What is it like to be me?
What is it like
to see a beautiful sunset,
to hear a great piece of music,
to feel the pain of toothache,
to feel joy and sorrow, enthusiasm and anger?
We are conscious beings and we have experiences. Therefore we can ask questions like these of ourselves in a way which would be meaningless to ask of a computer or AI system, no matter how complex.
The only reason we think about consciousness is because we experience it, not because we can observe it in others.
People use the word “consciousness” to mean several different things and this can be confusing. The way I am using it refers to conscious experience. Sometimes people use the word to mean awareness or awakeness. But in this sense, many things could be said to be conscious. A computer could be said to be aware of a sunset if it were fitted with a camera and suitable software but a computer couldn’t experience a sunset and it’s beauty in the way that a human can. There is nothing it is like for a computer to see a sunset.
But, for us, consciousness is the key to everything. Without it we would just be lumps of material like any other structure in the Universe. Because we have conscious experience, and only because of this, we can observe, appreciate, desire and investigate the things around us. Without consciousness, concepts such as justice, freedom, virtue or morality would be meaningless. Without consciousness, nothing else would matter.
Consciousness is enigmatic because it is possible to describe the physical world, and the humans in it, perfectly well without speaking about consciousness at all.
Consciousness is hard to investigate for several reasons.
Conscious experience is private.
For instance, I can experience the taste of coffee but I cannot communicate to you what that taste is like. The closest I could get is to use comparisons with other tastes which we have both experienced. The only way you could know what it was like to taste coffee would be to taste it yourself. Even then there is no way to be sure that we experience the taste of coffee in the same way. Or at all.
For this reason, it is hard, or even impossible, for science to get a handle on it. The scientific method relies on repeatable, publicly available observations and conscious experience does not provide that.
Conscious experience is subjective.
Centres of consciousness are usually associated with brains, with one brain corresponding to one centre. There are exceptions to this but these may be considered pathological.
If there is an experience then there must be a person who has that experience. Who is that “person”? What is the nature of a “person”? Each time a baby grows up then a new centre of consciousness comes into existence. But why is this particular centre of consciousness associated with that particular person? Why is it that I experience what is seen and heard by this body and nobody else’s?
If I were able to make a perfect replica of myself down to the very atoms, would that replica be conscious? And if so would it be separate to me or in some sense would we be the same person?
Physical science has come nowhere near to even knowing how to address questions like this and, arguably, is incapable of doing so.
Consciousness provides no known survival value
So, from the Darwinian point of view, it is redundant. According to Darwinian theory, there is no reason for it to have evolved. An intelligent robot could have evolved to react to the real world in the same way that a conscious entity does and yet it need have no experiences.
When people assert that consciousness aids survival, they are usually referring to access consciousness, not conscious experience and so miss the point.
So why does it exist? Some say it is simply a bi-product of evolution, a spandrel, but if so it is a surprisingly complex and coherent one. A robot would be less complex and therefore is more likely to have evolved.
The most likely implications of consciousness being private, subjective and having no survival value are that:
Consciousness is not a purely physical phenomenon
There is more to humans than the material from which our bodies are made.
If consciousness has a purpose, and it does not help survival, its existence must be due to a different cause than evolution by natural selection.
The fact that we have conscious experience, and therefore are in a position to ask questions like this at all, is strong evidence that there is more to the Universe than what can be described by Physics and so the widespread modern belief in physicalism is false. [1]
1. Epistemic Mind, “The case against scientific materialism”. https://youtu.be/eHh9ju9wm7o