Why are sunsets beautiful?
A new thought experiment for understanding human consciousness
Consciousness is a popular topic on Medium. Having read and commented on many consciousness pieces (Paul Pallaghy, PhD, Gerald R. Baron, Paul Austin Murphy, Erik Hoel, Tim Andersen, Ph.D., etc) and having read many books on human consciousness (listed at the end below), it occurred to me to take a swing at it (instead of a “truth units” piece).
I just read Craig Axford’s The Fruitless Search for the Source of Consciousness, which explores dualism and materialism, two foundational explanations of consciousness, and includes ideas from John Searle and Iain McGilchrist.
An argument for materialism
The argument against materialism is “how can physical objects — specifically brain cells — produce the rich experience we call consciousness?” Like many, Craig Axford says the materialist explanation “won’t do.”
People who argue against a materialist explanation of consciousness don’t peel off enough layers of the onion to see how materialism can work. So to peel off more layers, here is a thought experiment inspired by — and along the lines of — John Searle’s famous “Chinese room” thought experiment.
A thought experiment
Think about the movies you’ve seen featuring submarines — Das Boot, The Hunt for Red October, Crimson Tide, etc. When you see a submarine underwater, it looks like a big chunk of steel, moving slowly and silently.
Inside the submarine is a crew — the “consciousness” inside the brain. Crew members watch instruments, the captain gives orders, and other crew members control the submarine’s motion.
Consciousness has a similar functional structure. External and internal information is reported and evaluated. Threats and opportunities are identified. Options are weighed. Decisions are made. Commands are given. Results of action taken are reported and assessed. It’s a constantly updated information and response loop.
If you were a 5-year-old inside the submarine, you likely wouldn’t understand what was happening. You’d see a bunch of people staring at screens, moving knobs and handles, and talking to one another. What they are doing in a high-level functional sense would be “invisible” to you.
The devil is in the details
Consider how the above picture reflects — in an inverted way — the state of neuroscience today. We understand generally what the crew and captain do, are aware of their roles, and see they are engaged in doing it.
But that’s about it. We don’t know the exact things the crew is doing, because we’ve never read the operations manual. We don’t know who actually determines when an instrument reading needs a response. We don’t know what they are communicating to each other, because they speak a specialized “lingo” we don’t understand.
Neuroscientists don’t understand enough about how our brain cells work to actually know whether or not our brain cells produce consciousness.
To see this, let’s expand our submarine thought experiment.
Let’s do an A/B test
According to the UK’s Royal Navy, a Dreadnought Class submarine accommodates 130 crew members.
To say that the brain cannot produce consciousness is like putting 130 untrained people on board a submarine and saying “see, brain cells can’t operate a submarine.”
On the other hand, if we put 130 untrained people through Dreadnought training and put them aboard a submarine, and they still couldn’t operate it, then we could say “brain cells alone are not enough to produce consciousness.”
However, if you train them, put them aboard, and they operate the submarine, you’ve shown the brain can produce consciousness.
Our brains are pretty cool
It took Nature billions of years to develop human consciousness.
Our galaxy contains more than 100 billion stars. The AMD Epyc Genoa (4th gen/9004 series) enterprise-grade 13-chip CPU module (up to 96 cores, 384 MB L3 + 96 MB L2 cache) introduced in 2022, has more than 90 billion transistors. The human brain has about 100 billion neurons.
These 100 billion neurons share up to 100 trillion synaptic connections. That’s as many as stars in 1,000 Milky Way galaxies.
How neurons and synapses might produce consciousness
Perhaps the two hardest elements of human consciousness to explain are self and qualia (a term for all subjective experience). We might picture self and qualia as a person (self) sitting in a theater watching a movie (qualia). Daniel Dennett mocked this idea of a “Cartesian Theater” in Consciousness Explained (1999) as neuro-scientifically ridiculous.
However, based on my reading (listed below), Antonio Damasio, a leading neuroscientist, has advanced the most compelling thought on how your brain could produce the qualia and self of human consciousness, in a functional equivalent of the Cartesian Theater. I’ll try my best to briefly explain his line of thought.
(1) Basic qualia. All mammals (and many other creatures) have brains that perceive and respond to their situations. While they are consciousness at some level, their qualia might not be as rich as ours, and they might respond to their qualia unconsciously, without having a sense of self. (American philosopher Thomas Nagel speculated about such possibilities in his famous 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”).
However, in order to generate any qualia at all, the brain must create a “map” of perceptual data (analogous to how computers arrange pixels to create a visual image).
(2) Human qualia. Evolution took our qualia “maps” to a higher level. Our perception becomes a conscious subjective sensation — a unique feeling, like when you hear Mozart’s Figaro overture or taste a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc.
Such rich qualia can be especially useful to a creature that has a self to experience and discern it — an awareness that “this is happening to me.” Computers and AI are so far not known to be able to do this, nor are less advanced creatures — and they don’t need to, in order to function.
(3) Human self. Our brain evolved to create a “map” of a self. Like other creatures, we have maps of our interior qualia — our bodily sensations — which we relate to our exterior qualia. Our evolved intellect “connects more of the dots” in these relationships, drawing on our memories and the futures we imagine.
The “connected dots” are a map that shows up in our consciousness as the experience of the self, just like our qualia maps do. You are you in the world, questioning and pondering everything — all your thoughts and experiences — your past, present and future — acting on your concern for your well-being. This description of you — isn’t this the you that you talk to when you think? “I think, therefore I am.” Is it any real surprise, when you look in your mind for something more to you than this you, it always seems just out of sight?
Of course, human consciousness could well be something more than that. Yet to apply Occam’s razor is to prefer— all else being equal — the simple explanations over the complicated ones. The simple explanation is we evolved to be precisely what we are. We are more than — but not all that much more than — our fellow creatures.
Sunsets are beautiful to us because of our seemingly unbelievable level of consciousness. Do we need more than our brains to see a sunset’s beauty? To feel its infinity wash through our souls? Perhaps we do. But let’s not write off our 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses too soon. Nature spent the last 4 billion years building them for us.
Thank you for reading. Please comment! Your questions and critiques are appreciated. I’m always eager to engage in dialogue, learn more and improve my understanding.
Also, please check out my Truth Units articles:
And here is the reading I’ve done relevant to consciousness:
Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens
Damasio, Self Comes to Mind
Damasio, Feeling and Knowing
Chalmers, The Conscious Mind
Dennett, Consciousness Explained
Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain
LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves
McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
Solms, The Hidden Spring
Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness
Shear, ed., Explaining Consciousness
McGinn, The Mysterious Flame
deWaal, Our Inner Ape
Nettle, Happiness
Nettle, Personality
Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh
Churchland, Conscience
Churchland, Plato’s Camera
Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs, and Steel
Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Pinker, The Stuff of Thought
Trivers, The Folly of Fools
Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence
Full bibliographic details on the above are embedded in:
