Consciousness- addition to last weeks work

*Please forgive the formatting. I used footnotes in my paper and they are not transferring over to this format.*

     I have never truly understood why I am the way I am. I guess that could be true of anyone, but for me it always seemed like such an odd idea; to be unfamiliar or unknowing as to what or who you are yet live day in and day out as ‘yourself’. What is ‘yourself’? What am I? Why am I? I have feelings, opinions, desires and so on, but for what purpose? What makes me, me? Why do I think the way that I do? Why do I act or respond a certain way? These are the questions I could never answer growing up as a kid and I feel were the root of a lot of frustration and trials in my life. To be ‘yourself’ every day, yet never exploring or discovering the WHY or HOW just never made sense. How can you move forward and progress in life if you have no concept of what your purpose is or why you are here? Is it random? Is there some greater cosmic plan I am not aware of? At some deeper level I feel I always had these questions eating away at me but was not necessarily consciously aware of them nor could I define them. It would be years later and well into my adult life before I realized these questions were and still are a crucial piece in my philosophical puzzle of acceptance as to who I was, who I am and who I will be.

     
     I knew growing up I was different. Although not diagnosed until my late teens/early twenties, looking back now it was clear from childhood I suffered from depression and anxiety. I did not handle situations like most kids, simple hiccups or bumps in the road would devastate me to the point of being unconsolable. I strived for excellence every waking moment, especially in school, and if I fell even a hair short I would hate myself and fall into what I now call the ‘dark place’. For example, if I made a 90% on a test, I would spend the rest of the day berating myself, telling myself I was stupid and would never amount to anything because I should have gotten 100%. My mind was constantly filled with negative self talk, and it was very convincing. Only absolute perfection was acceptable in my eyes and anything short of that meant utter failure. I would make myself believe others thought poorly of me if I made mistakes or showed any signs of struggle. Looking back now I can see this was due to the hidden fight I was battling within my own head with depression that no one could see yet I allowed it to control how I thought others perceived me even when no one said a word. This was my life for as long as I could remember and it was excruciating.

     
     In life, we all have to make tough decisions, but imagine having to make them while you convince yourself that no matter what choice you make, it will be the wrong one, you will fail and everyone will hate you for it. Seems a bit extreme I know, but this is depression and anxiety, as least it has been my personal experience with it. Eventually you seek help and try medications and therapy, you go through the motions and pretend to be ‘ok’ putting on that mask of a happy face, but the entire time you know what everyone else does not, you have become really good at faking it. And it makes sense, you have had to your entire life in order to fit in and somewhat function in society. But deep down you know, you are still different yet you still don’t know why. But unbeknownst to me, there in lies the start block. I know I am different, but how? How do I know I know I am different? What makes it possible for me to be aware that I am aware? If I am capable of acknowledging my awareness then what does that mean my awareness is and where does it come from? Is it something I can change, alter or manipulate? And if so, how? What is awareness? Then I discovered Rene Descartes and the notion of consciousness. In a single encounter with his works during my graduate studies, my entire world was turned upside down, pardon the cliche, but it is rather fitting. I will forever owe my progress into understanding myself and my battle with managing my mental health to this revolutionary philosopher and his ideas on mind, body and consciousness. So let us start at the beginning and see how Descartes came to this realization.

     
     If someone were to ask you, “Who are you?”, what would your response be? Your name? Your job title? Your heritage perhaps? These seem more like programmed responses society has engrained in us from an early age to reply with when presented with this question, but do we really KNOW that any of these responses are true or that they even qualify as an answer? And what does it mean to truly know something? What if your entire life you thought your name was Bob but one day you find out you were switched at birth with another baby, and your given name was really Clarance. Does that change your answer to who you are? Granted a name is just a name, for what’s in a name? (thank you Shakespeare) So I think we can agree there are deeper meanings behind the original question, ‘who are you?’ and those are the truths we are after. So I ask gain, have you ever asked YOURSELF, “Who are you?”. It may be safe to say we have all struggled with finding ourselves in life at some point (it almost seems as if it is a right of passage us humans must go through; an innate part of humanity but I am speculating here). We go through phases, periods of searching, wanting to know exactly what our purpose here is. So we set out to find ourselves and answer this question of who are we. But alas, few know where or how to start this journey. In my opinion, Rene Descartes found the starting point upon which this notion of finding absolute truth (and in turn one’s true self) begins. With his realization of, “Cogito, ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I exist”, he revolutionized philosophy and began a movement of exploration into the mind/ body theory. 

