What Is Consciousness?

In this meeting we will be discussing consciousness and experience.

To illustrate what philosophers call the "hard problem" of consciousness, imagine that you are outside looking at a tree and focusing on a single green leaf among the branches. What you experience certainly can be described in biological or physiological terms, that there is a wavelength of light associated with that particular color green entering your retina, interacting with the color cones in the back of your eye and becoming information that is then processed by your brain. But such descriptions, however true they are, fail to tell me what the experience of "greenness" itself is, or if it is true that consciousness is a purely cognitive function of the brain why any experience should accompany that brain process at all! In this instance, why does the experience of THAT shade of green correlate to the specific wavelength of light that is being reflected by that leaf.

And yet still, many (but not all) philosophers and scientists who study the brain would argue that we don't have the kind of experiences we think we have. Consciousness and experience are illusions of a purely physical, biological brain thinking it is conscious.

So what is consciousness? What is experience? What is subjectivity, the first person point of view, and if it exists at all why do our brains have such a thing as an "inner life" in the first place? Is consciousness only an illusion? Is it a separate substance or quality from physical matter? Or perhaps, as some people have theorized, is it a basic feature of the universe like mass of an object or the four fundamental forces? In other words, is consciousness only limited to living systems or can non-living things perhaps have a kind of, albeit, simpler form of consciousness? And finally, I have to ask, can computers and AI ever have the kind of consciousness that organic entities such as ourselves seem to enjoy?

If you're interested in doing a little research on this topic before hand and are looking for suggestions as to where to begin, feel free to look up the following: physicalism, materialism, eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, dualism, panpsychism, qualia, as well as Information Integration Theory (IIT) and Global Workspace Theory.

As for thinkers, Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland represent the physicalist/reductionist/eliminativist camp well. There's also John Searle who is a physicalist but not an eliminativist. David J. Chalmers is a dualist.

As far as reading material there is also the book Galileo's Error by Philip Groff which explains panpsychism. "What is it Like to be Bat" by Thomas Nagel is an important essay on the topic. And feel free to acquaint yourself with the thought experiments around "philosophical zombies", "Mary, the color scientist" and the "inverted spectrum".

This can seem overwhelming but I just leave all of this here as a recommendation for anyone who is interested. The discussion and what aspects of the debate we focus on, as always, are determined by those who show up. You don't have to look up all or any of the above suggestions in order to participate.

If you have any questions or comments please leave them in the comment section below. I look forward to this discussion.