The People Who Don't Believe Consciousness is Real

Are souls real or not? Am I mistaken about all that exists? Can we prove materialism is false with just our thoughts?

Illusionism is the belief that consciousness isn’t real*.

See, a long time ago, some philosophers like Aristotle thought that there was some “essence of vitality” that separated living matter and non-living matter. Outside physics and chemistry, he thought, resides a force that guides and animates biochemistry, turning rocks into life. This belief was completely obliterated by our modern understanding of biology, and was super-completely obliterated when in 1828 Friedrich Wöhler synthesized an “vitalist” substance called urea from inorganic salts.

In 400 BC Plato thought that concepts like “justice” and “triangleness” mirrored perfect, ideal concepts that could only be grasped by logic. He called this world The World of Being, and the stupid, dumb, imperfect world that we reside in he called The World of Becoming. As it turns out, algebra showed that triangleness was better represented as constructs based on rules, and linguistics showed that words are just pointers to shared ideas. Oops.

In the 1600s, scientists proposed Phlogiston, a negative weight “fire-stuff” that explains where stuff goes when it burns. It turns out that when fire is burned, it actually GAINS weight through oxidation, so the matter certainly doesn’t disappear into phlogiston. Another pure theory destroyed by the fact that chemistry happens to be very complicated.

Quintessence, the fifth element of perfect circular motion, a substance that fills the heavens to explain why planets orbit in circles? Destroyed by gravity and cosmology. Caloric, the stuff of heat, meant to explain why hot travels to cool? Destroyed by kinetics and the understanding of atoms.

Philosophers have a really really bad track record of asserting there is some pure, abstract substance to explain stuff that they don’t understand, when it turns out there’s just a number of complicated, smaller forces at play. Throughout history, vitalism has weaved to biology has weaved to germs, then to atoms, then to quantum mechanics, as

Harjas Sandhu

laid out on his fantastic guest post on

Eurydice

Lives. I pity the scientist or philosopher that says quarks are the smallest thing, and that we now have all the tools in the toolbox to understand all of reality. Thinking we’re close to done is not a position that’s held up well, and positing some “pure” layer of reality that’s not just created from a massive amount of much tinier forces dictating it has always failed.

So some today have taken their cannons and aimed it at The Big One, the one that people still think today must have some pure form apart from physics, the one that people cling onto for dear life, for diluting its unique position is diluting our very importance: consciousness, or whether our minds are even there at all.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy

There’s about a trillion schools of thought on consciousness, because philosophers love to Think about Thinking more than their sons and daughters.

Dualism¹ thinks that there’s a mind stuff, and there’s a physics stuff. In the brain, they interact, uhh, somehow². The fact that they don’t understand how they interact isn’t a knock against them, because consciousness is the least understood thing in the history of ever, but they believe there’s ways to prove and show that the mind must exist outside physics.

Conservative realists³, primarily, believe that dualists are wrong and stupid. There’s no secret other force that’s outside the realm of physics, that doesn’t make any sense bro, physics includes all forces that actually interact with the world. But they do, in fact, see consciousness as “a special thing” and are willing to give it some special status, but it must be something that exists in within physics. They might only believe this implicitly, given that tackling consciousness isn’t something every materialist has done, but we’re marking this group as seeing consciousness as a real force to reckon with.

Now the fun one. Strong illusionists, such as Daniel Dennett and Keith Frankish, think that the “what it’s like” properties of consciousness simply do not exist; they’re illusions. There is no mysterious redness of red, there is no “feeling” or wet, and no sensation of rough. It’s illusions, all the way down. Dennett’s famous computer analogy invites you to imagine consciousness as a computer; you can see and interact with the user interface, but the interface itself is a calculated illusion, based off of red, blue, and green pixels, designed in a way easy to interact with but betraying nothing of the inner workings themselves, simply a bundle of pixels designed to appear like something different.

