(PDF) Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness

SOUL DUST

NICHOLAS HUMPHREY

SOUL DUST

The Magic of Consciousness

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Jacket art: Soul Dust 1, 2010, acrylic ink. By Susan Aldworth.

www.susanaldworth.com

Excerpt from Yevtushenko: Selected Poems, translated by robin Milner-Gulland and

1962. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, reprinted by permission.

with permission of Faber and Faber Ltd, publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Humphrey, Nicholas.

Soul dust : the magic of consciousness / Nicholas Humphrey.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-13862-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Consciousness. I. Title. II.

Title: Magic of consciousness.

BF311.H7795 2011

126—dc22 2010036759

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as the

sunbeam; though this ill hap wait on her nativity, that she never

comes into the world, but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him

that brought her forth; till time, the midwife rather than the

mother of truth, have washed and salted the infant [and]

declared her legitimate.

—John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 1643

Contents

Invitation

Prelude

1 Coming-to Explained

Part One

2 Being “Like Something”

3 Sentition

4 Looping the Loop

Part Two

5 So What?

6 Being There

7 The Enchanted World

8 So That Is Who I Am!

9 Being Number One

Part Three

10 Entering the Soul Niche

11 Dangerous Territory

12 Cheating Death

Envoi

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Invitation

I wrote a short book a few years ago—Seeing Red: A Study in

Consciousness—that met with unexpectedly good reviews,

even from my colleagues.

1

Unexpected, because the usual thing, in the field that has

become known as “consciousness studies,” is for academics to

be dismissive of each other’s ideas. The psychologist Walter

Mischel has wryly noted: “Psychologists treat other people’s

theories like toothbrushes—no self-respecting person wants to

use anyone else’s.”

2

Philosophers tend to be charier still.

The review that pleased me best was in the American

Journal of Psychology: “This reviewer made at least three

passes through the book, each pass yielding a new

understanding. The first pass left me with a feeling of: ‘Oh he

doesn’t really mean THAT!’ But the second pass solidified and

verified: ‘Oh yeah he really does mean that.’ And the third, and

most rewarding pass: ‘Oh my god, I think he’s right!’”

3

nonetheless,

almost every discussion of Seeing Red had a sting in the

tail. No one would allow that the problem of consciousness had

actually been solved. Thus Steven Poole, writing in the

Guardian: “But the ‘hard problem’ is still there, packed away

into a corner of his argument. At some evolutionary stage,

sensory feedback signals get ‘privatised’ in the brain and

become ‘about themselves.’ Voilà, reflexivity and hence

consciousness. But between stuff and thoughts there is still an

argumentative crevasse. If there weren’t, this would be an

earth-shattering book. As it is, it is merely deeply interesting.”

4

They were right, of course; I had not solved the problem.

Yet, who wants to have it said, as his epitaph, that his ideas

were “merely deeply interesting”? I felt challenged to have one

more go at writing the earth-shattering book—or, at any rate,

the book that shows the fly the way out of the fly bottle.

This book, Soul Dust, takes off from the last few pages of

Seeing Red. Since I cannot count on readers being familiar with

my earlier work, I have reprised some of the ideas where

needed. Apart from this, however, the arguments here are new.

They are also, I must admit, largely untried by my peers. In this

new book I have deliberately tried to change the game by

following a different set of rules from those that have

traditionally framed the discussion of consciousness. In doing

this, and seeing for myself where it leads, I may say I have at

times been surprised by the moves I have found myself making:

“I can’t really mean that. But yes I really do. In which case,

here we go. . . .” In effect, the story has driven itself on. If the

book reads—almost contrivedly—like a journey of discovery,

that is because this is exactly what it has been in the writing.

My book is intended to be a work of serious science and

philosophy, and I hope it will be judged as such. But it is also

written for the general reader (while being furnished with

copious scholarly notes). As it turns out, I could hardly have

done otherwise than try to write a “popular book.” For it

becomes a central part of my argument that only by connecting

to the interests and anxieties of conscious human beings in

general can we begin to see the evolutionary raison d’être for

the existence of consciousness in the first place. So, as the book

proceeds to discuss the “whys” of consciousness, I come to

focus, naturally, on issues having to do with life, death, and the

meaning of existence—issues that matter so obviously to all

ordinary human beings (even if they sometimes care about

them more than they dare talk about them).

The result is that Soul Dust, which begins with the most

basic questions about the nature of conscious awareness and

sensation, becomes a book about the evolution of spirituality

and how humans have made their home in what I call the “soul

niche.” Though I have no belief whatever in the supernatural, I

make no apology for putting the human soul back where I am

sure it belongs: at the center of consciousness studies.

Still, while the book does end up addressing many familiar

human concerns, you should not expect it to be an easy read.

There has been work to be done on my part, and it will require

some work on yours. I begin the book by setting out my own

account of what consciousness is and what the hard problem

amounts to. This means my commencing with some relatively

dry analysis and then, as the answers begin to emerge, some

far-from-dry but still none-too-easy excursions into speculative

neuroscience. At several points in

part 1

, I offer the reader a chance to skip to the next stage. But I

hope in

part 2

, where I begin to ask what consciousness is for, the earlier

work of establishing what it is starts to pay off. For if, as I

argue, consciousness

is no more or less than a piece of magical “theater,” the

questions about what it is for begin to look very different from

those that philosophers and psychologists have been used to

asking. And with very different questions come very different

answers.

The answers I arrive at are certainly unlike any that science

has yet had to offer. This in itself, I would have to agree, is no

recommendation. Science is surely meant to be cumulative

rather than revolutionary. Yet, when the fact is that previous

research on consciousness has delivered almost nothing in the

way of answers to the big questions people ask about the

mystery of their experience, perhaps we can no longer rely on

the science we are accustomed to.

The material world has given human beings magical souls.

Human souls have returned the favor and put a magical spell

upon the world. To understand these astonishing events, I invite

you to start over.

PRELUDE

1 Coming-to Explained

Chances are it is less than a day since you regained

consciousness. It probably happened soon after the sunlight

returned this morning. What was it like for you, as you came

to? remember? The chink of a milk bottle, the touch of sheets,

the sight of a patch of blue sky. You rubbed your eyes,

stretched your limbs, and before you knew it, waves of

sensation refilled the lake of your being. You re-emerged into

the subjective present. Once more you felt yourself alive.

You were not alone. Something like this happened today to

countless other individuals here on Planet Earth. Our planet, we

are told, is merely a condensate of stardust, not so different

from all the other minor cosmic bodies that litter the universe.

But this one planet has become home to an extraordinary

phenomenon. Here is where sentience evolved. Here is where

conscious selves have come into their own. Here live souls.

In this book I will address the questions of what sentience,

selfhood, and soulfulness amount to. In the course of it I will

propose a solution to the “hard problem of consciousness.” The

hard problem is to explain how an entity made entirely of

physical matter—such as a human being—can experience

conscious feelings. The problem is hard because such feelings

appear to us, who are the subjects of them, to have properties

that could not possibly be conjured out of matter alone. We

say—because we do not know what else to say—that “it’s like

something” to be conscious. Yet, the problem with this

inadequate phrase, “it’s like something,” is that what it is like

seems to us—no, is to us—unlike anything else out there in the

material world.

There are philosophers who think the problem is simply too

hard to admit of a solution. For Colin McGinn, trying to

explain phenomenal consciousness as a product of the brain is

like trying to explain how you can get “numbers from biscuits,

or ethics from rhubarb.”

1

For Jerry Fodor, “We can’t, as things stand now, so much

as imagine the solution of the hard problem. The revisions of

our concepts and theories that imagining a solution will

eventually require are likely to be very deep and very

unsettling. . . . There is hardly anything that we may not have to

cut loose from before the hard problem is through with us.”

2

I disagree. I acknowledge, of course, that theorists have not

been doing too well in imagining the solution. I am as

impressed as anyone by what seem to be the insuperable

difficulties. But I suggest we attend to the word “seem.” The

fact that something seems to have mysterious and inexplicable

features does not necessarily mean it really has them.

Figure 1. The Penrose Triangle.

Let me illustrate the difference between seeming

impossible and being impossible with the help of a well-known

example. Suppose you were to come across a solid wooden

object that looked just like the object shown in

figure 1

, Penrose’s “impossible triangle.” Certainly, it would seem

to be a physical impossibility. Yet no one would say that just

because of what the object looks like you should throw away

your physics books and cut loose from everything you know.

You would soon realize, of course, that it must be an illusion.

And sure enough, if you could only change your viewpoint,

you would discover that what you are actually looking at is the

curious object shown on the next page in

figure 2

. This object was cunningly constructed by the psychologist

Richard Gregory, precisely so that, when it is seen from a

certain position, it creates the impression of an impossible

triangle. This object deserves a name. With Gregory’s

permission, I call it the “Gregundrum.”

3

If you were to come across the Gregundrum lying on a

laboratory bench, without knowing its “function,” I am sure

you would never guess that it holds the key to anything

interesting. It is certainly not a pretty thing in its own right.

Who would have thought that such a perfect thing as the

Penrose triangle could have such an ugly explanation? Yet, as

Sherlock Holmes said to Dr. Watson, “When you have

eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however

improbable, must be the truth.”

4

Figure 2. The Gregundrum.

I will argue that the truth about consciousness—if and

when we see it from the right perspective—is that it is indeed

the product of a highly improbable bit of biological

engineering: a wonderful artwork of nature that gives rise to all

sorts of mysterious impressions in our minds, yet something

that has a relatively straightforward physical explanation. As

Holmes went on, “We know that he did not come through the

door, the window, or the chimney. We also know that he could

not have been concealed in the room, as there is no

concealment possible. Whence, then, did he come?” “He came

through the hole in the roof,” Watson cried. Our job as

consciousness researchers is to find the hole in the roof.

I do not say it will be easy. To start with, in an area where

theorists continually talk past each other, there will be issues

about the use of words. To forestall at least some potential

verbal misunderstandings, I have set out in the box a rough

guide to the conceptual territory as I see it. (You should not get

hung up on anything in this list at this stage—I will justify and

explain these definitions further as we go on.)

But it is not just words that may come between us and the

truth; it may be the deep-seated biases that we bring to the table

as subjects of consciousness ourselves. We cannot of course opt

out of our privileged position, but we can at least try to imagine

where we would be without it. To that end, I want to begin our

investigation of the problem by handing it over to someone

else, someone who should have a remoter and more objective

view of what consciousness is doing for us than we ourselves

have.

In general, when I talk about consciousness I mean

“phenomenal consciousness.”

A subject is “phenomenally conscious” (or plain

“conscious”) when and if there is something it’s like to be him

at this moment.

There is “something it’s like to be him” when he experiences

feelings, or what philosophers call qualia.

Qualia—for example, the felt redness of fire, the sweetness

of honey, the pain of a bee sting—are features of sensations.

The subject is “phenomenally conscious” just when he

experiences sensations as having these peculiar features.

To experience sensations “as having” these features is to

form a mental representation to that effect (with the meaning

of “represent” still to be decided).

Thus “consciousness” (or “being conscious”), as a state of

mind, is the cognitive state of entertaining such mental

representations.

Consciousness can change the subject’s life just to the extent

that these representations feed forward to influence what he

thinks and does.

Let us return, then, to this morning. Only now imagine that a

few hundred miles out in space, a visiting scientist from an

advanced civilization in the Andromeda galaxy is orbiting our

planet, on her first trip to investigate life on Earth. (I call her

“her” because I assume the Andromedans long ago dispensed

with the male sex.)

Situating her craft so as to get a good view of the boundary

as night turns to day on the Earth’s surface, she observes how,

all along this boundary, living creatures are emerging from

their nighttime coma. Birds are breaking into song, butterflies

are taking to the wing, monkeys are leaving their beds in the

trees, and human beings are going downstairs to brew their

morning coffee.

She observes this great awakening, and she nods

knowingly. She recognizes, of course, that the central

processors that run these earthlings’ onboard software have

been in sleep mode overnight, so as to save energy and perform

system maintenance. And now, with the sun’s rays bringing

light and warmth, it is time for them to resume their life tasks.

As a scientist, she has much to look forward to. Once she gets

down among these creatures, how interesting it will be for her

to study their brains and behavior and figure out how it all

works. Indeed, she fancies herself as a bit of a philosopher: one

day she will write a book called Coming-to Explained.

Our visitor has every reason to trust the scientific method.

Wherever else in the universe she and her colleagues have

applied it, natural phenomena have given up their secrets. No

doubt, she reckons, there can be nothing so different or difficult

about those living organisms down there on Earth.

But is she right? What about consciousness? Will it ever

dawn on the Andromedan visitor that there is a dimension to

the lives of at least some of the creatures she is studying

that needs special treatment, that when they “come to,” it is as

if a light is coming on inside their heads? Given that she can

see things only from outside, is it possible that she will miss

this altogether, that she will never even suspect that

consciousness exists?

5

I think we should assume the Andromedan does not have the

circuits in her own brain that would make her phenomenally

conscious herself. Otherwise we will not know how to assess

any claims she may make to have discovered the existence of

consciousness in other creatures. (She might just be arguing

from analogy with her own case, in the way you or I might

argue, for example, that it is obvious that a dog feels pain the

way we do.)

