even if there’s a common interest, it’s likely hidden behind lack of a common language. This problem has led to the growth of ‘inter-disciplinary centres’ to bridge the gaps. But even these initiatives keep the foundations of each discipline fixed – because science has become more or less divorced from philosophy. And science’s foundations – essentially, the ‘laws’ of fundamental physics – have become structurally-fixed17.

Like every duality or division, the recent18 separation of philosophy and science is a tricky matter. In many cases, as the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynmann observed, ‘the philosophy of science is as useful to science as ornithology is to birds’. But not in all cases – as we’ve already seen. If Chapter 1’s understanding of the relationship between unseen and experiential realities is part of philosophy, then, for consciousness science, this particular piece of philosophy is crucial. (And, again, setting consciousness science straight is crucial for the timely path to science-3.0, and all that brings.)

To reset consciousness science, we need a new sort of inter-disciplinarity – a deeply inter-disciplinary outlook, that’s prepared to look at how the roots of each discipline meet and model reality itself. An approach that’s prepared to reconfigure those roots – if reason and experiment indicate this is necessary ...

3.2.2 Consciousness Studies, Consciousness Science, and the ‘No Science’ Camp Moving on from science-as-a-whole, let’s look at the specific terrain around the study of consciousness (Figure 3.1).

For the purposes of this book, I use the term ‘consciousness studies’ to point to a broad collection of academic disciplines that discuss or study ‘consciousness’. These range from philosophy to the arts to various spiritual and religious schools to various scientific sub-fields (notably, neurobiology, cognitive science, and cognitive psychology). Consciousness studies as a whole uses a wide range of definitions of ‘consciousness’, as I briefly discussed in Chapter 1. So, at this broadest level, we have a lot of disciplines with a lot of different paradigms of reality (and even different ways to explore those realities), using the same word to label different things.

Next, I use the term ‘consciousness science’ to label the subset of consciousness studies that claims to employ a scientific approach, or to be part of science. In Figure 3.1, consciousness science is depicted as the subset of consciousness studies that also lies within science. (There’s no scholarly precision in this analysis19. I’m just trying to indicate some thematic stakeholders, and their relative positioning.) In my view, there are various sub-factions within consciousness science in a way that there are not, in other scientific fields. (I’ll talk about some of these in the next section.)

Another curious feature of ‘consciousness science’ is that there seem to be many scientists who do not think consciousness can be studied scientifically. In Figure 3.1, I depict this view as a ‘no science of consciousness’ grouping, within science-outside-consciousness-studies. Physicists can (and do!)

The Troubles with Consciousness Science debate the relative importance of sub-fields e.g. in terms of who should get priority funding. But condensed-matter physicists don’t (usually!) deny the scientific credentials of people studying elementary particles20 (or vice versa). I see scientific scepticism about the possibility of a science of consciousness in part as an echo of the 1990s failure to resolve methodological foundations, mentioned in section 3.1. In that sense, this is an important and valid voice. Equally, however, as long as ‘no science’ remains as a vague and poorly-formed critique (rather than a precisely-expressed scientific challenge), it’s a danger to science-3.0. Reputational damage is hard to counter, and can have a dramatic effect on future prospects.

Finally, although I haven’t shown this grouping explicitly in Figure 3.1, there are a number of philosophers who are prominently associated with consciousness science. (To throw out a few names: David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Ned Block, Jaegwon Kim, David Rosenthal …) This might seem a bit curious, given my observation just now that science and philosophy have parted ways! Although I won’t be able to go into it in any detail in this book, the relationship between consciousness science and philosophy of mind is all a bit tortured – and part of the obstacles to science-3.021.

Briefly though, an aspect of what’s currently called ‘philosophy’ does have a role to play in catalysing the transformation of science, as I’ve said. But the danger in philosophizing is making radical and ungrounded leaps in reason that should properly be put to experiment. All the philosophers named are guilty of this in respect of consciousness science. They all believe that something they call ‘causal closure’ is a built-in property of the Universe. The general thing they are trying to defend is a sort of universality of causal relations in Nature, which is more-or-less OK22. (Although, it should be held as a tentative conjecture, if it makes its way into science). But the specific thing they all end up effectively saying is that standard physics is structurally-complete23. This is not OK, scientifically. Without experimental verification, they rule out the transfer of information from experience to brain-activity. However, they fail to see – as we will – that if you rule out that information-transfer, you can’t have a proper conscious-experiential science. Of course, that doesn’t mean ‘we should therefore deduce information-transfer exists!’. It means we should test for it. And while we’re waiting for that test, everything else going on in conscious-experiential ‘science’ should be deemed proto-scientific24.

To help us towards the science we need, what we need philosophers to be doing is mounting precisely the sorts of critique that this book offers. What we have them doing, instead, is taking science-2.0’s foundations and trying to jam consciousness science into that. Instead of explaining why that program doesn’t work, they are coming up with all sorts of esoteric, jargon-laden and incorrect defences of it25.

3.2.3 The Three Conferences that Don’t Recognize Each Other As I’ve noted elsewhere26, one concrete reflection of the fractured state of consciousness science is the existence of three annual conferences, each with a reference to ‘science’ in their title27, each of which more or less ignores the others. (These are: Science and Non-Duality28, The Science of Consciousness29, and the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness30.) Of course, there isn’t a dedicated conference for the ‘no science of consciousness’ view from science-as-a-whole. (And observation and experimental intervention suggest there’s currently no room for proper consciousness science31, at any of the three existing conferences!)

3.3 Mainstream Consciousness Science: A Three-Part Account So how did get consciousness science get from the 1990s to its present state? Essentially, what I’ll call mainstream conscious-experiential science picked up definition D1 from Chapter 1, and didn’t stop to fix or examine the contradiction between reliable experimental methodology and standard-physics. It

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Figure 3.2: The Two-Meter Approach in Mainstream Conscious-Experiential Science. A. The basic experimental set-up in mainstream conscious-experiential science involves presenting various stimuli (depicted by the line-drawing of the tree), and collecting two kinds of additional data: brain- dynamical information and data about conscious experience, collected typically e.g. by verbal report. I call this a ‘two meter’ approach because it compares data from a brain-meter, and from the meter-of- report. B. Apparatus such an EEG set-up is a meter for brain-dynamics. This is the first of the two meters. C. Report is a meter for conscious experience. This is the second of the two meters. Obviously, ‘report’ does not look the same as an EEG apparatus or an MRI scanner. Nevertheless, its functional role in the experiment is the same: it’s a meter. Once this is accepted, meter-‘readings’ from the report- meter can be analysed in the same way as those from standard physical-apparatus. In particular, the meter-of-report must be connected to the phenomenon it is gathering data on, just as a thermometer gathering data on the temperature of coffee must be in the cup, not on the shelf!

The Troubles with Consciousness Science has more-or-less declared victory or impending victory32 – even though its entire approach is inherently illogical and contradictory33. (As we’ll see in more detail in Chapter 4, this doesn’t mean it’s irreparable. But to regain scientific logic it will have to surrender standard-physics dogmatism. It’s right to not surrender standard physics on a whim. Which is why we need the One Experiment!)

3.3.1 Mainstream Conscious-Experiential Science: ‘The Big Five’ (and Their Emergentist Friends) ‘Mainstream conscious-experiential science’ is an approach that broadly accepts D1’s definition of conscious experience as the thing-to-be-explained, and tries to use what I call the ‘two-meter approach’ to relate brain-activity to experience-as-deduced-from-report34 (Figure 3.2).

Now, it might not be obvious what’s wrong with this. Brain-encoded information is plausibly involved in experience. My own subjective experience seems to support the idea that experience is the basis of report-of-experience. (You may need to read that twice!35) So recording brain-activity, and comparing it to experience-reconstructed-from-report, seems to be a good way to try to figure out the role that brain-activity plays in the construction of experience (Figure 3.2). But in Figure 2.5, I gave a naïve account of what could be the problem with this approach. If our model instead is ‘brains cause experience and brains cause report’, then report itself carries no information about experience. Correlating report-of-experience with brain-activity would then tell us nothing reliable about experience. In fact, as we’ll see, if the ‘experience and report are independent brain-properties’ model (or any of its very sophisticated iterations!) is accurate, we can’t even talk about experience in a scientifically-meaningful way! And we’ll see that, if standard physics is true, something equivalent to the independent–brain-properties model must be true. So, if standard physics is true, report isn’t really about experience, and the two-meter approach doesn’t work. Conversely, we’ll see that a specific kind of non-standard physics is both necessary and sufficient for a scientific approach to conscious experience.

