Identity, Self, and Other

Consciousness:

The Hard Problem

Dualism

Physicalism

Idealism

Identifying Consciousness

Vast Minds

Identity, Self, and Other

The Question of Meaning

Suppose there is a boat. As the boat goes on many voyages, its pieces wear out one by one and are replaced. Eventually, there are no original materials left. But the pieces are saved, and they are all put together into a second boat. Which of these two boats is the original, the one that continued to voyage, or the one made out of all the original materials?

This thought experiment is called the Ship of Theseus, and it goes back to Ancient Greece. Its answer, as we talked about in our discussion of reductionism and holism, it that which ship is the original is completely arbitrary, we decide. Objective reality has nothing at all to say on the matter.

That’s fine for inanimate objects, but it can be a lot harder to swallow when we try out the same idea on human beings, particularly ourselves. Every few years, the atoms and molecules that make up our bodies are cycled out and replaced, even in our neurons and other cells that stick around. Imagine if all of the atoms from you of ten years ago were reassembled into a new person, whose consciousness picked up as if waking up after going to bed ten years earlier. Which of these two people is the real you? If we want to be consistent with the Ship of Theseus, the answer is completely subjective. Both versions of you have equal claim to be the original, as was discussed in my YouTube video on the subject.

This feels like nonsense. After all, you know that you are you. This other person is clearly someone else, a new person with false memories. But this concept of a continuing self which is distinct from all others is an illusion. To demonstrate this, let’s ask what a self is supposed to be.

If the self is not found in the matter that makes up our bodies, maybe it is in our soul, a self-contained essence of identity that remains with us, unchanging, from the moment our lives begin until we die. However, as science continues to develop better tools to look into the body and the brain, we understand better and better how the mind works, but there is still no sign of a soul to be found. So it appears that souls are a relic from mythology and folk wisdom, and unless souls are a metaphor or an abstraction of something else, we have no reason to believe they exist.

Perhaps what the soul is an abstraction of is the continually evolving process of consciousness over time. Except our consciousness is not continuous. It turns off when we are asleep, and turns on again when we dream or wake. And we have lapses in consciousness now and then even when we are awake. To top it off, the experience we think of as “this present moment” is actually the result of the brain ordering and constructing an experience based on sensory information it received a fraction of a second ago over a period of a few milliseconds.

With some meditation practice and an open mind, we can discover that our conscious experience is not a homunculus, an internal receiver of perceptions and generator of thoughts and will. Instead, our conscious experience is the perceptions, thoughts, and will, which arise, exist for a moment, and then disappear again. Thus, the consciousness we have now is different from the consciousness we had ten years ago, or even ten minutes ago.

Furthermore, rare phenomena show that our consciousness is not necessarily bound within our bodies. I’m not talking about out-of-body experiences or anything like that; I mean things like connecting brains together to make a collective consciousness. Right now, we have very few examples of joined or split consciousnesses. We would hope so, because performing experiments in this area would be the ultimate personal violation.

Nevertheless, we do have a few points of data. Patients of split-brain surgery who have the two halves of their brain separated can develop two distinct personalities, one in each half of their brain. In terms of joining consciousness together, we have cranially conjoined twins whose brains are connected, and, to a degree, these twins share consciousness.

Science fiction goes crazy on these ideas with thought experiments of collectives, groups of people—perhaps hundreds, thousands, or even millions—who link their minds together and become one giant person. Famous examples include the Borg in Star Trek and the Formics in Ender’s Game.

In these stories, it is sometimes possible for an individual body to disconnect from the collective and become an individual person. But if that person has been in the collective for long enough, they are not the same person they were before they joined. Rather, they are a small version of the collective who now only has access to body and one set of senses.

Thus, it would appear that consciousness is not made up of distinct units, “selves,” that can link together and separate, but it is more like a liquid, which can join, mix, and separate like droplets and bodies of water. This analogy especially makes sense when thinking about the distant future when the vast majority of conscious life will live within an immense virtual reality network.

Coming back to us, here, today, we may see ourselves in a new light. Now, this model we’ve always taken for granted of distinct individuals, of you, me, that person, and the other person, does not seem so set in stone. We don’t all have our own unique, fundamentally separate existences from one another. Rather, it’s almost as if we are a collective already. All living things, lakes of consciousness. One, but for the space between us.

In this view, it can be said that there is life after death. Not an afterlife, nor is it quite reincarnation; it’s all the people and animals who are still alive. I am you, and you are me. We are the universe, and when one droplet of consciousness evaporates, there are still an ocean’s worth remaining.

I realize that a lot of what I said here sounds pretty weird, and I admit it does stray quite a bit beyond the realm of well-grounded science. But it’s not just something I thought up out of nowhere, nor am I repeating something I heard someone else say. I did take some liberties with narrative interpretation—it’s entirely subjective whether we consider everyone today to be a collective or individuals—but the liquid-like interpretation of consciousness is the most logically consistent analogy I can think of given my knowledge of current science and philosophy.

Vast Minds – A Bizarre Possibility of Physicalist Consciousness

Consciousness:

The Hard Problem

Dualism

Physicalism

Idealism

Identifying Consciousness
Vast Minds

Identity, Self, and Other

The Question of Meaning

Disclaimer: The content of this blog post is outside the realm of current scientific knowledge. These ideas are meant as a fun exploration of possibilities, and should be taken with the same level of seriousness as life on other planets and alternate universes. 

Despite all of the revelations of science and philosophy, consciousness remains one of the universe’s most incredible mysteries. We have gone over several explanations of consciousness in this series, and in my judgment, physicalism fits best with the jigsaw puzzle of science. In particular, the version of physicalism that says consciousness is patterns of information in the brain. For this discussion, we will assume physicalism of this kind is true. (And remember, it has nothing to do with the q-word!)

Brains are made of neurons, a very simple machine. A neuron fires an electric pulse if it receives enough stimulus, and that’s it. But get enough of these simple machines together, and we get a system that exhibits conceptual models, self-awareness, free will, and consciousness.

If consciousness in the brain is a result of the collective information processes of neurons, then it stands to reason that if the same information processes happen in another system, such as a computer, that system will be conscious too; consciousness is substrate-independent. The unit of computation is the transistor, which behaves somewhat differently from a neuron, but wire enough transistors together and they can do anything a network of neurons can do. Thus, it should be possible to build a computer that is just as conscious as a human.

