Why has understanding the “mind” become necessary?

 Abbas Goya - July 2022

The concept of consciousness is often used interchangeably with the concepts of mind and awareness, of both inner and outer existence.

From a scientific standpoint, consciousness is still regarded as the greatest mystery of life. From a philosophical perspective, one might argue that consciousness encompasses everything we experience as living beings—and more specifically as human beings: the experience of all five senses, as well as emotions such as love and hatred, joy and fear; intelligence, will, taste, interest, genius, creativity, and most importantly, the “self” or the “I.” The latter is what David Chalmers calls the “hard problem of consciousness,” because the “I” is the origin of subjectivity, for which there exists no accepted scientific paradigm.

The enigmatic nature of consciousness in human society is reflected in the myths humanity has produced since descending from the trees. Some claim that consciousness served as the tool for the emergence of spoken language among Homo erectus roughly two million years ago. Spoken language elevated social relations among humans to a higher level, as it further liberated human hands for hunting and daily activities. Language requires a degree of abstraction; abstraction and the capacity to grasp it arise from interactions within the brain that are reflected in consciousness. 

Explaining the existence—though not necessarily the cause of the existence—of consciousness distinguishes three major philosophical schools from one another: materialism, from Thales to Karl Marx; dualism of soul and body, from René Descartes to the present; and idealism, from Plato to Immanuel Kant. Each of these philosophical branches is, of course, further divided into more specific strands that in turn offer differing views on how consciousness functions. In particular, materialists address consciousness or mind through at least three distinct intellectual subgroups; in my view, Marx’s materialism offers the most compelling explanation and is consistent with contemporary scientific achievements.

Materialism posits that consciousness is a secondary, emergent phenomenon—a product of complex matter. What distinguishes Marx is that he further asserts that consciousness is not merely a passive reflection of matter, but a product of "sensuous human activity" and social relations while earlier materialists viewed the world as a static object. 

Nonetheless, philosophy has not been the driving force behind today’s extremely costly research aimed at the scientific understanding of consciousness.

Over the past two decades, the study of consciousness has expanded exponentially from philosophy classrooms into departments of psychology, psychoanalysis, biology and neurology, quantum physics, and mathematics. It has also become the subject of experimentation and research by giant software companies such as Google and Microsoft. The reason for this shift is the technological need for artificial consciousness. 

What has thus far been marketed under the title of artificial intelligence (AI) is, in the view of most materialist philosophers, neurologists, physicists, and mathematicians, not a reflection of   consciousness—because the technology employed in producing artificial intelligence is computational in nature, whereas the functioning of consciousness is non-computational. Consciousness arises from neurobiological interactions in the brain; yet consciousness itself manifests on another level, one that cannot be placed under a microscope or calculated through a computer model.

The relationship between consciousness and biology is often compared to that between the wetness of water and the combination of oxygen and hydrogen atoms. Wetness cannot be found within the constituent atoms of water—namely oxygen and hydrogen. Rather, wetness is a quality that “emerges” under specific environmental conditions and only when a large number of water molecules have come into existence; in other words, it is the result of the transformation of quantity into quality. 

Conversely, if consciousness were calculable—and therefore predictable—we would merely be robots whose decisions had already been dictated by the design of a particular type of neurobiological brain structure. In that case, not only our personal behavior and actions but also human history—contrary to what Marx regarded as the product of human activity—would be deterministic. 

Roger Penrose, a physicist and mathematician active in this field, argues that to understand consciousness we require a new physics. He maintains that while matter in its most fundamental form is described by quantum physics, and in large, observable objects follows classical physics, there must exist a third kind of physics that mediates between the quantum and classical states of matter. He concludes that within this physical intermediary, quantum physics transitions into classical physics. This intermediary physics, however, remains unknown to us. He contends that by uncovering it, we may gain access to an understanding of consciousness. This, nevertheless, remains a theory.

According to most scientific authorities in this field, understanding consciousness is a function of understanding the brain. The effort to achieve a scientific understanding of the brain has always been a concern of both philosophy and science, yet it has never before witnessed such breathtaking acceleration—largely because there had been no clear prospect of producing concrete, marketable products from it. Now, however, as the application of “artificial intelligence” technology in everyday products is poised to become mainstream, it appears that understanding the functioning of the brain—specifically through the study of consciousness—has become a necessity.