Musing on Consciousness

​Musings on consciousness.
 
Consciousness stands as a necessary condition for purpose and free will. (For now, I will leave aside the questions of the reality of God and human immortality.) But the notions of purpose and free will require that consciousness has real effects in the natural world. Otherwise we are ineffective spectators of the results of natural processes that take place at the micro level. Many scientists hold just that, namely that free will is an illusion and what we think are free acts are the result of electro-chemical processes going on in our brain.
 
            Among those scientists who hold this view are Kristof Koch with his “Romantic Reductivism,” and Sean Carroll with his “Poetic Naturalism.” Other prominent scientists who hold the naturalistic reductive position are the late Stephen Hawking and Francis Crick. Maybe the majority of scientists hold this view, but that does not matter. Although I respect scientists and scientific consensus, the question of consciousness goes beyond science.
 
Sean Carroll believes that physics has explained consciousness, and in this he joins the old “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Philosopher Thomas Nagel argues that consciousness cannot be reduced to an object of physical science; Kristof Koch, neurobiologist and protégé of Francis Crick, admits that science cannot yet explain consciousness, but believes that it has the capacity to explain it in the future. I want to analyze and explicate the views of Nagel, Carroll, and Koch, but first I will present my own take on the problem. (Not that I imagine myself to be in the same leagues as the fore-mentioned).
 
Most of the attempted explanations of consciousness explain the neural conditions necessary for human consciousness. But they leave out the unique subjective experience of humans including the physicists and philosophers who do the analysis. Carroll dismisses this problem while Nagel and Koch grapple with it. From the point of view of the physicist, the question can be framed:  How can something that is not physical move something that is clearly physical, such as the electrons that compose our neurons? The answer of the reductionists is simply that something non-physical, even if it exists, could not move something physical. Such movement would contradict the law of conservation of energy.
 
I see the major premise of the reductionist argument to consist in this: Whatever exists can be an object of physical science; and whatever cannot be an object of physical science cannot exist. So a common position of reductionism holds that consciousness cannot be anything apart from properties and processes of the brain. Furthermore, consciousness cannot exert a physical effect on the brain, and therefore our thoughts, choices, and values depend on physical activity in the brain, these conscious experiences can only be the effect of physical event, never the cause. As Kristof Koch sums up the reductionist position. “No matter; never mind.”
 
I join those who contend that consciousness is unique and not reducible to physics. When scientists study the brain you can think of at least three distinct aspects of the study. There is the object of scientific knowledge gained through instrument-aided experiments; the physical processes going on within the brain of the scientists; and the consciousness of the scientists of their knowledge. Physicists can reduce biology and chemistry to physics. The reduction includes the structure and processes of their own brains. But what about consciousness including their own. It is unlike any object of physical science.
 
In my next posts I will consider the reductive arguments of Sean Carroll and Kristof Koch.