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Alan J. McComas, "Consciousness: The Road to Reductionism" (American Scientist, 2025)
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welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Gregory McNiff, and I'm excited to be joined by Alan McComas, the author of Consciousness the Road to Reductionism, an article in the March April 2025 issue of the American Scientists. Professor Alan McComas is an emeritus professor of medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. He trained in medicine and surgery at Durham University in England and in neurophysiological research at University College London before serving as head of neurology at McMaster. He is the author of Arancio, Seahorse and the Search for Memory and Consciousness, published by Oxford University Press in 2022. I selected this article because it offers a clear account of the reductionist approach to consciousness, one of the most important and contested questions in neuroscience and philosophy of mind. Professor Muscomas brings together clinical experience, single neuron recording, and the history of competing theories to provide a compelling framework for understanding how neural activity gives rise to the sense of self. Alan, thank you so much for joining me today to discuss your article.
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My pleasure.
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C
Okay, three, two, one. Alan, why did you write the article and who is the target audience?
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Well, the article really was written for laypeople interested in science and philosophy, but to some extent it was also directed at people who are, as it were, dabbling in the field of consciousness because one cannot escape this. I mean, consciousness is there all the time in articles on the radio, on tv, tv, on the Internet, and so on. Greg, if I might suggest something, I think we should try and define what we really mean by consciousness. Everyone has their own idea as to what consciousness is, but they have great difficulty in defining it. And there's no absolute agreement on this. In fact, there are as many as 30 different definitions of consciousness that have been published. One definition, and this is the one that I use, and probably the one that you use, is that consciousness is an awareness of self. This is absolutely fundamental, and I think this was the first aspect, the first type of consciousness that evolved. There are other aspects of consciousness. There's the aspect of the Special senses, that is the consciousness of seeing and recognizing what we're looking at. The consciousness of hearing, the consciousness of the internal speech, that inner voice that is there all the time, sort of commenting on what we're doing and appearing to guide us. There's the consciousness of thinking and planning ahead. And of course, there's the consciousness of memory. So one really has to have an understanding of consciousness which can embrace all of these aspects. And very often, if you pick up a book or an article, you find that it's just one aspect. How do we see, for example, how do we hear? How do we feel? So back to the simple definition then. Consciousness is an awareness of self. So far, so good. The next question, really, for your listeners is what we really mean by reductionist approach. And I suspect most of your listeners do know. But I think there's a good analogy with a car. I studied Latin at school. I didn't do mechanics. So my knowledge about cars is very primitive. I know that I can get in a car, and if there's gas in the tank, I can push a button and I'm off. And in the same way, people take consciousness for granted. But if I want to know how a car works, I'm going to probably start by opening up the hood, lifting the hood, and looking inside the engine compartment. And I'll see objects there that I can recognize. There's a radiator, a fan, a battery, and then a big object at the bottom, which must be the engine. Okay, so that's good. But now I need to know more. It's all very well talking about an engine, but how does the engine work? So I would need to go to a garage where they've actually opened up an engine for me. And I can then see the pistons and the cylinders. Very good. But we're still not quite done, actually, in our reductionist approach to the car, because we don't know where the energy comes from. What is actually driving the pistons in the cylinder. And in order to answer that question, we have to go to chemistry and study hydrocarbons and their interactions with oxygen. So with all this information, we can put it together and we can get a very good idea as to how a car works. Now, translating this to consciousness, we start off with the brain. We know that the brain is the seat of human consciousness, because if someone has a knock on the head, they become unconscious. Okay, so far so good. The next step is to look at the brain and see if we can recognize different parts. And that was what was done in the Renaissance. And to A greater extent at the end of the 19th century, when you had some very skilled anatomists doing dissections. And they actually went further because they were able to look at individual nerve cells under the microscope. Okay, well, the physiologists were sort of slow. They were late to start in this game. And their first attempts to understand how the brain worked and therefore how consciousness developed, was to see what happened when different parts of the brain were damaged. Or in the case of animal experiments, what happened if part of a brain was removed. And the neurologists did their part because this was a new branch of medicine developing in the late 1800s. And there was the possibility of linking deficits in speech or movement, for example, to a blood clot or a tumor in a certain part of the brain. So that was really equivalent to looking at the different parts of a car engineering. But as reductionists, we need to go much further than that, of course. We need to know about nerve impulses and neurons. Greg, may I also add something else? May I add a historical note here. The reductionist approach to understanding consciousness, I think really began with, with Rene Descartes in the early 1600s. And Descartes was a very brilliant man, actually. I