NCC and the Hard Problem

Here are two claims:

1. That while neuroscientists are getting closer to finding the neural correlates for consciousness (NCC) this will not solve the Hard Problem (s). But:
   
2. That is the fault of the Hard Problem, not the neuroscientists.

And briefly:

3. A way forward.

What are the NCCs?

No one really knows, but they are getting close, for example:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527520.400-firing-on-all-neurons-where-consciousness-comes-from.html?page=1

(And a BIG THANKYOU to David Pearce for bringing the link to my attention!!)

Whether this particular work finds NCCs or not, the fact is that many people are working on it and sooner rather than later they will find them.

What is the Hard Problem?

Essentially it is the statement that even when the NCCs are found, this event in itself will not be able to solve such problems as why or how is it that these physical or electric entities seem to transform themselves into the apparently individually unified consciousnesses we all experience.

So,

1. The discovery of NCCs will not solve the Hard Problem:

I have no idea how the engine in my car works, but I know that it does. In theory, someone could explain to me all the different parts of the engine and how they interact to make the car brrmm. But no matter how intricate my knowledge of my car and its constitutive parts becomes, it will get me nowhere near being able to describe what it is like to drive at 150km /h along a dirt track behind Mt. Macedon. No matter how detailed the description of the constitutive parts of my car, the description will not define 'car' in its broadest experiential sense. I am not going to get into a solipsistic Cartesian argument about who is driving the driver of the car, because I don't need to for the point to stand. Whatever the descriptions of the physical workings of my brain, those descriptions will not in themselves describe, let alone define, what it is to have (or do) consciousness.

But this is not at all meant to belittle the search for NCCs. It is important that we find out. It is perhaps the most we can ever do.

2. It's the Hard Problem's fault anyway.

The Hard Problem and its related mysteries are like a retreating mist. Once an answer is found to a question, the Hard Problem ideologues will always be able to draw back further and merely say the answer does not resolve some deeper issue about what it is like to be the consciousness looking at the answer. This is akin to religion's retreat before science. Whereas hundreds of years ago the religious consensus may have been that there really is a physical heaven with angels actually located in the sky, or that a really existent God physically shook the earth to make earthquakes, as science advances so religion retreats into more and more esoteric explanations of what religion itself stands for. Now, I have even heard it posited by the religious that religious entities are themselves constituent of 'those things that can not be answered'. This is beautiful in its impermeability. That is, whatever science discovers, God is that thing that exists further than science's reach. This position would set religion up forever, since there will always be something beyond what science knows. The problem is it fails the falsifiability criteria, the greatness is that it does so deliberately, it indeed defines itself and will go on defining itself as that which does not contain falsifiability. But it still has a popular pull, in that even if we now know that earthquakes are caused by shifting tectonic plates, the religious can simply claim God makes the plates move. Once science established that the interaction of gravity and the earth's core make tectonic plates move, the religious can simply say that God makes the gravity etc, this can go on forever.

The Hard Problem does the same thing. Firstly, in clumsy hands, it can always descend in to the recursive Cartesian spiral alluded to above. That is, what's inside the head of whatever it is inside the head of .....on and on and on. But that is a little simple these days. Secondly, it can do the same thing in disguise. That is, whatever 'explanation' 'science' attempts at defining or describing consciousness it can merely remove itself from the scene, ducking into another room with a plaintive 'But now where am I?' or, 'But what is the meaning of love?'

This is because the tautology of scientific explanations does not fit into realms which define themselves essentially as being non-tautological. We will never come to a conclusion that consciousness = x in the same way as we might say 1 + 1 = 2 (which is a tautological truth). And we will never come to that conclusion because for some consciousness (as religion mentioned above) will always be defined as 'whatever it is that is not reducible to '= x'.

But this is not the fault of the neuroscientists. As Dennett has said regarding magic, people tend to think there is real magic and then there is trickery. And when you explain to someone the mechanics behind a piece of 'magic', they often simply say that right, now you have explained a piece of trickery and you are no closer to showing the mechanics of 'real' magic. Of course, the rub is there is no such thing as 'real magic', only well delivered trickery. The more you explain, the more the required definition recedes.

