Source is an article from the periodical, New Scientist, Autumn 2022. The article is by Thomas Lewston and is entitled, “Consciousness in the Cosmos.”
Some context, recently, at the bar, my three partners in intellectual crime discussed the nature of consciousness over some beer and whiskey, arguably the only proper way in which to have such discussions, that is, among friends who are having a good time talking about profound subjects. I had argued that much of the disagreement concerning the nature of consciousness concerned homonyms, or the misaking of the sign for the thing, the signifier for the thing signfiied. I had given two examples:
One of my friends had had an argument early in life with an artist who said to him, “There are no rules in art.” My friend who is of a scientific nature by inclination and profession replised, “Of course there are laws. If the artist wants to pain green, she will have to mix blue with yellow to arrive at that pigment.” I explained to my friend that possibly there’s a confusion over the word law which can mean more than one thing—it can refer to laws of nature, e.g., the law of gravity, but it can also refer to social laws which are human created and thus maleable. If the artist friend of my science friend is referring to social laws, then I agree with him—there should be few if any social laws proscribing the artist, but we are on the other hand, all subject to the laws of nature. In the latter meaning of the word “law,” my scientific friend is correct. It’s possible these two weren[t really in disagreement with each other but were simply using the same symbol/signifier “l-a-w” to refer to two different things, and the disagreement was one of misunderstanding or miscommunication.
Antoher example. I host a group that is studying the philosophy of Kant, and knowledge and consciousness is a frequent topic. For Kant, knowledge is closely related to consicousness, in that one cannot know something if one is not conscious of knowing something. Kant was trying, among other things, to distinguish belief from knowing, both of which require consciousness, but the former requires the additional consciousness of one’s justification for believing something as well as the belief itself. Aha! some of my friends would say, “How do you know that plants and other objects don’t have knowledge and consciousness.” Aside from the fact that my friend has just acknowledge that there is a distinction, it is perhaps the case that for those persons defending plants, the distinction is purely morphological, i.e, plants are not different from humans in not thinking but in that they are structured morphologically different. Part of the confusion of the argument is that two meanings for knowledge is being confused hear. Knowledge, as the noun form of “to know” is an active proces that requires consiousness, but “knowledge” in the sense of information, i.e, a book has knowledge in it, is a passive definition of knowledge. In the sense that plants have information in their DNA, perhaps they do have knowledge, but in the sense that plants are able to distinguish between facts and beliefs, well, we’re just not sure. Aha! my friends assert, “I am not just referring to knowledge as passive information but to the facts that plants seem able to act on that information in what could be described as deliberate, i.e, arching their leaves towards sunlight.” To which I reply, in order for plants to have knowledge in this sense, then they would have to have all its accompaniments, e.g., the choice to turn away from the sunlight, which we humans have, or at the very least, anticipating the strict determinists, the phenomenon of choice.
And this is precisely the issue. It’s not about what the symbol “c-o-n-s-c-i-o-u-s-n-e-s-s” is in an absolute metaphysical sense. Words can denote anything we want them to. It’s a matter of what concept or phenomenon are we referring to. In the case of knowledge or law, I have no probelm with the assertions that plants have knowledge and art knows no law, as long as we KNOW that by the one we are referring to passive information and by the other, to social laws. It’s when we confuse these meanings, even our own minds. Yes, I believe plants have knowledge in the sense of having DNA information, well therefore, plants must consciously know things. Wait a minute! Two different meanings have just been conflated in this judgment.
And now that we have the context, I’m hoping that Thomas Lewton will set me and my friends straight on the subject.
My beginning starts with Lewton’s ending where he suggests an uncomfortable truth, “The traditional stuff of physics—namely objects with absolute properties, to which Galileo devoted his life—can’t exist alone” (p. 40). As a Kantian, I like this conclusion as the Critique of Pure Reason asserts the need to unitfy objectivity with subjectivity, and to do so metaphysically, not empirically. This statement seems perfectly compatible with Kant, may even be piggybacking on him.