mean, he invented what is now called Cartesian algebra, but he had a dualist approach to consciousness. He said that there was consciousness, something, some sort of mental agency which was acting on the brain. And how it acted on the brain, he proposed, was that it interacted with the little gland called the pineal gland. Now, as I said, Descartes was a very clever man. He examined the optics of the eye and saw how an image was reflected onto the retina. He was able to understand how the human body produces movements in terms of springs and levers and pulleys and so on. And he really was trying to apply the same sort of approach, breaking the project down, as it were, into pieces. He was trying to apply the same approach to understanding consciousness. And then it's a big thing. The next big event that occurred, I think, was in the late 1800s with Thomas Henry Huxley. Now, listeners will be familiar with that name, I'm quite sure, because Huxley was the champion of Charles Darwin in the debate about evolution. Huxley was a very, very clever man. Actually. He was a self taught physiologist and scientist. He was absolutely brilliant, talking and arguing. There was the famous debate with the Bishop of Oxford over evolution and apes and so on. But anyway, Huxley took up the reductionist issue and he gave a very important lecture in 1874. And this was to the British association for the Advancement of Science. And the title of his lecture was on the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata. And although he said animals, I think that was really a political decision because he was really talking about humans. However, actually was very dismissive of consciousness. And he ended his talk by saying that really, and I'm reading now, the consciousness of brutes, animals would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working, and to be as completely without any powers of modifying that working as the steam whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without inference upon its machinery. Well, that really was devastating. And there's been so much argument, of course, since that time. So I think Huxley was wrong, but we can go into that later on.
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Yeah, that's an extremely thorough introduction. Thank you, Alan. I want to follow up on a few themes you introduced, one in which was or several which were addressed in your article. I particularly found interesting the fact that you argue that neural activity precedes consciousness or conscious awareness in action, memory and attention. How do we think about the traditional notion of free will in light of this finding?
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Well, I think in a way, Greg, you've really gone to the heart of the problem. We believe that we are in charge of our bodies, that we are in charge of our thoughts and our desires, emotions and everything. In other words, the natural philosophy for us is that of dualism, rather like Descartes. But anyway, a very clever experiment was done by a man called Benjamin Libet in ibet, and he was very good neurophysiologist and an American. And what he did was to get a volunteer subject just to carry out a repetitive movement, tapping the hand on the table, for example. And at the same time, Libet was recording EEG activity, electrical activity from the brain as recorded by a silver electrode on the scalp. The way an EEG would be done and the signals from the scalp electrode were fed into a tape recorder and then they could be played back. Now, it was already known from other people's work that if you did this, if you performed a repair, repetitive movement and recorded brain activity, that there was activity, there was a negative potential which built up on the surface of the brain during the movements. Well, Libet's very important modification of the experiment was to actually time the movement and relax to the potential in the brain. And what he showed, this is the really important thing, what he showed was that the electrical activity in the brain, the impulse activity in the brain, actually began before the subject was aware of wanting to make the movement that was extraordinary. So you have brain activity in advance of the actual feeling, the desire. And this was so much against what one might call common sense and what we accept as being normal, that Libet's publication was very much discussed on radio, on television, and in universities and so on. And even now, as many people will not accept that result as will I do. I think you have to follow the science, and the science is very clear. So we don't really have free will. We have the illusion of free will. And that's very important because can you imagine a world in which we human beings did not have consciousness, that we would see things happening, our bodies moving, doing things, but there'd be no sort of reason for doing them, and no sense of agency that we are actually wanting to do these things. I mean, it would be very alarming. So the illusion of free will is something which is very necessary to us. It's necessary for our sanity. And I think one can go a little bit further than that. Consciousness does actually influence our decisions, Even though the consciousness is being generated in the brain. If we're thinking of doing something, perhaps going on a trip or reading a book or having a meal, through consciousness, we have imagery, we have images of places that we might go to, or foods that we might eat. And each of those images will have associated with it a sense of pleasure or the opposite repulsion. And we become aware of that. Again, it's all generated in the brain. But those images, those conscious images, will influence our decision. And the same thing, really, about the internal voice. This is a very important aspect of consciousness. If someone, a friend of mine, says, alan, you must do this, I take notice of it and I will probably do it. And if my internal voice says, alan, you must do this likewise, it reinforces any desire I might have to do something. So brilliant man that he was, I think Thomas Henry Huxley was absolutely wrong to dismiss the importance of consciousness, to liken it to the steam whistle on a locomotive. But on the other hand, he was correct in viewing consciousness as a product of the brain's activity.
