Customer Reviews

Consciousness and the Probability of Being: The Origin of the Particular "I"

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As I read the first chapter of this book, I found my curiosity and interest kindled. Pure chance is a fickle, yet powerful creature, allowing all things to happen if we are willing to wait long enough. The interactions of the various types of matter are also deterministic, so it is difficult to see how these two together could create the phenomena we know as consciousness. These ideas are introduced in the first chapter and the author describes how he is going to explain how self awareness and the concept of the "I" came into existence.
Unfortunately, he never quite seals the deal. The explanations are rambling and never manage to get to a viable conclusion. The worst example is in chapter six, where several parameters are defined. A few of them are:

PMEMORY - the synaptic patterns of the brain underlying long-term behavior.
PAUTO - patterns encoded in the brainstem that make up the autonomic nervous system.
PSENS - patterns responsible for integrating into perceptions the sensory input to the brain.
PFRONT - patterns that deal with rational thought, motivation, volition and so forth.

These parameters are then used to create equations such as:

PACONSC = PRAS + PAFFECT + PMEMORY
PACONSC = PRAS + PSENS
PRCONSC = PRAS + PMEMORY.

And the largest off them all

PTOTAL = PMEMORY + PAUTO + PAFFECT + PSENS + PMOTOR + PFRONT +
PACONSC + PRCONSC + PRAS + PMETA.

The problem is that the equations are put forward without the necessary justification. It is as if the author felt that the arguments would be taken more seriously of they had a mathematical rather than verbal form.
I was very disappointed with this book; it was advertised as one that extends the ideas of Richard Dawkins that he expressed in his book, "The Selfish Gene." It turned out to be much less than that, Dawkins presented cogent, succinct arguments and Wright is nowhere close.

Ask two scientists (even specialists in the field) to define what they mean by consciousness, and you're likely to get two different answers. Ask them to describe how to measure consciousness and the responses are likely to be even more disparate. Because of this muddled situation, I think authors who write about it should first provide a clear and non-ambiguous definition of what they mean by "consciousness." To his credit, Wright does make the effort, but fails (like all other authors I know) to give a scientifically testable definition.

Because of the uncertainty, consciousness is a field rife with philosophical speculation. Philosophers, no doubt, think highly of their opinions, but philosophy is fundamentally distinct from science because it doesn't rely upon the scientific testing of hypotheses. Wright's book references philosophical opinion heavily.

As with other authors, Wright seems to take the opinion that consciousness and self awareness are primarily human characteristics. However, as evolved characteristics, consciousness and self awareness, like my backbone and femur, are likely to differ from other animals only in degree, and not in some absolute or fundamental way.

In reading this book I found myself alternately agreeing and then disagreeing with the author. For example, on page 74 he says that our first-person view doesn't arise deterministically from our genes. That's almost certainly true since environmental influences have undeniable effects on how the brain is wired. But just a paragraph later the author claims that genes have "nothing whatsoever to do with" the development of the specific "you" in your brain. That assertion is quite flabbergasting, given his materialistic point of view. Wright rejects the notion that my unique consciousness owes its existence to any specific physical pattern in my brain. For example, the author says:

"Even if the neural wiring of all brains were minutely identical down to the synapse, we must still conclude that the distribution of subjective directions would be unaffected. "You" would still be here (or not); someone else would still not be here (or would be). [p. 188]

Wright echoes this reasoning throughout his book, but the argument is based on a false premise because our brains are modified by sensory input and so two brains in different locations (subject, necessarily, to different sensory input) cannot be "wired" exactly the same. Instead, they will be differentially modified by different sensory input (sight, sound, etc.). Furthermore, their quantum states must necessarily be different.

A typical thought experiment used by Wright may be found on page 116, where he says:

"Hypothesize that future machines can scan your body from head to toe, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, and store the atomic and molecular configuration for each cubic millimeter of you on magnetic tape for later access...[now along comes a scientist who] invents a second machine that can accept this first tape as input. Atom by atom, molecule by molecule, this machine can create as output another individual similar to you in all respects, including every conditioned and unconditioned synapse of your brain."

