Consciousness

Sam Harris commented on the mystery of consciousness here.  I thought I might make a few comments on this subject.

The existence of consciousness is the only thing that we know is not an illusion.  It is puzzling to many that we seem unable to explain how consciousness emerges.  I would argue that we cannot even be sure that it emerges.  In fact, I believe that it is unlikely that it does.

We are in the habit of believing that all humans have consciousness, as well as animals.  Plants and inanimate objects lack it.  It is commonly associated with certain cognitive processes.

However, not all of these assumptions are necessary.  Consciousness does not imply any sort of intelligence.  All it implies is that it is something to be like that thing.  Humans are in the habit of imagining what it is like to be another human.  This was a valuable skill for our ancestors.  Likewise with the ability to imagine what it would be like to be a certain animal.  That would make it easier to hunt, for example.  Few advantages would accrue to those who could imagine what it would be like to be a tree and even fewer to imagine what it would be like to be a rock.  We use other cognitive processes to deal with plants and inanimate objects.

The reason why science cannot tell the difference between conscious and unconscious matter is because the only consciousness you have access to is your own.  In order for our observations to answer this question we would have to place humans, animals and physical objects into two categories.  One which we could reliably say possessed consciousness, the other not having consciousness.  We are unable to do this as the only object we could reliably place would be ourselves and even here we could be mistaken in identifying our physical bodies as our own.  If we are even more skeptical we may question whether or not we have bodies at all.

Many of these doubts are unreasonable.  If the external world doesn't exist, then we have no basis for even having a conversation.  The differences between people don't seem sufficient to conclude that some have consciousness while in others it is an illusion.  However, the differences between animate and inanimate matter are not sufficient to conclude that there is a radical enough difference to account for one having some experience and the other none at all.  If animate matter has consciousness, it seems likely to me that inanimate matter does as well despite our intuition on this subject.  Our intuition has a known source.

But all this may be useless speculation.  We can use analogy and parsimony to speculate on what causes us to be conscious, but there is little or nothing that we can do to test our ideas.