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Excellent. I want to dive into the article because you do trace this sort of scientific history of exploring consciousness. Particularly, I want you to ask you about these early thalamic recordings in conscious patients, I think maybe related to Parkinson's, and how that helped reshape our approach to perception and awareness.
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It certainly had a big influence on my attitude towards consciousness. And if I may, I will tell you about the experiments. We're going back quite a long Way in time now to the late 1960s and to the work of a very fine neurosurgeon who was actually based in New York at St. Barnabas Hospital, called Dr. Irving Cooper. Cooper had patients who suffered from Parkinsonism. I think probably most listeners will know of someone with Parkinsonism, or certainly know what it is, is a condition usually of the elderly, in which there is stiffness and an inability to start a movement. And a further problem can be a very severe tremor of the hand. So it becomes very difficult for someone to drink from a cup, for example. And Irving Cooper, the neurosurgeon, had found that if he made a small area of damage, a lesion in a deep structure in the brain called the thalamus, he could at least abolish the tremor. Now, the problem with the thalamus and finding the right part inside the thalamus is that our heads and our brains are of different shapes. They all have the same pieces. But, you know, some people have big heads, some small heads, some long heads, some squat heads, and so on. And even with the best brain atlas, you could never be sure where the target was inside the thalamus, because the thalamus itself was very complicated, with many collections of nerve cells, each with different functions. And if you weren't in the right spot when you made your damaging lesion, you could leave the patient worse off than before. Well, this was long before the days of CT scans and MRI scans. We didn't have the imaging at all, so we relied on the neurophysiology. And I was a young neurophysiologist at that time. And I had a long recording in electrode made, which was inserted into the brain and then driven forward. And when the electrode was advancing, the impulse activity going on inside the brain was being recorded. And I knew from my neurophysiology books and experience, I knew when the electrode was in the right part of the thalamus, so I could locate the target for the neurosurgeon to then make his lesion. And Dr. Irving Cooper, who was very good at doing that, he had a special probe with liquid nitrogen, and he made the lesion by cooling. And it really worked very well. I mean, the patients lost their tremors, and other patients that I did in Newcastle lost their very severe pain, because we would do cancer patients, for example, with intractable pain. And by going to a different part inside the thalamus, we could again define the target. Now, you don't often have the opportunity to record impulses inside a conscious human brain, but this was a Wonderful opportunity. The patients were fully conscious, and I was able to carry out at least to answer a question which had been raised by a very eminent neurophysiologist called Edgar Adrian. Lord Adrian, the winner of the Nobel Prize in 1932. And Adrian had suggested that the brain could act as a sort of filter. It could turn off incoming information if it was not important to the individual at that time. And there were certainly pathways which were already known about going from the cerebral cortex to the different stages in a sensory pathway. In the case of touch, the sensory pathway went through the thalamus. So here was a wonderful opportunity to test out Lord Adrian's idea. And it really was a very good idea. Most people believed that that was probably what happened because all the ingredients were there. So we would ask our patients if they could feel a tap on the hand, for example, and I would repeatedly tap the hand, and then I would ask them to read something or perhaps to do some simple arithmetic, adding two numbers so on, to distract them from what was going on in the hand. And all the time, I was recording impulses, which were ultimately coming from nerve fibers in the hand, traveling up through the spinal cord into the thalamus. And I was very surprised, really, and really disappointed as well, that it didn't matter what the patient was consciously doing, what he or she was thinking of. The sensory information was not being modified at all. It was not being cut off in favor of some other information, for example, from the eyes or the ears. So to me, that was a very important lesson because it showed that even the best ideas are very often wrong, that you can't necessarily predict correctly how something might work just by looking at the parts. It also showed me that it was technically possible to get very good recordings from single nerve cells. And I have to say, Greg, that recording from single nerve cells, to me, is the gold standard of brain investigation. I think it's such a very powerful methodology.
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And, Alan, could you just maybe expand on why it's the gold standard, why it's so powerful? Single neuron recordings?