This accusation that consciousness is not real is a very natural one: we simply reject that the “pure substance” of consciousness exists. Just like the pixels on a screen are complicated representations of code, just like vitalism is complicated interactions of chemistry, consciousness is just complicated interactions of circuitry in the brain. They are trying to avoid the mistake philosophers have made since Plato and Aristotle, the mistake that says this pureness of consciousness is a true, final wall.

“You,” they say, are 200-300ms bundle of self-referential circuitry in the brain that’s provided a scene and information like memory and schema. The circuitry provided, communicating I am the body, I am looking at a tree, I am thinking of my sister, are all a jumble of information supplied that creates a computer monitor-style simple representation of the world. Getting any more specific would require knowledge of psychology that we don’t have. But the most important part for an illusionist is the fact that the neurons come without markers of where they came from. The tag “red” appears self justifying, as if these facts couldn’t be reduced. But it’s just the neurons in the brain, redness is represented just with “pixels.”

Perhaps this is all a bit too technical. What does illusionism actually say, like, what claims does it make about consciousness? These aren’t bugs, they’re features: these are the claims that follow naturally from what illusionism posits. These are not arguments against illusionism, these are the very claims it’s making itself.

• Well, first of all, if you made a clone of yourself, the question “which one is me” doesn’t make any sense. Neither of them are you; the illusion of a continuous self is part of the play.

• If a teleporter destroyed you and made a perfect copy of you on another planet, that would be the same amount of “you” as yourself if you go to sleep.

• Consciousness is not an “exists or not” phenomenon, if a brain was split in two, both halves are conscious and nothing there is mysterious or needs to be explained, because there’s no “flow of person” anyway.

  • I’m gonna be really really clear here, because it’s implied from the three before: “you” in 30 seconds is as different from “you” now as a stranger is from you. This naturally follows from illusionism — we cannot claim there’s a immutable soul that travels along with you. Dismissing that is the whole point.

• If you were a brain in a vat, that would not be any different from if you weren’t, because the feels reported to your brain are the same.

• It’s impossible to imagine a sort of “zombie” replica of you without consciousness, because we’re all zombies, in a certain way — there’s no way to make a zombie without the illusion if it’s physically identical.

Now, first of all, I think was misled. I was promised that these were the people who didn’t believe consciousness was real, but they actually believe that consciousness is an illusion generated by smaller properties, just like the way a tree is made of atoms. Sure, they say there’s no continuous self, but in his paper, Frankish says that the existence of an illusion implies an audience, and his three paragraphs explaining the different illusionists view on just who the illusion are for is the most curious part of his whole 23 page paper. Illusionists are, in a manner of speaking, committed to that 200-300ms view of the illusion itself, or some illusion-moment like it. That leads me to my most beautiful and controversial belief, from my heart of hearts:

I don’t think illusionism goes far enough.

The Soul

The most debated question in all of consciousness is called “the hard problem of consciousness.” It’s about whether these “what it’s like” properties of consciousness like the redness of red can exist in a purely physical universe or if consciousness requires special, nonphysical properties or not. Illusionism’s scope says that there is no “redness of red" and that we’re wrong about what we see. This is, like we said, an attempt to explain why the physical universe is all that’s necessary for consciousness.

But what they won’t say is that literally nothing exists. The greatest line in all of philosophy, spoken by Decartes, is “I think, therefore I am.” Illusionists say that “I think” is neurons making an elusive and incorrect self-model of itself. They say “therefore” is an algorithm foolishly establishing a metaphysical connection between two unrelated bridges of matter. And they say “I am” is a center of narrative gravity that’s absolutely not an additional center of nature. You could convince me of all of these.

But these still don’t fight off non-physicalism, because of a pesky substance called time.

Physicists posit a 4D model of the universe, with time as a fourth axis. A shame that this model isn’t real, or else the illusionists might have a point. But it doesn’t matter if you strip away qualia, strip away the continuous self, strip away all that makes me human if you still say that time is experienced right now. Right now, as opposed to any other moment in history. You know what I’m talking about. The present. Bask. Introspect, and realize you are there.

