New York Review of Books Conciousness Is an Allusion

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For any materialist vision of consciousness, the crucial stumbling block is the question of free volition. A modern, enlightened person tends to feel that he or she has rejected a mystical, immaterial conception of the eternal soul in substitution for a strictly scientific understanding of consciousness and selfhood—as something created by the billions of neurons in our brains with their trillions of synapses and circuitous chemic and electrical processes. Merely the fact of our beingness entirely material, hence subject to the laws of cause and effect, introduces the concern that our lives might be altogether adamant. Is information technology possible that our experience of decision-making—the impression we have of making choices, indeed of having choices to make, sometimes hard ones—is entirely illusory? Is information technology possible that a chain of physical events in our bodies and brains must cause us to act in the mode we do, any our experience of the process may be?

In my conversations with the philosopher Riccardo Manzotti, we have explored his Mind-Object Identity Theory, a hypothesis that shifts the physical location of consciousness away from the encephalon and its neurons. Rather than representations in the head, Riccardo suggests that our experience is made up of the very earth nosotros perceive. Just if this is the case, if subject and object are i in experience, does this not brand it all the more difficult to explicate our impression of complimentary volition? Isn't it precisely our moment-past-moment awareness of making decisions that proves that we are separate and sovereign subjects moving in a globe of objects that remain quite singled-out from us and over which we take an obvious mastery?

—Tim Parks

This is the ninth in a series of conversations on consciousness between Riccardo Manzotti and Tim Parks.

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Tim Parks: Riccardo, how is it that we can constantly make up one's mind to do this rather than that, or simply to look at this rather than that, if as you lot suggest, mind and object of perception are ane?

Riccardo Manzotti: The question is: When we choose to do something, could we in fact accept washed otherwise?

Parks: We certainly have that impression. For example, I am quite certain I could have answered differently to your question.

Manzotti: But could you lot really? If the universe was rewound a moment, given your thoughts, feelings, and circumstances, would you lot do anything dissimilar? And why would you, if you, whatever you are, were exactly the aforementioned? Surely if you did something dissimilar, and then yous would be different; the thoughts, feelings, etc. wouldn't be the aforementioned. Then possibly the really pertinent question is, When we choose to do something, what are we, what is the thing that is the cause of our actions?

Parks: Well, mainstream science tells united states of america that essentially we are our brains. Didn't Francis Crick say that we are zilch but our neurons and their activeness? In his book The Brain: The Story of You, David Eagleman claims that, "Who you are depends on what your neurons are upwards to, moment by moment."

Manzotti: Right. Crick and many other neuroscientists are convinced that we are our neurons and that these neurons, which are of course physical things, somehow brand our choices. The problem is that when we use modern microscopes to look at our neurons, we don't find any evidence of this. All we see is a passage of electrical charges and circuitous chemical changes. Some people no dubiety take consolation from the thought that they tin blame their greyness matter for their sins, equally in the past they liked to blame the devil or fate. Eagleman, in the book you mentioned, describes with some satisfaction how a homo went on a shooting spree, killing xiii people, equally a direct upshot, he claims, of a pocket-size brain tumor "the size of a nickel," which pressed on his amygdala and upset all the neurons there. In this scenario, and then, nosotros aspect moral blame to a bunch of cells. But this is hard to square with our actual experience of living and acting in the globe. We don't experience an identity with our neurons and we exercise feel we are responsible for what we exercise. So, again, the question is, What are we?

Parks: I notice that when I say I have a strong instinctive impression of something, you call my feel into question. But when a neuroscientist says nosotros are our neurons you appeal to instinct and experience to deny information technology.

Manzotti: Our experience offers a starting indicate. We have this or that impression, okay, so permit's exam it scientifically. Crick has neither experience nor science on his side when he claims we are our neurons. Our experience does not offer testify that this is the case, and despite years of research, it has non been demonstrated.

Parks: I'm certain neuroscientists would disagree with y'all. For example, didn't Benjamin Libet demonstrate as long ago as the 1980s that our brains anticipate our conscious experience of deciding to do something? When we press a button for example, in that location is neural activity tending in that direction every bit much as a second or 2 before we tin report "deciding to press it."

Manzotti: Absolutely. In fact, contempo research by Patrick Haggard and, independently, by John-Dylan Haynes, has confirmed Libet's findings. Well before nosotros are aware of our conscious volition, the neurons are decorated in that direction. When John all of a sudden decides to osculation Mary, his brain was actually ahead of the game.

Parks: But surely this confirms the neuroscientist's claim that we are our neurons, since the neurons are calling the shots.

Manzotti: Not at all. You're leaving something rather large out of the equation. In the example of pressing the button, for case, you've forgotten the push button. In the case of John's buss, y'all've forgotten Mary'due south lips. Y'all are speaking equally if the brain were entirely separate from what is exterior our bodies. I hope nosotros've established in our previous conversations that the objects that become our experience are not "absolute" merely "relative"; they are as we know them because our torso with the causal structure of its perceptive system carves them out thus from the mass of atoms and photons round about. The object, whether it be a push button we are about to press or a mouth nosotros are almost to kiss, is relative to our body and only equally such is our experience. We are identical with that experience, not with our bodies or brains.

