On Consciousness

               Over at The Sweatervest Chronicles Mr. Blanchard discusses a conversation he had with a biology/philosophy student about the nature of consciousness . The biology/philosophy student thinks that consciousness is “a combination of biology and experience, spirituality, instinct, etc.” Mr. Blanchard seems to believe that experiences play a role, but that ultimately experiences and all of the other factors that affect consciousness are all some kind of chemistry. Mr. Blanchard asks “What do you think?” This is something that I have thought about a lot. My short answer is that Mr. Blanchard is absolutely right. Your consciousness is just the result of chemical reactions. When you feel a soft blanket the nerves in your skin send an electrical signal to your brain and the electro chemical reactions cause your brain to interpret those signals as softness. I think the natural, and more interesting, follow up questions are “If consciousness is just chemistry do we have free will? Is consciousness even real or just some sort of illusion?”

                I will answer the second question first. Of course it is real. What would it even mean for it to be an illusion? If consciousness is an illusion, who is being illuded? If I were to define consciousness, it would somehow involve what humans feel or experience. If consciousness is something different than what we thought it was, we need to change the definition.

                Do we have free will though? I think the answer is yes. I think there are two closely related reasons people believe this perspective on consciousness eliminates the possibility of free will. The first is that by understanding how the brain works that somehow makes it seems like you don’t really decide things it’s just a function of x, y, and z. The second is that it is potentially possible to predict what someone would do. Hypothetically if you knew exactly how all of the atoms in someone’s body (and really you would need to know the exact distribution of all mater and energy (and dark energy and what not) in the universe) and you had a perfect understanding of the laws of nature and you had access to some sort of super duper computer with oodles of processing power you could predict everything that person would do (on the quantum level things are supposedly random, so I don’t know if that changes anything).

                I will address the first reason first. Any sort of consciousness is necessarily going to work through some sort of process. I don’t understand how any consciousness in any possible universe could exist that didn’t work through a system or set of rules or whatever of some kind. Maybe you would argue that I am right and therefore it is not even theoretically possible for a free willed consciousness to exist in any sort of universe. If that’s your perspective I don’t really have a counter argument, and I will kinda address that towards the end.

                As to the second reason, I don’t think the predictability of consciousness necessarily means that it lacks free will. If I said to you “you have two options. I can give you a thousand dollars or I can punch you in the face” I think I can be confident of what you would choose. My being able to predict what you would choose does not mean you did not have a choice. You could halve chosen to be punched in the face, but you didn’t and never were going to which brings me to my second point. The future is by definition fixed. The future is what it is and always has been, and it will be until it happens. If circumstances change so that what you thought was going to happen won’t, the future hasn’t changed your expectations have changed. The future is by definition what will happen. What you will do is by definition in the future and therefore already fixed in a certain sense. Again I think you could argue that therefore consciousness in this universe or any other conceivable universe does not have free will since it is already determined in some sense. And again in that case I can’t say I necessarily disagree which I shall address in the next paragraph.

                I don’t really think it is possible to definitively determine whether or not there is free will. I guess I mostly just think it is the most useful way of looking at it. I feel like in a certain sense the only way to truly, truly describe anything is to talk about the physics of it, the exact protons, neutrons, electrons etc. and their relative position in the universe that make it up. I feel like everything else is really just an ultimately futile, though still useful, attempt to understand and make sense of the universe.  I think this is partly why some people tend to reject the idea that consciousness is just chemistry. It makes life seem meaningless or pointless. It makes the universe seem empty and just filled with random stuff. I don’t feel this way at all. One of the reasons is pictures like this.

(Credit:Wikipedia)

                I think the first time I saw an image like this my thought process went something like this. “This is a cool looking picture what are all of those big blotches? They can’t be stars.” Then I realize that some of them clearly have a spiral shape and think “Wow those are galaxies! What are all those lights behind them? Those are all galaxies too!” Then I realized I was looking at a picture of hundreds, maybe thousands of galaxies each with hundreds of billions of stars.

                There are creatures in this universe (and your one of them) that have the ability and the desire to study and understand the universe. That can build a telescope with a 2.4 meter mirror. Put that telescope on a big rocket. Launch that telescope into an orbit around Earth. Point it out towards the universe, realize that it is broken. Put humans in a shuttle on a rocket. Launch those humans up to the telescope to fix it. Point the telescope out to the universe again and take amazing picture like the one above; creatures that can study and understand themselves and how they came to be. Creatures that have the intelligence to ask questions like “What is consciousness?”  “Do we have free will?” No matter how you look at it, that is amazing.

 All glory to the hypnotoad!