The Hard Problem

Computing Conciousness

The mind-body problem was once considered one of the most intractable in the philosophy of science (or just philosophy, as science was called back then). It seems few are aware that this problem ended with Newton, who concluded it was absurd to think there was any way, let alone an intuitive way, of accounting for reality. The best science can hope for is to understand a theory.

That said, if you were someone like Descartes, before science lowered its goals, you might have asked a question like: can a physical process account for my subjective experience? Well, what else is there? On the other hand, like organization is fundamentally different at the cellular level from the world of large organisms like you and I, it seems correct to say that consciousness is fundamentally different from matter and the flow of electrons, even if they are the source of it. Is the cause of consciousness of a different nature than the effect? It seems hard not to say yes. But it also seems impossible to answer such a question.

Let’s say the answer is, “no”. In that case, it seems premature to rule out consciousness in machines. Consider a machine that precisely mimics the flow of electrons in a human brain. Ruling out the difference in material with which each is constructed, wouldn’t you expect the same effect? Say we could create the material and conditions (pressure, temperature, etc) such that the two are now identical in all known respects, what then?

Here it seems convenient to think about teleportation. In science fiction, your atoms are sent through space to a remote location where they are reassembled. In quantum teleportation, your quantum information appears at a remote location where a set of particles are entangled with a set of particles at your origin. The particles at the remote location then interact with a third set of particles to recreate an identical quantum state.

Whether reconstructed from the same atoms or with the same quantum state, is it still you? Or would your life end and another just like it begin? If it ends, then what can we say about consciousness? What was it that ended exactly? Maybe consciousness must be continuous in an individual? But what about dreamless sleep? Will you die tonight?

It seems safe to say conciousness is not continuous. As it happens, neither is the body. Consider that every five years or so we become a completely different material object. All the atoms in our bodies are replaced. Yet we do not say that we die every five years. If neither body nor mind are continuous or contiguous in time or space, then what, if anything, is constant. Since that seems to be a property of our experience. We don’t change into someone else. In that sense, we remain the same, even if nothing else does.

Another perspective that is reasonable to take is the position that we shouldn’t be so surprised by the seeming difficulty of the hard problem, but not because of anything having to do with consciousness, rather the real problem is matter. We just dont know what it is.

Building on that perspective, it could be, just like Goedel showed with arithmetic, that any knowledge of it is either inconsistent or incomplete. For those born blind from birth, there is simply no way to understand what sight is like. Say you have Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, King Solomon, Shakespeare, Byron, Milton, Goethe, Voltaire, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Melville, Poe, Steinbeck, Rilke, Rimbaud, Camus, Hesse, Hemmingway, Bukowsky and Cormac McCarthy work tirelessly on a description. Still it won’t convey, even in the slightest, what its like to see to those blind folks. Does it seem absurd, then, the same might be true for all of us: that their is a fundamental sense perception we simply don’t have. Put another way, rats cannot solve prime number mazes. It’s just not in their wheelhouse. Nor is there cat math or dog literature. If we keep going, it seems reasonable enough to extend this property to human mammals—and conclude that, like the rat, there are things which are simply beyond our understanding.

That said, we should never give up trying to understand, even if the answer is ultimately beyond the limits of our intelligence or experience, since that is something we will never know.