BW: What would you highlight as the theory’s practical value?
MG: There are several possible answers to that. One of course is just insight into such an important question, what are we? I mean from a philosophical perspective, one can say it’s the most important question there is. We’re not just looking at what the brain is made out of but what’s that inner essence that experiences. So it’s intrinsically important just to know. I think of it a bit like cosmology.
Whether the universe is expanding or contracting has no practical significance, but we want to know! But there is another, more practical answer, which is perhaps a bit scary. The more we know about those mechanisms, the more we understand them from the point of view of computation and algorithm, the closer we get to building these things. And I think the idea or presumption behind a lot of this scientific work on consciousness is that this is information processing and it can be engineered, it can be duplicated, it can be constructed.
BW: You mean we can create conscious computers?
MG: Yes, exactly. And it’s probably not that far in the future either if you look at the rate of progress, if progress is the word you want … I think some people find it scary and awful and others find it intriguing. I’m not certain what the outcome will be, but I’m quite sure that we’ll build this stuff, we’ll build aware hardware, computers, and so on. I think that’s inevitable. So that’s another consequence.
BW: How does this relate to evolution? Are we more aware as we evolve?
MG: We spent quite a bit of time sorting through the literature and trying to understand that. What I suspect, and there’s a lot of speculation here, is that if we’re right, if we attribute awareness to ourselves and other things, and if we do this because it’s useful to monitor the brain’s processing, this probably evolved fairly early.
Possibly, animals first applied this model to themselves, then growing in social sophistication, began to attribute awareness to other animals around them. We suspect that this is a long evolutionary process of hundreds of million of years, that most animals have some element of being aware of themselves and other things around them.
Humans may have particularly sophisticated mechanisms. But I’m not sure that as the brain becomes more complicated it becomes more aware. Let’s think of it this way — the visual system processes colors. But I don’t think that the more complicated the brain gets, the brighter the red gets.
I think of awareness in that way. I could imagine that the way we use awareness can become more and more complicated and sophisticated, but awareness itself remains the same kind of thing.
BW: So animals are aware, but can they ask themselves something like “Who am I?”
MG: Of course, nonhuman animals don’t have language so they wouldn’t literally ask themselves that. But some animals probably think that thought. You can be aware of a large range of information. You can be aware of sensory signals, like touch and color, or aware of internal signals like emotions and thoughts, you can be aware of yourself in space and time, these are all just examples of being aware of some of the information processed in the brain. The question that’s most interesting to me is, how does a brain get to be aware of anything at all, whether aware of oneself or of something else? That’s the heart of the question. Once you understand what awareness itself is, then it’s not really much of a stretch to extend that to awareness of any information. Self-awareness is really the same as any other kind of awareness.
BW: Based on this theory, who are we?
MG: The very rationalist, scientific answer would be that we’re biological machines, very very complicated ones. And when we think of ourselves as aware of stuff, as having inner experience — very much like we think of objects as having colors, like an apple is red — that’s just our construct. An apple has a complicated mixture of wavelengths bouncing off it and the brain assigns a simplified construct of redness to that apple. So when we think of ourselves as aware of ourselves, in a sense that’s not really true, that’s again just a construct. It’s sort of the brain’s way of understanding what it means for a brain to process information.
Before Copernicus we were the center of the universe, and now we’re just a speck floating around, and we’re inconsequential in the larger universe. That’s a little bit humbling I suppose. And this theory of awareness and other similar approaches require a similar disconcerting change of perspective. It’s not that we have this magic spirit inside of us, but that we are machines that compute these useful constructs, and awareness is one of them.
BW: You write novels and compose music, how is this compatible with your purely rationalistic approach to your work?
MG: I think this theory of consciousness is a rationalist theory, but on the other hand, you know, science is always embedded in a social context. You can’t just do it, you have to communicate it. And it does no good to merely describe what you think you have, but you have to resonate with people, you need to be able to tell stories. Half of science is being able to tell a story.
One of the things that intrigues me most in this work on consciousness is not just coming up with a theory of what it is, but how that interacts with who we are, and with how people think of themselves. I think sticking solely to the mechanistic and rational is a bit limiting. The scientific theory — which is always going to be mechanistic and rational — has enormous power, explanatory power, but what we make of it is a much more philosophical and emotional proposition. Ultimately, I see a lot of similarity between music, writing, and science. There is a certain art to all of them.
This article was originally published in the Winter 2015 issue of Brain World Magazine.
Related Articles
- Before You Know It: An Interview with Dr. John Bargh
- Ecological and Emotional Intelligence: A Q&A with Daniel Goleman
- Recognizing Multiple Intelligences: An Interview with Dr. Howard Gardner
- Speed-Dating: How the Brain Thin-Slices a Face
- Total Recall: Marilu Henner Can’t Forget (Even If She Wanted To)
- What is Face Blindness?
