I will start by saying that I would be in the Sean Carroll camp on this. One foot might cross over to the Christof Koch side at times, but only to hear him out and to think upon his ideas. I have a lot of respect for Koch and was fortunate to attend a few of his lectures over the years. But my instinct has been to step back into Camp Carroll and in recent times, I am more planted here.
For Koch, consciousness is fundamental. Annaka Harris would agree with him. For Carroll, consciousness is emergent. Roger Penrose would have similar view to Carroll.
The way I see it…in brief… (and very simplistically) is that human intelligence is a product of evolution. We started off with basic pattern recognition and cognitive functions that all evolved over time. Intelligence evolved and we began to “store” information. If we saw another person attacked by a lion, we did not make the same error. We reflected on what happened we “learned by experience”. This ability to store ‘information’ gave rise to consciousness, in its basic form. I guess we call these the easy problems of consciousness.
That still leaves the hard problem which focuses on qualia: the raw, subjective aspects of experience, like the redness of red or the pain of a headache. Neuroscience can explain how the brain processes information, but it does not explain why certain physical processes feel like something from the inside. For example, why does neural activity in the visual cortex give rise to the experience of seeing colour rather than just processing wavelengths of light?
We have a gap in our understanding of consciousness. Or maybe it would be better if I said we have a gap in our attempts at explaining it. Physical sciences describe objective properties of the world, but consciousness is inherently subjective. For me, the mind is the manifestation of what that brain does. There is no duality of mind and body, even though it is easy to feel like there is. People can be excused for continuing to think that consciousness is something that exists at a deeper, more fundamental level in the fabric of the universe, like energy. But when I think critically about it, I see consciousness as a biological emergent property from the neural complexity of our evolving brains.
Christof Koch, who has been a long-time proponent of Integrated Information Theory (IIT), has in recent years leaned toward panpsychism as a plausible explanation for consciousness. So long as he only saw it as a ‘plausible explanation’, I was happy to keep dipping my foot into his camp to hear more. But when he said “Consciousness is not an emergent property. It’s a fundamental feature of the universe”, I drifted away from him for a while.
Sean Carroll disagrees with him completely. For him panpsychism adds ontological baggage without any explanatory power. His stance is that any theory of consciousness should emerge from known physical laws, without positing new fundamental properties of matter. He in turn said “Consciousness doesn’t show up in the equations. So why smuggle it in?” (I am paraphrasing that quote).
TheEncogitationer 2 weeks, 1 day ago.
