Preface
Here’s a neat little tidbit: the image above, The Creation of Adam, depicts God bestowing consciousness. Look closely at the image of God – notice that He, His cloak, and the others with Him form a human brain? This is a beautiful demonstration of what most theists believe it means to be “made in God’s image:” to have a mind. To be capable of abstract awareness, and, by extension, to be aware of God.
What is consciousness? What’s the big deal? Consciousness is a combination of the ability to experience and the ability to self-reflect. Many will address what’s called, “the easy problem of consciousness” – determining the processes related to different states – and move on. This neuron activates pain, this chemical causes pleasure, and so on. No problem, we’ve explained it! However, this mechanistic interaction does not explain why the result is a subjective experience of “feeling like” something – why is a particular series of electrical signals, pain? Why does it feel like pain, and not something else? Why does a certain frequency visually appear to be red?
This is called the “hard problem” of consciousness – why biological creatures, instead of being like computers and operating “in the dark,” are animated. How could a naturalistic, unconscious universe develop beings who experience subjective states? And how could it develop conscious, unified centers of self-reflective experience?
There are three mysteries related to the hard problem of consciousness: qualia, psychophysical harmony, and intellect. I will explore each of them.
Qualia
“Qualia” is the word for subjective qualitative states. They are the building blocks of consciousness. An easy way to determine whether something is a qualia is if it cannot be objectively described. For example, try to think of how you would describe red to someone who was born blind. There is no objective answer; you can only describe a color by referring to another color. If the person you’re speaking to hasn’t experienced any of them, there’s no way to enlighten them.
Firstly, it pains me to mention this, but we must address that some scientists do actually purport that one could describe red to a blind person. That is, that qualitative states are actually not subjective, but are somehow intrinsic and objective. Dr. Dan Dennett, the main proponent of this philosophy, described in his seminars and in his books how our brains create what is a sort of hallucination of the world around us. This is his response to the “hard problem.” I don’t think I’m missing anything here when I say, “yeah, and?” This line of thought seems to be missing the point entirely – I am not this image my brain creates, I am that which experiences the image. The reductive description of the components of the experience does nothing to negate the fact that the experience is still being had.
Moving on: if qualia are subjective, it’s difficult to see how science could explain them in principle. Imagine we built a robot that was designed to run through the woods. Nothing else, just run through the woods. It would need an unbelievably complex array of sensors which provide a map of the world around it. It would need the ability to navigate through audio, visual, and tactile sensors. Let’s say we built this computer to perform this task just as well as most humans – would it then magically feel something while performing it? We have no reason to think it would. That is, the robot could operate through the use of these senses without actually experiencing consciousness. Consequently, there’s no reason to think evolution couldn’t have developed animals the same way. We could’ve just been flesh robots, performing evolutionary tasks just as well as we do now. Why aren’t we?
Even if one were to suggest that qualia has a positive effect on survival, there is still no way evolution could “create” qualitative experience. Evolution is only capable of acting upon a genome. There are no “experience organs” or “consciousness cells,”, so there’s nothing for it to act upon. In other words, in an open system, evolution can bring creatures to higher levels of complexity, but it cannot explain the categorical shift from, “complex without subjective experience,” to “complex with subjective experience.” Why is the metaphysical status of our universe such that qualia emerge in complex carbon-based lifeforms? What sorcery could transform unfeeling, disparate material into a unified center of subjective experience?
Psychophysical Harmony
But the problem only becomes more mysterious with the introduction of psychophysical states. That is, the relationship between subjective, “psychic” states and objective, physical states. There are five possibilities regarding this relationship, and none of them have a good naturalistic explanation. Before I continue, all credit to Dr. Dustin Crummett for coming up with this analysis.
Possibility #1: The psychic does not affect the physical, and vice versa.
The idea here is that your body physically functions, and your qualitative experience exists entirely separate from that function. However, if subjective experience is not at all affected by physical inputs, then the coherence of mental states is unexplainable. In the real world, two people can look at a tree and both agree that it’s a tree and actually experience looking at a tree. But if our psychic states are totally disconnected from our physical states, why is that the case? Why don’t we just see random images and hear random noises? Or just see and hear gray static all the time, for that matter?
Possibility #2: The physical does affect the psychic, but not the other way around.
The idea here is that your body handles all of its functions “on its own,” and your subjective experience is just “along for the ride.” This would explain why our subjective experience is connected to reality, but not why it is meaningfully connected to reality. Under this view, your physical experience could affect your conscious experience in totally incoherent ways. What’s the difference? Your body “decides” what it’s doing on its own; the qualia are unimportant. So, for example, imagine two people look at a tree. One may see a slightly different tint of gray than usual, and experience unbearable pain. The other might experience a red glare and desire. But in neither case could the qualia encourage them to stop looking at the tree, because psychic states have no impact on our physical states.
