Outer Worlds
Or, the intense experience of objectivity.
I want you to imagine something impossible.
Imagine a world in which there is only one conscious human being. That individual, conceived in a test tube, has been raised from infancy by machines, so that every single physical need was taken care of. Their need for interaction with other conscious human beings was taken care of by an array of AIs that, through Large Language Models, a global digital library etc, imitated the human experience. Perhaps those AIs were embodied as humanoid robots. But it doesn’t really matter. In this scenario, human beings were simulated for that lone human being as they grew up – those simulations were all the individual knew. But would that real human being be conscious? And if so, would it be phenomenal consciousness as understood by philosophers?
The overwhelming majority of the essays and books I read by modern philosophers of consciousness focus entirely on the brain. In the main they focus on what are termed the mind/brain problem, the hard problem, the existence of qualia, and so on. The underlying framework of such discussions is that of a single brain and a single mind. Questions are asked. What is going on in there? Does that brain see red as I see red? Real or illusion? And so on and so on…
This framework, however, has a particular background and reason for its existence. We live in a society founded on Ancient Greek concepts of thought, logic and philosophy, and we live in a society that was until recently dominated by the Christian Church. Both those circumstances led to a situation where only men were supposed or allowed to be philosophers, and where their worldview was the only one available for most, if not all people. The consequence of that for Western philosophers is that they are overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly consider the intellect far more important than, say, emotions, empathy, or even social phenomena. Those misogynists the Ancient Greeks were very clear in their attitudes to thought and emotion. Emotion was unimportant compared with cerebral thought and hard logic. Thought and logic were the philosophical way to truth. Emotions and stuff like that were for women, packed off to their gynaeceum. As for the Church, its history of promoting a dualism of mortal body and immortal, incorporeal soul has led to all sorts of assumptions, made in the main by cultures worldwide, but also evident in the work of some philosophers. Just for the record – there is no soul, there is no spirit. (Says me.)
When we consider the reality of the appearance of conscious human beings on our planet, however, we are faced with a completely different scenario than that of the single brain and mind. Every human being ever born was born into a world of intense, omnipresent and constant social interactions. There never has been a situation where a single, conscious human being existed all alone. And this fact, ignored by so many philosophers because of the framework they do their thinking in, has implications for various hypotheses of consciousness.
Some philosophers are fond of the following thought experiment. How can I be certain that what I see as red is definitely the same as what you see as red? From this beginning, all sorts of possible consequences arise, most of which emphasise the fact that no human being has direct access to the phenomenal experiences of any other, and so there should always be an element of uncertainty regarding those experiences of redness. We all have a subjective perspective, after all. But hold on a moment. Human beings evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in those intensely social circumstances. Actually, in reality, is it likely that there would be any significant differences in phenomenal experiences? Perhaps very occasionally, for instance in somebody who had synaesthesia, but otherwise – no. Such differences would worsen survival rates in communities, not improve them. Clearly natural selection would act against any such sensation or perception differences. So, what I see as red is the same as what you see. Because we are both conscious human beings with exactly the same shared evolutionary background, we can be as sure of that as makes no difference. Of course, if a philosopher wanted to be literally true, he would, quite rightly, point out that nobody could be 100% certain. My reply to him would be: that’s not the world we live in.
A few weeks ago I wrote a piece called Inner Worlds: the Intense Experience of Subjectivity. This essay is the opposite… or is it?
Over the last five hundred years a profound change in our societies has taken place, particularly in the West. That change was the arrival of science and the scientific method. We have used science with universal reach to bring incredible success.
Inevitably, in due course, the scientific method began to be applied to the study of consciousness, and that led to a problem. It seemed to most philosophers that the human subjective world – the world of the phenomenal experience of the red rose, for instance – must be beyond science. Most philosophers cannot see how that world could be interrogated in the same way as the objective world, which we can think of as the public world – the shared world.
Consider this 2017 extract from arch-panpsychist Philip Goff (panpsychism is the notion that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world):
Radical naturalism – Third-person observation and experiment, and only third-person observation and experiment, should be our guide in finding out the nature of reality.
Goff continues:
The reality of consciousness does not seem to be accessible to third-person observation and experiment; I can’t see your pain no matter how much I poke around in your head. And thus, if we accept radical naturalism, illusionism becomes extremely plausible. The question we now need to ask is: what reason do we have to be radical naturalists?
And then:
It would be nice if we could apply the methods of third-person science to the qualities of experience, but their private nature is incompatible with public observation…
Let’s now go through these section by section.
The first section is in essence how human beings do science. Science – the human endeavour – is different to the scientific method. The former is subject to all the flaws and problems of any human belief system, while the latter is a universally applicable method of interrogating reality. So far so good.
