The Conscious Human

Conversation 13, Socrates Worldview 9/22

ADEIMANTUS. Good morning, Socrates. We’ve brought along a friend of ours, Justin, if you don’t mind. As well as being a fine cyclist, he calls himself a born-again Christian.

SOCRATES. You’re very welcome, Justin. I imagine you’ve been forewarned about my requirements regarding names?

JUSTIN. I have, Socrates, and I’m prepared to go along with your choice of name.

S. Very good. I could call you Sosthenes, but we can’t have two names beginning with ‘S’ in the group. How about Euthydemus?

EUTHYDEMUS. Fine.

S. Your joining us makes for a well-balanced group. Adeimantus is a thoughtful fence-sitter and Critobulus is a committed postmodernist, although I don’t think he is quite as certain about things as he used to be. Perhaps you will suffer the same fate, Euthydemus.

E. I pray the Lord will protect me if you try to lead me into the ways of Satan.

S. Amen to that, Euthydemus. I pray I will not lead you into Satan’s clutches, although I confess that it might look that way at times.

CRITOBULUS. It is very boring listening to all this praying, Socrates, can we please get on?

S. Your eagerness is commendable, Critobulus. Now, I have spoken at length over the last two sessions about the scientific materialist view of the world. I trust you’ve given Euthydemus a quick overview of what we’ve covered so far.

C. I believe we’ve given him the gist of it, and he didn’t like the sound of it, Socrates. I think he has come along to set you straight. Isn’t that right, Euthydemus?

E. More or less.

S. If you can find fault with my arguments, Euthydemus, then I will have to concede to you, but until then, let me press on. I now want to explore how far our scientific materialist view of things goes in describing the human person and the experience of human life. I alerted you in an earlier conversation that I think the materialist view does well in areas that would have surprised most people not long ago, but does not do at all well overall. So, let me ask you, what do you consider to be the essence of human life? You go first, Euthydemus.

E. The soul, Socrates. It animates the body.

S. What do you say, Critobulus?

C. I don’t believe in an immaterial soul, Socrates. I think the body contains enough complex machinery to explain human behaviour. In particular, I think that consciousness and mind are the essence of human life and that they are processes of the material body. I think most people would agree with me these days.

S. You like to be on the right side of history, don’t you Critobulus? What do you say, Adeimantus?

A. I see the merits of both points of view and I remain undecided. I would like to hear the arguments fleshed out. Firstly, I would like Euthydemus to explain how the soul interacts with the physical body and, as he says, animates it.

S. Very good, Adeimantus, you are all being true to your type! I was about to ask Euthydemus the very same question. What do you say, Euthydemus?

E. I am not sure I can explain how the soul animates the body. I would class it as a mystery.

S. I expected nothing less, Euthydemus, but that is not good enough in this forum. We must try harder. Let me make an attempt on your behalf. Imagine that the human body is analogous to a radio receiver. A radio receiver contains a lot of complex circuitry tuned to extract radio waves with certain specific properties from the ether. By analogy, the complex machinery of the human body, especially the brain and nervous system, is tuned to allow it to resonate with a certain immaterial soul. The radio tunes into the radio waves from a particular station and extracts a program which might be scintillating music, or more likely a boring current affairs program. Likewise, the soul resonates with and ‘inhabits’ a particular human body and animates it with whatever personality that soul possesses. Are you happy with that analogy, Euthydemus?

E. It’s very good, Socrates.

A. What happens when the body declines due to age or ill health?

S. Let’s pursue the analogy. As the radio ages, its diodes and transistors begin to crumble. Its solder becomes brittle, its capacitors leaky. The radio no longer pulls out your chosen station as well as it used to. You hear static and it fades in and out. As the human body declines, it no longer expresses the characteristics of the soul as well as it used to. If the brain is affected, dementia may appear, in which memories can no longer be accessed and the personality is distorted. At the other end of life, we could say that as a baby grows and its neural circuitry develops, it is able to more fully express the essence of the soul that inhabits the body.

A. Could a human soul inhabit a dog?

S. Now we are speculating, Adeimantus. Perhaps so. Dogs display some human-like behaviour. Maybe the human characteristics of the soul are being unfaithfully presented through the body of a dog, which is not fully tuned to the human soul.

A. Our thoughts turn naturally to reincarnation. Imagine what it would be like to be a human soul trapped in the body of a cricket.

S. I imagine the novelty of the experience would wear off rather quickly, Adeimantus, and the frustration would be overwhelming.

