For thousands of years scientists and philosophers have thought about the following question: how can we combine mind and brain – two quite distinct entities? At first, this question might appear meaningless, but trust me: it is a hard one, perhaps one of the biggest problems in science and philosophy today. Although our language is filled with dualistic terminology inherited from Descartes and religion, our science seems to be telling us that everything can be reduced to matter.

 In The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, Caltech neuroscientist, Dr. Koch asks: what are the biophysical and neurophysiological operations that give rise to specific conscious perceptions? How can the brain, a physical system, express subjective states such as emotions? How can neural activity give rise to sensations like pain? What is consciousness?  And now Bernard Korzeniewski in his book offers answers to these probing questions.

A Google search for “Chinese Room Argument” yields over a million hits! That John Searle thought experiment shows up in one way or another in almost all discussions of AI, consciousness, self-consciousness, intent, and the like. Searle tells us that it came to him as he was flying to a conference on artificial intelligence and computers. It goes like this:  

“Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese. “

Searle goes on to say, “The point of the argument is this: if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have.”

Korzeniewski argues in his book that the CRA fails because we should consider the entire system as exhibiting consciousness. The mind/matter distinction is indeed one of the big mysteries in the history of philosophy – one that continues to vex scholars in various disciplines in the arts and sciences.

Korzeniewski’s book goes a long way in offering a theory of mind that will be of interest to both scientists and humanists. As he writes:

The relation of spirit (consciousness, mind) to matter (the external world, the objective reality) is probably the greatest mystery in the history of philosophy. The view known as materialism maintains that matter is primary with respect to consciousness, that it is a result or “by-product” of the functioning of the human brain. … Idealism, on the contrary, maintains that consciousness is the only truly existing being, while the so-called external world (or broadly understood matter) is only a product of consciousness, an area of the psyche isolated in a particular manner. … the mystery of the relation of spirit to matter has not been solved until now . . . In this book I present this question within the perspective of the biological sciences. (154-155)

In fewer than two hundred pages Korzeniewski develops a theory that encompasses physical, biological, and conceptual explanations for the “mysterious” self-awareness that we experience but have such difficulty explaining without ending up in either solipsism or panpsychism. He differentiates three levels of reality: “the physical, the biological, and the psychic level, while renouncing any claims of their absolutization.” The book is divided into ten chapters, each building on the previous:

1.    The Main Idea

2.    The Functioning of a Neuron

3.    Brain Structure and Function

4.    The general Structure of the Neural Network

5.    Instincts, Emotions, Free Will

6.    The Nature of Mental Objects

7.    The Rise and Essence of Self-Consciousness

8.    Artificial Intelligence

9.    The Cognitive Limitations of Humans

10. Conclusion

In these ten chapters Korzeniewski shows how we can get from a simple physical component (neuron) to the self-aware theory-constructing human being and her mind. On the way he provides new insights and discoveries from science and philosophy. One of the lesson here is that we are of the world ad in the world, and that “What we can do is to treat spirit, matter, time, space, the sense of our own “ego” and all other phenomena as equally important concepts that signify by connotation and belong to a conceptual network that constitutes everything we can have access to. This is equivalent to admitting that our knowledge is only relative, and to resigning from any “absolute truth.”

What a trip! From a single neuron to human self-consciousness. This is a book for anyone interested in a new theory of consciousness that does justice to current neurobiology and to humanist concerns about scientism and radical reductionism.

 

© 2012 Bob Lane

 

Bob Lane is an Honorary Research Associate in Philosophy and Literature at Vancouver Island University in British Columbia.