Physicist Brian Greene on Consciousness and the Soul

 

The theoretical physicist Brian Greene is a self-described “physicalist” and “reductionist”. That doesn't mean that he dismisses all philosophical and even religious alternative notions of consciousness. In fact, Greene came to reject his earlier crude(?) explanations of consciousness after reading Frank Jackson’s paper ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’ (1982) . Yet he’s still a physicalist! (Jackson himself returned to physicalism.) What Greene does now is put consciousness in a various historical and social contexts, which means noting what philosophers have written too.

Source: Wiki Commons. See here.

Brian Greene quotes Albert Camus (of all people) stating the following:

“‘Everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it.”’

That truly is a consciousness-first philosophy. Greene then speaks for himself:

“For science to pay no mind to consciousness would be to turn from the very thing, the only thing, we each can count on.”

This almost reads like the words of an idealist or a phenomenologist. And it’s hard to disagree with them… except for the last clause. It was certainly once the case that science paid no mind to consciousness, but that hasn’t been the case for over three decades now.

Having stated Greene’s “open mind”, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t see the problems with other views, and the motivations behind them. He concludes the above passage this way:

“Indeed, for thousands of years many have denied the finality of death by hanging existential hope on consciousness.”

Of course, the denial of death wasn’t always about something as abstract and intangible as consciousness. So perhaps Greene was simply referring to thousands of years of consciousness-first philosophy — if philosophy with a religious bent. Faith in eternal consciousness seems a little more sophisticated than the “resurrection of the body” and its “ego” — or is it?

The faith in eternal consciousness may itself be eternal. Greene writes:

“Atman, anima, immortal soul — it has been given many names, but all connote the belief that the conscious self taps into something that outlasts the physical form, something that transcends traditional mechanistic science.”

Humans have always wanted to live forever, whatever form that takes.

Brian Greene on Anti-Materialists

Greene not being an analytic philosopher, and these words being from a “popular science” book, means that he tells us about the possible motivations of those who hate physicalism. He writes:

“I have encountered many people who resist this perspective. People who feel that any attempt to subsume consciousness within the physical description of the world belittles our most precious quality. People who suggest that the physicalist program is the ham-fisted approach of scientists blinded by materialism and unaware of the true wonders of conscious experience.”

Greene himself responds to such a position. But firstly, let’s add a few more points into the pot.

It’s utterly bizarre that anyone could ever believe that the “scientists blinded by materialism” could be “unaware of the true wonders of conscious experience”. Isn’t it the case that conscious experience is available to all — even to Hitler and the insane? Who else could be unaware of the true wonders of conscious experience? Greene is correct to say that some anti-materialists believe that materialists are mentally and spiritually impoverished. But that seems to go against their central doctrine: that experience is fundamental and universal. Do “evil materialists” somehow bypass that which is fundamental and universal?

Of course, people can be “blinded by” all sorts: by idealism, anti-idealism, Marxism, anti-Marxism, etc. too. So this is a malady common to all isms. (Those who criticise materialism often seem blinded by their anti-materialism.) Thus, perhaps we should conclude that the term “blinded by” doesn’t help anyone.

Anyway, as stated earlier, Greene offers his own riposte against the “anti-materialists” when he writes the following:

“That the mind can do all it does is extraordinary. That the mind may accomplish all it does with nothing more than the kinds of ingredients and types of forces holding together my coffee cup makes it more extraordinary still.”

Then comes the clincher:

“Consciousness would be demystified without being diminished.”

In a spoon-feeding manner, this means that an evil materialist can happily accept that the human mind is “extraordinary” — even unique. Yet he needn’t import anything mystical into his picture in order to stop consciousness from being diminished. Surely it isn’t too much to state that consciousness can be extraordinary without importing anything mystical or non-material into the equation. In basic terms, then, nothing Greene says diminishes consciousness.

Is Greene a Physicalist?

The odd thing about the ‘Particles and Consciousness’ chapter is that it’s sometimes hard to decide if Greene is actually a physicalist. He says that he is. This indecision isn’t because Greene is open-minded and refuses to crudely dismiss other viewpoints. It’s because his actual philosophical position sometimes seems unclear. Perhaps Greene has a clear scientific position on consciousness, but is open about philosophical positions.