But here’s the question that comes to my mind: if we’re going to introduce the idea of substrate-independence to talk about conscious computer programs, why stop at computers? Drawing the line there seems just as arbitrary as drawing it at brains. A few adventurous thinkers extend the idea of substrate-independence to systems like billions of people standing in a field, raising flags or pulling levers. If these people can imitate the human connectome well enough, then this field of 80 billion people will be just as conscious as the human brain it is emulating.

So let’s be speculative pioneers and take this line of reasoning to its extreme conclusion. Let’s dispense with the idea of mimicking brains, and ask what kinds of sufficiently complex systems in general might be conscious? For instance, what about an ant colony?

Ants are not very smart creatures. For brains, they have only 250,000 neurons, which may not seem too shabby, but it is only .0003% of the 80 billion neurons humans have. These little brains can run programs to tell the ant where to find food, what task to perform, when to attack an enemy, and a number of other simple things like that. If an individual ant is conscious at all, its awareness is very limited, more of a mush of impressions and sensations than a thinking mind.

But what about the colony as a whole? The capacity for ants to build nests, gather resources, and wage wars is not in the individual ants, but in the collective actions of the colony. When ants come into contact with their sisters, they interact by sharing pheromones. This influences what each ant does next. The meeting between two ants is the unit of information sharing for the colony. Could the meetings of ants add up to information processing in such a way as to make the colony as a whole a conscious mind?

Ant colonies have between 500 and 10,000 ants. This is much less than the number of neurons an individual ant has. So it seems unlikely that an ant colony would be more conscious than an individual ant. But that conclusion is dramatic in itself; the very fact that known science does not dismiss outright the idea that an ant colony could be conscious if it had enough ants is mind-blowing!

Now that the door is open, let’s let ourselves loose and imagine the possibilities of consciousness in other collective systems. Perhaps the internet is conscious. After all, it is a network of sites and files and cookies and all that, which people and programs are constantly clicking through and changing. Perhaps the entire internet is one giant conscious mind, or maybe pockets of it are minds, like Facebook and YouTube.

What about more abstract things, like economies? The economy shares information through transactions, and every transaction influences future transactions and the overall state of the economy. Might an economy be conscious? Could our purchases, working hours, and business ventures contribute to the health and wellbeing of a living mind?

What about other complex systems? Might weather patterns be conscious? Ecosystems? In another discussion, we analogized ideologies, religions, and cultures as memetic organisms, propagating themselves through memetics rather than genetics. Might religions, ideologies, and cultures literally be alive and conscious?

It all seems absurd, and for all I know, the answer to all these questions is no. To the best of our knowledge, the only things in the universe that we can be certain are conscious are brains. But, consciousness is the least understood phenomenon known to science, and it may well be that once we understand it better, we start to find consciousness in all kinds of places we never expected.

Your Brain is a Virtual Reality Machine

What is the difference between reality and virtual reality? At first, the answer seems obvious: reality is real and virtual reality is made up. It’s right there in the definitions of the words. But when we get down to the nuances of the meanings of these terms, we will find out that there may not be nearly as much of a difference as we first think.

Teasing Apart Reality and Perception

Being human, we have an instinctive intuition about what reality is. We look around, and we see it. We hear it, touch it, smell it, orient ourselves within it. Our senses tell us what reality around us is like, and in our consciousness, we perceive it. This instinct is called naive realism.

To make naive realism concrete, we look at an ancient theory of vision: eye beams. Back before the days of modern science, people believed we saw things by emitting invisible beams from our eyes. Anything these beams touched, we perceived in our vision. Perception was thought to take place out at the location of the things we perceive, and thus, our perceptions showed us reality.

Modern science has shown us that, to the contrary, perception happens in the brain. Our eyes do not emit beams. Instead, light bounces off the objects and brings information about their colors and textures into our eyes. Our eyes receive that information and translate it into electrical signals, which travel up our optic nerves into our brains, where our brains take the information and construct a representation that makes sense to us. The same is true for the rest of our senses.

Thus, what we think of as reality is not actually reality; it is a representation of reality created in our brains out of the information brought to them by our senses. When you see an apple, you see something red, round, and delicious over there. But “redness,” “roundness,” “deliciousness,” and “over there-ness” are just concepts created in your mind; they are not real qualities! Sure, there is something out there corresponding with each of these qualities, but it is different from the qulia that represent it. This theory of perception and reality is called representational realism.

Brains, Reality, and Virtual Reality

What is virtual reality? Those of us who have tried it have the experience of putting on a headset with screens in the eyepieces so close to our eyes we can’t tell they are there. These screens produce images that give the illusion that we are in a different place. The things we see in virtual reality are not material objects, they are illusions fed to us by a computer.

There’s an old thought experiment that asks, how do you know you aren’t a brain in a vat of nutrients, and that everything you perceive isn’t just being fed to you through your sensory nerves? Well, according to science, you are! The vat is your skull. Your brain is being fed electrical signals through your sensory nerves, which are translations of information received by your sensory organs.

Reality, like virtual reality, is made of information. The ultimate information in reality is a set of relationships between mathematical constructs, which we think of as matter and energy. The ultimate information in virtual reality is a set of relationships between mathematical constructs, which we call electrical signals in the computer. The concept and image of an apple in your brain is not like the electrical signals in the computer. But neither is it like the information making up the material apple. It is an equally false, and equally true, representation of both.

Thus, the only difference between reality and virtual reality is the type of information that exists “out there.” In terms of what we naively think of as reality, the images and sounds and colors and spaces and all that stuff, there is no difference! This “reality” created in our brains is a virtual reality, generated to help us process the information coming from our senses so that we can survive and thrive. There is one major difference between a material apple and a virtual apple: you can eat a material apple. But as to the question of which is more real, they are both mental constructs made from real information out there.

How do We Know if Something is Conscious?

Consciousness:
The Hard Problem
Dualism
Physicalism
Idealism
Identifying Consciousness

Vast Minds

Identity, Self, and Other

The Question of Meaning

I know I’m conscious, and you know you’re conscious. But how does each of us know the other is conscious? We have daily interactions with family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. We assume they are conscious just like us. But how do we know? How does any of us know that other people aren’t just p-zombies, robots programmed to behave in such a way as to deceive us into thinking they are conscious? And beyond humans, how can we know whether animals, insects, plants, or AI programs are conscious?

