The Assessment of Neuroscience: Brain, Consciousness, and Identity (Part 2)

Consciousness plays a significant, perhaps even total, role in our identity, it seems.[1] This conviction is, at least, what much modern philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience contend. Yet it is not obvious what “consciousness” means. Further, neuroscientific accounts tend to reduce consciousness to the brain. Some popular proposals, which I surveyed in my first installment, present consciousness as a matter of diverse and distributed brain activity, in which only some perceptions rise to the top and achieve “fame in the brain.”

Here I would like to provide some global critiques of how neuroscientists define and research consciousness, before providing a less flawed approach. I will return at the end to the question of identity and the degree to which it can be conflated with consciousness.

A Global Critique of Neuroscientific Approaches to Consciousness

My survey in the previous installment indicates some of the myriad ways in which neuroscientists and philosophers of consciousness consistently speak of the brain, or its parts, as agents. Bennett and Hacker call this the “mereological fallacy,” the fallacy of taking the part for the whole. Against it, they quote Aristotle on the soul: “To say that the soul is angry is as if one were to say that the soul weaves or builds. For it is surely better not to say that the soul pities, learns, or thinks, but that the man does these with his soul.” It is not the brain that is conscious or that senses or that acts; it is the human person.

Neuroscientists have objected to this characterization of their positions. They argue that saying “the brain is conscious” or “the hippocampus remembers” is a figure of speech, a linguistic shorthand that does not in fact give personal agency to the brain.[2] Against this, Bennett and Hacker can find numerous examples of the fallacy that do not seem to be mere figures of speech. Stanislas Dehaene (to pick just one example) states that “consciousness arises in the only physical system that undoubtedly possesses it: the human brain.”[3]

Here materialist neuroscientists want to have it both ways—on the one hand, to claim that material mechanisms are sufficient to explain consciousness and, on the other, to bring some kind of trans-material personhood into the picture only when needed against the accusation of mereology. In fact, materialists who fall prey to mereology are also those who tend to fall prey to the “hard problem of consciousness,” as Chalmers called it. In proposing a purely mechanistic explanation, they cannot make sense of aspects of the human person that seem to transcend the brain. This leads to the “hard problem” of how the “wetware” of the brain’s neurons and tissues relates to the non-material “I” that acts, and knows, and loves.

In general, neuroscientists do not seem to be aware that their attribution of agency to a part (i.e., to the brain, or to one of its parts) is Cartesian at root. In fact, their overall debt to Descartes is profound. Bennett and Hacker argue,

In the second half of the twentieth century, with the rejection of Cartesian dualism, the fundamental logical structures of Cartesian and empiricist explanations of human thought and experience were unaffected. For all that was done was to replace the aethereal non-matter of the mind by the grey glutinous matter of the brain, while leaving all else intact.[4]

To understand this Cartesian view better, it is helpful to contrast it with the Aristotelian soul. The latter’s dual purpose is to give life to the body and to make the entity a certain kind of thing, with the powers that flow from that kind. These powers include bodily powers. Aristotle’s biology, which holds that the soul and body are inseparable until death, entails the impossibility of teasing out agency that belongs to the body alone, separate from its soul. The abilities to digest and to feel anger are due to the powers of the soul, while they are enacted by the body.

Descartes first redefined the soul to be a substance separate from the body with the job of thinking. He then extended “thinking” to include “everything which we are aware of as happening within us, insofar as we have awareness of it. Hence thinking is to be identified here not merely with understanding, willing, imagining, but also with sensory awareness.” The body, thirdly, is purely mechanical, and the soul is not its principle; the activities pertaining to living (such as digestion) happen because of the body’s own powers. So, for Descartes, my bodily part or substance does do things, and does them without my involvement, because I am not my body but only my mind.[5]

Neuroscientists generally accept all three of these points, even if they do not advert to the Cartesian origins: First, such researchers consider qualia or other first-person experiences to be of a completely different order than that of the brain, thereby spawning the “hard problem of consciousness,” namely, how “mind and matter” interact. Further, consciousness is understood to include sensory awareness; indeed, such awareness is almost the entirety of what consciousness studies measure. Lastly, the brain is viewed as the bodily side of the hard problem of consciousness, and neuroscientists believe it functions like a machine. Let us look more closely at each of these.