Greene does tell his readers the following story:

“Some years ago, during a good-natured but heated exchange on the role of mathematics in describing the universe, I emphatically told a late-night television host he was nothing but a bag of particles governed by the laws of physics. Not as a joke…”

This reads like the very-well-known quote from Francis Crick and it’s certainly unequivocal. It’s worth noting, however, that Greene uses the words “some years ago”. It’s clear that Greene’s views on consciousness have changed over the years. However, he is still a physicalist. In terms of the quote itself, not even an evil materialist believes that such a television host is literally “nothing but a bag of particles governed by the laws of physics”. Just as Francis Crick didn’t literally believe the following:

“‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

I believe that Crick was being rhetorical and provocative here. At the same time, he may have been telling the truth too — if only to a degree. In terms of the rhetoric and provocation, it’s true that Crick’s critical attitude toward religion was one motivation for writing The Astonishing Hypothesis. So, to put it in non-rhetorical terms, Crick certainly did believe that religions can often be wrong about scientific issues (as do many religious people). He claimed that it is science’s job to rectify the false claims of these religions too. (At least those claims which appear to have a scientific subject.)

Crick was also well aware that when he began studying consciousness he was tackling a subject which traditionally had been the sole property of religion and philosophy.

Another point that can be made about Crick’s rhetoric and provocation is that he was simply attempting to get a point across. And the best and simplest way of doing such a thing is to be poetic and rhetorical. After all, strongly-expressed views often attract a large audience.

To return to Brian Greene’s own, “You are nothing but a bag of particles”. Is the non-literal nature of this statement given away by the use of the word “bag”? Or is there more to it than that?

Interestingly, and in terms of the dreaded reductionism, Greene tells us that “the remark sprang from my deep-seated reductionist commitment”.

The Hard Problem

It’s fascinating that Greene ties his subsection ‘The Hard Problem’ to a passage from Isaac Newton. He quotes Newton stating the following:

“‘To determine more absolutely, what light is… and by what mode or actions it produceth in our minds the Phantasms of Colours, is not so easie. And I shall not mingle conjectures with certainties.’”

This is almost literally a statement of the hard problem, written some 300+ years ago… On the other hand, it isn’t! From Newton’s own words, it’s clear that he only wanted to find out “what light is and by what mode or actions it produceth in our minds the Phantasms of Colours”. Newton didn’t want to know why we experienced particularly colours in response to various actions. He wasn’t interested in the why-of-qualia. That would have been to “mingle conjectures with certainties”. Newton believed that we could be certain about light, and how it caused certain colours in the mind via the eyes and brain. However, everything else was conjecture. In other words, everything that depended exclusively on first-person or subjective reports was beyond science, and thus conjecture to Newton. And that remained the case for 380 to 390 years.

If we update Newton’s words, we can say that he realised that everything he knew about light, etc. (as Greene puts it) “seem completely disconnected from anything remotely like subjective experience”.

Greene, unlike Newton, did once indulge in an explanation, if not a conjecture. He writes:

“When asked, I would often say that conscious experience is merely what it feels like when a certain kind of information processing takes place in the brain.”

Greene became unhappy with that position. Why? It was because “the core issue is to explain how there can be a ‘what it feels like’ at all’”. Thus, Greene’s former “response too quickly dismisses the hard problem as not being hard and not even being a problem”.

Despite that, Greene finished off the same paragraph by stating the following: “The physicalist perspective does indeed summarize my own long-held view.” So let’s spell that out. Even though Greene seems to reject, or simply just question, his former view that “conscious experience is merely what it feels like when a certain kind of information processing takes place in the brain” as failing “to explain how there can be a ‘what it feels like’ at all”, and that was too quick a dismissal of the hard problem, he still sees himself as being a physicalist.

In any case, it was Frank Jackson’s Mary who made Greene question his former position.

Humans Are Unique: Rats Are Unique

 

Historically, humans were deemed to be unique because of their “special relationship with God”, as well as their overall place in the universe. Later, specific features of humans were singled out as being unique. This tradition has carried on until this day. The physicist James Trefil wrote a book called Are We Unique? in which he discusses this subject in what he deemed to be a scientific manner. (So much so that he was “fearful of seeing [his] book quoted approvingly in some fuzzy New Age publication”.) Perhaps surprisingly to some (i.e., because Trefil is a scientist), he does deem humans to be unique — indeed, uniquely unique. The following essay takes issue with some of Trefil’s arguments.

The physicist James Trefil doesn’t hide his emotions, concern and, well, bias when discussing human uniqueness. For example, he tells his readers that he’s

“worried about a very new kind of incursion on traditional human space, one that comes from the machines that human beings, using their cerebral cortices, have built”.

So at least human beings built the machines…That’s until the machines themselves can build other machines. The word “incursion” (as in “incursion on traditional human space”) is strong too.

Elsewhere, Trefil writes:

“Make no mistake, though. This isn’t going to be a cool, dispassionate examination of an intellectual problem. I desperately *want* to find a way out of this dilemma, and I intend to devote whatever scientific skills I’ve developed in my career to finding it.”