But mainstream conscious-experiential science ignores all this. (I don’t mean it’s unaware of the issue. It has a set of responses to the independent-properties critique, which I’ll start to examine in the next section. Self-assessing its responses to be sufficient, it declares victory and then goes on to ignore the issue because it’s allegedly settled. Unsettling this point is one potential strategic intervention in the direction of science-3.0: see 3.8.1.)

Thus, mainstream conscious-experiential science assumes that a standard-physics setting, the D1- definition, and the two-meter approach are entirely sufficient for a rigorous science of conscious experience. After a silent and presumably skeptical period of about thirty years, mainstream science seems to be finally buying into this framework36. That’s a mistake.

To bring us finally into direct contact with the present-day scientific literature, the sorts of theories that belong (or could belong) to my ‘mainstream conscious-experiential science’ category include what I call ‘the Big Five’37: global neuronal workspace theory38, integrated information theory39, higher-order thought40, predictive coding41, and Orch-OR42. (You don’t need to know any details about these. I’m just painting a picture for those familiar with the field.) There are many other theories in this category, too, most of which share the property of being what I call ‘emergentist’ theories: they all propose conscious experience is an emergent property of the brain, ‘just like temperature’. I’ll be discussing the emergentist class – which is broadly synonymous with the mainstream conscious-experiential category43 – in section 3.4.

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Figure 2.5 (Reproduced): The ‘Causal Source’ of Reports about Experience. The causal origin of reports about experience is a vital issue for the foundations of consciousness science (and so for science 3.0, and the future of humanity!). A ‘report about experience’ is something like ‘I experience brownness of that table-top’. Of course, we can program a computer to speak in the same way, when it detects brown (in the unseen realm!). (Recall that italicized brown refers to brown-wavelength light, an unseen, objective-realm thing.) A: Brain activity causes report-of-experience. One possibility is that our reports are like a computer’s! Our brain more-or-less mechanically says ‘brownness’ – but that report is really driven by brown light and its neural consequences. At the same time, we have an experience brown, and we tell ourselves that report was directly driven by, sourced in or caused by experience. If the causal chain is light-to-eye-to-neural-activity-to-speech-muscles – without experience-itself playing any part – we’re deluding ourselves. One curious consequence of this picture is that it seems impossible to ever talk meaningfully about experience – but we do it all the time. (I just did!) But there may be some even deeper delusion at play. B: Experience causes report-of-experience. This actually requires experience to couple with, or transfer information into, brain-dynamics governing report. (This step is not shown.) Experience-causing-report accords with intuition, but turns out to conflict with standard physics (Chapter 4).

Philosophers and others will criticize various aspects of this simple, introductory picture44 (and associated language). Notably, one school (‘identity theory’) tries to claim that the distinction between A and B is meaningless, because conscious experience is nothing but, and identical to, brain-activity that ‘causes’ it (by virtue of identity!). But this view is at least puzzling. Even if experience were folded into brain-activity, with no intervening machinery, such brain-activity would seem to have two different kinds of properties, at least: its conventional, unseen-realm aspect (molecules, electromagnetic-field states etc.), and its experiential, qualitative aspect (e.g. brown).

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3.3.2 Denettian Eliminativism: Consciousness Science without ‘Experience’ Emergentist conscious-experiential science is one major grouping within mainstream consciousness science (Figure 3.3). Another structural component is due to a single theorist: Daniel Dennett. Famously45, he propounded a theory that seems to view conscious experience as a sort of illusion. We behave as if we have it – but we don’t really.

Many people – including many professionals – find Dennett’s position impossible to accept. Once we have defined experience as we did in Chapter 1 – particularly, to include audiovisual features of the external world – it seems incomprehensible. After all, many people take the existence of experience as the one thing that can be known to be true, the very bedrock and definition of certainty! And very few people seem to understand why anyone would propose an ‘illusionist’ stance46.

Dennett’s view disagrees with my own personal data and hypotheses. (I have subjective experience! And I can coherently talk about it47.) Nevertheless, I would find his stance logically compelling, if I rigidly held to the truth of standard physics. In fact, Dennett’s theory is the logical consequence of standard physics, whereas mainstream conscious-experiential science contradicts standard physics (while simultaneously assuming it!).

As we’ll see, under standard physics, experience (if it exists) can’t affect brain-dynamics. So, it can’t affect verbal reports about anything. Therefore, any speech acts purporting to be about experience aren’t really, physically, so. Realizing this, and if I elevate the truth of standard physics to an absolute standard that governs all my conduct, I would then refrain from speaking about experience. I would have to train myself to stop even thinking about it, if I wanted to create an inner world free from delusion. I would talk to other people about conscious experience just as Dennett does.

Far from being the ‘crazy science’ that many think, Dennett’s stance is the only coherent one, if standard physics is true. If standard physics holds (as mainstream conscious-experiential science claims), Dennett’s behavior is actually the sane side of the field. But standard physics is not the only possibility.

3.3.3 Other Views Mainstream conscious-experiential science assumes (incorrectly) we can talk about experience, and do experiments about it, under standard physics. Dennett’s stance about experience can be understood as an expression resulting from a (correct) analysis of logically-coherent behaviors, if standard physics is true.

What other components of mainstream consciousness science could there be? Two other logically- possible sub-cases we haven’t looked at yet are theories that aren’t directly about experience, and theories that don’t assume standard physics. Because my definition of mainstream consciousness science presumes a standard-physics setting, the only other theories that could then logically exist in this category are non-experiential kinds.

Sure enough, we can find these, too!

As I mentioned in Chapter 1, philosophers use the term ‘phenomenal consciousness’ for what I call ‘conscious experience’, and use ‘access consciousness’ to label what can be reported, or accessed for report. Examining access, in this sense, is the study of a non-experiential form of consciousness.48

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Figure 3.3: Major Features of Mainstream Conscious-Experiential Science. Two major sub- components of mainstream consciousness science are mainstream conscious-experiential science (which studies the relationship between the brain and D1-style conscious experience; purple ellipse) and approaches that study access consciousness (the ability of the brain to report on some kinds of brain-encoded data but not others; red ellipse). (The two approaches are shown as not overlapping here. In another view, we could use an overlap of the ellipses to depict the camp that believes in a sort of identity between what’s in conscious experience and what can be reported.) The green-dashed ellipse shows a different kind of sub-component of consciousness science, identifying those approaches which can be thought as conventional emergent-property explanations. As shown, conventional emergence is applied both to explaining experience (overlap with the purple ellipse) and to explaining access (overlap with red ellipse). Equally, for both experience and access, there are theories that aren’t based on conventional emergence. Five major theories are mapped relative to the experiential, access and emergentist sub-components (blue numerals; see inset). Two theories (global neuronal workspace, and Orch-OR) appear twice, in dashed and plain forms (1, 1; 5, 5). This depicts the fact that these approaches can be interpreted as either experiential or access theories. [See (Rosseinsky, 2019b) for more details.] Dennett’s eliminativist or illusionist approach stands for another major theme in modern consciousness science, that conscious experience is either an illusion or can’t be studied with scientific rigor. (Criticisms and denials of conscious-experiential science from within the field of consciousness science are additional to ‘no science’ critiques shown in Figure 3.1, although the two sorts of challenge sometimes share grounds for their skepticism.)

The Troubles with Consciousness Science

There’s a huge debate about whether the contents of phenomenal consciousness (all the things we experience) are identical to the contents of access consciousness (all the things we can report on). Leaving the nuances of this debate aside, simply notice that computer programs have access consciousness, without (presumably) having conscious experience. So, merely being able to understand the neurally-encoded information that we can make reports about doesn’t seem to establish anything about what we experience, or about how experience arises. (Just as, understanding the computer-encoding of information and which parts a program can make reports about doesn’t tell anything about its ‘experience’!)

