The Mind Explained

A Concise Solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness

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In 1995, a philosopher named David Chalmers described what he called the “hard problem” in contrast to the “easy problems”, like that of finding the neural correlates of specific states of consciousness. The former requires a complex explanation-based solution, while the latter requires simple correlation-based solutions. By doing this, Chalmers was able to articulate precisely why the easy problems are easy. It’s because all that is required for their solution is to specify a mechanism that can perform the function of mental phenomena such as perceptions and emotions. Thus, their proposed solutions, regardless of how complex or poorly understood they might be, can be entirely consistent with the materialistic conception of the body, specifically the brain. Then, in the classic blunder of thinking that correlation is analogous to causation, psychology is often erroneously reduced to neurology, based on illogical assumptions.

A big part of the problem is that people like to use the word “brain” as a synonym for the word “soul”, rather than for the word “body”. The thing is that the brain is physical in nature, not metaphysical. So, it makes no sense to do that, at all. This means that, along with accounting for the fact that the correlation of physiological activity does not equal the causation of psychological activity, any sufficient definition of consciousness must explain what qualia are, and this is no small task. As part of this, in philosophy and certain models of psychology, qualia are generally defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. So, rather than asking what consciousness is, some philosophers ask why and how quale exist.

With that in mind, among philosophers of mind, the term quale refers to a specific property of a subjective experience: like the way a dog’s fur feels, the way a lightning bolt looks, or the way your own laughter sounds to everyone but you. With that being said, in the philosophy of mind, there are many different definitions of qualia. However, in general, the term simply refers to the experiential character of mental states. In other words, what it’s like to be a specific person, dog, bacterium, or whatever the case may be. It’s also important to understand how an impression grows into an insight that grows into an idea, and so on and so forth, as qualia form together into certain experiences of specific intensities at given levels of metaphysical complexity.

As such, it’s necessary to have a theoretical model of the world that includes substance dualism, requiring that the body and soul be composed of two ontologically distinct kinds of substances: namely tangible objects and intangible subjects, respectively. This invariably leads to the mind-body problem, which is a debate centered around the relationship between thoughts in the human mind and the brain as part of the physical body. That brings up an old question of whether the two are separate things, or not. Going back to the primary source on this. In a now world-famous thought experiment, the 17th-century French philosopher, Rene Descartes, pointed out that even if all of our physical sensations were just a hallucinatory dream, then our mind would still have to be there.

Moreover, in an attempt to explain how a metaphysical soul can have any interaction with a physical body, according to the standard substance dualist model, the mind is comprised of non-physical substances, while the body is constituted of physical substances, but they are both intimately interconnected as a mind-body composite. Along with this, according to substance dualists, psychological systems and physiological systems are capable of causally affecting each other by way of their intimate interconnection. This form of substance dualism is known as interactionism. In essence, the argument postulates that the mind and body are so interwoven that they can influence each other by virtue of their extremely close proximity. However, this is a very weak argument.

Here, the burden of proof lies in finding out how the interconnection happens. It’s also important to explain how psychosomatic phenomena, such as the placebo and nocebo effects, actually work. This would shed some light on the problem of phantom limbs, as well. As part of this, substance dualism is consistent with near-death and out-of-body experiences (NDEs and OBEs), among other things that are often relegated to parapsychology. In addition to this, if the mind is just as fundamental as the body, then consciousness does not emerge from the central nervous system. Instead, it co-evolves with it. This view is consistent with what is known as panpsychism, which is compatible with integrated information theory (IIT). This is important because IIT inverts the standard relationship of the brain and mind, working from phenomenological axioms to the material world, not the other way around.

According to integrated information theory, all physical entities have sufficiently complex mental counterparts in “qualia space”. In this way, panpsychism solves the hard problem parsimoniously by making consciousness a fundamental feature of existence. This framework should enable theoreticians to derive a full-fledged mathematical model of the mind, with consciousness being as fundamental as time and energy, in a grand unified theory of everything. After all, integrated information theory tells us when matter gives rise to consciousness, while quantum mechanics tells us when consciousness gives rise to matter. Some philosophers, such as Chalmers have even suggested that this could be the key to simultaneously solving the measurement problem in physics as well as the hard problem in metaphysics.

Furthermore, according to John Wheeler’s “participatory anthropic principle”, our reality is created by observers within the universe itself. Based on this “it from bit” doctrine, all things physical are “information-theoretic” in origin. Of course, this flies in the face of cerebrocentric convention. Still, this kind of idealism is entirely consistent with quantum mechanics, and it specifically concerns the findings of the double-slit experiment. Furthermore, in the traditional collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics, a conscious observer is necessary to bring about the collapse of a wave function in the thought experiment with Schrodinger’s cat. This specifically addresses the causal relationships between physical systems (such as bodies) and metaphysical systems (such as souls).

