Too Near, Too Far

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9976/01/index23article8.html

Let us make no bones about it. Consciousness is puzzling. The rest of our common experience contains no obvious analog, no remotely parallel phenomenon, no clear and evocative model that promises some useful grasp of its essential nature. Consciousness thus appears unique and, to many minds, beyond scientific explanation. Or anyway, beyond purely physical explanation. Consciousness, it has been argued, is essentially a subjective phenomenon, accessible only to the creature that has it, while anything that is truly physical — one’s brain activity, for example — is doomed to be objective in nature, that is, to be accessible to many people from many points of view. Conscious phenomena, it is often concluded, can hardly be identical with mere brain phenomena; and the objective science of the latter cannot hope to explain the ineffably subjective character of the former. This view may be right, but I am inclined to the opposite opinion. Let me explain why.

We have confronted comparable mysteries before, and more than once. The historical examples are worth recalling. The first-century astronomer Ptolemy wrote off the possibility of any real scientific explanation of the nature and motions of the stars and planets on grounds that they were too remote and inaccessible to human understanding. We could aspire only to describe what little of those motions we could see. Physics, he said, would never capture their true nature or underlying heavenly causes. Those were inaccessible from our earthly perspective.

A similar idea about the heavens was urged by the mathematician, historian of science, and positivist philosopher Auguste Comte as recently as the early nineteenth century. Citing their unthinkable remoteness from us, he ruled out as impossible our ever knowing the physical constitution of the stars.

The point is not that these men were fools. Quite the contrary. Ptolemy was the greatest astronomer of antiquity, and Comte was a hard-nosed and deeply learned defender of scientific method. The point is that even a brilliant thinker can come to assume that what transcends his imagination transcends discovery by science.

By Comte’s time, of course, Sir Isaac Newton had already shown that Ptolemy’s counsel of explanatory despair was premature. The sun and planets, it turned out, were all made of matter, had mass, and moved as they did because of gravitational forces. Comte’s ideas about our cognitive limitations were likewise premature. For within twenty years of Comte’s claim, astronomers had discovered the many emission and absorption lines present in the spectrum of the light arriving from any star in the heavens, the sun included.

… In Ptolemy’s case, the inaccessible, unknowable cause of the planetary motions was in fact the very same force that held his own feet squarely against his ancient observatory floor. Ironically, as it turned out, he was in vital and intimate contact with that force every minute of his life. Naturally enough, it went utterly unrecognized by Ptolemy, for he lacked the conceptual framework that Newton would later construct. Ptolemy, learned Aristotelian that he was, thought of any object’s “gravity” as an intrinsic feature of that object, a feature like its shape or its color. As he understood things, it was not a force at all, let alone a force that emanated from the sun and every planet, a force spread throughout the heavens. Newton’s framework was therefore revolutionary, for it would have partitioned parts of Ptolemy’s neuronal activation space in a new and radically different way. Newton’s framework, in contrast to Aristotle’s, would have made it possible for Ptolemy to recognize what was endlessly tugging at his own body.

Comte’s case was comparably ironic. The information “forever inaccessible” was in fact flooding continuously into his eyes and over his body whenever he stood in direct sunlight or starlight. He was literally awash in it for most of his life. Naturally enough, that spectral information went utterly unrecognized by him, because he did not understand the structure and the sources of light; nor did he suspect the rich information that it contained. He lacked the conceptual framework necessary to appreciate what was going on. Even if someone had put starlight through a prism for him, the pattern would have meant nothing to Comte.

Like Ptolemy before him, he wasn’t lacking informational contact with the mystery at issue: he was lacking the proper concepts with which to grasp it. Perhaps we should not be too impressed, therefore, by the puzzling nature of consciousness. The appearance of unique mystery and permanent inaccessibility to standard science may reflect only our own ignorance and current conceptual poverty, rather than any special metaphysical status possessed by consciousness itself.

— Paul M. Churchland,
The Engine of the Reason, the Seat of the Soul:
A Philosophical Journey into the Brain,
Chapter 8 – The Puzzle of Consciousness