     
     Why is this important? In order to understand the mind/body theory we must establish and understand that Rene Descartes believed in absolute truths. These are truths that are true regardless of opinion and perspective. How do we discover these truths? Through self obtained knowledge and discovery which we will discuss further.

     
     During his studies, Descartes attended Jesuit College Royal Henry Le Grand at La Flèche. It was here that he was first introduced to Galileo’s work along with countless other great minds. All students were assigned six years of preparatory studies, three years of philosophy and four years of theology totaling in 13 classes. Students were also divided not by age like in today’s educational systems, but by their progress in their studies along with their level of achievement. It would have been during this time in college Descartes would have studied Quintillian and we see the first signs of his journey beginning. Clarke describes, “…(H)e would have learned from one of its classical exponents those features of rhetoric that were especially important for lawyers. The objective of any rhetorical presentation was to convince one’s hearers. Hence the need, according to Quintillion, for clarity and distinctness- two concepts that were to figure subsequently as key features of the Cartesian account of evidence.” Descartes seems to latch onto this concept as it will carry over into his work for the rest of his academic life. This quest for clarity and distinctness slowly starts to take precedence over adhering to societal norms of not questioning ideas and authority. In order to clarify, one must ask questions, think deeper and have an open mind to possibilities that may go against current ‘known’ ideologies. For example, if one were to ask for proof of God’s existence in order to clarify that he is indeed a reality, what would a clarifying response be with absolute truths as evidence? After struggling with this, Descartes tried to find proof, but kept finding his way to a dead end, beginning to believe there just isn’t one. At least not one that narrows down the line of questions to a single absolute truth. Descartes expresses this notion in his Discourse, “The long chains of inferences, all of them simple and easy, that geometers normally use to construct their most difficult demonstrations had given me an opportunity to think that all the things that can fall within the scope of human knowledge follow from each other in a similar way, and that as long as one avoids accepting something as true which is not so, and as long as one always observes the order required to deduce them from each other, there cannot be anything so remote that it cannot eventually be reached nor anything so hidden that is cannot be uncovered.” This idea of clarifying and questioning would start the wildfire in Descartes head leading him to his greatest philosophical discovery, “I think therefore I am.”

    
      “I thought about what a proposition generally needs in order to be true and certain because, since I had just found one that I knew was such, I thought I should also know what this certainty consists in. Having noticed that there is nothing at all in the proposition ‘I think, therefore I am’ which convinces me that I speak the truth, apart from the fact that I see very clearly that one has to exist in order to think, I judged that I could adopt as a general rule that those things that we conceive very clearly and distinctly are all true. The only outstanding difficulty is in recognizing which ones we conceive distinctly.” So thus, the mind/ body theory is born. The sole absolute truth Rene Descartes had discovered is that he is aware that he is aware. He knows he exists because he can think about his own existence. 