In regards to this, consciousness is often thought of as an accident of biology, not a purpose of teleology. This raises a number of different questions too. For instance, what is the mind supposed to be used for? Which kinds of things are conscious, and in what ways? Do souls animate every form of life or just certain kinds of organisms, and why? The list of possible questions just goes on and on. As an example of what I mean, at the most basic level, is it true that something either does or does not have a soul? Think of it like this. In much the same way that correlation is not causation, simulation is not duplication. So, the question is, will there or could there ever be androids that are completely indistinguishable from people, far surpassing the Turing Test? Better yet, does “Watson” from IBM think? Or, does MIT’s “Kismet” feel? If so how?

Of course, the real question is, is consciousness less fundamental than, equally fundamental to, or more fundamental than matter? This is the main difference between physicalism, interactionism, and idealism, respectively. Of those, interactionism necessitates that tangible objects and intangible subjects must have coexisted for billions of years, in separate but interconnected planes of existence: physical and metaphysical. The problem is, where is the “qualia space” that Giulio Tononi and other theorists describe? Well, in searching for an answer to that, I’ve found that by applying Ed Witten’s M-theory cosmology, which requires an 11-dimensional spacetime continuum, it becomes apparent to me that the three dimensions of open external space contain bodies while the seven dimensions of closed (“compactified”) internal space must contain souls.

What this means is that, along with these mental and physical state-spaces, I personally think that time serves as the dimension of interaction, thereby solving the mind-body problem. So, assuming my hypothesis is tenable, then the mechanism by which the mind affects the body is temporal in nature. This is true for the body affecting the mind, as well. In other words, the 3-dimensional objects in physical space (dimensions 1–3) and the 7-dimensional subjects in metaphysical space (dimensions 5–11) interact by way of time (dimension 4). With that being said, I obviously disagree with Descartes’ assumption that the pineal gland has something to do with the interaction between the two. After all, it’s part of the body and not the soul.

In addition to this, based on Ned Block’s intriguing philosophical proposal, there are two distinct types of experiences: phenomenal (P-consciousness) and access (A-consciousness). This perfectly maps onto the collective unconscious mind and the personal conscious mind, in Jungian psychoanalysis. In this way, both panpsychism and emergentism can be used to adequately describe psychological states which are consistent with each other in so much as they independently characterize interactionism (dualism), in one manner or another. Of these, the former doctrine is best described by panexperientialism according to which all entities have phenomenal consciousness though not necessarily access consciousness.

Here’s the thing though, if the assertions of emergentism and panpsychism are both true, then there might be a difference in degree as well as a difference in kind regarding the subjective nature of animate and inanimate materials, even though they would both have to possess mental qualities of some form or another based on the unique parameters of metaphysical systems in general. Otherwise, there appears to be a problem inherent in the idea of emergentism, given that higher-order properties would have no way of causally interacting with the more fundamental levels of existence, while panpsychism would easily allow for mind-to-body causation since there aren’t any lower levels to supervene over. That is to say, without primitive panpsychism being fundamental then derivative emergentism has nothing to build off of.

This is known as the combination problem, which is part of the mind-body problem as it specifically pertains to panpsychism. Thus, the solution must be that P-consciousness exists in all places, at all times, while A-consciousness only exists in certain places at specific times, making both panpsychism and emergentism valid theories. With that being said, it would appear that dualism (interactionism) is a better fit than monism (either physicalism or idealism). More to the point, the fact that neurology and psychology are distinct fields of study is proof of dualism. Simply put, the word “brain” is not a synonym for the word “mind”. Consider the fact that physicians refer to the Physician’s Desk Reference to treat patients, but psychiatrists refer to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. One deals with the body and the other with the soul.

This is proof of the validity of predicate dualism as well as property dualism, if not full-blown substance dualism. More to the point, what this means is that you are a soul with a body, not a brain with a mind. Ultimately, this means that the solution to the hard problem will be found in the rejection of reduction through expansion by means of correlation. It also means that a number of different proposals such as panpsychism (IIT), emergentism (A-consciousness), and interactionism (substance dualism) are, at least part of, the best set of available theories to solve the hard problem. Therefore, any viable theory of everything will necessarily contain such models of the mind as they correlate to specific states of awareness. In the end, though, philosophers and scientists are still a long way off from bridging what Joseph Levine dubbed the “explanatory gap”. The thing is that only time will tell how long that will take…