In the same way, no matter how detailed the description of NCCs, for many they will never be able to 'explain' consciousness because consciousness (like magic) is always defined as that which eludes explanation.

3. The way forward.

Just as in the car example, perhaps we are expecting too much from the mechanics. If I were to seek to more effectively define my car in its wider social or experiential sense I would immediately need to look not at the engine but at the environment in which the car operates. I drive it mostly on roads. It is a social signifier of my family-style life. It is a pretty smooth ride. For most people, in most situations, the 'definition' of their car has nothing to do with the engine or its parts. The 'car' is embedded in a much more complex series of social nuances. And essentially these definitions have virtually nothing to do with what kind of spark plugs are in the car. I would argue that in nearly every case (except when the car breaks down) the most effective and widely used definition for car is not going to be found in the car's parts themselves, but in this wider net of images and considerations about the car.

The problem is some Hard Problem ideologues wish to still locate the Hard Problem in the singularity of an individual's conscious experience (the car itself), while at the same time denying the neuroscientists (mechanics) the ability to define within those parameters. If you restrict the derivation of meaningful statements about consciousness to the individual experience of that consciousness, it is like you are requiring the mechanic to define car somewhere in the engine while at the same time denying that the meaning of car will be located in the engine. You are asking the mechanic to tell you how the spark plugs made it possible for you pull chicks on Lygon St. The mechanic will probably come up with a whole series of causal relations between the kind of spark plugs and the engine and the style of car, but he will never explain the leap between the car and the friendly smile by recourse to the engine alone.

Perhaps we would find more viable explanations for consciousness by decoupling the idea of consciousness from the individual experience of consciousness.

For more information:

For Dennett see:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOxqM21qBzw

This guy does a lot of interesting stuff at Monash:

http://arts.monash.edu.au/philosophy/staff/jhohwy.php

Ethical circles get tighter

I am going to make three claims:

1. That although people commonly ascribe universality to statements of ethical values in practice there is none, and that the border between those to whom we ascribe ethical value and those to whom we do not is commonly drawn along geographic, economic and racial boundaries, often working in parallel.
   
2. That this boundary is central to modern Western capitalism's ability to exist, and that the evolution into modern capitalism has really been a shifting of ethical boundaries, rather than the elimination of them.
   
3. That ongoing changes in technology have increased the diffusion of ideas and the movement of people between the geographic boundaries and that modern capitalism's response has been to tighten the circle inside which humans who have ethical value are allowed to exist, thus decreasing the area in which ethically valued humans can exist rather than increasing it.
   

1. There is an ethical boundary.
   

   I imagine there's a new factory opening in my suburb. The owners plan to make it succeed by producing shoes at a much lower cost than their competitors. They say they are going to do this by employing child labour. The plan is to ship in thousands of Indonesian children and house them in long prefabricated huts. The children will work six days a week, ten hours a day. They will be paid next to nothing, and what they are paid they will spend on basic needs provided by the company store. In order to prevent any organising by the children the owners will also be importing certain security personnel who will be engaged in bashing and killing anyone who tries to organise the kids.
   

   For some reason the idea of this happening in my suburb is repugnant, but the knowledge that it is indeed happening in huge areas of the earth and affecting hundreds of millions of people does not in any way prevent masses of people in the West from buying Nike, or virtually any other brand of clothing made in Asia you can name. Why? Because for some reason the idea that it is happening in another country, out of sight, over the pond, abrogates the ethical value these children would have were they working in my country.
   

   The borders between the countries simply eradicate the need to respect people's ethical value as humans. Now, people might feel uncomfortable about this, they might claim some mitigating factor, or claim that they are in fact concerned about the children's rights, but in practice they are not. There is absolutely no serious political movement in the West with broad popular support dedicated to eradicating this exploitation. It is thus condoned by our actions in continuing to engage it, via buying the products, and by our inaction via our not doing anything to stop it. This is an example of an ethical border primarily drawn on national lines, but race and economic class are still clearly operating.
   

