What's Really on (or in) Our Minds?

For nearly a century, science has avoided the study of human consciousness. Now, a UA philosopher is helping to reinvigorate this most difficult and profound avenue of inquiry.

by Dan Huff, Tucson Weekly

A UA professor takes us back to basics

During the millennia, philosophy has given rise to mathematics, physics, biology, and psychology, among other scientific endeavors, as well as their countless attendant technologies.

And if the philosophical explorations of today are eventually translated, via scientific research, into the technology of some far-flung tomorrow, the ghost of David Chalmers, UA philosophy professor, may be in gleeful attendance.

"I'd put up with a great deal of nonexistence to be able to come back for a day or so at 100-year intervals to see what's going on, what sort of progress we're making," says Chalmers. At age 34, he is, of course, very much among the living.

In fact, he's living on the cutting edge.

Chalmers recently turned down an offer from Oxford University to assume its prestigious Wilde Professorship of Mental Philosophy.

"I could have legitimately called myself the Wilde Professor," jokes the long-haired, T-shirt-and-tennies-attired native Australian. But he's quick to add that the UA has more to offer a scholar with his unique interests than just about any place in the world at the moment; and, he says, it doesn't hurt that Tucson has better weather than England.

Nevertheless, J. Christopher Maloney, UA philosophy department head, says he "went to the mat" to keep Chalmers at the UA.

"First of all," Maloney says of Chalmers, "he's remarkable in that he's both very young, and, at a quite early stage in his career, he also has made a stunning impact on the profession, in a very large and influential way. That's quite unusual for someone so early in a career to have done that. But what is, in part, remarkable about his meteoric rise, is that shortly after completing his Ph.D., he wrote an important book, The Conscious Mind. It was one of the most influential pieces of writing to open up a very important, and relatively new, area of research in both philosophy and the cognitive and neural sciences."

Besides the philosophy department, another big draw for Chalmers is the UA's Center for Consciousness Studies, of which he's an associate director. It's an interdisciplinary effort offering a rigorous yet inclusive approach to the study of consciousness, as well as scientifically rigorous and sustained discussions of all phenomena related to consciousness. Among the center's current projects are the study of the neural correlates of emotional experience and an attempt to develop first-person methods of verbal reporting to help bootstrap the science of consciousness. The center is looking for sponsors to fund its many activities, Chalmers notes.

Every two years, the center sponsors the largest conference on consciousness, attracting leading scientists from around the world. The next one is scheduled for April 2002, in Tucson.

In short, the center's mission is to reopen an avenue of inquiry that has, since the era of philosopher/psychologist William James, been more or less taboo for serious researchers. Questions include:

• What is the true nature of this gloriously buzzing, glowing, shimmering, and ever-shifting something going on inside our heads?
• Does consciousness reside wholly in the brain and its processes? Or is there something more involved?
• Is consciousness a unified experience, or only seemingly whole?
•  And why do we experience the world as we do - why does the color red, for example, which is apparently just a particular frequency of vibration on the electromagnetic spectrum, possess the subjective qualities that it does for us? Why, for example, do we hear sounds, instead of experiencing a disturbance of the atmosphere as some other sensation, or none at all?

Although James delighted in exploring consciousness, chiefly his own, and is generally considered to be the father of modern psychology, this aspect of mankind's study of the mind was quickly abandoned shortly after the turn of the 20th century.

Perhaps it was the spectacular successes of the hard sciences - cellular biology, X-rays, radio waves, and the like - that prompted the early psychologists to abandon the most puzzling question of all in their nascent science - What is human consciousness?  They opted to examine more easily studied phenomena such as behavioral conditioning, the physiological basis of perception, or the all-too-easily commercialized subject of motivation.

Then again, perhaps it was simply the fear of appearing overreaching - or worse, unscientific - in the quest for what has always been the Holy Grail of both science and religion, a deep understanding of the true nature of reality.

Or perhaps it was simply that no scientific instrument could define or measure something as elusive as consciousness. Even today, with our nuclear magnetic resonance technology and other devices that allow us to peer into the living brain, consciousness remains an elusive "ghost in the machine."

As Chalmers noted in his seminal 1995 paper on the matter, "Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness": "There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target."

In fact, it was Chalmers who brilliantly pulled this ancient tangle of philosophical and scientific conundrums into sharp focus for modern researchers in his formulation, in the same paper, of what he calls the "Hard Problem."

"It is useful," he wrote, "to divide the associated problems of consciousness into 'hard' and 'easy' problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.

The "easy" problems of consciousness, Chalmers pointed out, include those of explaining the following phenomena:

• the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli
• the integration of information by a cognitive system
• the reportability of mental states
• the ability of a system to access its own internal states
• the focus of attention
• the deliberate control of behavior
• the difference between wakefulness and sleep

These are, of course, seriously difficult problems - as physiologists and brain specialists, as well as those who are trying to develop artificial intelligence programs for computers, have discovered. But Chalmers labels them "easy" because it's generally agreed science and technology, as we currently understand them, eventually should be able to sort it all out.

