I Am a Strange Loop (67 page)

No matter what your opinion is on consciousness, reader, I suspect you would scratch your head at the tenets of liphosophy. It would be unnatural if you didn’t wonder, “What is this nutty Capitalized Essence all about? What follows from having this invisible, undetectable aura?” You would also be likely to wonder, “Who or what agent in nature decides which entities in the physical world will receive dollops of Leafpilishness?”

Such musings might lead you to posing other hard questions, such as: What exactly constitutes a leaf pile? How many leaves, and of what size, does it take to make a leaf pile? Which leaves belong to it, and which ones do not? Is “belonging” to a given leaf pile always a black-and-white matter? What about the air between the leaves? What about the dirt on a leaf? What if the leaves are dry, and a few (or half, or most) of them have been crushed into tiny pieces? What if there are two neighboring leaf piles that share a few leaves between them? Is it 100 percent clear at all times where the borders of a leaf pile are? In short, how does Mother Nature figure out in a perfectly black-and-white fashion what things are worthy recipients of dollops of Leafpilishness?

If you were in a yet more philosophical mood, you might ask yourself questions such as: What would happen if, through some freak accident or bizarre mistake, a dollop of Leafpilishness got attached to, say, a leaf pile with an ant crawling in it (that is, to the
compound
entity consisting of leaf pile plus ant)? Or to just the upper two-thirds of a leaf pile? Or to a pile of seaweed? Or to a child’s crumbly sand castle on the beach? Or to the San Francisco Zoo? Or to Andromeda galaxy? Or to my dentist appointment next week? What would happen if
two
dollops of Leafpilishness accidentally got attached to just
one
leaf pile? (Or zero dollops, yielding a “zombie” leaf pile?) What dreadful or marvelous consequences would ensue?

I suspect, reader, that you would not take seriously a liphosopher who argued that Leafpilishness was a central and mystical aspect of the cosmos, that it transcended physical law, that items possessing Leafpilishness were inherently different from all other items in the universe, and that each and every leaf pile had a unique identity — thanks not to its unique internal composition but rather to the particular dollop of Leafpilishness that had been doled out to it from who knows where. I hope you would join me in saying, “Liphosophy is a motley belief pile!” and in paying it no heed.

Consciousness: A Capitalized Essence

So much for liphosophers. Now let’s turn to philosophers who see consciousness as an elusive — in fact, undetectable — and yet terribly important nonphysical aspect of the universe. In order to distinguish
this
notion of consciousness from the one I’ve been talking about all through this book, I’m going to capitalize it: “Consciousness”. Whenever you see this word capitalized, just think of the nonphysical essence called
élan mental,
or else make an analogy to
Racecar Power
^®
or Leafpilishness; either way, you won’t be far off.

At this point, I have to admit that I have a rather feeble imagination for Capitalized Essences. In trying to picture in my mind a physical object imbued with a nonphysical essence (such as Leafpilishness or
élan mental
), I inadvertently fall back on imagery derived from the purely physical world. Thus for me, the attempt to imagine a “dollop of Consciousness” or a “nonphysical soul” inevitably brings to mind a translucent, glowing swirl of haze floating within and perhaps a little bit around the physical object that it inhabits. Mind you, I know all too well that this is most wrong, since the phenomenon is, by definition,
not
a physical one. But as I said, my imagination is feeble, and I need this kind of physical crutch to help it out.

In any case, the idea of a sharp dichotomy between objects imbued with dollops of Consciousness and those deprived of such leads to all sorts of puzzling riddles, such as the following:

Which physical entities possess Consciousness, and which ones do not? Does a whole human body possess Consciousness? Or is it just the human’s
brain
that is Conscious? Or could it be that only a certain
part
of the brain is Conscious? What are the exact boundaries of a Conscious physical entity? What organizational or chemical property of a physical structure is it that graces it with the right to be invaded by a dollop of Consciousness?

What mechanism in nature makes the elusive elixir of Consciousness glom onto some physical entities and spurn others? What wondrous pattern-recognition algorithm does Consciousness possess so as to infallibly recognize just the proper kinds of physical objects that deserve it, so it can then bestow itself onto them?

How does Consciousness know to do this? Does it somehow go around the physical world in search of candidate objects to glom onto? Or does it shine a metaphorical flashlight metaphorically down at the world and examine it piece by piece, occasionally saying to itself, “Aha! So
there’s
an entity that deserves one standard-size dollop of me!”

How does Consciousness get attached to some specific physical structure and not accidentally onto nearby pieces of matter? What kind of “glue” is used to make this attachment? Can the “glue” possibly wear out and the Consciousness accidentally fall off or transfer onto something else?

How is
your
Consciousness different from
my
Consciousness? Did our respective dollops come with different serial numbers or “flavors”, thus establishing the watertight breach between us? If your dollop of Consciousness had been attached to my brain and vice versa, would you be writing this and I reading it?

How does Consciousness coexist with physical law? That is, how does a dollop of Consciousness push material stuff around without coming into sharp conflict with the fact that physical law
alone
would suffice to determine the behavior of those things?

A Sliding Scale of Élan Mental

Now some readers might say that I am not giving
élan mental
(a.k.a. Consciousness) enough respect. They might say that there are gradations in the dispensation of this essence, so that some entities receive a good deal of it while others get rather little or none of it. It’s not just all-or-nothing; rather, the amount of Consciousness attached to any given physical structure is not precisely one dollop but can be any number of dollops (including fractional amounts). That’s progress!

And yet, for such readers, I would still have numerous questions, such as the following:

How is it determined exactly how many dollops (or fractional dollops) of Consciousness get attached to a given physical entity? Where are these dollops stored in the meantime? In other words, where is the Central Consciousness Bank?

