Water Into Wine (Q2Q VII)

This post follows What Is It Like To Be Self-Aware? (Q2Q VI) as the seventh in my "Quickening to Qualia" series.

Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works

When we think hard about the phenomenon of consciousness, as I have been doing all along in this series, we are apt to agree with professor of psychology Steven Pinker, writing in How the Mind Works, that "consciousness or sentience, the raw sensation of toothaches and redness and saltiness and middle C, is still a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" (p. 60).

"Consciousness," Pinker notes, "has struck a great many thinkers as not just a problem but almost a miracle" (p. 132). One such thinker, Thomas Huxley, the English biologist known as "Darwin's bulldog" for defending the theory of evolution by natural selection, called it "just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp." Philosopher Colin McGinn, adds Pinker, speaks of "the water of the human brain ... turned into the wine of consciousness."


I must admit that I personally find consciousness not only unaccountable but nearly indescribable, despite my possibly vain attempts to characterize it in earlier posts. "Raw sensation" may be as good a way as any to characterize the ephemeral phenomenon we call subjective experience (the latter being synonymous with consciousness or sentience).

Yet "raw sensation" is a phrase that feels like the opposite sort of thing. It is quite close to the primary idea of sensation as being what nerve endings do in feeding data to the brain. One reads, in discussions of consciousness, references to the notion of the "sensation of redness," for example. What is meant, though, is anything but the notion of what light of a certain wavelength does to receptors in the retina of the eye.


It is as if there is a mind within the mind. The outer mind is a computer. It takes in the sensory data from nerve receptors and processes it into various sorts of perceptions and higher cogitations. The outer mind is responsible for learning, memory, emotions, and everything else about the mental life which we place in the category of psychological, or functional, or behavior-causing.

At some point in the outer mind's neural circuitry perhaps — speaking not literally but figuratively — there might be taps or probes from the inner mind which furnish the latter with its raw sensations: e.g., "redness." The inner mind is a mind of experientiality. Toothaches and redness and saltiness and middle C are experiences that the inner mind is alert to.

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

Imagined slightly differently, there is an interface between the outer mind of activity and the inner mind of experience. The "sensory inputs" at the interface to the inner mind are the qualia, such as "redness," spoken of by David J. Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.

In The Surprise of Selfhood (Q2Q V) and I and Thou (Q2Q IV), I suggested that Judeo-Christian religion is all about an I-Thou relationship with God. We cannot enter into an I-Thou relationship with a personal God, I said then, unless we are ourselves persons who can have the experience of selfhood. I think I'd now prefer to change that: what we actually need is a capacity for the experience of "Thouness."

Martin Buber's I and Thou

On this view, which I adapt from I and Thou by Martin Buber, "Thouness" is a quale (the singular of qualia), just as is "redness" is also a quale. "Thouuness" contrasts with another quale, "Itness," in this way: "Thouness" is associated with others whom we experience as subjects; "Itness," with mere objects. Subjects have inner minds like ours, capable of conscious experience; objects do not, and are fair game for various forms of manipulation which we undertake with a view to our personal gratification.

Chalmers's view of the conscious, subjective experience of such qualia is that it co-occurs with the psychological operations of what I am calling the outer mind. He wants to lay the groundwork for a scientific theory to explain, as cognitive science does for the outer mind, the workings of the inner mind.

He also wants to establish that the set of facts about and properties of experientiality in the inner mind supervenes on the physical facts and properties of the outer, functional mind in a way that results from the natural laws of this world. Supervenience basically means that facts at a "higher level" actually add nothing at all to the facts pertaining to some foundational "lower level."

For example, the facts of biology supervene on the facts of physics in this world. Once you know the facts of physics and the properties of the world's biological entities, you know all the facts about biology. (For the most part, facts are merely specific instantiations of general properties. Humans qua humans have the property of having a brain. It is accordingly a fact that you have a brain, and another fact that I have a brain.)

The properties of human brains for the most part supervene on the properties physicists study. The facts about brains, likewise, on physical facts. Furthermore, they both do so in a logically supervienient way. There could be no world physically indistinguishable from our own in which the properties and facts pertaining to human brains were different. Chalmers says that logical supervenience is (with a slight semantic qualification) the same thing as metaphysical supervenience.

But, says Chalmers, there could be a physically indistinguishable world in which God (speaking hypothetically, since Chalmers claims no belief in God) did not go to the trouble of establishing an (extra) natural law which makes conscious experience supervene on the physical, in a mode of supervenience Chalmers terms natural supervenience. If conscious experience in the inner mind (as I call it) co-occurs with the functional information processing going on in the outer mind, it is only because God (again, speaking hypothetically) made this extra law.

I'll now take it a step further: I suggest a firm theological explanation for the co-occurrence. God not just hypothetically but actually ordained, when he created our world, that by virtue of its natural laws there would be such an inevitable co-occurrence. His purpose: to enable creatures to evolve who can enter into a I-Thou relationship with him, and equally with each other, the twin foundations of spiritual life. Absent our inner mind's receptivity to the quale of "Thouness," that could never happen. The "water" of our natural lives could never be turned, through faith and good works, into "new wine."