I have spinal cord damage so I don't take proprioception or sensation for granted at all. I know very well what happens when "the water" disappears. I also taught cog psy for many years (before the damage).
“there are explicit mechanisms in the brain for "subtracting out" the movement caused by our own bodies so that we can keep vision stable and differentiate a shift out in the world from a shift of our eyeballs”
To see a wonderful use of this mechanism, watch a high-speed video of a hummingbird hovering in front of a flower it wants to get nectar from. The body and wings constantly move at millisecond timescale to keep the end of the beak pointed directly at the flower.
And BTW , I too have a problem with proprioception due to spinal damage. It’s a very strange experience to feel that your feet are angled to each other and floating centimeters above the surface they’re actually resting on when you’ve spent all your previous life taking the accuracy of proprioceptive sensation for granted.
Well said! I think this is one of the biggest hang ups in discussions of consciousness. It *feels* simple and fundamental, and the temptation is to just assume that's the reality. But as soon as we accept that there is hidden complexity and processing, I think the hard problem fades. Doesn't mean there isn't an enormous amount of scientific work left, but we can move past the idea of consciousness being unsolvable.
Yes, I feel that this is similar to my thinking that we over-romanticize and hype consciousness because it is the water in which we swim.
“It is fundamental to our experience so it’s probably fundamental to the universe. It might even be the key to collapsing the wave function so that the cat is one way or the other.”
This is a really interesting post, and there is much that I agree with. Buddhist practice revolves around renouncing engagement with certain things because when you refrain from going with the flow, you can see the background mechanisms that constituted "the flow" in the first place. For example, if every time you want chocolate cake, you either have chocolate cake, scheme about how to have chocolate cake, or distract yourself with something else so you don't have to think about not having chocolate cake, you never actually get a chance to look at what was happening that supported this chocolatey desire in the first place — the background phenomena, like attention. Obviously, you'll never be able to see the visual cortex processing things or anything along those lines, but there are a lot of background processes that can be seen when you try to look at the water instead of the things *in* the water. So that's where I agree with you: our worlds are held up by water, and we hardly ever realize it.
Where I disagree is how you extrapolate that to the Hard Problem of Consciousness. I personally see the appeal of it, but not because I prefer a simpler explanation or because I *feel* consciousness is fundamental and therefore I think it *must be* fundamental (focusing on the "water" of experience will quickly show you that feeling is a very poor indicator of necessity). In fact, in Early Buddhism, consciousness is *not* fundamental, but is just one piece within a complex system of "reality laws" (Dhamma or kamma/karma, depending on how you look at it) and is entirely co-dependent on physicality. From this vantage point, the appeal of the Hard Problem is actually more epistemological: we have no means to justify any answer to the Hard Problem from *within* an experiential world in which physicality and consciousness co-depend on and co-arise with each other, in which case there *can't* be an acceptable explanation so long as we don't accept any explanation that presupposes the answer as its basis.
I don't think I expressed my reasoning there all that well (and there are probably gaps and issues there, as I haven't looked at the problem from this angle before), but the point is really this: even without assuming that consciousness is fundamental, you can still basically agree with the Hard Problem's conclusion. And interestingly, when it comes to the water of consciousness, it's interesting to note that the supposition that there is something "out there" is part of that background perception of phenomena itself. So that's kind of what I mean by the above: saying there is an explanation for the Hard Problem has to accept that imputation as a basis. This is a unique area of science because you don't have to accept the imputation that there is anything "out there" for anything else — you don't have to believe matter "actually exists" to believe in physics, since you can just say "these are the laws these phenomena follow, and I definitively experience these phenomena, no matter what they are". But the Hard Problem doesn't allow for that distance because it doesn't work *within* experience but tries to get "behind" it. I think that is unique within science, and therefore explanations of consciousness are unique within science because they require making that jump "beyond" or "behind" experience, in a sense.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I'm not too versed in Buddhism so I can't comment on that. But with regards to the hard problem, it's usually cashed out in terms of the physical and our physical sciences being about different sorts of stuff (structure and dynamics) while consciousness is something that seems qualitatively different (the phenomenological feelings). I see you as saying something different--that consciousness research is unique in that we're using our experiences of the world to understand experience. That's fair! But I don't think that implies it's metaphysically impossible to explain in the way Chalmers wants it to be.