In my view, the use of the word ‘consciousness’ in conjunction with ‘access’ is incredibly misleading49. It leads, for example, to popular articles suggesting we should call any machine that can make a report about something ‘conscious’! It can also lead to the surely wrong-headed (and empty-hearted!) stance that lifeforms incapable of making access-reports that humans can understand – i.e. the vast majority of life-forms on Earth! – do not possess conscious experience.

3.4 Emergentism in Mainstream Conscious-Experiential Science: ‘Just Like Temperature’?! Now I want to take a little time to address an issue that’s at the heart of the problems with current mainstream conscious-experiential science. It’s not in itself the acute problem. But it’s entangled with the acute problem. It obscures the acute problem. It stops many professional scientists (and laypeople) from paying attention to the acute problem, talking about the acute problem, or even allowing that the acute problem might exist.

This entangled, obscuring, obstructing issue is the idea that conscious experience is – in a scientific, explanatory, way – somehow ‘just like temperature’.

3.4.1 The Meaning of ‘Just Like Temperature’ ‘Just like temperature’ is another way to describe the ‘emergentist’ group in mainstream conscious- experiential science. It’s the view that conscious experience is a conventionally-emergent property of the brain, just as (analogically speaking) temperature is a conventionally-emergent property of any conventionally-definable macroscopic ‘object’ (or system)50. Some philosophers like to use ‘nothing but’ language, for conventional-emergence. ‘We now understand temperature is nothing but the average kinetic energy of molecules. Similarly, conscious experience is nothing but certain kinds of brain-activity.’

‘Nothing but’ might seem to be a poor term for an ‘emergent property’, because emergence is sometimes popularly characterized as the occurrence of ‘new and unexpected’ features. ‘Nothing but’ seems unsurprising. ‘New and unexpected’ seems … well, definitely surprising! Simply, the popular idea of equating ‘emergence’ with novelty is unscientific51. A better way to talk about emergence is as a property possessed by a system or object that none of its component parts have. Rigidity of a solid body is emergent, but not surprising, to anyone with a basic knowledge of modern physics, and experience of trying to move a piano.

3.4.2 The Significance of ‘Just Like Temperature’ ‘Just like temperature’ (or conventional emergence) has acquired what I might call a ‘political’ significance in consciousness science (and science more generally). Say we think that physics contains only two explanatory modes – fundamental-particles/general-relativity, and emergent properties52. Then, denying that conscious experience is conventionally-emergent seems like saying ‘conscious experience is beyond physical explanation’. Naturally, some people find this upsetting. If the natural

12 © Nicholas Rosseinsky, 2019 The Troubles with Consciousness Science order only has fundamental and emergent explanatory modes, then saying experience might be neither of these can look like a move towards supernatural explanations! But that’s not so53.

In additional to a political, nature-and-status-of-science, significance, ‘just like temperature’ also has an in-science, methodological significance. If conscious experience is just like temperature, then the sort of experimental methodology that works for conventionally-emergent properties will work for conscious experience. Take the experimental investigation of temperature, for example. Imagine we had a large number of ‘molecular kinetic-energy meters’. Then we could measure temperature (using a thermometer) and molecular kinetic-energies, and compare the two. We could do that a lot of times, under a lot of conditions. And verify the proposal that temperature equals average molecular kinetic- energy. This is essentially what I’m calling the ‘two-meter methodology’. It’s the basis of mainstream conscious-experiential’s science claim to being science.

If experience is conventionally-emergent (or can consistently be thought of in that way), the two-meter methodology certainly works. But if it isn’t, then we are in a new methodological ballpark, and we have to be much more careful. We have to examine in detail the reasons for believing experiments reveal reliable information. This examination leads us to the One Experiment, which will establish whether we live in a Universe where we can have reliable experiments about experience. So, the presumption or dogmatic assertion of conventional-emergence – whether it’s from a political insistence, from inertia, or from simply not thinking about it in the first place – leads to a denial, obstruction, or obscuring of the enquiries that take us to science-3.0.

3.4.3 Deconstructing ‘Just Like Temperature’ Curiously, it’s actually self-evident that conscious experience is not ‘nothing but brain activity’! Look at Figure 1.1 again. (Panel B of Figure 1.1. is reproduced in panel A of Figure 3.4.) Brain-activity is in the unseen realm (purple entities). Experience is definitively not! So how could experience (in one realm) be ‘nothing but’ brain-activity (in another)?!

‘Ah, you are misunderstanding emergence’, is the emergentist response54. ‘What you are calling the experiential realm is just an appearance that exists as a physically-conventional property of the physical brain.’ This response misses the original point. The ‘nothing but’ version of emergentism says that temperature is nothing but molecular movement – and that movement exists only in the unseen realm. (One confusion here is to think that emergent-property explanations of temperature explain the experientially-felt warmth of objects, or the visually-experienced melting of ice. They don’t. They explain the unseen-realm correlates of those things!) A nothing-but, conventionally-emergent, explanation of experience would say that red (an experience of redness) is nothing-but some brain- activity – say, for concreteness, a particular, complicated, large-scale pattern of electromagnetic activity. But nothing-but means abolishing the red symbol itself! (Pictorially, if experience is nothing but unseen-realm activity, that means deleting the colored images from all our Figures! See Figure 3.4.) We can’t make the experiential-realm in a physically-conventional emergent-property because by (current!) definition all physically-conventional properties belong totally within the unseen-realm55.

If the not-conventionally-emergent point is so obvious, why hasn’t it been seen, and accepted? There are a variety of reasons. One is what I just called ‘political’56 – the incorrect view that it’s conventional- emergence or nothing, scientifically speaking. Another huge one is the failure to analyse and discard direct realism. (Obviously, if I never clearly make an unseen/experiential-realm distinction, I can’t understand the ‘deleting coloured-images’ point.) And confused definitions of ‘consciousness’ don’t help. (Notably, ‘access’ clearly is – or can be! – nothing-but the movement-of-molecules. It seems entirely amenable to explanation solely in unseen-realm terms. Think speaking-computers.)

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Figure 3.4: ‘Nothing But’, Conventional-Emergence, Explanations Delete Conscious Experience! A conventional emergent-property explanation of conscious experience is sometimes expressed (correctly!) as the view that experience is ‘nothing but’ certain brain-activity. (That is, conventional emergence is identical to ‘nothing but’ explanation. For example, a specific temperature – an emergent property of a macroscopic system – is ‘nothing but’ a label for any state with a specific average molecular kinetic energy.) The ‘nothing but’ version shows why conventional emergence cannot be a valid explanation for conscious experience. A. This reproduces panel B from Figure 1.1. Objective reality, the unseen realm ‘behind’ the grey veil, is depicted under a computationalist worldview, in which elementary particles and other fundamental features (e.g. spacetime curvature) exist only ‘as’ numbers. Conscious experience, as usual, is a collection of phenomena including audio-visual experience (the coloured image and the ‘sounds’ placeholder), and thoughts and feelings. B. A conventional-emergence explanation of experience says it is ‘nothing but’ brain-activity. But any objective-realm activity is just a collection of numbers! If reality is ‘nothing but’ numbers, there’s no place for experienced colours, sounds, etc. to appear. (Certainly, we could point to certain collections of numbers that correspond to brain-encoding e.g. of environmental surroundings. But encoding is not experience, as the introduction of angle-bracket symbols in Chapter 2 emphasized.) Thus, any ‘nothing but’, conventional-emergence explanation actually deletes conscious experience as a phenomenon! (The same result occurs, slightly less dramatically, if we start with panel A from Figure 1.1. Then we are also left with a purple line-drawing world under conventional emergence, in which there’s no place e.g. for the coloured tree-image.)

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3.4.4 Alternatives to ‘Just Like Temperature’ In fact, the not-conventionally-emergent point has been made by many others57! Just not quite in the visual way I did it in the last subsection, to my knowledge. (It’s been made, but it’s clearly not been accepted by mainstream conscious-experiential science. That’s a problem for science-3.0, because mistaken conventional-emergence theories provide a natural rallying point for scientific thinking, and funding, that’s stuck in a 2.0-paradigm.)