First, and based on the mereological fallacy, scientists tend to make “the mind” a distinct substance, rather than a way to speak of the intellectual powers of the human person. Here I am not using “substance” in a Cartesian sense but in an Aristotelian one. Primary substances for Aristotle are not a question of being a certain kind of thing (“material” or “immaterial,” as with Descartes) but one of existence. Primary substances exist per se, through themselves (they “subsist”), and not in another, as qualities do. The dog subsists, but his blackness, while real and existing, exists only in the dog and not on their own. You cannot play fetch with “black,” only with a substance that is black.

Neuroscientists tend, however, to substantialize parts, qualities, and functions as existing things (as substances). Bennett and Hacker give the example of logician Gottlob Frege’s picture of an “outer world” of physical things, an “inner world” of mental things, and a “third realm” of propositions. This picture influenced the neuroscientist John Eccles and his proposal of the “liaison brain” that mediates between these different worlds. His proposal is a clear antecedent of the Global Workplace Theory of consciousness. Against this view, Bennett and Hacker state tartly, “There is absolutely no need to succumb to Platonism and conjure new entities into existence and new worlds for them to inhabit.”[6]

Put in Aristotelian terms, “mental entities” such as thoughts and perceptions are not substances; they do not subsist, much less subsist as material realities with a location. In fact, they cannot have a location, not even “in the brain,” pace the great neuroscientist Charles Sherrington, who posited that the “finite mind” has “a ‘where’ and that ‘where’ [is] within the brain.”[7] Likewise, William James proposed that “the ‘Self of selves,’ when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of the collection of . . . peculiar motions in the head or between the head and the throat”!

“Mind,” however, refers to a set of intellectual powers, and these powers are properly spiritual. As Bennett and Hacker put it, if you want to pinpoint the location of a thought, you can only pinpoint the location of the person who is thinking. They appropriate Wittgenstein to say “the mind . . . is not a nothing, but it is not a something either” (i.e., not a substance).[8] Indeed, even physical powers, such as the ability to ride a bike, do not exist in a location that can be pinpointed, although such an ability necessarily entails habits of physical responsiveness that we call muscle memory. Such habits require the muscles, but the habit itself is not located in, say, one’s quadriceps. Abilities are not substances or even parts.

You would be confused by the request to point to your ability to ride a bike, and you could only point to yourself. “Powers are not tangible, space-occupying entities, but attributes of space-occupying entities. . . . (The horsepower of a car is not made of cylinders or of steel),” although the horsepower is due to these structures.[9] All the more so for spiritual powers that produce spiritual products such as ideas. “Where did Archimedes solve the problem of measuring the volume of an irregular figure? According to legend, in his bath (not an inch behind his right eye).”[10] Thoughts are not material realities that compete for space in the brain, shoehorning themselves into a neuron or synapse.

The solution for this illicit substantializing is Aristotle’s hylomorphism, which makes a non-substantial distinction between body and soul, matter and form. Matter only exists as formed, and while you can distinguish between the shape of the seal and its wax, they actually always exist as united. This approach, which refuses to make realities like powers, habits, and thoughts into subsisting things, is derived from the actual harmony that we experience as embodied rational beings. Dennett and Gazzaniga know that their proposals of a disunified brain, with its sensory data duking it out amongst each other for fleeting “fame in the brain,” are counter-intuitive. What they do not advert to is that they are counter-intuitive because we simply exist and experience ourselves as unified persons. When this experiential unity is fractured, it is a sign of a pathology.

The second point concerns the confused extension of “conscious” to mean “awake, aware, perceiving,” and so forth. This is Cartesian in origin and deeply unhelpful definitionally. Helminiak summarizes this confusion within consciousness studies, which engage in “unrelenting attempts to use perceptual modeling to account for the imperceptible (as in Searle), insistent appeal to percepts and images to explain the invisible (as in Dennett, Griffin, Hay, Searle), [and] sustained supposition that the invisible needs explanation although only the palpable is actually deemed real (as in Chalmers, Dennett).”[11]

Indeed, almost all the leading theories of consciousness, including both local recurrence theories and GWT, rely on studies of visual awareness; such studies have achieved impressive results. But arguably what is being examined here is only the neural correlation of visual awareness, that is, whether or not a given visual percept is something we notice or not. Other animals respond similarly, in that their brains also allow only a certain amount of visual data to be brought to awareness. On a Cartesian account, this awareness is an activity of thinking. On a hylomorphic account, this pertains to sensation; it need not be connected to consciousness, given that non-human animals experience it.

