One. The mystery. Many people say consciousness is the greatest mystery
facing science today, but why? Isn't it obvious?
This is consciousness? No it's not. And the problem goes back to the
philosophical problem called the mind-body problem, or in its modern
incarnation, the hard problem of consciousness. We seem to have
subjective experiences that are private to ourselves and yet, we believe there is
an external world that we can all see and feel and hear and touch. How can
these two things relate to each other? How can a physical brain give rise to
create, be responsible for subjective experience. That's the mystery.
Two. What is it like to be a bat? This weird question was asked by the philosopher
Thomas Nagel in 1974 and it has become the closest thing we have to a
definition in consciousness studies. If you ask: what is it like to be a cup?
Well, nothing. There's nothing like to be a cup, is there? It doesn't do anything
or feel anything. But what about a bat? The idea is this - if there is something it's
like to be a bat, something for the bat, the way things are for the bat,
that's what we mean by being conscious and if there's nothing it's like to be
a bat, that's what we mean by not being conscious.
Three. Qualia. Philosophers talk about qualia - these
qualitative aspects of our experience. So a quale might be, for example, the redness
of this red, or the green-blue, whatever this is. The experience. The way
it feels to hit myself or the smell of coffee. These are all supposed to be
qualia and they're supposed to make up our
experience. But others would say 'That's a ridiculous notion. Experience
isn't like that. You can't break it down into qualia.' Which is right?
Four. The philosopher's zombie.
I'm sitting here. Now imagine that there's another Sue
sitting here and she is, from the outside, indistinguishable in every way from the
real Sue. She behaves and looks and acts and thinks, says the same
things, but inside she's quite different. She's not conscious. She's a zombie.
There's nothing it's like to be zombie Sue. We can easily imagine such a thing,
but could it exist? Some consciousness researchers say of course it could exist.
They must believe that consciousness is some kind of added extra - that we might
have or not have. We might have evolved to have it or not to have it.
Others say that is completely wrong. Any creature that could do all these things
and behave this way and think and see and feel and talk would have to be
conscious by virtue of being able to do those things.
Five. Are other animals conscious?
When I stood on my cat's tail she howled and ran away and I'm convinced
that she really felt pain. But did she? Behavior can be misleading. I could, for
example, have a toy cat and put some mechanism in its tail so that when I
stamped on it, it went 'Yow!' That wouldn't prove it was conscious. There are other
methods though. We can look at the anatomy. Other mammals, dogs and cats and
even bats, have similar anatomy to us, similar brain structures that make us
think that probably they could feel pain. But then what about fish or caterpillars
or octopuses, they have totally different anatomy. So we can't tell from that. One
last way we might tell is the physiology. Experiments with fish show that they
don't like even mild electric shocks and will swim away from them, but if you give
them painkillers, the same sort I might use for a headache, then they don't mind
so much. So maybe they do feel pain.
Six. Altered states of consciousness. We
all know what it's like to feel different. We sleep, we dream, even if we
don't remember our dreams and most of us have been an inebriated at some time or
another in our life. But it's not obvious to know what is altered in an altered
state of consciousness, or even how to measure them. Do you take someone's word
for it? How they feel? Do you look to see whether they've taken some drug, or
been hypnotised? It's not such an easy concept as we might have first thought.
Seven. The neural correlates of consciousness. One of the most popular ways of studying
consciousness is to ask which bits of the brain are responsible for when we're
conscious of something, or when we're not. So experiments might take something like
this. Are you seeing a duck or a rabbit? And then look in the brain to see where
things change. But we find that low down in the visual system nothing changes, but
higher up in the brain things flip, according to when we flip from duck to
rabbit, or back again. But does this really tell us where consciousness is arising in the brain?
Eight. Is consciousness all an illusion?
That might seem ridiculous. I mean, I know I'm conscious. But the so called illusionists don't say
that consciousness doesn't exist or there isn't a problem, rather the idea is
this - we have all these wrong notions about our own minds. We think our
consciousness is something we have, that we control, that it has effects and is
powerful and does things. But we may be completely wrong about that. So for an
illusionist, our first task is to undermine all our assumptions about
consciousness and start again, in the hope that this way, we might see through the mystery.
Nine. Free will. Consciousness and free will
are closely related. I may feel as though I consciously decide to
do something and that's why I do it. But when we look in the brain, we
don't see that this can happen and indeed we can see there's decisions
being made in different parts of the brain that explain why these actions
happen. And experiments also show that the conscious experience of
deciding to act comes too late to be the cause of emotion. So could free will
be illusory and if so how do I live my life without believing in it?
Ten. The self.
What is a self? I feel as though I'm inside here looking out. I'm the one who
has free will, who is conscious. There's got to be a me. But when we look inside
brains, we don't find anywhere that self could be, or indeed anything that it will
be needed to do. So what is a self? Is it the construction of the brain?
A representation of a self that doesn't exist? An illusion indeed?
That's an interesting thought. Who am I?