On the one hand, it can be useful to give concrete examples of what a not-conventionally-emergent theory of experience could look like. These examples head off the ‘denying conventional emergence is non-scientific and supernaturalist’ critiques. One idea close to (but distinct from) conventional- emergence is ‘non-reductive physicalism’. In this view, whenever the unseen-realm brain meets the conditions for specific experiential states, Nature then generates those states themselves based on specific brain-to-experience rules. (No additional substances. No God. Everything is orderly and lawful.) It’s ‘physicalism’ because it looks like physics, more or less, and builds on it58. But it’s ‘non- reductive’ because we have to add experiential qualities for Nature to use59 (as labelled by symbols like red!). If we call those experiential qualities fundamental rather than contingently-emergent, then we have ‘property-dualism’60. Another school-of-thought that’s quite close to non-reductive physicalism is ‘strong emergence’61. This differentiates itself from the ‘weak’ form (another label for conventional, nothing-but, emergence) by saying that a new kind or quality of property arises, contingent on certain collective-system states being in existence.

On the other hand, giving specific, worked-out, examples of alternatives to ‘not conventionally emergent’, as I just did. can fall into two traps. One is making things too concrete too early, when we’re doing proto-science. As far as I know, there’s no way to experimentally distinguish between non- reductive physicalism, property-dualism, and strong emergence, for example. And that points to the second potential trap. Science isn’t really concerned with ‘isms’, for the most part62. Many of these debates sidetrack us from the real points.

Concerning emergence, the real, central, issue is experimental methodology. And that will turn out to have nothing to do with any ‘ism-istic’ ways of conceiving of the entities that make up reality. Instead it’s about the dynamical, coupling, properties of reality-features, irrespective of whether those features are fundamental or emergent, or whether they exist as ‘objects’ (Figure 1.1A), or as numbers (Figure 1.1B), or in some other, unimaginable, form. And, to get and keep a focus on dynamical issues, it’s important to rule out conventional emergence, because it’s a smokescreen and a dead-end.

We’ll pick up the central thread – of dynamical-coupling, experimental methodology, and the path to science-3.0, in Chapter 4. But following the observations of this subsection, going forwards we’ll be travelling in a space that’s ruled out conventional emergence, as a way of thinking about experience.

3.5 The Troubles with Consciousness Science If there weren’t any urgency about science-3.0, I wouldn’t write this section. (Or even this book, likely!) It gives me no pleasure to give an account of the problems in a field that I don’t really belong to. But if we’re to plot a path to science-3.0, one of the terrains we have to at least survey, and consider, is that of current consciousness science.

To be as positive as possible, I’ll frame the five main issues as requests (R1 to R5) rather than problems. But to give them some bite, I’ll ‘should’ and ‘must’ them, too … For example:

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R1. Consciousness science must re-open and re-examine its basic claim to a scientifically- reliable experimental methodology for studying conscious experience.

This is the central path-to-science-3.0 thread that we’ll be stepping back onto in the next Chapter. The next two points concern making R1 a clear and constructive exercise.

R2. Consciousness science must relinquish implicit and explicit appeals to conventional- emergence as a way to explain conscious experience.

As I’ve just mentioned63, conventional emergence gets in the way of moving ahead with the methodological enquiry. Setting it aside helps with R1.

R3. Conscious-experiential science must give up dogmatic insistence on standard-physics as the only possible foundation for its explanations and experiments.

This is a bit trickier. The internet is full of ‘new physics’ solutions for everything – including consciousness. As we’ll see, though, R1 and R2 lead logically to the conclusion that it’s either non- standard, ‘new’ physics of a specific kind in a specific aspect of conscious experience – or, no science of conscious experience at all. And crucially (and unlike all those new-physics internet-theories!), we’ll formulate an Experiment that can test whether this non-standard physics actually exists in our Universe. (Note that R3 doesn’t say ‘science must adopt my ideas about new physics’. It calls for ‘giving up dogmatic insistence’ – an insistence that is in any case quintessentially unscientific!)

R4. Consciousness science should coalesce around and prioritize the study of conscious experience, in the first instance, and drop the use of the word ‘consciousness’ for access and eliminative theories.

This point is simply an appeal for clarity and unity, concerning the science-3.0 imperative. (It doesn’t mean that the study of access or the analysis of eliminative scenarios must stop. It just means defining ‘consciousness science’ as a sub-field with clear, useful, boundaries.)

R5. Science and society should significantly increase the funding of a consciousness science that implements R1 to R4.

This point contains an acknowledgement. A lot of the dysfunctions in the field – perhaps including the inability to identify and address R1 to R4 to date – persist in part because of a scarcity of funding. Intuiting the importance of the field, investigators are currently drawn to the conventional way of moving it ahead: creating theoretical stances, and fighting for them. But the fight is hard when funds are scarce. And hard fighting does not create the kind of space for resolving the issues behind and around R1 to R4.

3.6 Getting Constructive: Strategic Lines-of-Reasoning to Fix the Problems To implement R1 to R5 – which can be viewed as milestones on the way to science-3.0 – we’ll need to navigate the big-picture territory laid out in Figure 3.1, some of the more detailed terrain discussed in Figure 3.3, and a lot of smaller-scale rocks and boulders we won’t even have a chance to look at in this book.

In the next two sections, I’ll outline two major strategic components in moving from the consciousness science we have, to the one we need (Figure 3.5). In section 3.7, I’ll discuss how to disarm those who

16 © Nicholas Rosseinsky, 2019 The Troubles with Consciousness Science

Figure 3.5: Sub-Components of Strategies U and V. The rest of this book focuses on just two viewpoints, ‘no science’ and mainstream conscious-experiential science. Strategies U and V (sections 3.7 and 3.8) respectively shepherd these two camps towards science-3.0. Strategy U. Starting at the ‘no science’ viewpoint, we first ask ‘why isn’t it possible?’. Only two of many possible answers are shown. If the reason given is qualitative ineffability (Ch. 2), we respond with angle-bracket symbols (and possibly with back-up, science-as-a-whole reasoning; Ch. 2). If the reason given is ‘no experiments under standard physics’, we agree (U1; U1 also includes the general clarification of the ‘why’). As a balancing step (U2), we also show that theory and experiments can both be viable under a specific kind of non-standard physics. Finally (U3), we bring the standard-physics case (red rectangles) to an experimental test against the non-standard physics case, via the One Experiment. As the dashed-blue line shows, if the One finds only standard-physics in experience-to-brain coupling, the original position – ‘no science of consciousness possible’ – is supported. Strategy V. Starting with ‘mainstream conscious-experiential science is valid’, we first show (V1) that there are no scientifically-reliable experiments in the standard-physics setting assumed by mainstream conscious-experiential science. If that demonstration is resisted or denied, we fall back to the demonstration of fatal theoretical problems for spatial relationships, under standard physics (V2). V1 and V2 together should generate openness to the possibility of invalidity under standard physics, and to the One Experiment as a test for the existence of validity-supporting physics (V3a). If the Experiment detects the specific non-standard physics required for viable theory and experiments (green rectangles), conscious-experiential science can be valid (purple dashed-line, V3b). However, it won’t take its original ‘mainstream’ form that was based on standard-physics. It would then be set in the evidence-based new-physics detected by the One Experiment. (And ‘no experiments under standard physics’ would then be an irrelevant critique!)

The Troubles with Consciousness Science believe ‘we can’t have a scientific approach to consciousness’, under any circumstances. (I’ll call this the ‘no science’ view, from now on.) In section 3.8, I’ll talk about undoing the stance that makes current mainstream conscious-experiential science actually not-a-science – which is the claim that there can be a reliable experimental methodology under standard physics.

These two building blocks for a scientific-reasoning strategy don’t directly meet and address all the viewpoints and challenges we must face on a path to science-3.0. But they address the two largest challenges – the denial of consciousness science’s viability by other scientific voices, and the assertion of viability for the current form of mainstream conscious-experiential science. And the obviously- nuanced dance that’s required to meet both of these simultaneously – to say at the same time ‘we can …’ and ‘… just not like this!’ – exemplifies the sort of challenge-of-precision that the path to science- 3.0 will call for, more generally.