    
      According to Descartes’ dualist view, or later known as the Cartesian view, the mind and body are separate. This is apparent throughout most of his writings. Let us use one example from Rule Three of his Rule’s for Guiding Ones Intelligence where he explains the difference in how we obtain knowledge. ‘(W)e can arrive at knowledge of things by means of two paths, viz. by experience or deduction. It should also be noted that experience of things are often deceptive, whereas a deduction- or the pure inference of one thing from another- may be overlooked if it is not apparent, but it can never be performed badly by a minimally rational intellect. The chains of dialectics, by which they think they can regulate human, reason, seem to me to be of little use for deduction, although I do not deny that they are very appropriate for other purposes. No deception that can occur to human beings ever results from a poor inference, but only from the fact that verso experiences that are poorly understood are accepted, or rash judgements are made without any foundations.’ In context Descartes is rationalizing the difference between obtaining knowledge from disciplines such as arithmetic and geometry verse other more abstract disciplines stating the fore mentioned are free from every taint of falsehood or uncertainty due to their nature as disciplines where as the latter leaves some room for interpretation depending on perceived experience and personal deduction. My my understanding of this is, for example, in mathematics 2+2=4 regardless of language spoken or if there is an observer to count thus making the knowledge obtained through such a discipline a ‘truth’ if you will. So again, why is this important and how does it relate to consciousness? Because it shows there is a distinguishable difference between the world in which our perceptions, observations, experiences, etc. provide our construct of the universe and a world that our conscious awareness of has no real effect on. So if we follow this Cartesian view and say perhaps not operationally but in some sense our consciousness and our body are separate, how then do they interact with each other?

     
     This leads us to the primary issue with Descartes theory, called the mind-body or the hard problem. Simply stated, “The mind-body problem is something philosophers have struggled with for years. The trouble is that in ordinary human experience there seems to be two different kinds of thing, with no obvious way to bring them together.” Here Blackmore is pointing out the difference between personal experiences we have that cannot be conveyed to anyone else as opposed to the perhaps undeniable physical world that exists that can have some sort of influence or effect on us. For example, how can I be sure your experiences of green are the same as mine or to each other? I cannot. Yet my experiences are the only ‘sure’ to ‘real’ substance I have that I can construct my world upon. At the same time, I never truly know if I am experiencing the ‘real’ or ‘same’ world as everyone else because I am unable to compare it with anything other than myself. On the other hand, it is these experiences that also allow me to know there IS in fact SOMETHING out there. Thus why Cartesian dualism believes there are two realms or worlds if you will. One of the physical and one of the mental and in turn separating mind from body. Yet if they truly are two separate entities how do they interact or influence each other? “How can a physical brain, made purely of material substances and nothing else, give rise to conscious experiences or ineffable quaila? (individual instances of subjective, conscious experience). Descartes, being a man of faith, explained this discrepancy through out many of his writings with the existence of God. “He tried to show that scientific knowledge of the physical world (in reference to his physics) depended on the existence of a mind or soul distinct from the body, a mind or soul that had to know God before it could grasp the principles.” So not only did Descartes believe in God, he also theorized the only way a person could understand the relation between mind and body as well as the higher knowledge of physics and its applications to the world, one must first have and know a relationship with God.

     
     Although some may be satisfied with faith being the answer to the mind-body problem, there are others who have sought an alternative solution. If the brain is a biological structure, then perhaps it is worth looking into its biological make up. In this next section we will discuss the brain and what we have learned about its functions thus far in the pursuit of understanding consciousness.