The absence of phenomenal consciousness may or may not

affect the way she thinks about philosophical and scientific

issues (this is something we should be better placed to judge by

the end of the book). But I see no reason, as of now, why it

should place any limit on her intelligence (“artificial

intelligence,” as we might want to call it) or her skills at

scientific research. Let us suppose, indeed, that she does have

an exceptionally brilliant analytic mind. And let us allow her

every other scientific advantage anyone might ask for. She can

undertake meticulous behavioral studies of how earthlings

behave in the wild, and then follow up this fieldwork with

whatever laboratory investigations are suggested. She has all

the research instruments she could possibly need: scanners and

imagers and calculators of a sophistication yet undreamed of

here on Earth. She can prod and probe and listen in and cross-

question. She can, if she wants, take the earthlings apart

and examine their machinery (the Andromedan ethics

committees have no objection to alien vivisection). Then, back

home, she will be able to run theoretical simulations on her

computer and build working models in the robot shop.

Then, what will she discover, and what will she not? Let us

consider some possibilities.

She will find, to her surprise, that in order to explain the

behavior of certain species of earthlings, she needs to

postulate the existence of an extraspecial mental state—a

state with peculiar qualitative properties, unlike anything

else, which just because of what it is like is changing how

these creatures live their lives.

Though perhaps she will be unable to deduce the

existence of any such special inner state from what she

observes of public behavior, she will nevertheless realize

that such a state exists when she examines in detail the

flow of information in the earthlings’ brains and figures

out what kind of private mental representations are being

generated.

She will do better still. Beyond simply discovering the

existence of conscious states, she will be able—either

from behavioral observations or from brain scans—to

arrive at a complete description of what it is like to be the

subject of a particular state. Perhaps she will even get to

the point where she can compare one individual’s state

with another’s—so that she can tell, for example, whether

different subjects are experiencing the sensation of red in

the same way.

Or then again, perhaps she will be able to do none of the

above.

Now, as it happens, there are a good many students of

consciousness here on Earth—they may even be in the

majority—who believe the answer can be only the last of these.

In their view our visitor will fail to discover anything about

consciousness by any of the scientific means at her disposal

because of an awkward but undeniable truth: consciousness, for

all its subjective importance, is physically featureless; it does

not show.

The psychologist Jeffrey Gray has written, for example,

“Nothing that we so far know about behaviour, physiology, the

evolution of either behaviour or physiology, or the possibilities

of constructing automata to carry out complex forms of

behaviour, is such that the hypothesis of consciousness would

arise, if it did not occur in addition as a datum in our own

experience; nor, having arisen, does it provide a useful

explanation of the phenomena observed in those domains.”

6

Others have gone further still, arguing for what the

philosopher Owen Flanagan has called “consciousness

inessentialism”—“the view that for any intelligent activity I,

performed in any cognitive domain d, even if we do I with

conscious accompaniments, I can in principle be done without

these conscious accompaniments.”

7

Thus, according to John Searle, “We could have identical

behavior in two different systems, one of which is conscious

and the other totally unconscious.”

8

There could even exist a “philosophical zombie human,”

David Chalmers has suggested, who is physically identical to a

normal human being and who looks and acts in every respect

just like one, yet who is not phenomenally conscious—“all is

dark inside.”

9

Then, if you or I were to meet such a philosophical zombie

in the street, we would not—and could not—know the

difference.

True, each of us is presumably convinced that

consciousness exists in our own case, and therefore we may

want to give the benefit of the doubt to others who so obviously

resemble us. But the Andromedan scientist does not know

about consciousness from her own case. Therefore, if and when

she notes resemblances between herself and any of the

earthling creatures she is studying (those naked bipeds who

seem to have taken over the planet are certainly technologically

ingenious!), she is likely to assume they resemble her in this

respect as well. And if consciousness inessentialism is right,

she will not discover anything in the course of her research to

make her revise her opinion. At the end of the day, she will not

think she has missed anything. So she will return to

Andromeda—and write her book—with a satisfied sense of

mission accomplished: “Coming-to Explained Away.”

I said I wanted to hand over the investigation of the hard

problem to this visitor, because we might expect her to have “a

remoter and more objective view of what consciousness is

doing for us than we ourselves have.” But if this is really how

things stand, it seems the problem will not even cross her

horizon. Fodor wrote, “There is hardly anything that we may

not have to cut loose from before the hard problem is through

with us.” He cannot have meant this interpretation, but is the

lesson that if we want to keep up with the best science in the

universe, we ought to cut loose from the concept of

consciousness itself ?

You will realize—if for no other reason than because my own

book does not end here—that I do not think so. My starting

point is that consciousness, however elusive and enigmatic

from a scientific perspective, is a fact of nature. And if

it is not evidently a fact of nature, that can be only because

scientists and philosophers have been looking for evidence in

the wrong places. I believe this because I think the idea that

consciousness has no observable effects is daft (and the notion

of a “philosophical zombie”—a physical duplicate of a

conscious human who completely lacks consciousness—is

dafter still). However, I have to say I do not think it is daft to

suppose that certain aspects of conscious experience could have

no observable effects. So, before we go further, I want to

consider just to what extent conscious experience will—and

will not—be observable to an outsider.

We know, of course, that not everything that goes on in the

mind of a person or an animal has to show up in behavior.

There can obviously be purely private mental states. Indeed,

most ordinary mental states are private, insofar as they occur

without anyone’s—except the subject—knowing about them.

No one but you knows what your thoughts are right now (why

else would anyone give you a penny for them?). No one but me

knows about my dreams last night (and, as it happens, even I do

not know any longer).

Still, we might want to argue that states such as these are

only contingently private. If you were given the penny, you

could tell me what your thoughts are. If I had kept a dream

diary, I could have shared my dream with you. And even

without language, there would probably be ways of

communicating much of the content of these mental states.

But that is thoughts. And with feelings it would seem to be

a different matter. How about basic sensory experiences? They

undoubtedly seem to be more absolutely private. You would be

hard put to it, however much you tried, to reveal the full

content of what it is like to experience the smell of a rose or

the coldness of a snowball. Though you could surely

communicate some part of it, you would not know how to

capture the subjective quality of the sensations, the qualia.

It is by no mean obvious exactly what the problem is. Is it

that there is something about the logical status of qualia, as

intrinsically subjective properties, that makes them

incommunicable in principle? Or is it simply that in practice we

do not have the requisite communication skills? Could it even

be that our minds have been designed to have some kind of fire

wall around sensory experience which puts adaptive limits on

what others can discover about us?

There could be some truth in all these possibilities. But

whatever is causing the problem, we must surely accept that

there is a problem; we must concede that in practice, even if

not in principle, conscious sensations are private in crucial

respects, so that nothing the subject can say or do can reveal

everything about them.

However, I would say this is all we need concede. We

need not—and should not—accept either of two stronger

propositions, namely, (1) while an outside observer is restricted

to studying behavior, she will not even be able to detect that

phenomenal consciousness is present, and (2) even if the

observer were allowed complete access to the subject’s brain,

she would not be able to discover the full content.

Let us look at these two issues. First, why do I believe that

consciousness must reveal its presence, if nothing more, at the

level of behavior?

The reason is the ultimate one, the hand of natural

selection. Since consciousness, as we know it, is a feature of

life on earth, we can take it for granted that—like every other

specialized

feature of living organisms—it has evolved because it

confers selective advantage. In one way or another, it must be

helping the organism to survive and reproduce. And of course

this can happen only if somehow it is changing the way the

organism relates to the outside world.

Now, how could this be happening? Conscious creatures do

not smell different or look prettier. Consciousness does not

provide extra strength or better health. Instead, consciousness

can have its effects on survival only by changing what we may

loosely call the creature’s “psychology.” In other words, being

phenomenally conscious must be influencing how the creature

thinks or what it wants or what it believes, in just such a way

that it now acts in the world in adaptive ways it would not have

done otherwise.

In later chapters I will explore in detail just how this may

be working: how the effects may be present on several levels,

and how they may be more or less important for different kinds

of animals, pushing the evolution of consciousness along

species-specific lines. As we will see, human beings, with their

developed sense of “conscious self,” are most likely in a class

of their own. But the important point for now is that if natural

selection can “see” the effects—whatever they are—of the

changed psychology on behavior, presumably so too can other

outside observers (if only they knew where to look). What is

more, if these observers can see what natural selection sees,

they should also be able to see what it is about it that is

beneficial—and hence why natural selection has favored it.

Thus they should be well on their way to constructing a story

about why consciousness evolved.

Still, do not get me wrong about this. I am not suggesting

that because consciousness has been designed by natural

selection, this means that every one of the features of the

design must be able to be seen from the outside. Rather, what it

means is that every one of these features must be contributing

to the beneficial effects that natural selection does see.

It would be easy to misunderstand this, so let me tell a

parable to make it clearer. Imagine that in a certain country the

government has a Department of Happiness, whose minister

has the job of maximizing the general happiness of the

population. The minister must therefore be on the lookout for

things that put people into a good humor. One day he comes

across a group of people who are looking at a cartoon and

smiling broadly. From where he stands, the minister cannot

actually see the picture they are looking at, and so he does not

get the joke. Still, he can see the positive feelings the cartoon is

eliciting. And that is enough to persuade him to take

departmental action to “breed” this cartoon by ordering

additional cartoons in the same style. So he does this, and the

next day he sees more people laughing at the new drawings. He

repeats his order, and soon enough cartoons in this special style

are everywhere. The style has become, as it were, a ministerial

design feature. But note that at no point has the minister

himself needed to know what the cartoons look like. All he has

needed to see is evidence that the cartoons exist and that they

are funny.

My point is that, likewise, natural selection need never have

known what conscious experience is actually like for the

subject. All it must have seen is evidence that conscious

experience exists and that it is in some way life enhancing. This

being the case, it is possible and even quite likely that the

detailed phenomenal content of sensations will not ever have

been evident in behavior. And so today our visiting scientist,

while she

relies on outside observations, will be able to get only

halfway to discovering the facts of consciousness. She should

certainly be able to detect that the special inner state exists in

some creatures and that, in whatever way their behavior

suggests, it adds to their success in life. However, this may well

be as far as she can go.

10

Yet, what if she were able to search inside their heads? Why

do I believe that an observer who can go beyond behavior

down to the level of brain activity should be able to discover

all there is to know?

My reason is simply the guiding principle, which underlies

all science, that nothing interesting occurs without a material

cause. In short, miracles do not happen. When conscious

experience arises in a person’s mind, it is the outcome of events

in the brain. Moreover, if and when these events (in their

totality) occur, the outcome has to be that the person is

conscious (which is why the idea of a philosophical zombie

makes no sense). Thus, if a scientist can go inside and observe

these crucial events, she should be able, in principle, to deduce

what the outcome is—provided only that she has a theory

linking brain states to experience, a theory that enables her to

move from one level of description to the other.

What kind of theory would this be? Philosopher Dan Lloyd

has written: “What we need is a transparent theory. One that,

once you get it, you see that anything built like this will have

this particular conscious experience.”

11

We can draw an analogy with explaining the properties of

water. Scientists are able to deduce that a pail of molecules,

whose chemical composition is H2O, at room temperature will

have the physical properties of the substance we know as water

(fluidity,

wetness, and so on) because, with their understanding of

the laws of physical chemistry, they have a theory of why

water under its chemical description must amount to water

under its physical description.

Then, so too, we may reasonably hope that if and when

scientists have a comparable understanding of the laws of what

we may call neurophenomenology, so that they have a theory

of why brain activity under its neuroscientific description must

amount to mental activity under its experiential description,

they will be able to deduce that, for example, a man whose

brain is in a particular state is a man who is thinking such and

such thoughts.

12

It is already widely agreed by those who study mind-brain

relationships that it is the pattern of information flow in the

brain that determines mental states. I would say we can assume

therefore that the neurophenomenological laws will essentially

be laws about how experience is computed. Admittedly, apart

from having this one insight, our scientists here on Earth are

nowhere near to discovering what the laws actually are. Still,

we need not doubt that the laws exist and will eventually be

found out. So, to continue with our story of the Andromedan

scientist, let us imagine that the theorists on Andromeda are far

more advanced than ours are, and—in anticipation of their

sister’s mission (or perhaps just for the fun of it)—they have

worked out ahead of time the relevant laws as they apply to

alien brains.

Thus, let us suppose the Andromedan scientist has arrived

among us prearmed with the theoretical tools she needs for

interpreting earthlings’ brain activity in experiential terms.

Where will this take her? Given what was said above, we may

assume that, on the basis of her purely behavioral observations,

she will already have concluded that in some of the

earthlings under study (notably, human beings) there does exist

a special inner state that is influencing their outlook on life—

though a state of which the detailed content is so far a mystery

to her. But now that her brain research is under way, she will,

with the help of the theory, be able to deduce that these

particular subjects are having experiences with exactly the

weird and wonderful phenomenal content that you and I know

so well firsthand.

“Well, blow me!” she may say. “Who’d have guessed it?”

For she will indeed have deduced the existence of qualia. She

will, as it were, have arrived at a complete description of the

private joke that lies behind the public smile.

Are you with me still? Or do you think I have tried to pull a

fast one on you (in fact, did I not try to pull it a few pages

back)? Can it be true that the Andromedan—who is not

conscious herself, remember—has discovered what

consciousness is really like? Or has she merely discovered its

pale shadow?

The big question, you may insist, is whether the scientist,

when she examines the brain of someone who is having a

conscious sensation, can deduce what that person’s experience

actually is, and not merely deduce a description of what that

experience is (and calling it a “phenomenological description”

simply begs the question).