Sometimes consciousness is viewed to be found at an even lower neural level than perception. It is sometimes taken to mean simply the opposite of “unconscious,” as one is when asleep, in a coma, or under anesthesia. We have seen that study of the neural correlates of “consciousness” often entails examining the brain activity of people moving from sleep to wakefulness. Bennett and Hacker offer a salutary schema of different kinds of “wakefulness” and their associated pathologies; these include waking from sleep, or being in a coma state.[12] All of these states are perfectly appropriate objects of neuroscientific study, and certainly it is necessary for a person to be awake in order to exercise the human powers that align with consciousness. But studies exploring states of wakefulness are at most preliminary, in that they establish a baseline of healthy functioning of any kind, but they should not be called studies of consciousness in itself. Helminiak writes,

The irony is this: These feats are explicitly concerned to track down an elusive phenomenon lurking "out there" or else hidden deep down "in here"—note the perceptual imagery—yet all the while, but inadvertently and like electromagnetic waves, as it were, this phenomenon [of consciousness] is everywhere actually governing the concern itself. Because of a focus on perception, human consciousness—the implicit, the taken-for-granted, the condition for the possibility of the analyses themselves—eludes attention.[13]

Lastly, consciousness studies reliably present the brain as a machine. This approach makes it easy to transition from the brain-as-machine to real machines, such as computers. If consciousness arises out of a machine, then it can arise out of other machines, such as AI programs.

This mechanistic reduction of consciousness is understandable, in that machines operate in regular and controlled ways, and if our bodies would only do this, they would be so much more penetrable by quantitative analysis. Alas, they do not, for the simple reason that they are not mechanical but biological, that is, living.

Life itself is an immaterial, non-substantial reality, a power of living things that cannot be isolated in a petri dish or reduced to a physical system, any more than a car’s power can be reduced to its cylinders. Horsepower arises out of these cylinders but is not identical to the parts themselves. How much more so does life transcend the material systems that are living, given that it cannot be simply the result of engineering the way horsepower is.

Theories like GWT try to address, to some degree, the mysterious complexity of a living being, but they fail insofar as they are reductionist about what life is. Life enlivens physical systems—or, more properly, the soul does so by giving life—but physical systems themselves are not that life. On their own, without life, without the soul that gives life, our bodies are corpses, not machines.

These critiques do not mean that neuroscience should abandon consciousness studies, but such studies need to be thoroughly reformulated conceptually. Consciousness is not a physical process like digestion, but neither is it a ghostly thing thinly buttering the brain. When scientists assume any of the ideas criticized in this section, they do not advance our understanding of consciousness at all. What neuroscience can do is “to explain how it was possible for [a person] to reason cogently at all (i.e. what neural formulations must be in place to endow a human being with such-and-such intellectual and volitional capacities).” It cannot, however, prove that these neural formulations are equivalent to consciousness or (even worse) to a conscious agent or “I.”[14]

Consciousness Holistically Understood

A helpful aid to coming to a better understanding of consciousness is found in the writings of Bernard Lonergan, SJ.[15] He argues, “The notion [of the ‘subject’] is primitive. It cannot be reached merely by combining other, better known concepts. It can be reached only by directing one's attention to the facts and to understanding them correctly.”[16] Unlike Dennett and Gazzaniga, Lonergan presumes that my ordinary experience of being a unified rational agent occurs because I am such an agent.

For Lonergan, consciousness is found in the rational subject, by means of his acts. These acts include those acts and states that neuroscientists most frequently study, but also ones that they generally neglect, such as conceptualization, judgment, and logical argument. As summarized by Helminiak, the cognitional structures that are distinctively human are “of four different kinds: reflective awareness and attention; inquiry, insight, and formulation; assessment and judgment; and deliberation, decision, and action.”[17] A perceptual experience, such as the omnipresent “seeing red” example in consciousness studies, can be experienced by other animals, maybe even better than humans can. But only a human being can say, “I saw the color red,” or even more: “I judge that this object is red” or “I am capable of reflecting both on the color red and on the fact of my seeing.”[18] Human perception is already cognitive, already the leading edge of understanding.[19]

What is necessary is not that all these experiences and statements must be brought to conscious reflection, but rather that they may be. This latent potency of human consciousness means that we, as inherently conscious subjects, have the capacity to switch our intellectual attention at any moment from focusing on the duck we are thinking about to focusing on our thinking of the duck. “We humans have access to acts of seeing and hearing as such because consciousness is imminent in the acts themselves. Accordingly, we can attend to them; and, regardless of their objects, we can make the subjective experiences themselves the objects of our wonder.”[20] Let us see how.

