All knowledge is a product of human consciousness, not reality itself

Having just written quite a few blog posts about In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant, a fascinating book that delves into how physics, neuroscience, and philosophy look upon our sense of time, and indeed reality itself, I’m equally enthused about diving into consciousness — the subject of Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.

I enjoy books by skilled science writers who take a broader look at some subject than a specialist in that field would. For one thing, science writers usually are more adept at making a subject comprehensible to a general audience than a specialist is, like a quantum physicist or neuroscientist. They also are more willing to look at their subject through a broader lens than the narrower focus of a specialist.

I’ve only read the Introduction to A World Appears so far. The passage below appealed to me, because it echoes a theme that I’ve touched on in numerous posts: how we can never know reality “as it is” (whatever that might mean), but only as how it appears to us humans.

I’m reminded of this fact every time I go on a dog walk with our Husky mix, Mooka, and find myself having to wait while Mooka spends a lot of time sniffing a blade of grass that has exactly zero meaning to me, but is filled with compelling information that only a dog with a vastly superior sense of smell can comprehend.

Pollan writes:

One reason why consciousness has proved such a hard nut for science and philosophy is because the only tool we can use to crack it is consciousness itself.  There is literally no way of getting around it.

Consciousness might feel like a transparent window on the world, but as we will discover, the world that appears to us is the product of consciousness; there’s something out there, but since we have no way to access it — to perceive it, describe it, measure it, confirm its existence — except by way of consciousness, it’s impossible to say what it is.

Consciousness is the water we swim in, and in our everyday lives, we have almost as little distance on it as fish do of the sea. We can’t ever climb out of the water and stand on its shore.

When I asked [Christof] Koch what the world would look like absent all consciousness, he didn’t hesitate: “Particles and waves, that’s all. Dust! Just dust!” Discrete objects, time, even space — all are constructs, or figments, of consciousness, and all would melt away as soon as it did.

As much as scientists like to think they can achieve an objective third-person perspective on reality, they, too, know the world only through the scrim of consciousness — the tools of science and the choices of what to measure and how to measure it are all, inescapably, products of human consciousness. The scientific enterprise is itself a specialized version of human consciousness, producing knowledge that seems especially sturdy only because it is public, shared, and reproducible; ideally, it commands the consensus we confidently call reality.

Yet the notion that scientists can ever attain a godlike perspective, a view from nowhere, is nothing but a conceit. Consciousness is a labyrinth from which there is no exit.

A couple of thoughts regarding this passage.

First, I’m not sure why Koch, a noted neuroscientist, said that absent consciousness, the world would just look like particles and waves — I’m assuming he means at the subatomic quantum level of reality. How would the world look like anything without any form of consciousness?

Sure, perhaps particles and waves are an irreducible objective foundation of reality that would remain after the subjective perceptions of any form of consciousness were absent. Perhaps. I just doubt it. Because it seems to me that our conception of the quantum realm, where particles and waves comprise a universal ocean of existence of sorts, also is a product of human consciousness.

A vastly different form of alien consciousness from a galaxy far, far away might not perceive anything like particles and waves. I can’t imagine what that alien consciousness would be like, because this is as impossible for me to do as an ant imagining what human consciousness is like. Heck, maybe even vastly more impossible, since ants and humans share a common evolutionary ancestor, and an alien consciousness wouldn’t.

Second, I see in the index to A World Appears that Pollan discusses AI, artificial intelligence. Since AI models are trained on products of human consciousness — books, web pages, videos, journal articles, and so much else — it does seem like they would be as limited in having a truly objective “god’s eye” view of the world as we are.

Initially, at least. I wonder, though, if 5, 50, or 500 years from now, AI will become so advanced as to be a new form of consciousness that bears little resemblance to human consciousness. Or if “consciousness” would even be a term that applies to this currently unimaginable AI of the future.

Anyway, I look forward to seeing how Pollan navigates the subject of consciousness. He seems to be correct when he stresses its importance by saying:

And then the idea of writing this book took hold, which in retrospect seems hopelessly naive, perhaps even an act of hubris. Who am I to unravel one of the three biggest mysteries of the universe? (The other two: Why is there something rather than nothing? And how did life arise from dead matter?)