But, no, I have not pulled a fast one. Rather, if you make

this objection, I would say you have just pulled a fast one on

yourself. You have fallen for the tempting idea that there is

something conscious experience actually is that is separate

from what the subject thinks it is—that is, the mental

representation that he makes of it. But it is not so. If you do not

see

this now, I hope to persuade you of it as we go on. To give

a foretaste of what is coming, in the very next chapter I will

argue that what I called at the start of this book the inadequate

phrase “it’s like something” is not such a bad phrase after all.

Because, when it comes to it, for a subject to have a sensory

experience that is like something really is for him to represent

the object of experience as if it is something with some very

peculiar features. In short, for the subject to have a sensory

experience that is like something is just for him to experience it

as what it is like.

The philosopher John Searle (with whom, on the question

of consciousness, I agree about very little) put his finger on this

point precisely when he wrote: “If it seems to me exactly as if I

am having conscious experiences, then I am having conscious

experiences.”

13

Just so. “Seems to Searle exactly as if” can only mean “is

represented mentally by Searle exactly as being.”

What follows from this? Since mental representations can,

in principle, always be described or re-represented in some

public medium—they would not count as representations

otherwise—it surely follows that, despite what was said above

about the de facto incommunicability of private experience, it

must be possible in principle to describe what it is like to be

conscious.

It is undeniably true that, as of now, we humans do not

know how to do this satisfactorily. We lack both the theory and

the language for the job. But these, we should assume, are

contingent limitations—already overcome in Andromeda and

soon enough to be overcome back here on Earth.

I would say we should acknowledge that the

phenomenological descriptions of conscious experience that

will feature in the final theory will probably require a new

vocabulary,

even a new grammar.

14

But we should not be too alarmed by this, let alone see it as

a reason for giving up. It has happened before in the history of

science that scientists required a new conceptual language

before they could move on—and yet, after initial awkwardness

and even disbelief, soon enough everyone gets used to it.

Think, for example, of how mathematics has had to come to

terms with “complex numbers” involving the square root of

minus one, or of “transfinite numbers” that are bigger than

infinity. Think of how physics has had to come to terms with

relativity.

Future descriptions of conscious experience will almost

certainly require concepts that sit oddly with our standard ways

of thinking today. I already remarked at the opening of this

chapter that the problem with saying “it is like something” to

be conscious is that what it is like seems to us—no, is to us—

unlike anything else out there in the material world. The

phenomenal experience of the “subjective present” as existing

in “thick time”—as I have attempted to describe it elsewhere

15

and as I will revisit shortly—is perhaps just such an

apparently essential yet nonsensical concept.

Yet, let us stick with our story. We have assumed that

scientists on Andromeda are well ahead of us in recognizing the

neurophenomenological laws. Contained within this

assumption must be the assumption that they have already

developed a suitably esoteric language for describing conscious

experience (even if the development of this language must have

been, as it were, “on spec,” since the Andromedans, having

never encountered creatures such as human beings before,

cannot yet have had occasion to apply it).

16

So we are assuming that our visitor will have the tools for

describing what it is like for us, even if we humans at present

do not.

However, I do not want to make our own inadequacy an

absolute sticking point. To claim—as many philosophers

would—that consciousness is essentially ineffable is to

underestimate human ingenuity and creativity. As we will see

later in this book, humans may be more capable of expressing

publicly what it is like to be conscious than the philosophical

and scientific skeptics would have us believe—though when

they do so, they “cheat” by using the language of art rather

than that of science. Well, we will see.

17

This introductory chapter, which started off so breezily, is

getting heavy. It is time to sum up—and lighten up, if possible.

I wanted the Andromedan scientist’s help with the project

of understanding the hard problem—the nature of

consciousness—because I hoped that to see the problem from

her perspective might provide us with some useful guidelines

for our own inquiry. Whatever the differences between us and

her are, I take it that science is science wherever in the

universe it is being done. What counts as evidence and

conclusions for this researcher from a far-off galaxy should be

what counts as such for us on Earth. That is why I asked above

what will the Andromedan find out about consciousness, and

what will she not. I assume this is what, at the limits of our

human abilities, we can expect to find out too.

Here is the score.

We have established that the Andromedan scientist will be

able to discover at a behavioral level crucial hints that

consciousness is present in some creatures. At the very least,

she will discover that consciousness is having certain beneficial

effects—these are the effects on which natural selection has

been acting in the course of evolution. She will discover that

consciousness exists and—in the larger picture—what

consciousness is for.

Nevertheless, while she stays on the outside, she will

probably be unable to reach a deep understanding of the

contents of consciousness. This is because the crucial features

of what it is like for the subject will, in normal circumstances,

probably be hidden from public view—even though these

features are ultimately responsible for the beneficial effects.

To find out more of the details, she will have to go inside.

When she does so, using all the neuroscientific techniques at

her disposal, she should indeed be able to discover everything

about what it is like to be conscious, provided she has a theory.

But this neurophenomenological theory will have to be a new

and remarkable theory: not a theory that we human beings can

never get to understand (as some philosophers, notably Colin

McGinn, have suggested),

18

but certainly a theory we will not understand until we have

put in some more work.

So now, let me set out my agenda for this work and my

book. What I plan to do is to emulate, in my own way, the

Andromedan scientist’s investigation. Yet, because, first, I am

not as clever as she is, and, second, I am a living example of

the phenomenon under investigation, my strategic goals will be

a little different.

On Andromeda, I have suggested, scientists have already

developed the theoretical tools for solving the hard problem of

how matter could in principle give rise to consciousness, even

if they have never yet come across a case of consciousness in

fact. By contrast, we humans know consciousness exists in fact,

but we do not at the moment have the theory of it. The first task

for the book, then, must be to come up with at least the

beginnings of a plausible theory of what consciousness is

and how it relates to the brain. To do this I will, in the next

few chapters, argue for a radically new account of what we

mean when we say that “it is like something” to experience

sensations. I will make a proposal as to what the thing in the

brain that the subject represents as “being like something”

really is, and I will suggest what its biological origins in

nonconscious animals may have been.

The Andromedan scientist, I have assumed, being

completely new to the world of conscious creatures, will, at the

start, have no idea what difference consciousness is making at

either the private or the public level, let alone what good, if

any, comes of it. By contrast, we humans know rather a lot

about the difference that consciousness is making to our private

lives, though we are far from understanding how this translates

into public benefits. The second task for the book then will be

to figure out—knowing what we already do—how being

conscious changes people’s psychology (and perhaps that of

other conscious animals as well) in ways that ultimately

increase their chances of survival.

Having read this far, you may be nervous that the book is

going to be unduly scientistic. Do not worry. There is indeed

work to be done. We need to get the science right if we can.

But my book is called Soul Dust, and it will live up to that title.

The book will continue with some hard-going philosophical

analysis, but it will end with a fairy tale—a scientifically based

fairy tale—about how consciousness lights up the world.

PART ONE

2 Being “Like Something”

So we want a theory of what being conscious is like and

how this could result from the activity of nerve cells in the

brain. If only it did not make us feel so queasy just to think

about it! Four hundred years ago René Descartes described his

own plight as a human mind trying to think about the nature of

its own experience: “It feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly

into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that I can

neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top.”

1 We need something to help us get our bearings. Some

clever new idea. Yet where to look for it? If I say I want to start

with the language people use, you may be disappointed.

Surely, you may think, philosophers in the last century pretty

well exhausted that approach without solving any important

scientific problems. Maybe it is true that Ludwig Wittgenstein,

in his Philosophical Investigations, helped clear the air around

consciousness

by showing how the ways people talk about mental states

can lead them astray, creating conundrums and mysteries that

do not really exist. But did not Wittgenstein’s analysis prove

signally unhelpful to understanding what does exist?

Yes, it did. However, that was then. And the zeitgeist of

consciousness studies is very different fifty years later. The

identification of the problem of qualia as the “hard problem”

has changed what questions are worth asking.

2

When the price of gold goes up, it can be worth reopening

seams that were supposedly mined out long ago.

“It is like something.” I do not know when people—at least

those writing in English—first started to use this phrase to refer

to the essence of being conscious. But the use was already well

established when Tom Nagel, in 1974, wrote his famous essay

“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” In that essay Nagel simply

asserted (rather as I did in the previous chapter) that being like

something is the defining property of consciousness:

“Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and

only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—

something it is like for the organism.”

3

He took it for granted that his readers would understand what

he was referring to. And so it seems they did. The fact that this

way of talking has subsequently become widespread in both

philosophical and popular writing suggests that it must

somehow sit peculiarly well with people’s first-person

understanding of what being conscious means.

Why ever should this be? Since words gain their meaning

from how they are used across the language, presumably the

use of “it is like something” in relation to consciousness must

have something in common with its use in other contexts.

So, can we look to ordinary English for a clue?

Now, in pretty much every other situation, when we say “X

is like Y” (for example, “This wine is like a Beaujolais”), what

we mean is that in our view X resembles Y or X shares some

salient property with Y. However, we mean something rather

more than this too. Note that we would never say “X is like Y”

when we know that X actually is Y. So when we say “X is like

Y,” we mean X shares some particular property with Y, but—

so far as we know at this time—it does not share all its other

properties. True, sometimes we may want to imply that since it

shares at least this particular property, X could share all of its

other properties with Y. But there has to be at the least some

uncertainty about it. It has to be unconfirmed whether X is Y in

fact. “This wine is like a Beaujolais, it could even be a

Beaujolais, though I’m not sure it is not actually a Chianti.”

Suppose, then, that when we say “it is like something for

someone to experience a sensation,” we mean the subject is

literally likening his sensation to something in just this sense.

What might this tell us about consciousness?

I proposed already in the previous chapter that for someone

to be conscious of having a sensation must involve his

representing the object of experience as something with

properties of a special and peculiar kind. But now this would be

taking matters considerably further. It would be suggesting that

for someone to be conscious of having the sensation involves

his representing the object of experience as if it is something

that it may not be— something he has certainly not been able to

confirm it is.

Let us suppose the someone in question is you.

4

Then, when you say “it is like something for me to see

red,” for example, you would be implying that, strictly

speaking, your sensation is a hypothetical entity. Indeed, if we

were to follow this line, I would go beyond this: I think you

would be implying that the sensation is intrinsically

hypothetical, for the phenomenology suggests that the as-if,

unconfirmed quality of the representation is not just a

temporary or remediable condition. When you say it is like

something to see red, you are not allowing that soon enough

you may discover the truth about whether the sensation actually

is this something. You would never expect to say: “I thought

the red sensation merely resembled this, but then I found out it

actually was this.”

No. Sensations, it would seem, are always as-if. So, in this

regard, the being-like-something of sensations is different from

the being-like-something of the wine. With the wine, if you say

“it is like a Beaujolais,” you are assuming there is a

discoverable fact of the matter as to whether it actually is a

Beaujolais or a Chianti. With sensations, however, if you say

“it is like something for me to see red,” you are assuming no

such thing: whatever the fact of the matter about the red

sensation, it is not discoverable by you as the subject—nothing

could help you to decide once and for all whether what it is

like is what it is.

But this is remarkable. What can be going on, such that it

would make sense to say of X that it resembles Y, even though

you could never in principle have the evidence to alter your

opinion about whether X actually is Y?

There is only one set of circumstances I can think of where

this might be appropriate: it would be when you recognize

that Y does not or could not exist as an entity belonging to

the ordinary world where you can test things, but might exist in

another world with different rules to which you have no direct

access—indeed, where X is evidence of there being such

another world.

Imagine, by analogy, that you are facing a wall on which

the shadows of solid objects passing behind you are being cast

by the light of a blazing fire some distance farther back. What

do these shadows look like to you? “This shadow is like a cart.”

“This one is like a bird.” But you cannot confirm that the

objects are what their shadows resemble because you cannot

turn around and enter directly into their three-dimensional

world.

I have taken you now—you may be as surprised as I am—

to Plato’s famous story of the cave. In The Republic Plato uses

this analogy to explain how there might exist a world of

transcendental entities—“pure forms” or “substances”—of

which human beings have only indirect and partial knowledge.

I did not expect our discussion to lead so soon to Plato’s

metaphysics. But now that it has, let me cite a revealing remark

by the painter Bridget Riley. Writing about visual sensations,

she says: “For all of us, colour is experienced as something—

that is to say, we always see it in the guise of a substance.”

5

Does her choice of that word, “substance,” suggest she

believes that we do indeed liken sensation to something

belonging to a higher level of reality? The phenomenal is

transcendental? Is that what we imply by using the language

of “it’s like”?

Well, maybe, kind of. I hope all will become clearer in due

course. But now let us explore this idea further, without asking

for too much clarity at the beginning. Suppose it were so; what

kind of transcendental/phenomenal world might we be talking

about? With the analogy of the cave leading us on, let

me suggest, to start with, that this would have to be a world

that requires at least one novel extra dimension to describe it

(whether a physical or a conceptual dimension, we will see).

And yet what would be the status of such a world? Would it

have to exist for real?

I am sure that for most people “consciousness realism” is

irresistible. Sensations undoubtedly exist, and sensations are

like entities in the phenomenal world. So presumably the

phenomenal world must have a substantive existence. But even

though this may be how most laypeople see it, it is another

question entirely whether theoreticians should see it this way

too. Since things in this other world apparently have such

exotic properties, and since their existence cannot be

independently confirmed, surely we ought to consider seriously

the possibility that it is some kind of make-believe—not real at

all but an illusion. That is, sensation might be merely

appearing, as Riley so well put it, in the guise of a substance.

