Mind-Body Problems: Science, Subjectivity & Who We Really Are

by John Horgan

According to integrated information theory, a system is conscious if it possesses Φ, or phi, a measure of the system’s “integrated information.” Phi corresponds to the exchange of information between different parts of a system. Phi is often equated to “synergy,” the degree to which a system is more than the sum of its parts.

“…the central identity of IIT can be formulated quite simply: an experience is identical to a conceptual structure that is maximally irreducible intrinsically. More precisely, a conceptual structure completely specifies both the quantity and the quality of experience: how much the system exists—the quantity or level of consciousness—is measured by its Φmax value—the intrinsic irreducibility of the conceptual structure; which way it exists—the quality or content of consciousness—is specified by the shape of the conceptual structure. If a system has Φmax = 0, meaning that its cause–effect power is completely reducible to that of its parts, it cannot lay claim to existing. If Φmax > 0, the system cannot be reduced to its parts, so it exists in and of itself. More generally, the larger Φmax, the more a system can lay claim to existing in a fuller sense than systems with lower Φmax. According to IIT, the quantity and quality of an experience are an intrinsic, fundamental property of a complex of mechanisms in a state—the property of informing or shaping the space of possibilities (past and future states) in a particular way, just as it is considered to be intrinsic to a mass to bend space–time around it.”

Workshoppers seemed especially confused by a postulate called “exclusion.” According to IIT, many components of a brain—neuron, ganglia, amygdala, visual cortex—may have non-zero phi and hence mini-minds. But because the phi of the entire brain exceeds that of its components, its consciousness suppresses or “excludes” the components’ mini-minds.

Koch’s mind-body expertise didn’t give him much insight or control over his actions. If anything, he said, the smarter you are, the better you are at rationalizing your urges. “There are parts of the brain that are generating these very powerful emotions. Love, hate, sadness, guilt, lust. And you have very little access to that, and you only control them very indirectly.” After you behave in a certain way, “you construct some scenario where you think, ‘Well this is probably what happened.’ Whether that actually corresponds to what happened, I think nobody knows.”

Koch once assured his wife, falsely, that he had ended his affair. He went for a long, guilt-wracked run in the mountains. When he returned, his wife was holding a phone bill documenting a conversation between him and his lover. He had left the bill on a table, where his wife couldn’t miss it. Koch believes he subconsciously wanted his wife to find the bill. “I’m one of the world’s experts on consciousness, and my mind does this trick!”

“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” “This,” Koch adds in Confessions, “is a perhaps overenthusiastic expression of my position on free will: For better or worse, I am the principle actor of my own life.”

But Koch has always been pretty happy and stable, at least emotionally. At no point in his life has he succumbed to despair or self-loathing. “I never once went through a depression,” he said, not even when his marriage was crumbling. He conjectured that his cheeriness is largely genetic. “The biggest trick in life,” he said with a grin, “is to choose your parents well.”

Hofstadter asserts that consciousness is “not as deep a mystery as it seems.” It is a pseudo-problem, because consciousness is an “illusion.” By this, Hofstadter seems to mean that our conscious thoughts and perceptions are often misleading, and they are trivial compared to all the computation going on below the level of our awareness.

“I don’t feel as though I have made any decisions,” he replied. “I feel like decisions are made for me by the forces inside my brain.” He paused. “I don’t object to the notion that there is will, and a battle of wills, but there is nothing free.”

Hofstadter is, in most respects, a hard-core skeptic, who denies himself beliefs that comfort others. He rejects God, the afterlife, the soul and free will. He seems to derive comfort, however, from his faith in a Platonic realm of sublime forms. The forms exist independently of us, but if we are lucky, we can discern them.

My skepticism wobbled again in 2014 when I met Rupert Sheldrake at a conference in England. Sheldrake, who earned a Ph.D. in biology at Cambridge, is a leading parapsychologist, renowned, or notorious, for claiming that humans, dogs and other animals have extrasensory perception. Sheldrake and I hit it off. He was smart, knowledgeable, funny, passionate about his research without being fanatical. He told me that scientists constantly confess, privately, that they keep their belief in the paranormal secret for fear of damaging their reputations. These are some of the reasons why I have devoted a chapter to the strange, tragic case of Stuart Kauffman.

“The only way to get that ontological requirement for free will is through quantum mechanics, that we know of. I mean, you could just posit indeterminism, but we have quantum mechanics. Why not use it?”

The phrase “God of the gaps” suggests that faith will endure as long as mysteries like the origin of the universe and life remain unsolved. The implication is that freedom of belief is proportional to ignorance. In the case of the mind-body problem, our ignorance is an abyss, not a gap. So how free should we be? Free to believe in panpsychism? Souls? Ghosts? Heaven, reincarnation, nirvana? The God of The Bible? Of Spinoza? Where should we draw the line between credible and incredible mind-body stories?

