Only After Human Beings Vanish Can the Problem of Consciousness Be Solved

Tom McBride

1 Connection

If you follow popular science at all, you know that two common themes are when the sun will run out of fuel, and how we can solve the problem of consciousness. The two are rarely if ever connected. It is time that they were.  

Scientists know that in a billion years the sun will transition to a red giant and life on earth will be uninhabitable. Multiply a billion times 365 days and watch your calculator explode. You and I have nothing to fret about.  

Scientists are much less sure about consciousness. Alfred Russel Wallace, who co-founded the theory of evolution by natural selection with Darwin, once observed that the existence of consciousness meant that a purely spiritual realm must exist. Wallace thought my awareness of a snail in the grass was due to a ghost in a neuronal, evolved machine. No one much believes this now, but if consciousness is entirely material, how do we get from neurons to my self-aware attention to that snail? And then there’s the view of Philip Goff and others (including Bertrand Russell) that consciousness comes not from the inside but from the outside: that even rocks have a proto-sense of what it is like to be a rock. (See Goff’s Galileo’s Error.)

We have consciousness because we are swimming in the stuff. Like God, it is everywhere and nowhere, somewhat like divinity in every blade of grass–and snail. 

So, when will the problem of consciousness be solved? Why haven’t we done so by now? We’ve solved other mysterious problems.  Wetness is an emergent problem of water, so we know how molecular hydrogen and oxygen get us to the stuff we bathe in and drink. Of course, it could be fake water and we might still baptize kids in it. But that is not a scientific issue. 

My proposition is that the hard problem of consciousness will never be solved until conscious human beings disappear. 

If we are lucky, that means that not for another billion years will we blow ourselves up or choke ourselves to death with foul air. If there is a transition period in which humans are gone but advanced AI is still around, then–and only then–will the problem of consciousness be solved. That means a solution will be at hand in a billion years max but, given human propensity for self-destruction, perhaps as early as, say, 2525. 

2 Superman

When I was a kid, I donned a red kerchief draped on my back. I was Superman. I sought to fly, and when I did, I never hurt myself, just as Superman never did. The gravity that Superman and I tried to defy, we now know, is the curvature of space by mass, and there are formulae for that. They are devoid of ambivalence. But when I say I “never hurt myself,” that is because I only leaped off short fences. Neither Superman nor I hurt ourselves, but the phrase is ambiguous. Gravity resides in an enduring physical system adequately describable by numbers and symbols. The Man of Steel and I live in an intersubjective and fleeting social system, expressible and enforceable only in words.

The expressive gap between the formula for gravity and Superman and my declaration of non-injury is a chasm that, as we shall see, cannot be bridged. It is why we humans will never see a solution to the enigma of human consciousness.   

The impediment to the solution is human and non-mathematical language. Only after it is removed from the picture, can the solution emerge. A quantum computer might solve it. But the hang-up resides in the fact that we cannot get Albert Einstein and Jane Austen together in any sort of consonance whatsoever. 

3 M&m

Einstein’s most famous equation is that energy is mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light. E = MC squared. It is a magnificent achievement with all sorts of physical implications. Scientific humanists such as the late Jacob Bronowski would compare such revolutionary equations to the composition of a Shakespearean tragedy. He stated again in the recently re-released Ascent of Man his theme of 1951: “It has been one of the most destructive modern prejudices that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests.”

Humanism whether in science or arts thus becomes the universal solvent of differences and the ultimate explanation of great human accomplishment. 

“What a piece of work is a man,” as Hamlet once said, before doubting himself savagely. 

As Hemingway’s character Jake Barnes might say, isn’t it pretty to think so. This line of thinking is wrong, and, as we’ll see, means that we human beings must go away for good before the riddle of human consciousness can be unraveled. 

Yes, it does mean that we won’t be around to see it. 

Nearly a hundred years before Einstein, Jane Austen wrote her own great formula: “It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Unlike Einstein’s formula, with its claims to universal truth, Austen’s is ironic and wry. Elizabeth Bennet’s silly mother believes it is universally true and makes a fool of herself. If Austen had written Einstein’s formula, it would be in quotation marks. Wink, wink. 

It is possible to put Einstein into the Austenian language. Fire a bullet with .06 mass and 186,000 miles per second times 186,000 and you will get the energy of that bullet, which would be considerable. Yet Einstein is uninterested in specific examples. He only cares about universal law. That takes math. Austen is interested in the implications and exceptions of “universal” law–that takes words, not numbers. 

The only thing Jane and Albert share are letters of the alphabet Einstein has an M (Mass), while Austen has one, too, which is the “m” in “must.” Other than that, they are billions of light years apart. They are not two geniuses sharing gigantic global achievements. They are in different realms altogether. 

Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein would say, they are playing two entirely different language games.  For Einstein’s M is energy; for Austen it is the first letter of the English “must.”   

The variance in the two language games is so great that a solution to consciousness must be the casualty. 

4 Boston

This is not to say that there can’t be an Einstein of brain science. If we assume that consciousness is a neuronal function, then it is entirely possible that some future Einstein will make a great discovery about the electrical combinations of neurons.  

Her problem will not be science. It will be language. She will have language within her game, as in, “Algorithm 31963rc0/.6.” This may well emerge as, say, the key to how consciousness occurs. 

And we might even go further and hypothesize that this is the very algorithm by which I recall, with vivid consciousness, that my maternal grandmother used to feed me, ,as a child, Lipton’s tea and cinnamon toast and tell me how wonderful I was and how, in my own humble opinion, she was the only one who ever described me accurately: a mix of remembrance, nostalgia, vanity, and pride. And I could describe all this to our neuronal Einstein and she might say, “yes, this is an outcome of Algorithm 31963rc0/.6. If you had recalled your paternal grandmother, it would have been Algorithm 31963rc0/.19.”

Again, pretty to think so. But, as Wittgenstein said in his 1922 Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, there are certain places that language cannot go, such as to the metaphysics of beauty. And, adapting this view, I suggest that language cannot cross the membrane between self-evident objective and mathematical language to non-mathematical subjective recollective language. 

You cannot play two language games at once. That is all you know on earth and all you need to know, at least when it comes to solving consciousness. 

As my wife’s uncle-in-law once told me in Boston, “you can’t get there from here.” 

5 Words

An astute reader of these thoughts points out that while there may be a canyon between scientific equations and the daily language of human consciousness, not all science is equations, symbols, and mathematics. Some scientific explanations are in ordinary language. Why could not an explanation for consciousness be one of these?

The short answer is that we should not be fooled by similarities in everyday language.

One of Wittgenstein’s great insights was that the same words can occur in many different contexts, language games, or “grammars.” Some words are “family resemblance” words that have some overlap but mean quite different things upon usage. “I love you, Juliet” is different from “I love you, sis” or “I love Shakespeare” or “I love hot fudge.”

Let us examine a sample of linguistic consciousness flow from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, known for its stream of consciousness style,  

“She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!”

This is a moment from Mrs. Ramsey’s inner flow of musings at novel’s end. She is the main character, While the novel does have some small mainspring of a plot, it is mostly set inside her private thoughts, feelings, judgments, and intutiions.  The book is not what she and others do.  It is what happens inside her multi-layered awareness, of herself and her surroundings, and how the two are both fused and confused. And yet a hypothetical explanation for consciousness itself could use some of those same words.

“A conscious experience arises from a complex network of globally exchanged signals, fired electro-chemically by millions of waves of neurons, curved from the pre-frontal lobe to the hippocampus, with an almost undetectable swelling of the latter, prevented from being broken by parallel processing,  and converging on the floor of at least two cranial regions and resulting in a production of sensory experience blended with a sense of the self. “

I have italicized the six or seven words the two passages—fictional stream of consciousness and scientific hypothesis—have in common. Otherwise, you would hardly notice them. Why? Because the words themselves are far removed in meaning and affect due to their surrounding milieu, just as there may be an A-flat in a George Jones song and an A-flat in a Beethoven Sonata. But they are not the same A-flat. There are, by analogy, “waves,” and there are ”waves..” But the twain do not meet. Getting from Mrs. Ramsey’s subjective and singular inner musings from a monosemic scientific explanation; and declaring that the latter “causes” the former, is to try to meld discursive realms that are universes apart. The disconnect between Mrs. R’s intuitive waves of self-sufficiency and the brain’s waves of parallel processing is not so much a chasm created by reality but by language itself, which is, as Wittgenstein put it, the limits of our world.

Whether mathematical or linguistic, science cannot solve the hard problem of consciousness as long as richly conscious beings are in the way.

6 42

There is hope. Perhaps as part of the post-human project or of climate disaster or of a depleted sun, human beings will disappear, and with them our subjective awareness of snails and cinnamon toast. Even Proust’s memories of parties he never needed to attend will become evanescent. Machines, with their cavernous learning, might remain (depending on the circumstances of human disappearance); and no longer needing to account for the wildly unique and various human mental experiences, they can solve the problem. The solutions will be algorithmic entirely, as though Einstein had lived in a world where Jane Austen and her ilk had never been. 

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams reports that computers finally found the meaning of the universe and of our lives in it. The answer was 42. It was a truth universally acknowledged. 

–Thanks to Brad Dahlager for his helpful suggestions about this essay.