Words: Joanna Cummings
This feature was first published in April 2023 in My Mensa Weekly, our exclusive newsletter for Mensa members. Find out more about becoming a Mensa member here.
Buckle up. We’re about to dip into one of the biggest, most profound – and most debated – mysteries of humankind: the existence of consciousness.
What is consciousness?
In simple terms, consciousness could be defined as, ‘being aware of what is happening to you’ – or perhaps more accurately, ‘being aware that you are aware what is happening to you’. In more detailed terms, there are three main dimensions that determine our level of consciousness:
1. Being ‘awake’, and our physiological response to external stimuli;
2. Our ability to have thoughts, feelings and perceptions, or ‘awareness’;
3. The way we organise or combine our own perceptions with abstract concepts.
Philosophers have been debating the nature of consciousness for centuries. René Descartes famously summarised his argument as “cogito, ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am” – in other words, a person’s awareness of his or her own existence proves that the mind exists as distinct from the physical body.
In more recent times, philosophers have questioned the Cartesian mind-body dualism; Gilbert Ryle dismissed it as the dogma of the “ghost in the machine”, stating that a mental act cannot be separated from a physical act.
Consciousness research has become increasingly multidisciplinary, drawing on everything from neurobiology to linguistics, philosophy to physics. It has even been explored in our literature; whether in Anthony Trollope’s representation of ‘conscious akrasia’ or James Joyce’s streams of consciousness.
Just because you think, doesn’t mean you are
One of the biggest challenges for scientists, psychologists and philosophers alike is that it is not possible to prove consciousness actually exists in anyone but ourselves, what philosopher David Chalmers refers to as the ‘hard problem’. And even our own intuition – ‘I know I exist because I see, hear and feel’ – is unreliable; the neo-Aristotelian conception of consciousness suggests that the certainty of your own consciousness does not, in fact, prove your consciousness.
In fact, and in contrast to the Cartesian belief that consciousness distinguishes humans from animals, integrated information theory (IIT) suggests that everything from animals to inanimate objects, such as rocks and teapots, could possess a level of consciousness.
In addition, we are not even sure why we might possess consciousness – though a recent theory by a team based at Boston University posits that “consciousness developed as a memory system that is used by our unconscious brain to help us flexibly and creatively imagine the future and plan accordingly”.
Even research into neurobiological aspects of consciousness can only tell us so much. Techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have allowed researchers to ascertain correlations between certain regions of the brain in different conscious states. A more recent approach using functional geometry analyses gradients of activity within the cerebral cortex. (This area, believe it or not, is referred to as the ‘easy’ problem.)
The science of explanations?
But, by whatever means we measure brain activity in relation to consciousness, it will only ever tell us part of the story. This is what David Chalmers describes as the “science of correlations, not a science of explanations”.
One thing is clear: we value the concept of consciousness very deeply; in fact, we tend to see it as a fundamental part of what makes us human. It could be argued that our current uneasiness about AI ‘taking over’ is, in fact, a fear of losing our own humanity, that even our fear of and fascination with zombies – which behave in ways indistinguishable from humans but without experiencing consciousness – is rooted in a terror of losing our conscious thought. (Some scientists have even debated the possible existence of ‘philosophical zombies’.)
As psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik says: “We fear death so profoundly, not because it means the end of our body, but because it means the end of our consciousness.”
The innate tension in the study of consciousness is this: that we are trying to analyse something subjective using objective means. Researchers from all disciplines are coming to suspect that the ‘science of explanations’ is not currently within our reach – at least, not with the tools that we currently have at our disposal.
