Human Conscious Experience I

Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop has been a hot topic of this blog recently and in the past. The book tries (and, I think, succeeds) in explaining the ability of the human mind to conceive of itself in the first-person, as an "I." It does this by recourse to ideas broached in early-20th century mathematics and symbolic logic to the effect that all symbol-manipulating systems above a certain low threshold of complexity, of which the human brain is one, are intrinsically "incomplete."

There are, inescapably, truths concerning these symbol-manipulation systems themselves that have to be true, Hofstadter shows, but nonetheless cannot be derived as theorems from within the system. Hofstadter calls the ability of a system to contain countless truths beyond its own ability to prove them a "strange loop." A strange loop arises from the ability of a system to refer to itself. Hofstadter shows, convincingly, that the "I" in the human mind is nothing more than just this sort of strange loop.

Once that much has been established, he extends it in quite a lovely way to show that we humans build up in our minds over the course of time (albeit imperfect) copies of the "I-loops" of other persons whom we love ... and they harbor copies of our "I-loops." When one of us dies, an "I-loop" copy lives on in the brains of their mourners.


After saying that much, I think Hofstadter misses an opportunity. He tries to show that what philosophers of the mind call "consciousness" (or "feeling," or "experience") is nothing more than the working of the strange "I-loop" in the brain. To the extent that consciousness and "soul" have been conflated historically in our thinking about thinking, the soul, too, is just the strange "I-loop," nothing more.

Hofstadter contrasts this view with that of David Chalmers, whose book The Conscious Mind I have dealt with in earlier posts. Chalmers' take on human consciousness is that it "supervenes" on the physical workings of the brain in a way that makes it a very real but nonphysical phenomenon.

Hofstadter won't embrace the views of Chalmers (who is a personal friend and former student of his) because they are dualistic: they require that not all things having being in this world be part of the physical order of things. Specifically the mind, to the extent that it is possesses consciousness, is nonphysical.

Here, in the Chalmers view as opposed to Hofstadter's, we have a way for the "soul" to be real but nonphysical and immaterial — though not necessarily God-given in any supernatural way. Hofstadter admits to puzzlement and even outright revulsion at such dualistic philosophies of mind.

Hofstadter even comes right out and lampoons Chalmers' views, accusing him of positing that there has to be an immaterial substance out of which consciousness is made: "feelium." Feelium really exists, Chalmers implies, but it is incapable of exerting causal influence over the physical stuff of the universe, including the matter in the brain. Or, as Hofstadter puts it pithily, feelium cannot "push anything around."

There has never been in the life of the entire universe any object, molecule, atom, or quark whose trajectory has been altered by the exertions of feelium. Rather, feelium is naught but the putative stuff of human inner experience — "stuff" which Hofstadter feels is a grand illusion. Philosophers have in the past not so frequently in the present) held that consciousness is bound up with categories of experience called qualia (sing. quale, a two-syllable word pronounced KWAH-lay). Whenever we see a red tricycle, the quale for redness is invoked in our minds, thus providing us with our inner experience of the redness of the tricycle. In this view, all of our inner experience is qualia-based. If there were no qualia, there would be no conscious experience.

So the qualia exist as the "atoms and quarks" of our conscious inner experience, as it were, but they never push "real" atoms and quarks around.


This Chalmers view is one which takes as a given the idea that the universe is "causally closed." In other words, all physical effects have causes, and all the causes that account for all the effects in the whole physical universe are contained within the physical universe itself. There is no room for the laws of nature to be guided from above, as it were.

It is the insistence on a causally closed universe which — paradoxically, since neither Chalmers nor Hofstadter believes in a supernatural God — winds up providing Hofstadter with his greatest occasion for heaping scorn upon Chalmers. Chalmers builds up an elaborate theory that there could be, at least in concept, an alternate universe in which humanoid beings who are outwardly our exact twins wholly lack conscious inner experience.

These "zombie twins" of ours have evolved in the same Darwinian way that Homo sapiens did in our universe, Chalmers asserts, but since in their universe our "extra" laws of nature — those above and beyond our merely physical laws, that gave us conscious inner experience that supervenes on our brain function — don't hold. In the absence of these "extra" laws, our zombie twins have evolved without what Hofstadter sneers at by calling it an inner store of feelium.

Yet, since the physical laws of nature are identical in both worlds, and since the zombie world, like ours, is causally closed, every physical event that happens in Z-world precisely mirrors its twin event in our world. So when one of us utters the words, "I am having conscious inner experience of a red tricycle," our zombie twin mouths the exact same words ... and, as we do, fully believes them! His brain's "belief" circuitry functions just as ours does — a necessary consequence of the assumption that the feelium in our heads (but absent in those of our zombie twins) cannot push anything around, not even the particles whose interactions result in the activity of the neural circuits of our brain.

In short, if a universe is causally closed, and if, accordingly, any purported conscious experience that exists within that universe is wholly unable to influence its physical events, there is absolutely no way for that universe's denizens (much less any outside observers) to know for sure whether purported conscious experience is real or not. The denizens could be total zombies, and not even know it themselves! (And so could we!)


Hofstadter pokes great fun at Chalmers for this necessary upshot of his, Chalmers', theory of consciousness as supervening in a wholly acausal way upon the physical workings of the brain, and therefore of the material universe. But it seems to me all this silliness about zombie twins dissipates once you eliminate the assumption that the physical universe — ours, that is — is closed to nonphysical (i.e., mental) causes.

My guess is that:

(a) "feelium" exists in our universe

(b) it is an emergent property of the physical brain's functioning

(c) it can exert downward causal influence on physical events

(d) its downward causal influence is always mediated through physical intermediaries

To say (a) is true is to say that there really is "mind stuff," in addition to physical matter in the universe. Consciousness, feeling, experience: these are all real.

