Creation Moment 2/19/2024 - Hard Problem of Consciousness

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Genesis 2:7

"To contemplate consciousness is, as professor of religion Greg

Peterson put it, like looking into and out of a window at the same time. No surprise then that philosophers of science call it the Hard Problem of Consciousness. The inexorable progress of brain imaging was supposed to dissolve the conundrum but we spoil no surprise by saying that new information and insights only deepened it.

Among the many quests, one has been to discover the seat of consciousness. The most widely popularized theory of mind — the triune brain theory — depends on organization rather than imaging. Originally developed by Yale University physiologist and psychiatrist Paul D. MacLean (1913–2007) decades ago and promoted by celebrity skeptic Carl Sagan (1934–1996), it divides the brain into three parts. The reptilian brain controls things like movement and breathing, the mammalian brain controls emotion, and the human cerebral cortex controls language and reasoning.

The human brain was bound to disappoint pop culture in this matter because key functions are distributed throughout. 

Also triune brain theory doesn’t square with the high animal intelligence recently found in (non-vertebrate) octopuses. Claims for the mammalian brain in particular don’t square with the high intelligence found in some birds. Let alone with the fact that human consciousness remains an absolute outlier.

Never mind, the exciting new world of -omes (genomes, epigenomes, biomes…) beckons. 

The connectome — essentially, a complete “wiring diagram” of the brain, might possibly identify human consciousness. In 2010, computational neuroscientist Sebastian Seung told humanity, “I am my connectome,” a thought on which he expanded in his 2012 book, Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are. In 2012, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins was thinking along the same lines: “Ever wonder what is it that makes you, you? Depending on whom you ask, there are a lot of different answers, but these days some of the world’s top neuroscientists might say: ‘You are your connectome.’”

That moment has passed. 

Harvard neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman, who is trying to map the brain, surveys the awful complexity nearly a decade later and sums up, …if "I asked, “Do you understand New York City?” you would probably respond, “What do you mean?” There’s all this complexity. If you can’t understand New York City, it’s not because you can’t get access to the data. It’s just there’s so much going on at the same time. That’s what a human brain is. It’s millions of things happening simultaneously among different types of cells, neuromodulators, genetic components, things from the outside. There’s no point when you can suddenly say, “I now understand the brain,” just as you wouldn’t say, “I now get New York City.”

But what about the bioelectric fields that swarm throughout the

brain? Bioelectric currents, unlike electric currents, rely on ions rather than electrons but they are still electricity. Evolutionary biologist and lawyer Tam Hunt tells us, “Nature seems to have figured out that electric fields, similar to the role they play in human-created machines, can power a wide array of processes essential to life. Perhaps even consciousness itself.” That’s a remarkable idea because it includes the notion that our individual cells exhibit consciousness: “Something like thinking, they argue, isn’t just something we do in our heads that requires brains. It’s a process even individual cells themselves, and not requiring any kind of brain, also take part in.”

This sounds cool but gets us nowhere. 

We have no reason to believe that our individual brain cells are conscious; what we know is that we are conscious as whole human beings.

Max Tegmark, MIT physicist and author of Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (Knopf, 2014), goes still further. 

He suggests that consciousness is a so far undetected state of matter, perceptronium, “defined as the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware.” 

Which, again, gets us precisely nowhere." 

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