Yet this would point to further remarkable goings-on. If the

phenomenal properties of sensation are an illusion, this can

hardly be just a stroke of good luck. Conscious experience is

altogether too impressive—even too perfect—to have been

thrown together by chance. There would obviously have had to

be some method behind it. In short, the evidence that leads you

to believe in the existence of phenomenal entities would have

had to be planted. We would be dealing, as it were, with a

coup de théâtre.

Let us pause for breath and collect these thoughts. From

examining the phrase “it is like something to be conscious,” we

have now raised an extraordinary possibility, or rather two.

First, from the subject’s point of view, consciousness appears

to be a gateway to a transcendental world of as-if entities.

Second, from the point of view of theory, consciousness is the

product of some kind of illusion chamber, a charade.

Is this the clever new idea we need? Consciousness as a

Platonic shadow play performed in an internal theater, to

impress the soul! It would certainly take us into interesting new

territory. It might even explain why the hard problem

sometimes seems not just intractable but so gloriously

intractable.

The philosopher Natika Newton has remarked,

“Phenomenal consciousness itself is sui generis. Nothing else

is like it in any way at all.”

6

The Koran says of Allah, “[Allah is] the originator of the

heavens and the earth . . . [there is] nothing like a likeness of

Him.”

7

When the going gets mysterious, mysteries get going.

Suddenly the quasi-magical properties of qualia would no

longer pose such a problem.

8

Magic is just what is to be expected in a magic show.

But that is for later. I would say the immediate reason to be

pleased with this idea as the basis for a scientific theory of

consciousness is that it allows us to start thinking about the

brain basis of it all. If sensations were truly to have out-of-this-

world properties, there is no question that the search for a

theory would be in trouble. However, it is an entirely different

story if sensations merely have as-if out-of-this-world

properties.

Let us exchange Plato’s cave for a more humdrum analogy. I

want to return to the model that you may have realized I have

had in mind since early on: the “real impossible triangle” with

which I opened the previous chapter. It is becoming clearer

where to steer the line of thought.

Suppose, once more, you were to be confronted by the

wooden object, the Gregundrum, as shown next in

figure 3

. Now, however, for the sake of argument, I want to place

you squarely in the special position of Observer A in this

diagram, the one position from which it appears that the top

arms of the triangle are coincident so that you see the whole

thing as joined up.

Figure 3.

As we noted earlier, if only you could move to the position

of Observer B, you would see things differently. But this time,

let us suppose, so as to give you a truly special perspective on

it, that things are rigged so that, as and when you move around

the object, some hidden hand turns it so that it is always facing

you in the same way. (Compare how it is to look in a mirror

and to find your eyes always looking straight back at you.)

Then, what does the object look like to you? You see it

presumably as an impossible object. You represent it in your

mind as such. If asked to explain what you are perceiving to

other people, you might very well prefer to define it ostensively

by inviting them to come and see it for themselves from your

position.

However, assuming there is no opportunity for them to do

this, I expect you could, if pressed, tell them about it in

words—that is, you could describe the perceived object as it

does indeed appear to you.

Here, I will do it for you (refer back, if you like, to the

larger illustration of

figure 1

). “What I see is an unbroken solid triangular object, made

of three square-cross-section posts of equal length. The posts

are connected at right angles, so that, starting at the bottom left

corner, the arm to the right is angled away from me at 45

degrees; at the right corner the arm to the left is angled away at

45 degrees; at the top corner the arm downward is angled away

at 45 degrees.”

The description is surely accurate so far. This is indeed

what you perceive the object to be in terms of its elements. Yet,

even as you perceive it as being this, you are well aware that

such a triangle as a whole could not possibly exist in the

ordinary world. So, I would guess you will want to add: “What

I see is either (a) evidence of there being a world to which the

rules of physics do not apply or (b) some kind of trick.”

However, since no one in his right mind would posit the

existence of a nonphysical world merely because he is

confronted by a wooden object that he cannot explain,

“everything considered, this has to be a trick.”

9

So, how does this bear on the mystery of sensations and

qualia? What I suggest is that the logic of the situation you find

yourself in when you have a sensation is very much the same as

when you are confronted by the Gregundrum—although the

psychological impact is different in two crucial respects.

You look at a ripe tomato, for example, and in response to

the red light reaching your eyes, something happens in your

brain that you experience as the sensation of red. We can say

that, like Observer A, you clearly have a special perspective

on this brain activity. It is only from your privileged position as

the subject of the experience that the brain activity does indeed

come across as a conscious sensation. An outside observer, if

she could observe this same brain activity, would be like

Observer B and never get it.

Then, what does the sensation feel like to you? You

experience it as having the phenomenal quality of “red,” which,

strange to say, is somehow out of this world. Again you

represent it in your mind as such. If asked to explain to others,

your first thought, as with the triangle, will be to invite them to

share the wonder of it by experiencing it for themselves.

However, if there is no opportunity for them to do this, it is

now a different story from the triangle, because you will not

find it straightforward to describe it. In fact, you may find

yourself completely tongue-tied.

So here is the first difference. The phenomenal qualities of

sensations are next to impossible to communicate to other

people. It seems it is not possible even to say what is

impossible about them. People have, of course, tried to put

words—or pictures or music—to their experience. I will have

occasion later to cite many bold attempts to capture and

communicate what consciousness is like.

The painter Wassily Kandinsky, whose preferred medium

for celebrating consciousness was the painted canvas, had this

to say about sensation: “Color is a power which directly

influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the

hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings.

10

You may or may not relate to this as true of what it is like

for you. Still, Kandinsky’s words at least hint at the majesty

and mystery of the phenomenon.

Suppose, then, we let the epithet “soul-hammering” do duty

for the description that otherwise seems so elusive. Then, soul-

hammering is what you experience the sensation as being. Yet

soul-hammering does not correspond to any conceivable

quality of the material world. So now, again, you have two

choices about the interpretation: “What I am experiencing is

either (a) evidence of there being an alternative transcendental

soul-hammering reality or (b) some kind of illusion.”

But here is the second crucial difference. For, now, with

sensations, it seems that many a person in his right mind is

prepared to posit the existence of a nonphysical world just

because he is confronted by an entity he cannot explain.

“Everything considered, this suggests I have one foot in

heaven.” I am exaggerating. But not much. When in later

chapters we get to explore the psychological effects of

consciousness, we will see just how far the change in self-

image can go.

I am running ahead. The point I want to make at this stage

is that there does seem to be a formal similarity between, on the

one hand, representing sensations as like something and, on the

other, representing the Gregundrum as like something.

Although what you make of these representations, in the larger

scheme of things, is certainly different, the logic of experience

is the same.

Then where should we take this next? There is a

philosophical term of art, “intentionality,” that I think may

come in useful here. Philosophers say that whenever you form

a mental representation of something—when, for example, you

represent object X in the world as object Y in your mind—the

representing is an “intentional state.” What the term

“intentional” is meant to capture is that the representing is

about

something, it points to or fingers Y (“intendere” is Latin for

“to take aim at”). Expanding on this, we can say that object Y,

the thing the representing is about, is the “intentional object,”

whereas object X, the thing that gives rise to the representation,

is the “real-world source.”

In practice, the Xs and Ys sometimes come to the same

thing. Using your eyes, for example, you may perceive a

physical object to be pretty much what a physicist using his

instruments would say it is—a cricket ball as a red leather ball,

say. In that case, the distinction between the real-world source

and the intentional reading collapses. But it is often the case

that X and Y do not come to the same thing at all: you perceive

a physical object to be something more or other than what the

physicist would say it is—a piece of paper as a dollar bill, a

pattern in the clouds as the face of a cat, a pile of old clothes in

the bedroom as the ghost of your dead grandfather.

Then how about the Gregundrum? This is, of course, a

particularly interesting and revealing case. On one hand, when

you look at the Gregundrum from the special position, the

object as you perceive it—which is the impossible triangle—

becomes the intentional object of your perception. Meanwhile,

the thing you are actually looking at, the wooden object that

was constructed to deceive you, is the real-world source. On the

other hand, when you look at the Gregundrum from anywhere

other than the special position, then the object as you perceive

it—the weird object as it physically is—becomes the

intentional object of perception. And now this is in fact also the

real-world source. Thus, if we return to the situation illustrated

in figure 3

, we find that for Observer A the intentional object and the

real-world source are nothing like each other, whereas for

Observer B they coincide.

What, now, if consciousness were to be an illusion of a

similar kind? Would this not mean we ought, in the case of

consciousness too, to make a distinction between the

intentional object and the real-world source? Exactly. Then let

us do it.

Let us suppose that when you have a sensation, when it is

like something for you to see red, for example, this mysterious

thing it is like is “the intentional object of consciousness.” Then

there has to be a real-world source for this—some physical

activity in your brain that you, from your special position as the

conscious subject, engage with and represent as having the

phenomenal properties. But assuming, as before, that this is not

an accident, this brain activity would have to be nothing less

than some kind of “sensational Gregundrum,” something that

has been created precisely so as to give rise to the

consciousness illusion.

What and where could this wonderful thing be? Actually

we already got halfway to identifying it a few paragraphs back.

“You look at a ripe tomato, for example, and in response to the

red light reaching your eyes, something happens in your brain

that you experience as the sensation of red.” But the phrase

“something happens” is much too weak, and “in response to the

red light” is too weak too. Sensation does, of course, have

specifically sensory qualities, so we can safely assume the

brain activity in question is typically some kind of a response to

stimulation of the sense organs. But sensation—as we will see

in the next chapter—is nothing if it is not personal and affect

laden. So I would say the brain activity that constitutes the

sensational Gregundrum must be something that you create in

response to what the stimulation arriving at your body surface

means for you. But this rather changes the picture. It suggests

that the thing to which you are attributing those marvelous

esoteric properties is in fact your own creation, something

you are doing. Thus, if you are being tricked by an illusionist, it

is not by an outside agent, no Richard Gregory scheming in his

lab; it is by some part of yourself. The sensational Gregundrum

is really an ipsundrum (from the Latin ipse, “self”).

“Ipsundrum” is what I will, from now on, call this

hypothesized, illusion-generating inner creation in response to

sensory stimulation. It is an odd sort of word. But I am not

unhappy with that. It is an odd sort of thing.

So there we are. We wanted a theory of how “it is like

something” to be conscious of sensations. And now we have

one. Consciousness is a magical mystery show that you lay on

for yourself. You respond to sensory input by creating, as a

personal response, a seemingly otherworldly object, an

ipsundrum, which you present to yourself in your inner theater.

Watching from the royal box, as it were, you find yourself

transported to that other world.

I know that philosophers in recent years have mocked the

idea of there being a so-called Cartesian Theater, where the

brain creates a picture of the outside world for the edification of

the mind. Daniel Dennett, the leading critic, writes: “The

persuasive imagery of the Cartesian Theater keeps coming back

to haunt us—laypeople and scientists alike—even after its

ghostly dualism has been denounced and exorcized.”

11

He is right, of course, to reject the idea that there could be

a place inside your head where one part of your brain creates a

faithful replica of the world for another part of your brain to

look at (and what part of your brain would look at the replica of

the replica?). But let us note that, despite its entry into the

philosophical literature, this is a bad use of the word

“theater,” and it is certainly not the kind of theater I am now

proposing.

Replication is not what theaters are about. Instead, theaters

are places where events are staged in order to comment in one

way or another on the world—to educate, persuade, entertain.

In this sense, the idea that one part of your brain might stage a

theatrical show in order to influence the judgment of another

part of your brain is perfectly reasonable—indeed, biologically

reasonable, as we will see.

12

3 Sentition

Consciousness is a self-created entertainment for the

mind? A show that dramatically changes your outlook on life,

so as to help you—however indirectly—to propagate your

genes?

I may say I have some hopes for this theory, once we have

properly fleshed it out. However, I do not expect everyone to

be convinced it is a good idea just yet. And among the several

reasons why you would be right to be skeptical would be this.

As things stand, this is a theory that would seem to have been

invented for the sole purpose of “saving the phenomena”; in

other words, providing a plausible explanation of the facts in

front of us—namely, the curious things people say and imply

about the inner state they are in when they are having

sensations. What is lacking are any ancillary reasons to believe

it is a true account.

1

I would argue that even if this is all our theory can do—

save the phenomena—this would be a major advance, since

there is no competing theory that can do so much. I would go

further and suggest that if we were to build a humanoid robot

on these lines, with its own designed inner theater where self-

generated illusory sensory objects—ipsundrums—were on

show, this robot might be able to pass itself off as being

phenomenally conscious; it would make all the right claims

about the soul-hammering qualities of its experience,

ineffability, privileged access, and so on.

2

But why say “pass itself off”? Arguably, this would

amount to the real thing. The building of such a robot would

certainly be an advance too.

Yet I realize we want more than this; we want our theory to

be true not of robots but of human beings and other conscious

creatures as they have evolved here on Earth. Which means we

must show, if we can, how it relates to what we already know

of the evolution of animal nervous systems. This theory of

consciousness as a stage show will deserve to be taken much

more seriously if we can argue that before consciousness ever

arose, animals were already engaging in some kind of inner

monitoring of their own responses to sensory stimulation. If

this is indeed how things started, then it will be relatively easy

to argue that sensations acquired their new and amazing

properties by the accepted Darwinian route of “descent with

modification.”