There is a famous thought experiment called the Turing test, put forth by one of the great pioneering minds of computer science, Alan Turing. The Turing test says if a machine is able to fool people into believing it is a human, that machine is conscious. But this idea has not aged well. The first glaring problem is that one person being conscious does not depend on other people believing they are conscious. Whether or not you are conscious is a fact within reality. Secondly, we have programs today that pass the Turing test, but clearly aren’t conscious. For instance, if an internet chatbot writes a comment on a video or conversation thread with a few key words and some profanity, there is a chance that some people will be fooled into believing it is a human. Yet if you know how these bots are programmed, the idea that they are conscious is laughable. The Turing test was a genius visualization of the future, and extremely important to the history of computer science, but it has not turned out to be a useful tool for determining whether someone or something is conscious.

For this discussion, we will draw heavily on what has been discussed in the first three entries of the consciousness series, so if you haven’t read those, you may want to do so before continuing. We will assume Realism rather than Idealism, because answers in Idealism could go a million different ways, and as I have argued many a time, I think it is far more reasonable to believe Realism is true.

If Dualism is true, the answer is simple: develop technology that can precisely measure the processes going on in the brain. If energy and momentum are not conserved, appearing and disappearing in ways that correlate with the person’s choices, it is evidence that a soul is interfering with the brain. If energy and momentum are conserved, then that person has no soul, and, according to Dualism, is not conscious. This is a way Dualism can be tested; you know you are conscious, so if you turn this machine on yourself and find no violation of conservation of momentum or energy, then Dualism is false.

In order to shine light on how we know anybody else is conscious, we should first ask how we know we ourselves are conscious. This is referred to in philosophy as the meta-problem of consciousness. Each of us can say, “I’m conscious, and I know I am conscious, and I know I am not wrong.” It is not an assumption. It is an observation, something that is directly experienced, and requires explanation.

As far as we can tell, the brain follows the laws of physics, without any interference from dualistic soul stuff. This means all knowledge corresponds to patterns of neurons and electricity in our brains. This leads to the illusionist view mentioned above: the brain is aware of its own awareness. It has a neuro-electrical pattern corresponding with the way its own neuro-electrical patterns work. When translating those patterns into language, the brain makes the mouth call it “consciousness.” Thus, consciousness is something made-up by the brain to describe the neuro-electrical patterns that represent neuro-electrical patterns.

If you understood that, and if you’re like me, that explanation is not satisfying. According to the illusionist, we are p-zombies who think we are conscious, but we are wrong. But that cannot be true. You know you are conscious; that is an indisputable fact. If consciousness is an illusion, then we must ask how is it possible for the illusion to exist. It does not solve the problem, it merely changes the word describing the thing we’re trying to explain.

I have a hypothesis. As of writing this, I do not know if any professional philosopher has explicitly put forth the suggestion I am about to make. If the reason we have a concept of consciousness is because of a neuro-electrical pattern of information within our brains, and that is the end of the physical description of what is going on, explaining our outward behavior completely with no holes, then that pattern of information not only correlates with the concept of consciousness, it is consciousness.

More precisely, that pattern is a quale, a piece of conscious experience. In particular, it is the quale of self-awareness. Other qualia include things like colors, tastes, thoughts, concepts, and elements of imagination. If my hypothesis is correct, then the correlation between qualia and their corresponding patterns of information are not correlations at all; they are equivalent descriptions of exactly the same thing! This would be true no matter what material or substrate the patterns exist in.

If this is true, it answers both the hard problem and the meta-problem. How is it possible for consciousness to exist? Consciousness is patterns of referential information acted out by processes within physical reality. How can we know about consciousness, and ask the hard problem? Because knowing about consciousness is one of many things that are consciousness. And finally, we have discovered a way to know from the outside whether someone or something is conscious. The trick is to look at their information processing structure, be it a brain or a microchip, and see if it has conscious patterns.

Of course, this is merely a hypothesis. It answers all the questions and leaves no logical loose threads, at least as far as I can tell, and it doesn’t require postulating any new elusive features to our theories of physics. Speaking of which, it doesn’t even mention the q-word. Still, it is a hypothesis nonetheless. In order to build a theory incorporating it, we will need instruments that can read individual neurons in conscious human subjects, and build catalogs of qualia and their corresponding neuro-electrical patterns. This will stimulate a cycle of hypotheses and experiments, and the science of consciousness will reach maturity. Then, we may feel as comfortable saying we understand consciousness as we do saying we understand electricity, or sound waves, or the rainbow.

Idealism – What if Consciousness is All there Is?

Consciousness:
The Hard Problem
Dualism
Physicalism
Idealism
Identifying Consciousness

Vast Minds

Identity, Self, and Other

The Question of Meaning

We began our exploration of the metaphysics of consciousness by discussing the Hard Problem and the philosophical zombie. We then explored the two routes we could take from there: Dualism, which says consciousness is a substance different from the rest of physical reality; and Physicalism, which says consciousness is part of physical reality, either at the fundamental level or emergent. But these paths both make an assumption: physical reality exists, a stance called Realism. Today, we’re going to question that assumption.

Suppose there is a universe where no life exists. No one and nothing is able to observe it. Does it make sense to say that universe exists? A Realist would say, “Of course, what does observability have to do with existence?” But to some people, the very idea of something existing without being observed seems incoherent, because to imagine it requires imagining oneself observing it. This theory, that nothing exists unless it is being observed, is called Idealism.

Idealism states that without consciousness, nothing exists. Or in other words, reality is a projection of consciousness. Our bodies, the Earth, houses, cars, trees, computers, all these things exist because we collectively expect them to, either consciously or unconsciously. If something is not being observed by a conscious being, then, it doesn’t exist.

The distinction between Realism and Idealism can be seen by considering the old question, if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? According to Realism, it does. The impact of the wood on the dirt causes pressure waves in the air, which are sound. On the other hand, the Idealist would say it does not. In fact, the tree would not even fall in the first place, it would simply manifest into existence as a fallen log the next time someone walked by!

This raises a big problem for Idealism. If nothing exists if it is not being observed, then why do things manifest as if stuff has happened when nobody is looking? Why do trees fall? Why do clocks show the right time? If nothing exists when it is not being observed, shouldn’t there be random inexplicable changes whenever we look away from something and then look back?

An Idealist would say these things happen because we expect them to. When we look at a clock, we know it is supposed to accurately tell us what time it is, so it does.

But what about when things don’t happen as expected? If reality is a projection of our minds and behaves as we expect it to, we should never find ourselves surprised. Not only in our everyday lives, but at the frontier of scientific knowledge as well, such as when Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter, or when astronomers discovered the universe is speeding up as it expands. Furthermore, science and technology work for people who don’t know how they work or what they are supposed to do. How can this be so in an Ideal universe?