In the second section we come to the gist of the difficulty. I can’t see your pain no matter how much I poke around in your head. Really? Is that actually true in the human world we all live in? Or is it just another thought experiment taking place in a framework that doesn’t exist? It is true of course that I cannot literally experience your pain, but then again I don’t need to. By virtue of being conscious I embody a method of interrogation that allows me to understand your pain – and that is enough. I do not need literally to feel your pain, but, being a human being in the human world, I do need to have some method of empathising. That method is consciousness. I use myself as an exemplar to understand you from the inside without literally feeling everything you feel. In a touchy-feely, empathising, yet symbolic sort of way, we merge with one another. We are, from the point of view of human beings experiencing consciousness, one entity, not a collection of many entities. This, however, is not the stuff of male philosophers like Goff and his ilk.
What, then, does this suggest about the supposed split – which I wrote about as an “intense experience” in my earlier piece – between subjectivity and objectivity? Suppose, heresy of heresies, that consciousness when it first appeared had nothing to do with the real world – all that red/rose/pain stuff. Suppose it had everything to do with other human beings, and only later, or at the very earliest at the same time, began applying itself to the real world of red roses.
It is beginning to look as though the subjective world of my phenomenal experiences and every other world of human phenomenal experiences could be one and the same thing. Which is to say, although I experience myself as an isolated, conscious individual with subjective phenomenal experiences, that in fact is an illusion. For the purposes of human beings living in the real human world, all these phenomenal experiences are one and the same thing, with no split between subjectivity and objectivity. They are literally split, yes, but that is irrelevant, because we do not live in that literal philosophical world, nor have we ever. We live in the softer human world, as it evolved over three hundred thousand years or more.
Perhaps it is time now for philosophers to turn away from the “consciousness inside a single head” framework. There never was any such thing. Consciousness can only exist in the intensely social circumstances we all live in. It is supported by those conditions and by no others. To believe, as panpsychists do, that it is a “thing” which can be “found” throughout the universe is no different to believing in a literal God sitting on a literal white cloud.
The reality of consciousness does not seem to be accessible to third-person observation and experiment, Goff writes. But that is not true in the human world. He is writing about a hypothetical stance. In fact, we human beings are doing third-person observation and experiment all the time, every moment of the day, but in a way that a cerebral thinker like Goff does not recognise, though I bet many women would. We are constantly accessing the phenomenal experiences of other human beings by the process of having our own. That’s science. A mother watching her infant child would comprehend that. Because we live within a single entity – the human social world – those phenomenal experiences are neither subjective nor objective. They are both. They are held in common. When I see a red rose, as I did in my garden last weekend, and smell its gorgeous scent, I know on an overwhelming balance of probability that Nicci, my other half standing beside me, has exactly the same experiences. I do not need to go through all the tedious pondering over whether or not she does or doesn’t with 100% certainty have those same phenomenal experiences. I know she does. I base my entire moment-by-moment experience of consciousness on that principle. So does she.
No doubt you’re now thinking – hang on a moment, this can’t be right. Steve, you’re on record as saying the fundamental difference between science and religion is that science assumes the independence of the external world. If interrogating yourself in order to interrogate somebody else is science, how can it be reliable? How can your subjective world be independent of the human mind, as you say science is?
My reply would be this. When it comes to, say, the James Webb Space Telescope – surely the greatest human technological triumph – we do need to be sure that all the qualities of the JWST – the measurements, for instance – are real and true; that is, independent of the minds of those who made that telescope. This is a public sphere, in which the reality of the construction of the JWST takes precedence over anything a human being might think. In this instance, the experimental nature of science and the agreement of more than one person meant that the manufacture of the JWST was undertaken according to science. The JWST therefore accords with reality.
The same, at first, does not seem to be the case with using yourself as an exemplar in order to interrogate the subjectively felt experiences of another. But in the case of consciousness we are limiting ourselves to the human world, which does not have to accord with the incredibly high specifications of the JWST. We do not need literally to feel another’s pain. That method of empathy which we call consciousness only has to work. Moreover, since we are positing circumstances in which human beings share a common condition in which there are no significant mental differences between them, we can say with a high enough degree of probability that interrogating yourself – asking the questions and doing the experiments – is to all intents and purposes the same as interrogating another.
Let me give an example here. If you see your friend crying in some quiet corner of the pub you’re visiting, you don’t need to perform any experiments on them – that is, upon reality – to find out what is going on. Because you yourself have cried following some sad event, you know what that emotion means. Of course, there could be a little experimentation to be done. It is possible that they are crying tears of joy. That does happen sometimes. And so you interrogate yourself further, asking yourself whether it is more likely that they are weeping or crying tears of joy. I am saying that such a process is science, albeit not the pure and absolute version we know from building the JWST.
