Clash of Minds: Where Does Consciousness Reside?

One of the leading theories of consciousness, Integrated Information Theory, says it comes from the back of your brain. Another, Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, puts it squarely in the front. And they're both considered the most promising scientific explanations we have. Exactly. Last week on Clash of Minds we talked about unsolved mysteries, but this one feels like the biggest of all. We can’t even agree on WHERE in the head it is, let alone what it IS. And that's the whole debate, isn't it? The mainstream scientific view, your view I suspect, is materialism. Consciousness is an emergent property. It’s a byproduct of, uh, enough neurons firing in a complex enough way.

Matter is fundamental, and consciousness just sort of… pops out. I wouldn't say "pops out." I'd say it arises from a high degree of organization. Just like wetness arises from water molecules, consciousness arises from neural computation. There’s ZERO evidence for anything else. We can literally see brain activity corresponding to thoughts. Oh, you can see correlation. Of course you can. If I smash a TV with a hammer, the TV show goes away. That doesn't mean the TV was generating the show. It was a receiver. Okay, but that's an old analogy. We have way more than that. We can stimulate parts of the brain and produce conscious experiences.

That’s not a receiver, that's a generator. You can produce flashes of light and muscle twitches. You can't produce the subjective experience of seeing the color red, or the feeling of awe. That's the hard problem of consciousness, and materialism has absolutely no answer for it. None. I'll give you that the hard problem is... hard. Explaining qualia—the private, subjective feeling of things—is the wall we keep hitting. But saying it's fundamental to the universe feels like giving up. Does it? Or does it feel like opening up the inquiry? Thinkers like David Bohm proposed that consciousness isn't a fluke of biology but a basic feature of reality.

The brain doesn't create it; it tunes into it. It acts as a filter or an amplifier. But that’s unfalsifiable! How do you test for a "universal consciousness field"? It sounds more like philosophy or spirituality than science. At least with IIT and GNWT, we have concrete, testable hypotheses about brain structures. And those hypotheses are failing to explain the one thing they're supposed to explain! Calling consciousness "emergent" is just a fancy way of saying "and then a miracle happens." It's a placeholder word for ignorance. The Fractal Consciousness Theory, for example, suggests it's a fundamental pattern that repeats at different scales.

That’s a far more elegant solution. Elegant, maybe. But is it true? The materialist view, for all its gaps, is grounded in what we can observe and measure. Your view requires us to believe in a property of the universe that is, by its nature, invisible. Soooo, like dark matter? Or dark energy? Science is full of things we infer from their effects before we can see them directly. The biggest effect to explain here is your own subjective experience. Materialism just pretends it's not a big deal. I think it's the ONLY deal. Okay... I hear you. The dismissal of subjective experience is a weak point for my side. It's treated more as an annoyance than the central data point.

And the lack of a clear mechanism is the weak point for mine. I’ll grant you that. "Tuning in" is a metaphor, not a mechanism. For now. So we have one side with a mechanism that can't explain the experience, and another side that prioritizes the experience but doesn't have a mechanism. That's a pretty fair summary. We're stuck between a theory that explains everything except consciousness, and a theory that explains consciousness but not much else. It feels like the real question isn't just about brains versus the universe. No, it's not. The real question is whether reality is fundamentally dead, or fundamentally aware. Is the universe just a bunch of rocks and gas that accidentally woke up on one tiny planet?

Or is awareness baked in from the very beginning?