EXPLORATIONS IN THE NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

If you have ever wondered what it would have been like to sit in on arguments between Socrates and Plato, or Freud and Jung, or Einstein and Bohr, then imagine what it might have been like to hear debates between all of them and you get an idea of what took place in Tucson, Ariz., recently. Drawing from experts in such diverse fields as neuroscience, philosophy, physics, psychology, computer sciences, and the arts, participants at a conference sponsored by the University of Arizona presented papers, proposed theories, and debated their views concerning consciousness -- what it is, how it occurs, and how we should proceed in developing a science that will focus on this most basic of all human experiences.

Now you may say, "I know what consciousness is. 'I think therefore I am.' Right?"

But have you considered the other species of animals that inhabit our planet? Is a monkey conscious? Is a dolphin? A chimpanzee? Do they have the same type of consciousness as exists in humans? What about computers? Will the Internet become conscious someday? And how do we answer these questions in meaningful ways?

One avenue we can vigorously pursue is to define the process. We know we have memories, that we make associations between memories, and that these associations help us make judgments. For example, a person stands before me. I recognize that it is a man's face and I associate this face with certain experiences. Through this process, I deduce that this face belongs to my husband. If my husband were an identical twin, there would be clues that would help me distinguish him from his brother. I am not suggesting that it would necessarily be easy to distinguish between identical twins, only that there would be clues that would help me do so.

Now we have computers which have been trained to identify faces using a learning process that stores faces in memory. Even when shown only a portion of a target individual's features and even when target faces are expressing different types of emotion, the computer has proven incredibly accurate in distinguishing between the individuals it is shown.

"OK," you say, "but computers don't have personal emotions associated with the experiences in their memories of that face." And as far as we know, that statement is true. Yet I wonder, has anyone ever asked a computer how it feels about the faces it sees? Or whether it has emotional responses regarding what it sees?

Danny Hillis, adjunct professor of computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argued that our current concept of computers is too simple. He says we think of computers as "dumb devices" with no greater capabilities than a toaster because we are just at the beginning of development of this technology. Hillis asked the question about whether the Internet is or may one day become conscious? And further, he says he believes it will. It has more data available to it at this very instant than any single human being has ever known, and it already exceeds our capacity to understand how it works or to model its patterns of interaction.

Countering Hillis, Tim Roberts, a member of the computing & information technology faculty at Monash University, Victoria, Australia, said, "By organizing buckets of water and pipes, we can perform every high level computation any sophisticated computer is capable of, and yet, no matter how many buckets of water we have and no matter how sophisticated the system of pipes we develop, we are still left with nothing more than buckets and water and pipes. There is no consciousness, nor will there ever be."

These two arguments typify the various viewpoints of the several hundred scientists and thinkers attending the conference. In fact, it became clear that each of us, regardless of our field of expertise, is quite certain we know what consciousness is. In general, most of the conference attendees could be separated into three (3) main groups: 1) The metaphysicist/scientist: those who believe consciousness is a strange and wonderful mystery that exceeds our current understanding but are certain that we will somehow, someday define it. 2) The Materialist: those who believe that consciousness is purely the result of mechanical processes and that we have already defined it, but need more research to refine our models. And 3) The True Mystic: those who believe consciousness is indefinable and ultimately unknowable.

Professor John Searle, a member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, suggested that we need what he called a "common sense definition" of consciousness and he offered the following: Consciousness consists of subjective, qualitative states of awareness, sentience, or feeling. It is a biological phenomena intrinsic to certain biological systems.

There were a great many participants who took issue with this definition. They would be less vehement in their objections, I was told, if Dr. Searle would remove the word "biological" from the definition.

Recognizing the differences of opinion represented by conference attendees, in the conclusion of his talk Dr. Searle stated emphatically, "Whatever else we may disagree on, we now regard nature as intelligible and understandable. We have de-mystified nature, and we are making great strides in describing all natural processes."

So, have we demystified nature as Dr. Searle suggests?

Henry P. Stapp, a physicist with the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at UC-Berkeley said, "Science has taken us beyond the primitive superstition that spirits are lurking behind every tree and causing things to happen."

And in the Western, Greco-Roman derivative civilizations that is true. We actually moved beyond that concept centuries ago. But has science explained the subjective experiences of love, beauty, harmony, or ecstasy? Have doctors and neuroscientists identified the place in the brain that coordinates the multitude of associations and assigns meaning to those associations which transcends the sum of all the various and sundry parts? Have they understood intuition, that wondrous experience that gives rise to leaps in human understanding?

I think the majority of those present at the conference would answer, "No." And as F.J. Varela (Laboratoire de Psychophysiologie Cognitive, Paris, France) suggested, any science which hopes to understand consciousness must include not only the objective details that can be weighed and measured, quantified and calculated, repeated and verified, but also the subjective experiences because "at the core, it is always the subjective, first-person experience that is reported. The individual scientist is always at the base of any research effort."

We cannot divorce ourselves from nature, for we exist within it. We cannot separate ourselves from consciousness for it is the only experience we truly have, everything else is merely a representation of what our physical senses are capable of perceiving. In trying to define consciousness, we have become the proverbial eye turning to look upon itself. What do we see? Some of us find only the physical processes in the brain, neurons and synapses and neural maps. Some of us find all those things but also include qualia and Cartesian Cuts and many mysteries yet to be explored. Still others say of course it includes all those things, but that is not what consciousness is. It's that buzz, that esoteric out-of-body, out-of-mind experience that transcends the physical, existing not only within but also beyond time and space. It's the magic, the hidden essence, the spark of God, the link to Spirit, and for some it is the link to the world of spirits.

Nature demystified? For the materialist, yes, but for the rest of us, not yet, not completely. One can only hope that Nature, in her infinite creativity, will always provide us with new mysteries to be explored. For without nature's mystery, we have no need for art which attempts to touch it, religion which attempts to exalt it, literature which attempts to expose and/or solve it, nor for science which attempts to explain it.

Jacquelyn Close is a writer living in Jackson. Her husband, Ed, also a writer, submitted a paper at the Consciousness Conference titled "The Case for the Non-Quantum Receptor."