Neural correlates of consciousness – how exactly can we find them?

August 13, 2020Posted inAxis Praxis, neurologism

This is a slightly edited version of an answer I wrote on Quora: What is the best way to understand consciousness?

File:Digesting Duck.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

This emoticon captures my attitude towards questions about consciousness:

¯\(°_o)/¯

Consciousness seems to be invisible to scientific methods. The only way to incorporate consciousness into science is to change the definition of science so it includes subjective experience. I am not really comfortable with doing this, because it waters down science to the point where it becomes indistinguishable from introspective philosophy. Science is useful because of what makes it different from philosophy: it makes predictions that can be tested objectively. Truly subjective experiences seem to be ruled out by definition.

My favorite way to think about consciousness is inspired by Indian philosophy, though the general idea crops up all over the place:

Consciousness is not a phenomenon: it is the precondition for the appearance of phenomena. The mind is not a thing to be observed, but the medium by which things are observed.

This is emphatically not a scientific statement, but that’s okay: science is only one of many ways to look at the universe.

So let’s examine the scientific approach to consciousness in detail!

Are Selves Illusory? Emergent? Ubiquitous?

July 16, 2020Posted inAxis Praxis, neurologism5 Comments

https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/skeleton-ellora.jpg

I was asked this question on Quora recently:

Is the self an illusion or an emergent phenomenon? I’ve read people who use neuroscience to argue for one, the other, or both simultaneously.

Here’s how I responded.

No one knows what the self is. Least of all my fellow neuroscientists! 😉

Personally, I think the idea that the self is an illusion is meaningless. I suspect it’s just a (highly misleading) shorthand for saying that people’s notions of a permanent, unchanging self are incorrect. In other words, it means that the self is not an eternal soul with permanent, intrinsic, essential properties. Instead it is a process that changes on various timescales.

Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so Hard? Intentionality.

June 24, 2020Posted inAxis Praxis, neurologism1 Comment
Someone I know sent me some material related to their research on consciousness, asking for some feedback. What follows is an edited version of what I wrote to them.
Flint Spear and Arrow-Heads
Solving the easy problem of consciousness — by explaining the causes and neural correlates of particular conscious experiences — is challenging but at least conceivable. This is not so for any claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness — it is going to evoke skepticism from both scientists and philosophers. I’m one of the many neuroscientists that do not think the hard problem is solvable — to us it is not clear that phenomenal consciousness is a scientifically tractable phenomenon in the first place.

Science does not disprove free will

June 18, 2020Posted inAxis Praxis9 Comments

Someone contacted me through Quora recently because they were having an existential crisis — it was stimulated by the ostensibly scientific notion that humans do not have free well.

Any theory that insists that we do not actually make choices is going to causes distress among many people who valorize academic thinking. Many hard-nosed metaphysicians simply don’t care about the mental well-being of the general public. I find this attitude simultaneously patronizing and irresponsible.