Those familiar with quantum physics will recall William Wootters and W. Zurek who proved, in the 1980s, that a quantum particle can never be "cloned." Their theorem says that the process of transferring the full quantum state from one quantum particle to another always ends up changing the original. It is impossible (not just technically improbable) to copy the full quantum information from one particle to another, resulting in two exact duplicates. Wright's argument is thus based on at least one of two dubious assumptions; that it's possible to violate quantum physics, or that consciousness in no way depends on the quantum state of the material in the brain.

Wright also takes the point of view that there are essential elements of "you" and "I" that are invariant over time. I find philosophical arguments frequently stumble over the concept of existence. This misconception is illustrated nicely by the following statement from Wright's book:

"The mathematically inclined may wish to scribble in the margin that subjectivity is being postulated as invariant under genetic rotation. The constituents of a river, a burning flame, and (we hold) consciousness, can change without the river becoming another river or the flame becoming another flame or the consciousness switching to another first-person view." [p. 61-62]

The Native Americans had a better grasp on the nature of existence when they observed that it's impossible to step into the same river twice. In other words, the persistence of the river is nothing more than an illusion, made possible by an apparently seamless path of evolution from one moment to the next. The turbulence in the river never repeats, the plants along the edge of the bank change, and even the river bed can move. Given enough time the river can go dry, become covered with kilometers of sediment, and fossilized. The river not only can become another river, it is continually becoming another river.

When we look at the extremes it's easier to see the changes and sometimes we admit that the changes are enough to destroy the old river and create a new one. But such thresholds are arbitrary. In fact, the river is never static, and always changing - continually reborn. In my opinion, it's much the same with consciousness, though Wright specifically disavows this point of view.

This was a difficult book to read and, I'm sure, to write. I give Wright credit for making a good stab at it. He certainly has done a nice job of summarizing the opinions of philosophers on the subject of consciousness. While I agree with some of his points, I think he's failed to establish his core thesis. Regardless, though, I recommend the book to people who like to think, and like to think about how they think.

The question of what makes consciousness is in itself an interesting field. And we know that consciousness resides in the brain. We even know what sorts of injuries make people semi-conscious. And we are making progress with the question of where consciousness resides.

But what makes us not merely conscious, but ourselves? Why isn't someone other than you, um, you? Someone who looks just like you would not be you. Your twin isn't you. And, as the author explains, even a duplicate of you would not be you either. If one of the two of you had to be killed, you would be quick to choose the other!

The book includes a discussion of genes. But this is merely background: we already know that we are not the same as our twins. Now, what about what feels a little like a religious issue: do we have a chance to find ourselves resurrected as other beings in the future? If copies of us arose in the distant future, would we sense that we had awakened? Meanwhile, what could happen to us during our actual lives so that we'd appear to still be ourselves and conscious but would no longer really be us?

The author considers a couple more questions of this sort. Suppose our brain patterns could be put into a computer. Would we feel that we existed, as ourselves, in that computer? And here is another one. Suppose we could slowly inherit the brain patterns of someone else. Would we be destroyed in the process, even though it all felt continuous? We'd become a little different. But would we really die? Would the person whose brain patterns we inherited come back to life?

And finally, we get to probabilities. Superficially, it might seem that the probability that you would exist in the first place was pretty much zero. And that therefore it is unlikely that you will ever exist again. But that probability might be much higher than zero. We just don't know. And that could mean that the probability that you will exist again is higher as well. It would help if we were sure what makes one aware of being oneself as an individual, not just aware. But so far we don't even know that. I think that it is significant that none of us really appear to be aware of having existed before. But that alone doesn't prove much.

At least, Wright has shown us what the issues are, and what we know about them so far.

I recommend this book.