The Joss Knight Universal Theory of Mind

For some time now I've been working on a theory of consciousness, or rather I've had a theory and I've been trying to work out how to articulate it. I'm not entirely there yet, but I believe I've got it to a stage now where some people understand what I'm talking about.

When philosophers, psychologists and so forth talk about 'consciousness' they often mix two different concepts together and I should prise them apart first. Firstly, there is consciousness as opposed to unconsciousness. There are things we are aware of and things we aren't. There is a temporal sequence of events of which we are aware and usually causal relationships between them. There is the internal monologue, what we are 'thinking', as distinct from the everyday things our brain is doing. This is the mechanism of consciousness, this is consciousness as an engine for boiling the world and our experience down to some simplified model so we can make sense of it. It's the cognitive module where experience, thought and decision converge. This is much of what Dennett is talking about in his book Consciousness Explained.

Secondly there is conscious experience. Recently I've just been calling it 'experience' or sometimes awareness to distinguish it. It is also sometimes called 'qualia' (singular quale). This is what it 'feels like' to be aware, to receive sensory input and to have a functioning brain. It refers to the feeling of pain as opposed to the stimulus and neural activity, the feeling of being in love as opposed to the mental parameters of it. It is this meaning of consciousness that I'm going to discuss.

You see, the engine of consciousness may not be fully understood but nobody is suggesting it is anything fundamentally incomprehensible. The brain just has a particular way of modeling the world for us, and it's essentially just a matter of time while we work out how that works (and perhaps why the brain has evolved to represent the world that particular way).

But for this other aspect, subjective experience, there seems to be a problem. Not only does there seem to be a need to explain where it comes from - how you go from neural activity to 'feelings', to put it simply - but it's quite hard to understand how we might even start investigating it. The two things just seem so fundamentally different that they could never been connected up.

One possible method of investigation suggests itself: build an artificial consciousness. If you can build a machine that has experiences then that will have explained the connection between the cognitive material (silicon, electricity, computer programs etc) and the qualia. But the people who suggest this are being a bit disingenuous. How exactly are we going to tell when our AI is conscious? Right now I can have a device which measures stimuli and records the data and nobody believes my device is 'feeling'; I could even create a robot designed to shy realistically away from undesirable stimuli - but still nobody would believe my robot was actually in pain. I see no reason why this would change as the stimuli and responses got more and more complex.

The reasons we believe other people are conscious are twofold: firstly we know we are conscious (that's part of the whole definition), and secondly other people are like us. This doesn't apply to a manufactured device. No matter how convincing a simulation an AI may be, there is no way to 'get inside its head' and prove that it is experiencing rather than just responding as if it were (and the same is true of other people of course). Even if the created device were biological rather than mechanical, organic rather than metallic, the same objections would apply. Taken to the extreme, perhaps the only way people would be convinced the created organism was conscious would be if it had grown from some simple beginning (like an egg) rather than being built complete - and that just leaves room for the magic spark of consciousness (if it is magic) to get in in the same way it does for us, thus leaving the problem unsolved. Before you know it, we're discussing P-Zombies and you know when that happens you should shut up and go and hide in a corner till it goes away.

So building a machine that appears to be having subjective experiences, although it might be enough for some people, really won't cut it. And the question is whether anything will. I think I know the answer: no.

The problem as I see it is not how to resolve the causal relationship between brain activity and experience, but to recognise it as non-existent. There is no causal relationship because they are the same thing! One is just a different aspect of the other. A different point of view. Specifically, qualia are brain activity from the brain's point of view. The apparent difference is because subjective experience is like introspection, we are perceiving brain activity using sensors made up of brain activity, the sensor is sensing itself. When we look at brain activity objectively, from the outside, we measure current, charge, ion flow and so forth, but when we are the current, charge and ion flow it 'looks' different, and that is what experience is.

What I usually tell people is that our brain activity has to feel like something, so why shouldn't it feel like it does? If all a brain is doing when it experiences pain is switching on a neuron for 'pain' (obviously it is more complex than that but let's simplify it) then switching on the neuron has to feel like something, the damn thing is in our head where our very identity exists. What else ought it to feel like? Something going 'click' perhaps, like a light switch? A musical tone changing frequency? An LED illuminating? Why those and not 'pain'?

And for those who think it ought to feel like nothing, what possible justification is there for that? If we are our brain activity then things like neurons firing ought to impinge on our experience (or at least they ought to sometimes). It's only if we're not, if we are brain activity plus magic (or some other 'aspect' or 'stuff'), that we might be tempted to assume that a neuron switching on wouldn't feel like anything, but in order to look at it that way we have to assume what we are trying to prove, so it's circular. The important point is that 'experience = brain activity' is self-consistent, nothing more is needed.

Now in the past this is as far as I've gone and, to be honest, if you lost me above then you're probably never going to follow what I'm getting at. Certainly I've spent hours arguing these points with very clever people (monists, not dualists, who still think there's a missing causal link despite not believing in a soul or other magic mind-stuff), and they haven't been able to come with me thus far.

However, I have put together a new analogy which is supposed to help clarify what I mean by "they are the same thing" and there's always a hope that it might be enough to get some others on board. I call it "Joss's Car Analogy of Mind", and it has two versions. Like all analogies if you try to stretch it too far it will break. It only works within the bounds established by the description. It is an aid to comprehension not a theory or a challenge.

Joss's Car Analogy of Mind

Version 1.

The brain is a car. The workings of the brain are the engine. 'Experience' is that of a person, 'you', inside the car. Everybody has their own car, nobody can leave their car, and nobody else can get into your car. You experience your car as the sound of the engine. You can also investigate other people's cars by listening to the sound of their engines. Because of the difference in aspect, location and so on, ie. point of view, other people's engines sound distinctly different from the way your engine sounds to you inside the car. Nonetheless, the source of the sound is the engine, and it's the same sound energy whether it's you that's listening or someone else, it just sounds different.

In this version of the analogy, the emphasis is on the fact that the engine's activity is all there is to explain the sound. The difference between the way your engine sounds and other people's is because you are inside your car, and not in theirs, not because something else is operating, generating other sounds which mix with that of the engine.

Version 2.

Now the cars are perfectly sound-proofed so that no sound energy can leave your car and impinge on other people's. Sound, as a concept and material thing, only exists inside the car, and all the sources of sound must be inside the car. Other people can still investigate each other's cars through other means, like measuring heat radiation. But only you can hear the sound of your own engine. However, despite the fact that your experience of your engine is dramatically different from the way other people perceive it, the engine is still the only thing doing anything in your car.

In this version of the analogy, we make sound special to the inside of the car to draw analogy with the extent to which subjective experience is qualitatively different from the material activity of the brain (neurons firing, ions flowing etc.). It still doesn't require us to postulate more mechanisms, or other engines or devices.

Discussion.

The main flaw in this analogy as I see it is the distinction between the sound of the engine, and the activity of the engine. The engine causes sound inside the car and there is still the question of 'how'. In the analogy the sound isn't caused by the engine so much as it is representing the activity of the engine, but there is no good analogy for that. Still, the analogy does help us see how point of view can make something that is actually the same appear very different.