The strangeness here is this superposition of the subjective world and the objective one; but it only applies to consciousness, which appears nowhere else except in social groups. Science is above all a testable pursuit, unlike religion. This testing – hypothesis, experimentation, reproducibility, re-testing and theorising – is done by every human being as they navigate the extraordinarily complex social world they live in. Consciousness allows us to hypothesise, experiment, test and theorise about other human beings. It could be described as an “automatic science,” an unconscious science almost, one we hardly notice as we live our lives in a string of moment-by-moment experiences.
Science means knowledge. Consciousness means understanding. In the former, the real world is assumed to be independent of the human mind. But the same is true of consciousness, albeit that a unique merging occurs of subjectivity and objectivity.
Sensing the redness of that garden rose represents my feeling about the stimuli arriving at my eyes related to that rose. The subjective sensation I have about it therefore represents something about an objective fact. That, far from being a passive experience owing to some mystical property of the universe, is an active experience that I, that we all create. We do this by virtue of being conscious human beings, but we never do it alone. We do it only in the medium of human society, where every other human being is the same as us and we all know that. Others are using phenomenal notions about the red rose in exactly the same way that we are. That multiple exactness of method is critical here. Such notions, such ways of representing, we all know; it is the basis for our moment-by-moment experience of being alive and conscious. And it is a unique occurrence – at least, on Planet Earth.
It is often said that one of the most difficult problems of the illusionist stance on consciousness is to explain the sheer power of phenomenal experiences, which we human beings revel in purely for their own sake. Music, for instance, or red roses if you are a gardener. But even if the process of such representation is currently obscure, surely the reason for the power of phenomenal experiences is obvious. It is everybody else in the human race.
So, the superposition of a subjective perspective and the real world cannot occur. There can be no such identity between a human mind and the circumstances leading up to the building of the JWST, even though those circumstances originated in human minds. JWST science is about the objective world only. But the superposition of the perspectives of a human mind and any other mind can occur, and in that case the subjective and objective perspectives are actually the same. This is a unique circumstance particular to conscious human beings. Phenomenal experiences, such as the redness of that rose, arise because of representations inside a human mind, their existence turning them into facts. That they are real for a human being is enough. They are real within the arena in which they appear, that of representation. But more than that, that they are real for every other human being is also enough. Every other human being, not just a single mind pondered over by a philosopher… because that is how we evolved.
A third-person observer knows pain is real for another because it is real for them. The two are equivalent. Science on the self is science on everyone else.
I think the entire Greek/Christian mindset just needs to be consigned to the dustbin. I wouldn’t mind betting that the earliest stirrings of consciousness and of phenomenal experiences were sourced in the relationships of mothers and others. Men caught on eventually – a bit slow on the uptake. Erich Fromm observed that the Western habit was the Either/Or metaphor – one of exclusivity and opposition. Duality, in other words. Ultimately, this is sourced in Ancient Greek ideas. What is needed now in philosophy is the And metaphor. That means unity.
Men, of course, being obsessed with their brains and the power of their intellects, look only inside brains, for instance for the neural correlates of consciousness. Believing in an absolute subjectivity that cannot be interrogated by third-person enquiry, they seek an actual physical phenomenon that could indicate consciousness. But consciousness does not exist inside brains, nor as some property of the universe. It exists within human society. None of those male deep-thinkers looks at society for the social correlates of consciousness, because why on earth would they? That’s not their thing. They are seeking philosophical truth by a process of rational, unemotional enquiry, and doing a soft science like sociology or psychology is hopelessly vague and fuzzy. But if they did look, what would they find? Three phenomena which indicate the possibility of the position outlined above, that human beings are merging subjective and objective all the time, and in the process performing science. Those phenomena are emotion, humour (a specific and critically important type of emotion), and music.
Human beings experience subjectivity intensely, and that experience was something visible to evolution by natural selection. Yet the experience is only one half of the story, and it has fooled a lot of philosophers into thinking that there must be a deep, hardline, literal subjectivity beyond the powers of third-person observation and experiment. But consciousness did not evolve via the brains of isolated human beings, rolling around their various cultures and societies like so many marbles. It evolved in groups, and in groups alone. It only exists in social circumstances. Those groups were not collections of steel-hard ball bearings, they were fuzzy at the edges, always merged, and they acted over vast amounts of time as single entities. Yes, the experience of individual human beings was different – that sense of isolation behind the eyes – but that experience was identical across humanity.
I want you to imagine something impossible. Well, it looks like the imaginary world mentioned above of one conscious human being all alone is impossible, however well they are nurtured, educated and supported. Such a world has never existed.
And?
