In the world of science - neuroscience in particular - there is something called the "hard problem of consciousness." I love that phrasing. It's called a "hard problem" because we can't explain it and, frankly, if you've tried to read Roger Penrose's "Shadows of the Mind", you realize that we don't even know where to start. There isn't really even a field of study in which to place consciousness. Will it be answered from the field of biology? Physics? Metaphysics? We don't even know if it belongs in the hard sciences or liberal arts. It really is a hard problem! In fact, we can't even come up with a good definition of consciousness, even though we all experience it. Consciousness is defined as "awareness of existence." Great. What is "awareness"? "Awareness" is defined as the "state of being conscious of something." That's a textbook example of a circular definition. We don't know how to define it and we don't know where to study it. So, yes, consciousness really is a "hard problem"!
However,
to me, consciousness is just one side of the issue. The other side is our ability to make
decisions - what some of us would refer to as our "free will." I have discussed free will in other entries,
so I am not focusing on that here, except to say one thing: compared to the problem of free will,
consciousness is easy!! Free will is an
11 on the Mohs scale.
Just one
more thing: in my view, consciousness
and free will are two aspects of the same thing. Consciousness correlates to the
"sensory" system and free will correlates to the "motor"
system. Consciousness is an input. Free will is an output. To go further, since I hypothesize that
consciousness and free will reside in the "soul-spirit" (or the Greek
"psuche-pneuma" - see here for general discussion), consciousness is
the part of the soul-spirit that is acted
upon by the physical brain (senses the brain's status) and free will is the
part of the soul-spirit that acts upon
the physical brain.
I said all
that to say this: I'm proposing using
the idea of an orchestra as an analogy to consider the mind/brain/soul/consciousness/free
will problem. With this analogy, I hope
to show that consciousness and free will cannot
be physical, material structures in the way we currently classify things as
being material.
For
starters in this analogy, let's correlate each musician in the orchestra with a
neuron. Of course there are a lot more
neurons in the brain than musicians in an orchestra. So you have to imagine a really huge orchestra and an incredible array of instruments. Some instruments play very few notes - like
specialized percussion instruments.
Other instruments are like violins - almost always playing. But each musician is primarily responsible
for their own instrument. In the brain,
neurons may have an effect on other neurons and multiple organs. In a very loose way, each musician is
affected by the musicians around them.
If they play faster or slower or so on, they can be influenced in a way
that might affect their play. Granted,
it's not a perfect analogy: orchestras
lack "feedback loops" and "reflexes" and other features of
the nervous system. And a musician is,
of course, much more complex than a single neuron and maybe each musician
should be thought of as more of a network of neurons. But, really, that's not the point of this
analogy.
As
described so far, the orchestra can function pretty well - especially if it is
composed of a group of well-trained musicians - and this is analogous to the
brain. The instruments are the neural
signals - the action potentials of each neuron or the aggregate action
potentials of each neural circuit. The
orchestra is a self-contained unit just like the brain is a self-contained
unit. If you have an instrument that
measures sound alone, you will only measure the results of what each musician
does - the sound that comes out of each instrument. In the same way, if all you have are measures
of neuronal activity - voltage or metabolic measures - then all you will see is
the neural activity. When we record
brain activity, we are listening in on each musician or each section of
musicians to hear the music they are playing.
By listening in on different areas of the brain, we hope to assemble the
entire "score" that is being played.
But there
are two things missing: one is obvious
and you probably know what I'm going to say.
The other is even more obvious, so obvious that you might not think of
it. These two things are: 1) the Conductor and 2) the Listener - the
audience.
First,
let's consider the Listener. The
Listener represents, in this analogy, the consciousness of the soul. Of course you don't have to have any listeners for an orchestra to function. But what is the point of an orchestra if no
one is listening? Actually, though, you do have to have at least one
Listener: the Conductor. A deaf, blind, and insensate conductor would
not be able to conduct. Even if no one else
is listening, at the very least the Conductor is listening.
