Brains II

"'...what's really to the point, the degree of brain activity more or less independent of the other nerve paths. That is, whether the animal is thinking.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 590.

Here is the philosophical mind-body problem in a nutshell. Someone is thinking. He is conscious of the subject-matter of his thoughts which could be anything, for example the novels of Poul Anderson. Someone else is observing the thinker, using scientific instruments. The scientific observer is conscious of detectable cerebral processes.

Thus, there is a single process of thinking. However, there are also two qualitatively distinct perspectives on this single process. My account of what I thought about Anderson's novels and a scientist's account of the neurological interactions detectable inside my brain seem to be accounts not only of different processes but even of qualitatively different kinds of processes.

There is a difference between the questions, "What did I think?" and "How did I think it?" However, the second question has two kinds of answers: certain neurons interacted and certain ideas interacted. Some terms like "data" bridge the gap but only partially. Sensory inputs, including, e.g., the sight of a printed page, are cerebrally processed and meanings are recognized. However, there remains a qualitative difference between the recognition of meaning, which we all experience whenever we read a familiar word, and a technologically detectable exchange of electrical or chemical impulses between neurons in a brain. I think that we have to say that the cerebral event causes the mental event.

Mental events involve or at least refer to consciousness - even though, paradoxically, there can be unconscious mental processes. "Meaning," "recognition" and "experience" assume consciousness whereas "electrical or chemical impulses" does not although the impulses seem to be the causes of consciousness. My best attempt to explain the emergence of consciousness is to suggest that naturally selected organismic sensitivity to environmental alterations quantitatively increased until it was quantitatively transformed into conscious sensation.

"Conscious sensation" is tautologous because "sensation" is another of those words that assume or imply consciousness. However, I write "conscious sensation" in order to differentiate this psychological process from organismic sensitivity which is not necessarily conscious. Consciousness, as soon as it did exist, was naturally selected because pleasure and pain have survival value. "Psychological" means "of consciousness." Any attempt to define consciousness either assumes it or leaves it out. Thus, I think that it is impossible to write, "X is ---," then to fill in the blank in such a way that readers of the sentence say, "X is consciousness," unless the blank is filled by one or more synonyms of "consciousness."

Causes and effects are neither identical nor interchangeable. A quantitative difference between wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation causes a qualitative difference between colors as perceived by sighted organisms whose eyes are sensitive to those particular wavelengths. For a longer discussion of "Minds and Brains," see here.