Various Idealists come back with two possible answers. The first is to invoke a personal God as the all-seeing observer, who keeps the universe from disintegrating into nonexistence by constantly observing every atom. This interpretation is popular with some theologians, because it gives us a universe that is mostly indistinguishable from a Real universe, but provides a mechanism by which God and other supernatural beings can intervene.

The second answer is to say reality is projected from our collective expectations, not our individual minds. In this case, things happen the way they do because most people believe it. Or rather, because most of the available power of belief is aimed toward it. It could be that minds have different strengths, and so the belief of a powerful mind might influence reality more than the belief of a weaker mind. We talked last week about how narratives spread as memetic complexes. If this brand of Idealism is true, then these narratives are not just competing for propagation, but for influence over the nature of reality itself.

This brand of Idealism would also allow for wizards and magic and all kinds of supernatural things. Minds without bodies, super-powerful minds, influential minds; these could obtain some amount of control over the local fabric of reality. Different kinds of powerful minds would bend it in different ways. A strong mind could bend reality to their will, a powerful but weak-willed mind would bend it uncontrollably, and an instinctual animal mind or an ignorant mind would shape it unconsciously around their view of the world. In fact, much of the magic of fantasy and superhero stories becomes accessible under the metaphysics of Idealism.

On the extreme end of Idealism, we find Solipsism, the belief that, not only is reality a projection of your mind, but so are other people. You are the only person who exists. Everyone and everything else is no more than a dream.

By Clarissa Blackburn on Flickr

Of course, the only evidence in support of Solipsism is that we can’t prove absolutely that it’s not true. Any argument in favor of the existence of things other than oneself can be countered with, “but how do I know?” The same can be said of Idealism. A Realist must postulate a quality called “existence,” which is independent of knowledge, perception, and belief, but the Idealist can immediately counter with, “How can you know about something that is independent of knowledge? You can’t!”

The answer to which of these theories is correct, Realism, Idealism, or Solipsism, is by no means trivial. We each might feel strongly toward one of them, but arguing in its favor is a difficult task. My strategy is to use the Anthropic Principle: which of the three theories is most likely to produce the world we find ourselves in?

Let’s start with Realism. Assuming things exist, they obey non-contradiction, acting according to the “way they exist,” their natures. Because of this, we expect absolute coherence. Clocks tell the right time because they work even when no one is looking at them. When they tell the wrong time, it is because they don’t run at a perfect rate, or they are set wrong, or they are broken, or they undergo relativistic time dilation.

In order to understand how things work, we play detective to figure out what they have been doing while no one was watching. This works for things on Earth, in the solar system, in the galaxy, and all throughout the entire universe, every atom and subatomic particle doing its thing, adding up in enormous numbers to yield what we see through our telescopes and microscopes and all or our biological and mechanical senses. It makes sense, because it exhibits the same kinds of behavior while we are observing it and while we are not.

Quantum physics is an exception; particles and quantum systems behave differently if they are being observed than if they are left alone. However, this is because in order to observe systems on the scale of atoms and subatomic particles, we have to disturb them with other particles, like photons. Any photon capable of observing an atom is going to knock the atom around, changing the state of the system. According to Realism, the reason quantum systems behave differently when they are being observed is because of the tools necessary to take measurements, not because of anything special about awareness.

I also want to dispel a myth about quantum physics; it’s not inherently mysterious. A famous physicist once said, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” This is catchy and comes with a flavor of authority, but it is a lie. Quantum physics is consistent and understandable, it’s just different from what we’re used to. Thus, it is perfectly compatible with Realism as defined three paragraphs above.

In Idealism, there is no hard principle keeping everything consistent. Hypothetically, you could turn around to see an apple floating in midair, or a million dollars manifested in a pile on the floor. We can think of this in terms of entropy: the number of incoherent ways we might find the universe to be vastly outnumbers the number of coherent ways. Therefore, if Idealism were true, we would expect to find lots of messiness and inconsistency all over the place, not this ordered world that behaves so consistently according to physical laws.

Of course, Idealism has a counter-argument: to suggest there are inconsistencies, like miracles and haunted houses and other supernatural stuff. The reason they are rare enough that people can live their whole lives without believing they exist is because the narrative of Realism is so powerful; if more people believed in magic and mysticism, such inexplicable things would be more commonplace.

Solipsism does not have this defense, since if it were true, then the only mind with beliefs would be a Solipsist, giving the narrative of Realism no power. Sorry Solipsism, the only argument in your favor is the teenage favorite, “You can’t prove I’m wrong.”

When we look out into the universe, we see billions of stars in the galaxy, each with its own set of planets. Out in the vast reaches of space, we see billions of galaxies, each with its own billions or trillions of stars. To me, it feels extremely self-aggrandizing to suppose we imagined all that into existence within the past hundred years. It has long been our nature to put ourselves at the center of existence, to seek power over nature and reality. To that end, we may find it convenient to believe that if we just believe hard enough, anything imaginable can happen. We also tend to look for rationalizations to continue believing what we already believe, be it ideological, religious, superstitious, or scientific. Thus, we can keep looking for rationalizations to explain how an Ideal universe might come to look exactly how we would expect a Real universe to be. Or, we can acquiesce to Occam’s Razor, and accept the universe as Real.

Interestingly, there are circumstances where things like Idealism and Solipsism can exist within a larger framework of Reality. We’ll explore those in later posts when we get to the Simulation Hypothesis and Boltzmann Brains.

The Theseus Dilemma – A Short Story

Hello, dear readers. Last week, my writing group wrote and swapped short stories, and from that came this sci-fi nugget. I hope you like it.

The Theseus Dilemma

by Christian Horst

The doctors didn’t wear white.

That was Olander Brice’s first thought as his wheelchair drove him into the Turing Society’s operating room. Funny. Here he was, about to have his soul travel through a wire from his body into a virtual reality on a supercomputer, and what stuck out to him the most was the way the surgeons were dressed. Button-up shirts, a man in blue, a woman in brown. Not white, like the advertisements always showed.

“Hi, Mr. Brice,” the woman said. “I’m Dr. Sutter, and this is Dr. Lars.”

Olander made a series of eye movements, the only motion his body allowed him. From a speaker on his headband, his voice said, “It’s nice to meet you.”

The room was small and cozy, like most doctors’ offices he had been to. A padded operating table lay in the middle, and one side of the room had a counter where various tools and papers rested in a well-organized manner. On the other side stood a large machine with various knobs and bits protruding from it. The walls were lined with posters explaining the science of the brain and consciousness. One of them caught his eye. Substrate-Independence, it was titled.

