HOUSTON IONS DISCUSSED "THE HARD PROBLEM"

Welcome to this chat.

I am here on behalf of the Houston Group of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. IONS, as we call it, is a research and education center based in Northern California, which employs science and personal experience to examine the mysteries of human consciousness. It was founded by the astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who was an MIT-trained scientist of aeronautics and the sixth man to walk on the moon. In establishing this organization, Mitchell was motivated by his own mystical experience as he viewed the earth against an infinite field of stars when Apollo 14 returned from the moon in 1971. IONS has community groups in cities throughout the world; several members of our Houston group are with us today.]

With us here are several of the actors in this superb production: We are honored to have with us Jessie Hyder, who played Hillary, Connor Flynn (Spike), and Rhett Martinez (Jerry).

We’re aiming for a conversation among all of us, yourselves included, about the philosophical issues at the heart of this play, and the way they animate the characters and their conflicts. I propose first to give a brief sketch of the central issue, what Stoppard calls “the hard problem” of consciousness, and then to turn to the actors to talk about how they see their characters assuming particular perspectives on this issue, how those views might resonate with their behavior. After that, we’ll invite your comments and questions.

Stoppard introduces the phrase “the Hard Problem” in Scene 3. Ursula says this about the Institute: “The Kroll mostly does brains. Matter. But Leo likes minds as the way to go. What he likes, what he really, really likes, is the Hard Problem. Hillary says, “Which hard problem? Ursula responds, “We do brain science. There is only one Hard Problem.” Stoppard doesn’t explicitly define what that is, so let’s take a closer look at the origin of the term. 

Here are words of the biophysicist Francis Crick, whom Spike references in the play. Crick once quipped that mind “is nothing but a pack of neurons.” “You, your joys and your sorrows,” he wrote, “your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” That’s the position we refer to as “materialism,” or by the preferred term these days, “physicalism.” Matter, in that view, causes mind, and by extension there is no other reality than matter as we understand it and what results from its interactions. 

The effort to find correlations between the chemistry and electromagnetic activity in the brain and the thoughts and experiences that we think of as mind began with the rise of the discipline of psychology in the 19th century. Since then, those correlations have been developed, mapped out, more and more fully. Throughout that time, a dominant assumption of brain science has been that these correlations lead inexorably to the conclusions expressed by Francis Crick. That is the position, in this play, represented by Spike, Amal and others at the Kroll Institute.

But that view has not been universal, especially because of what we now call “the Hard Problem of Consciousness.” The term was brought into the scholarly lexicon in the mid-1990s by David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist. The easier problems in brain science, he said, can be answered by now standard procedures, identifying neural or computational mechanisms at play—the links between brain operations and behavior. The hard problem, however, is the problem of our experience: the connection between those physical operations and the vast subjective, conscious world in which each of us live, laden with emotions, joys, despairs, memories, anger, satisfaction, and an infinite array of thoughts, ideas, and imagination. How can it be that these physical operations of the brain give rise to the immensely rich inner lives that ARE our experience? 

Neuroscience, says Chalmers, has not given us anything approaching an adequate answer to that question. We are forced, then, to bring some other element to the equation, something beyond the neural and computational mechanisms. Identifying the physical process can’t tell us whyexperience arises. Chalmers believes that we can answer the why, that is, get beyond function to experience, only by seeing consciousness not as an epiphenomenon, or byproduct, of matter, but rather as something itself fundamental to reality, like mass, energy, space and time.

He makes a distinction between awareness and consciousness. Awareness is a direct result of sensory stimulation, in ways that have convincingly been traced, but consciousness is something different, something beyond, and far more complex than, simple awareness. Brain mechanisms and awareness feed into consciousness; they play a role in our complex world of experience, but they cannot account for the whole of it.

What might be an alternative model of the relationship between brain and mind, an alternative to the materialistic notion that brain causes consciousness? In posing the Hard Problem, Chalmers is essentially reviving an alternative theory that has also been around since the late 19thcentury. It was best expressed by the American psychologist and philosopher William James, in a talk given at Harvard in 1897. The title of that talk is interesting for our purposes, as an indicator of the vast implications of this question: It was called “Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine.” If consciousness is simply produced by chemical and electromagnetic processes, then when the brain dies, its mind can no longer exist; our consciousness cannot survive bodily death.

James conceded that consciousness is a functionof the brain. Even in his time, psychologists had located specific areas and operations of the brain that affect experience and behavior, and he recognized that that process of research would grow steadily: The correlations between brain and mind would seem ever more refined. But that does not mean that brain produces consciousness. Production is only one way of conceiving of its function.

Another way is transmission: The brain might not, or not only, create consciousness, out of nothing; it might transmitit from some pre-existing state, like a prism transmits, and affects, light rays. All those correlations that we trace apply just as well in a transmission model as in a production one. If that is a true, it opens up the possibility, as Chambers would have it, that consciousness is not an byproduct of matter, but rather an irreducible element fundamental to reality. It opens up the possibility of an infinite reality beyond the material world, a reality that we tend to call spiritual.

Think of the analogy of a television: The wires and hardware of the machine in your living room definitely enable and affect the image, but they don’t produce it. Production come from a vast, invisible reality beyond it, of radio waves, social organization, economic structures, production studios, human interactions, ingenuity, imagination, and much more. That transmission concept presents us with the possibility of consciousness independent of matter, and, incidentally, of its survival of bodily death. In any case, it is of course Hillary in this play who most instinctively connects with, and believes in, that spiritual reality, with its issues of goodness, altruism, morality, love, and a sense of the divine.

This is a work of drama, not a philosophical treatise, and Stoppard’s great skill is to put ideas into play in human interactions and dialogue. So let’s turn now to the actors and ask what thoughts you have about the way that these ideas come to play in the actions of the characters.