This Is Not An Essay On Consciousness

"Neuroscientist and author Sam Harris, whose new book Waking Up: A Guide to Sprirituality Without Religion is currently the #1 Science and Mathematics Best Seller on Amazon, defines consciousness as "an experiential internal qualitative dimension to any physical system." Put more simply, consciousness is what it's like and how it feels to be you.

Thus, consciousness exists in a realm of irreducible subjectivity with which science isn't always comfortable. That's because scientists strive to simplify visible subjects into information. It's a "seeing is believing" sort of approach that butts up against the fact that consciousness is not a visible entity. Half of reality, says Harris, is qualitative experiential. The assumption that the entirety of reality can be seen and quantified is a facile one. Harris explains:

So when you’re trying to study human consciousness, for instance, by looking at states of the brain, all you can do is correlate experiential changes with changes in brain states. But no matter how tight these correlations become that never gives you license to throw out the first person experiential side. That would be analogous to saying that if you just flipped a coin long enough you would realize it had only one side.

As an example, Harris points to the third-person "objective measures" for fear and anxiety: sweaty palms, increased blood cortisol, and responses in the brain. It's important to remember that the validity of these measures depends entirely on first-person reporting:

If half the people came into the lab tomorrow and said they were feeling fear and showed none of these signs and they said they were completely calm when their cortisol spiked and when their palms started to sweat, these objective measures would no longer be reliable measures of fear. So the cash value of a change in physiology is still a change in the first person conscious side of things. And we’re inevitably going to rely on people’s subjective reports to understand whether our correlations are accurate.

This is one of many reasons why Harris believes you can't have a reasonable scientific discussion of consciousness if you're going to ignore qualitative internal experiential language. There's so much more to consciousness than the tangible. It's not something you can simply graph on a spreadsheet."

- http://bigthink.com/think-tank/the-subjectivity-of-consciousness-with-dr-sam-harris

 It's funny that science now wants to be in on consciousness, when only a few hundred years ago science couldn't get rid of the subjective quickly enough. Science was finally, and practically, wedding itself to the train of thought that starts by saying only external things can be measured. You can think and feel all and anything you want - science has no opinion on, nor, truth be told, interest in such things. It will focus on the only real reality, which is the measurable.

Now science wants in on the consciousness game. Science wants to say that consciousness is only brain states. But science does what it always does when it theorizes: science asks 'How do we explain what we see?' The answer to that is straightforward and wholly material when we ask the question of external things. But when science does science on consciousness, the question 'How do we explain it?' is to ask, 'What are you conscious of when that brain state is detected?'

Science is admitting that scientific observation can't get beyond consciousness - our theories have to let consciousness speak on its own behalf in order for there to be any meaning to the theory. You have to observe consciousness in order to understand it.

Science says, either implicitly or explicitly:

- Brain states 'mean' something

- The meaning of the brain states is the consciousness of the person being observed with those brain states


By the way: if you don't care that your theory have any meaning, you can ignore this whole argument.