Susan Blackmore

Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction (2017) (2^nd Edition)

In a paragraph

Delusionism is the best explanation for scientific discoveries and reflections about consciousness.  My sense of being a conscious self is constructed when I probe by asking if I am conscious, while at other times my brain and experience reflect parallel processing.  It is a delusion to think I have a unified conscious stream, a detailed visual field, a self or free will. 

Key points

• Consciousness is an illusion: an enticing and compelling illusion that lures us into believing that our minds are separate from our bodies; that consciousness is a stream or theatre; that some experiences are ‘in consciousness’

• When I probe and ask: ‘What am I conscious of?’ an answer is instantly concocted, and in that moment a ‘now’, a ‘stream of experiences’, and an ‘experiencing self’ all appear together; a moment later they are gone. Next time we ask, a new self and a new stream are concocted. So, we (wrongly) assume that they are continuously present because whenever we asked, we found it was true.

• Consciousness is an attribution we make. We call perceptions ‘conscious’ but this distinction is based only on them being accessible when we ask about them. When we are not asking the question, there are no contents of consciousness and no experience. Instead, the brain carries on doing multiple things in parallel. There is no finishing line where perceptions ‘enter consciousness.’

• There is no true answer to the question ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, any more than there is anything it is like to be us most of the time. There is only an answer when we construct a model of self or ask the question and, as far as we know, bats don’t do that.

• Consciousness is inseparable from brain activity, not an additional component. In Global Workspace Theory, being widely broadcast is itself consciousness, not an additional factor.

• It is an illusion to think that consciousness is some kind of force or power, and that we need it for the cleverest or most difficult things we do.

• Delusionism best explains scientific discoveries about consciousness. Brain processes distributed. Libet’s delay from readiness potential to conscious awareness.  Change blindness.

• When we look around, we see a world with no gaps, so we assume that there must be such a gap-free world represented inside. We know roughly what we are looking at and can look again if we need more detail. The rich kind of visual world we think we have is a grand illusion.

• Science does not need an inner self, but most people are quite sure that they have or are one. The self as merely the centre of narrative gravity.  We can ignore the evidence and philosophical difficulties, hang on to the way our precious self feels, and believe in a soul or spirit.   Alternatively, we can try to live with the knowledge that self is an illusion

• If consciousness is conceived of as a force that makes free will possible, then it amounts to magic — an impossible intervention in an otherwise causally closed world. But if consciousness is not such a force, then our feelings of having conscious control must be an illusion.

• An illusion is not something that does not exist but something that is not the way it seems.

• My hope is that one day our scientific understanding of consciousness will come together with personal insight

Comments

Although billed as a short introduction to consciousness, and although it does lay out scientific evidence and alternative theories, the main thrust of the book is to set out and argue for Blackmore’s ‘Delusionist’ theory.  As such, it is very readable and compelling.

Links

Conciousness: A Very Short Introduction on Amazon UK

Susan Blackmore website

My notes on Anil Seth’s Being You

My notes on Nicholas Humphrey’s Soul Dust

My notes on Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel

Extracts

1 Why the Mystery?

Consciousness is at once the most obvious and the most difficult thing we can investigate.

This hard problem is a modern incarnation of the famous mind–body problem

Most people have been dualists. Many Hindus believe in the Atman or divine. Non-duality is also found in the Buddhist concept of anatta, or no-self

Cartesian dualism. Non-extended. Pineal gland. Interaction problem.

Monism, idealists, neutral monists, materialists.

‘Hard problem’ of consciousness 1994.  An illusion caused by ‘the pseudo-profundity that often accompanies category mistakes.’  We cannot, in advance, decide which problems will turn out to be the really hard ones.

Defining consciousness.  What is it like to be a bat? Subjectivity or phenomenality. Qualia.  What is it like to be the mug? It is no good imagining that you are a bat because an educated, speaking bat would not be a normal bat at all.

Mysterian. Cognitively closed. Phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness.

Is consciousness an extra ingredient added to our ability to perceive, think, and feel, or is it inseparable.  If consciousness is an extra added ingredient then we naturally want to ask why we have it, what it’s for, what it does, and how we got it. Consciousness might be intrinsic to complex biological processes.