E. Now you are making fun of me!

S. Not so, Euthydemus. Your inability to offer a cogent explanation for how a soul interacts with a body has left you exposed to this line of thinking. This is the problem with all proposals for interactions between the natural and the supernatural. This is a matter to which we must return on another occasion. Let me say for now that it would be better if you proposed that the soul had a natural existence, but in a domain which is beyond the realm of science. Such a domain must exist, as I will discuss at another time also. Then the interaction between body and soul would be a natural process, but one which is beyond scientific scrutiny in our macroscopic world. But now, Critobulus, let us hear your scientific materialistic explanation of human consciousness and mind.

C. It is quite easy, Socrates. These days we have computers that are nearly as smart as people – smarter in some respects. They can beat grand masters at chess.

S. Yes Critobulus. I read in the newspaper that chatbots are writing homework essays that teachers cannot distinguish from the work of their students.

A. The programmers of those chatbots must be very clever to get them to write that badly, Socrates!

S. My thought exactly, Adeimantus. Nevertheless, I predict that in a year or two you will have abandoned me and will discussing philosophy with a chatbot that knows much more about it than I do. You will have to buy your own coffee, though.

E. Will those chatbots express moral preferences, I wonder? And if they do, whose preferences will they be reflecting?

S. You have hit the nail on the head, Euthydemus. Hold that thought, we will return to it.

A. But are those computers aware of what they are thinking, or are they just good at processing information and sorting through lots of options? Didn’t Searle’s Chinese Room argument show that only biological organisms could be conscious, as in self-aware?

S. You are equating consciousness with self-awareness, by which we mean awareness of our own thoughts and feelings. That will do us as a working definition of consciousness. Now perhaps, Adeimantus, you had better explain Searle’s Chinese Room for Critobulus and Euthydemus.

A. Very briefly, this is how I understand the argument (Foton, 2022), (Cole, 2020). Suppose I, a non-Chinese speaker, am locked in a room. Someone outside slips under the door notes written in Chinese characters. My job is to look up these characters in a Chinese-English dictionary and translate the notes into English. I do it successfully, but I do not understand the notes at all. I have no awareness of the meaning and the emotional connotations those notes would have for a Chinese person. I am not conscious of the meaning as a Chinese speaker would be. Now, I could easily be replaced by a computer programmed to look up a Chinese-English dictionary. Searle argues that this example proves that a computer can do its job without being aware of the meaning of what it is doing, so it is not conscious. By extension, the argument applies to any machine. Hence, since people and maybe some animals are conscious, only biological organisms, or at least some of them, can be conscious.

C. There must be an error somewhere in the reasoning, because I believe that a human is just a fancy machine and is conscious, so a machine can be conscious.

S. For once I am with you, Critobulus. Let us see if we can home in on the problem. Let’s try to envisage a self-aware computer. Suppose that as well as the information processing function, the computer runs a self-awareness process in parallel. The information processing function reads input, does some processing on the input according to well-defined algorithms, and outputs the results. This process is completely unconscious, I think we agree. The self-awareness process ‘sits on top’, we could say, of the information processing function. It spies on the information processing function and pulls from it bits of information that interest it. These form the input to the self-awareness module.

A. What do you mean by ‘interest it’?

S. Ah, Adeimantus, that is the right question! The self-awareness process continuously runs a model of the world, a simulation if you like, and this model includes not only the external world but also the internal states of the host body, and even what it is thinking. So, the model includes an entity called ‘I’, which it interprets as being itself.

C. Where does it get the idea of this ‘I’ from?

S. It is preprogramed to do so, Critobulus. In living beings, the preprograming has been done by evolution. It seems to be a function of the higher cortex of the brain, although the question is one of much controversy among neuroscientists¹. Humans have it, and so might some of the higher animals. Animals that give signs of recognising themselves in a mirror probably have a concept of ‘I’. Dogs might be borderline. They seem to know that they are dogs, like other dogs of their pack, but they seem not to realise that the dog they see in a mirror is themselves. But, getting back to Adeimantus’s question about what interests the ‘I’, the model is continuously on the lookout for inputs that might imply that its model needs adjusting. You see, it bases its plans for the future on what the model is telling it. If the model is predicting that all is safe and it is a good time for a sleep, it will be alert to sounds that might indicate that a tiger is creeping up on it. It will be ‘interested’ in those sounds.

A. I see the evolutionary advantage in this ability. The model can represent entities and events by symbols, such as words, and use its memory of experiences involving those symbols to estimate the likelihood of various outcomes to scenarios. Then it can use these estimates to formulate plans for its future actions. I also suppose that the awareness of ‘I’ is useful in social interactions for group actions, which give the higher animals a survival advantage over other species.