Consciousness can exist anywhere that can store and evolve its patterns of information. Brains and computers can host consciousness, as can any other substrate that can store memories and process information via neural networks.

Beside the text were two diagrams. The first was a side view of the inside of a human head, and the second was a computer chip. Over top of both of them were two identical patterns of blue lightning, symbolizing the ability of a human soul to exist in either body.

“Okay, Mr. Brice,” Dr. Sutter said, “we’re going to lay you down. Is that all right?”

Olander blinked rapidly three times, and his speaker said, “Yes.”

Four hands lifted him out of his wheelchair and placed him onto the table. As his body settled and relaxed, a deep happiness came over him. After years of paralysis, his life was finally about to change.

“Take a look over there,” Dr. Lars said, his hand gently tilting Olander’s head. “See that camera? That’s where you’ll be viewing the room from in just a little while.” On the desk stood a camera on a short stand, its two adjustable lenses set apart by the same distance as Olander’s eyes, so that when he looked through it he would see in 3D.

Olander felt a dampness on the inside of his forearm as Dr. Sutter swabbed it with rubbing alcohol. “We’re going to give you a full-body pain blocker,” she said. “We can’t give you anesthetic, because that would prevent the procedure from working.”

Olander knew this. The company had made it very clear that the doctors had to connect the mind transfer cable directly to the frontal lobe of the brain, and had him sign several forms consenting to letting them drill a quarter-inch hole in his skull while he was conscious. Though it was a little discomforting, he was reassured by the testimonies of those who had undergone the procedure before him and ended up happily in the simulated world of the Turing Society. Besides, the alternative was to stay trapped in this useless body of his.

“We sometimes administer a paralyzing agent,” Dr. Sutter said, “to keep our patients from moving, but in cases like yours, it is unnecessary.”

Dr. Lars put his hands gently on Olander’s head, fingers resting on his headset. “We’re going to have to take this off. Is there anything you would like to say first?”

Olander thought for a few moments. Once they removed his headset, he would not be able to talk until the operation was finished. He moved his eyes. “I would like some water, please.” That was one of his saved speed-messages. The next sentence took a little time to construct. “To taste it one last time.”

“Certainly.” Dr. Lars walked out of Olander’s field of view, and the hiss of a sink faucet met his ears. The two doctors worked together to prop him up, and Dr. Lars’ hand tipped a small paper cup to Olander’s lips. He felt the cool liquid enter his mouth and slide down his throat, and he savored the sensation. After today, he could drink virtual water, but it would never be the same. Though it was scientifically proven to be an identical experience, many people reported that just the knowledge it was an illusion rather than material caused it to lose something.

“I’m ready to remove my headset.” Olander said.

The doctors laid him down again, and he felt the set’s pressure release, feeling its echo as the cool openness of the air took its place. He marveled at the strangeness of the feeling, as if the headset had been a part of his head, and removing it altered his body away from its natural state.

“Okay, let’s start with the shaving,” Dr. Lars said. There was a click, and a buzz, and Olander felt the tingling of a trimmer as the hair on the front of his scalp fell away.

“We’re going to administer the pain blocker now,” Dr. Sutter said.

Olander closed his eyes and tried to relax. He was excited and frightened. If everything went smoothly, he would be walking around and talking inside a computer within an hour. The sting of the IV needle made him wince, but then it was in and over. He assured himself that the rest of the procedure would go more or less the same.

“Okay, Mr. Brice,” Dr. Lars said, “Your pain sensations should be blocked now. I’m going to test it by pinching you. You should feel a tug, but no pain. If it hurts, blink rapidly.”

Olander felt the doctor’s fingers press on the skin of his other arm. It felt a little tight, but that was all.

“No pain?”

Olander slowly opened his eyes and looked at the doctor, then closed them again just as slowly.

“Okay, it looks like we’re ready to start drilling.”

The newly-shaved part of his head was dabbed with rubbing alcohol. Then, there was a shift in the air pressure, a few clicks and whirs, and the touch of something small and cool.

“Drill in place,” Dr Lars said. He shifted to a softer tone. “Remember, if you feel any pain, let us know. Are you ready?”

Olander opened and closed his eyes, feeling almost as if it were someone else’s body on the table saying yes, not him. He had no choice; there was no turning back. Yes, I am ready.

The sound of the drill began, echoing inside his head. His skull felt tight all over. Then, just like that, it was done.

“Inserting the cable,” Dr. Lars said.

Olander steeled himself for the feeling of something poking around inside his brain. He knew it was perfectly harmless, perfectly normal procedure, but the thought still made his skin crawl. However, when the connector was inserted, he found it wasn’t nearly as bad as he imagined, instead feeling as if the cable had attached itself to the outside of his head. Maybe it was because of the pain blocker, or maybe brains couldn’t feel things directly. Either way, he was relieved.

“Beginning transference.”

What happened next did not follow any pattern of order or cohesion. He experienced a jumble of fragments of the doctors’ speech, a view of the room from outside his body, the feeling of the cable on his forehead, the perception of his body extending to enormous size and complexity, and the redness of the insides of his eyelids.

The sound of Dr. Sutter asking if he could see her brought him back to full consciousness. The two doctors stood looking at him at eye-level. Behind them lay his own body, a green wire plugged into his head, held up by a protrusion from the operating machine. With a swell of elation, he let out a cry. “Yes! Yes, I can see you!”

“How do you feel?” Dr. Lars said.

He felt as if he were floating in a warm emptiness. No, that wasn’t quite right. Thousands of unfamiliar sensations tickled him in ways he couldn’t make sense of. Did he have a face, hands, and legs? It felt like it. That must be the ghost-body sensation he had been told about, his mind not letting go of his body’s shape after decades of learning its nervous system. “Great!” The sound of his own voice, issuing forth with naught but a mental command, filled him with joy. If he’d still had eyes, he was sure he would be crying.

“Can you switch between cameras within the office?” Dr. Sutter asked.

Olander thought about it, and noticed what could only be described as knobs at the edges of his awareness. When he tugged on one of them, his view changed to a view of the reception room, showing a worker on the phone behind the counter, and a few patients waiting in chairs for their appointments. He tugged on the operating room camera knob, which was conveniently easy to find. “Yes, I can. It’s wonderful.”

The doctors smiled. “It looks like the operation was a success,” Sutter said. “Congratulations. If you look behind you, you will find a doorway to the Turing Society virtual world.” An autonomous stretcher wheeled itself into the room. “As you requested in your documentation, we will donate your blood and organs to the National Health Reserve.”