Once a certain portion of Consciousness has been dished out to a recipient entity (Ronald Reagan, a chess-playing computer, a cockroach, a sperm, a sunflower, a thermostat, a leaf pile, a stone, the city of Cairo), is it a permanent allotment, or is the size of the allotment variable, depending on what physical events take place involving the recipient? If the recipient is in some way altered, does its allotment (or part of it) revert to the Central Consciousness Bank, or does it just float around forevermore, no longer attached to a physical anchor? And if it floats around unattached, does it retain traces of the recipient to which it was once attached?

What about people with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia — are they still “just as Conscious” as they always were, until the moment of their death? What makes something be “the same entity” over long periods of time, anyway? Who or what decreed that the changing pattern that over several decades was variously known as “Ronnie Reagan”, “Ronald Reagan”, “Governor Reagan”, “President Reagan”, and “Ex-President Reagan” was “one single entity”? And if it truly, objectively, indisputably
was
one single entity no matter how ephemeral and wispy it became, then mightn’t that entity
still
exist?

And what about Consciousness for fetuses (or for their growing brains, even when they consist of just two neurons)? What about for cows (or their brains)? What about for goldfish (or their brains)? What about for viruses?

As I hope these lists of enigmas make clear, the questions entailed by a Capitalized Essence called “Consciousness” or
élan mental
abound and multiply with out end. Belief in dualism leads to a hopelessly vast and murky pit of mysteries.

Semantic Quibbling in Universe Z

There is one last matter I wish to deal with, and that has to do with Dave Chalmers’ famous zombie twin in Universe Z. Recall that this Dave sincerely
believes
what it is saying when it claims that it enjoys ice cream and purple flowers, but it is in fact telling falsities, since it enjoys nothing at all, since it feels nothing at all — no more than the gears in a Ferris wheel feel something as they mesh and churn. Well, what bothers me here is the uncritical willingness to say that this utterly feelingless Dave
believes
certain things, and that it even believes them
sincerely.
Isn’t sincere belief a variety of feeling? Do the gears in a Ferris wheel sincerely believe anything? I would hope you would say no. Does the float-ball in a flush toilet sincerely believe anything? Once again, I would hope you would say no.

So suppose we backed off on the sincerity bit, and merely said that Universe Z’s Dave
believes
the falsities that it is uttering about its enjoyment of this and that. Well, once again, could it not be argued that
belief
is a kind of feeling? I’m not going to make the argument here, because that’s not my point. My point is that, like so many distinctions in this complex world of ours, the apparent distinction between phenomena that
do
involve feelings and phenomena that do
not
is anything but black and white.

If I asked you to write down a list of terms that slide gradually from fully emotional and sentient to fully emotionless and unsentient, I think you could probably quite easily do so. In fact, let’s give it a quick try right here. Here are a few verbs that come to my mind, listed roughly in descending order of emotionality and sentience:
agonize, exult, suffer, enjoy, desire, listen, hear, taste, perceive, notice, consider, reason, argue, claim, believe, remember, forget, know, calculate, utter, register, react, bounce, turn, move, stop.
I won’t claim that my extremely short list of verbs is impeccably ordered; I simply threw it together in an attempt to show that there is unquestionably a spectrum, a set of shades of gray, concerning words that do and that do not suggest the presence of feelings behind the scenes. The tricky question then is: Which of these verbs (and comparable adjectives, adverbs, nouns, pronouns, etc.) would we be willing to apply to Dave’s zombie twin in Universe Z? Is there some precise cutoff line beyond which certain words are disallowed? Who would determine that cutoff line?

To put this in perspective, consider the criteria that we effortlessly apply (I first wrote “unconsciously”, but then I thought that that was a strange word choice, in these circumstances!) when we watch the antics of the humanoid robots R2-D2 and C-3PO in
Star Wars.
When one of them acts fearful and tries to flee in what strike us as appropriate circumstances, are we not justified in applying the adjective “frightened”? Or would we need to have obtained some kind of word-usage permit in advance, granted only when the universe that forms the backdrop to the actions in question is a universe imbued with
élan mental
? And how is this “scientific” fact about a universe to be determined?

If viewers of a space-adventure movie were “scientifically” informed at the movie’s start that the saga to follow takes place in a universe completely unlike ours — namely, in a universe without a drop of
élan mental
— would they then watch with utter indifference as some cute-looking robot, rather like R2-D2 or C-3PO (take your pick), got hacked into little tiny pieces by a larger robot? Would parents tell their sobbing children, “Hush now, don’t you bawl! That silly robot wasn’t
alive
! The makers of the movie told us at the start that the universe where it
lived
doesn’t have creatures with feelings! Not one!” What’s the difference between
being alive
and
living
? And more importantly, what merits being sobbed over?

Quibbling in Universe Q

At chapter’s end, we are thus brought back full circle to the “pedantic semantic” pronoun issues with which we began. Should we use different pronouns to refer to Universe Q’s Dave Chalmers (which is clearly a “he”) and to its indistinguishable zombie twin in Universe Z (who is just as clearly an “it”)? Of course such semantic quibbles aren’t limited to humans and their zombie twins. If a mosquito in our universe — our warm and fuzzy Universe Q overflowing with
élan mental
— is unquestionably a swattable “it”, then what about a turkey? And if a turkey is unquestionably just a Thanksgiving dinner, then what about a chinchilla? And if a chinchilla is just a fur coat, then what about a bunny and a cat and a dog? And then what about a human fetus? And what about a newborn baby? Where lies the “who” / “which” cutoff line?

As I said at the chapter’s outset, I see these as important questions — questions that in the end have everything to do with matters of life and death. They may not be easy to answer, but they are important to ponder. Semantics is not always just pedantic quibbling.