Lonergan argues that scientific data encapsulates experience as understood through our senses, while the data of experience of ourselves is consciousness.[21] But such inner experience is not like the “qualia” of consciousness studies; the latter are precisely not shared, because they are unshareable. This feature of qualia’s irreducible privacy and particularity leads to the “hard problem” of consciousness, of the incompatibility of private mind and public matter. How can I know you are conscious as I am conscious? In contrast, Lonergan assumes, on the basis of a shared human nature as well as abundant evidence, that his inner experience, which is consciousness, is fundamentally like your inner experience, which is consciousness.

Because of this shared reality, he can call his readers to examine themselves and move from the capacity of knowing themselves to actual self-knowledge. He writes, “I say that all of us are conscious of these activities, for our sensing and feeling, our inquiring and understanding, our formulating and checking, our deliberating and deciding, are not unconscious but conscious.” Consciousness shades all of our activities, because we are conscious subjects in all of them. But, he adds, “I say that so few have any exact knowledge of these operations, for while they are conscious, still that consciousness is not knowledge but only the infrastructure in a potential knowledge that few get around to actuating by adding its appropriate suprastructure.”[22]

Here I am interested in that suprastructure. What is it, if it is not an agential brain managing the chaos of sensory phenomena with post-hoc narratival rationalization?[23] Lonergan argues that consciousness is the raw material of actualized self-knowledge, and such actualization constitutes us as not only objects of our own knowing but also as knowing subjects. “Consciousness is knowledge, not of the objects of acts, but of the acts themselves and their subject.”[24] This subject is I myself, a conscious human being, and not my brain alone, and I am constituted as a subject in and through my consciousness. This constitutive power of consciousness deserves further elaboration.

Consciousness is fundamentally cognitive, as pertaining to the ability to know ourselves. This is a straightforward meaning of consciousness, and it is not wrong, according to Lonergan, but it is too simplistic, because it overlooks the truth that such cognitive acts also constitute us as knowing subjects. “A cognitive act exercises no constitutive effect upon its object; it simply reveals what the object already is . . . Accordingly, if consciousness is [merely] knowledge of an object [here, myself], it can have no constitutive effect upon its object.”[25] If consciousness is only knowing myself as a cognitive object, I am not transformed by that knowing, any more than my knowing a duck transforms the duck in some way.

But consciousness constitutes us as a subject, so it must be more than the knowing of myself as an object.[26] Thus, Lonergan writes, “My position cannot be understood if it is true to say that whatever is known is [only] an object. . . . One and the same act is at once the act of the object and the act of the subject; inasmuch as there is a sensibile actu or an intelligibile actu, an object is known; inasmuch as there is a sensus actu or an intellectus actu, the subject in act and his act are constituted and known.”[27] In this act of knowing, we know both the object known as well as know ourselves as the knowing subject. “The subject in act and his act are constituted and, as well, they are known simultaneously and concomitantly with the knowledge of objects.” Thus, “the object is known as id quod intenditur, the subject is known as is qui intendit, and the act is known both as the intendere of the subject and the intendi that regards the object.”[28]

When we do not advert to this subject-constitution happening in our cognitive acts, we are not actualizing the full cognitive possibilities latent in the data of the experience of consciousness. “It is one thing to wonder about sensible objects: it is quite another to wonder about intellectual wonder itself.”[29] Lonergan provides a method, especially in his book Insight, for pursuing this wonder about wonder. This pursuit relies upon the constant reality of consciousness and attempts to bring it to reflective understanding, judgment, and action.

Lonergan criticizes the neuroscientific reduction of consciousness to perception avant la lettre, when he writes: “If consciousness is conceived as an experience there is a psychological subject, while if consciousness is conceived as the perception of an object there is no psychological subject.”[30] Researchers in consciousness studies do the latter by focusing on perception and then by making the subject of consciousness the brain (the mereological fallacy). Lonergan’s observation sheds light on why they are so prone to posit the mere epiphenomenality of an “I” or a subject, or even its total nonexistence. Namely, by conflating consciousness with awareness of perception or (worse) wakefulness, they have abandoned the cognitive reality of consciousness that makes it precisely consciousness and that therefore allows for a conscious subject.

