Consciousness Inside Out

The modern discussion of consciousness is over-concerned with what goes on inside the brain. Inevitably, this leads to some vague "computational" metaphor that imagines the brain to be some kind of computer. clearly an "object" in the world, like a toaster only more complicated.

Putting aside the objection that most writers who use this analogy are less than experts on computers or the actual brain, the problem is that they ignore the most amazing and obvious nature of mind, which is literally right before their eyes. As the saying goes, they are fish that can never discover water.

Let's suppose that some future technology wires up my brain to provide complete information on the changing status of every neuron and synapse along with every connection in the brain, along with the most sophisticated interpretation of all this data in real time. Needless to say, such technology is far in the future and may not even be remotely possible.  Nonetheless, let's do a thought experiment.

Permit me to describe the current contents of my mind and imagine whether this instrumentation would display and completely "explain" what is going on "in my head". Let me capture a few seconds:

• For some reason, I thought briefly about the old 1953 Chev which was my first car
• Inevitably, I was lead to a certain disaster of a romantic nature where the car played a key role
• All the while, I am pouring these words onto the screen without thinking of the keys (I touch type)
• I am aware of my body, slightly uncomfortable due to the forward leaning adjustment of my chair
• I am aware of my office and each piece of equipment including printer, two screens, empty coffee cup and so forth
• Memories of my life (like the old car) float by, such as my experiences in Columbia, Libya, ...
• Other memories are available "on demand", such as the approximate time, the status of the dog, the weather outside, the location of Bogota on a map of Columbia, the view of the city from our walk along the ridge yesterday, the way my legs felt when we climbed up a steep hill. The context of that feeling and why I was pleased that it was my legs and not my heart complaining.

Time out.

Can we imagine that our instruments will somehow convey all this to another human observer? If not, are we not entitled to be a bit skeptical of the philosopher who claims to understand how the "mind" works in general but fails to incorporate the obvious nature of any particular mind in his "explanation"?

It may be that in trying to imagine what the mind "is", we make a mistake right at the start. We imagine the mind as something in the brain and the brain as something in the world. Yet, obviously, the world is something in the mind. What "we" know and experience of the world is exactly what the mind "knows". The keyboard under my fingers is precisely the keyboard created in my mind by a very complex process of sensation, skill, and memory which is precisely the kind of phenomenon we would like to "explain" when coming up with a description of what mind "is".

This is not simply a trick of language. It is a hard-won insight into the relationship between "mind" and the "real world". Quantum Mechanics, the most fundamental description we have of nature, is about what we can observe of nature, not what nature really "is". Quantum Mechanics is, therefore, about the mind, not "real" Nature, which is always assumed to be just beyond our ability to directly perceive.

To put it in a nutshell, to understand the mind, we must understand the "model" of the world it creates. The function of the mind is to create this image of the world we call "reality". 

It might be objected that Quantum Mechanics is not something that I, personally, understand well enough to be part of "my" mind. However, the same could be said of my keyboard. I have only a general idea of how it works (mysteriously, while using it, I had no need to access that understanding). One is inevitably lead to the position that "mind" is shared.  Even on a personal level, consciousness "floats" on a vast sea of hidden "unconscious" connections. It does not seem clear to me that there is a bright line that divides "my" unconscious connections with "general knowledge". My mind seems to constantly take on board new public information and pack it away as "mine". For example, I have no trouble driving down a street I have never seen before using the help of public conventions such as driving on the right. The most glaring example of this phenomenon is language, which is undeniably a work of countless generations but is used effortlessly by individual "minds" to say and think totally new ideas.

My experience of reality is shared with other minds, which provide me with a steady flow of reassuring information about the world as we see it.

Obviously, our hypothetical instrumentation of my brain will not have access to all human knowledge or knowledge not known until somebody seeks it out.

There is a clue here about the "hard problem of consciousness", which is about the mystery of why a few pounds of meat come to experience and feel the world as (obviously) it does. The mistake is buried in the question: the assumption that the mind is "in the world". In fact, the mind is the world. 

We are left with a mystery about how that happened, but this is presumably a question of biology - well within our ability to understand. There is nothing stopping us from working within the central mystery - that our minds and the world our minds perceive are the same thing.