“Don’t replace the unknown with the unknowable.”

Cody and Dusty, via Nano Banana

 
“Don’t replace the unknown with the unknowable.”
Losing p. 90

All through history, humans have faced unknowns. Why do we exist? What causes lightning (earthquakes, etc.)? Where did the universe come from? Why was there more matter than antimatter at the Big Bang?* How did inanimate matter give rise to life? Why do good things happen to bad people?

And nearly everyone has answered these questions with some form of “gods” – an answer that ends any further inquiry or insights. 

(The main exception might be the question, What is life? Then lots of very smart people posited vis vitalis, a ”vital force” outside of materialism. This was true even well into the 20th century.)

I bring this up because a smart, thoughtful person insists to me that since materialism doesn't (currently) explain consciousness, we have to move beyond materialism.

No thanks. 

Could they be right? Sure. But history is not kind to those who claim we have to move beyond materialism because we're currently ignorant about something.

History shows that the correct response to the unknown is always: I don't know.

It may always be mysterious

Specific to consciousness, I have to agree with Sam Harris: I don't even know what form a satisfying explanation of consciousness could possibly take. 

When humans faced the question of ”What is life?” we had specific attributes to explain: reproduction, energy production, (locally) countering the second law of thermodynamics. For the longest time, we didn't know how to explain those, so we posited a vital force. Then scientists figured out DNA, the Krebs cycle, proton pumps, membranes, etc., explaining every single attribute of life within a materialist framework.  

We still don't know for sure exactly how life first arose from inanimate matter, but there is no reason to invoke magic; materialism is entirely adequate.

OTOH, I can't imagine an explanation of consciousness that explains its single attribute: How does it feel like something to be a conscious entity. 

I tend to broadly agree with Antonio Damasio's homeostatic hypothesis of why consciousness came about and what purpose it serves. But maybe Integrated Information Theory is right. Or something else.

But none of those theories explain how anything feels, how matter and energy gives rise to subjective experience.

The Hard Problem might just be The Impossible Problem for our feeble minds.

And that is OK.

The universe as god

When faced with this particular unknown, a surprising number of people go to panpsychism – that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. But again, this doesn't explain how consciousness emerges, why anything feels. Panpsychism simply says, ”That's just how our universe is." 

To me, this is even worse than saying ”God did it.” For one, it has just ridiculous implications, like electrons are conscious (and the ultimate, inescapable EA endpoint for all you expected value junkies). 

But more importantly, all the actual evidence shows that consciousness is an emergent property of certain types of systems. As I write in ”When we believe absurdities, we commit atrocities”:

How do we know the brain leads to consciousness? Because we can manipulate conscious, subjective experience by manipulating the structure and chemistry of the brain [not by changing ”fundamental reality”]. Even with our excruciatingly limited understanding of the brain, we can dim consciousness, deepen it, distort it, dement and derange it, depress it, disengage it, dull it, diminish it, and destroy it with relatively small [material] changes.

Fantasies are harmful; Ignorance is OK  

Again, this doesn't explain why having a (certain kind of) brain involves conscious feeling. (This is separate from the question of what purpose consciousness plays once it does arise. Like most everything, that question can be understood in its evolutionary context; see, for example, Walter Veit.) 

We simply don't know how a certain arrangement of matter and energy gives rise to subjective experience. We might never know.   

And that is OK.

Saying that consciousness comes from ”fundamental reality” or god or spirit or quantum mechanics doesn't do any good. It goes against the evidence and doesn't give us any actually useful information.

Positing a modern vis vitalis might makes us feel [sic] less ignorant, but that doesn't make it correct. 

More importantly, panpsychism etc. distracts us from what we do know – consciousness arises from brains** – and keeps us from acting on what we can (or might) know – what kinds of brains are capable of (different kinds of) subjective experience (see postscript). 

We might never know how our universe came into existence, why there is something rather than nothing. We might never know how that universe gives rise to subjective experience.  

And that is OK.

The only thing we can know is that consciousness exists. Even without knowing how or why, this is enough to lead a meaningful life: 

PS / tl;dr
When I mentioned this to Anne, she said, “Maybe we should stop fretting about what consciousness is and instead help those who are conscious and suffering.”

*OK, the antimatter question isn't something we've wondered about for all of human history.   😉

**This isn't to say that consciousness can only arise from biological brains; there is no evidence that consciousness is substrate-dependent.