Susan Blackmore | Photo @2024

Tony Sobrado: The "hard problem of consciousness" can be thought of in two ways that essentially overlap - why is it that a physical brain gives rise to subjective first-person qualitative experiences, or why is it that some physical things, like brains, are conscious and some physical things, like rocks, are not conscious. The issue is experience. Before we even get to all of that you question the validity of the proposition in the first instance. You have always had an issue with the following statement ‘Consciousness 'arising' from the brain’. Why is that?

Susan Blackmore: Consciousness arising from the brain is fundamental to David Chalmers’ original definition of the hard problem of consciousness. This way of thinking inevitably leads to the mind-body problem and makes it insoluble. It's basically saying - here's this world made of matter and something that's not matter comes out of, arises from, or is generated by a material brain. Thinking that way leads to all the muddles that I think our whole field is in.

You correctly picked out that this is the core principle that that I object to the most. For example, a huge amount of the neuroscience of consciousness and its research has been put into hunting for the neural correlates of consciousness, with the implication seeming to be that consciousness arises from some bits of the brain or from some processes in the brain, and not others, and we have to find which ones they are. I am not surprised that this has completely failed. The research keeps finding fascinating things about the processes involved in perception and decision-making for example. It finds, in ever greater detail, the neural correlates of actions and perceptions and sensations but can never, to my mind, find the neural correlates of something called 'consciousness itself' that ‘arises’ from the brain. That's the main reason why I think that whole way of construing the problem is doomed to failure.

Now I'm not saying that I can solve the problem and when I talk about my own version of illusionism what I’m pointing out is where we are deluded - where we've got it all wrong from the start. That’s why I call it ‘delusionism’. Basically the idea that ‘consciousness arises from the brain’ is a delusion doomed to failure.

Tony Sobrado: Before we move on to other elements let me unpack some of that. So for you it is basically not really a scientific question to start with it's a philosophical question and this is the initial problem with it. For me this is familiar, I was discussing emergence with George Ellis and Paul Davis (emergence is a very loaded topic) and so now this is just another loaded philosophical question. This time, the loaded philosophical question is ‘why is it that there is consciousness arising?’It's just one of those questions that may not be philosophically answerable. For example, ‘why are some things the way they are?’- Well either by necessity or possibility. It’s like asking ‘where do the laws of physics come from?’ so as you say why is it that consciousness arises from the brain? Well in terms of the practice of neuroscience this is already asking the wrong question. Is that how you generally feel about it?

Susan Blackmore: Yes, that’s exactly it.

Tony Sobrado: Ok but then there is Joseph Levine’s explanatory gap which was a precursor to David Chalmers ‘hard problem’, this then may create more problems which may have consequences on identicalism and identity theory. Let me recap and explain. Firstly, the explanatory gap says that if pain is simply brain state X then we need an explanation for why brain state X produces the sensation of pain Y. Others say this is the wrong premise, pain is brain state X - no more no less. That is to say that the sensation of pain Y is identical to brain state X.

But then, as you argue, if consciousness is not something arising from the brain you would expect that you are identicalist - that is that consciousness does not arise from the brain it is the brain; however, you also do not subscribe to identity theory. Therefore if consciousness does not arise from the brain nor is it identical to the brain then what is going on? What is consciousness then?

Susan Blackmore: Let me say a little more about illusionism before I explain what I think about consciousness more broadly. My kind of illusionism is very different from Dennett’s, although greatly inspired by him. The wonderful thing about Dennett’s 1991 book Consciousness Explained was the way he kept exposing all the traps that we fall into. I think he was right about those traps, and yet people keep falling into them again and again. But in the end I don't think his Multiple Drafts Theory does what he thinks it does involving the problem of consciousness. I also disagree with Keith Frankish "eliminative" version of  Illusionism. For me, the important point is to understand the many ways in which we can be deluded about our own minds. That's why I call my version ‘delusionism’.

So what do I replace it with? Way back in 1986, when the modern science of consciousness had barely got going, I gave a conference paper called ‘What is it like to be a mental model?’. My thinking was inspired both by the limited literature then available on consciousness and by my own experiences with meditation, psychedelics, and mystical experiences. But I faced a huge problem. I am not a philosopher and I could not understand what on earth a mental model could be. Also, back then we did not have the science to enable me to take this idea any further. Now we do, which is why I have at last come back to this way of thinking. To understand what I am trying to do we need to go back to the beginning and ask where we went wrong.