The problem that may not be so easily answered, however, is a real mind-bender:

"The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience," Chalmers wrote. "When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion; and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience."

Whether the ultimate nature of experience lies within the processes of the brain itself, outside of those confines, or somewhere in between, is currently the subject of much debate.

One of the most intriguing theories comes from Oxford mathematical physicist Roger Penrose and UA Medical Center anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, who is also an associate director of the consciousness center. The Penrose-Hameroff model postulates a so-called Platonic Realm at the Planck's Scale, the unimaginably small scale at which physical reality loses its apparent seamlessness and becomes "granular."

Penrose and Hameroff have theorized the raw qualia of experience - the ultimate nature of the color red, for example, which our brains perhaps only imperfectly interpret - reside in this ultra-tiny, ultra-fast, and yet all-pervasive (and currently only theoretical) gap in our reality. Our brains access this realm - named for the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who postulated a world inhabited by ideals - through a series of rapid-fire quantum mechanical interactions, they speculate.

Many researchers in the artificial intelligence community, on the other hand, believe the ultimate nature of consciousness resides in algorithms, those calculational programs by which computers do their work. If an algorithm for human consciousness exists, those who take the extreme view of this position speculate it may reside in the actual formula itself, the numbers as it were, and not necessarily in its interaction with the brain.

In this scenario, a robot running the human consciousness algorithm would be no less conscious than a human brain running the same program. Penrose and Hameroff, on the other hand, argue the human brain's alleged deep connection to nature on the quantum level may preclude machines from ever achieving consciousness as we know it.

Today's consciousness theories take some bizarre twists and turns, and Chalmers, who began his studies as a mathematician, is delighted to be in the thick of it.

"Much of science these days is really just a matter of filling in the blanks," he says. "Most of the big discoveries have already been made. But this is certainly one area where great discoveries are still possible."

A science and technology based on those possible future discoveries is perhaps all but inconceivable to a mind of today - although the makers of the movie The Matrix recently did a gruesomely good job of depicting an artificially induced mass reality created by evil alien machines bent on world domination. At the very least, a future science of consciousness might make for some hyper cool video games, perhaps akin to the "holo deck" on the fictional - for now, anyway - Star Trek series.

Whatever science might turn out in some distant future, Chalmers today certainly doesn't claim to know all the details about where consciousness might reside.

"I've argued strongly, for example, that a theory of consciousness will require new fundamental laws connecting physical processes to consciousness. So you might say I suspect consciousness arises from physical processes in the brain, but isn't reducible to physical processes in the brain."

In other words, it's still a mystery. And that's what makes the Hard Problem so fascinating for a philosopher like David Chalmers. 

A Shining Star

While UA philosophy professor David Chalmers is modest about his recent offer from Oxford University to assume the Wilde Professorship of Mental Philosophy - an offer he's declined - his UA department head, J. Christopher Maloney, is more willing to point out its significance:

"He was the youngest person, I believe, in the history of Oxford to be offered a chair in philosophy," Maloney says. He adds, "Oxford is one of the absolutely elite universities, and I use that in the good sense of the term. Its philosophy program, which goes back to the very beginnings of Oxford (roughly 1096 A.D.), is one of the largest and most highly regarded programs in the world."

When it came to keeping Chalmers in Tucson, however, Maloney says the task was made easier because the UA philosophy department is well regarded, even when compared to Oxford's.

"Our department is internationally known," he says. "It's certainly considered to be within the top 10 of the best graduate programs in the country, a little bit higher than that in most people's estimation. Its strength, in part, has been determined by people working on questions at the intersection of metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind."

While Chalmers may be one of the brightest young stars in this area right now, he's not the only UA professor other institutions are attempting to woo away.

"Last year," Maloney says, "many members of our faculty had offers from very prominent departments and institutions to assume distinguished professorships. It happens pretty regularly. And to the University's credit, it has gone a long way to retain the very best faculty available."

It's a point Maloney wants to emphasize: "Students who come here face big classes and long lines," he says. "It's different here than at a small college. But here you get the chance to study and interact with a philosopher like Dave Chalmers. And you don't get that in too many places. That's true not only in philosophy, but in other departments as well. Just in my college, it's true in sociology, in anthropology, in linguistics. There are many other departments like this across the University, and they represent absolutely remarkable opportunities for students." 

What is the true nature of this gloriously buzzing, glowing, shimmering, and ever-shifting something going on inside our heads?

There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.

Whether the ultimate nature of experience lies within the processes of the brain itself, outside of those confines, or somewhere in between, is currently the subject of much debate.