Going Out on a Limb (Human Conscious Experience II)

In Human Conscious Experience I I talked about two ideas concerning what human consciousness is. The first came from Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop. Hofstadter shows that human self-awareness is a "strange loop," a property of any sufficiently complex system of information processing which allows the system to turn right around and process itself.

The other idea about consciousness came from David Chalmers' book The Conscious Mind, which holds that consciousness "supervenes" on physical brain processes. Consciousness as such is powerless to affect events in the physical world, just as the occupant of the sidecar of a motorcycle cannot steer the motorcycle.

For Hofstadter, consciousness qua consciousness is an illusion. All we really have is self-awareness, in the form of a self-referential strange loop. For Chalmers, consciousness is real, but (at least to a first approximation) it is "epiphenomenal." We wouldn't possess it were it not for the "extra work" that God (figuratively speaking; Chalmers is an agnostic) must have done to institute certain non-physical laws of nature, above and beyond the physical laws, that cause consciousness to supervene on physical brain states.

If you believe Hofstadter, we have no soul.

If you believe Chalmers, there is a wisp of a soul — but it can't do anything except enjoy its own inner conscious experience.

In my previous post, I tried to sketch out an alternative view of the conscious soul. It holds that the conscious mind or soul is an emergent property of the brain. As such, it is more than a limp epiphenomenon; it exerts "downward causation," also known as "top-down causality" or "whole-part influence."


That means it is like emergent properties of all sorts of complex systems. In theories of emergence, the whole world can be seen as one big complex system containing many complex subsystems that themselves each contain many complex subsystems, and so on and so on until a minimum level of complexity is reached. Each level of complexity emerges from the lower level. Each is the result of bottom-up causality in which the parts assemble themselves (or are assembled by some external force) into a whole that is greater than their sum, thereby causing something "extra" to exist above and beyond their own existence as parts.

An arch possesses such "extra" being, above and beyond the stones it is made of.

These emergent wholes, in turn, exert whole-part influence or downward causality on the parts at the next lower level. If the conscious mind is an emergent whole that springs forth from physical brain activities, it in turn causes events to happen at the physical level of the brain, and via the brain the body, and via the body the whole wide world.


One upshot is to believe that the conscious mind, contrary to Chalmers, is the natural result of human biological evolution. It did not arise because God did "extra work" in instituting non-physical laws of nature. It arose because evolution has just naturally produced ever-increasing embodiments of complexity at higher and higher levels of emergence.

I do not suggest that my view is an atheistic one, though. I think it is very theistic — as long as you are willing to entertain the notion that evolution is part of God's plan.

I'd like now to go out on a limb and try to show why believers in God might put aside any initial distaste for evolution and see these ideas as friendly to their point of view.

My argument is to the effect that the core of human consciousness is our ability to have personal inner experience. That is, we experience what we are conscious of in ways that differ from one individual to the next, but in all cases involve personal inner experience. If we were androids like Lt. Cmdr. Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, that wouldn't be true. Our experiences, plural, would register upon the screen of our mental awareness, but they would not generate inner experience, singular.


Experience as I am using the word is hard to define. Philosophers of mind have spoken of it as knowing "what it is like to be/do/know X," where X is just about anything that an entity is able to be, or do, or know. If a bat were conscious, it would know "what it is like to be a bat."

When we see a red tricycle, we feel we somehow know "what it it like to be, or at least to see, red." "Consciousness," "experience," and "feeling" are synonyms. In such philosophies, these terms imply more than awareness, more even than self-awareness. Chalmers gives this very sort of description to conscious experience or feeling; it is just that he does not ascribe causal efficacy to it, as I do.

For Hofstadter, there is nothing higher or loftier than strange-loop self-awareness. To him, such notions as "consciousness," "experience," and "feeling" are illusions of the strange loop inside the workings of the brain.


I hinge my argument that both Chalmers and Hofstadter miss the boat on the ideas of the great Jewish theologian Martin Buber about (in the title of his most famous book) I and Thou.

Buber's ideas in I and Thou are if anything even more abstruse than the ideas about consciousness I just talked about. I'll give my interpretation here.

When I encounter another person, I can treat that person as Thou or as It. The I-It relationship is deadening, and it doesn't matter whether I say I-He or I-She instead of I-It. Only an I-Thou relationship is a true, life-affirming dialogue.

In fact, the "I" of I-It is a different "I" than the "I" of I-Thou.

I interpret this as meaning that when I experience another person as Thou, what emerges into consciousness from the strange loop of my own self-awareness is a different existent than that which emerges when I experience the other person as It.

There are accordingly two "I" experiences: "I" of I-Thou and "I" of I-It. Ergo, the strange-loop "I" of Douglas Hofstadter's soulless philosophy is not the end of the story.

Moreover, unless these two seemingly very different inner "I" experiences make no difference to what actually happens in the physical world, Chalmers is equally off base. It seems to me, contrariwise, that a rich I-Thou dialogue will have different worldly consequences than a sterile I-It relationship. For example, the former is far more conducive to a healthy marriage and plenteous children.


It seems decidedly contrived, then, to claim that the inner, experiential distinction between "I" of I-Thou and "I" of I-It isn't somehow responsible for altering the stream of physical events in the world.

To go along with Chalmers is to imagine that the physical world is hermetically sealed off from mental phenomena — if mental phenomena exist at all. Hofstadter takes the position that there are no mental phenomena; what seem to be mental phenomena are but illusions of the strange loop. Chalmers says nearly the same thing, except that there are epiphenomenal manifestations of consciousness which exert no downward force on events.

Hofstadter accuses Chalmers of being a dualist, but I'd say Chalmers is nearly as much of an anti-dualist or materialist as Hofstadter is. Materialism is non-dualistic; it holds that the only reality is made of material, physical stuff. When the only exception to that rule is Chalmers' notion of "superveneient" consciousness which makes no difference at the level of physical events, in my book that's materialism with an asterisk.

In my book, consciousness as an emergent mental phenomenon possesses downward force and exerts whole-part influence. That is dualism par excellence.

The anti-dualism of Hofstadter can give no account of how the I-Thou experience and the I-It experience can have different "I's."

The anti-dualism of Chalmers (with an asterisk) cannot show how the I-Thou experience produces a different world than the I-It experience does.

Could this "different world" of the I-Thou experience be, by the way, what Jesus meant when he said the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand (Matthew 10:7)?