     
     When discussing consciousness, the topic of emotions tends to play a roll in trying to develop an answer to the mind-body problem. I started this portion of my research by reading into the James-Lange Theory of Emotions.This theory proposes the body’s biological responses are what triggers how we feel in a certain situation. So instead of, I see a bear, I feel scared, therefore my heart rate increases and I start to shake, what actually happens is my perception of the bear causes my heart rate to increase and me to shake thus causing our bodies to recognize these biological responses as fear so my brain tells me to feel fear. I am somewhat embarrassed to say I had never thought of the order in which my body experiences feelings or emotions. Does the biological response led to the psychological one or the other way around? This idea yet again leads us back to the overlaying point of the mind-body problem. The mind and body influence each other in some way and it seems in order to recognize this, it takes consciousness. I dug deeper into this idea which led me to an amazing lecture by Dr. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford where he explains, “Here’s how you feel an emotion. It is not the case that your brain decides it’s feeling an emotion based on sensory information (coming in memory or whatever), the brain decides it’s feeling an emotion and tells the body let’s speed up the heart, let’s breathe faster, let’s sweat, whatever it is… that’s not how emotion works. Here’s how emotion works, stimulus comes into your brain and before you consciously process it, your body is already responding with heart rate, with blood pressure, with pupillary contractions, whatever. How do you figure out what emotion you are feeling? You are getting information back from the periphery telling you what’s going on down there. In other words, how do you figure out you’re excited? If I’m suddenly breathing real fast and my heart’s beating fast, it must be because I feel excited.” So in this sense, mind and body are not looked at necessarily as separate, at least not in an operational stand point, more that their interaction with each other produces a working unit. This brings us to a naturalism or a naturalistic approach which would led one to the possibility of a unified theory or a reductionist view which holds that not only is there a connection between mind and body but that mental states can be reduced to brain states. However, in order to test this theory and see if indeed mental states can be reduced to brain states, we must first define which theories of mental state and brain state are being considered for reduction. This is where the lines already begin to blur. Although there has been exceedingly more research and discovery in the recent decade into the discipline of scientific psychology, we have yet to truth understand and/or define functions such as memory, learning, perception, development, language use, etc. Nor do we understand fully the cognitive and sensorimotor workings or the brain organ. So if we cannot clearly define the terms to be reduced, then how can we be sure of the reduction? Skeptics of the reduction view commonly point out this problem and tend to fall into one of two categories. Some, referred by Churchland as boggled skeptics, simply argue that the brain and it’s countless neurons are are just too complicated and that we will never be able to fully unlock and understand its functions and capabilities thus discounting the reductionist view. Others, coined principled skeptics, hold the view that, ‘the generalizations of psychology are emergent with respect to the generalization of neuroscience and that mental states and processes constitute a domain of study autonomous with respect to neuroscience.’  As pointed out, there are some issues with the reductionist theory of consciousness and the mind-body problem, so where does that leave us?

     
     Studies into neurology and neuropharmacology have shown the ‘abstract’ parts of the mind such as consciousness, reasoning, personality traits, etc. can all be effected or altered in some way if the brain undergoes an injury such as a lesion or is under the influence of a substance. For example, there are countless drugs out there now doctors can prescribe to alter behavior (i.e. mood disorders, depression, anxiety, ADHD, PTDS, etc.) that have a direct effect on the behavior, thought process, sometimes even auditory and visual sensations experienced by there patients. This would suggest the correlation between mind and body is not as separate as dualist would theorize. Yet how can a physical thing have an effect on a nonphysical thing such as a medication that alters brain chemistry leading to altered behavior in consciousness? It can also be said that the nonphysical effects the physical. What caused the patient to seek out a medication to alter their mind state in the first place? Did they realize their perceptions, experience, feelings, thoughts were not ‘normal’ (I do not like using the term normal as it is so vague and undefinable but for the sake of my point I must proceed with it) and thus the nonphysical consciousness led them to physically make an appointment, go see a healthcare professional and eventually take a physical pill to help? Or is this the wrong way to look at it as it could be questioned is behavior really ever ‘nonphysical’ and in fact it has been pointed out to me by Dr. Oliver that this could indeed beg the question to say is ANYTHING encountered in experience ‘nonphysical’? The unfortunate reality is when it comes to mental health, medication expectations are roulette wheel. It takes countless trial and error in order to find which combination will best work for each specific individual. There is no magic box to put people in that scans the brain and tells you exactly which chemical(s) needs adjusting and which medication will produce the best results for the desired change. Yet there clearly is a change in brain state and mental state when under the influence of certain substances.

    
      I found another lecture by Dr. Sapolsky pertaining to this exact topic using depression as a great example. (As I’ve stated in other papers, I like to include my personal experiences and insight at times into my writings, if for no other reason than to show my passion behind what I am researching. I have recently come to the conclusion my true drive behind wanting to study Philosophy of Consciousness is based in a deep desire for self discovery. I want to know why I am the way I am. Why I think the way I think. Why I feel the way I feel. And this all stems from having depression and anxiety. So when I discovered Dr. Sapolsky’s lecture on the subject, explaining the relationship biological and psychological need to have with one another in order for us to feel what we feel, how we feel it, when we feel it, I had to watch it.) 