Behind them, on the operating table, Olander’s eyes snapped open.

“W-what’s that,” Olander said.

“What’s what?”

“My body, it’s still alive!”

The doctors looked at Olander’s body, which was now moving its eyes erratically. “That’s nothing to worry about,” Sutter said. “Just a residual effect from the mind transfer. Technically speaking, the body isn’t dead, it just doesn’t have you inside it anymore.”

“He’s talking,” Olander said. “Can’t you see?”

“Olander,” Sutter said, “you’re overthinking things. You’re inside the computer, not your body.”

“But my body is still alive! There’s still a version of me in there! Look at my eyes. They’re saying the same thing over and over: Help me!”

“You’re in post-operational shock. If you go into the virtual reality and regain the experience of having a body—”

“I’m telling you, I’m still alive in my body! Put my headset back on and listen!”

Sutter leaned toward Lars and spoke quietly. Lars nodded, and pulled the cable out of Olander’s head and plugged the hole with what looked like some kind of adhesive. Then the two of them lifted his body onto the stretcher. Olander continued to cry out, but the doctors accompanied the robot platform out the door without giving him another glance.

Olander floated helplessly in the digital aether. They were going to kill his past self, or his duplicate, or—he didn’t have time to be pedantic about the situation. He had to do something. But what? He tried feeling out the hundreds of pathways of his strange new body. Somewhere, a coffee maker started pouring water onto an empty tray. Someone’s PC account was denied access due to an incorrect password. The lights went out in an empty hall. Then . . .

Aha! He gained control of the robot stretcher. With two swift motions, he slammed it forward, then backward, knocking both of the doctors to the ground. Before they could recover their wits, he wheeled the platform back down the hallway, around a corner, and into the reception room, making some of the people waiting jump to their feet. Olander identified his driver, and exclaimed, “Morgan, help!” through the reception room speaker. “It’s a fraud!”

The well-dressed man stood up from one of the waiting chairs. “What is going on here?” he demanded in a booming, authoritative voice.

Sutter emerged from the hallway, followed by Lars. “This man is trying to steal his former body, which he voluntarily signed over to the company when agreeing to the terms and conditions of the transference.”

“And why,” the man said, turning to face Olander—or rather, the room’s camera—“are you doing that?”

“Because he’s—I’m—still alive.”

“That’s just a precaution,” Sutter said. “We have to keep the body’s mental operations intact until we’ve confirmed that the transference is a success. But now that it is, it’s no longer important.”

“So you knew,” Olander said. “You knew all along.”

“It’s only standard procedure—”

“You murderers!” Olander cried.

“As we explained,” Sutter said, her voice patronizingly calm, “it’s just an echo. You, Olander Brice, have successfully been transfered into the computer network. This body is not you anymore.”

The man spoke again. “Are you saying, Mr. Brice, that you believe you were not transfered, but instead copied?”

Sutter lifted her chin. “Who are you to be sticking your nose in company affairs?”

The man looked contemptuously at her. “I am Morgan Stanton, Mr. Brice’s close friend, and a representative of League Neuroelectrics, a significant partner of the Turing Society.” Sutter’s mouth worked soundlessly, and Stanton took the advantage to turn to Olander’s body. “If you would, please blink.”

Olander’s body’s eyes blinked.

“Look to the left.”

He turned his eyes to the left.

“What is five plus two?”

He blinked seven times.

Sutter interjected. “I know what you’re trying to pull. Of course it is going to respond. It is still a living human body, after all.”

“So you admit it!” Olander cried.

“Not at all. It’s a p-zombie, a living body that acts and responds indistinguishably from a human, but has no consciousness.”

Stanton glowered at her. “That’s the kind of thing slave owners and animal abusers say to justify their cruelty.”

“That was hurtful and highly inappropriate,” Sutter said. “You can’t compare us to monsters. That’s immature slander.”

“If you don’t want to be compared to monsters,” Stanton said, “then don’t act like them.” Sutter snarled, ready to retort, but Stanton cut her off. “I have connections with lawyers. Good ones. We will conduct an investigation into this company’s practices, starting with the testimonies of these two instances of Mr. Brice.” He pulled out his phone.

An hour later, the two Olanders sat in Stanton’s car side-by-side, one in the flesh, the other in a robot body. The mood was glum, as if invisible water had filled up the streets around them. Neither of them spoke, but they thought. What would they do now? Who would be married to his wife? Who would own his house, his money? He felt, in his heart and soul, that he was the real Olander Brice. But he couldn’t help but think the man sitting next to him might feel the same way, ruminating about the same questions. What was the soul? Was it something that was unique, or could it be copied so that there really were two of the same person? And if he and his counterpart were two, yet one, what did that mean for the nature of consciousness itself?

Something seemed to nag at the back of his mind, but then it was lost. The questions were so confusing he hardly knew how to think about them, much less what their implications might be. One thing was for sure: from here on out, his life—their lives—were going to be difficult. All he could do was hang on and hope something made sense at the other end.


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Consciousness – Physicalism

Consciousness:
The Hard Problem
Dualism
Physicalism
Idealism
Identifying Consciousness

Vast Minds

Identity, Self, and Other

The Question of Meaning

Recommended Pre-Reading:
Representational Realism
Existence and Natures
Knowledge of Reality
The Hard Problem

In the philosophical zombie thought experiment, there are two possible routes to follow. Last time, we explored what happened if we assumed p-zombies are possible, and something could exist that could act like, talk like, and be physically identical to a human, yet have no consciousness. It would follow that consciousness is something independent from, yet able to interact with, physical reality. Today, we are going to explore the other route, what we get if we assume something physically identical to a living human must be conscious, and it is impossible for it not to be. This is called physicalism.

For physicalism, we must suppose that something about the physical world is equivalent to consciousness. Right away, this seems weird. The way we conceptualize consciousness is completely different from the way we conceptualize physical systems. Consider light. Light doesn’t have any color, it’s just a wave in the universe-spanning electromagnetic field. In order to become color, it has to enter your eye, interact with the cells on your retina, be transformed into electrical signals, which make electrical patterns in your brain.

The physicalist must say these electrical patterns are color and shape and texture. The collection of neurons in your brain firing and buzzing together not only correlates with your consciousness, it is your consciousness.

This seems crazy. After all, if you think about a color, and you think about a bunch of cells shooting electrical pulses to one another, the two thoughts are nothing alike! In fact, they seem so different from each other that it feels like they must be fundamentally different things.