S. I couldn’t have said it better myself, Adeimantus.

C. So, this ‘I’ can plan, but how does it feel anything?

S. You are in good form today, Critobulus. The extra blood flow to your brain from cycling is boosting your thinking power! To experience emotions, I suggest that the ‘I’ must be aware of pleasure and pain. I do not mean merely the sensation of physical pleasure or pain, but of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. We could suppose that when the thing is satisfied it is happy, and when it is dissatisfied, it is unhappy.

C. I accept that as a starting point.

S. Good! Now, why would the ‘I’ be satisfied or dissatisfied? It must be because it has goals it is trying to achieve through its plans, and it is satisfied if it achieves a goal and dissatisfied if it fails to achieve them.

A. Where would the goals come from?

S. I think that, again, they are preprogramed by evolution. There are very basic goals, like the need to get food to satisfy hunger, or there might be higher goals, like the desire to write a major orchestral symphony to satisfy some need to express the appreciation of order and beauty of the world. If you know anything about computer science, you will recognise that we are talking about the conscious entity as an agent, a thing with beliefs, desires, and intentions. Computer scientists use such agents in programming artificial intelligence, which is very suggestive for our discussion.

A. I see.

S. Let me give you an example of preprogramed goals, Adeimantus. Some time ago, Petal and I had a little dog.

E. What was the dog’s name, Socrates?

S. It is amazing how everyone always wants to know the name of any dog in a story! What is in a name? That is something our discussion will lead to soon. As it happens, the dog’s name was Artemis. She was an indoor dog and led a very comfortable life. She never experienced any threat from the time she was a pup. Nevertheless, she was constantly worried about danger. In the absence of a real threat, this anxiety became fixated on the ironing board. Whenever Petal took the ironing board out of the cupboard, the dog would explode in a paroxysm of barking in her brave efforts to defend Petal from what she perceived as a ferocious beast. I can only assume that the far distant ancestors of our pretty and thoroughly domesticated Artemis evolved the desire to be constantly on guard against beasts, maybe lions or bears, that threatened them out on the steppes, and that this vestigial desire was still operative in our little wolf.

C. Fascinating, Socrates! But I am still not convinced that satisfaction and dissatisfaction equate to feelings. A computer might register satisfaction by observing, rather clinically, that it has achieved a programmed goal, but does that mean it feels good about it?

S. You lead us to a remarkable insight, Critobulus. There is a feedback loop from the higher thinking processes to the more primitive sensory processes and what is called the sympathetic nervous system, the system that gives you feelings in the pit of your stomach. So, when you think of something revolting, you can actually experience revulsion, or at least imagine that you are experiencing revulsion. Likewise, the thought of achieving your goal could stimulate an actual experience of physical pleasure. I think this demonstrates that a computer equipped with something resembling a nervous system could be said to be experiencing feelings through this kind of process. Of course, we can only know if the computer truthfully tells us that it is experiencing a feeling, we could never experience what it is feeing. As it is, even among our fellow humans it is very hard to know just what it feels like to be another person, or even if the colour red looks the same to you as it does to me. We can never know what it feels like to be a dog, even if we concede that it does have feelings. How much harder would it be to imagine what the computer feels like, even though it is equipped to experience feelings?

C. All this is very hard to imagine, Socrates.

S. Our imagination often fails us when we are contemplating systems of exquisite complexity, Critobulus. It is hard to imagine computer circuitry of sufficient complexity, but our biological bodies have evolved the necessary complex circuitry to support the processes we have been talking about.

E. So where is the soul in all of this?

S. Nowhere, Euthydemus, just electrons buzzing around very complex circuitry. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, we will get back to the soul in good time, if not today. Firstly, let us consider the emergence of the ‘I’ processes in a very complex organism, namely a baby human.