It has to be said that no one knows for sure how things

started. We do not have an authoritative, empirically grounded

account of what the early evolutionary history of sensation was.

But there have been recent attempts by scientists and

philosophers—including me—to reconstruct this

history from first principles.

3

So, I am now going to give you a summary sketch of my

own version (with the assurance that the missing parts of the

story can be found elsewhere).

4

Let me start with some definitions and distinctions.

What is sensation? In modern human beings, sensation—

for all its special phenomenal features—is still essentially the

way in which you represent your interaction with the

environmental stimuli that touch your body: red light at your

eyes, sugar on your tongue, pressure on your skin, and so on. It

is important to recognize that sensation is not the same thing as

perception. Perception is the way you represent the objective

world out there beyond your body: the chair in the kitchen, the

tall tree in the garden, the thunder booming in the night sky.

Sensation, by contrast, is always about what is happening to

you and how you feel about it: “the pain is in my toe and

horrible,” “the sweet taste is on my tongue and sickly,” “the

red light is before my eyes and stirs me up.” It is as if, in

having sensations, you are both registering the fact of

stimulation and expressing your personal bodily opinion about

it—and indeed, as will emerge shortly from my analysis, I

believe you are doing just that.

Now, sensation as human beings experience it is, of course,

a state of mind: a cognitive state in which you represent things

to yourself as being this way. Yet, we can assume that,

historically, sensation had simpler beginnings. Indeed, we can

be sure that our own far-distant ancestors must have been

sensitive to stimuli, reacting to environmental stimulation in a

purely reflex way, long before they had anything that could be

called a mind.

We can be sure of it not least because we can still see

evidence of mindless sensitivity all around us. In fact, one of

the great branches of life on Earth never took things further.

Many plants today show adaptive bodily responses to stimuli—

opening their petals to the sun, drooping at the touch of a

predator, closing their jaws to trap an insect, leaning over in the

direction of a suitable host. A plant’s responses can show

discrimination and purposiveness. We might even say they are

a behavioral expression of how the plant evaluates the stimulus:

the daisy welcomes the sun, the mimosa recoils from the

deer’s attention. Except, of course, that these evaluations are

hard-wired and automatic. No feelings are involved.

5

We should assume, then, that our distant ancestors—let’s

suppose them to be, say, wormlike creatures living in the

Cambrian seas—were in this respect like plants. They too

would have reacted expressively to stimulation, in ways that

took precise account of the nature of the stimulus and how they

evaluated it. But, at least to begin with, it would have been a

mindless activity: expression without mental representation.

Unlike plants, however, our ancestors were mobile and

free-living animals. They found themselves living in a

relatively fast-changing and complex world. Thus, even while

they continued to show set patterns of response, they must,

soon enough, have come under pressure to raise their game by

developing more “thoughtful” kinds of behavior. They needed

not just to respond reflexly, but to form some kind of internal

picture of what they were responding to, so that they could

begin to engage in cognitive planning and decision making.

Yet, how to go about creating this mental picture, given where

they had gotten to already?

The answer was beautifully simple. When an organism is

already doing something about a stimulus reaching its body

surface, something specifically tailored to the particular

stimulus and its significance, then what the organism is doing is

potentially highly informative about what the stimulus is and

also what it means. Indeed, the expressive response as such is,

to anyone who cares to read it, already a form of

representation. It comes preloaded, as it were, with aboutness

and intentionality.

Think of how much you could tell about what is affecting a

man’s body by observing his behavior when, for example, he

flicks an insect from his arm, winces and covers his ears on

hearing the shriek of chalk on the blackboard, or savors a

chocolate in his mouth. For that matter, think what you could

learn by observing how the petals of a flower open and close as

the light changes.

6

But if you could tell so much from the outside, then in

principle so too could the subject who is making the response.

Indeed, if the subject were to have no other way of knowing

what was happening to his own body and how he felt about it,

he could find out by observing his own behavior. What is more,

since it is his behavior, he would not have to observe it from

the outside; he could do it by monitoring the motor command

signals he is issuing from his brain (perhaps by means of an

“efference copy”—a copy of the signals that has been shunted

to the side just for this purpose). The subject would, in effect,

have elevated his own behavior to the level of a performance

that he himself can read—not yet something that he is

specifically staging for that purpose, but nonetheless a de facto

source of information about what is going on.

The subject could find out like this in principle. And we

have good reasons to believe that this is precisely how the first

animals to form representations of what was happening to them

did find out in practice. Chief among these reasons is the fact

that sensations, as human beings experience them today, still

show all the signs of having been originally a representation of

self-generated bodily activity. We may note, especially, how

both sensations and bodily actions (i) belong to the subject, (ii)

implicate part of his body, (iii) are present tense, (iv) have a

qualitative modality, and (v) have properties that are

phenomenally immediate. (For readers who want to go further,

these resemblances are spelled out in more detail in the notes.)

7

Yet, if monitoring the command signals for expressive

responses was indeed the start of the story, the evolution of

sensation clearly did not rest there. In the early days, the

responses were real bodily responses, wriggles of acceptance or

rejection. The animal reacted to this stimulus with the

equivalent of a scowl, to that with a welcoming smile. But

humans today show little, if any, overt bodily response to most

sensory stimuli. In fact, it is clear that far in the past, long

before humans came on the scene, these overt responses

disappeared from view. And yet humans still feel the

stimulation. What happened?

What happened, I suggest, was that natural selection did

some tidying up. There must have come a point in the course of

evolution when the original expressive responses made by our

ancestors were no longer appropriate. At this point, other things

being equal, these responses would soon have been completely

eliminated. However, by this point other things were not equal

because the animal had become reliant on using the information

contained in the responses as the

basis for its mental representation of the stimulation at its

body surface.

Now, if the animal had been monitoring its responses by

observing from the outside, there would have been no way of

both eliminating the responses and preserving access to this

information. However, if the animal were in fact monitoring

not the actual behavior but the motor command signals, there

was a neat solution. This was that the responses should be

internalized—or, as I have put it, privatized.

How to do this? Given the requirement that the responses

should continue to carry relevant information about the

stimulus, they still had to implicate the locus of stimulation on

the body somehow. But this could be achieved without too

radical a transformation by converting the responses into

virtual responses at loci on a virtual body. Therefore, what

occurred, I suggest, was that the responses began to get short-

circuited before they reached the body surface, becoming

targeted instead at points closer and closer in on the incoming

sensory nerves, until eventually the whole process became

closed off as an internal circuit within the brain. In fact, as

things now stand in creatures like ourselves, the outgoing

command signals now project only as far as the body maps at

the level of the sensory cortex, where they interact with the

incoming signals from the sense organs to create, momentarily,

a self-entangling loop (see

figure 4

).

The upshot is that when today you experience sensory

stimulation, you are still responding to it—behind the scenes—

with something like the ancient pattern of bodily expression

handed down from distant ancestors. The response still retains

vestiges of its original evaluative function, its intentionality and

hedonic tone. But now it has become a virtual expression

occurring at the level of a virtual body, hidden inside your

head. Now it is indeed a kind of pantomime—something

whose purpose is no longer to do anything about the

stimulation but only to tell about it. Action has become acting.

Figure 4.

I have given a name to these internalized responses:

“sentition.” This name—somewhere between sensation,

expression, and exhibition—is meant to capture the creative

and staged quality of the response. More particularly, I have

spoken of the response to red light at your eyes, for example, as

“redding,” to salt on your tongue as “salting,” to noxious

stimulation on your skin as “paining,” and so on.

And where is the sensation you experience at the end of all

this? Sensation is where it has been since early on: sensation is

sentition—the privatized expressive activity—as monitored by

your mind.

Figure 5

illustrates how it works. Red light reflected from a tomato

arrives at your eyes, and you create an internalized expressive

response; you engage in redding. You monitor what you are

doing so as to discover what is happening to you. And the

representation you form of your own response is the sensation

of red. Thus, for you to have the sensation of red means nothing

other than for you to observe your own redding.

Figure 5.

This, then, I suggest was the history of sensation, up to—but

not yet at—the crucial point where the subject began to

represent his sensory responses as having mysterious

phenomenal qualities. Can we now see how this astonishing

new development would have come about?

I will not say it is all there yet. But it is surely looking

good. We wanted reassurance that the idea of consciousness as

a self-generated show could be supported by what we might

separately conclude about how sensation has evolved. Now the

evolutionary story is telling us that the ancestors of human

beings and other conscious creatures, since far back, have

indeed been showcasing their sensory responses—just so as to

learn from this how their bodies are being stimulated.

There is no reason to think that this internal monitoring of

sensory responses will in itself have been sufficient to bring on

consciousness. For the fact is that sentition, to begin with, will

simply have been a handed-down form of bodily expression

that will not have had any of the fancy properties that we

hypothesize are responsible for generating the subjective

illusion of being in the presence of mysterious qualia. Sentition,

in other words, will not—yet—have become that strange thing

the ipsundrum.

This implies, of course, that our ancestors were

nonconscious before they were conscious; what is more, that

they were nonconscious even after they began to form mental

representations of sensory stimulation and so could be deemed

to be fully sentient. This may strike us as a strange idea. What

would it be like to have nonphenomenal sensations—

sensations that provide you with all the requisite information,

but without any of the phenomenal quality you take for

granted? What would it be like, if I may put it so, to have

SENSATIONS as opposed to SENSATIONS? The answer has

to be that it would be “like” nothing in Nagel’s sense of the

term. This may be hard, if not impossible, for us to imagine.

Still, it is certainly a consequence of the theory that this was the

situation early on. Moreover, presumably this continues to be

the situation of many sentient animals today. Animals that have

not come under specific selection pressure to move to the next

stage and generate the consciousness illusion—worms, fish,

frogs—will not have done so.

But some did! I wrote just now that sentition will not—as

yet—have become that strange thing the ipsundrum. But the “as

yet” is why it is looking so good for our theory. For surely we

can claim that by the time preconscious creatures had evolved

to the point shown in

figure 5

, the ground was laid. At this point sentition will have been

perfectly placed to take on an enhanced new role, being already

a stage show of sorts, possibly needing only new direction to

become a magical stage show.

Figure 6.

Figure 6

—where I have taken literally the analogy between the

ipsundrum and the Gregundrum—illustrates what our theory

predicts happened next. You will see that the activity of

redding has taken on a remarkable new look.

4 Looping the Loop

So, the idea now is that, in the course of evolution, the

illusion-generating ipsundrum was conjured up out of

sentition. And our two questions must be: What happened, in

terms of brain engineering, to bring about this remarkable

advance? And why did natural selection favor this

development? In this chapter I will offer a suggestion about

what. The rest of the book will be devoted to the question why.

I cannot pretend to know what exactly went on at the level

of the brain. This will therefore be the least confident—and

possibly the most throwaway—chapter in the book. But you

would expect me to have something to say about the structural

basis of the innovation that I am arguing changed everything.

And so I will.

I feel justified in sharing some highly speculative ideas

with you on two grounds. First, I am convinced that, since the

ipsundrum has to be a real-world object, in the sense I

defined earlier, it must be within the capacity of science to

describe it. The neuroscientists Francis Crick and Christof

Koch have written: “The most difficult aspect of consciousness

is the so-called ‘hard problem’ of qualia—the redness of red,

the painfulness of pain, and so on. No one has produced any

plausible explanation as to how the experience of the redness of

red could arise from the actions of the brain. It appears fruitless

to approach this problem head-on.”

1

But I rather believe the opposite is true: if we do not

venture, we will not gain.

Second, I think it will be not too serious a matter if we get

the answer wrong. At least getting it wrong need not

compromise our discussion of the functional benefits of

consciousness, which will come later in the book. Let the

ipsundrum really be made of chalk while we conclude it is

made of cheese, and we can still go on to ask all the right

questions about what biological advantage creating the

ipsundrum brings (which, incidentally, allows me the luxury of

saying—and meaning it—that if you find parts of the argument

of the next few pages hard going, then it is okay to skip them

and go straight to

chapter 5

).

My starting point is that whatever was done to sentition, it

cannot have been much. Natural selection works by modifying

existing structures, and then only in easily available steps.

Given that sentition was already an internalized kind of bodily

expression, then this must have been the clay from which the

ipsundrum was modeled.

What I would like to do theoretically is to “reverse

engineer” this process. Ideally, this would mean we should

begin with what we want to explain as the end product, namely

sensation

with its phenomenal qualities as human beings experience it

today. Then we should work out what kind of real-world object

could possibly support this illusory experience. And then we

should try to trace the evolution of this structure backward.

Hopefully, at the end we should have discovered a route by

which, through a series of relatively minor quantitative changes

in sentition, a major qualitative change could have been

brought about in how it gets to be represented. I cannot say this

has been my strategy exactly. But you will recognize the spirit

of it in what follows.

Let us turn then to the phenomenology of sensation, with a

degree of attention we have not given it so far.

Consider any moment of sensory consciousness you will.

Drinking a cup of breakfast coffee. Rain falling on your head.

The sting of a stinging nettle. Staring at a starlit sky. This—

whatever “this” is that you are pointing to in your experience—

is how you, a human being, are representing the ipsundrum you

are creating. This, we are assuming, will not be what the real-

world object actually is, but it is what it is like.

Now, sensation, we can all agree, has special qualities on a

variety of levels. Let me list the most salient (while offering

excuses, as always, for the inadequacy of the language here).

There is the sense you have of being there, present and

embodied, and yet as if on a separate plane of existence

from the physical world that carries you.