However, let’s remember that in analytical thinking, we might discover truths that go against our intuition. Last year, in the Nature of Reality series, we did a discussion on how we can know truth if our conceptions of reality are just representations. We concluded that if the math/logic of our conceptual representation is isomorphic with (the same as) the math/logic of reality itself, then our conceptual representation is true.

The models we create of physical systems, the images we draw and imagine and look at, are just representations. The picture in your mind of cells sending electrical pulses between each other is not reality-as-it-is, it is a conceptual representation. Consciousness, on the other hand, is not a representation. It is the direct experience of reality.

Let’s be clear. The computer you see in front of you is not a direct experience of reality. It is an image created in your brain. The direct perception of reality is the fact that you perceive an image, regardless of its contents.

This is important, so let’s go over it again. Consciousness is like the chalk marks on a chalkboard. Many things can be written on a chalkboard. They can be erased, and replaced by something else. You can write words or equations, or draw pictures. The things we write on chalkboards convey meaning to those watching. Yet all of it, regardless of what it means, comes from the chalk marks.

Your mind lets you experience many things. You see sights. Hear sounds. Feel feelings. These things are parts of consciousness. You find all kinds of meaning in the sights, sounds, feelings, and other senses. You can learn about the universe, keep a relationship going with another person, experience the imaginary world of a story. Yet all these things come from sights, sounds, and feelings. All these things come from consciousness. All the things we do with the contents of our consciousness are models, representations, not true reality. But consciousness itself, the sensations of sights, sounds, feelings, and other senses, is a little piece of direct reality.

When we apply this to the paradox of neural patterns and conscious experience, we find it is not so contradictory after all. The mental model of neurons and electrical pulses is just a representation, whereas consciousness is reality-as-it-is. If they don’t seem like the same thing to our intuitions, that is completely fine. It’s the logic and math that matters. If the math/logic of the model of neurons and electrical pulses is the same as the math/logic of consciousness, then those neural patterns are a valid model of the real system, which is consciousness.

If this is true, what does it mean metaphysically? To be conscious as we know it, a brain needs billions of neurons working together. A single neuron is about as conscious as a rock. The phenomenon of large numbers of things coming together and demonstrating new, holistic behavior is called emergence. The reverse of emergence, the process of examining systems in terms of their constituent parts, is called reductionism.

by Chlodulfa on Deviantart

If the conscious part of a brain can be reduced to neurons, what is consciousness reduced to? If consciousness and the conscious part of the brain are equivalent, then the same logic that reduces the conscious part of the brain must also reduce consciousness.

Does this mean what we said a moment ago about neurons and rocks is incorrect? Does it mean a neuron, despite being just one cell, is a tiny bit conscious? What about the things the neuron is made of? Molecules, atoms, and sub-atomic particles? If we say the fundamental physical level of reality has no consciousness, but brains do, then somewhere along the train of emergence there must be a step where the smallest possible building blocks of consciousness come into existence.

This idea, that somewhere along the hierarchy of emergent complexity the smallest units of consciousness appear from nothing smaller, seems non-scientific. Stuff doesn’t just pop into existence without any reason. One way to resolve this paradox is to say the fundamental level of physics and the fundamental level of consciousness are the same. Consciousness doesn’t magically appear at some level, rather it breaks up and keeps breaking up into smaller and smaller pieces the further down the physical reductionist ladder we go. When we get down to sub-atomic particles, we find that electrons, quarks, and the like all have a tiny bit of the stuff that comes together and makes consciousness. This would mean everything in the universe is a little bit conscious, a theory called panpsychism.

As the philosopher David Chalmers describes it, panpsychism contains the hypothesis that, just like electrons and other sub-atomic particles have properties like mass and electric charge, they have another property: a tiniest possible amount of consciousness. This wouldn’t be consciousness as we know it, with colors and concepts and perceptions, but a tiny bit that builds up and joins together with the other bits of consciousness from the other particles it interacts with, and in large enough numbers and the right organization, become the consciousness we recognize in ourselves.

Panpsychism isn’t the only physicalist option, though. If we can find a different ladder of reductionism to follow, we might end up at a place other than sub-atomic particles. As it turns out, matter isn’t the only dimension the universe can be reduced down. There is also information.

At the fundamental level of information, we find bits. Bits are things that can be one of two possibilities: on or off, yes or no, true or false, 1 or 0. It may be that any amount or type of information can be reduced to bits, or if not, to some other indivisible basis. So maybe consciousness can be reduced to bits.

By Christiaan Colen on Flickr

To me, this makes more sense than panpsychism. Consciousness seems to be correlated with information, not matter. Intuition would say a giant brain with the same number and configuration of neurons as mine should be exactly as conscious as I am, despite being made of a lot more matter. And if we could simulate a brain using electrons rather than cells, it seems to me like it would be just as conscious too. Of course, intuition can often lead us astray in science, especially when we’re talking about consciousness, so experiments would have to be done before we say anything confidently.

There is a scientific theory that looks into the possibility that consciousness comes from information, Integrated Information Theory. It looks at networks of information where each bit is connected to other bits, and changes based on the signals it gets. The brain is such a system, each neuron functioning as a bit, either firing an electrical impulse or not. According to Integrated Information Theory, consciousness is formed according to each state of the brain related to all other possible states it could be in.

Integrated Information Theory is a first step toward a scientific understanding of consciousness, but it is almost certainly not the whole answer. Just as Newton’s theory of gravity gave way to Einstein’s theories of relativity, Integrated Information Theory will probably give way to something much deeper and more insightful. Some avenues to pursue would be the time lag between signals and patterns passed along by neurons, and the fact that much of the brain seems not to contribute to consciousness, despite being very active.

Information is not something constrained to one universe or another. It is a mathematical construct, which means it transcends material reality. There is something deeply wondrous about the idea that consciousness comes from timeless, spaceless truths, made real by physical systems acting out their natures. Not from a religious or spiritualistic narrative, but from analytical thought and a scientific worldview.

Mind-Body Dualism

Consciousness:
The Hard Problem
Dualism
Physicalism
Idealism
Identifying Consciousness

Vast Minds

Identity, Self, and Other

The Question of Meaning

When asking what consciousness is, the first thing we tend to jump to is dualism, the idea that a person’s consciousness is something separate from their body, a soul or a spirit. Sometimes the soul is thought of as an indivisible object, unique for each person, hosting their personality, rationality, perceptions, memories, will, continuing self, and moral worth. Sometimes a soul is thought to be made of a fluid-like substance, which I like to call “soul stuff.” Either way, the soul is thought to be something fundamentally different from the other materials in the universe.

