 |
| Mirror Self-Recognition (Steve Jurvetson, Menlo Park) |
One of the
most serious difficulties faced by materialists is the
problem of consciousness, sometimes called self-awareness, the awareness
I have of being myself rather than another person or object, the feeling of
being the same individual from my first memory to my death, even though every
few years all my atoms are changed, and hence the specific matter which makes
up my body.
Since the
materialist ideology assumes that only matter (in the broad sense) exists, it
adopts a reductionist approach, according to which our self-consciousness must be,
by definition, an epiphenomenon, the result of the joint action of our neurons.
This is a dogmatic stance, without scientific support, as in the present state
of our knowledge neuroscience has not the faintest idea about how self-consciousness
is generated.
The word consciousness
has in English two different acceptations:
·
The
consciousness of being oneself, usually called self-awareness, the
object of this post.
·
The
consciousness of having experimented something, as when we say I’m
conscious of having seen you yesterday.
It is clear
that the two senses of the word are very different. We must not confuse them.
In a
previous post I commented Jeff Hawkins’s book On intelligence,
referring to his reductionist profession of faith and how he incurred the
fallacy begging the question. In this post
I will discuss Hawkins’s ideas about consciousness, expressed in the same book.
In this case he incurs another fallacy, straw man,
also discussed in
another post.
In his book,
Hawkins contemplates the problem of
consciousness, and although he confesses he is not an expert
(and immediately gives proof of it), he says he has solved the problem: he can
prove that consciousness is the result of the normal interplay of neurons, basically
reducing it to the same thing as declarative memory. To argument this,
he uses the following thought experiment:
Imagine I could flip a switch and return your
brain to the exact physical state it was at some point in the past... I just
flip the switch... and your synapses and neurons return to a previous state in
time. By doing so, I erase all your memory of what occurred since that time. Let’s
assume you go through today and wake up tomorrow... I flip the switch and erase
the last twenty-four hours. From your brain’s perspective yesterday never
happened... It’s as if you were a zombie for a day, not conscious. However, you
were conscious at the time. Your belief that you were conscious disappeared
when your declarative memory was erased.
What is the
problem with this argument? The fact that it confuses the two meanings of the
word consciousness.
The problem of consciousness, such as
discussed in philosophy and neuroscience, refers to the first meaning indicated
above. Hawkins’s thought experiment, however, refers to the second meaning, the
consciousness of having lived a particular experience.
Of course,
if you lose your memory for a time, which could happen if the passage of your
short-term memory to long-term memory is broken, you cease to be aware of some
things that you have actually lived. This syndrome has been very well studied. Oliver
Sacks, in his book The man who
mistook his wife for a hat, gives several examples. But this has
nothing to do with the problem of consciousness, just
with the fact that we can lose the consciousness of having experienced something.
Therefore Hawkins’s argument, based on his thought experiment, is a classic
example of the straw man fallacy, because it
has mistaken its target by confusing the meaning of the word he is trying to
explain away.
Manuel Alfonseca
No comments:
Post a Comment