To say (b) is true is to say that this "mind stuff" or "feelium" emerges from our brain states and neural activities, but is distinct from those merely physical phenomena and events. An analogy: an arch is an emergent property: in this case, of an arrangement of stones. When by means of a scaffolding we stack stones in just the right way and then drop a keystone in place among them, we can remove the scaffolding and the arch stands. It possesses an integrity of its own and merits being called an arch rather than just a stack of stones. The arch qua arch is real. It exists.

Likewise, the mind that emerges from brain states and functions has an integrity of its own, merits being called something more than a brain, is real, exists.

To say (c) is true is to say this real, existent entity we call the mind can actually, in Hofstadter's words, "push stuff around" in the physical world. It is not merely the limp "epiphenomenon," or some such thing, that Chalmers believes it to be. In Chalmers' view, the notion that the conscious mind "supervenes" on the physical brain is what renders it unable to "push stuff around," and is what opens the door to the possibility of a zombie world (and to the possibility that ours is the zombie world!).

(d) is the most important of the four points: To say (d) is true is to say that the mind, though real, can't cause physical things to happen all by itself. Mental causation requires mediation through the brain and the body.

In other words, mentalists like Uri Geller who claim to be able to bend spoons with their minds alone are a sham.

I don't know what good a bent spoon is anyway. Still, there are times when we intend to bend things for practical purposes, such as when (a long time ago) I used to straighten a paper clip in order to insert its end in a little hole in front of my computer's floppy disk drive (remember those?) to get it to eject a stuck disk. That seems such a practical task, but I can remember my relief at getting the disk out ... and that it was my anticipation of such relief which impelled me to do the paper clip trick in the first place.

I contend that relief, as a type of feeling, qualifies accordingly as a type of conscious experience. And it is an emergent property of a situation or activity organized/witnessed/anticipated/remembered by the brain. It was anticipated relief which impelled me to (a) remember how to do the paper clip trick and (b) actually use it. But the paper clip would not straighten itself, would not poke itself into the little hole, and would not press firmly on the mechanism inside. My mind had to tell my brain to tell my body to accomplish those things. My mind exerted a "downward causation" on parts of the physical world — specifically, on my computer. There was a causal sequence. That causal sequence, though it arose in my (nonphysical) mind, was mediated by certain parts of the physical world: my brain and body.


What I'm really trying to get at with all this abstruse talk about consciousness is the idea that our conscious experience counts for something. It is real, and it changes everything. It "pushes stuff around" in the physical world in ways that wouldn't otherwise happen. And it is the core of who we are.

Hofstadter disagrees, saying it's all an illusion. Chalmers, too, disagrees, saying it's real but can't push anything around physically.

I say it's real, and it pushes stuff around.

Taking the position I take has some real advantages. For one thing, systems that have "emergent properties" (as opposed to limp "epiphenomena") are generally "complex" systems. The sciences of complexity apply to the complex system of the brain and mind, once you assume that the conscious mind is an emergent property of the brain.

Emergent properties are quite real; the quality that makes two stacks of stones into a standing arch (once a keystone is in place) is an emergent property, and an arch-qua-arch is real.

Systems that have emergent properties put a different spin on the notion of causation. They embody bottom-up causation and top-down causation. Top-down causation is sometimes called whole-part influence. The whole is not only more than the sum of the parts, it influences the parts' very behavior: it causes things to happen.

If the mind is an emergent property of the brain, then mental states cause, or change, physical events. Those physical events occur initially in the brain, but they spread to the body and then, via the body, to the world around us.

Another advantage of assuming the conscious mind to be an emergent property of the brain is that it leverages complexity science's ability to explain the quantity of diversity of the natural world. Complexity science helps explain why Darwinian biological evolution sometimes produces new species by the droves, and later watches as small, medium, and large extinction events take place, wiping out most or all of the species.

For example, the sizes of species extinction events are not random, it turns out. Plotting the event's sizes (the numbers of species eliminated in any given event) against the frequencies of events of each size yields a curious result: when so-called "log log" axes are used, the plot turns out to be a straight line!

In nature, evolution originates and destroys biological species over time in a way that Darwin's theory alone couldn't have predicted: it is as if the earth's biosphere were a "complex adaptive system," and one that is not as "random" as once assumed. Because of (albeit difficult to explain) top-down causation/whole-part influence, the pageant of speciation and extinction is more orderly than even Darwin assumed.


The same "dynamics of diversity" apply to human conscious experience, I would speculate. That's why our experiences are the most real things we know: experience is a very real, downward-causative property of the mind that emerges from, and then influences, the workings of the physical brain.

I am put in mind of that extra-special event Christians sometimes call their "conversion experience." It is also sometimes called their experience of being "born again."

It can be argued that there is no experience more central to the Christian belief than being born again, accepting Christ as one's personal savior, or other verbal descriptions of the same inner phenomenon.

The Christian New Testament is an account of historical events in the style called, by those who know such words, kerygma. "Preaching the gospel of Christ in the manner of the early church"; "the Apostolic proclamation of religious truths, especially as taught in the Gospels"; "the element of proclamation in Christian apologetic, as contrasted with didache, or its instructional aspects": these are all formal definitions of kerygma. Less formally, I would put it this way: kerygma is preaching designed to produce in the listener a born-again conversion experience.

The born-again experience is one of the vast number of "species" of experience that the conscious human mind is capable of. Especially to the evangelical Christian, no experience could be more important than the born-again, conversion experience.