There is the feeling of singularity, of occupying a place

in the universe that cannot be accessed by anyone or

anything else.

There is the paradoxical sense of living outside the

physical instant, as if in a moment of thick subjective

time.

There is the quality space you have entered, where

every sensation is created out of a sense-organ-specific

medium—light, sound, taste, smell, touch—with a

seemingly unbridgeable gulf between these sensory

domains.

There is the strangely unjustifiable—unjustifiable

because to human reason unquestionable—nature of all

this.

There is the wondrous beauty of it all.

The ipsundrum must have a lot to answer for if it gives rise

to such a many-layered entertainment. We can safely say there

can be few types of real-world objects that could generate an

illusion on this scale: not just a one-trick pony, but a complete

cirque fantastique. Yet, conscious beings are living testament

that there was one type of object that could do it. And if

natural selection found it, and found it merely by modifying

sentition, then so I hope can we.

I will not tease you by holding back my answer. I think the

secret is that the ipsundrum is not so much a physical object as

a mathematical object. It is a complex dynamic pattern of

activity in neural circuits whose special properties are realized

and become “visible” only at the level of a computation that

integrates what happens over time. In short, the ipsundrum is a

bit like a developing thunderstorm, a bit like a wheeling flock

of starlings, a bit like a musical sonata.

I suggest that what is supporting this pattern of activity at

the brain level is the existence of reentrant feedback loops—

loops

that allow the activity initiated by external stimulation to

become, for a brief while at least, self-sustaining. Such

feedback would have been a relatively easy thing for natural

selection to arrange, because the ground had already been laid

by the privatization of sentition. Since the earliest days, when

the sensory responses were an overt kind of bodily expression,

these responses would have been influencing the stimulation to

which they were a response, so the potential for feedback was

already there (think, for example, of what happens when you

scratch an itch). To begin with, the feedback would have been

too uncoordinated and slow to have had any interesting

emergent properties. However, once sentition became

internalized and the return pathway much shortened (see

figure 4

in the last chapter), conditions would have been ripe for the

activity in the circuit to catch its own tail and so begin to cycle

around and around.

Then, all at once, things will have been ready to take off.

Once there is recursion in a loop like this, the potential will be

there for generating dynamic patterns with properties that are

very strange indeed. All that has to happen is that each time the

activity cycles around the circuit, the transmission

characteristics of the circuit are altered by this activity. In that

case, the way in which the activity develops in each new cycle

will depend on the level of activity the previous time around.

The growth of activity in such a circuit will be governed by

what is called “a delay differential equation.” A delay

differential equation (DDE) is an equation where the evolution

of the system at a certain time, t, say, depends on the state of

the system at an earlier time, t-T, say.

What happens then is that the activity, once started, if it

does not quickly die away, will either develop chaotically,

never settling down, or soon settle into a “basin of attraction”—

an “attractor state” in which the same pattern repeats itself

indefinitely and to which it returns even if disturbed.

Figure 7

shows a simple example of an attractor state, where the

stable pattern can be described by the path of a line in a three-

dimensional graph.

2

However, typically the attractor will turn out to be very

much more complicated and will occupy a higher-dimensional

landscape. That is, while the pattern is still stable and has a

precise mathematical description, it would require a graph with

more than three dimensions to portray it. The number of

additional dimensions can be very large indeed. In fact, there

will be cases where it would require a graph with an infinite

number of dimensions.

Figure 7. A typical discrete delay differential attractor.

But is this not exactly the kind of thing we have been

looking for?

3

Suppose that natural selection, in designing the ipsundrum,

had all those extra dimensions to play with. The mind boggles

(perhaps literally) at the possibilities for creating

mathematical objects in the brain that when “seen” by an

internal observer, would give rise to the illusion of something

with extraordinary otherworldly properties.

Of course, insofar as the ipsundrum must be observed from

a unique position for the illusion to work, natural selection

would also have had to arrange for the internal observer to have

this special perspective. But, now it comes to it, I wonder

whether perhaps this condition could be relaxed. It is an

intrinsic feature of attractors that they are resistant to

perturbation: they are indeed “basins” into which things tend to

fall, so that the developing activity ends up in the same state, no

matter where it started from. Arguably, this very feature could

have been exploited so as to give the ipsundrum the same

illusionary look no matter where it was seen from. I wrote

earlier, in relation to the Gregundrum, let us suppose “that

things are rigged so that, as and when you move around the

object, some hidden hand turns it so that it is always facing you

in the same way.” Would it not be neat if this could be taken

care of automatically, so that from the point of view of the

internal observer the ipsundrum as a mathematical object is

“self-positioning”?

At any rate, without more ado let me propose that this is the

solution. What natural selection did to bring consciousness

onstage was nothing other than to adjust the properties of

existing sensory feedback loops so as to steer the activity

toward a special class of attractor states—just such states as

would seem, from the subject’s point of view, to give

sensations their phenomenal qualities.

These are nice ideas. But I would have to agree they are still

very loosely formulated. And I am sure you would want

me to make some more specific suggestions before you come

onboard. So let me discuss one prominent feature of sensation

that I believe can be explained—perhaps can only be

explained—along these lines. It is a feature we have already

identified as a key element of sensory phenomenology, and one

that many commentators have considered fundamental. This is

the peculiar way that time enters in.

Imagine yourself looking at a cascading waterfall or

listening to the song of a skylark. Physical time is flowing

linearly forward, with no letup in the relentless passage from

instant to instant. The stimuli that are reaching your sense

organs are always changing. Many a new stimulus is over just

as soon as it arrives.

But this is not how you experience it at the level of

sensation. Rather, the present moment, the “now” of sensation,

has a paradoxical dimension of temporal depth. Each instance

of sensation is still there for you for a brief period after you

create it, as if it happens for longer than it happens. Thus

successive instances are co-present in consciousness. But this is

not because the old is lasting into the time territory of the new;

it is because each new instance lives on for a little while in its

own time. You have co-presence of sensations without

simultaneity.

The paradoxical status of time in the experience of

sensations has been remarked on since the dawn of philosophy.

Aristotle, in his book Of the Senses, struggled—as we still

do—to describe it. Here is a modern commentary on what

Aristotle meant to say: “The undivided ‘now’ of sensation must

rest upon a duration with which it does not altogether coincide;

the present moment must conceal, within itself, the passing of

another, immeasurable by its own standard. . . . It is another

time; to the degree to which time cannot admit of varieties of

itself, it may well be something other than any time at all.”

4

We may well ask: What is going on? What could possibly

give rise to the illusion—for of course it must be an illusion—

that the past is still present, as if you are living in “thick time”?

Can we imagine some kind of ipsundrum that would appear to

the subject to endure without ever getting older? Is there a type

of attractor that could take us there?

Because of Douglas Hofstadter’s groundbreaking work in a

related area, I believe there is an answer we can take right off

the peg. Hofstadter has pioneered the analysis of a special class

of feedback relationship that he calls a “strange loop.”

5

This exists in a system when there are several layers of

operation, the higher layers being built upon the lower, but in

which the higher layers are capable of reaching down and

changing the structure or rules of the lower levels. Cyclic

activity in such a loop is again described by a delay differential

equation, but in this case with a particularly remarkable

outcome. In Hofstadter’s words, the outcome, for someone

observing it, is that “in the series of stages that constitute the

cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or

structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in

a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive ‘upward’ shifts

turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s

sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up,

to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out.”

6

What would this be like for the observer on the inside?

Well, if you want a visual spatial metaphor, it might be like

climbing an endless staircase that always takes you back to the

same place you set off from (

figure 8

). Or if it is to be an auditory metaphor, it might be like

listening to a glissando where the sound seems always to be

falling or rising in pitch without the note ever changing (you

can hear such an amazing glissando online).

7

Figure 8.

But where might “unused time” come in? Let us look at it

this way. If you climb the staircase in

figure 8

and end up exactly at the height you started out, we would

conventionally describe this as having traveled no distance

upward. But space and time are equivalent in this peculiar

situation. So, if you climb the staircase and end up exactly

where you set out earlier, an equally good interpretation would

be that you have passed no time. Indeed imagine you were to

measure time by counting how many steps you have ascended:

one second, two second, three seconds . . . no seconds. You

would have spent time, without using it.

Now, to translate this back to sensation. Suppose that, in

responding to a sensory stimulus, you were to initiate activity

in a feedback loop whose attractor turned out to be just such a

strange mathematical object. Then, when you monitored

yourself doing this—and found yourself creating something

that from your first-person viewpoint would appear to be the

temporal analogue of an endless staircase—is it not possible

that you would find yourself having the experience of living in

the thick moment?

I do not know. But I daresay you might. In

figure 9

I have tried to illustrate how it could work. You will see (if

you can follow the diagrammatic convention) that things have

moved

on again since

figure 6

. The activity of redding has now acquired the interesting

new property of seeming to the subject to exist in its own

virtual time.

This is not, of course, all we need to explain the subjective

properties of qualia. But it is surely not a bad start. And having

made this start, I think we can see how we might take it further

by adding appropriate bells and whistles to sentition. If, as

theorists, we can describe just what it is that, as a feature of

sensory phenomenology, we want to add, I would hazard that it

ought to be within the power of the mathematics of complex

dynamical systems to deliver it as the property of an attractor

state. And in that case we are home and dry. For we can safely

assume it would have been within the power of natural

selection to create this attractor by playing around with the

design of the sensory feedback loops. Of course, describing

what we want to add will still be half the battle (though I think

we will make some progress with this as the book proceeds).

Figure 9.

At any rate, who says, now, that it cannot be done, that “we

cannot so much as imagine the solution of the hard problem”? I

should not say this, but I will say it anyway: it is a good thing

that natural selection did not give up on the search for the

ipsundrum so easily. Just how good a thing, I hope to show in

the pages that follow.

Meanwhile, where is the Andromedan scientist in all this? I

have not forgotten her. Let’s suppose—if you will suspend your

reasonable skepticism—that these ideas about the physical

basis of consciousness are basically correct. Should we expect

the Andromedan to discover the existence of this kind of

ipsundrum when she examines the human brain? And will she

realize its significance?

I will start with the second part of this. Will she realize its

significance? As we discussed at the end of the first chapter,

unless consciousness is some kind of uncaused miracle, once an

outside scientist has identified the brain events that correspond

to the subjective experience of sensations—the neural correlate

of consciousness, the NCC—then, provided she is in

possession of the neurophenomenological rule book, she ought,

in principle, to be able to see that these events must lead to the

subject’s having just the experiences he has. Now we are

suggesting that the NCC is in fact the set of brain events that

occur when the subject observes, from a certain privileged

position, his own ipsundrum, which is the integral of the

activity in a special kind of feedback loop. So, yes, why not? If

and when the Andromedan has identified this particular set of

brain events as the NCC, she ought to be able to deduce what it

must be like to be the subject, and so she will indeed realize

exactly how significant the ipsundrum is.

But, we have to ask, will she be able identify this set of

brain events as the NCC to begin with? Let us assume she has

taken an interest in the evolutionary story. She has understood

how sentition has been internalized, and she has picked up on

the existence of sensory feedback circuits. She may even have

noticed how the activity in these circuits tends to settle into

higher-dimensional attractor states (although this may not be

easy for her, it is not exactly going to show up as colored

patches on an MRI scan).

However, here is the difficulty: unless and until she

happens to put herself at the subject’s position and so see for

herself the magical illusion that is being created from his point

of view, she is unlikely to think anything very remarkable is

occurring. Even if, as I suggested a few paragraphs back, the

ipsundrum as a mathematical object has been designed to be

“self-positioning” from the point of view of the first-person

subject, this is unlikely to be at all obvious from the outside.

So, the problem for the Andromedan is that she is going to

require either extraordinary prescience or extraordinary luck,

because without it she is simply not going to appreciate what

the ipsundrum is designed to do. There is surely a lesson for

experimental scientists here on Earth, for if the Andromedan

would have such problems with recognizing the ipsundrum as

something significant, worth further investigation, then so will

they. It goes to show, I would say, that we cannot wait for

advances in neuroscience to solve the problem of

consciousness. Crick and Koch, in the passage I quoted earlier,

continued: “It appears fruitless to approach this problem head-

on. Instead we are attempting to find the neural correlate(s) of

consciousness (NCC), in the hope that when we can explain the

NCC in causal terms, this will make the problem of qualia

clearer.” Good luck to them. But I suspect that finding the

NCC experimentally will be even more difficult than

approaching the problem head on. The probability is that brain

scientists would not recognize the NCC for what it is even if it

were right in front of them.

I know there are scholars who will—and do—tut-tut at my

own way of proceeding in this chapter: by trying to think

things through. The geneticist, Steve Jones, once wrote in

relation to some earlier ideas of mine: “I have a problem with

scientists who spend time looking at their own navels. . . . My

feeling about [most scientists who have gone into the field of

consciousness studies] is that they’d find life more interesting if

they continued to do what most of them started by doing—

getting their feet wet by doing experimental work.”

8

He memorably added: “I often think that philosophy is to

science as pornography is to sex, I mean it’s cheaper and easier

and some people seem to prefer it.”

This is all very well. Yes, of course we should use

experimental evidence when we can. But if—as with

consciousness—we have as yet almost no inkling as to what we

should be looking for, and if, as I am now suggesting, we

would probably miss it even if we did, then we ought not to be

embarrassed to make use of pure theory. This is one problem

that really may be best approached from an armchair.