Trefil is honest in the passage above. Yet his book is more rational, argumentative and balanced than many others I’ve read on this subject.

Trefil named his book Are We Unique. His conclusion is that “we” are unique. The problem here is that the word “unique” isn’t very helpful in this context. Even Trefil seems to see the (or one) problem, if only implicitly. He tells his readers that

“there are many species that have evolved unique adaptations over the millennia — think of the Venus’s-flytrap and the bat’s sonar navigational system”.

Not only that, Trefil concludes: “Being unique doesn’t necessarily make you special!”

Some readers may be able to add their own species which have unique features. Indeed, as soon as you begin to think about this, it’s clear that literally every species has at least one unique feature. So perhaps there’s unique, and then there’s unique. That’s the route which Trefil goes down.

Trefil stresses that he’s keen to take a scientific approach to the subject of human uniqueness. So much so that he was “fear[ful] of seeing [his] book quoted approvingly in some fuzzy New Age publication”. This is like those New Agers and spiritual idealists who constantly quote the same small number of passages from Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, Max Planck, etc. to advance New Ageism and/or idealism.

Either Science or the Soul?

The problem for Trefil is something he paints as being an either/or choice. (He states this either/or choice in various places.) For example, take animals:

“Looking at the human-animal boundary, some people argue that we either have to give up trying to make a distinction or have to give up scientific inquiry and accept the existence of something like the soul.”

What about machines? -

“At the human-machine boundary, we face a similar dilemma: either accept that the brain is just a reproducible collection of neurons or posit some nonmaterial (and non investigable) entity.”

Trefil concludes:

“In both cases, the message seems to be the same. Either give up any notion of human uniqueness or give up doing science.”

Is this really an either/or choice? The language Trefil uses seems to make this choice a necessity. But that’s just it. His assumptions can be questioned.

For example, what does Trefil mean by “distinction” (as in “trying to make a distinction”)? Accepting distinctions between animals and human beings doesn’t seem to have the results Trefil cites. After all, a cow can be distinguished from a rat. So he actually means specific and important distinctions.

A similar point can be aimed at his statement “either accept that the brain is just a reproducible collection of neuron or…” The brain isn’t just a collection of neurons, and not even “evil materialists” believe that. That said, this may not matter too much to Trefil. That’s because even if a brain is more than just a collection of neurons, everything else about a brain may be reproducible too. Surely if the brain weren’t reproducible, at least in principle, then perhaps we would need to fall back on some “nonmaterial (noninvestigable) entity”. However, the difficulties with reproducibility may have nothing whatsoever to do with anything nonmaterial or soul-like.

In simple terms, it seems obvious that there is another choice here: to accept human uniqueness and still carry on doing science. This, of course, depends on the special cases of uniqueness Trefil refers to. Yet even here we needn’t fall back on religion and give up on science when it comes to trespassing on the human “soul”. This seems to be an option Trefil himself is pursuing.

Differences in Degree and Kind

Trefil believes that humans instantiate “differences in kind”, not just “differences in degree”. So it will help here to see an example of a difference in kind. Trefil tells us about a

“rather profound difference between the toolmaking involved in a chimp using a stick to gather termites and that involved in humans building a jet aircraft or a skyscraper”.

This is a difference of degree. Of course, it’s possible that after chimps first started to use sticks as tools, that trick probably didn’t advance or change much after that. When it comes to human beings, on the other hand, in the 19th century there were no jet aircrafts or skyscrapers, and in the 20th century there were. (There are many other examples like this dating back long before that.) We can shrink the timespan down and talk about the Internet. There was no Internet in the 1960s, yet in the 1990s millions of people were using it. That’s a timespan of less than forty years. So the many differences between chimps and humans aren’t being denied here. They’re just not a case of differences in kind.

Having said all that, some scientists, philosophers and commentators go too far in the opposite direction, as Trefil is keen to tell us. For example, Trefil tells his readers that

“[i]t has lately become fashionable among intellectuals to ignore ways in which humans are different from other living things and concentrate on the ways in which we are similar”.

In the passage above, Trefil implies a problem without noting it. That problem is that it’s just as easy to “concentrate on the ways in which we are similar” as to “ignore ways in which humans are different”. It can even be said that the same facts and data are being approached from two different angles. Perhaps these two different angles are chosen for reasons of prior ideological, political or religious bias.

So we could play this game. I could mention a way in which humans are the same as some/many animals. And readers could mention a way in which humans are different from some/many animals.

Chimps using sticks to collect termites was mentioned earlier. So it’s interesting that Trefil quotes a “fashionable intellectual”, Carl Sagan, stressing the similarities in the following passage:

“‘Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and apes casually knock them down — toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy.’”