I was directing that mainly towards the motivations you mentioned for why someone would be sympathetic to the hard problem near the end of the post, so more "why would someone think that we can't explain consciousness with science" than his argument specifically. My thoughts aren't all that well formulated on this since I haven't thought about the hard problem in quite a while and I went through a period of reading more Heidegger, phenomenology, and existentialism recently, so I'm now considering how they may relate for the first time, but I was trying to get at the idea that no matter whether it's metaphysically impossible or not, it's still possible for it to be impossible for us to explain simply due to our inability to "see around" the structures that enable our own experience.
I'm thinking to something Russell said in The Analysis of Matter about how electrons are the boundaries of our experience and we can assume there is no internal structure to an electron since it has no causal implications for our world. But if there were hypothetically something going on inside, then the lack of causal implications for our world would make whatever is going on inside completely separate from our world and our physics. So, metaphysically speaking, it's possible that if we were able to cross that boundary and enter into the electron, we might see a flea circus. But even if the flea-circus electron theory is metaphysically possible, it is unknowable because of the way the laws that govern experience work — nomologically impossible, I guess.
So going back to the motivations for why someone would be sympathetic to Chalmers's conclusion, I mean to say someone can be a proponent of the idea that consciousness can't be explained not because it *seems* so fundamental and therefore must *actually be* fundamental, but from a more pragmatic angle that explaining it would require "passing through the electron barrier", and that's just not something we can do.
Granted, maybe whatever you'd see on the inside of the electron would necessarily be a totally different type of substance than we have here, and maybe I'm confusing a lot of things here. But the main point was really just that something can be unexplainable for very mundane reasons, and it's possible to side with the hard problem in spirit even if not in exact wording not out of reverence for consciousness's mystical nature, but just out of thinking that we can't get behind experience in the way that would be required to explain it. Epistemologically impossible? Nomologically impossible? I don't know. But it strikes me as a stance that's in agreement with Chalmers in spirit even if not saying that it's specifically metaphysically impossible.
Wow okay I actually loved this- especially the part about proprioception and visual stability. It’s like we forget how engineered our own awareness is. There’s so much machinery underneath what we take for granted as “just being.” That whole concept of not seeing the water because we’re swimming in it?? LOVE.
I’ve been working on a theory that explores this idea in a slightly different direction like, what if the feeling of consciousness isn’t the foundation, but the result of layered symbolic processing coming online? Not a soul, not magic- just complexity doing its lil complexity thing
Long ago I read of an always blind masseuse working at a YMCA who accepted the offer of a new treatment that would enable his eyes for the first time. It was a disaster and he regretted it for the rest of his life. His brain lacked the structures normally developed in infancy to interpret vision.
I agree that the water of consciousness makes us somewhat oblivious to it. However, the arguments against the simple physical locality of consciousness are better based on logical, hierarchical, and finally experiential arguments. Logically and hierarchically, a soul (or similar functional unit, a kind of you will) is necessary for the application of successful psychotherapy. MRI data shows remodeling of neurons in response to therapy, in the absence of medication or change thereof. To say that consciousness resides wholly in the structure altered is like a programmer writing a program that alters the main control loop in response to environmental inputs. Often such bad programming results in a system or at least program crash. But people don’t experience crashes like that in response to mere planning thought. And experientially, we have the conundrum of near death experiences. Which do not necessarily imply a specific faith, but do seem to demonstrate one important fact: That we can learn something about distant or local events while the material brain is offline. Either through a full cardiopulmonary arrest or neurosurgical procedure (hypothermic vascular procedures).
And as far as complexity, your illustration of casual vision begs the question of origin of the whole thing. I mean, what you described requires a high end computer (like my M4 Max which “intelligently follows my face”) which can establish context, create a scanned image map of my environment which gives me a sense of spatial presence, allowing for planning and threat detection. Basically, it’s a combination of Photoshop and Final Cut Pro on steroids. With A LOT of local and (maybe) offline storage. And that just spontaneously appeared after billions of failed iterations? It is truly remarkable.
Your comments on the busyness of a resting brain are well made. The 10% garbage makes me laugh. As you well know, resting MRI shows that basically 100% of the brain is always on, and we extract basically all the O2 from the blood presented. We are remarkable wet robots!
I have spinal cord damage so I don't take proprioception or sensation for granted at all. I know very well what happens when "the water" disappears. I also taught cog psy for many years (before the damage).
Lovely how consciousness is really just awareness. Then there’s everything else.