     
     Dr. Sapolsky starts off by explaining the psychological definitions of depression, focusing on Major Depression and its layers (Anheadonia, Greif, Guilt, Self-injury, Psychomotor retardation, Vegetative symptoms- sleep, appetite, stress hormones). He goes on to discuss the biological workings of brain chemistry (Neurons talk to each other over a synapse by sending and receiving neurotransmitters, the three major neurotransmitters found to be related to depression are norepinephrine, dopamine and serotonin). Over the course of the hour or so lecture, Dr. Sapolsky shows the correlation between the biology of depression and the psychology of depression and how they interact and influence each other, (i.e. the Cortex and it’s ability to convince the rest of the brain to ‘go along’ with things, hormones and their effect on our moods and how we behave, stress and how the biological responses to stress can permanently change the psychological response to stressors.) It was incredibly enthralling and I recommend anyone who can spare an hour to watch the lecture. But I’m still left wondering where consciousness fits in. We are aware of both the biological and the psychological, (meaning I physically can feel- Biological, we can have thoughts make us feel- Psychological) so this seems to suggest our consciousness can tap into either one. Or perhaps is consciousness the way these two systems communicate? In order to maintain our existence, or in other words in order for us to stay alive in the form we are in, there has to be a way for the biological and the psychological parts to talk to and influence each other. We have to eat, we have to sleep, we have to not be eaten by a lion. Consciousness could be the necessary piece to keep everything working together and on the same page.

     
     In his book The Feelings of What Happens, Antonio Damasio makes several cases to this possible necessity of interaction between mind and body and why this correlation is not only needed but in his opinion a key to our existence. “For example, work from my laboratory has shown that emotions is integral to the processes of reasoning and decision making, for worse or for better. This may sound a bit counterintuitive, at first, but there is evidence to support it. The findings come from the study of several individuals who were entirely rational in the way they ran their lives up to the time when, as a result of neurological damage in specific sites of their brains, they lost a certain class of emotions and, in a momentous parallel development, lost their ability to make rational decisions… I have suggested that the delicate mechanism of reasoning is no longer affected, non consciously and on occasion even consciously, by signals hailing from the neural machinery that underlies emotion. This hypothesis is known as the somatic-marker hypothesis, and the patients who led me to propose it had damage to selected areas in the prefrontal region, especially in the ventral and medial sectors, and in the right parietal regions.”  These studies stem from Damasio’s core belief that emotions are an integral part of maintaining homeostatic regulation which is a necessary component to not only consciousness but to the logic of survival itself. The amazing thing is, through several case studies such as the good-guy/ bad-guy experiment Damasio presents on pages 43-49 show that not only can our emotions be programmed unconsciously through experience, but we also cannot stop them (emotions meaning that which can be observed by others in us and us in others as opposed to feelings which we experience internally and individually but others do not experience). 

• Discuss abstract view of Quantum Mechanics

Tong

Rovelli

• Hagelin
• Discuss naturalist view

Hume

Dennett

• Pragmatic Perspective

William James

• Conclusion

Works Cited

Blackmore, Susan J. Consciousness. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Churchland, Patricia Smith. Neurophilosophy: toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain. The MIT Press, 2015.

Clark, Desmond. Descartes: A Biography. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Damasio, Antonio R. The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness. Harvest, 2000.

Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method. Pantianos Classics, 1637.

Descartes René, and Desmond M. Clarke. Discourse on Method and Related Writings. Penguin Books, 2003.

“Robert Sapolsky - James Lange Theory of Emotion.” YouTube, YouTube, 28 Mar. 2015, youtu.be/qExorKaZaUE.

Sorell, Tom. Descartes: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 1987.

“Stanford's Sapolsky On Depression in U.S. (Full Lecture).” YouTube, YouTube, 10 Nov. 2009, youtu.be/NOAgplgTxfc.