3.7 Strategy-Component ‘U’: Countering ‘Not a Science’ 3.7.1 U1: Accept ‘There Is No Science (Under Standard Physics)’ (And Clarify Conditionality) Sub-component U1 directly demonstrates some of the delicacy here. There is something to the ‘no science’ claim, if we insist on a standard-physics setting! In any argument, it’s constructive to find and then accept the possibly-hidden truths in the other side’s declarations. Here, this means understanding how and why discomfort with the reliability of subjective data is valid, if standard-physics holds.

Specifically, it’s important to clearly capture the reason that standard physics invalidates consciousness science. For example, it’s not the ineffability objection that we discussed in Chapter 2. We can get round that with angle-bracket symbols (or the inferred-reconstruction simplification of those symbols). It’s that we can’t populate the symbols with reliable data (or even talk about experience in general), if experience doesn’t couple with brain-activity in specific ways.

3.7.2 U2: Demonstrate Viability of Experiential Science, If Specific Non-Standard Physics Exists Once we’ve distilled discomfort with consciousness science down into its precise, genuine, standard- physics contingent, basis, we can demonstrate an alternative: if specific forms of non-standard physics exist in our Universe, we can have a science of consciousness, because we can fix the problem accepted in step-U1.

3.7.3 U3: Suggest the Standard/Non-Standard Physics Alternatives Be Put to Experimental Test We’re left with the question of whether we actually live in a U1-no-science or a U2-valid-science Universe. The entirely-scientific way to answer this question about capacity-to-do-science? We design and propose an experiment that can find out. This is, of course, the One Experiment.

3.8 Strategy-Component ‘V’: Countering Mainstream Conscious-Experiential Science 3.8.1 V1: Show that Standard Physics Implies ‘No Reliable Experiments about Experience’ The primary way to empty the momentum that’s taking mainstream consciousness science down the wrong track with conscious experience is simply to demonstrate the problem, logically. That problem – as I started to indicate towards the end of the last Chapter, and will amplify in the next – is that a standard-physics assumption denies the possibility of reliable experiments about experience. Without experiments, there’s no science.

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Clearly, V1 (“no reliable experiments under standard physics”) is closely related to U1 (“accepting ‘no science ‘under standard physics”). The U1/V1 distinction here is less about the destination that arguments end up in than their starting-point and consequent presentation. For U1, presentation must respond to ‘we can’t ever do consciousness science’. U1 needs to change ‘can’t ever’ to ‘can’t under these conditions’. But V1 is responding to ‘we can do science (in this specific way)’. So, it has to shift ‘it’s all perfectly OK’ to ‘the very conditions you are assuming make it not OK’.

3.8.2 V2: Show that Standard Physics Leads to Contradictions Elsewhere in Mainstream Approaches Now, V1 by itself should be enough to bring mainstream conscious-experiential science to a halt. (It’s not that I want to destroy it. It just needs to reset itself in a post-One physics.) Bitter experience suggests that all sorts of excuses will prevent the acceptance of U1/V1 logic64. In Chapter 2, I talked about one way to respond to a situation where argument-1 (say) should work, on its merits, but habit, or emotional resistance, or whatever-it-is, prevents a change-of-mind. (In Chapter 2, the issue was resistance on the part of physics to accept angle-bracket symbols as a basis for consciousness science.) We can construct a supplementary argument-2 – not because argument-1 is logically lacking, but because other factors are blocking the acceptance of logic. (In Chapter 2, this second ‘back-up’ argument was to show the benefits to science-as-a-whole, of building a proper consciousness science based on angle-bracket symbols.)

Here, the backup argument to V1’s ‘standard physics means no experimental science of experience’ will be V2: ‘standard physics leads to contradictions elsewhere in the mainstream explanatory science of experience’. The basic idea is that resistance to V1 often comes from an attachment to standard physics. (This attachment has many roots65: historical, sociological, funding …) So, let’s point out another, V1-independent, line-of-reasoning that also denies the trustworthiness of standard-physics conscious-experiential science. V1 denies the validity of current mainstream approaches because experiments aren’t valid under standard-physics. V2 denies validity because explaining the inherent features of conscious experience becomes contradictory, in a standard-physics setting. (V2 focuses in particular on explanations of detailed spatial-relationships between experience and brain-activity.) V1 is primarily experimentally-focused. V2 takes on theory-based explanations.

3.8.3 V3: Show that Mainstream Conscious-Experiential Science Can Restart, After The One One natural resistance to V1 and/or V2 can come from an individual theoretician’s perception that ‘no standard-physics consciousness science means the end of my particular theory – which was built in a standard-physics setting’. But ending the general momentum of current mainstream conscious- experiential science – in relation to its standard-physics foundations – does not necessarily mean that specific theories can’t start up again, once the relevant physical features of our Universe have been clarified. (By the One Experiment, of course!) For example, each of the ‘Big Five’ has a post-One form that could be entirely viable. The issue is not the detailed form of current, specific, proposals in mainstream conscious-experiential science. It’s their common setting. Emphasizing this point may be significant in getting change started, reducing people’s fears about the future status of their championed theories.

3.9 The Rest of This Book: A Preview For the rest of this book, I’m going to set aside explicitly addressing all the competing sub-factions in and around consciousness science. In the arguments that I construct, and the counter-arguments that I consider, I’m going to write as if there were only two other voices in the discussion. One will be mainstream conscious-experiential science – the view that we can do an emergent-property66,

The Troubles with Consciousness Science experimental, science of conscious experience. The other is the ‘not a science’ stance – the view that studying consciousness should never be part of, or influence the content of, hard science67.

Parts 2 to 4 – Chapters 4 to 9 – are focused on the building-blocks of what I’m calling strategy- component-V, the three steps for countering mainstream conscious-experiential science (i.e. V1 to V3, outlined in section 3.8), and discussing its implementation. In parallel, the strategy for meeting the ‘no science’ objection (strategy-component-U, section 3.7) is implemented in the way that the counter- mainstream strategy is developed: I construct an actual candidate for ‘proper consciousness science’ as I go. Thus, Parts 2 to 4 are primarily voiced as a dialogue with mainstream conscious-experiential science. This apparently neglects responding to the ‘no science’ camp. But, it just so happens that when we get to that dialogue’s end, what’s been voiced does counter the ‘no science’ claim! (Figure 3.5).

As section 3.8 mentioned, the first two counter-mainstream steps (U1 and U2) respectively address the conditions for reliable experiments about experience (which is the focus of Part 2) and theory-based analyses of spatial aspects (Part 3). Finding out if conditions for reliable experiments are met calls for the One Experiment (Part 2). Again, one alleged-objection to even considering the One Experiment is that it investigates ‘new physics’. In response to the view that ‘I’m quite happy with my standard- physics mainstream conscious-experiential science’, Part 3 shows that you can’t have a standard- physics theory-of-experience anyway – for spatial reasons, that are quite independent of coupling. So, Part 3 dismantles the kind of resistance to Part 2’s One Experiment that’s based on standard-physics attachment and complacency. Part 3 implements the second-line, independent backup for Part 2.

Part 2 focuses on experiments and experience-to-brain coupling. Part 3 focuses on space. Part 4 develops a further strategic asset for the response to mainstream conscious-experiential science, which I call ‘The One Hypothesis’. (Another name for this Hypothesis is ‘N-theory’. See Chapter 8 for more on where this name comes from!68)

N-theory is a concrete, complete, hypothetical, theory-of-conscious-experience that contains a sophisticated experience/brain-coupling thesis. Although e.g. Chapter 4’s content alone is logically sufficient to justify the One Experiment, I constructed N-theory in part as a response to objections that ‘this Experiment doesn’t actually test a concrete theory’69. (This is N-theory’s contribution to strategy- V.) At the same time, N-theory answers objections from the ‘no science’ crowd that critiques of mainstream approaches in Part 3 couldn’t be solved by any theory. (This is N-theory’s contribution to strategy-U). Thus, N-theory can be viewed as competing with mainstream theories in the One Experiment70, and stands as a demonstration of the possibility of rigorous consciousness science, as a rejection of the ‘no science’ stance71.

Part 4 concludes with Chapter 9’s discussion of how we would analyze and interpret the results of the One Experiment, as and when it gets done. Chapter 9 links possible outcomes from the One Experiment with the move to various versions of science-3.0. It starts a turn back from consciousness science per se, towards science-as-a-whole, and its role in human civilization.

