Consciousness and the Challenge of Neuroscience

Consciousness and the challenge of neuroscience.

            The whole notion of consciousness as a reality independent of and higher than the brain has come under attack in recent years. Scientists and philosophers, most notably Daniel Dennett and Francis Crick have presented explanations reducing consciousness to brain molecules. As noted in an earlier post, Francis Crick in his 1994 book, the Astonishing Hypothesis, depicted consciousness and the very awareness of self as nothing but the activity of molecules. Daniel Dennett offered extended arguments for understanding both consciousness and freedom in physical terms In Consciousness Explained (1991), and Freedom Evolves (2003).  

            Christof Koch, a younger colleague of Francis Crick took on the project of fully explaining consciousness in physical reductionist terms. In his 2012 book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, Koch sets out to “describe a plausible quantitative theory of consciousness that explains why certain types of highly organized matter, in particular brains, can be conscious.” Koch argues that consciousness will ultimately be explained by the physical sciences, especially neuro-biology. But while he insists that consciousness cannot exist without matter, he rejects the notion that the reduction of consciousness to the activity of billions of tiny nerve cells excludes the possibility of meaning in the universe. 

            Koch grapples with the hard problem, a term used by David Chalmers, which refers to understanding why anybody can be conscious at all. He summarizes the great progress that neuroscience is making in connecting conscious states with neural events, but admits that all of the science is from a third person point of view. He poses the question that involves the hard problem from a reductionist’s perspective: “…how does nervous tissue acquire an interior first-person point of view?” Koch rejects the notion that the gap between brain’s mechanisms and consciousness is unbridgeable, dismissing such views as defeatist and a denigration of reason. His premise asserts that since science has been the best method for understanding the external world, it should also help us explain the interior world of consciousness.

            Koch contends that science can close the gap that still separates neurological understanding of the brain and actual first-person states of consciousness. Describing the advances that have been made in exploration of the brain he writes: “Neuroscience textbooks describe this organ in mind-numbing detail yet leave out what it means to be the owner of one.” Koch intends to make up for this “remarkable omission” by showing the link between the experiencing subject and the perspective of the brain scientist. His specific goal is to find what he and Francis Crick call the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) defined as “the minimal neural mechanisms jointly sufficient for any one specific conscious concept.”

It would seem that if he is successful, he will have refuted my thesis as explained in my opening post, namely that it is reasonable to believe that consciousness precedes matter. But even if Koch, or other researchers show how matter becomes conscious by developing a highly complex brain, and I am assuming that they will, it will show what a material being needs to be conscious, but not necessarily entail that all consciousness requires a material base. A full explanation of how matter becomes conscious leaves open the question of whether any conscious reality existed prior to matter becoming conscious.