Michael Lockwood

talks to Stephen Jones at Tucson II.

SJ: What I'd like you to do is talk a little bit about the argument you're putting. It seems to me that what you're doing is putting forward an argument along the lines of: Is there a need for a quantum discussion in this question of what produces consciousness. Am I more or less right there?

Michael Lockwood: Well, yes. I wouldn't say that it was central. My philosophical starting point is that the language of physics simply has no room in it for consciousness as it stands. This has to do with several features of consciousness, one of which is qualia: the feels, the sense and so on, what it's like to have a headache or smell a rose or taste a banana. There just doesn't seem to be room in the theory for those sorts of things. Another aspect of it is the unity of consciousness, the fact that the unity of my mind doesn't seem to be arbitrary and a matter of degree in the way that the unity of any physical object is, ultimately. And a third aspect is the aspect of meaning, that's to say that my thoughts, for example, aren't just meaningless sets of brain events, they actually have reference to things beyond themselves. Indeed it seems to me that meaning is ubiquitous in consciousness. I don't think there's any experience we can have which doesn't involve an element of interpretation, conceptualisation or identification, and I imagine that must be true for the very lowliest organism which has consciousness.

Obviously the meaning is going to be of a very basic kind, probably so primitive we don't even have a word for it, but nevertheless I find the notion of consciousness without meaning unintelligable.

But equally it seems to me that the world as described by physics is a meaningless world, once again there just doesn't seem to be room in the framework. So that's one part of it. That's the mystery, what I call the "enigma of sentience". On the other hand, I'm basically optimistic about the whole project of correlating mental states with neurophysiological processes. I don't think I really expect that project to break down. Nor do I think that consciousness is going to be something which somehow exists in parallel with those neurophysiological processes. That doesn't seem to me to make sense either. It seems to me that the logic of the whole project of trying to understand the neurophysiological correlates of consciousness is ultimately going to be that conscious states are physical states, they are firmly embedded in the material world, they are part of the material world.

SJ: Is this the idea of 'supervenience' that I've heard used quite a lot at this conference?

ML: Philosophers use that term a lot. Basically, when they say that mind "supervenes" on the material, what they mean is that you can't have two different mental states, which correspond to the same physical state. And they also mean this in a way that has to do with necessity, that is to say that it's a metaphysical necessity that if anything is in the physical state that I'm in now, then it will be feeling and experiencing just what I'm feeling. And I buy all of that.

But I think that supervenience itself only makes sense ultimately on the basis of an underlying identity. So the moral I draw from what I've just said is, on the one hand, that there's not room in the physical description as it stands for consciousness, but on the other hand, optimism about the project of finding neurophysiological correlates for consciousness. I think that the moral of all that is, yes, conscious states are material states, they are identical with neurophysiological states, but what the existence of consciousness shows is that there's more to matter than meets the physicist's eye. That there's something inadequate about the physical description. Not inadequate simply because it leaves consciousness out, but that the existence of consciousness shows that, in a certain sense, it's systematically incomplete. Ok, does that make sense so far?

SJ: To me there's this whole problem of just what is this extra state or this extension of physics, or that kind of thing, that seems to be one of the major questions that's being bandied around at the moment.
ML: Indeed... Quite.
SJ: So, perhaps you could expand on that a little.

ML: Ok, well, again, part of the story, it seems to me, is that we have to recognise that although we feel that we have a kind of full bodied conception of the physical world. We think we know what we mean when we talk about material objects. I think that that sense that we know what we mean is in large part an illusion. If you look at modern physics, what strikes anybody about it, and, I think, what makes it, in a way, rather off-putting to a lot of people is its incredible abstractness, that it deals basically in mathematical structures. It uses the language of higher mathematics.