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Well, you really have to compare it against other investigative types. Now, the one investigation that you read so much about is FMRI functional magnetic resonance. This is okay after a fashion, but you're not measuring impulse activity. You're not even measuring electrical activity. You're measuring a change in hemoglobin saturation in the blood in part of the brain. And the idea is that if that part of the brain is active, it will extract more hemoglobin, and that will be picked up by the MRI machine. Well, you're several steps away from what is really going on in the brain because we're talking about electrical impulses, and you're actually looking at oxygen saturation. The other point is that you're looking at the results for tens of thousands of nerve cells. And those cells will be doing different things. Some of them will be doing something for one part of the body, others for another part. Some of them will be exciting, others inhibiting, and so on. When you get down to single cells, you know exactly what is happening. You know exactly where you are and whether it's being excited the cell, or whether it is not. So so much for functional mri. You see a lot of papers and a lot of articles on TV and radio and books about eeg. EEG is the recording of electrical activity, but it's the recording of electrical activity through electrodes on the scalp. So you're well away from the activity going on inside the brain to begin with. And secondly, you probably need the activities of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of neurons all doing the same together for there to be a wave projected to the scalp that you can actually pick up with your recording electrode. So it's very, very insensitive. And yet you find that, as I say, there are all these papers promising wonderful things to do, all on the basis of the eeg. All right, so I've told you how important I think the ability to record from single nerve cells is, and it is. You know, there are other techniques. They are very, very sensitive devices which can detect magnetic fields. And when a neuron is active, there's a flow of current, and the flow of current sets up a magnetic field around it. And these magnets are so sensitive that they can actually pick that up. But the trouble is, you know, nerve cells are not separated from each other. They're in clusters. There are thousands of them together, and you'll never know what they're doing. All you will get is a sort of average of activity. Okay, so there you are. I rest my case.
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Excellent.
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C
I want to go back to the 1960s, because in the article you identify five widely held assumptions about consciousness. Which of these do you think has been the most difficult for the field to abandon?
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Well, I'll tell you which I think is the most difficult. I'll tell you which I think is the easiest. The most difficult by far is to accept that we really are machines, that we don't really have free will, that it's only an illusion. Even I find it difficult to accept that. But it just has to be true. You have to look at the evidence, and you will find even very prominent people in neurosciences like the late Sir John Ecclesiastical, who, like Rene Descartes, had a dualist philosophy that there was a psychic force of some kind which was acting on the brain. Not true. Not true at all. But that is the most difficult aspect to accept. The easiest one, I think, especially for someone who has a pet, is to accept that animals may also have consciousness. I'm very much aware of this, and I was this morning. Earlier, there was a squirrel that hopped onto the windowsill outside my kitchen window, and it gave me its look and it knew that I had seen it. And if I went away from the kitchen sink, in all likelihood I would be getting to the back door, door opening onto the patio, and I would give it some peanuts, which is exactly what I did. The squirrel had trained me to do that, not the other way around. And dog lovers and cat lovers know that the animals can signal to you exactly what they weren't doing. I mean, a dog will bring a ball to you, telling you that it wants to play. A cat will go to the door and wait there, signaling to you that it wants to go out, and so on. I think the idea of animals being conscious is something which was more readily acceptable, and especially so now that we have all these marvelous nature films of animal behavior in their natural environments. I mean, there are pictures of rats driving miniature electric cars, of octopuses racing to safety by climbing into the shell left by another animal. Monkeys, of course, chimpanzees can solve problems of all kinds, including computer problems. And so it goes on and these wonderful behaviors. I better stop there. I was going to go into the territory as to whether machines could ever become conscious. And I'll stop.
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No, I want to circle back to that. I do want to hit on a few more interesting insights in your article, particularly around concept cells. Why do you see them as a turning point in linking memory mechanisms to consciousness?