But what I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter if you’re mistaken about whether you’re here right now; say you’re on shrooms and imagine yourself everpresent, or an animal who can’t introspect. It doesn’t matter if the you in 30 seconds is a completely different person than the present right now. As long as there is an illusion, as long as you admit that something exists, you concede that there is a perspective. And where is that perspective? Well, I can tell you where it’s not: in the physical world.

This should be obvious, and I’m not just saying “this should be obvious” to cover up an insane belief. What I’m saying right now is that time exists. That, I hope, is an uncontroversial presence. And I’m saying that time is not experienced from a 4D omnipresent perspective that physics says it is, I’m saying that time is experience from… uh, A perspective. ANY perspective. This, I also hope is obvious; it would be strange to posit that this separate, 4D perspective exists, when we have no direct access to it, instead of just saying that time is experienced from A PERSPECTIVE.

But if time is experienced from a perspective, which one? There’s an intuition that time happens at the same time for everyone. This is a funny little belief that has been completely disproved by general relativity. Really, if you want to strip us barebones down to I think therefore I am, then you are experiencing life at a time from a perspective. WHATEVER perspective exists, whatever is the only sight we can see on reality, that’s consciousness, and that’s YOU, baby. Even if you in 30 seconds isn’t you, you RIGHT NOW are you! Congrats! This perspective, this only access to reality that exists, there’s a name we can call it.

The soul.

How can we differentiate your soul from another’s soul without invoking something outside physicalism? You say “Kyle, this is all ridiculous, I can just say that I’m me, and you’re you, and we exist inside physics. You’re providing some essence outside physics here when it isn’t needed; A tree exists in one location, but doesn’t in another. In the same way, I exist here, you exist there. All within materialism.”

I think you’re missing something crucial: Atoms in the tree are different from the atoms outside the tree. But how in the world am I going to say that my perspective is different from your perspective? Do I have special “consciousness atoms” that indicate that my perspective is currently what exists? Unless solipsism is true, surely not. What property are you saying is the difference between the perspective I have and the perspective you have? Because the only thing that exists in the universe, the single window into time we call the present, only exists in one. You may argue “saying nonphysicalism is true because I’m different than you is stupid and unnecessary; we’re just saying ‘the cord is plugged into laptop A, not laptop B.’” Once again I insist you show me the part in the universe that represent your perspective, and the atoms that represent mine.

Whenever I say the word “soul” if that causes some revulsion in you, you can just replace it with “the index that I am currently experiencing time from” and my point will be the same; and this is something that I hope you see must exist. You can also call this The Soul Problem, and say it proves God’s existence if you wish, but what I’m making here is really an extremely limited claim of dualism.

So I’m going to call this The Index Problem⁴, because all it asks is you to show me the index that indicates what time it is. Show me the index that says it’s now the present for you in the physical world, instead of the present for me, or the present for someone in 100 years, and physicalism is solved. But without that, the admission that anything exists at all, the admission that there’s something rather than nothing, leads to the soul. So physicalism falls flat.

The present is all that exists

The claim that “a soul” exists FEELS like such a strong claim, but I’m not even claiming this soul follows you from moment to moment, which is what illusionists deny. I really believe this claim is simple, and it’s the best argument for dualism I have; I’m unconvinced by philosophical zombies and Mary the color scientist.

I just don’t think illusionism goes far enough, and I think philosophers talk way too much about qualia and not enough about time. Admitting we exist at all might be enough.

I hope I could communicate just how truly odd time is as the only vessel for consciousness we know, and how it would require denying consciousness exists in the true sense to escape from the fact that time is experienced from one perspective.

The present is all we know we have; the past and future are but dreams in the hurricane of reality. Cling to the you that you are, and hope that whatever else exists is good.

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1. Also called radical realists

2. Dear god, there are so many opinions for how they interact, and that’s only among philosophers. I’m not even going to try to mention religion in this one, but bro. So many.

3. Also called conservative realists, non-dualists, weak illusionists

4. This is related to anthropics, the sleeping beauty problem, and “the essential indexical” (which talks about how “I” isn’t the same for me as it is for you, but has too much of a focus on linguistics to be the argument I’m making here) but I think all of these don’t capture what I’m talking about.