“there are explicit mechanisms in the brain for "subtracting out" the movement caused by our own bodies so that we can keep vision stable and differentiate a shift out in the world from a shift of our eyeballs”
To see a wonderful use of this mechanism, watch a high-speed video of a hummingbird hovering in front of a flower it wants to get nectar from. The body and wings constantly move at millisecond timescale to keep the end of the beak pointed directly at the flower.
And BTW , I too have a problem with proprioception due to spinal damage. It’s a very strange experience to feel that your feet are angled to each other and floating centimeters above the surface they’re actually resting on when you’ve spent all your previous life taking the accuracy of proprioceptive sensation for granted.
Well said! I think this is one of the biggest hang ups in discussions of consciousness. It *feels* simple and fundamental, and the temptation is to just assume that's the reality. But as soon as we accept that there is hidden complexity and processing, I think the hard problem fades. Doesn't mean there isn't an enormous amount of scientific work left, but we can move past the idea of consciousness being unsolvable.
Yes, I feel that this is similar to my thinking that we over-romanticize and hype consciousness because it is the water in which we swim.
“It is fundamental to our experience so it’s probably fundamental to the universe. It might even be the key to collapsing the wave function so that the cat is one way or the other.”
This is a really interesting post, and there is much that I agree with. Buddhist practice revolves around renouncing engagement with certain things because when you refrain from going with the flow, you can see the background mechanisms that constituted "the flow" in the first place. For example, if every time you want chocolate cake, you either have chocolate cake, scheme about how to have chocolate cake, or distract yourself with something else so you don't have to think about not having chocolate cake, you never actually get a chance to look at what was happening that supported this chocolatey desire in the first place — the background phenomena, like attention. Obviously, you'll never be able to see the visual cortex processing things or anything along those lines, but there are a lot of background processes that can be seen when you try to look at the water instead of the things *in* the water. So that's where I agree with you: our worlds are held up by water, and we hardly ever realize it.
Where I disagree is how you extrapolate that to the Hard Problem of Consciousness. I personally see the appeal of it, but not because I prefer a simpler explanation or because I *feel* consciousness is fundamental and therefore I think it *must be* fundamental (focusing on the "water" of experience will quickly show you that feeling is a very poor indicator of necessity). In fact, in Early Buddhism, consciousness is *not* fundamental, but is just one piece within a complex system of "reality laws" (Dhamma or kamma/karma, depending on how you look at it) and is entirely co-dependent on physicality. From this vantage point, the appeal of the Hard Problem is actually more epistemological: we have no means to justify any answer to the Hard Problem from *within* an experiential world in which physicality and consciousness co-depend on and co-arise with each other, in which case there *can't* be an acceptable explanation so long as we don't accept any explanation that presupposes the answer as its basis.
I don't think I expressed my reasoning there all that well (and there are probably gaps and issues there, as I haven't looked at the problem from this angle before), but the point is really this: even without assuming that consciousness is fundamental, you can still basically agree with the Hard Problem's conclusion. And interestingly, when it comes to the water of consciousness, it's interesting to note that the supposition that there is something "out there" is part of that background perception of phenomena itself. So that's kind of what I mean by the above: saying there is an explanation for the Hard Problem has to accept that imputation as a basis. This is a unique area of science because you don't have to accept the imputation that there is anything "out there" for anything else — you don't have to believe matter "actually exists" to believe in physics, since you can just say "these are the laws these phenomena follow, and I definitively experience these phenomena, no matter what they are". But the Hard Problem doesn't allow for that distance because it doesn't work *within* experience but tries to get "behind" it. I think that is unique within science, and therefore explanations of consciousness are unique within science because they require making that jump "beyond" or "behind" experience, in a sense.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I'm not too versed in Buddhism so I can't comment on that. But with regards to the hard problem, it's usually cashed out in terms of the physical and our physical sciences being about different sorts of stuff (structure and dynamics) while consciousness is something that seems qualitatively different (the phenomenological feelings). I see you as saying something different--that consciousness research is unique in that we're using our experiences of the world to understand experience. That's fair! But I don't think that implies it's metaphysically impossible to explain in the way Chalmers wants it to be.