Possibility #3: The psychic does affect the physical, but not the other way around.
This is the most absurd possibility. On one hand, it fails to explain why qualitative states seem to reflect physical reality in a coherent manner. On the other hand, it also contends that this subjective experience can somehow cause changes in a material brain it has no receptive connection to. The result of this would probably be the experience of gray static with some sort of random physical writhing.
Possibility #4: The psychic and the physical interact with each other.
Based on our experience of consciousness, this is certainly the most likely thus far. However, pointing out the mutual relationship still does nothing to explain how and why these states interact uniformly. We could have incoherent interactionism. We could have qualia inversions, for example; that would mean experiencing pain when we should be experiencing pleasure, or vice versa. Here’s an example: you see expired milk in your refrigerator. Your body is revolted, but you subjectively experience this stimulus as the qualia of pleasure. You drink the milk and subjectively experience this physical stimuli as pleasure. Then your body throws up because the milk is rancid.
Natural selection is often cited as a response to this, since harmonious interaction would be advantageous for a properly ordered animal. That is, organisms with the right calibration of consciousness would thrive, and organisms with the wrong calibration would not. However, this argument presupposes the very uniform harmony or disharmony we’re trying to explain. Again, natural selection can only select a genome in accordance with the laws of nature; it can’t change the laws of nature. So if each organism experienced qualia with random inversions, there’d be nothing to naturally select. Even if the statistical improbability occurred in which an animal happened to have the “right” set of qualia, there’s no reason under this paradigm to think the harmony would be genetically transmissible. Every individual being could have different qualia. No solution.
Possibility #5: The mental state is entirely corporeal, so there is no interaction between psychic and physical; it’s all physical.
There are two forms of physicalism; the first is the a priori physicalist. This is the position that all psychophysical truths are necessary truths and can be deduced from the physical world. In other words, we can explain qualitative experience as a physical truth the same way we can deduce that a triangle must be 180°. But for this to be the case, it would have to literally be impossible to conceive of a qualia inversion, the same way it is literally impossible to conceive of a 190° triangle. This is evidently not the case, based on the fact that the last four examples coherently conceive of qualia inversions. There are practically no philosophers or scientists of mind who hold this view, so we’re going to ignore it.
The other type of physicalist is a posteriori, and this view contends that physical and mental states are equivalent to each other, but can only be known through experience. Or, in other words, qualitative states are not a logical necessity like the degrees of a triangle – it is conceptually possible they could’ve been different. The a posteriori physicalist can conceive of possible worlds where qualia are inverted. They just contend that’s not the one we happen to live in. In this particular world we inhabit, it is a metaphysical necessity that qualia are harmonious with sense, the same way the gravitational constant and the speed of light just are what they are, even though they might not have been. That is a satisfying answer for this world. But then we have to ask the question – how many unfathomable possible worlds are there where it could’ve been different?
Much like the last example, natural selection is often the response to why our world is ordered. But much like the last example, this still doesn’t answer the question. Let’s use the milk example again: you see expired milk in your refrigerator. Your body is revolted, but you subjectively experience this stimulus as the qualia of “pleasure.” Natural selection can’t change the stimulus itself under this paradigm, so instead it selected for olfactory pleasure to lead to avoidance behavior. So, you throw away the milk. Now your body is safe from the rancid milk and evolution is happy, but your subjective experience is a nightmare where you always feel pleasure when exposed to undesirable smells. Natural selection in intrinsically indifferent to qualia under this paradigm, because natural selection can invert any response to “match” the inverted qualia. There’s no reason it would select for harmony.
I find the “fine-tuning of the universe for life” argument not to be very compelling due to observer bias. Of course the universe appears fine-tuned for life; how would life be there to observe it if it wasn’t? But this argument doesn’t have the problem of observer bias. There are genuinely trillions of possible worlds where we could have existed as living observers with our qualitative experiences in disharmony with physical reality, even if only in small ways. What are the odds we happen to be in the one possible world where there is perfect harmony? And I must remind you, this comes after the problem of qualia existing at all.
Intellect
I will be employing two terms here which are often used differently, so I must begin by defining them. First: “cognitive.” Cognition is the process beginning with what the “5 senses” and the appetites perceive in the environment. The common sense faculty unites these senses, forms a complete picture in the imagination, and stores it in the memory. The result of whatever occurs in the environment contributes to the “estimative power,” which informs perception. This is then responded to. This is the longform description of how instinctual behavior works. You can meditate on this process from start-to-finish using the infamous example of “Pavlov’s dogs.”
