Does there have to be a distinction? This is how I think of it. Imagine a human inside of a glass box. The question is: is there anything outside the box that is influencing his consciousness? You can say, well, light is. OK, so paint the box black. What else? Well, sound. OK, so evacuate an area around the glass box so sound cannot reach the box or his ears. What else? Heat (insulation), electro-magnetic waves (Faraday cage), and so on. Once you’ve finished, there will still be the local atmosphere of the box itself and the mysterious “vacuum energy density” which nobody really has any idea what the hell that is.
But I think we can safely say that all the causal factors that we understand can be eliminated without injury to consciousness. Hence, there is no causal dependency on any of those causal factors - with respect to all of known physics, consciousness exists exclusively within the cranium. There is still the vacuum energy and all we can say in respect to this is we don’t know if there is a causal relationship between that and consciousness because we have no way to isolate a conscious being (or anything, for that matter) from it.
I think a more philosophical way to answer the question is to start morphologically. Clearly, what we mean by consciousness - what is special about it - is something that is not enjoyed by a rock, even if it were to turn out that the spiritualists were not just uttering mumbo-jumbo when they say “the world is spirit”. That is, even supposing “everything is conscious”, in whatever sense a rock is conscious, we are conscious in a different, more special way and it is that “alertness” or “awakeness” that we are interested in. But we can just look at a human brain and note that its shape must be playing a causal role in the fact that it - and not a rock - is alert/awake/conscious. And this is clearly not exclusively true of human brains - however much lower the conscious awareness of other animals is, it is not zero. But how far down does it go? Are spiders conscious? I just flushed one down the shower drain this morning… I didn’t squish him because I figured I’d let him have a fighting chance. But he was invading my shower! Anyway, even if you said insects are conscious - are amoeba conscious? Are protein chains conscious? At some point, you have to draw a line and say “these things are conscious in the special, ‘alert/awake’ way that these other things are not.”
Any line we draw is arbitrary because we cannot go inside the head of a spider and “see what it’s like to be a spider”, for example. So, I draw the line at central-nervous system. I don’t think anything that doesn’t have a CNS can be conscious in the special, alert/awake sense that we are, even a little bit. In terms of consciousness, there is no difference between a rock and a protein chain. There is no difference between a gear-box and an amoeba. There is no difference between a pile of dirt and a tree. These entities are “isoconscious”, to invent a word.
So, having excluded everything that does not have a CNS, that still leaves a big chunk of the animal world, including ourselves. Let’s suppose that everything with a CNS is conscious in the special, alert/awake way that we are, it just expresses itself differently. In this case, we can ask a simple question: what is it about the morphology of a CNS that causes it to be capable of alert/awake consciousness? And I think this is where the “neural correlates of consciousness” folks are coming from. However, I think they have an unduly stunted conception of physical possibility. Given how little we know about physics, I think we need to adopt a mantle of greater humility towards the possible springs of consciousness. Perhaps the CNS simply has a morphology that happens to be able to “tune in” to some kind of “consciousness broadcast” from somewhere else in the galaxy that is mediated through forces that operate in the vacuum, which we don’t understand. Or, perhaps it manufactures the entire theatre of consciousness within itself (this is the orthodox view). Either way, we should still be able to narrow our search by considering the morphological characteristics that differentiate a CNS from a non-CNS entity.
To put into perspective what I mean by humility, I was just browsing YT videos about pulsars. The crab pulsar, for example, emits an 11 cycles/sec. signal clearly audible in the X-ray spectrum. It’s amazing. But there are some pulsars that are in the millisecond range - the astrophysicists believe these things are literally spinning at that rate. The plasma cosmologists laugh at this… the surface of the highest frequency known pulsar must be rotating at a rate 1/7th the speed of light. Um. The plasma-cosmological view is that pulsars are simply resonances in stellar plasma. But the fact is that we can’t resolve this question by looking at objects 100’s of thousands of light-years distant. You have to “build your way out” as we did for setting the scale structure of the Universe by first calculating the distances to the planets and then to the nearest stars - through parallax - and so on.
The lack of humility is what drives this search for bigger, faster, more incredible things. It’s a scientific pissing contest. Why not try to understand how our local environment actually works? There are clearly electromagnetic resonances and energy exchanges happening between the Sun and its planets. Why not try to build a solid understanding of this before speculating about X-ray emitting objects that are zillions of times more distant?
This same arrogance is present in neurology. Everybody’s looking for that ‘big breakthrough’ that ‘explains it all’ when every indication is that a) the human brain is not special (animal brains do everything the human brain does in the basic terms of alertness/awakeness which is the central puzzle here), b) brains consist of a rat’s nest of purpose-built “modules” that solve particular problems, just like the heart solves a particular problem and the liver solves a particular problem, c) “general-purpose reasoning” isn’t… it’s just the capacity for language. Rather than looking for the big breakthrough that explains it all, why not start with explaining what we have in front of us? There are some folks who are doing this, with amazing results. Basically, it’s just a matter of reverse-engineering the damn thing.
Clayton -