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Okay. Well, as I said earlier, the gold standard, I think, in investigating the brain and consciousness and as a function to the brain is to be able to see what individual neurons are doing, whether they're firing impulses or not, and if they are firing how strongly or how weakly, for how long, and so on. Now, in the investigation of consciousness, what you're going to be looking for are some cells whose electrical activity, whose impulse firing is associated with some change in consciousness. And people have searched for these cells, and it so happened that they were found in a different part of the brain that we haven't mentioned so far, which is called the hippocampus. Hippocampus are named because it looks rather like a seahorse. And the recordings were made in human patients, and these were patients who were epileptic. And unfortunately, even with the best chemical treatment, the best drugs that were known, they still had disabling seizures. Well, it's been known for quite a long time that you can reduce the seizures, sometimes stop them altogether, by removing a part of the brain, and that part of the brain is the front of the temporal lobe at the side. Now, removing parts of the brain is not something you undertake lightly because all parts of the brain have some sort of function, and you're not quite sure what the result may be if you remove too much. And also you want to make sure that you're going to remove that part of the temporal lobe which has the seizure focus where the seizures actually arise. Hence, the experimental approach here is to again, use recording electrodes not just on the surface of the brain, but like the mic recordings which I described earlier, using electrodes which were inserted into the substance of the brain and which had small enough recording surfaces that they could detect the activities of individual cells. And this could all be done in patients who were fully conscious. All right, now, the key experiments were done in Los Angeles, and a great deal of credit is due to the neurosurgeon, Dr. Isaac Fried, who had been doing these sorts of recordings for quite a few years. Well, he linked up with a neurophysiologist called Christophe Koch, and also with a young Argentinian called Rodrigo Quiroga. And they were able to sort out the activities of individual nerve cells in the temporal lobe. And in their experiments, they had the subject look at a computer screen, a laptop, and a succession of pictures was shown on the screen. The picture was only there for a second, then there was a blank period, and then there'd be another picture for a second, and so on. And there were cells in the hippocampus which fired impulses when very specific pictures were shown. And one of the earliest examples was that of the Hollywood film actress Jennifer Aniston. It didn't matter what Jennifer Aniston was doing or wearing, how she had her hair, what clothes she was wearing and so on, which direction she was looking at the computer. The cell that was recorded from would fire impulses. It wouldn't fire to other objects, but there were cells which would fire to other objects. For example, to well known buildings like the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower. And it could be very specific that they would only fire to that one building. And then, just to add to the complexity of the situation, it was not just the sight, the ability to see the object, but the ability to hear the name of the object or to see the name of the object written down that would also activate the same nerve cell. So these nerve cells were. They were concerned with the whole issue, not just the appearance, but but also the name of whatever it was, whether it was a building or a car or person. So for the first time, you knew that there were cells whose activity was very closely linked to consciousness. And we had never been in that situation before. And the group in Los Angeles carried on with their experiments and, and did all sorts of clever but obvious things. For example, if you asked the patient to think about something or somebody, then the concept cell for that thing or that person would start firing impulses. When they stopped thinking about it or him, it would stop firing impulses. They also did face morphing experiments. Using a computer program. You can meld Two faces together. I think in their example, they used presidents. Sorry, not Lincoln, Clinton and Nixon. They could make one composite face. And then again with the computer program, you. You can gradually extract one face from this amalgam so that it becomes recognizable. And when they did that, it was only when the face became recognizable that the concept cell was actually firing. So there was a very strong link between cause and effect. Another experiment showing how important the concept cells were in consciousness was to make the image shown on the laptop screen increasingly brief. So instead of being shown for a second, it was just shown for a fraction of a second. And if it's less than a tenth of a second, most people are simply aware that there was something on the screen, but they don't know what it was. If you increase the duration, if you allow the image to linger just a little bit longer, then of course they do recognize the person or the place or the thing. And it's at that point that the concept cell starts firing. So you have this very strong linkage between consciousness or something and activity in a part of the brain. And I really think this was a game changer. And I could go on. I find it very surprising that more attention has not been given to the wonderful papers describing the concept cells and their behaviors.
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C
Fascinating. I wanted to ask you about consciousness and evolution. I know there's some discussion about whether or not it's an emergent property, but you seem to suggest that it did not suddenly appear in the evolutionary process, but rather started small and has reached its greatest complexity to date in humans. Is this correct?