The bottom line for this kind of theory is that we are deluded; we feel as though our consciousness is a power or added ability and so we believe it is, but we are wrong. If this theory needs a name, we might call it ‘delusionism’

The most natural way to think about consciousness is probably something like this. The mind is like a private theatre inside my head, where I sit looking out through my eyes. But this is a multi-sensational theatre with touches, smells, sounds and emotions. And I can use my imagination to conjure up sights and sounds as though seen on a mental screen or heard by my inner ear. All these thoughts and impressions are the ‘contents of my consciousness.’ A finishing line in the brain’s activities, after which things mysteriously become conscious or ‘enter consciousness’ We have to understand how this feeling of being a conscious self who is having a stream of experiences comes about in a brain that really has no inner theatre, no show and no audience.  Dennett coined the term ‘Cartesian materialist’ to describe people who claim to reject dualism but still believe in the Cartesian theatre.

2 The Human Brain

1.5 kg, 100 billion neurons connected by trillions of synapses.

Necker cube.  Blindsight.

3 Time and Space

Benjamin Libet.  Libet’s delay. 

Cutaneous rabbit illusion.

Theories of consciousness:

Dual-aspect or property dualism.

Higher order thought (HOT) theories

Integrated information Theory. Tononi. The capacity of any system to integrate information over a vast number of possible states measured by a variable called Φ (phi).

Global workspace theory (GWT).  Bernard Baars.  Dehaene.

In one version, items ‘become conscious’ by virtue of being broadcast. In other words, something changes and a previously unconscious item becomes a subjective experience. The alternative is that nothing changes and the broadcast is all there is. This is what Dennett means by ‘fame in the brain’ . There is nothing more to being famous than being widely known; likewise there is nothing more to being conscious than being widely available

Multiple drafts theory

When the system is probed in a certain way — say by asking someone to answer a question or respond to a stimulus — he may decide what he is conscious of and tell you about it. But up to that point there was no truth of the matter about whether that thing was, or was not, ‘in consciousness’

Driving unconsciously is really ‘rolling consciousness with swift memory loss’

So, the problems do not arise. But doesn’t this do away with the very phenomenon we are trying to explain? Some people think so and accuse Dennett of ‘explaining away’ consciousness

There are always lots of threads going on at once, and none is really ‘in’ consciousness until it is grasped

We may have to give up the idea that each of us knows what is in our consciousness now, and accept that we might be deeply deluded about our own minds

4 A Grand Illusion

Vision is a ‘grand illusion.’  An illusion is not something that does not exist but something that is not the way it seems.

Another is to think that consciousness is some kind of force or power, and that we need it for the cleverest or most difficult things we do. Good examples might be creative thinking, decision-making, and problem-solving, but in fact it turns out that some of these can best be done unconsciously. Studies of incubation.

Something similar is probably going on all the time in our highly complex social worlds. We meet someone new, see their face, clothes, and gestures, hear their voice, and quickly judge them as friendly or cold, trustworthy or dubious, intelligent or not, but how? Along with all our innate abilities we have a lifetime’s history of meeting people and seeing how they turned out. We could not possibly remember all this explicitly, or work out the equations for the probabilities involved, but somewhere in the system all this is being done and we end up making surprisingly reliable judgements

Implicit processing explains much of what we call emotional decision-making, or intuition, for we do not know where the answers come from — we just seem to feel what is right, or ‘know’ what to do

Antonio Damasio called this ‘Descartes’ Error’, giving evidence that the ability to feel emotions is intrinsic to thinking and decision-making ‘embodied cognition.’

Our clever brains process all this information in fantastically complex ways, and yet we consciously know little about it.

When we look around, we see a world with no gaps, so we assume that there must be such a gap-free world represented inside.

Seeing is not a process of building up a picture; it is more like making guesses or predictions about what is there.

Dennett now asks us to imagine walking into a room papered all over with identical portraits of Marilyn Monroe.

Fovea, saccades.

We get the vivid impression that all that detail is inside our heads, when really it remains out there in the world.