   I imagine that the government has decided that in order to prevent any further increase in inflation they will be taking over the bank accounts of everyone who earns over 100,000 per annum and then issuing to them on a monthly basis enough money to feed their family and pay the mortgage/rent. The rest will be kept in the bank accounts to prevent these people from flooding the economy with their excess cash and thus risking inflation. Again, this would be repugnant were it to happen to people I know, but when the government takes over the bank accounts of aborigines and does exactly the same thing there is no massive electoral backlash. The plain fact is that because the aborigines are poor, and, well, aborigines, the ethical consideration that would be given in the case of the government planning to take over my accounts simply does not apply with the aborigines. They are in this instance outside the border of ethical consideration. That's why the government lifted the Racial Discrimination Act in order to implement their plans. Again, while this ethical border is based on race; economic and geographical borders are still in play.
   

   
   

   I am sure you could think of many more instances where it would appear that our concern for ethical universality is contradicted by actions. But my point is that it is not a contradiction at all once you realise that these ethical boundaries exist, and are used essentially as a part of the society in which we live. The idea that the ethical considerations are universal is simply false, and once you understand that, it ceases to be contradictory.
   

   
   

   An aside: Another example of how the sense of contradiction can fall away by understanding the context in which the action takes place is with politicians lying. At first when a politician makes two apparently contradicting statement like say, 'We want to decrease greenhouse gasses' and 'We are happy to continue brown coal processing in the LaTrobe Valley / logging in Tasmania' it can give one a certain irksome cognitive dissonance. But once you understand that what the politician is actually doing is trying to stay in power, and will say anything to any electorate to do so, then it is no longer a contradiction to make those two statements at the same time as they both serve the purpose of trying to get out a message that will get votes.
   

   
   

   
   

2. That Western capitalism needs the ethical boundaries to exist, and that its history is one of changing boundaries.
   

   
   

   It is not that the developing world is poor and oppressed and we are rich; it is that the developing world is poor and oppressed because we are rich. The two facts are causally related; it is not just chance.
   

   
   

   One way of looking at the development of the Western world is think of it as a continually increasing circle within which people have ethical value. You could trace the growth of this circle in tandem with the extension of the franchise. If we go back to the birth of the industrial revolution, to say the dark days of England, we can see a picture where the owners of the means of production felt they had no ethical responsibility at all regarding the people who worked in the factories. Now this could be a very complicated historical argument and I'm not going to go there right now, this is just an illustration, you'll get the gist.
   

   At the time, the ethical circle was very tight. That is, the only people with much ethical value were propertied English men. Over time, through a long series of struggles, that circle is widened. Men without property get the vote, new governments are elected, mitigating legislation is enacted and enforced, women get the vote, onwards and onwards more and more people get inside the circle of ethical concern. You could use this perspective equally well in Australian or US history. As capitalism develops the ethical circle grows until nearly everyone within the polity is accorded a certain set of rights, becomes ethically valuable.
   

   
   

   But what is equally important is that this circle necessarily does not include everyone who is touched by capitalism. It is essential that concurrent with the expansion of this circle there is yet another, wider circle outside this circle that contains people who are co-opted into capitalism's growth and are not only not given ethical consideration, but are necessarily and deliberately deprived of ethical value as the system grows. For the inner circle of ethically valuable people create and are created by, the wider expanding circle of people who are continually dragged into capitalism and exploited so that the inner circle may continue to grow. You can see this through the abovementioned prism in the growth of the British Empire. Living standards and the ethical value of humans increases at home because of and at the expense of the subjugated people who are drawn into the capitalist system and have no ethical value because of this. From India to China to Africa, the spread of capitalism is one whereby other forms of living are dismantled (along with their own internal ethical circles of value) and the humans, emotionally, geographically, racially and economically are drawn into capitalism's influence as production workers, servants, whatever.
   

   The very reason I can buy clothes that are so cheap is that the people who make them are poor and have no rights.
   

   So while it is undoubtedly true that capitalism has been, overall, a good thing for the living standards of the ruling West, it is not true to say that therefore capitalism raises living standards. In fact, it is only because we have been able to dislocate and oppress people in other countries that we are able to enjoy a high standard of living in our own.
   