In Part 5 – Chapters 10 to 12 – I follow this turn back further, looking at the broader significance of science-3.0, to society (Chapter 10), economy (Chapter 11), and to human existence in general (Chapter 12). Here the tone switches away from the more-technical focus of Parts 2 to 4, and into the more humanity-focused viewpoint that framed our beginnings in Chapter 1. One thematic issue in Part 5 is the suggestion of urgency, for a shift in the trajectory of consciousness science towards a science-3.0 path. Sometimes it’s said that new science only comes with new scientists. (The unspoken point is that we may have to wait for the retirement of influential academics who won’t ever change their minds.)

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Because of science 3.0’s pivotal role in multiple, pressing, situations, I don’t think we have the luxury of waiting for that, in consciousness science.

In Chapter 13, I round everything up and try to put it all in terms of practical action steps72. If I’m reading this book, and I’ve understood some or all of it, and I want to contribute to making change, in the direction of science-3.0 – what can I actually do? Here I talk about the pros and cons of ideas like putting citizen-led pressure on the institutions of science, raising funds to get the One Experiment done outside institutional science (but within the prescriptions of good science), and simply spreading societal understanding of science 3.0 and its significance. Of course, just by reading, reflecting on and digesting the contents of this book, you’ll have done something amazing – you’ll have changed your personal patch of society73!

So – reminding ourselves that Parts 2 to 4 contain some more-technical material, which each person need only draw on according to their own, individual, needs for understanding and insight demand – let’s proceed!

3.10 Summary Modern consciousness science began in the 1990s, via brave and constructive approaches. However, the basic methodological issues for a standard-physics science of subjectivity were never addressed.

‘Consciousness studies’ labels a broad array of disciplines, including ‘consciousness science’. However, one view within science-as-a-whole claims there can’t be a ‘hard science’ of experience.

Three major sub-groups in mainstream consciousness science are mainstream conscious-experiential science, Dennett’s ‘experience-is-illusion’, and approaches that study access consciousness.

Conventional emergent-property explanations dominate current consciousness science, but are invalid. Their “‘nothing-but’ brain-dynamics” claim simply deletes the experiential-realm (…-symbols!).

Conventional-emergence is problematic because it obscures the road to the One Experiment. Rejecting it doesn’t mean supernaturalism or dualism etc. Non-reductive physicalism is one scientific option.

The crucial issue for consciousness science is not which ‘ism’ is adopted. It’s whether experience couples dynamically with brain-activity or not, which determines if we can have consciousness science.

Getting the field of consciousness studies, and science-as-a-whole, to focus on what’s crucial is made harder by current fragmentation. This book simplifies the problem, addressing just two specific views:

1. The ‘No Science’ View. Strategy-U aims to: clarify the basis of this view; show that good science can exist under certain conditions; and, point out that the One Experiment can test if conditions hold.

2. Mainstream Conscious-Experiential Science. Strategy-V aims to show the following three points.

[V1] Mainstream conscious-experiential science’s standard-physics assumption implies there are no reliable experiments about experience. Thus, this assumption denies the approach’s own validity!

[V2] The same standard-physics assumption leads to V1-independent problems for spatial brain/ experience-relationships. Thus, V1’s ‘no experiential-science under standard-physics’ can’t be denied!

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[V3] V1/V2 point to the need for the One Experiment, to see if the non-standard physics required for experiential-science exists. If it does, mainstream experiential-theories can be revived, in a new setting.

Parts 2 to 4 explicitly demonstrate a simultaneous implementation of Strategies U and V. They culminate in the One Hypothesis (‘N-theory’), and the One Experiment. This Experiment essentially tests N-theory against each and every standard-physics theory in mainstream consciousness science.

3.11 Further Reading For more on the state of consciousness science, please see Mind the Gap: A Seven Question Field-Map Highlights Consciousness Science’s Critical, Neglected Terrain (Rosseinsky, 2019b). For detailed treatment of conscious experience and conventional emergence, please see Conscious Experience Is Not Conventionally-Emergent: Three Proofs (Rosseinsky, 2020a). The non-existence of reliable experiments under standard physics will be the central theme of the next Chapter. [And, as usual, an intermediate-level treatment of all these topics can be found in Consciousness Science: A New Approach (Rosseinsky, 2019a)].

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Koch, C. (2018). What Is Consciousness? Nature 557, S8. doi:10.1038/d41586-018-05097-x.

The Troubles with Consciousness Science

Michel, M., Beck, D., Block, N., Blumenfeld, H., Brown, R., Carmel, D., et al. (2019). Opportunities and challenges for a maturing science of consciousness. Nature Human Behaviour 3, 104. doi:10.1038/s41562-019-0531-8.

Penrose, R. (1989). The Emperor’s New Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Quiroga, R. Q., and Panzeri, S. (2013). Principles of Neural Coding. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Rieke, F., de Ruyter van Steveninck, R., Warland, D., and Bialek, W. (1997). Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rosseinsky, N. M. (2019a). Consciousness Science: A New Approach. www.thescienceweneed.com.

Rosseinsky, N. M. (2019b). Mind the Gap: A Seven-Question Field-Map Highlights Consciousness Science’s Critical, Neglected, Terrain. doi:10.31234/osf.io/qu6js.

Rosseinsky, N. M. (2020a). Conscious Experience Is Not Conventionally-Emergent: Three Proofs. www.thescienceweneed.com.

Rosseinsky, N. M. (2020b). Reclaiming Reality. www.thescienceweneed.com.

Seth, A. K. (2018). Consciousness: The last 50 years (and the next). Brain and neuroscience advances 2, 1–6.

Smolin, L. (2007). The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science and What Comes Next. New York: First Mariner.

Sprevak, M., and Irvine, E. (forthcoming). “Eliminativism about Consciousness,” in Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, ed. U. Kriegel Available at: https://marksprevak.com/publications/eliminativism-about-consciousness/.

Tononi, G. (2012). Phi: A voyage from the brain to the soul. Pantheon.

Endnotes

1 It’s meaningless because the act of defining conscious experience can’t be done in a way that’s scientifically-linked to the thing-that’s-being-defined. This can be very confusing, if it’s the first time you’ve come across it. (It’s still very confusing to me, on a daily basis!) 2 Here I’m hinting for the first time that there are two possible versions of science 3.0 – call them science 3.0a and science 3.0b, say. More on that in Chapter 9, and beyond. 3 See Chapter 4. 4 (Seth, 2018). 5 Another partial contributor to post-Truth’s vigor comes, of course, from the energetic investments of those whose self-interests its existence serves. 6 See, for example, The Remembered Present (Edelman, 1989). 7 See, for example, The Astonishing Hypothesis (Crick, 1994). Crick’s reference to ‘the soul’ in the title of this book shouldn’t be taken as a religious stance! His message is that we are all essentially ‘nothing more than a pack of neurons’ – there is no ‘soul’. 8 See, for example, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness (Baars, 1988). 9 For a view of computational neuroscience in the early 1990s, see The Computational Brain (Churchland and Sejnowski, 1992). For a sample of the field’s evolution over time, and some different emphases, see e.g. (Buzsáki, 2006; Quiroga and Panzeri, 2013; Rieke et al., 1997). 10 Computational neuroscience’s advances were in turn dependent on technological advances. EEG had been around for a while, as a means for collecting brain-data. But fMRI was invented around 1990. Around the same time, desktop computers were starting to acquire the sort of computational power sufficient for processing large EEG and fMRI datasets, and to run large and computationally- sophisticated simulation-models of neural activity.

11 The Emperor’s New Mind (Penrose, 1989). 12 The Conscious Mind (Chalmers, 1996). 13 www.consciousness.arizona.edu. 14 (Crick and Koch, 1990). 15 This viewpoint is often criticized as being ‘overly reductionistic’. But no-one has given me a single example of an explanation that’s accepted in mainstream science, and not expressible in terms of fundamental-particle physics. Of course, this doesn’t mean that every scientific explanation has to be given in those fundamental terms. Chemistry summarises physics, and biology uses chemistry’s summaries. Biology doesn’t need to explain biomolecules continually in terms of quarks, gluons, electrons and photons. But biomolecules are those collections, and the interactions of biomolecules are the interactions of their fundamental constituents.