Note that
only the Listener hears the whole orchestra (assuming they are in a room with
good acoustics). Each musician hears the
musicians around them, and probably focuses in to certain sounds (like the percussion),
but they really are not sitting back and listening to appreciate the music as a
whole. It is kind of hard for an
individual musician to hear everything being played (especially since, as you
recall, we are talking about a really really huge orchestra), and they naturally
"tune out" some sounds in order to concentrate on what they are
playing. In general, they hear their own
instrument and the instruments of those around them much more intensely than
anything else. Their attention is
focused on what they have to play. But
the Listener is generally listening to the entire combined sound of the
orchestra. What the Listener hears is
not just a single, combined output. For
example, the Listener doesn't just hear a homogenous sound that increases or
decreases in volume alone. No, the
Listener hears a richness of many different components: volume, pitch, harmonics, beat, etc. The components - the instruments - are all
there in what the Listener hears. They
hear the whole musical piece.
The thing
about our consciousness is that we are aware of the states of multiple neurons in
our brain at the same instant in time and that awareness is updated with each
passing instant in time. At each
successive moment, we are tracking the status of millions of neurons. Usually, we are just listening to the entire orchestra,
although we do have the ability to "tune out" portions of our sensory
inputs and concentrate on a small part of what is happening around us. The Listener also has memory and may have a
memory of familiar passages in a musical piece.
The Listener can be moved to emotions through those passages of
music. These are all characteristics of
our consciousness. Again, the analogy is
not perfect, but I think it can be instructive.
The lack
of a "Listener" in the physical brain is, to me, one of the major
problems confronting the idea of consciousness as a physical entity that
resides in the brain. There is nothing
that physically connects all of our neurons to a single, unified point - no
"Organ of Listening." Of
course there are many neurons that have electrical connections to a huge number
of other neurons throughout the brain.
But a single neuron does not
contain signals that can fully represent the richness of the conscious
sensations we feel. A neuron,
fundamentally, either outputs an action potential or it doesn't. A neuron is simply binary in that manner. Even if we allow for the variation in
excitatory potentials as some kind of continuum over a range, we are still left
with just a single value (voltage) that is, fundamentally, discrete and cannot
provide anywhere near the richness of our conscious experience. Our conscious experience is composed of the
activity of many many neurons simultaneously.
But there is no physical anatomical structure that makes such a
connection. There is nothing physical in
the brain that is like a recording array, picking up the electrical signals
from a large ensemble of neurons and then displaying them on a screen to be
appreciated in aggregate...or, related to our proposed analogy: converting the neuronal spikes into sounds
for someone to listen to. There is nothing
in the brain (physical) that is like a PET scan, which can show neural activity
across the entire brain. There is no
"uber-neuron" that is simultaneously aware of all of the states of
the other neurons in the brain. Even if
there were such a neuron, it could not maintain the richness of the input
because all a neuron can experience is the summation of all inputs into a
single voltage level. The anatomy is
clear. We've dissected lots of brains to
trace the anatomy and there is no "Listener" in the brain - at least
no listener made of a material substance.
I think I
need to diverge here and give another analogy:
numbers. Consider a series of
numbers: say 6, 2, 55, 17, 8. If you sum these numbers together you get
88. Our consciousness experiences each
number simultaneously and is, or can be, aware of each individual number. A neuron only experiences a summation and
thus any individual neuron can only be aware of the number 88. These experiences are not the same. A
single "uber-neuron", no matter how connected, cannot be the seat of
consciousness as we experience it.
Now let's consider
the Conductor in our analogy. The
Conductor represents the will of the
soul. The will of our soul is our
intention to carry out decisions. It is
our free will. It is our moral
decision-making. It is our conscience.
The conductor directs the entire orchestra, but does not play a single
instrument and does not make a sound. As
a listener, you don't (at least not normally!) hear the conductor. If you closed your eyes and listened, you
would not know there is a conductor. And
yet, we afford the conductor a lot of credit for how the orchestra plays. Of course, a lot of credit is based on what
we imagine the conductor did during the practices for the performance. But, in a good orchestra, each musician will
be primarily focused in on the conductor even during the performance. A good musician will not be affected by a
sudden poor, off-beat, off-key note of the musician next to them - they will
have a laser-focus on the conductor and will keep playing properly despite what
is going on around them.