However, the same is not true of where I will go next in this

book. This is: to the big question of why consciousness—

whatever its brain basis—has been selected during the course

of evolution. Of course, this is a question that can be answered

only by attending to the facts: the facts about what difference

consciousness makes to the survival of those who have it.

PART TWO

5 So What?

I have tried, in

part 1

of this book, to do what no one has done before: to explain

how phenomenal consciousness could be an evolved feature of

the human mind. My particular suggestions about the brain

basis may be wrong. But in putting them on the table, I hope I

have persuaded you that a naturalistic explanation of

consciousness is at least a possibility in principle.

My theory is not quite the “transparent theory” that has

been called for, “one that, once you get it, you see that anything

built like this will have this particular conscious experience.”

But it is getting there. I would say we have every reason to

believe that if a human being were to have evolved to be built

like this, he would end up thinking, saying, and doing all of the

right things for us to suppose him conscious—and of course for

him to suppose it too. What is more, a human being could have

evolved to be built like this, because there would have been

a natural trajectory through the biological design space,

leading him from primitive ancestors to where he is today.

So now let us put the question of what behind us. Now the

challenge is to explain the purpose of it all. We can be sure it

did not happen accidentally. It must be the result of natural

selection favoring genes that underwrite the specialized neural

circuits—whatever they actually are—that sustain the illusion

of qualia, giving rise to the magical mystery show for the first

person. And it is axiomatic that this will have happened only if

those lucky enough to be spectators of this show have somehow

been at an advantage in terms of biological survival compared

with their less fortunate cousins.

In

chapter 1

I mentioned the idea of a philosophical zombie—the

philosophers’ fantasy of a creature who is physically identical

to a normal human being but completely lacks conscious

experience. “Philosophical zombies look and behave like the

conscious beings that we know and love, but ‘all is dark

inside.’”

1

I gave reasons for saying that, in principle, philosophical

zombies do not and could not exist. However, it has to be part

of my evolutionary argument that these zombies have a near

relation that could certainly exist. We might call it a

“psychological zombie.” A psychological zombie, let’s assume,

is physically identical to a normal human being except in one

crucial respect: namely, that he or she lacks just those evolved

circuits in the brain that yield the phenomenal quality of

conscious experience.

Would psychological zombies look and behave like the

conscious beings that we know and love, despite the fact that

all is dark inside? No, that is exactly the point. If consciousness

is an evolutionary adaptation, the answer has to be that they

would not. There must be things that a psychological

zombie would do differently precisely because all is dark

inside. And for natural selection to have seen this, this

difference must result in the zombie’s being less likely to

survive and reproduce. Compared with a conscious human

being, a psychological zombie would fail to thrive.

In the pages that follow, I will discuss, in point after point,

the possible advantages that conscious creatures might have

over psychological zombies. But “psychological zombie” is a

cumbersome term, so I will sometimes talk simply of

“zombies.” Since I will be referring to creatures that are

biologically credible (indeed, creatures whose like must once

have existed on Earth and were outcompeted by the conscious

creatures who came later in the course of evolution), I trust no

one will confuse my zombies with the logically impossible and

ultimately much less interesting philosophical version.

2

But if conscious creatures did outcompete the zombies,

why? What reasons are there to believe that the phenomenal

richness of consciousness could play an essential part in

anything of practical value? Here is a reminder of Flanagan’s

definition of “consciousness inessentialism”: it is “the view that

for any intelligent activity I, performed in any cognitive

domain d, even if we do I with conscious accompaniments, I

can in principle be done without these conscious

accompaniments.” As Fodor has colorfully put it:

“[Consciousness] seems to be among the chronically

unemployed. . . . What mental processes can be performed only

because the mind is conscious, and what does consciousness

contribute to their performance? Nobody has an answer to this

question for any mental process whatsoever. As far as anybody

knows, anything

that our conscious minds can do they could do just as well

if they weren’t conscious. Why then did God bother to make

consciousness?”

3

Fodor is undoubtedly asking the right question: “why . . . did

God [or natural selection] bother to make consciousness?” But

I believe I know why he finds it all so baffling (“I understand

his ignorance,” as the poet Coleridge would say).

4

It is because he is looking at the problem from entirely the

wrong angle. Note the bias in both Flanagan’s and Fodor’s

formulations, toward thinking of consciousness as contributing

to the capacity to do something. They are both assuming, as

indeed almost everybody does, that the role of phenomenal

consciousness—if it has one—must be to provide the subject

with some kind of new mental skill. In other words, it must be

helping him perform some task that he can perform only by

virtue of being conscious—as, say, a bird can fly only because

it has wings, or you can understand this sentence only because

you know English.

5 However, I have another idea. What if the role of

phenomenal consciousness is not this at all? What if its role is

not to enable you to do something you could not do otherwise

but rather to encourage you to do something you would not do

otherwise: to make you take an interest in things that

otherwise would not interest you, to mind about things you

otherwise would not mind about, or to set yourself goals you

otherwise would not set?

I hedged my bets in the introductory chapter and suggested

that consciousness has its effects on survival by changing what

we may loosely call the subject’s psychology—knowing that

the term “psychology” could cover just about everything the

mind is involved in, from cognition to self-expression. But

from here on I want to put aside all the usual subject matter of

cognitive science—intelligence, information processing,

decision making, attention, and so on—where people have

looked in vain for a role for consciousness, and to explore

instead the impact of phenomenal experience on subjective

purposes, attitudes, and values.

In short, I want to suggest that what having phenomenal

experiences does is profoundly to change your worldview so as

to change the direction of your life. It brings about a kind of

Kuhnian paradigm shift in your take on what it’s all about.

Thomas Kuhn, of course, was concerned with scientific

revolutions: “Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new

instruments and look in new places. Even more important,

during revolutions scientists see new and different things when

looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked

before.”

6

But what, now, if led by the consciousness paradigm,

human ancestors had adopted new instruments and looked in

new places? Even more important, what if they had seen new

and different things when looking with familiar instruments in

places their unconscious predecessors had looked before?

A “consciousness paradigm”? We will have to explore what

this could mean in practice. What difference does being

phenomenally conscious make to the way individuals think

about and conduct themselves? What beliefs and attitudes flow

from it? In the case of humans, if not other animals, what

transformations does it bring about in the collective culture, and

how do these in turn bring further changes?

These are—or ought to be—empirical questions: questions

we can answer only by careful fieldwork in the realm of

conscious creatures. So we need to engage in a

thoroughgoing study of the natural history of consciousness.

And it must be a program of research in which we are ready to

consider all sorts of possibilities—not just those we would

expect to find discussed in the science or philosophy sections of

the library but perhaps those that belong in the self-help, mind

and spirit, or even New Age section.

What we have to do is what Daniel Dennett has called

“heterophenomenology” (phenomenology from another’s

viewpoint). Here is Dennett discussing how Martian scientists

might set about their consciousness fieldwork (Dennett flies in

his investigators from a nearer place than I do): “Among the

phenomena that would be readily observable by these Martians

would be all our public representations of consciousness:

cartoon ‘thought balloons’ . . . soliloquies in plays, voice-overs

in films, use of the omniscient author point of view in novels,

and so forth. . . . They would also have available to them the

less entertaining representations of consciousness found in all

the books by philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists,

phenomenologists, and other sober investigators of the

phenomena.”

7

However, I would go further than Dennett. I think this list

is still too cautious and biased toward traditional kinds of

evidence. Neither he nor any other mainstream philosopher of

consciousness seems to have recognized how consciousness

may contribute to personal growth.

It is our good fortune, however, that other types of

researchers have recognized this all along. We might call them

the “alternative natural historians of consciousness”: on one

side are painters, poets, musicians; on the other, followers of

meditative religious traditions, such as Buddhists. Do not be

surprised, therefore, if I call artists and monks to the

witness box or if I make much of direct quotations from

individuals rhapsodizing about their personal experiences. The

things people say—and especially the things that are

remembered and quoted as seeming right and interesting to

other conscious beings—provide some of the best evidence we

can get about what consciousness does.

In what direction will this testimony lead? I will not hold

back my main conclusion, although I expect I may shock you

with how simple it is (after a lifetime of working on the

question, I have shocked myself).

I think that what the natural history reveals is that

consciousness—on several levels—makes life more worth

living. Conscious creatures enjoy being phenomenally

conscious. They enjoy the world in which they are

phenomenally conscious. And they enjoy their selves for being

phenomenally conscious. But “enjoy” is too weak a term. In the

case of human beings, at any rate, it would be truer to say: they

revel in being phenomenally conscious. They love the world in

which they are phenomenally conscious. They esteem their

selves for being phenomenally conscious.

Moreover, as I will show in the coming chapters, for

conscious creatures there is real biological value in all this. The

added joie de vivre, the new enchantment with the world they

live in, and the novel sense of their own metaphysical

importance has, in the course of evolutionary history,

dramatically increased the investment individuals make in their

own survival.

I say “in the case of human beings, at any rate.” Should I say

nonhuman animals too? And if so, which? The question

of which other species are conscious, and which are sentient

but unconscious—psychological zombies, in effect—is an issue

we have not fully faced yet.

In presenting the evolutionary story, I have of course gone

along with the standard assumption that human beings are not

the first and only animals to have developed phenomenal

consciousness. However, the grounds for this assumption are

by no means as strong as we might wish. If there has been

rather little systematic study of the natural history of

consciousness in our own species, there has been still less for

other animals. Indeed, if you look at Dennett’s list of the

evidential sources that an alien scientist (but it could equally be

an Earth scientist) might use to research consciousness in

humans, you will realize that not one of these sources would be

available for nonhuman animals, not even a chimpanzee, let

alone a mouse. Chimps simply do not go in for dramatic

soliloquies and so on.

You may think it would be absurd to suggest that human

beings alone have consciousness. I would agree. Evolutionary

considerations rule out the possibility that the whole thing

began with human beings. However, this does not mean that

consciousness just as we humans know it is widely shared with

animals.

I drew attention in the previous chapter to how sensations

amaze us humans in a variety of ways. But there is certainly no

reason to believe that these varieties came all at once in

evolution. It is surely more probable that consciousness

evolved in stages and that today there still exist animals with

differing kinds and degrees of sensory qualia.

For a start, given what I have suggested about the brain

basis of the ipsundrum, it would seem likely that phenomenal

properties were established independently in the different

sensory modalities. So, perhaps, for our distant ancestors it was

“like something” to experience touch before it was “like

something” to experience sound or light. And it could still be

the case today that some animals have consciousness in only

one modality.

But beyond this, it would seem likely that different kinds of

phenomenal effects kicked in at different times: temporal

thickening, the absolute separation of quality spaces, aesthetic

valency, intrinsicality, privacy, ineffability . . . In an order we

cannot yet specify (although ineffability could hardly have been

an issue for prelinguistic creatures). Again, this would imply

that some animals today are more richly conscious than others.

True, we might want to argue that the single most important

transition was the first one: from being like nothing to being

like something—and that all the rest is icing on the cake.

Maybe in some sense that is right. You are either in flatland or

in three dimensions; you either enter a magical nonphysical

world or you do not. Arguably, the truly revolutionary

development must have been when, perhaps quite soon after

sentition became privatized, some chance change in its

configuration first created the subjective illusion of being in the

presence of something magically different. But if this was

indeed the tipping point, it was still only the prelude. There

would still have been a way to go before the full-blown magic

show of consciousness was on the road, plenty of scope for

“improving” sensations so as to make them ever more

impressive.

Lacking the evidence to clinch it (though with plenty of

suggestive evidence to be considered in the coming chapters), I

may tell you my guess is that the self-made show did not

become outrightly soul-hammering, in the grand sense

Kandinsky

was alluding to, until quite recent times—and maybe only

thanks to advances that occurred specifically in the human line.

Though I am jumping ahead, I will say it now: no nonhuman

animals make of consciousness what human beings do.

Consciousness may indeed contribute to a sense of self in

nonhuman animals. But there is no evidence that any

nonhuman animals, whatever the level of their consciousness,

have gone on to invent the idea of a “person,” an “I,” let alone a

“soul” with a life beyond the body (which is, of course,

precisely why Dennett’s list of the “evidences of

consciousness” cannot be used with animals: they are all

essentially “I” related).

How far this specifically human notion of selfhood has

followed on from innovations in what sensations are like for

humans—that is, primary facts about the quality of human

consciousness—and how far on feedback from culture, once

humanity as a cultural phenomenon came of age, are issues we

have still to explore. I am sure most theorists would put their

money on cultural influences. Yet the fact is that humans have

evolved rapidly since they split from chimpanzees five million

years ago. Their brains and minds have undergone radical

rewiring. And, remarkably enough, new research in

comparative anatomy shows that human brains have diverged

not only in higher executive functions but also in the early

stages of sensory processing. The primary visual cortex in

humans has an extra layer of cells that does not exist in apes or

monkeys. Todd Preuss and Ghislaine Coleman, who made the

discovery, comment: “The existence of substantial differences

in the organization of primary visual cortex between human

and nonhuman primates (including the commonly studied

macaque monkeys) may come as a surprise, given how widely

held is the conviction that the human visual system is basically

or essentially similar to our close relatives.” There is no

evidence yet as to what this extra layer is doing. The authors

suggest a “low level” explanation in terms of differences in

visual attention and perception of movement. But I wonder if

they are not underestimating the significance of their discovery.