I admire Kauffman’s attempts to fuse science and spirituality. I once asked him about attacks on religion by Richard Dawkins and other "New Atheists." Kauffman replied that “to dismiss those who do believe in God, in any sense, is arrogant and useless and divisive.” I agree. It is also “arrogant and useless and divisive” to dismiss those who, like Kauffman, are open-minded about extrasensory perception, telekinesis and other paranormal phenomena.

Stephen Laberge was speaking. He is an authority on lucid dreams, during which you become aware that you are dreaming. In the 1970s Laberge showed that lucid dreamers could communicate with the outside world by moving their eyes, which unlike most other body parts are not immobilized in REM sleep.

I didn’t have any lucid dreams in LaBerge’s lab or on my own, but my waking life became dreamier. I kept asking myself, as LaBerge recommended, Is this a dream? The more you ask this question when you’re awake, the more likely you are to ask it when you’re dreaming and to realize: Hey! This is a dream!

The speaker before me, Hedda Morch, pondered whether individual human minds can merge into a meta-mind, as implied by integrated information theory. She noted that several prominent philosophers have explored the concept of “combined consciousness,” including Charles Hartshorne.

Someday science might produce gene therapies or brain implants that eradicate schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. We will then face a momentous choice, because such technologies could also conceivably cure us of common unhappiness and angst. We might become so content, even blissful, that we cease agonizing over who we are. The mind-body problem will no longer be a problem, because we will no longer be human. In that world, perhaps, Freud will finally be dead.

Catholicism is criticized, justly, for excessive shaming, especially when it comes to sexual behavior that violates Church rules, like homosexuality and pre-marital sex. But shame can be “an appropriate thing to feel,” Flanagan said, if it motivates you to behave better. Flanagan defined shame as “feeling like a bad person, not the person you want to be.” Flanagan cannot shake his shame for his cruelty toward his ex-wife, especially when he blamed her for his cheating. This, of all his misdeeds, seemed to haunt him most. “There is this person,” he said, “a good Catholic boy, who still believes, and always did believe, you shouldn’t hurt people, especially good people, who don’t fuck you over.” Philosophy didn’t save Flanagan’s marriage or, for years, help him stay off booze. It couldn’t help him achieve self-mastery, or relieve him of guilt. But it still did Flanagan a lot of good. Throughout his ordeals, he kept philosophizing, thinking, talking, teaching, reading about the mind-body problem. He wrote five books during his troubles! Without philosophy, who knows? Flanagan might still be drinking, or dead. Writing about how life has no transcendent meaning gave his life meaning.

Smiling proudly, he pointed at a big stack of paper on a table beside me. It was his new book, The Geography of Morals, which seeks common ground between diverse moral perspectives. It combines insights provided by evolutionary psychology and other fields with cross-cultural comparisons of moral customs. “I love seeing the way other people have put together meaningful lives.”

You can react to this mystical experience in two very different ways. You might see each individual creature as precious. You cherish all sentient things and yearn to ease their suffering. This is the path of the saint, savoir, bodhisattva. Or you might think, Nothing lasts, nothing matters. The suffering of everyone on earth, or everyone who has ever lived, is infinitesimal, compared to eternity. A human life has no more value or meaning than that of a cockroach. You don’t give a shit about the Holocaust, or Syrian kids blown to bits by American bombs, let alone one woman’s hurt feelings.

The cases of Eamon Poole and Owen Flanagan have helped me discover a contradiction in my philosophy. If I had to choose a supreme value, it would be freedom. Life has no meaning unless we are free to choose. Fearlessness should be desirable, too, because the more fearless we are, the more free we are. But fearlessness can turn us into psychopaths, who do not give a shit about anything but our own pleasure. If you don’t fear death, the judgment of God or of other people, if you know—really know—that nothing matters, what, if anything, restrains you? What keeps you from hurting others? Reason? No, because reason confirms your mystical intuition that all things pass, there is no divine justice, nothing matters. If reason can’t guide you, you’re left with your innate tendencies. If you have a strong tendency toward empathy and compassion, you become a good guru, a bodhisattva, who cares for others. If you have a strong innate desire for sex, power and high adventure, you become a bad guru, de Sade in a saffron robe. Your “choice” comes down to the genes your parents bequeathed you. In one of his dialogues, Socrates argues with Glaucon about the true nature of men. Glaucon imagines a magic ring that makes men invisible, so they can do anything and get away with it. He asserts that men who found such a ring would be bad, really bad. They would kill other men and take their property and their women. Socrates says a wise man would resist such temptations, because true freedom mean...

I sometimes wonder, What would it be like to be a psychopath, unencumbered by fear or compassion? What would it be like to be one of those crazy, charismatic gurus who drink and fuck with abandon and are worshipped for their holiness? If there is no God, and no Good, everything is permitted. I’m not sure where this leaves me. I still think the world could use more freedom and less fear. But if we lose all our fear, we might lose our self-doubt, and become self-righteous dicks, or worse. We might lose our sense of wonder, because what is wonder but doubt with positive valance? One outcome of this rumination is that I no longer fantasize about a cure for fear, a neural or genetic tweak that makes ...