A. They are complex enough in my experience and get more complex as they get older!

S. That’s my experience too, Adeimantus. People used to think that the mind, or rather the brain, of a baby was a blank slate, but that cannot be so. A blank slate has no program to motivate it, but a baby clearly does. Apart from its obvious need and desire to be fed, a baby displays a great desire for new experiences. It craves new sights, sounds, smells, movement, and above all, physical contact with people. Through these experiences it begins to build up its model of the world. Can you imagine trying to make sense of the blurred and changing patterns of colours and shapes that are presented to the baby’s eyes, sometimes accompanied by sounds that become familiar, and sometimes not? Now a worm also experiences a jumble of sensory inputs, but its processing is much simpler. If it senses food by detecting some combination of chemicals, it automatically goes towards it and eats it. If it detects signals emanating from a predator that evolution has programmed it to avoid, it makes a run for it. The worm does not need to understand, to make sense, of any of these things. It doesn’t have the mental machinery to do so because it doesn’t need it to survive. It is alive, but not conscious in the sense of being self-aware. But the human baby does have the mental machinery. The baby soon learns that it can focus its vision on particular shapes so that it can see them clearly. It learns that certain images seem to be associated with objects that come and go. After a while, the baby learns that these things that often appear in front of it, its hands, can feel the objects it is seeing. What is more, it realises that the hands belong to it. The innate concept of ‘I’ owns the hands and can control them. The feet and the stomach, that sometimes feels full but more often feels empty, also belong to it. The baby learns that some of the things it perceives belong to it and other things are external to it. The baby actively invites interaction and new experiences. Most marvellously of all, the baby begins to discern words out of the jumble of sound presented to it. It learns to copy sounds and speak words. It does this by mimicry and mirroring, a preprogramed ability to copy actions of other people. Before long, certainly by the age of two years, the baby understands that it is a person like the other people it knows. It has learnt to use the word ‘I’ in sentences: ‘I want it!’, or just as likely: ‘I don’t want it!’ The child has its own plans and intentions and can say when things are not going according to its plans. By the age of six years, the child is a person who is aware of its position in its family and increasingly of its position in wider social groupings. The person has emerged from the seemingly blank slate, all because of the wonderful complexity of its nervous systems and the preprogramed abilities evolution has equipped it with.

A. You tell a wonderful story, Socrates, and I find it plausible, but there is something bothering me about all this. Where among these mental processes does perceiving and thinking occur? Is it in the unconscious information processing module, or in the conscious self-awareness module?

S. I would say that most thinking and perception occurs in the information processing module and is therefore unconscious. Roughly speaking, the self-awareness module just becomes aware of what has been thought, or what it thinks has been thought, after the fact. Then the thought is associated with the ‘I’ and becomes conscious. But much of this may be an illusion. Some very clever experiments by psychologists and neuroscientists have shown that people can perceive signals and respond to them before they are consciously aware of those signals and of making a decision to respond. It seems that the conscious thought process becomes aware of what action the unconscious thought process has done and thinks it has made the decision that has, in fact, already been taken. There is a complex interplay between the conscious and unconscious processes. Thoughts in the conscious sphere can stimulate further processing of unconscious thought which can then pop back into the consciousness. We believe that we, our ‘I’, are in control of all this, but it could only be an illusion of control.

E. Are you saying that free will is an illusion? That goes against everything I believe!

S. I was wondering when you would raise the question of free will, Euthydemus. It is a question of the utmost importance to the way we govern our society, and I don’t believe that many of those people who say there is no free will have given sufficient consideration to the consequences of that position. Do you read Tintin, Euthydemus?

E. No Socrates. Who is Tintin? Why should I read him, anyway?

S. What about you, Critobulus?

C. I know who Tintin is, but I can’t say that I’m a fan.

S. I am not surprised. Your education is deficient, and it shows! Hergé, the author of the Tintin comics, was a great student of human nature. If you learn nothing else from him, you will at least gain from his character Captain Haddock a large store of expletives to employ whenever you hit your thumb with a hammer or are stuck behind a slow driver. But today I want to focus on the decision-making process of Tintin’s dog, Snowy. Snowy is tempted to steal a bone, which Tintin has forbidden him to do. Two versions of Snowy appear in Snowy’s mind. One is the little devil Snowy who urges him to take the bone. The other is little angel Snowy, who reminds him of what Tintin has said. Just as the devil is about to prevail, Snowy sees the real Tintin and he abandons the bone, wearing an angelic smile. This story presents decision making as a contest between basic urges. Now consider a human story. You are standing on the edge of a swimming pool on a hot day. You are wearing your swimming trunks and are ready to dive in. You hate the shock of the cold water, but you also know from experience that after a while you will get used to the cold and enjoy a wonderful swim. Your rational mind tells you that you should dive in, but the fear of the cold holds you back. You consciously think that probably you will dive in eventually, but perhaps you won’t. You stand there staring at the water for a long time in a state of indecision. Suddenly, you dive in. Did you decide to dive in, or did it just happen? You are not sure. You think you made the decision consciously, but maybe you did not. The experiments I mentioned before indicate that you made the decision unconsciously and only became consciously aware of it very soon afterwards. You feel that you made the decision consciously, because you were consciously aware of debating the arguments in your mind.