We now know that filling-in is a real phenomenon and can be detected in the brain.

Change blindness. These methods inactivate the pop-out mechanisms and movement detectors that normally draw our attention to a change.

The richness of our visual world is an illusion.  The kind of visual world we think we have is a grand illusion

There is no conscious perception without attention. Gorillas in Our Midst.

Every time we move our eyes, we throw away most of the available information.  Extract the meaning or gist of the scene.  We know roughly what we are looking at and can always look again if we want to see something in detail. 

William James.  Trying to turn up the gas to see how the darkness looks.

Crick aimed for the correlates of ‘the vivid picture of the world we see in front of our eyes’ If the visual world is a grand illusion, they will never be able to find the neural correlates

Enactive theories of vision.  An activity. Sensorimotor theory of vision.  Exploit the way your own actions affect the information you get back from the world

5 The Self

Who — or what — am I? Answers such as ‘I am my body’ or ‘I am my brain’ are unsatisfactory because I don’t feel like a body or a brain. I feel like someone who owns them.  But who could this be who feels as though she lives inside this head and looks out through the eyes?

My brain doesn’t need ‘me.’ I have this overwhelming sense that I exist.  Science does not need an inner self, but most people are quite sure that they have or are one.  Ego theories and bundle theories. If each person has a spirit or soul, as well as a brain, then science ought to be able to detect it, but so far it has not

Parfit refers to the Buddha as the first bundle theorist.  Anatta (no-self)

The word ‘self’, useful as it is, refers to nothing that is real or persisting; it is just an idea or a word

And as for the self who has experiences, this sort of self is just a fleeting impression that arises along with each experience and fades away again. The illusion of continuity occurs because each temporary self comes along with memories that give an impression of continuity

Gazzaniga.  Splitting brains.

Our brains consist of lots of partly independent module, and the verbal part does not have access to everything that goes on, yet it frequently supplies convincing reasons for our actions. How many of these are plausible confabulations rather than true reasons, and can we tell? The term ‘multiple personality’ was replaced by ‘dissociative identity disorder’

If controls show the same phenomena as ‘really hypnotized’ subjects, the idea of a special hypnotic state is redundant. We still do not know whether hypnosis involves a dissociated state of consciousness or not

James rejected extreme bundle theory

‘Centre of narrative gravity.’ ‘Benign user illusion’

Sam Harris rejects any ‘unchanging thinkers of thoughts and experiencers of experience’

Metzinger: ‘Nobody ever was or had a self.’  ‘Phenomenal self-models’: representations that cannot be recognized as such by the system that created them.  We are deluded because we confuse the model with what it represents.

Baars.  The self-system is part of a hierarchy of contexts that determine what gets into the spotlight in the theatre of consciousness and allows information to be reportable and usable This self-system is also an ‘executive interpreter’ and located in the left frontal cortex.

Damasio’s multi-level scheme.  Proto-self, core self, autobiographical self.  

Default mode network (DMN). DMN as a self-centred predictive model of the world. This may be essential for running our lives and even for staying alive, but with its focus on self it may also be the cause of pointless rumination, anxiety, depression and suffering. Meditation and mindfulness have been found to reduce DMN activation

A collection of different models constructed by different parts of the brain.

We can ignore the evidence and philosophical difficulties, hang on to the way our precious self feels, and believe in a soul or spirit.   Alternatively, we can try to live with the knowledge that self is an illusion.

6 Conscious Will

It is consciousness that gives the whole problem its bite

If consciousness is conceived of as a force that makes free will possible, then it amounts to magic — an impossible intervention in an otherwise causally closed world. But if consciousness is not such a force, then our feelings of having conscious control must be an illusion

‘Readiness potential’ or RP. Libet found that the decision to act, W, came about 200 milliseconds before the action; but the RP began about 350 milliseconds before that.  Conscious veto.  Conscious mental field theory.  By accepting that W can be timed, you are accepting that conscious experiences are something other than brain events.

Faraday.  Unconscious muscular action.  Feelings of willing can sometimes be wrong.