Second, “intellect.” While the cognitive process receives, imagines, and stores sense information from material observation, the intellect sees beyond materiality. Intellect is related to abstraction. For example, the cognitive process sensorily perceives a courtroom, but the intellect is what comprehends “justice.” Intellect is the “fullness” of consciousness.
Bear in mind that in the research I’m citing, they may use these words differently.
Here are my two key points: first, there are mountains of evidence that animals with similar cognitive ability to humans are incapable of abstraction. This points to the idea that intellect, though supported by cognition, is not a higher form of cognition, but a categorically separate, emergent property. Second, there’s no feasible naturalistic explanation for the presence of intellect due to its nature as an abstracting mechanism.
Point #1: Confronting bias.
If you google, “can animals abstract?” you’ll find dozens of articles about how they can. Here’s one from Scientific American titled, “Many Animals Can Think Abstractly.” The evidence for this claim is a few apes who, after hundreds of trials, succeeded in associating images of similar animals “better than chance.” Hm. Well, here’s an article titled, “Insects Master Abstract Concepts.” It refers to a study in which bees figured out that one configuration of images leads to a reward, and the other to punishment… after 30 consecutive tries, using the same configuration every time. Here’s one called, “Dogs Can ‘Think Back’ and Form Abstract Concepts.” The researchers are astonished to learn that dogs can be trained to do things again when told, “again.” This so startles one researcher that he says, “we’re learning that humans aren’t that cognitively unique after all.” These dogs are on the verge of special relativity.
Now, I’m not saying that all studies into animal abstraction are unconvincing nonsense. I am only pointing out that pop science has reached a verdict on animal consciousness that real science and philosophy has not. I think the reason this is the pop opinion is that people like the idea of their pets being just a little more aware than they seem. Koko the gorilla is a great example. Koko was famous for being the first gorilla to “speak sign language.” Her seeming consciousness and heartwarming sentimentality for humans took her and her trainer to stardom. Her trainer, Penny Patterson, constantly put out PR about Koko’s consciousness, despite never performing a single controlled experiment to prove it. Koko never made any spontaneous signs, and nearly every string of signs she ever made was gibberish. But people wanted it to be true, so it worked.
As cool as it would be, the real research suggests Fluffy the dog’s consciousness is probably nothing like yours after all.
Point #2: There are many reasons to think animals do not have intellect.
There are all sorts of animal activities that we label as “abstract” which are absolutely not. For example, monkeys are capable of putting triangular objects into triangle-shaped holes. This does not denote understanding of triangularity, rather just the capability to associate one physical object with another. Some animals can make pretty interesting associations, such as connecting an object to a stimulus via a shared stimulus. But this is still not abstraction, and this is the highest form of mental capability animals have ever shown. Even seemingly abstract tasks like tool use are, believe it or not, still not evidence of abstraction. Humans with brain damage can maintain a full capability to abstract while being incapable of tool use, which proves tool use is a wholly cognitive process.
When animals “teach,” it is purely adaptive. They instinctually behave in a fashion which rears their young to perform advantageous behaviors, but they are not aware of it. A cat may “teach” its young to hunt, but it is a matter of cat-specific natural selection. Humans, on the other hand, can apply practice and teaching to abstract ends as a general competence. No definitive examples of “planning” have been observed in lower animals, rather further demonstrations of inflexible adaptations. This includes the storage of food or migration of birds. Humans are, of course, capable of abstract, multi-step goal-setting.
The most developed animals have a form of cognition whereby a goal-directed act followed by a desired item creates association. This is a higher function than basic association, by which direct stimulus is related to a desired item. On the other hand, humans can develop a conceptual theory of causality. So, where a lower animal may form a goal-directed association with pressing a button in a lab setting and receiving a meal, a human would understand that there is no intrinsic causal connection between pressing a button and the presence of food, and would look for an intermediary explanation.
Short term memory in chimpanzees is equal to that of humans in terms of raw cognitive power. But consider the following sequence: 1492 1776 1865 1918 1945 1980 2001. A chimp would only be able to see an indiscriminate series of numbers and perhaps be able to remember the first 8 or 9 digits. But a human can abstractly relate each number to the year of an event in American history. Thus, the human can practically reduce the dataset from 28 to 7, and then remember that order through the concept of chronological sequence.
Animals do show some basic propensity to deceive, but once again it has only been shown in relation to adaptive functions or by association. In the latter, despite hundreds of reinforcements, monkeys found the suppression necessary for a basic act of deception very difficult. Contrast this in comparison to humans, to whom acts of deception are a “domain-general competence which can serve many goals.”
“When [animals] find that A leads to a larger reward than B, B a larger reward than C, C a larger reward than D, D a larger reward than E, and are given a choice between A and E, they choose A.” In animals, this inference only exists when rewards are present, which drive the instinct to mechanically pursue the greatest reward. They show no comprehension of monotonic order as a concept. On the other hand, children (age 3) show the ability to order objects in a monotonic series, but also to develop their own monotonic metrics of evaluation. In other words, 3-year-old humans understand the concept of order; they do not mechanically infer.
