Chapter
Six
The unity
Commenting on Aaronson’s blog post (comment #125), Chalmers splits the
Pretty-Hard Problem up into four subversions, and suggests that IIT may still be a
candidate partial answer to a version in which we try to match the facts rather than
our intuitions about which systems are conscious. On present evidence, it doesn’t
seem that IIT could ever offer more than a partial answer to a partial question, but it
does have the advantage of entailing specific testable hypotheses, both mathemat-
ically and empirically. Maybe this alone justifies its current popularity.
UNITY IN ACTION
Theories discussed so far either leave the hard problem untouched or involve
magical transformations of neural firing into subjective experience. Escaping
completely from these problems is very difficult. One way forward might be to
drop the idea of unifying representations or experiences, and think instead of
unity of action. British biophysicist Rodney Cotterill says:
I believe that the problem confronted during evolution of complex organisms
like ourselves was not to unify conscious experience but rather to avoid
destroying the unity that Nature provided. [. . .] singleness of action is a vital
requirement; if motor responses were not unified, an animal could quite
literally tear itself apart!
(1995, p. 301)He concludes that consciousness arises through an interaction between brain,
body, and environment.
British philosopher Susan Hurley (1954–2007) rejects the conventional idea of
consciousness as a filling in the ‘Classical Sandwich’ between input and output
or perception and action (Hurley, 1998). Instead, she stresses that perception,
action, and environment are intimately intertwined. The unity of consciousness
arises from a dynamic stream of low-level causal processes and multiple feedback
loops linking input and output, in an organism which she describes as a loosely
centred ‘dynamic singularity’ with no clear external boundaries.
In a similar vein, Nicholas Humphrey asks what makes the parts of a person belong
together – if and when they do. Although Humphrey himself may be made up of
many different selves, he concludes that
these selves have come to belong together as the one Self that I am
because they are engaged in one and the same enterprise: the enterprise
of steering me – body and soul – through the physical and social world.
[. . .] my selves have become co-conscious through collaboration.
(2002, p. 12)These views are all versions of enactive theories of consciousness. They treat
consciousness as a kind of acting or doing, rather than representing or receiving
information, so being conscious means interacting with the world, or reaching
out to the world. This sidesteps the question of whether consciousness is really
unified or not, for it is obvious that a single organism, whether an amoeba or a
woman, has to have unified action. The tricky part is to understand how acting,
‘unity [is] more like the
twisting together of the
strands of a rope, where
each strand displays
continuity of sensory
and motor aspects’(Hurley, 1998, p. 183)