Parks: I'm sorry, I know nosotros've spent a dandy deal of time establishing your notion of the identity between object and feel, just I don't meet how this can explain how action is initiated. You can't tell me the push button decides to be pressed, or non pressed, if information technology comes to that. As for Mary, she may very well give John a slap on the face when he moves in for the kiss.

Manzotti: Let's have a simpler example, since for the moment we have no thought what pressing that button might lead to, while kissing of form implies another body and another brain.

Parks: I'g all for simple examples.

Manzotti: Ok. When I come across an bonny new motorcar and decide to buy information technology, what is the cause of my activeness? Couldn't it exist the car itself? Why should I introduce an intermediate entity betwixt the car and what my body does? Why not imagine instead a perfectly natural causal chain?

Parks: I actually can't see the purchase of a car as simple. This is a big ticket item. It'south a nightmare for me when I have to buy a machine. I lose sleep weighing up all the pros and cons.

Manzotti: Ane doesn't buy a car every twenty-four hours. You're correct. Many factors are involved. Your journey to work. Your budget. The kind of roads you lot utilise. But all these things are external to your body and, as we said, exist relative to it. Together they make up the composite relative object that is your experience, the car. And then why shouldn't it be this car experience, rather than your neurons, that determines your decision? Later all, yous can't decide to buy the car if it doesn't first exist, if it isn't in some way role of your feel—part of you—even if only through magazines or hearsay.

More generally, what could we hateful by the pronoun I if not the thing that is the crusade of the deportment my body initiates? As it happens, neuroscientists agree that I must be the thing that is the cause of my activeness. And they locate that thing, that cause, in the brain, the neurons. Merely neurons are non the starting time of the causal chain. Their activity is caused past something else: the external world. If we trace any neural action back, dendrite by dendrite, synapse past synapse, sooner or after we come out of the brain through our sense organs and inevitably notice ourselves outside the body, in the globe, where our feel is. And we are our experience.

Parks: Well, it'southward easy to accept that any object I'one thousand attracted to must have some role in my decision to buy it, or grab it. But aren't we only repeating Steve Jobs's truism that people don't know what they want until you testify it to them?

Manzotti: No. We're going a pace further. We're saying people don't know what they are until you lot evidence it to them. Once we are shown the iPhone, say, once our trunk with its sense appliance carves out that fantastic object, we are changed. We become the object our senses allow to exist, in this case the phone. So it is with all our goals. Showing people things is very powerful. Hence the world of advertising!

Parks: Notwithstanding, people brand different decisions, don't they? While half the earth was lining up to grab an iPhone, I was holding off. I deliberately chose not to buy. Surely that's because my encephalon was calling the shots, not the object, which yous claim is one with experience. And, to get back to Libet, as I recall, he remarked that the brain could ever modify its position at the concluding second or millisecond. It tin alter class. And then a decision is being made. The neurons are decorated.

Manzotti: What would that late minute change of neural activity exist caused by? John's on the brink of kissing Mary when he catches a glimpse of Mary's husband coming out of the bank. Bad news. Or maybe he holds back because something in his unique past is still affecting his actions right now, some cautionary tale he heard when he was a child. For me this past experience is, over again, an object, a piece of the external world fabricated possible thank you to your body. Then one piece of world contradicts another. About to buy the world's most heady machine, I am suddenly enlightened of my latest depository financial institution statement. It is still causally active in my caput, part of my immediate experience. In your case, something in your past resisted the iPhone. It had nothing to practice with your brain calling the shots. Y'all are the cause of your actions and inactions; but that "you" is not an invisible ghost in your encephalon simply the relative earth your trunk has brought into being.

Parks: I guess your indicate is that we ever exercise what we want at that instant of doing, perhaps despite other pressures, other experiences, that in some other moment might boss. And if we didn't want it, nosotros wouldn't do it.

Manzotti: Right, but let's non imagine this exempts united states from our responsibilities. Rather, information technology reveals what we really are. We are the causes of the things we do, and our deportment are the furnishings of the things we are. Nosotros are that collection of experiences/objects that, given the prevailing circumstances, do what we do. If we lie, we are liars. If nosotros fight, we are fighters. If we love, we are lovers. The cause is defined past its effects. "Ye shall know them by their fruits."

Parks: Matthew iii:16! My biblical childhood is withal causally agile it seems.

Manzotti: Hah! What a memory! Simply find the chemical element of necessity. You cannot not remember that biblical reference, you are but obliged to produce that fruit, beingness who y'all are, the evangelical chaplain's son. And find that this kind of "determinism" is not disturbing to you, considering you practise indeed identify with the person who had the biblical education and produces the reference. But if I tell you your neurons decided to remember that, then you worry that you are a puppet in the easily of something alien, some strange gray matter, because you don't identify with your neurons. And rightly and so, even so important they may exist! You are your experience, past which I mean the globe as fabricated possible by your torso.