“Animals neither attribute embedded mental states nor have embedded social behavior.” They are capable of understanding the perceptions of agents, but cannot ascribe a presence of knowledge or a state to the agent. In other words, they are capable of instinctual reaction to mechanical stimuli presented by other agents. On the other hand, human infants aged only six months are capable of distinguishing psychological objects and assigning positive or negative emotional states to them. I must point out that chimps of greater cognitive ability can do nothing of the sort.
The best research ever done on animal lingual abilities was the study of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee raised as if it were a human and taught sign language to see if it would comprehend it. The unequivocal conclusion was that Nim could only learn sign language as a matter of perceptual association and memorization. On the other hand, young human children with similar cognitive ability understand abstract grammatical rules. Look at the three sentences you just read: there are 60 words, and only 10 of them have material referents. The other 50 words refer to abstract concepts a chimp would find fundamentally inaccessible, like trying to explain red to the blind.
Point #3: Evolution cannot explain intellect either way.
Whether or not anything besides humans have intellect, there is another issue: evolution can’t explain it either way.
Evolution acts upon a genome through the process of natural selection. In other words, it selects for material properties of organs. In this fascinating video, Richard Dawkins describes the process of the evolution of the eye. It begins with the most elementary and basic degree of sense, detecting presence or absence of light. Then it slowly mutates to perceive shade. Later, some animal has a blurred image, and then another a more precise image, and so on. There are two facets to this theory of the eye’s development which make it coherent. First, the development creates an advantage. Second, the development operates upon an organ by gradation.
Intellect clearly fulfills the requirement of being advantageous. Consider a tribe of neolithic hunters developing an abstract plan to hunt large game, for example. However, the second condition is what makes a theory of the development of intellect challenging. Teleportation would certainly confer an evolutionary advantage to humans, so why don’t we have that ability? Well, natural selection can’t develop it. Teleportation is not a process which could be contained by an organ or set of organs, and evolution only acts upon organs. Likewise, intellect is definitionally the ability to perceive something which isn’t sensorily present. The eyes do not and cannot see “justice,” for example.
This isn’t a “God of the gaps” appeal to the fact that we just haven’t found a solution yet; it’s an observation that intellect is definitionally incompatible with evolution. How could the ability to comprehend what can’t be sensed by an organ be contained by an organ? Which organ could contain “abstraction?” The eyes? The amygdala? The prefrontal cortex? The hippocampus? Some mix of them? How could a mix of different sense-receiving and sense-processing organs see beyond the senses? Much like qualia, even though there are predictable neural correlates to abstraction, the correlates cannot actually explain the emergent property, even when considering pleiotropy.
Conclusion
You are made of about 100 trillion cells – none of them are conscious. None of them know who you are. Yet miraculously, 100 trillion cells stacked on top of each other form – you. A unified center of consciousness who loves, desires, dreams, thinks, and creates. The naturalistic proposal that unfeeling, disparate material inverts into this unified center of self-reflective awareness through increases in complexity or natural selection is practically an appeal to magic. There are three specific, key components to consciousness which prove the absurdity:
First, the existence of qualia. It is unclear how it would be possible in principle for an unconscious, mechanical universe to result in beings who experience subjective states. Second, psychophysical harmony. If it was unclear how an unconscious, mechanical universe could engender subjective experience, it is doubly unclear why that subjective experience is uniformly coherent. Third, intellect. Abstraction seems to be categorically different from cognition – an emergent property which allows a creature to see immaterial universals. It is difficult to see how evolution could explain it, by nature of its definition as an extrasensory activity.
Imagine your consciousness as a fixed point of being and experience. The world is sort of like an interactive “slideshow,” sequentially processed by that fixed point of experience. But the fixed point does not require the slideshow to survive. Eventually, all temporal things pass away, but there’s no reason to think your consciousness will. The theist contends that your consciousness will remain fixed, and more than that, fixed in whichever direction it was pointed at death, good or bad. All that is left after temporal things pass is one single moment of eternity – one instant which goes on forever.
So, back to The Creation of Adam. Awareness of God first requires awareness – qualia, psychophysical harmony. But then it requires awareness of the immaterial, which is intellect. Indeed, wherever you stand on intellect, it is absolutely certain that humans are the only beings on earth who can comprehend the idea of God. And that’s the whole point of the painting. Perhaps consciousness is not a burden of existential awareness, but rather the privilege of being able to know as God knows? Perhaps consciousness is not just a strange accident in an uncaring void, but an invitation from a friend to share the immobile instant of eternity?