Lonergan notes, “If without consciousness John has no other psychological unity beyond the unity found in the objects of his knowledge, then by consciousness John is merely manifested as having no psychological unity beyond the unity found in the objects of his knowledge.”[31] This is an exact representation of, e.g., the support given to the Global Workplace Theory of consciousness (developed long after Lonergan wrote these lines). Supported by animal and visual studies, brain scans determine the neural correlates of perception (again, mostly pertaining to vision). Having begun studying the absence of consciousness, the studies conclude that consciousness is no more than what was studied, namely, the unity of perceptions, now proposed to be unified within a brain that magically turns perceptual pandemonium into a (misleadingly) coherent autobiographical narrative.

Against this, Lonergan insists, “Consciousness does not reveal the psychological unity that is known in the field of objects; it constitutes and reveals the basic psychological unity of the subject as subject.”[32] In order to study consciousness, as an experience of a rational subject, neuroscience requires a course correction.

Back to Identity

Let us take stock and return to the question of identity. Neuroscientists writing on “identity,” “the self,” or “the I” tend to reduce it to consciousness, which is then reduced to brain activity. For example, Antonio Damasio states that consciousness raises two problems: “the problem of how the movie-in-the-brain is generated, and the problem of how the brain also generates the sense that there is an owner and observer for that movie.”[33] Here the self is the illusory “owner” of the brain’s “movie.” Further, Blakemore writes, “The ‘I’ in me is the operation of a mind, which is itself the operation of a brain, constructed solely by genes and the environment.”[34] In positing that identity is a kind of self-construction, here a neural one, neuroscientists are thinking in line with the dominant theories of self-construction since early modernity.

In contrast, according to Lonergan’s understanding of subject-constitution by means of our knowing acts, self-consciousness is a power that is constructive; it is not the given (and inexplicable) result of unconscious neural pre-construction. A person is pre-formed primarily by her human nature, which gives her certain powers to form herself further. These powers include the ability to be formed by material and social realities that pre-exist us; we are the kind of being that, as material and social, is formed by such conditions. Our human nature further means that we are conscious beings, and we form ourselves well or badly through our awareness and thinking and also through our judgments and choices. All of these make us to be who we are and so help to construct our identity. The neuroscientific self-constructionists are not simply wrong, but they fail to hold the balance between what is given—which has a priority—and what is formed based upon that givenness. If we were not human, which is a given, we could not construct ourselves at all.

With this correction in place, we can advance fruitfully. Philosophers such as Paul Ricœur, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor have convincingly demonstrated that the crafting of an autobiographical narrative is necessary for historical beings to root themselves in the present and act coherently.[35] Psychologists and neuroscientists have shown that damage to the parts of the brain that are utilized in memory, or other psychopathological conditions that affect memory, can be thoroughly disruptive to healthy functioning.[36]

And yet, in these pathological cases, it cannot be said that a person’s identity simply evaporates because the creation of an autobiographical narrative becomes too difficult. Believing otherwise is a result of conflating the first two meanings of identity—continuity through time and the true self—into the third meaning, self-understanding. An elderly man with dementia is still the same man who served in the Korean War, who married Susan, who loved, thought, prayed, and suffered. His continuity through time is safeguarded metaphysically, not only consciously.[37] It is a continuity that supports not only his mind and memory but also his body, which is part of his hylomorphic “true self,” as a human body-soul unity. Self-consciousness is key to our identity, but who I am cannot be reduced to what I think myself to be.

Our neural functioning, psychological health, and human powers are all contributors to my “true self,” but my identity cannot be flattened to any one of them. I argue, elsewhere, that the central aspect of identity is Identity2, my “true self,” and while all of these factors contribute to it, who I am as an individual is ultimately found in God’s idea of me.[38] This is the saint who God wants me to be. This is the heart of Identity2, my “true self,” and it is not self-constructed, although our pursuit of it does form ourselves for good or ill.[39]

With this more synoptic vision in place, it becomes clear that both neuroscience and philosophy have a real but limited role to play in understanding the phenomenon of identity and the self. Scientists can study the neurological substructures that allow for essential human functioning, in particular for rational activity, while psychologists can probe how these structures are incorporated more broadly in true human flourishing. Philosophers can deepen our understanding of human nature and activities, in particular the reality of self-consciousness. These studies need, however, to be normed by conceptual clarity around the key terms—especially “consciousness”—as well as a richer, hylomorphic anthropology. That strategy would dissolve the “hard problem” of consciousness as well as the conceptual tangles that are downstream of the reigning post-Cartesian psychology. These disciplines would only be strengthened as a result.