As far as evolution is concerned, it does not matter that the centre of will is a fiction, as long as it is a useful fiction

We can learn a lot about any process from the occasions when it goes wrong.  Examples in which people caused something but got no corresponding feeling of having done so. On other occasions the opposite occurs.

In seeking to understand the weather, the heavens, or patterns of health and disease, we use brains and perceptual systems that evolved for other purposes. We simply cannot help adopting the intentional stance and so we imagine that someone must have caused the events we see.

This illusion happens in three stages (though they may all occur very fast).  First, our brain begins planning an action.  Second, this brain activity gives rise to thoughts about that action. Third, the action happens and — hey presto — we jump to the conclusion that our conscious thoughts caused the action. The illusion of conscious will works just like a magic trick and for the same reason.

Sam Harris argues that incompatibilism renders hatred irrational while leaving love unscathed.  Some people make a compromise, others grasp the nettle.

7 Altered States of Consciousness

It is dream recall that varies widely, rather than dreaming itself.  On waking up, any number of stories can be concocted backwards by selecting one of many possible threads through the multiple scraps of memory that remain.  Retro-selection theory.

Anaesthetics usually consist of three separate drugs to reduce pain, induce relaxation, and abolish memory.

Transcendental meditation (™).  Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR).  Dropping thoughts and training attention.

8 The Evolution of Consciousness

Hyperactive agency detection device.

In Gallup’s experiments chimpanzees tried to rub off a spot seen only in the mirror.

Natural selection now gets to work on this mixed population of zombies and conscies, and what happens? Absolutely nothing happens because, by definition, zombies are indistinguishable from conscies.

It is difficult to see how subjective experiences or what it’s like to be could actually affect anything. Then there is all the evidence that conscious experiences come too late to be the cause of actions.

Delusionism

The confusion we have reached is deep and serious, and I suspect reveals fundamental flaws in the way we think about consciousness.

My own view is this. Consciousness is an illusion: an enticing and compelling illusion that lures us into believing that our minds are separate from our bodies; that consciousness is a stream or theatre; that some experiences are ‘in consciousness’ and others ‘outside consciousness’; that some brain processes are conscious while others are unconscious.

The reason we are so confused, I suggest, is this. Take the simple question, ‘Am I conscious now?’  Whenever I ask this question (I expect you are asking it now), the answer is ‘Yes’ So it is easy and natural to assume that this is always the case as long as I am awake. But what about when I am not asking the question? With vision, every time you look, you see a rich visual world, so you falsely assume it is always there.

This, I suggest, is how the grand delusion of consciousness comes about. It arises because we clever, thinking, talking humans can ask ourselves such questions as, ‘Am I conscious now?’ or ‘What am I conscious of?’. When we do so, an answer is instantly concocted, and in that moment a ‘now’, a ‘stream of experiences’, and an ‘experiencing self’ all appear together; a moment later they are gone. Next time we ask, a new self and a new stream are concocted. So, we (wrongly) assume that they are continuously present because whenever we asked, we found it was true. If we go on to believe that we are always conscious, and construct metaphors about streams and theatres, we only dig ourselves deeper and deeper into confusion.

The truth is that consciousness is an attribution we make. We call some of our thoughts, perceptions, and actions ‘conscious’ and others ‘unconscious’, but this distinction is based only on them being accessible when we ask about them. When we are not asking the question, there are no contents of consciousness and no experience.  Instead, the brain carries on doing multiple things in parallel.

In this new way of thinking about consciousness many old problems disappear. There is no stream of experiences — only fleeting events that give rise to a false impression.

Only creatures capable of being so deluded could be conscious in the way we are. This may mean that humans are unique among animals because only we have language and theory of mind, and we alone model ourselves as having an inner self.

There is no true answer to the question ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, any more than there is anything it is like to be us most of the time. There is only an answer when we construct a model of self or ask the question and, as far as we know, bats don’t do that.

Can we escape from delusion? I believe we can. We should not be hunting for the mythical ‘neural correlates of consciousness’, but rather for the correlates of processes that create the illusions in the first place, and of those states in which such illusions disappear.

My hope is that one day our scientific understanding of consciousness will come together with personal insight.