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Yes, that's what I believe. Of course I can't prove it, but by and large it's true of most evolutionary characteristics. There are sort of small changes which then become bigger ones with evolution. Sometimes there's a major change in evolution, but very often, as Darwin noted, it's small changes. Things happen gradually, and I think in evolution it was gradual. There's a real problem, though. I don't think I would have any difficulty convincing you if you weren't already convinced that a dog or a cat or monkey was conscious. The simpler creatures like rats and mice, which are also very clever and can do wonderful things rather than gestive of consciousness. But where do you actually draw the line? Where did consciousness begin? At what level? I mean, there are insects that do incredible things. We all know about the honeybee doing its dance at the hive to indicate to the other bees in which direction they must fly and how far they must fly in order to come to a sweet. All sorts of Nectar. Other insects can do things. Assassin bugs in the jungle can disguise themselves and go fishing for termites in termite mounds. And they really are fishing. They use a dead termite as their bait. Then we have monarch butterflies. They can do the most incredible thing. I mean, they can fly from my garden in Ontario all the way down to a certain forest in Mexico, a distance of many hundreds of miles. How do they do it? If I had to find the same forest, I would. Well, I would use sat nav in the car, but other than that, I would have to use a road atlas and road signs and so on. And everyone would say, well, how clever you were to find it. But there's a monarch butterfly with a tiny little brain which performs this wonderful cognitive feet. So can we say that a creature which to all intents and purposes is very clever must also have some sort of consciousness? And I don't know the answer to that. I really don't know. But I do believe, and it's only a belief, that consciousness did, as it were, start off small and then become stronger with evolution. And if I might just elaborate a little bit, I think the very first consciousness in evolution was the consciousness that I used in my definition right at the start of our talk, the awareness of self. And I might say that that's also the opinion of a very eminent neurologist, philosopher Antonio Damasio, who's written several books about consciousness. He believes that consciousness started when the creature became, as it were, aware of signals coming from its own body, from the heart, the gut, the lungs, and so on. Information fed into the nervous system from receptors in the different tissues. I think an alternative which is every bit as likely is that at some point in early evolution, there was some change in the creature, which was a sort of primitive pleasure. And this is absolutely crucial because this primitive pleasure would be associated with sex, but also with food as well. And for the creature to survive, it obviously had to remember places associated with these pleasures, where it could get food, where it could retreat to safety, and so on. So I think pain, pleasure, and the memory of pain, pleasure may have been the very start of a consciousness. I'm afraid it's a question that we will never have the answer to, and we just won't. We can't.
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C
Okay, I want to move on a little more to how the relationship between consciousness and how we behave. Specifically, could you explain the role of the reticular activating system in enabling automatic behavior without conscious recall?
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B
Well, I'm very glad you mentioned the reticular activating system. Because this is absolutely crucial to consciousness. To be conscious you have to be awake and it's the reticular formation that makes you awake. Now the reticular formation got its name because is a very complex system of nerve cells and fibers and it's one that runs all the way through the nervous system. It's there deep within the brain and it runs all the way down through the hind brain into the spinal cord, right down to the bottom of the spinal cord. And it started off as the nervous system which was concerned with simple process body functions, principally eating, feeding, but it's also concerned with the running of the body, breathing, the heartbeat and so on. So it's absolutely vital. And one of the things it also does is to switch on the brain. And it does this in response to light falling on the eyes. If the reticular formation is not working, then you cannot have consciousness. The reticular activating system makes the nerve cells and all other parts of the nervous system, including the brain, sufficiently alert that we can then have consciousness. It was neglected, the reticular formation was neglected for so many years because no one had any idea what it might do. And its structure was so complex. I think it was Sir Peter Medawar, the immunologist and Nobel Laureate, who said that research is the art of the soluble. You know, if you only have 20 or 30 years for a research career, you want to choose a problem which is likely to give you an answer. So when you were investigating the brain, it was probably advantageous to look at vision or hearing or how you actually produce a movement rather than consciousness. And also the structures in the brain that were associated with these different phenomena were already known. But the reticular formation was sort of accessory. No one paid any attention to it. Now it absolutely is regarded as absolutely vital. Destroy the reticular formation and you've destroyed life. Fascinating.
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C
How did Dr. Z, his experience provide the evidence for the reduction of few that humans are not dualistic beings that were not a marriage of spirit and matter, but rather some form of a complex form of automata.
- [52:59]
B
This really gets to the heart of the present day problem. I think most people would not accept the reductionist view at all. Actually, just to give you some idea of the divergence of viewpoints, I should mention that there are are people who are very well known in the field, very highly regarded, who believe in panpsychism, pan meaning everything and psychism really meaning consciousness. One such person is Professor David Chalmers, an Australian who I think now is in New York. He believes in panpsychism and he once said that there's a sort of element, a property of consciousness associated with protons, that consciousness is really a part of matter. We're really down to atomic structure. And when you get atoms put together, molecules put together, then you get a sort of pooling of consciousness, a strong consciousness. But basically consciousness is a property of matter. Well, there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever for this. And I might say that there's no evidence whatsoever for a more elaborate theory about consciousness, which is being put forward by a very, very clever man who's won a Nobel Prize. This is Sir Roger Penrose. And he believes that consciousness is due to quantum mechanics, due to quantum collapse in very small tubules inside nerve cells. Well, again, there's not a shred of evidence for this. Granted that consciousness is a difficult field to understand. Let's at least make use of the evidence that we do have, like the concept cells. And there is the evidence. We can start to put things together and come up with a plausible scheme.
