Is Consciousness Causal?
Why the Brain’s Most Expensive Feature Isn’t Just for Show
Consciousness is a very deep biological phenomenon. Anatomically, it depends upon the cerebral cortex together with the "egg in the middle of the brain," the thalamus. These are biologically ancient structures that are found throughout the Mammalia, and, in a less prominent form, throughout the vertebrates. Consciousness marks two daily states—waking and dreaming—which show very similar scalp EEGs. Of course, we can often remember specific experiences from those two states as having been conscious.
Slow-wave sleep is the LEAST arousable state of the circadian cycle, and it does not give rise to explicit memories, in contrast to waking and dreaming.
The circadian sleep-waking cycle is very ancient in the animal kingdom, and is therefore tied to other biological functions—as you can tell when you miss a night's sleep. Drastically sleep-deprived animals die in a few weeks, perhaps from cumulative stress products in the brain and body.
But many modern philosophers deny that consciousness has a causal function. It kind of exists without participating in the causal dance of the universe.
I think that idea is wrong from a scientific point of view. In science, we have to treat every concept as a variable—something with at least two different values. Atmospheric pressure is always compared to the absence of air pressure in a vacuum bottle, for example. The concept of temperature means nothing without absolute zero on the Kelvin temperature scale.
Conscious experiences also need actual comparisons: sleep versus waking, attended vs. unattended, and "new" versus "automatic" skills. Your ability to read this sentence comes from thousands of conscious moments, going back to your first baby language, followed by thousands of conscious moments learning to read the oddities of English spelling. Those were moments of learning, and learning always requires conscious access.
Once we have learned a complex skill, we no longer have access to those thousands of attentive moments that built the right kind of adaptive plasticity in our brains. Then we can feel the illusion that our conscious learning events were not causal at all in constructing our automatic skills.
When you ride a bicycle, you can't bring to mind all the thousands of brief moments that built that skill. It has become automatic and unconscious, and yet your skillful habits continue to do the same things you learned in a piece-by-piece fashion.
As soon as we approach consciousness as an empirical variable—by comparing our conscious "nows" with conscious "thens" in our past—we suddenly see conscious moments as causal.
Consciousness depends upon the biggest structure in our brains, the cortico-thalamic system, which is also our most expensive adaptation. Expensive adaptations always need to pay for themselves, like the giant horns of the Canadian moose in heat. The conscious brain is big and hungry—to pay for its enormous adaptive potential.
Thus, the idea that consciousness is "real but not causal" is itself an illusion of conscious solipsism. Our philosophical friends might consider the 33,000 scientific articles about consciousness that have built up in the journals in recent decades. These articles treat consciousness as a variable, comparing at least two values: "more conscious" and "less conscious." Our eye movements in reading this sentence seem to be conscious, but actually they are guided mostly by unconscious automatisms. Efficient eye movements are the key to reading skillfully, but you no longer move your eyes voluntarily from word to word. Yet the skill of reading was built upon thousands of such conscious moments.
If we look at consciousness scientifically, the causal role of consciousness simply pops out for us. Deep biological adaptations never evolve without causality.
It comes from the soul.
My conclusion about the role of Consciousness is a major part of the reason humanity or any other life form, exists, which is to reach an understanding of existence. It has occurred to me that once the latter is achieved, then all will be revealed, and there will be nothing else to do.
I suppose that I’ve always considered that there has to be some point to the bother and trials that existence burden any lifeform with, and part of the process of life is to attempt to understand why and how this might be achieved. One way of perhaps accomplishing this end is to attempt an understanding of the mechanism of thought, which also involves a grasp of memory’s operation for which we currently have almost zero agreed explanation.
However, once progress is made towards this end, humanity should be able to run its affairs in a more equitable and satisfactory manner, and would hopefully begin to realise more about the reason why life existed at all. A conjecture along these lines on which I am currently considering, is very roughly and briefly as follows.
I have placed on Substack, as well as other publications, a description of how I consider the brains ability to reach decisions intuitively that will enhance chances of future existence, are based on being able to place the firings of the cognitive neurons in the brain into as near perfect random motion as possible. Once this might be achieved, the individual concerned very often appears to then be able to exist in a more calm and enlightened state, as indicated by many ancient and usually eastern religious beliefs.
However, I read an article some months ago on The last unresolved problem of late Wheeler, an eminent physicist who was unable to describe consciousness in terms of quantum physics, at which he was in his lifetime one of the most competent authorities with his thesis of It from bit. This had bothered him hugely despite his attempts at resolution before he died.
Having read this commentary, it occurred to me that there was a remarkably simple answer, almost embarrassingly so. Very briefly , this is as follows.
The motion of stars and other Stellar masses as observed by humanity out to the limits of the observable universe, will appear to be absolutely random in motion and composition overall out as far as light speed will allow. However, it seems more than just coincidence that the latter is also a duplicate writ small of what is happens in the mind of the random motion of the brain’s cognitive neurons when in this almost trance state of enlightenment and perfect comprehension of existence.
So simple, that it is almost embarrassing to attempt an explanation, but having said said that, such a scenario ties in well with my principal and first interest which is to explain the mechanism behind memory, and rather more complex, and not dissimilar in some ways to Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance. That is rather more complex.