Qualia--The Hard Problem?

David Chalmers, a leading philosopher of mind and consciousness, tells us that the "hard" problem is qualia, that is, explaining the subjective experience of experience. Explaining the sensation of seeing the color red, for example. How do we explain the subjective internal experience of seeing the color red?

The philosophers always seem to choose the color red, for unclear reasons. First of all, I object, because I am partially red/green color blind. I can't see any numbers in those Ishihara plates with all the colored dots. So my experience of red is not exactly the same as that of other people. In medical school, when we had to identify gram-negative organisms under the microscopic, I saw grey. My classmates saw vivid bright red. I aced the exams because the gram-positive organisms that we had to distinguish from the gram-negative organisms was easy: distinguish grey from blue. No problem.

But, putting that aside, I have to wonder on what one-dimensional planet these philosophers are living. They seem to have no understanding of consciousness at all, despite being the supposed deep-thinking experts on consciousness. Chalmers has written books on the subject. Seems to me like the blind trying to lead the deaf.

What's my beef? Chalmers' problem of qualia stems from a simplistic model of the brain, a linear, mechanical, deterministic system, an electrical/synaptic entity composed of electric wires with synaptic connections that are activated by neurotransmitters. The brain is seen as a hardwired computer, nothing more, nothing less. That view has led to Chalmers' dictum that a computer software system that reproduces the functioning of the brain will itself be conscious. Which itself is complete nonsense.

The human nervous system is far more than a wiring system with synapses. Given that the human nervous system has some 100 billion neurons with roughly 100 trillion synapses, even that simplistic view of the human nervous system as a wired system gives us arguably the most complex entity in the universe. There is nothing like it, except other species' brains. How do scientists study this? One way is by doing experiments on C. elegans, an organism with 302 neurons and some 5000 synapses. That's going to tell us what's going on in the human brain, right?

Not exactly.

But, based on these primitive to specious notions that, as Wolfgang Pauli might have said, are concepts that aren't even wrong, Chalmers has pronounced his dictum that computers that model the brain will be conscious. The complexity of the computer system that would have to be built to mimic the brain is beyond the capacity of humans to construct. So Chalmers is safe. His dictum can never be disproven. Can't be proven either. But the chutzpah based on ignorance that is Chalmer's dictum is almost infinite.

Consider just one additional aspect of the human nervous system: The cytoplasm of all of the neurons in the human nervous system is directly connected via gap junctions, sites of connections between neurons, where cell membranes merge and create small channels between the neurons, connecting the cytoplasm. The human nervous system is a plasma, a continuous cytoplasm that is entirely and directly connected, beyond nerves and synapses. Hameroff, an anesthesiologist in New Mexico, has pointed out this plasma system, a with Roger Penrose has proposed and entirely different model of the human nervous system. And then there is additional function of individual neurons that can be pulsatile in a very complex way, influenced by many factors. Neurons in the hypothalamus that produce Gonadotropin hormone-releasing hormone (GnRH) demonstrate pulsatile activity that is affected in a complex fashion by both GnRH itself and by cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP). These are neurons that affect the menstrual cycle. The understanding of neuronal systems, let alone the nature of gap junctions on nervous function, is primitive, which is the understatement of the millennium.

Wilder Penfield, working at McGill in the 1940s, developed a surgical technique to treat epilepsy in which the patient was awake after the skull had been opened. Penfield could probe the exposed brain to identify the area causing seizures, and ablate it. He worked with various individuals, including a neurophysiologist, Libert, who did a few experiments of his own on these awake patients. One of those experimental approaches involved assessing the time to awareness of various stimuli done at a site on the body, such as the toe, and then stimulating directly the site in the brain that medicated sensation in the toe. What Libert found was that the awake patient became aware of the stimulus at that toe faster than he or she became aware of the stimulation applied directly at the site of the brain that medicated sensation in the toe.

That finding is completely inexplicable in traditional neurophysiology. It has never been explained. It has been resoundingly ignored. The point? Neurophysiogists, and the philosophers they influence, ignore the evidence that doesn't fit their understanding or their mechanics-causal system. They discard evidence if they have no means of including it in their model, i.e., they cheat. They ignore. They demand we accept their profound insights when they have no idea what they are talking about and refuse to consider the evidence. Descartes would be appalled. They function more like medieval theologians, without the strict logic of the Schoolmen, than like scientists.

Descartes, for example, famously pronounced: Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. This gave rise, somewhat inadvertently, it would seem, to mind body dualism, although this wasn't exactly implied by his pronouncement. Today, Cartesian dualism, so-called, is a hiss and a byword. Long since rejected by scientists, who, alas, function less productively than did Descartes (he gave us a coordinate system, analytic geometry, and the law of refraction, although the fuller understanding of light awaited Newton, Maxwell, Planck, and Einstein and beyond).

Descartes, and all who have followed him, have actually missed the import of his pronouncement. The fuller implication is that not only did he think, HE WAS AWARE THAT HE WAS THINKING.

As far as we know, this is a unique characteristic of humans: They are aware of their mental processes. Other species are obviously conscious, but don't appear able to consider, or analyze, their own consciousness. Humans are cognitively self-aware. You might say they exhibit a meta-awareness. This would immediately explain qualia. We are aware of our neurophysiological state and able to contemplate it. We can consider the experience of seeing red, and compare it to seeing blue, and green, and consider the implications of these colors. We can blend them to see what happens, and come to understand primary vs. other colors and how they come to be. We even come to understand the electromagnetic nature of light, explore its wavelengths and behavior, measure its speed, form elegant mathematical representations of the behavior of light, and even discard the idea of the ether once the recognition of light as a photon, a particle, and a wave, is extant. What a piece of work is Man, indeed! Certainly far more than Chalmers or the philosophers, or the neurophysiologists say we are.

