In this video I begin the unit on consciousness by considering a number of problems associated with understanding consciousness. These include the mind-body problem, the problem of other minds, and the hard problem of consciousness. While we don’t have solutions to these problems, we can still study certain aspects of consciousness and attempt to understand the characteristics of consciousness, levels of consciousness, and altered states of consciousness.
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Video Transcript:
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to start our unit on unconsciousness, so this means that things are going to get a little bit philosophical and very very complicated. So when we think about consciousness it’s a really hard thing to begin to think about and there’s a lot of problems that we encounter when we think about different aspects of consciousness.
In this video I’m going to outline some of these problems that we have when trying to even think about consciousness and the first problem that we have is we have this feeling that our mind and body are separate. I mentioned this in a previous video when we talked about Descartes and we talked about dualism. This was the idea that the mind and body were separate. We showed that this is probably not the case. We adopted a monist view that mind and body are the same thing but we still have this problem when it comes to consciousness of figuring out, well, what exactly is the relationship between the mind and the body?
Why is it that we have this feeling of a separate mind? This is referred to as the mind-body problem. We don’t really know the relationship between the mind and the body. Now it’s tempting when you think about your own consciousness to think in terms of what’s called a Cartesian theater. It’s named after Descartes and this is the idea that we have sort of this feeling of our mind being separate and so when we look out into the world and we imagine what our mind is, there’s a temptation to think of it as like a little person inside of our head who’s looking out at the world and controlling our body. This is known as the Cartesian theater and the problem, of course, is that well this isn’t really how it works because if it were, you know, what’s inside the mind of this little person inside our head and then what’s inside that mind and what’s inside that mind and you could do this you know indefinitely, you know, it’s sort of a “turtles all the way down” sort of thing.
So the Cartesian theatre is not really how things work but it’s hard to come up with a substitute. It really does feel that way sometimes. So how is it that it feels that way? How is that arising from physical processes in our body? So that’s the mind-body problem. You might say well, you know what, I can’t answer that but at least I can say that I’m conscious.This is similar to what Descartes wrote: cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am. In other words, the only thing I can be sure of is my own thought and I know that I exist. So we can apply that to consciousness and say “I am conscious. This I can be sure of.” Then the question is, am I the only one?
Of course, you might say “well that’s ridiculous. Of course other people are conscious”. To which I would ask “How do you know that? Can you really ever know that? How do you know that other people aren’t simply programmed to behave the way that they do?” Sure you know they go to work and they cook dinner and they do all sorts of things, they even talk to you, they may even tell you that they have some sort of internal mental experience but how do you know that those aren’t just empty words? How do you know that they actually have an internal mental experience? How do you know they’re not what’s known as a philosophical zombie?
So this would be a person who does all the behaviors that we would expect a person to do and they can talk and you know describe their thoughts and things but they actually don’t have any internal mental experience. They’re a zombie. There’s nothing going on upstairs so to speak. Well how do we know that everybody else around us is not a philosophical zombie? This is known as the problem of other minds because we can’t know because we only have our own mind. So we can’t really be sure that other people have internal mental experience.
And it’s not just people that we think about this for, we can apply this to animals as well. I mean you might imagine that your dog has some sort of internal mental experience but you can never really know what it’s like to be your do. So the philosopher Thomas Nagel described this in an essay he wrote titled “What is it like to be a bat” and he tried to figure out what is it like to be a bat and he realized that he could never really understand the experience of being a bat. In trying to imagine it, he wrote “it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat does”. In other words he could only imagine a human performing bat behaviors.
He couldn’t really understand what it’s like to use sonar. We can’t even begin to imagine that because we can’t use that at all and so when you imagine, you know, taking your dog for a walk you might wonder what is it like to be my dog right now. He suddenly becomes interested in some smell, you know, you can’t see and you can’t smell something. Your dog’s very interested in something. What’s going on in his mind?
First you make the assumption that something is going on that he has an internal mental experience but you can never truly understand it because you don’t know what a dog’s sensory system and mind is like and you can’t imagine it because you’re stuck in your human sensory system and your human mind. So you can really only understand things from the perspective of a human.
Now it’s not just people and it’s not just animals that we do this for, we have this tendency to assume internal mental experience anytime we observe behavior and this is demonstrated in a classic study by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel in which participants watched a short animation of some shapes moving around. Maybe that’s terribly boring but when people watch this they assumed internal mental experience of these shapes, you know, they thought that they had intentions and motivations; that they experienced fear.
It’s like, well, that’s crazy, right? Of course a triangle doesn’t have internal mental experience. It doesn’t feel like something to be a drawing of a triangle and yet as soon as that triangle starts moving around and starts appearing to behave we immediately assume that there’s some sort of internal mental experience going on. I’ll post a link in the video description where you can watch this simple animation and you’ll probably get this feeling that feels like this triangle has motivations and intentions and this explains partly why it is we can do things like watch cartoons. I mean what a weird thing, right?
We watch drawings, we watch lines move around on the screen and we become engrossed in it. We find a narrative and we assume these internal mental experiences of these drawings right and so this tells us a little bit about something of our own tendency to make the assumption that others have internal mental experience.
Now if these previous problems weren’t hard enough, we’ll end with the hard problem of consciousness and it’s a very hard problem indeed. So the hard problem of consciousness really has two parts. It says why do we have consciousness and how does it happen? How did we get it? Now we might ask, why do we have consciousness? I mean if we think about philosophical zombies it is hard to imagine that they would be any different right? If they didn’t have any internal mental experience, what sort of edge does it give us? What kind of evolutionary survival advantage is there in having awareness of your behavior? Why can’t you just do all the behaviors?
We can imagine if we were programmed to behave exactly as we do with no mental experience that we would survive just as well. So why is it that we have consciousness and then how did that happen? This is even harder. How did this come about? At what point did we suddenly become conscious? We might try to brush this question off as some people do and say “well, you know, if you have have 85 billion neurons all communicating with one another that must give rise to consciousness. It’s just a matter of numbers.”
Well that doesn’t really hold up because there’s people who have half their brain removed, they’ve had a hemispherectomy, they have half as many neurons and they’re still conscious. So we can’t say that overall it’s 85 billion neurons and we can also think about other things that are connected to one another. I mean your computer has many connections or if we think about the internet, millions and millions of computers all connected there’s billions of connections there but we don’t think that the Internet is conscious. There’s no internal mental experience of being the Internet is there?
So how exactly would this be coming about? If we look at people with brain damage, most of their brain is not functioning properly and yet they’re still conscious. The numbers problem also makes us think that, well is there a point where one additional neuron makes all the difference?” That you know, we had this many connections and if you just add one more neuron to it suddenly it becomes conscious? How does that happen? That doesn’t make much sense all, right? So of course I’m not going to answer these questions and have any solution to these problems.
These are very very difficult philosophical problems that we struggle with when we try to think about consciousness but we can still study consciousness. We can still try to identify some of the characteristics of it, which is what we’ll do in the next few videos. We can also think about different levels of consciousness and then at the end we’ll think about different ways that we can alter consciousness either through behaviors like meditation or hypnosis or through the use of psychoactive drugs that can influence consciousness.
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