Lewton’s source is a quantum physicist by the name of Rovelli, “It [knowledge? consciousness?] is the realization that nature is about things that manifest themselves to one another.” Is there an implication that there exist things that are no manifest? Hints of Kant’s noumena. But Kant’s noumena are absolute. There may be things that we are currently unable to “see” which we may someday see with the aid of technological advancement. Kant’s term is more absolute, referring to things that are not just beyond our reason to perceive but beyond our ability to even think, like 1 + 1 = 3. Or a being like God, who is beyond time and yet manifests itself in time via burning bushes and lounging on cloud cusions on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
According to Rovelli, “much confusion arises.” Confusion about what? I have outlined what I see as sources of confusion in discussion of consciousness, but what does Rovelli see as the confusion or the problem? For that question, we need another physicist, Ismael, “. . . physical theories will always with our internal self and the language of experience. The hard problem of consciousness isn’t something that physicists need to address . . . Physics can move on without worrying about it.” And yes, Kant concludes this as well. Scientists can go on being transcental realists and skeptics (even though they are wrong), but the philosopher, whose charge is to ask questions about how we think on the level of phenomena, which distinguishes the philosopher from the psychologist or any scientist.
But while I suspect I know why physics and philosophy will be at odds with each other, I need to know why Ismael thinks this. “Humans have the ability to develop abstractions that are far from our actual experiences, which helps when devising mathematical descriptions of nature. The mistake is when we try to reverse that process of abstraction—when we try to start from microscopic particles, like atoms and quarks, and recover our internal experience.” Ah yes, the hard body-mind problem. Science can explain neurobiological processes, but there is always a gap between thhose processes and my actual inner experience, like me thinking about this article and at the saem time, thinking about whether or not I should have another cup of coffee. Yes, I know the scientist can show me some brain wave pattern that accompanies these thoughts, but it can’t quite go far enough and explain why THESE THOUGHTS in particular. Why am I not instead writing about the Young Frankenstein movie I saw the other night and considering a cup of tea instead of coffee?
The technical term “qualia” is raised. What does that term mean? Is it similar to Kant’s categories of understanding—quantity, substance, alteration (cause and effect), relationship, and modality? The scientists don’t do a good job of explaining this term, “Qualia are expressions of the universe to surprise.” This is gibberish, in common language, abstract concepts like the universe don’t express anything. That is a human trait. I suppose the concepts can be leveraged by the humam mind in order to express something, but I don’t think that is what is meant here. Webster defines it as a property that an object can have that can at least be abstractly considered separately from the object, so we can, for example, consider the property of redness distinctly from the red apple. This still doesn’t explain the statement of the physicists Cortês, Smolin, and Vera. Precise quote, “The universe often surprises itself. Qualia are espressions of the universe to surprise.” Meaningless, in orderinary usage, the universe does not surprise itself. It is a concept of the totality of objects in nature, and as an abstract concept expresses no emotion like surprise. It’s possible the physics have a poetical, metaphorical meaning, or they have a different definition of the universe, that they think it is conscious. If so, then in what sense? Concscious in the Kantian sense, of being able to distinguish fact from fiction and make free choices? Or in the metaphorical sense—the plant arches towards the sunlight and so appears to act consciously.
Clearer picture starting to form. The article states there are two types of events in the universe, the predictable and the novel. Novelty can seem like a consciousness making a free choice. While a scientist might be able to determine the likelihood of a human behaving a certain way, humans, having free choice, can always surprise you. We thinks of this ability to surprise as a marker of the free, conscious human being who can resist natural inclination. To the extent the univertse behaves in this novel way, an as physicists, I assume they are referring to quantum or stellar events, then it at least appears to be behaving spontaneously (although I would argue that just because the plan appears to be behaving intentionally vis a vis light is not sufficient to grant it the qualia of consciousness).
The notion of qualia, we are told, develops from a theory that the laws of science, e.g., the law of gravity, are not static but evolve, so that of their own, the laws of gravity and relativity could change. I rather believe that it is WE humans who change our perspective, initialy favoring Newton, but later realizing a better model can explain some phenomena Newton’s cannot. But the law of gravity did not evolve into the law of general relativity—it is rather we that evolved. So still scratching my head . . .
The physicists, together with a philosopher named Verde, are cobbling a new theory to explain quantum gravity in terms of qualia (now we have two terms we need to understand). Quantum gravity, according to Wikipedia, is the attempt to explain gravity using quantum mechanics rather than Einstein’s theories of large objects. We still need to work on the term “qualia.”