Probably the best representation of this self-awareness is found in one of the ancient human stories, that of Genesis, when Adam and Eve partook of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. What happened? They became aware of themselves. And developed a conscience, which can only result when one is able to contemplate one's own actions, as well as thoughts and ideas. Self-awareness, particularly conscious awareness of consciousness, is necessary for a conscience, e.g., the knowledge of good and evil. Or even the ability to grasp the idea of good and evil, of moral capacity. Funny that the scientists never seem to consider such things in their theorizing. Maybe they should spend a little time reading the Bible. It would obviously help their thinking. Maybe get them past their one-dimensional perspective.

This being aware of being aware, this consciousness of being conscious, is like second-order logic. First-order logic is logic that is based on predicate statements only. Second-order logic allows predicate statements about predicate statements.

Euclid's geometry is first-order logic. Predicate statements and theorems proven from those predicate statements. Set theory gets to second-order logic. As does most of mathematics. Only Euclid's geometry and simple arithmetic involve first-order logic. So with set theory, with second-order logic, we get into self-contradiction and paradox. Consider Bertrand Russell's paradox: Is the set of all sets that are not members of themselves a member of itself? The set of all shoes is not a shoe, so that set is not a member of itself. So it is included in the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. But how about the set, itself, of all sets that are not members of itself? If it is not a member of itself, then it is included in the set of all sets that are not members of themselves, but then it becomes a member of itself and is not the set of all sets that are not members of themselves, if you follow my drift. So it is a paradox. It can't not be a member of itself and be a member of itself and still be the set of all sets that are not members of themselves.

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, logicians and mathematicians were trying to prove the validity of logic. Russell and Whitehead made a major effort with their Principe Mathematica. David Hilbert, the great German mathematician, suggested that meta-mathematics (sort of, but not exactly, like metaphysics) be used to prove such tenets. As a surprise to everyone, Kurt Godel, having just finished his graduate work, did exactly that. He used a metamathematical approach, to present his incompleteness proofs. As a warmup he proved that first-order logic, as in Euclid's geometry and simple arithmetic, is complete and consistent, valid in all respects. Then, however, he proved that second-order logic is Incomplete. That is, any axiomatic system of second-order logic, with a finite number of axioms has provable true theorems that contradict each other, e.g., is inherently flawed, and the remedy can only be to start with an infinite number of axioms.

When John Von Neumann heard the original presentation by Godel, his statement was: The jig is up. That is, mathematics was not the surefire approach to understanding reality that everyone had assumed.

He wasn't exactly right. Godel's interpretation of his own work, with which most disagreed, but which he espoused to the end of his life, is that this indicated that human cognitive capacity is "transfinite," (one might just as well say transcendent) and indicated that humans can verify truths that they can not formally prove. Mathematicians, logicians, scientists and philosophers, still kick against these pricks, these Godelian proofs with frustration and pique. But they have not buried Godel's work or his interpretation of it. (They generally ignore it.) When asked if his work was in the mainstream of modernity, Godel became upset and vehemently denied that it was. In fact, he said, it is completely contrary to the mainstream of thought in the 20th century. And right he was. He considered his work transcendent.

And the neuroscientists and philosophers of mind are continuing to attempt something that is so far off-base as to be completely risible. Chalmers' dictum about a computer modeling the brain being conscious is a case in point. Godel maintained throughout his life (and his work led to the Turing Church halting hypothesis) that AI could never equate to human consciousness, as human consciousness is transfinite (transcendent) which a computer can never be. (Could a computer match the prophecies of Isaiah?)

But Heidegger effectively closed the door on any notion of human transcendence, and demanded that human transcendence be barred from polite, or rather all, philosophical (and by extension, all scientific) conversation. Never mind that such transcendence had already been mathematically proven by Godel. Hence, philosophy, and the science that is aligned with it in modernity, refuses to consider that its foundational ideas have been disproven. So much for philosophy, science, and modernity. The epitaph for the disastrous 20th century could well be Stephen Weinberg's observation: The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. And yet he titled his last book, "To Explain the World." He missed the point. Science may, to a small degree, describe the world, but it never has, and never will, explain it.

So what are we to do? Penrose and Hameroff have proposed another model of the human nervous system, as a high-temperature superconducting quantum computational system (more with computer analogies). So with that, we get into hyper-fast computation, as with, say, savants. Savant phenomena can potentially be explained by a quantum computational capacity. Daniel Kahnemann of course, even in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, fails to consider savant phenomena. Again the 'scientists' or philosophers refuse to consider the evidence, and pick and choose and discard as they are led by their half-baked theories. (And their theories can at most be half-baked, given the almost infinite complexity of the human nervous system).

We also get into quantum entanglement as well as the interaction of consciousness directly with the physical world, in the sense of conscious observation collapsing the wave equation. Mind and matter directly interact, suggesting that mind is material. But what kind of material? Perhaps a consciousness field, with which our brains have evolved to interact. A noosphere, in the term of Pierre Tielhard de Chardin (long since discredited). But one preceding our consciousness, rather than being produced by our consciousness. A quantum field with which we are all entangled.

What mind and consciousness may be (products of a universal quantum field?) is nowhere near entering the lexicon of the philosophers and scientists. Thus the beauty of Marilynn Robinson's little book, "Absence of Mind."

So the actual hard problem is not qualia at all, but how to explain our awareness of being aware. Our ability to contemplate the neurophysical state that we experience when we see red. Or our awareness at all. The idea of explaining qualia is indicative of an avoidance of considering what consciousness actually is, looking at ALL of the evidence, not the infantile experimentation of someone like Kahnemann or his ilk.

When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?