It’s certainly true that philosophers, scientists and religious people have confidently offered up many traits said to be uniquely human. (History will show people that.) Yet there’s also something about Sagan’s rhetoric that some readers may not care for. As it is, I don’t know if chimps using sticks as tools was on Sagan’s mind. And I don’t know that Trefil had Sagan in mind when he used the words “fashionable intellectuals”. Having said that, ten lines after using the words “fashionable intellectuals”, Trefil does quote Sagan.

The Human Cerebral Cortex

According to Trefil, the source of the special uniqueness of human beings is the cerebral cortex. This organ “provides the difference we seek”. So Trefil is upfront about seeking out human uniqueness. Indeed, the cerebral cortex must do that job because

“[e]verything else about us, from our skeletons to the innermost working of our cells, is similar (and sometimes identical) to the ordinary run of things in the animal kingdom”.

Thus, the special uniqueness of human beings all hinges on the cerebral cortex.

Trefil’s stress on the cerebral cortex is placed within the context of evolution. He believes that all of us should shout the following words:

“This is amazing! Something has happened here. These animals have found a new way to win at the evolutionary game — something no other species on the planet has developed.”

This is false. Other animals have “w[o]n the evolutionary game” too.

This claim doesn’t mean that other species have evolved traits which helped them survive longer. That’s because that too would be a purely evolutionary matter. Instead, this means that some species have used their brains to win the game in real time, not as a result of genetic changes. In other words, many species didn’t wait for evolution. Here are four examples:

Octopuses open jars, manipulate objects, and learn quickly.

Dolphins use sponges as tools when foraging.

Crows and ravens manufacture tools and solve multi-step problems.

Rats “laugh” when tickled, demonstrate empathy, display “metacognition”, etc. [The opening image includes a rat in a maze. Yet other animals can work their way out of a maze. Does this mean that rats aren’t unique in this respect? It must do if we interpret the word “unique” literally. ]

These non-evolutionary changes are examples in which individual intelligence or social learning occurs within a single lifetime.

One possible riposte here would be that these other species adapted in real time because evolution provided them with the means which allowed them to do so. They didn’t need to wait for evolutionary change because evolution had already provided them with what they needed. The problem here is that this can be applied to human beings too.

Thus, Trefil might well have meant quicker and more widespread real-time adaptation when it comes to human beings. Yet that can only be a matter of degree when compared to certain other species. After all, humans didn’t do that much adapting for a long time. For most of their existence, humans didn’t display the kind of widespread and rapid adaptive power we saw in the last 10,000 years, and especially the last few centuries.

As we’ve seen, Trefil places a lot of stress on the cerebral cortex. Yet human beings had cerebral cortexes 300,000 years ago.

The problem is that Trefil seems to be bowled over by the advances and widespread nature of humans winning the evolutionary game. And no one could deny that humans keep on winning against not only evolution, but also biology and the environment too. Yet this is hard to quantify in terms of humans being the only species winning against evolution.

How do still-existing “primitive” human cultures fit into Trefil’s claims? (Let’s not focus on the word “primitive” here.) Would he say the following? -In principle, they are just like us. But isn’t it a contingent possibility that the human species as a whole might have stayed culturally stuck, say, 200,000 years ago?

In a sense, Trefil may unknowingly be ruling out people with mental/cognitive disabilities, people who’ve never invented or created anything, etc. too. This is a similar scenario to Roger Penrose’s argument that understanding (or “seeing”) “Gödel truths” makes human beings unique. However, if you can’t understand that a Gödel truth is a truth, then does that mean that you’re not a good example of the unique species?

The seeing of Gödel truths doesn’t even apply to all mathematicians. (Only meta-mathematicians — i.e., not mathematicians - and mathematical logicians give any deep thought to Gödel truths.) Can Penrose escape this by using the following words? - In principle, all human beings could recognise Gödel truths. This isn’t something Penrose could know about every human being. (Oddly enough, Trefil mentions that Penrose has often responded to his critics. He cites the case when Penrose tackled “twenty objections” in “excruciating[]detail[]”)

When it comes to the comparisons between chimps and humans mentioned earlier, it’s perhaps inevitable that Trefil said that he didn’t

“see the day coming when a chimpanzee will be able to do a calculus problem or compose a symphony, no matter what training it gets”.

Here we see a problem mentioned a few moments ago. Not all human beings can deal with a calculus problem or compose a symphony. Could they do so “in principle”? I don’t really know because the words “in principle” need to be spelled out. In any case, what about those 200,000 years or so in which humans didn’t do calculus or compose symphonies? Could these early humans do these things in principle too? What about those human beings who could never do calculus or compose a symphony?