Might not this extra layer be just what is needed to create a

uniquely human kind of reverberatory loop? At least let’s not

rule out the possibility that the wonderfully inflated human

self-image has arisen out of some more basic change in sensory

phenomenology—one that has happened in the human line

alone.

8

Let’s revisit this question of grades of consciousness when

we know more about what exactly is at issue.

6 Being There

In the previous chapter I headlined three levels at which I

believe the lives of our ancestors were transformed by

consciousness, three levels at which, if we look on the negative

side, we could say the lives of psychological zombies—lacking

those extra brain circuits—would be impoverished compared

with our own. Now in separate chapters, I will treat these one

by one—beginning with the simple pleasure of pure being.

The bottom line about how consciousness changes the

human outlook—as deep an existential truth as anyone could

ask for—is this: we do not want to be zombies. We like “being

present,” we like having it “be like something to be me,” and

only in the most drastic circumstances would we have it

otherwise.

Lord Byron says it: “The great object of life is sensation—

to feel that we exist, even though in pain. It is this ‘craving

void’ which drives us to gaming—to battle—to travel—to

intemperate,

but keenly felt pursuits of any description, whose principal

attraction is the agitation inseparable from their

accomplishment.”

1

Tom Nagel as a philosopher says it more soberly: “There

are elements which, if added to one’s experience, make life

better; there are other elements which, if added to one’s

experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are

set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. . . .

The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself,

rather than by any of its contents.”

2

John Galsworthy, in one of his Forsyte novels, describes

fourteen-month-old Kit Forsyte taking a bath: “He seemed to

lend a meaning to life. His vitality was absolute, not relative.

His kicks and crows and splashings had the joy of a gnat’s

dance, or a jackdaw’s gambols in the air. They gave thanks not

for what he was about to receive, but for what he was

receiving.”

3

The word “sensualism” approaches but hardly does justice to

what these writers are getting at. Maybe we need the word

“presentism.”

4

At any rate, the emotion is a basic and familiar one: the yen to

confirm and renew, in small ways or large, your own

occupancy of the subjective moment, to go deeper, to extend it,

to revel in being there—and, where you have the skill, to

celebrate it in words.

Here is John Keats, in a letter to a friend, sharing his mouth

with us: “Talking of Pleasure, this moment I am writing with

one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a

Nectarine—good god how fine—It went down soft pulpy,

slushy, oozy—all its delicious embonpoint melted down my

throat like a large beatified Strawberry.”

5

Or here, on a more heroic scale, is Albert Camus, inviting

us to enter the skin of his young body as he luxuriates among

the flower-covered Roman ruins of Tipasa on the Algerian

coast: “We enter a blue and yellow world and are welcomed by

the pungent, odorous sigh of the Algerian summer earth. . . .

We are not seeking lessons or the bitter philosophy one requires

of greatness. Everything seems futile here except the sun, our

kisses, and the wild scents of the earth. . . . How many hours I

have spent crushing absinthe leaves, caressing ruins, trying to

match my breathing with the world’s tumultuous sighs! Deep

among wild scents and concerts of somnolent insects, I open

my eyes and heart to the unbearable grandeur of this heat-

soaked sky.”

6

Or here, to take it down to a more domestic level, is Rupert

Brooke, stirring up thoughts of lesser ecstasies as he provides

an inventory of one small sensory delicacy after another.

These I have loved:

White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,

Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;

Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust

Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;

Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;

And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;

And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,

Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon.

The list is long. The poet fondles each moment, like a bead on a

rosary.

Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon

Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss

Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is

Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen

Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;

The benison of hot water; furs to touch;

The good smell of old clothes; and other such—

The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,

Hair’s fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers

About dead leaves and last year’s ferns. . . .

7

He is only just beginning, and I will return to this

astonishing paean to sensation in a later chapter. But in reading

this and the passages before it, I want to remark how rooted in

the natural world all these precious experiences are. There is

nothing in Keats’s or Camus’ descriptions, and only the

occasional item in Brooke’s, that has any contemporary cultural

reference. Absinthe leaves, blue massing clouds, moist earth,

and so on, have, since time immemorial, been freely on offer to

anyone with the senses and the inner leisure to appreciate them.

We can and should assume, therefore, that our human ancestors

of 100,000 years ago, or maybe as much as a million, relished

many of these same experiences.

But then perhaps we should assume that the emotion I just

now called presentism does in fact go back much further and

spreads much wider. There is no lack of evidence that many

nonhuman animals have evolved, at some level, to like “being

there” just as humans do—which strongly suggests that they

experience a qualia-rich version of the subjective present,

basically like ours.

Galsworthy, looking for an analogy for the boy in his bath,

went straight to animals: “the joy of a gnat’s dance, or a

jackdaw’s gambols in the air.” And there are, of course, animal

parallels to be drawn on every side, not just for Kit Forsyte but

also for Keats, Camus, Brooke, and even Nagel. Dolphins surf

the waves. Dogs chase their tails in frenzy. Bonobos give each

other erotic body rubs. Cats stretch themselves before the fire.

Lambs frolic on the spring sward. Monkeys leap from high

cliffs into water pools.

At the Gombe Stream Research Centre in Tanzania, a

chimpanzee beside a stream was observed by scientists drawing

her fingers repeatedly through the rippling water, trans-fixed, it

seems, by the delicate play of light, sound, and touch on her

body. Other chimps began to copy her, and within months this

kind of water play had become a family tradition. “Sitting

intently nearby was Golden, who watched for a time before

mimicking Gaia’s exact motions. Playing in Kakombe Stream,

the field team observes, has since become something of a

Gremlin family tradition: Every time they cross the creek,

Golden finds time to sit on a rock with her hand immersed in

the water, overturning stones on the streambed.”

8

But at Gombe scientists have also observed examples of

much wilder, Byronic sensation seeking, as when a chimpanzee

emerges into the open in a thunderstorm and dances and stamps

and screams as torrents of rain run from his back and lightning

forks the air.

Marc Bekoff describes: “I once saw a young elk in Rocky

Mountain National Park run across a snowfield, jump in the air

and twist his body while in flight, stop, catch his breath and do

it again and again. Buffalo have been seen playfully

running onto and sliding across ice, excitedly bellowing as

they do so.”

9

George Schaller describes a two-year-old panda on being

released from a dark tunnel: “It exploded with joy. Exuberantly

it trotted up an incline with a high-stepping, lively gait, bashing

down any bamboo in its path, then turned and somersaulted

down, an ecstatic black and white ball rolling over and over;

then it raced back up to repeat the descent, and again.”

10

Birds are up there too, as this account reveals:

A common feature of the hot, dry inland of Australia is

the dust devil or willy-nilly, a small vortex with winds

about 60 kilometres per hour. It can carry dust hundreds

of metres into the air. . . . A common native bird, the

galah, has been seen flying into these whirlwinds and

being hurled upwards, screeching loudly. On reaching

the top, the galahs fly down and enjoy another ride by re-

entering the vortex near the ground. There is one report

of a flock of galahs flying into a much less common and

more dangerous tornado. The winds, spinning at over

100 kilometres per hour, immediately spat them out,

screeching with delight.

11

“To feel that you exist—even though in pain”? It certainly

looks that way.

So here is the question. Why should feeling that you exist—

and valuing the feeling—be biologically adaptive, so that the

underlying brain circuits would have been selected in the

course of evolution?

I believe the answer (at least the beginning of an answer) is

right there in front of us. It is that a creature who takes pleasure

in the feeling of existence will develop “a will to exist” and so,

at least as we see it in humans, “a will to live.” But I must

unpack this. How does a will to exist differ from simply an

instinct to exist, or just existing? Most biological organisms

evidently manage to live their lives just fine without having the

will to do so. We would never attribute a will to live to an oak

tree, an earthworm, or a butterfly. These organisms, when the

need arises, act instinctively in a variety of preprogrammed

life-preserving ways. Human beings do the same much of the

time. You eat your food, withdraw your hand from the flame,

heal your wounds, and so on, without giving a thought to your

existence. So how might there be added value in your having

evolved to be conscious of existing?

It could work like this. If natural selection can arrange that

you enjoy the feeling of existing, then existence can and does

become a goal: something—indeed, as we’ll see, some thing—

you want. And the difference between your wanting to exist

and simply having some kind of life instinct is that, when you

want something, you will tend to engage in rational actions—

flexible, intelligent behavior—to achieve it. You will do things

that are not rewarding in themselves but that are calculated (on

some level) to deliver the goal. You may even do things that

are punishing—including going through pain.

I admit this may sound like some sort of bootstrap

operation, rather as if natural selection had designed a creature

to take pleasure in the sound of its own heartbeat. But why not,

if it works? We accept that Nature made sex pleasurable so as

to encourage animals to take the steps that lead to sexual

intercourse.

Then why not make the feeling of existence magically

delightful in order to encourage conscious creatures to do the

things that lead to their existing?

For human beings, the case hardly needs making. Happily,

we have all seen how it plays out in our own lives. “Where am

I going?” the boy sings in A. A. Milne’s poem “Spring

Morning”:

Where am I going? I don’t quite know.

Down to the stream where the king-cups grow—

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Where am I going? The high rooks call:

“It’s awful fun to be born at all.”

12

Awful fun is not the half of it. We know life can at times be

unspeakably beautiful. But what about those high rooks? And

galahs, and chimpanzees? Do nonhuman animals really want

to feel that they exist? And if they do, is it indeed evidence that

these animals are phenomenally conscious?

We need not doubt that there are many species of animals

who, just like humans, go out of their way to have fun. They

want, as it were, to live it up. The galahs seek out the

whirlwinds. Dolphins follow a ship to ride the bow waves.

Chimps beg to be tickled.

I once observed a young mountain gorilla who climbed a

high vine to fetch down a gourd-like fruit. My field notes

record: “She plays with the fruit, tossing it from side to side,

letting it drop into her hands, then she grips the stalk between

her teeth so that the fruit dangles from her mouth, stands

bipedally

and turns somersaults. Next she stands, still holding the

fruit between her teeth, and beats it repeatedly with both hands,

making a sharp clapping sound.” The following day she came

back to the same vine with the obvious intention of fetching

down another so satisfactory a plaything.

13

Every dog owner has seen the lengths to which a dog will

go to get taken for a walk, the anticipatory joy when he

succeeds, and the hang-dog look if he realizes he is not getting

what he wants. There are few sights so pathetic as a dog who,

having been taken out in the car for what might have been a run

in the woods, realizes he is approaching a boarding kennel,

where his existence will be put on hold.

Do examples such as these really add up to a will to exist in

these animals? Certainly, if you were in their place, conscious

presence would be both the goal and the condition of your

making these efforts to engage with life. It would be the qualia

you would be deliberately seeking. If you were a psychological

zombie, you simply would not bother to do these things. And I

would say it is a fair assumption (though by no means a

logically secure one) that if the animals were zombies, they

would not bother either. True, we should be cautious about

reading too much into the behavior of species distant from

ourselves. Yet we should not feel bound to read too little either.

The survival benefits of delighting in “existence” are

obvious. For a start, any creature who has it as a goal to indulge

its senses in the kinds of ways described will be likely to

engage in a range of activities that promote its bodily and

mental well-being (even if occasionally at some risk). Such a

creature will do life well, we might say. But it will not stop

there. Since you

can reach these moments of intense existence only by doing all

the other things required to stay alive, then, for at least some

animals, being alive as such will become a goal. You will not

just live well, you will want a life because you want to feel.

So here is the crucial question. Could not natural selection

have achieved the same result in easier ways? Given that there

are indeed benefits to be had when living it up becomes a goal

of behavior, then why not simply add some extra reward

circuits to the brain so as to make the experience of intense and

varied sensory stimulation “positively reinforcing,” as the

behaviorists would say, without going the extra mile to invent

the drama of phenomenal consciousness? Psychological

zombies could surely have sensory fun—of a zombie sort.

Zombies could still be designed to engage in play.

Yes, so they could. But I believe the reason their play

would be so much shallower—and in the long run less life

affirming—than that of a conscious creature is this:

phenomenal consciousness gives you (or at any rate gives you

the illusion of) a substantial thing to value. The great object of

life—the ball that, as a conscious being, you strive to keep in

the air—is not a shallow physiological variable, not a mere

number, but something psychologically in a different league. It

is the existence of a conscious self.

There, I have said it: a “conscious self.” It is time to bring

the “self” to center stage. The concept of self is a complex one,

and it will not be until much later in the book that we get the

measure of it. I will argue later that in the course of

evolutionary history, selves have come to exist on different

levels in different species. The self of an adult human being

certainly has no equivalent in animals (or human infants, for

that matter).

But, to begin with, I want to focus on something basic: let’s

call it the “core self,” by which I mean no more or less than the

owner and occupier of the thick moment of consciousness.

When “you feel that you exist” as the subject of sensation, the

core self comes into existence in that illusory time space.

This is not my idea. It is originally Aristotle’s idea

(although seldom acknowledged as such in contemporary

philosophy.) I wrote above, in

chapter 4

, how Aristotle drew attention to the paradoxical temporal

depth of consciousness. “The undivided ‘now’ of sensation

must rest upon a duration with which it does not altogether

coincide. . . . It is another time . . . It may well be something

other than any time at all.” But where did he go with this?

Remarkably, he went on to argue that it is precisely this “extra”

time dimension that underlies—and brings into being—the core

self: “If someone senses himself or something else in a

continuous time, then it is impossible for him not to notice he

exists. . . . In all sensation, simple or complex, sharp or dull, the

Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness

Abstract and Figures