   The national border is central to this. It allows for people, say in Vietnam, who are intricately linked with the economy of my country, to be yet disenfranchised from having any say about how that economic system works. The factory workers of China are ultimately employed by the consumers of the US, their lives are dependent upon political and economic decisions made by the representatives of the voters of the US, yet no one would seriously entertain the idea of allowing these factory workers to vote in US elections. As capital and supply chains move across borders they progressively disenfranchise more and more people from being able to have any power over the system in which they live and work; and it does this necessarily. Sure, the circle of people who have ethical value increases, but so does the circle of people who don't.
   

   (And yes I am aware that in recent years the Chinese have actually been lending money to the US so US people can keep buying stuff to keep Chinese people employed. But again, I'm trying to NOT write a whole bloody book here.)
   

   
   

3. Modern technology has made this impossible to continue, and our response has been to tighten the circle.
   

   
   

   Only a few years ago if you were born in Australia you were assumed to be Australian. No longer. Now thousands of people are born here each year who do not have an automatic expectation of a right to vote, or to access any of the privileges full citizens expect. The children of international students, for example, are not citizens. Likewise the children of people here on sponsored working visas. In fact, the whole visa system that has grown up over the last two decades can be seen as a harking back to a situation where there are people resident in the country who are citizens and have all the rights along with that, and people who are resident in the country but do not. I am reminded even as far back as Roman and Greek society, where it was natural that there be citizens, non-citizens, and slaves. This situation is not unique to Australia. Most nations of the Western world now have large resident populations of people who may themselves expect to live their entire lives in the country (whatever the government says) and not be enfranchised, and the same will be visited upon their children. How come suddenly there are hundreds of thousands of people living in Australia who do not have the rights of full citizens? When did this invention of the differentiation between the rights of a 'full' citizen and some other type of being-in-the-country-but-not-having-rights happen? It happened when people from the developing world started coming to Australia in greater numbers after the opening up of South East Asia and the Sub-continent to capitalist expansion. Cheap airfares, complex communication webs make this possible. Of course we have always imported people upon whom we did not visit the rights of full citizenship, but in recent years the number of people in this situation as increased dramatically.
   

   Put simply, as the space to exploit has expanded to almost encompass the entire world and the borders have started spilling over, we have pulled the circle of ethical value in, and drawn it around the idea of being a 'citizen'.
   

   And wherever it is occurring, whether they be fruit pickers in Mildura, or taxi-driving international students in Melbourne, or refugees in Bankstown, the visa laws are specifically written to restrict these people's ability to engage, to get into the circle. The rules are all about where and when and how much work they can do, which community services they can or cannot access, and obviously they can't vote. They are here, and yet economically and politically they are not here. Of course many of these people may become citizens eventually, but my point is about the very act of drawing this circle of ethical concern in, and I think it is clear that there is a large and growing number of people who won't become citizens anyway.
   

   I can only see this situation expanding in the future, as the inner circle of ethically valuable humans increases it will need ever more humans for the outer circle of exploited people who ultimately support the lifestyles of the inner circle people. Once the geographic limitations of the earth are reached, that outer circle will be increasingly defined by race and economic status. We are already seeing a continuing dismantling of the rights of economically disadvantaged people even in the inner circle countries of the West. The growth in the number of resident non-citizens is largely race and class based (as well as obviously deriving from a geographic difference to begin with). The result is that while the number of Australians who are in the inner circle increases, the number of people living in Australia who are in the outer circle also increases, both in raw number and as a proportion of the society from here on.
   

   It starkly challenges our conception of ethical universality even when we admit that this universality has recently often been nation-based, and the creation of different resident classes is a symptom of this challenge. In a sense, it merely brings home the ethical dissonance that was previously less apparent because the borders between the inner circle and the outer circle were more opaque, the exploited people more distant.
   

How will it end? I've got no idea. But I am certain that in order to keep this expansion of the Western lifestyle we need more and more human and natural resources to exploit, and they are running out.