Introducing Consciousness: A Graphic Guide

"Yes, it’s part of the Introducing… series that presents various topics in graphic form, a bit like a comic book. What I liked about this one is that it takes a very complex issue and shows that you do not need to be a great philosopher, or have a very deep understanding of the science, to understand why it’s a complex issue and what the fundamental questions we’re dealing with are. And the truth is that with consciousness we’re still at the point of raising the interesting questions, as philosophers have done for the last 2,000 years, rather than at the interesting, complex, answers stage. Despite being highly approachable, this book is a serious piece of work that gives a great overview of past and current thinking about consciousness, especially from the philosophical perspective. Most books or articles will look at the issue of consciousness from a different angle, and I’ve tried to balance that out in my choices. This particular book was written by a professor of philosophy, David Papineau, in conjunction with an illustrator. So it’s mostly about the philosophy of mind, with particular reference to consciousness, and while it mentions science here and there, that’s really not the main focus: where it mentions the science, this is done to describe potential methodologies with which to address the philosophical questions that have been raised. Not necessarily. I’m a scientist, and my own approach to these questions is scientific. But I got interested in consciousness because of the philosophical issues. What is consciousness? How can we possibly understand it? One of the frustrating things for scientists who deal with consciousness is that nowadays we have lots of great methodologies to look at the brain and at complex forms of behaviour. But we still lack a conceptual framework with which we could recognise an answer if it came along. The answer might be all around us: we may just not see it yet. That’s one of the main issues: is there a soul that is separate from the brain or from brain activity? Most scientists nowadays, including me, don’t believe there is. The biggest question in consciousness, what David Chalmers has called the ‘hard problem,’ is how can brain activity, the activity of something physical like neurons, give rise to something that to us is mental, that feels like something? It isn’t just about information processing: ‘Oh here’s the visual input, this is what it means, therefore it should induce this kind of action.’ Computers can do that, but we really don’t ascribe a soul to them. So what is it about brain activity that makes red look specifically like red? Or pain actually hurt – rather than just serving as a signal to say “avoid doing this in the future”? How does brain activity lead to things feeling like something? How does brain activity make us creatures with consciousness, with self-awareness, with a mental life? That’s still a philosophical question, and here’s why: we know a lot more about brain activity than we did several years ago. But say, for example, that I can now associate visual experience with a particular area of the brain, meaning I now know that whatever it is that gives rise to my visual experience happens in a particular location of the brain. How does that help me understand how that that activity leads to red looking like red? It really doesn’t. It just takes the question one step further back. Now I know that activity here leads to that. That still doesn’t tell me why that particular brain activity leads to things feeling or looking a certain away… Well I, personally, won’t! Others might…When I got into this originally, when I started graduate school, I thought: ‘Yes! Here’s an interesting question, give me a few years and I’ll solve it.’ I no longer think that. Science works incrementally; we will know a lot more than we know now by the end of my lifetime – we already know a lot more than we knew when I started graduate school in 2002. But all we know are details, we’re still looking for that conceptual framework – and that would require a revolution in thinking, and there’s no way of knowing when those might occur."