I recently came across this thought experiment which I invite you to try for yourself. It’s a very simple one. All you need do is notice what happens in your mind as you follow these four steps:
- Bring a movie to mind – don’t worry about whether it’s a good or bad one, any movie at all.
- Now bring a second movie to mind.
- And a third.
- Finally, choose which of the three you prefer most.
Now, let’s look at what you may have noticed.
In step one – did you scan the IMDB database of all movies ever made and pick one from there? Probably not is my guess as I’m making the assumption you’re a real human being not an artificial intelligence! What about running down a list of every movie you’ve ever watched and choosing one of those? I imagine you didn’t do that either. When I followed steps 1, 2, and 3 the name of the movie just appeared in my awareness or consciousness.
In step 4, when a choice needed to be made about which of the three I preferred, The Shawshank Redemption beat Captain Fantastic and Love Story by a whisker. Once I’d placed it top of the pile several reasons why also appeared in my consciousness:
- my recollection of the cinematography,
- the way I felt about the lead and supporting actors’ performances and characters,
- the sensations I had in this or that scene, and my reaction to some of Morgan Freeman’s one-liners,
- the intuitions I had about where the plot lines may go next and what the redemptive conclusion to the movie might be etc.
What was the key lesson behind this thought experiment for me?
I can’t “bring a movie to mind” – it just appears there. Then, quick as a flash, I “make up” the reasons why and weave them into a story after the fact. I embellish the story further by recalling what else I remember – about the movie in this case. In a nutshell, my experience in each moment seems to be generated by the way I make sense of whatever appears in my consciousness. If true, I wondered, does that mean every experience I have, and the choice I make, works in the same way?
A conversation with a fan of Newton
I wasn’t wrong.
He continued with “Newton invited us to imagine the world as a giant clock with tiny parts that move precisely. He thought that if we knew how all these parts move and what pushes them, we could predict everything that happens, including what makes up we humans’ experiences – that is what we each think, feel, and do.
“Newton developed three observable Laws of Motion:
- Things like to keep doing what they’re doing. If something is still, it wants to stay still. If it’s moving, it wants to keep moving the same way, unless something else makes it stop or change direction. (He called this “The Law of Inertia”.)
- If you push or pull something, it will move faster or slower depending on how hard you push and how heavy it is. Light things move more easily when you push them. (“The Law of Force and Acceleration”.)
- When you push or pull something, it pushes or pulls back on you with the same amount of force but in the opposite direction. It’s like a tug of war where both sides pull equally hard. (“The Law of Action-Reaction”.)
“He believed in determinism, meaning if we know how everything in the world moved and all the forces pushing them – via the Three Laws of Motion that help us understand how everything works – we could tell exactly what will happen in the future.
“According to a Newtonian worldview, therefore, even human experience – the way you, me, and all of us think, feel, and act – are parts of this big clockwork. Experience is connected to how things move and interact. The experience you’re about to have next is determinable. As was you choosing The Shawshank Redemption as your top preference from a list of three? All that’s happening is the parts that constitute your experience are in different states of motion” he concluded in that authoritative, Q.E.D kinda way.
“Wait a minute. Look, I’m no scientist, but who makes such predictions and how?” I asked, knowing what I just heard about determinism challenged my own intuitions somewhat.
“Good question. Not sure of the answer” he said. “Maybe it’s just a computing power problem. We can’t yet figure out how all the parts – neurotransmitters or chemical substances that serve as messengers and form synaptic connections in the brain for instance – work together as what we might call ‘experience creators’. But maybe it’s to do with consciousness too, something I just don’t ‘get’ and feel is a bit too woohoo sometimes.”
Conversations about consciousness
In her book Conscious: A Brief Guide To The Mystery Of The Mind, philosopher and author Annaka Harris explored the mysteries of consciousness. She shared several ideas that emerged from her own conversations with scientists and philosophers. These have sparked ongoing discussions not only with my friend above but that voice in my own head and colleagues’ curious about this topic too.
The first idea that struck me concerns “The Hard Problem”, a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers in 1995 in his paper Facing Up To The Problem Of Consciousness. It encapsulates a fundamental challenge we collectively have when trying to understand consciousness. If, for instance, we want an answer to this question – how does the brain make us think, feel, and produce the experience we’re subjectively conscious of – neuroscience helps us out, but only up to a point.
Experiments using fMRI scanners make some aspects about the brain relatively easy to understand – how we remember things and see colours, for instance. Similarly, how brain activities correlate with conscious states like happiness, anxiety, anger, etc., scientists can observe and report which parts light up when you think or feel something. These are known as “easy problems”, mainly because they can be observed and studied via experiments that rely on data-yielding measuring devices. But “The Hard Problem” is different. It’s about why you have thoughts and feelings in the first place. Here, so far at least, science struggles to explain why brain activities lead to our subjective experience of consciousness.
Where the science runs out, philosophy normally steps in. As philosopher Thomas Nagel did with his “What It’s Like To Be A Bat” analogy. He suggests that being alive means consciousness is present – the lights are on behind our eyes we could say. What we experience through it is inherently subjective and unique to the experiencer – you, me, or anyone else. It’s not objective.
A bat, for instance, is blind. Yet flies with pinpoint accuracy from where it is to where it wants to be, avoiding numerous obstacles along the way. As humans, we might recognise its lights are on – it’s conscious and alive – and that it has some notion of what being a bat is like, whether in flight or not. What it’s conscious of, however, is quite tricky for us to fully comprehend, not least because it’s outside our own experience of what’s in our consciousness.
If we use the bat analogy in a human-to-human context, it begs the question of whether we can accurately compare experiences. Can mine be compared to yours or anyone else’s? Is it the case that I cannot precisely know what it’s like to be you, nor you, me?
Annaka also spoke with David Eagleman and other neuroscientists for her book. They had conducted experiments to understand how the brain processes information and when we become consciously aware of it. These involved measuring brain activity to see how it responds to stimuli such as flashing images or sounds. The findings aren’t staggering to me, given the lesson I drew from the film-choice thought experiment above, but to others, they may be. They suggest our brains react to stimuli and make decisions before we consciously perceive them. Eagleman summed the findings up with “The Brain Knows Before You Do”.
This, of course, brings us right back to the mystery posed by “The Hard Problem” and Newtonian-style determinism. Stuff just appears in consciousness, from where we don’t yet know and whether it’s determinable or not, also remains unknown.
Where does this leave you, me, and everyone else?
Let’s keep things as simple as possible. Take a look at this image of me and Ted and just notice what appears in your consciousness as you do.
What is it like to be you looking at this image – what immediately pops into your mind at first glance? What other thoughts come to you and what meaning are you fusing into these? For instance, is your experience of this image suggesting Ted is cute, and me less so!? You’re bored by the image and this inquiry into it? Are you intrigued by the shadows on the wall? You’re wondering what all this has to do with the way you experience life more generally? Or is nothing much present in your consciousness at this moment?
See if you can describe what precisely you are conscious of right now. And to “The Hard Problem” – where does whatever you’re conscious of come from in the first place?
For me, now, the answer to the last question remains a mystery that I’m at ease with. But, I couldn’t always say that. Especially while suffering bouts of depression that occurred frequently. Until that is, they lessened in both frequency and intensity as my outlook on life changed significantly.