C. So you’re saying that free will is an illusion. That’s what I would have said.

S. It seems so, Critobulus. If man is a machine, then it must be so. It is not a simple thing, because our conscious thoughts and memories can condition our urges and tip the balance one way or the other. If society does not like our decision, it will attempt to provide us with experiences that further condition our urges, and it will do this kindly or unkindly. But at the end of the day, when the cows come home and the chickens return to roost, decisions are unconscious.

A. If all decisions are unconscious, how can any of them be rational?

S. Ah, Adeimantus, that is the right question! Remember in a previous discussion² we said a rational decision is one that is consistent with the evidence about the way things are. To make rational decisions I must have a strong desire to make rational decisions, then the desire will tip the balance in my unconscious mind towards the rational decision. When I make a decision, I can review it consciously. If I find that my decision is consistent with the evidence, then I will feel a satisfaction that will confirm to my unconscious mind that it was correct. If, on the other hand, after review, I find that my decision was irrational, then I might feel shame or embarrassment which is strong enough to cause my unconscious mind to alter the decision. This is, I think, generally how we appear to have free will, and even feel that we have free will.

A. So, if people make irrational decisions, it is because their desire to make rational decisions is not strong enough?

S. It would appear so, Adeimantus. Or it may be that their knowledge of the way the world is, according to the available evidence, is lacking. In either case, someone who values rationality, as I do, might suggest that the person needs educating.

E. But what about people who make bad moral decisions? Are they to blame?

S. It could be, Euthydemus, that it’s because decisions are unconscious that Jesus said: ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ And it is why religions offer repentance and atonement. These are topics we must delve into another day.

E. I hope so, Socrates, I am somewhat disturbed and downcast by the outcome of this discussion.

S. As I expected, Euthydemus, but be not afraid. I think you will find us on an upward trend from here. Now, so that we can be sure of where we have got to, and to have a glimpse of the road ahead, let me recapitulate. We began by asking what is the essence of human life, and we soon came to a consideration of consciousness, meaning self-awareness. You stated your opinion that consciousness is a manifestation of an immaterial soul, and I took up the challenge to describe a scientific, materialistic explanation for consciousness. I think I have adequately outlined an argument showing that, contrary to Searle, a computer could be conscious if it were suitably constructed. If a human is just a machine without a soul, as Critobulus believes, and yet it is conscious, why can’t a computer be conscious even though it has no soul?

A. Socrates, you’ve left yourself open to the argument you put into the mouth of Euthydemus, that if the computer had the right kind of circuitry, it could ‘resonate’ with an immaterial soul and be inhabited by it, thereby becoming self-aware.

S. You are right as usual, Adeimantus, but then we have the problem of explaining scientifically how the immaterial soul interacts with the computer circuits. Since we would have constructed the computer without regard to souls, but only to mimic certain processes found in biological organisms, there is no need to invoke a soul to explain the way the computer performs. And since we were using Critobulus’ analogy of the computer for the human nervous system, there is similarly no need to invoke an immaterial soul to explain human consciousness. I am not saying there is no such thing as an immaterial soul, only that we do not need the soul to understand how a human can be conscious.

C. So, where has this got us to in our overall program?

S. You will remember, Critobulus, what we said in the briefing we gave you on our initial discussions, and I state this again for the benefit of Euthydemus. I started out by maintaining that it is not irrational to believe in a materialist view of the physical world while also believing in God as an ordering principle for human life. These claims form the two complementary halves of my worldview. I have now, I hope, demonstrated the first half, namely that scientific materialism allows us to understand what goes on, and what does not go on, in the physical universe, right from the big bang up to the emergence of the conscious human. I hinted that there are limits to what science can tell us about the physical universe and that what is beyond those limits may be of the utmost importance. We will come back to that question later. The next topic we have to tackle is the experience of human life, including such questions as how we decide what is morally good and what is not, and how society should be governed. To begin on those questions, we must consider the nature of the human person. That will be the subject of our next worldview discussion. Will you continue the journey with us Euthydemus?

E. Indeed I will, Socrates. Those are questions that interest me greatly. Thank you for the invitation.

S. Until tomorrow, then.

References

Buzsaki, G. (2022). Constructing the World from Inside Out. Scientific American (June 2022), 28-35.

Cole, D. (2020). The Chinese Room Argument. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved January 25, 2023, from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/chinese-room

Foton, N. (2022). John Searle. In Encyclopedia Britannica (27 July 2022 ed.). Retrieved January 25, 2023, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Searle

1. See for example (Buzsaki, 2022)

2. See the conversation Rational and Reasonable.