Consciousness

The symbolic capacities of Neolithic humans illustrated by cave art is evidence that early people were at least minimally reflective when thinking of the nature of consciousness. The nature of a consciousness is today considered a “hard” problem by philosophy. The nature of a mind is a “hard” problem in that philosophers still cannot account for the nature of consciousness.

In the 5th BC century, Leucippus and Democritus are recorded as having proposed a materialist view of the world. A materialist perspective argues that everything, including the mind and soul, are composed of atoms and void. The problem of consciousness was dismissed for millennia in recent Western society because this account dismantled many of the church’s teachings.

The church used Descartes’ philosophy of “dualism” to account for human consciousness. Dualism conceived that the body and the mind are made of different things. Dualism first purported that the mind was immaterial in 1641. This was accepted by Christianity and most philosophers until neuroscience and other scientific advances proved that the brain was made of matter. This turned dualism on its head.

Indeed, it was not until the late 1880s or early 1890s that Ramón y Cajal and Camillo Golgi first conceived the “neuron theory.” This neuron theory theorized that brain was composed of interconnected cells. This “neuron theory” was confirmed by scientific advances in 1906 and won them a Nobel Prize.

In 1976, Wimsatt proposed that a “reductive physicalist’s solution for the mind–body problem holds that whatever ‘consciousness’ is, it can be fully described via physical processes in the brain and body” (Wimsatt 1976). This is true. However, philosophers of mind then asked, “Then what is the nature of consciousness?”

In a 1994 paper, Thomas Nagel published “What It Feel Like To Be A Bat?” In it, he asserts “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism” (Nagel 1994). He uses the example of the additional sense possessed by bats, but not humans: echolocation. Since echolocation exists, Nagel states that it must be like something to perceive that sense. Since we cannot perceive it, how can we describe how it feels to be a bat?

Quaila are individual characteristics about perceptions, like colors or the volume of a sound. The inherent subjectivity of qualia is apparent when the question of “what does it feel like to be a bat?” is considered. Since we have no words to describe the different quaila of echolocation, can we ever really know?

The existence of qualia highlight the deeply personal and subjective nature of perception, The question of “what it feels like to be a bat” describes this problem. Our inability to access the qualia associated with echolocation shows the limits of human empathy and language.

Bilbliography

Nagel, T. (1974). What Is It Like to Be a Bat. Philosophical Review, 83, 435-450.

Wimsatt, William C. (1976). Reductionism, Levels of Organization, and the Mind-Body Problem. Springer. pp. 205–267.