Imagining the impossible is a cool feature of human minds, but it creates philosophical enigmas

I’m enjoying Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness. My first post about it came after I’d finished the Introduction, also called The Wager. Now I’ve read the first chapter, Sentience. After that comes Feeling, Thought, Self, and The Cave.

While I don’t expect Pollan to clear up the mysteries surrounding consciousness in his book, going along with him on his journey will be enjoyable. He’s got a knack for making complex ideas understandable, and for describing fresh takes on old problems. That’s what I’m going to focus on in this post, a fresh take on the so-called hard problem of consciousness.

Which basically is why there’s “something to be like” a conscious being. There’s something to be like a bat. There’s something to be like a dog. There’s something to be like a person. Meaning, an interior subjective sense that seems distinct from the exterior objective goings-on of the brain: neurons firing, electrical activity, chemical secretions, all that sort of stuff that seems very different in kind from perceptions, thoughts, and emotions.

Figuring out how the brain operates is called the easy problem of consciousness. Not that it is really easy. Just that compared to the hard problem, it appears to be easier. Neuroscientists have made a lot of progress with the easy problem, but hardly any at all with the hard problem.

In 2007 I wrote “Digging into the hard problem of consciousness.” In 2013 I wrote “‘The hard problem of consciousness’ may not exist.” Some of what I said in that post echoes a passage from A World Appears that I’ll share below. Here’s how I put it in the 2013 post:

Some people, though, don’t agree that there even is a hard problem. I’m coming to agree with them. To me “the hard problem” bears a lot of resemblance to the famous question, “why is there something rather than nothing?” This presumes the validity of “rather than nothing.”

Why not solve the problem of why there is something rather than nothing by simply saying, “there is something.” End of story. No one has any experience of a cosmos that doesn’t exist, of absolute nothingness.

Yet philosophers act as if this is a possibility. So, wow!, isn’t it amazing that there is something rather than nothing!!! Let’s ponder why this is so!

Noted philosopher Daniel Dennett doesn’t believe there is a hard problem of consciousness. Here’s what he says in his new book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools of Thinking.

“The Hard Problem, for [David] Chalmers, is the problem of “experience,” what it is like to be conscious, the inexpressible, unanalyzable thusness of being conscious.…Some of us, myself included, think the Hard Problem is a figment of Chalmer’s imagination, but others — surprisingly many — have the conviction that there is or would be a real difference between a conscious person and a perfect zombie and that this is important.”

There is, of course, no evidence that a perfect zombie actually exists, someone who acts exactly like a normal person, yet has no conscious experience.

Again, this reminds me of the “something” rather than “nothing” question. Philosophers imagine that an entity which shows no sign of existing does, then wonder how it can be that what exists isn’t what doesn’t exist.

And here’s the passage from Pollan’s book:

The distinctive human ability to imagine and weigh the most elaborate counterfactuals suggests an intriguing, if indirect, line of attack on the hard problem of consciousness, according to Friston. Or, to be more precise, on what is sometimes called the “meta-problem of consciousness” — the curious fact that philosophers, scientists, and, well, people like me (and you, if you’ve read this far) puzzle over the mystery of consciousness, something that other creatures, even conscious ones, presumably don’t do.

When I asked Friston for his take on Nagel’s famous question (“What is it like to be a bat?”), he suggested, “It’s probably a bit like what it’s like to be you” — a sentient creature — “with one exception: The bat would never worry about what it is like to be a bat.”

“I don’t think the hard problem itself is nearly as interesting as the fact that we have philosophers,” Friston offered, with a sly twinkle. “How do we account for the existence of people who worry about the hard problem?” Clearly, he was enjoying this provocation, but I wasn’t sure how seriously to take it. I took the bait. So, I asked, what did cause philosophers to worry about the hard problem?

The extraordinary capacity of conscious humans to imagine the most improbable counterfactuals, Friston said, including the one about the philosophical zombie. This is the famous thought experiment posed by David Chalmers. If we can conceive of a being indistinguishable from a normal person, with all of a person’s behaviors, gestures, and expressions, but utterly lacking in conscious experience — it’s completely dark in there — then consciousness must be something above and beyond the physical.

“The hard problem of consciousness itself emerges,” Friston explained, “from being able to entertain the counterfactual hypothesis that we might not be conscious.”

Let that sink in for a moment.

Could it really be that simple?

“The ability to imagine the impossible is the great gift of consciousness,” Friston said as our time together neared an end, “but it also leads to all this puzzlement and existential angst.”

I tend to agree. Which isn’t surprising, since in my 2013 post I said something similar: “Philosophers imagine that an entity which shows no sign of existing does, then wonder how it can be that what exists isn’t what doesn’t exist.”

It seems to me that quite a few difficult questions fall into the category of imagining the impossible.

— Why is there something rather than nothing?
— Why do we humans possess consciousness rather than lacking consciousness?
— How is it that God can be omniscient while giving us unpredictable free will?
— How can the soul escape the physical world and return to God?

People worry, even agonize, over questions that only arise because of our ability to imagine the impossible. Or if you prefer a term other than impossible, things that are extremely unlikely to be possible.

Philosophy, spirituality, even science, become much more tractable when we deal with what clearly exists, rather than imagining what clearly doesn’t exist, and then worrying about why we don’t have that nonexistent thing.