Mystery of Consciousness Continues to Baffle Me
A look at Anil Seth and Donald Hoffman's approaches
The Dream
In my dream, I saw my cousin, who did not have the best of relationships with his mother (i.e., my aunt).
While dreaming, I told him to make peace with his mother since I thought he never knew when my aunt would pass away.
“Make amends while you are both alive because she is an old woman, and when she is gone, you won’t have a chance to repair the bridges and make peace.”
I woke up with a crystal clear recollection of my dream.
About six hours later, my cousin called to let me know that his mother had passed away a few hours earlier!
I of course shared my dream with him who didn’t show much reaction. He is an atheist and a hard-core materialist. He is the wrong guy to marvel at the coincidence of my dream and the passing away of his mother on the very same day.
I’m not a mushy sentimentalist New Age tree-hugger myself. However, such experiences impact me. I find myself at the edge of a cliff and I don’t know what’s at the bottom.
Seth and Hoffman
Moving on to Anil Seth (Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, UK) and Donald Hoffman (professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the School of Computer Science).
Both of them agree that reality is not what it seems to be. But they approach the issue of consciousness from diametrically opposite directions.
For Anil Seth, consciousness is something that evolution created for our survival. Without consciousness, the world would look like an uncontrolled hallucination. With consciousness, the world looks like a “controlled hallucination” where we can operate safely and survive.
I think we can loosely call Seth a “reductionist” since for him when the brain dies, so does our consciousness.
Hoffman, on the other hand, is much closer to the mystics of the old. For him, consciousness comes first, and the world comes later. When we die, we leave behind the “avatar” that we use in this world to go about our business. But consciousness lives on even if we don’t remember anything about our non-avatar existence. This is similar to when we go under full anesthesia during an operation: we don’t remember anything when we are under anesthesia but we don’t disappear.
For Hoffman, everything we see around us is an interface, covering the mad complexity of reality to make our jobs easier on earth.
For example, when I press the letter keys on my keyword as I’m writing this piece, letters appear on the screen instantaneously. But what’s “actually happening” is every letter is created by voltage modifications in my machine. If my task was to apply the right voltage to create the correct letter, I could never finish anything I wrote. Thus the practical advantage of the keyboard interface.
For Hoffman, what we think we know is nothing more than a similar interface, shielding us against the known and yet unknown complexities of Reality with a capital R.
The theoretical gap between Seth and Hoffman widens at this point.
Einstein is Old News?
Seth has a more pragmatic agenda whereas Hoffman thinks we outlived the usefulness of Einstein’s Space-Time paradigm. He thinks it’s time for a new paradigm of reality that takes Consciousness not as an emergent Space-Time Object but as what creates and explains Space-Time itself. He is not that far off from the Dalai Lama, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, or other spiritual masters of our day.
Seth, ever so humble, says such ontological and cosmological issues are above his “pay grade.” I think his overall goal is to help us live more efficient, productive, and healthy lives by understanding our minds better.
When I see a dream like the one I shared above, I tend to think like Hoffman since such dreams have no positivist or materialist explanations whatsoever.
But such experiences happen once in a great while. And in between two such experiences, I tend to slip back to the camp that believes when the brain dies, “I” die as well.
Am I Going to be Surprised?
Imagine my surprise if, after I die one day, I find out that I still exist as some sort of generic Consciousness with no expiration date!
And if I don’t, that is, if Anil Seth is correct, then I won’t remember that I don’t exist anymore anyway. I’ll be in a full anesthesia mode that will never end. Just like I don’t remember who I was before I was born, I won’t remember who I become after I die as well.
Not being born was perfectly all right for me. I don’t have any evidence to the contrary.
Thus I hope that leaving my body behind will be perfectly all right as well, regardless of whether Seth or Hoffman turns out to be correct about this Consciousness business.