Here’s a fascinating short video (9 minutes) of neuroscientist Christof Koch, interviewed on Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s YouTube philosophy show, Closer to Truth:

Koch, chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, has long been a proponent of physicalism as an explanation for the mind. On that view, the mind is wholly a product of physical processes in the brain. But last month he explained that he is now coming around to an explanation for consciousness that transcends traditional physical theories:

Koch: “Consciousness cannot be explained only within the framework of space and time and energy, but we need to postulate something additional — experience.”

He acknowledges that subjective experience — I am an “I” and not just an “it”— cannot be explained by physical theories. He asserts that no physical thing in the universe, whether matter, black holes, galaxies etc., appears to have conscious experience. Yet we clearly do; thus he believes that we need a profoundly new way to understand consciousness and the mind.

We Need a Better Philosophy than Physicalism

Of course, if we assume that panpsychism (everything is conscious) is not true, only living animals and human beings have experiences. But the logical inference to be drawn from the realization that subjective experience cannot be accounted for by materialist neuroscience is not that we need better neuroscience, but that we need better metaphysics, better philosophy. The materialist understanding of reality is impoverished.

So how do we come to a better understanding of the mind and of reality itself? I think that a prerequisite for a deeper understanding of the nature of the mind is, first and foremost, what neuroscientist M. R. Bennett and philosopher P. M. S. Hacker call, in their book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Wiley 2022), “conceptual hygiene.” That is, we need clear and sensible definitions of what we are talking about.

It is noteworthy that in so many discussions of consciousness we rarely find an attempt to define the quality with any rigor. We can hardly explain it if we can’t even define it.

What is Consciousness, Anyway?

Is consciousness the same thing as awareness? Most of what we do is outside of our awareness — while I am typing this essay, I am moving my fingers on the keyboard without any real awareness of what they are doing. Even most of my thoughts seem to be, at any moment, outside of my awareness — I have ideas, hold opinions, believe and doubt, etc. without full awareness at any given moment of exactly what I believe, doubt, etc.

I believe in God, but I certainly don’t think about God at every moment. I doubt materialism, but I don’t have my doubt in mind at each moment of my life. Yet it makes no sense to say that I don’t believe in God when I am not thinking about Him. I believe in things even when I am not thinking about them. So then is consciousness a kind of arousal, like wakefulness? It is undeniable that I am aware of my dreams, but I am not awake while I am dreaming. Is consciousness the same as self-awareness?

It is clear that most animals and young infants are not really self-aware, but they are certainly conscious. Is consciousness just experience? To define consciousness as mere experience seems, on closer examination, circular reasoning. What do I experience? That which I am conscious of. What am I conscious of? That which I experience. Experience is at best just another word for consciousness, not a definition of it nor an explanation for it.

The 19^th-century German philosopher Franz Brentano (1838–1917) distinguished mental states from physical states by pointing out that a mental state (i.e., consciousness) is always about something, whereas a physical state is never intrinsically about anything. This “aboutness” is called intentionality.

Yet intentionality leaves out experiences such as pain and mood that are very real but don’t necessarily have to be ‘about’ anything in themselves. My pain is just a raw experience, just as my mood (e.g., joy or sadness) is a raw experience. While I can often ascribe an aboutness to my pain and joy and sorrow (my pain is about my sprained ankle or my joy is about my good grade on an exam), the pain and joy and sorrow in themselves are not inherently about anything. To hurt or to feel happy or to feel sad is a raw experience. Aboutness is something that I usually (but not always) attach to it. I can feel happy or sad without knowing why I am happy or sad — this is the grist of much of clinical psychology, which helps people understand and change their moods.

Is Talk of Consciousness Just a Language Game?

So what is consciousness? I think that much of our talk about consciousness is what philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) called a language game. Language is a mutually-agreed-upon set of rules for usage of words. Language games are attempts to talk about things by using social conventions about meanings of words and about ideas the words refer to. Yet language games often lead us away from clarity and truth. We become caught up in rhetorical acrobatics — talk about talk, as philosophy is sometimes described.

I think the answer to the question — what is consciousness? — was given by Wittgenstein in his famous peroration of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein wrote: “What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.”

He means that there are things of such fundamental importance to us that efforts to speak of them inherently mislead us. I believe that consciousness is such a thing, and that is why it cannot be defined. We cannot say clearly what we mean by consciousness, not because we haven’t gotten the philosophy right or because we need more neuroscience experiments, but because conscious experience is too close to us, too fundamental to us to put in words. I think that Koch and, hopefully, other neuroscientists and philosophers are coming to understand this.

We cannot define consciousness or explain it by the methods of logic or neuroscience. Consciousness is that by which we perceive and understand, not that which can be understood.

On consciousness, silence, as Socrates said of his ignorance, is the beginning of wisdom.

Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.