Parks: Where does that leave the concept of gratis volition?

Manzotti: We often confuse freedom with arbitrariness, as though freedom were tantamount to doing something in a random mode. But nosotros are simply really free, or rather nosotros bask our freedom, when what we do is the necessary expression of what we are. Someone choosing to come out equally gay doesn't do it lightly. They exercise information technology considering they feel they have to. They have reached a betoken where at that place is no culling. All the same, it is in this necessity to come out that liberty is achieved. Freedom is to exist ane and the same with oneself, with the accumulation of ane's world of experience. This is what we mean by identity.

Parks: We notwithstanding take the upshot that Libet raised, that neural activeness anticipates conscious decision.

Manzotti: Libet'southward work, and indeed all of neuroscience, fits perfectly with the model I'thou suggesting. Imagine an action as a dam bursting and leading to a new object, a flood. Manifestly, the cause of that flood is not uniquely the dam breaking, but the heavy rain, or perhaps years of erosion and poor maintenance, that came earlier it. In the brain our neurons are affected by all kinds of external causes over time. Hence many dissever experiences are edifice upwards a readiness to act. Merely it'due south only when the dam bursts, or the body acts, that the cumulative issue results in united states of america making a decision. At that point what we practice seals what we are.

Parks: As ever you are moving experience outside the head. So here, y'all are seeing the experience of decision making, which I presume you don't deny, not equally a negotiation or even conflict betwixt "warring networks of neurons," equally Eagleman describes it, but as a coming together of different external objects/experiences pushing us in different ways.

Manzotti: No, not quite! Those objects experiences are not pushing us, they are us. They are pushing our body. Information technology is the relative automobile that is your feel, non an accented motorcar, that finally moves the mitt to the wallet. Information technology is the earth relative to our body, our perceptive faculties and accumulated experience, that is the cause of our action. The state of affairs is complex and can't just be described as external factors determining our action.

Parks: I see what yous're saying: my experience, which is none other than the aggregating of all the objects my trunk has encountered, eventually determines my actions. But I'm not altogether convinced. And my problem is this: non but do I have the impression of making decisions, cogitating, not merely acting, but I also believe that I "organize" experience. That I run into the globe in a certain way. I agree a system of political opinions, of aesthetic preferences, and then on. So I feel that rather than beingness a earth of objects coming together over fourth dimension to decide an action, I have an inner world that determines how I organize the outer world. I don't but act as consequence; I make up one's mind how to act, coherently.

Manzotti: Let me offer an analogy to suggest the fallacy behind your formulation. We'll stay with cars. When y'all drive you turn the steering wheel and, thank you to a complex yet easily understandable coupling of cogs and bulldoze shafts, the vehicle's front wheels turn appropriately. Is in that location anything mysterious between the steering wheel and the two wheels that turn? No. Just a concatenation of cause and effect such that given the turn of the driving wheel the front wheels have to turn.

Okay, now imagine an infinitely more complex object, a human torso. The globe acts on the torso, merely before the body is going to translate that cause into an event, an action, a simply enormous, though of class necessarily finite, number of causal events may take identify, inside the body and exterior. What'due south more than, unlike the car, which is a fixed object when it comes out of the factory, your wonderful body can change in response to the world, information technology is teleologically open up—so that, to give the simplest example, when you see a face a second fourth dimension, the experience is different from the first time, considering the first experience is still causally active in your brain, hence we accept the awareness of recognition. So with this fantastically circuitous object, the torso, we cannot excogitate the whole causal chain that precedes an activeness (this was a favorite observation of Spinoza's) and hence nosotros cannot predict what action will be taken. As a result of this conceptual impossibility, we sideslip into the habit of inventing an intermediate entity, the cocky, to which we attribute a causal power. We say that I, or my cocky, caused this to happen. But equally David Hume said, we never meet or run across a self; we meet ideas, or, equally I would say, objects. The self, this elusive intermediate entity that initiates action, is a shortcut, an invention, a user-friendly narrative to explain our complex feel.

Parks: Enough. Rather than saying I tin agree with this, I'm going to wait a day or ii and see what causal upshot your arguments have on my now tired encephalon. Simply, to be predictable, I desire to close with a challenge. You have constantly claimed that the internalist view that consciousness is neural activity has not been scientifically demonstrated. Well, tin can you demonstrate your externalist view of consciousness, scientifically? Are there experiments that would prove your position?

Manzotti: Indeed there are. And since, equally we have seen, I am a person who loves challenges, at least of this kind, for our next conversation I volition devise some experiments, which, if undertaken, volition prove or disprove my hypothesis.

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Source: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/06/17/consciousness-whos-at-the-wheel/

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