- [55:24]
C
Okay, I want to move on to a question. You draw a distinction between wakefulness and full consciousness, arguing that memory is what produces a sense of self. Why is that distinction between wakefulness and consciousness so important for the reductionist theory?
- [55:42]
B
Well, I think if you don't know who you are and where you are, you're going to be rather like an automaton. And let me give you an example. You probably do. We all do a certain amount of traveling. Very often we're in an unfamiliar hotel room and we wake up. We open our eyes, and there's a momentary confusion because we don't recognize the furniture in the room and where the windows are and so on. And then our memory catches up, as it were. It reminds us that we did actually make a journey to New York or San Francisco and book a hotel and so on. And we know who we are. It all fits into place. No, we would be in a terrible situation if we didn't have the sense of self. Have I answered your question? Yeah.
- [56:46]
C
No. That, I think, addresses the issue. Follow up here. You acknowledge that we still cannot explain how neural impulses become subjective experience. How does the reductionist approach address this hard problem of consciousness?
- [57:04]
B
Ah, yes, I should have touched on this before. The discussion so far has really been about what has misleadingly been called the easy problem of consciousness. If consciousness is produced in the brain, then in which parts of the brain is it the whole of the brain, or are some parts more important than others? And that is the problem which I believe can be solved and Is being solved largely through such things as the observation of concept cells. However, there is another problem which very correctly has been called the hard problem, and this is how do we get from nerve impulses into what are called qualia, Subjective experience? The redness of a rose, the sound of a musical chord being played on the piano, the touch of a skin. Even if we know how consciousness is produced exactly, which nerve cells are active and when they're active, and what gets them going and so on, there's still that last jump that has to be made to translate the impulse activity into the subjective experience. And I don't think anyone has any clue as to how that might happen. And I rather wonder if we're not dealing with a basic phenomenon of nature that if you have collections of nerve cells and you feed them information and they possess or they acquire certain autonomy of their own, that automatically you have consciousness developing. It's a very tricky one. I think the question is insoluble, and it may not be a question at all, but simply a statement of fact, A biological phenomenon, if you like.
- [59:28]
C
Last question. If we are robots and if we lack free will, how do we assign meaning and dignity to our lives?
- [59:39]
B
We have to keep it separate. I think there's an analogy with the universe. We are preoccupied as humans, with ourselves, with our families, with our house, with our jobs and so on. And we may also be aware of what is going on elsewhere in the world, but we don't really think about our place in the universe. And our place in the universe is very, very, very, very, very small indeed, actually. And it turns out that the universe was created from nothing, A void, matter and antimatter. These are absolutely astonishing concepts, and most of us can't really think about them. They're very disturbing. So no matter how our brains work, we can just put whatever is going on inside them to one side. We can forget about the mechanics and just enjoy life. Let me give you another analogy. I'm an awful pianist, but I really do enjoy playing the piano. And I especially love the music of Chopin. Okay, well, I can enjoy Chopin. I love his music. And I can see perfectly well how the wonderful sounds are produced, Because I have a musical score and there are dots and spaces there, so I know every note that has to be played. And I also have a sort of understanding as to how a piano works, Because I can see a hammer that comes up and strikes a wire and produces a sound. So I know everything about the music. But yet there's such beauty in it. I can't help but enjoy it. And I think that's what we have to do with consciousness. Unless we're philosophers, just forget about how it happens and just make use of it. Enjoy it. Excellent.
- [61:50]
C
I think that's a great place to end the interview. Alan, thank you so much for this conversation and writing such a thought provoking article. I think we all have a better understanding of consciousness to the extent we do understand it. Really appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation.
- [62:06]
B
Well, it's been my pleasure, Greg. I've enjoyed talking to you. Thank you.
- [62:11]
C
Likewise Alan. Thank you.
- [62:18]
E
Sa.