16 For an introduction to the concept and role of meta-narrative, in the context of economy, please see Chapter 11. For a deeper treatment, please see Reclaiming Reality (Rosseinsky, 2020b). 17 ‘Structurally’ fixed means we’re allowed to add new particle-types at the bottom, or new unifying layers below the currently-lowest level. But we’re not allowed to add new things higher up, such as

The Troubles with Consciousness Science

emergent properties that have causal properties over and above those of the fundamental particles they’re comprised of. 18 As recently as the early 1900s, philosophy and science were partners-in-enquiry. I’m not arguing for a return to that setup. But I am pointing to the vital and currently-missing contributions to science from certain kinds of philosophical enquiry or outlook. 19 For example, I’m not going to get into the question of who gets to decide who is or isn’t ‘doing science’.

20 There’s always an exception: many people are skeptical of the scientific status of string theory, viewing it as either proto-science or mathematics. [See The Trouble with Physics (Smolin, 2007).] But in a flailing attempt to keep my thesis intact, that’s a critique of a specific theory, not a whole sub- field!

21 Philosophy of mind is an obstacle to science-3.0 as long as it props up mainstream conscious- experiential science (whose as-is methodology is broken), or when it claims that there can’t be a science of consciousness, without giving equal (or greater!) weight to possibilities afforded by the One Experiment. 22 What are philosophers concerned about, in the insistence on ‘causal closure’? Essentially, they want to rule out ‘supernatural’ ‘uncaused effects’ in Nature. This more-or-less OK. But rigidly holding to a fixed set of possible causes limits physics in a way that physics itself doesn’t recognise. 23 They allow that we might discover new particle-types. But the overall structure of science – with fundamental particles leading to atoms leading to objects – is fixed and finished. Specifically, there’s no new causality at higher levels. The effects of me typing on the keyboard right now follow from – and are identical to – the effects of the elementary particles that make up my fingers. If this all sounds very abstract now, worry not – we’ll be coming back to it. It’s deeply interwoven with the issue of whether information can transfer from experience to brain-activity. 24 In another act of premature self-graduation, consciousness science is instead declaring itself a ‘mature’ field, ready for the big leagues (Michel et al., 2019). 25 Of the philosophers I’ve just named, Daniel Dennett is probably the least guilty of defending the viability of consciousness science in a science-2.0 setting. But he’s still guilty of unscientific, dogmatic, insistence on that 2.0-frame. 26 See e.g. (Rosseinsky, 2019b). 27 I won’t go into which of these deserves to use the word ‘science’, because that is simply a matter of opinion. Notably, science-3.0 would see at least some ‘science’ at all of the conferences, whereas science-2.0 apparently has a strong ASSC-bias. (My objective ground for the science-2.0 observation is the kinds of articles about consciousness that are published in the flagship journals Science and Nature.) 28 www.scienceandnonduality.com. 29 www.consciousness.arizona.edu. (This series is the successor to the Tucson conferences I mentioned earlier.) 30 www.theassc.org. 31 What I mean by ‘proper consciousness science’ is simply the recognition of the proto-scientific state of the field, until the One Experiment is done.

32 For alleged impending victory, see (Block et al., 2014). For alleged present-day victory, see (Koch, 2018). 33 The fact that a scientific subfield is stuck in a mistake probably doesn’t merit an entire book. It happens all the time. The fact that this stuckness is delaying or even sabotaging the transition to science 3.0 does merit 100,000 words or so.

34 Some cognitive scientists and philosophers think that my ‘two-meter’ description neglects inferred reconstruction (Chapter 2), and thus overlooks the central methodology that the experimental field is based on. It doesn’t. Inferred reconstruction is used to ‘know’ what the meter-readings of report ‘mean’. Before I reconstruct its reading, the meter must be coupled to the phenomenon under study (Chapter 4). The two-meter view is used precisely to compare rigor in conscious-experiential science with that in other hard-science disciplines (which use a two-meter approach!) Problems in conscious- experiential science arise before inferred reconstruction. (They also occur in inferred reconstruction, under standard physics. In that setting, the experimenter’s thoughts about experience aren’t driven by or related to experience itself. Nor are yours or mine, right now!) 35 Or, see the more extended treatment of this point, at the start of Chapter 4. 36 My data here is recent publications in Nature (Koch, 2018) and Science (Dehaene et al., 2017). I don’t mean that ‘everyone in science buys the mainstream conscious-experiential cool-ade’. 37 (Rosseinsky, 2019b). 38 See, for example, Consciousness and the Brain (Dehaene, 2014), and In The Theater of Consciousness (Baars, 2001). 39 See, for example, Phi (Tononi, 2012). 40 See, for example, (Brown et al., 2019). 41 See, for example, The Predictive Mind (Hohwy, 2013). 42 See, for example, (Hameroff and Penrose, 2014). Some people may be surprised that I include Orch- OR under mainstream conscious-experiential science – which is defined as a class of standard-physics theories. Orch-OR, after all, is Penrose’s somewhat-controversial quantum-gravity theory-of- consciousness, which seems to many to go beyond the orthodox view. This point is a little beyond the scope of this book, but I sometimes include Orch-OR in the mainstream group because of a lack of clarity about whether the theory contains the sort of non-standard physics sufficient for information- transfer from experience to brain. See (Rosseinsky, 2019b) for further discussion. 43 Every ‘emergentist’ theory – in the way I’m defining this group – is part of mainstream conscious- experiential science. Conversely, the vast majority of theories in mainstream conscious-experiential science are emergentist. Of the ‘Big Five’, all except Orch-OR are emergentist. (Orch-OR does not attribute conscious experience to a collective property of classical-matter, but to a specific feature of the quantum level.) 44 Contrary to some claims, this Figure does not assume or imply dualism of any kind. For example, I could interpret panel B in an identity-theoretic manner, noting in particular that the dashed-black doubled-headed arrow denotes association between brain-activity and experience. 45 Consciousness Explained (Dennett, 1991). 46 Illusionism in philosophy of mind is actually a bit broader than just Dennett’s view. See (Sprevak and Irvine, forthcoming).

The Troubles with Consciousness Science

47 This is the point most professional critics of Dennett have missed. It’s not just whether experience exists. It’s whether I’m deluded in talking or even thinking about it. If I can ‘prove’ to myself that thinking and talking about experience are delusional, and if I choose to act only in non-delusional ways, I would present myself professionally much as Dennett does – even though conscious experience is ‘going on’ for me! 48 There’s an additional confusion in this area. Sometimes it’s not clear whether an access explanation is meant to be a theory-of-experience, or a theory-of-report-alone. (Theories-of-experience use report in their experimental methodology, but report is reconstructed into a dataset about experience. Theories-of-report-alone focus on explaining why some sorts of data are reportable while others are not, even when both sorts are present in encoded form in brain-activity.) For example, some people believe that what’s reportable by a human about their immediate environment is necessarily, as a matter of natural law, the same as what they consciously experience. Then, studying brain-systems involved in report and those involved in experience is more-or-less the same thing. (But, those studies are based on a belief or axiom that itself has no ground in experimental evidence!) 49 Instead, I prefer the usage ‘access awareness’, as a contrast with ‘experiential awareness’. The latter is then also synonymous with conscious experience (when contextually appropriate). This prevents the transfer of the ‘conscious’ word to analyses that properly study information-processing, solely. 50 If anyone suggests that experience might require something new in physics, they’re often met with explanations of how people used to think that was necessary for temperature. ‘But look how we sophisticated modern people understand that was silly’. The implication being, experience will turn out to be the same – anyone who thinks now it’s not a conventional property of the brain will be judged harshly by history. Of course, anyone working seriously in the field understands the history of science, and the hypothesis of conventionally-emergent experience. Equally, anyone with the capacity to reason can see the falsity in ‘phenomenon-X was explained by explanatory-modality-Y historically, so this new object-of-study E must be explained by Y too’. More to the point, as I’m just about to discuss, we can show directly that ‘Y’ (conventional emergence) can’t explain ‘E’ (experience). 51 It presupposes some standard test-being with a fixed history (against which she judges ‘novelty’) and a fixed computational capacity (which she uses to form expectations and thus judge ‘surprise’). 52 I’m treating atoms and molecules as ‘emergent’ from the fundamental particles, here. Thus, all of chemistry and biology are treated as emergent-property explanatory styles relative to fundamental physics, for the purposes of this simplified summary.

