Consciousness

These pages are a place for me to collect thoughts, ideas and observations on the complex subject of consciousness. It's basically for my own benefit; if anyone else finds these pages interesting or useful then that's a bonus.

Everything here is my personal opinion and might be completely wrong. I have no academic qualifications in philosophy or neuroscience (my degree is maths) and am not a professional in the field. I just read a lot! I've tried to give credit where due, however since I have no formal qualifications I am probably unaware of much that has already been said. Thus whilst everything on this site is my own work I make no claim that similar ideas and arguments have not already been put forward by others.

Background

Since I was a kid I was fascinated by the idea of artificial intelligence. As I grew older I realised that AI is a conceptually easy and relatively uninteresting problem; what really interested me was artificial consciousness. Could we ever build a machine that was conscious in the same way that we are?

This obviously led to an interest in the wider areas of consciousness philosophy and science, an interest fuelled by reading the works of Philip K Dick! Before we can consider whether a machine is conscious we need to understand our own consciousness. Exactly what is consciousness?

My Position

Thirty years ago I believed strongly that consciousness was some form of emergent phenomenon resulting from the complexity of the brain's physical neural network. Since then I have become increasingly dissatisfied with both reductive physicalism as it currently stands and with emergent property dualism. At the moment I have no answers, though there are some suggested answers that I have rejected.

Although I admit to certain biases my position is not fixed. I am actively reading and considering options. I am currently a libertarian: I believe the universe is indeterministic and that we have free will. In fact these two statements go together: determinism is fundamentally incompatible with free will.

My position changes. Currently (July 2014) I favour some form of interactionist dualism with consciousness being a fundamental non-physical entity that interacts with the physical, possibly via the loopholes in physical determinism introduced by quantum mechanics. This would be a source of agent causation. Under such a theory consciousness would be perfectly natural and subject to natural laws, however it would be outside the scope of physics as it stands today. To incorporate consciousness our current science needs a shake up as significant as relativity or quantum theory.

Unfortunately I also find mysterian position depressingly believable.

Further Reading

If you want to read more about the subject of consciousness then there is a treasure trove of material available via the consc.net online library maintained by David Chalmers and David Bourget.