Do souls or soul stuff exist? To explore this, we first have to ask why so many people believe they do. There are two main reasons. The first is because they have been told it is true, by their parents, or religious leaders, or community folk knowledge. The second is because they feel like they are distinct from their body, which can be strengthened if they have had an out-of-body experience. I have had such experiences myself, the most recent of which was only a few months ago. Just as I was waking up one morning, I lifted my hand to scratch my nose, but I didn’t see it. I waved my hand in front of my face, but all I saw was the ceiling above me.

I could have jumped to the conclusion that my soul was moving around outside of my body. But a subjective experience is only evidence that the experience can be had. It is not evidence of anything mystical or metaphysical. Even while I was in the midst of my out-of-body experience, I remembered that the motor cortex in the brain is disconnected from the nervous system during dreams, and what I felt could be explained by the visual part of my brain waking up before my motor cortex, giving me the illusion that I was moving my arm when I was really not.

Of course, my answer is just a hypothesis based on stuff I’ve heard here and there, which is not sufficient evidence to rule out the possibility that I really was waving a spirit arm. So what would be sufficient evidence, either way? Some people believe the existence of a soul is a matter of faith, and it is not testable by scientific means. But does this claim make any sense? It is said that the soul is what makes decisions, controlling the body through the will. If this is the case, then it must exchange energy and momentum with the brain. Even if we grant the possibility that the soul itself is not detectable by any instrument we build, we would still be able to pick up on the bits of energy and momentum spontaneously appearing and disappearing as it exerts its control. Mind-body dualism can, in fact, be tested with the scientific method.

This brings us to a problem I have with the terminology. “Physicalism,” which we will discuss another time, implies consciousness is physical. “Dualism” implies consciousness is separate from physical reality. But if souls or soul stuff exist, and we detect them indirectly as I just mentioned, then scientists will expand the definition of “physical” to include it. The distinction between them is whether consciousness can be explained by what we already know about the universe or something else we haven’t detected yet, not whether it is physical.

There is one way that a soul might affect the brain without messing with its energy or momentum, and that is if we bring in quantum physics. I’ll put the usual disclaimer here: there are a lot of myths about quantum physics and consciousness, and all of them are false. Quantum physics is the study of things the size of atoms and smaller, nothing more. Nevertheless, I am going to talk about a possible way quantum physics and consciousness might be related.

At the size scale where quantum physics is relevant, particles behave probabilistically. Every possible interaction between particles comes with a specific probability, and conserves energy and momentum. We have no evidence to believe the workings of the brain involve quantum physics, but if they do, the soul may be able to exert willpower on the brain by changing the probabilities. Thus, it could control the body without having to worry about physical conservation laws.

This too, however, would be detectable. It would take more advanced technology, but in theory it could be done. If the brain uses quantum physics, we can run simulations to calculate the probabilities of events happening within it. Then, we measure what actually happens. If there is a significant deviation from the probabilities calculated, it is evidence a soul is interfering with them.

If neither of these pan out, there is one final option, which is truly impossible to detect by scientific means. That is if the soul is epiphenomenal, not affecting the brain at all, but just holding a copy of the brain’s perception and memory information. Because an epiphenomenal soul cannot affect the brain, it cannot house one’s personality, rationality, or will. These must instead be completely in the domain of the brain. However, this creates a big problem: if the soul cannot affect the brain, our brains should have no knowledge of it at all, and we shouldn’t be able to have this conversation! The fact that we can think and talk about consciousness suggests that whatever consciousness is, it does indeed affect the brain.

I do not claim to answer whether souls do or do not exist, at least not based on what we have talked about today. Rather, I claim that if souls exist and interact with the brain, then that interaction must be detectable by the scientific method. So much mental effort is expended by philosophers and theologians to hide the soul behind the veil of unfalsifiability, while at the same time insisting it must exist. Let’s stop with this magical thinking and open our minds to the possibility of using experimentation to determine the truth, whichever way it turns out to be.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

Consciousness:
The Hard Problem
Dualism
Physicalism
Idealism
Identifying Consciousness

Vast Minds

Identity, Self, and Other

The Question of Meaning

Consciousness. It is the one part of reality that we experience directly, rather than as a mental representation. Consciousness is the experience of existing and experiencing. When we are awake, we are conscious. When we dream, we are conscious. We are not conscious when we are sleeping dreamlessly, or when we are in a coma, or when we are dead. Without consciousness there is no color, no sound, no taste, no beauty, no meaning; only physical reality.

So what is it, and how is it possible for it to exist?

This question has been debated by philosophers and scientists for thousands of years. The very existence of consciousness seems at odds with everything else we know about reality. Nevertheless, we know it exists, and we know it absolutely, which we cannot say about anything else.

There is plenty we do know about consciousness. We know that while you are thinking or feeling or tasting something, there is activity in the neurons in your brain, and each sensation correlates with a different pattern. It is reasonable to assume that in the future, we will have machines sophisticated enough to read exactly which neurons fire, and figure out how to know what is going on in someone’s consciousness, to read their mind, just by reading the patterns in their brain.

But that is only the Easy Problem of consciousness. To understand consciousness, we have to tackle the Hard Problem: how is it possible that consciousness exists at all?

There is a famous thought experiment called the Philosophical Zombie. In this experiment, we imagine a person who looks exactly like a regular human being, who acts the same, their brain works the same, and they can have conversations with us that are just as sophisticated as with anyone. When you ask the zombie if they are conscious, they say yes. But they are wrong. They have no consciousness. There is nothing it is like to be them. They experience no color, no sound, no light, no time. They are nothing more than a bunch of matter functioning as a complex machine.

Taking this a step further, we can imagine an entire universe full of philosophical zombies. Perhaps a universe just like ours, planet for planet, particle for particle, person for person. In this imaginary universe, there is an exact copy of you, and an exact copy of me. But no one is conscious. They believe they are conscious, and have conversations about metaphysics, but they are wrong.

Our search for the nature of consciousness will take different directions depending on whether or not the Philosophical Zombie thought experiment is valid. If it is, then consciousness must be its own physical substance, different from anything else that we know of. This is known as Dualism. On the other hand, if it is impossible for a zombie universe to exist, then consciousness is not its own substance, but a property of other parts of physical reality. This is called Physicalism. As this series goes on, we will examine theories of consciousness from the perspectives of dualism, physicalism, and more.