I was directing that mainly towards the motivations you mentioned for why someone would be sympathetic to the hard problem near the end of the post, so more "why would someone think that we can't explain consciousness with science" than his argument specifically. My thoughts aren't all that well formulated on this since I haven't thought about the hard problem in quite a while and I went through a period of reading more Heidegger, phenomenology, and existentialism recently, so I'm now considering how they may relate for the first time, but I was trying to get at the idea that no matter whether it's metaphysically impossible or not, it's still possible for it to be impossible for us to explain simply due to our inability to "see around" the structures that enable our own experience.
I'm thinking to something Russell said in The Analysis of Matter about how electrons are the boundaries of our experience and we can assume there is no internal structure to an electron since it has no causal implications for our world. But if there were hypothetically something going on inside, then the lack of causal implications for our world would make whatever is going on inside completely separate from our world and our physics. So, metaphysically speaking, it's possible that if we were able to cross that boundary and enter into the electron, we might see a flea circus. But even if the flea-circus electron theory is metaphysically possible, it is unknowable because of the way the laws that govern experience work — nomologically impossible, I guess.
So going back to the motivations for why someone would be sympathetic to Chalmers's conclusion, I mean to say someone can be a proponent of the idea that consciousness can't be explained not because it *seems* so fundamental and therefore must *actually be* fundamental, but from a more pragmatic angle that explaining it would require "passing through the electron barrier", and that's just not something we can do.
Granted, maybe whatever you'd see on the inside of the electron would necessarily be a totally different type of substance than we have here, and maybe I'm confusing a lot of things here. But the main point was really just that something can be unexplainable for very mundane reasons, and it's possible to side with the hard problem in spirit even if not in exact wording not out of reverence for consciousness's mystical nature, but just out of thinking that we can't get behind experience in the way that would be required to explain it. Epistemologically impossible? Nomologically impossible? I don't know. But it strikes me as a stance that's in agreement with Chalmers in spirit even if not saying that it's specifically metaphysically impossible.
Wow okay I actually loved this- especially the part about proprioception and visual stability. It’s like we forget how engineered our own awareness is. There’s so much machinery underneath what we take for granted as “just being.” That whole concept of not seeing the water because we’re swimming in it?? LOVE.
I’ve been working on a theory that explores this idea in a slightly different direction like, what if the feeling of consciousness isn’t the foundation, but the result of layered symbolic processing coming online? Not a soul, not magic- just complexity doing its lil complexity thing
Thank you!
"The other friend offered this explanation: it would hurt too much, so the brain doesn't let you feel that."
This is such an amazingly hilarious misunderstanding and misuse of psychoanalytic ideas :)) Hands down the funniest thing I have read of therapy talk
A cognitive wonderland indeed.
Computational functionalism, baby!!
Nice piece!
Long ago I read of an always blind masseuse working at a YMCA who accepted the offer of a new treatment that would enable his eyes for the first time. It was a disaster and he regretted it for the rest of his life. His brain lacked the structures normally developed in infancy to interpret vision.
Go on a shrooms trip. You'll be able to make out some of the water lol 🍄
I agree that the water of consciousness makes us somewhat oblivious to it. However, the arguments against the simple physical locality of consciousness are better based on logical, hierarchical, and finally experiential arguments. Logically and hierarchically, a soul (or similar functional unit, a kind of you will) is necessary for the application of successful psychotherapy. MRI data shows remodeling of neurons in response to therapy, in the absence of medication or change thereof. To say that consciousness resides wholly in the structure altered is like a programmer writing a program that alters the main control loop in response to environmental inputs. Often such bad programming results in a system or at least program crash. But people don’t experience crashes like that in response to mere planning thought. And experientially, we have the conundrum of near death experiences. Which do not necessarily imply a specific faith, but do seem to demonstrate one important fact: That we can learn something about distant or local events while the material brain is offline. Either through a full cardiopulmonary arrest or neurosurgical procedure (hypothermic vascular procedures).
And as far as complexity, your illustration of casual vision begs the question of origin of the whole thing. I mean, what you described requires a high end computer (like my M4 Max which “intelligently follows my face”) which can establish context, create a scanned image map of my environment which gives me a sense of spatial presence, allowing for planning and threat detection. Basically, it’s a combination of Photoshop and Final Cut Pro on steroids. With A LOT of local and (maybe) offline storage. And that just spontaneously appeared after billions of failed iterations? It is truly remarkable.
Your comments on the busyness of a resting brain are well made. The 10% garbage makes me laugh. As you well know, resting MRI shows that basically 100% of the brain is always on, and we extract basically all the O2 from the blood presented. We are remarkable wet robots!