53 Alternatives to the fundamental-or-conventionally-emergent straitjacket include adding strong emergence, property-dualism, or non-reductive physicalism, to the explanatory mix. 54 Another emergentist response is to misinterpret what I’m calling ‘realms’ – an accounting mechanism for phenomena – as ‘substances’. As we’ll see imminently, the experiential realm can be not- conventionally-emergent while also being not-a-dualist-substance! (‘Substance dualism’ is the proposal that mind – e.g. the experiential realm – is made of one substance, while matter – the alleged- substrate of the unseen realm, in one view – is made of another.) 55 One obvious possibility is then some trivial extension of the definition of ‘conventional emergence’, to unlimit it from unseen-realm restriction. This is possible, but we need to ‘bring into science’ the things that these new, outside-unseen-realm, properties might explain. Didn’t we already do that, with angle-bracket symbols? Well, yes, but essentially the scientific character of these new symbols is fundamental (at least, not-conventionally-emergent!). Long story short, unlimiting doesn’t solve the problem, because what’s-to-be-explained by an unlimited-physics is still scientifically-novel. We get 28 © Nicholas Rosseinsky, 2019 The Troubles with Consciousness Science

non-reductive physicalism with a brain-contingent collection of otherwise-unreduced-properties. See (Rosseinsky, 2020a) for more details. 56 I use the word ‘political’ here in the sense of a ‘politically correct’ stance, within more absolutist schools of science. First, everything must be explainable by science. (No irreducible mysteries, only things that haven’t been worked out yet.) Second, the means of explanation are already ‘structurally fixed’ – we can add more particle-types at the bottom, or new unifying theories below the current foundations. But there can’t be any changes in the everything-else-is-an-emergent/collective-property structure, for levels above fundamental physics. 57 One famous example in a similar neighborhood is Jackson’s analysis of Mary the scientist who’s never seen red, but knows everything about the physics and neuroscience of vision (Jackson, 1986). Chalmers goes to great lengths with imaginary zombies to establish a not-conventionally-emergent character for conscious experience (Chalmers, 1996). (However, all his analyses are based on the assumed, untested, separation of conscious experience from brain-function – including report! – in his formulation of the so-called ‘hard problem’.) And there are many other critiques of conventional emergence. (Ineffability, for example, can be structured as a valid conventional-emergence refutation.) 58 As we’ll see though, non-reductive physicalism fails to establish a science of conscious experience that preserves standard physics, which is sometimes one of its goals. It fails to preserve the dynamical/causal features of standard-physics, because experience must couple to brain-activity for a trustworthy experimental science (Chapter 4). And it fails to preserve the explanatory structure, because it requires a ‘long list’ of experience-to-brain-activity relationships (Chapter 5). 59 If we have to add things, they haven’t been reduced! This is actually the cutting-edge of any ineffability critique of consciousness science: we can get experience into a scientific explanatory structure (angle-bracket-symbols!), but once in there those symbols can’t be reduced. 60 There seem to be two versions of property-dualism. One is where conscious experience is made fundamental. (Note that this doesn’t require a ‘substance’, though. We can think of properties as pretty abstract things, and ‘fundamental’ then just means ‘not composed of other properties’, and in some typically-undefined sense ‘around all the time’.) The other is where the property is not fundamental but not reducible, meaning ‘not composed of other properties but only existing contingent on certain conditions being satisfied’. Thus, in this second view, it’s not ‘around all the time’. These nuances and distinctions are not important to track, relative to the crucial issue for consciousness science. That issue is about dynamics – how and if experience couples back to the brain, once generated – not about cataloguing various ‘isms’ for the static makeup of experience itself. 61 I say ‘quite close to’ because strong emergence isn’t very well defined. For example, Chalmers (Chalmers, 2008) uses ‘strong’ to distinguish surprising from unsurprising (‘weak’) emergence, at the same time as labelling strong as properties not deducible ‘in principle’ – which is non-reducibility, not mere surprise. 62 Science is concerned with a ‘conventionally-emergent or not’ distinction. But that doesn’t translate into a single philosophical ‘ism’, as I just directly showed. 63 A formal, rigorous, demonstration that conventional emergence can’t explain experience requires formal, rigorous definitions of things like emergence and experience! We didn’t do that here. But it can be done. See, for example (Rosseinsky, 2020a). 64 One generic and familiar response to ‘no conscious-experiential science under standard physics’ is ‘I don’t see why not’. If people refuse to look again, it’s rather hard to shift from that place! The question remains: why are people so unwilling to look? I’ll return to this briefly in Chapter 13.

The Troubles with Consciousness Science

65 I’ll briefly survey distorting factors in Chapter 13. Reclaiming Reality (Rosseinsky, 2020b) contains a more expanded investigation. 66 I put Penrose and Hameroff’s Orch-OR (Hameroff and Penrose, 2014) into mainstream conscious- experiential science, and Orch-OR is not a conventionally-emergent theory. So, the phrase ‘mainstream, conventionally-emergent, conscious-experiential science’ is admittedly a bit confusing. Measured by numbers-of-theories, the vast majority of mainstream conscious-experiential is of the conventionally-emergent kind. For the avoidance of doubt, ‘mainstream, conventionally-emergent, conscious-experiential science’ does include Orch-OR, even though it doesn’t fit with the ‘conventionally-emergent’ descriptor! (I reluctantly adopt this sloppy convention just to try to cut down on the number-of-words.) 67 For those interested in explicitly following, or perhaps even participating in, the implementation of proper consciousness science: the only-two-other-voices treatment is, of course, a massive simplification of the actual strategic problem. There are many more competing and critical voices to respond to, than just mainstream conscious-experiential science, and the ‘no science’ crowd. 68 No, it’s not ‘N for Nicholas’! 69 The demand to test a single theory against another single theory in an experiment is a mistake. Experiments can test theory-classes against each other. For example, the One Experiment actually tests all theories that assume standard-physics in the brain against those that propose specific kinds of new physics (coupling experience to brain-dynamics, in a specific way). Nevertheless, to bring along those who insist on 1-vs-1 tests, I’ll just give them what they want!

70 Saying that ‘N-theory competes …’ might seem to contradict a claim I’ve made elsewhere, that I’m not out to ‘find the One True Theory of Consciousness’ – as many others are. The claim is true, nevertheless. N-theory is a single, concrete, complete-enough theory. (‘Complete enough’, to stand up in the scientific court as a valid experimental candidate.) But, in the context of the One Experiment, it ‘stands for’ a whole class of theories with experience-to-brain coupling. As I explain in Chapter 9, if the One Experiment evidences experience-to-brain coupling, this would not ‘prove’ N-theory is true. It would show that the class of experience-to-brain-coupled theories (of which N-theory is one member) is descriptively more accurate than the class of non-coupled theories (including all of mainstream conscious-experiential science).

71 For N-theory to work as a valid scientific theory rather than just as a hypothesis, the One Experiment has to show that a certain kind of experience-to-brain coupling exists. Thus, N-theory’s two roles – in relation to the Experiment, and as a rejection of the ‘no science’ camp – are not independent. As discussed, (and as will be discussed further!), if the ‘no science’ camp are right, in a sense, if the One Experiment turns out to show no experience-to-brain coupling. 72 In Chapter 13, I will bring back in other viewpoints, in addition to the two I’ve treated explicitly up to then (i.e. mainstream conscious-experiential science, and the ‘no science’ view). This will be appropriate to the pragmatic focus of Chapter 13, because it’s a reminder of the in-practice complexity of the actual landscape.

73 ‘Changed’: Of course, you may have come to this book with an intuitive or explicit understanding already, of everything I’ve written about here. But if that’s so, I hope you’ll at least have gained a new or renewed sense of recognition, of connection, of belonging … of being part of something that’s greater than yourself, in societal terms.