However,
despite the importance we place on the conductor, the orchestra can function without the conductor. In fact, when well-trained, an observer
(listener) might not know whether the conductor is there or not. I hypothesize that this is very analogous to
our brain function. The neurons respond
to inputs and create outputs via habits and learned responses and reflex loops
and complicated networks and so on. The
brain can create all sorts of music without being told what to do. It can run open-loop - i.e. apart from the
soul...apart from the will...apart from the conscience. I believe we were made to be tightly linked
to our conscience just like the orchestra should be tightly linked to their
conductor, but it surely is not always the case. A musician may decide to play whatever they
feel like playing and it might sound beautiful in isolation. However, it is not what the conductor wants
and is not what the listener is expecting to hear.
The point
of this analogy is that the Conductor is not in control of an orchestra in the
same way that a driver is in control of a car. A lot can happen in an orchestra without the
conductor being involved. If this
analogy is in any way correct, it explains why the "Conductor" or
"soul" would very hard to detect.
If you listen to a piece of music, how can you tell if the conductor is
there or not? If the orchestra is
well-trained, actually, even if it isn't...how do you know if a musician is
focused in on the conductor or not - especially if you don't know what the
conductor is wanting the musician to do?
By analogy, this is why it would be so hard to measure, in the physical
world, the impact of the soul on the neurons in the brain. How do you know when a neuron is
"looking up at the conductor" for direction and when it is just playing
its well-practiced music? I suppose the
best chance we have of detecting this effect would be during learning, but even
then it would be very difficult. Most
learning is still primarily based on physical sensory inputs and feedback. The soul probably has the biggest impact on
moral learning, but that type of learning must be very subtle and rarely occurs
in some concentrated training session. I don't know if it would ever be
possible to directly measure this influence [see discussion here].
With
respect to the "Listener" part of the soul (i.e., what I say is
analogous to consciousness): you would never detect the existence of a Listener. Ironically, the only way to try to detect
such a thing is to be the Listener yourself.
But the Listener doesn't change the music. So you may be conscious, but you could never
measure the presence of the conscious "Listener" if you are just
listening to the sounds of each musician or even if you make a scan of the
whole brain. The conscious soul...the
"sensory" part...has no effect on the physical brain. The Listener leaves no trace. It would be like standing at a radio
transmission tower and trying to figure out if anyone is listening to the radio
station being broadcast. How could you
ever know?
Finally, I
just want to say one thing about brain damage and the soul. Some argue that the fact that people's
personality can change as a result of brain damage - a stroke or head injury or
so on - is proof that the "soul" is not spiritual but rather is
physical and resides in the material properties of the brain. I hope that the orchestra analogy helps to
understand how brain damage relates to the soul. If a musician starts playing badly...or quits
playing altogether...then the music will surely sound different. But that has nothing to do with whether there
is a conductor or a listener. We are listening (when we measure the brain or
interact with a person) to the orchestra - we are not listening to the
conductor. Whether an orchestra is bad
or good has nothing to do with the existence
of a conductor. The greatest conductor
in the world, when conducting a group of fifth-graders who would rather be in
recess, will produce music that will sound horrible. That doesn't mean that the conductor doesn't
exist or is bad. Of course brain damage affects a person's personality and what they
do. But that does not negate the existence
of their soul.
No analogy
is perfect of course, and one of the problems with my orchestra analogy is that
it is kind of circular. By that I mean
that I am illustrating the mind-body problem by introducing a bunch of
mind-bodies into the analogy. The
analogy includes musicians, conductors, and listeners, all of whom have their
own minds and, presumably, their own souls.
We are using souls to illustrate souls, so does the analogy really help
us? All I can say is that the analogy
has helped me to imagine how, and under what circumstances, the soul might be
apparent and why it is so difficult to detect the activity of the soul. Maybe it is not helpful for anyone else. But the soul is not like anything we
encounter in the physical, material world so it is hard to come up with an
analogy of the soul that uses only material things. Ultimately, the only thing like a soul is...another soul!