Weirdly, as a field of study, we have no common definition of ‘consciousness’. Instead we generally agree that we mean by being conscious is that ‘there is something it is like to be …’ as in Nagel’s famous question ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ This is where I think we went wrong. My suggestion is that there is nothing it is like to be a bat or indeed any physical object at all. There is only something it is like to be the bat’s model of a bat - or the bat’s model of its world.

What are these models I am talking about? Now that we have Predictive Processing Theory think we can at last answer that question. Looking at the brain as a prediction machine, making active inferences about itself and its world provides a potential way forward. In this view, the brain is a complex hierarchical system in which, at each level, groups of neurons are trying to predict what the next input is going to be from the level below. In order to do that they are inferring the causes of that input, or making a guess or prediction about the likely causes of the input. This is what our perceptions are - the brain’s attempts to model the world dynamically as the input shifts and changes. Our experiences are controlled hallucinations. In other words, we experience the world through modelling, or hallucinating, what we think is there. Then those models, or hallucinations, are controlled by the input from the world. Understanding this, we now have an idea of what we mean by a mental model so my current thinking regarding consciousness is this: If you ask ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ it doesn't make sense for the reasons I have just said, but if you ask ‘What it is like to be the bat’s model of a bat?’ - then that makes sense and the answer is this - ‘It is like whatever the model says it’s like’. This is the heart of my idea. If we ask ‘what am I experiencing now?’ we can answer that this brain of mine is making an ever-shifting model of the sun shining on the moving leaves I can currently see out of my window. This is what my brain is doing. From the top down, the brain is processing and predicting what it's going to see next in the light of its own previous models. That’s what experience is, it's active, dynamic models. My suggestion is that for all those models at every level of the system in every living organism doing predictive modelling there is something it is like to be all of those models – whatever it is that those models describe. I guess you could say I’m suggesting something like a panpsychism of models.

There are many advantages to this way of thinking. For example, we might ask ‘why does it seem that I'm conscious of some things and not others?’ Then we can answer that it is because some of those models are connected to, or become part of, my ‘self-model’ and the rest don't. In other words, there is something it is like to be all the models currently going on in this brain but the only ones that I am conscious of are the ones connected to my ‘self-model’. So we have a completely different way of thinking about consciousness. We not only get rid of the idea that consciousness is ‘produced by’ or ‘arises’ or ‘emerges’ from the brain but much else besides. We can get rid of the idea that some brain processes are conscious while others are unconscious; that they can be in or out of consciousness, can enter the ‘global workspace’, or become conscious. They were conscious all along simply by being ever-changing models of a dynamic world. And we no longer need to hunt for the NCCs or ask whether a baby, or octopus, or slug is conscious. Instead we try to find out about the models those creatures are using.

Returning to the bat–bats do not have a complex self-modelor think they have free will and consciousness and all of that stuff, but they do have a body schema so can feel where their wings and feet are as they fly along incredibly fast catching insects. They can model all of that but with no sense that ‘I am a bat flying through the trees’. This is how I think about experience now. It makes sense to ask ‘What is it like to be a mental model?’ in a way that it does not make sense to ask ‘What it's like to be a physical object?’ I love working with this idea, but to what extent this really helps us with the mystery only time will tell.

Tony Sobrado: Before I press on some of the elements regarding experience, let me recap and provide context. So the levels of the interaction between the models in different levels in the brain and what you're consciously aware of at one time and not another obviously has elements of Dennett’s Fame in the Brain which is obviously largely borne out nowadays by neuroscience. I think it's interesting what you said in terms of there's nothing it's like to be a bat, obviously the the famous philosophy paper by Thomas Nagel, but there is something what the model does. Michael Graziano at Princeton has a very similar idea, basically the hardware (the brain) models itself to itself. Our illusion of consciousness so to speak is our brain’s way of understanding itself - obviously this has similar elements to what you're saying.

In terms of models and this framework of the brain as a prediction machine, Andy Clark has similar elements on that and so has Anil Seth. Kevin Mitchell at Trinity College Dublin focuses on the representation of schemes within neural networks and how they latch onto internal and external spaces of the world and how it's reproduced internally. This is all fine and works. Many people would agree with that.

The problem that you noted, and I don't know if you think this is too much of a problem, is you mentioned experience nonetheless. The opposing camp to the names I just mentioned above – notably David Chalmers, Philip Goff, Galen Strawson and the renowned philosophers of physics Tim Maudlin and Barry Loewer -when I speak with them they don't really care about how the self is modelled by the brain because ultimately experience is still there. David Chalmers will say that you still got explain why we have experience. Functionalism won't do it. These representational models of the brain and these prediction machines in neuroscience won’t do it, they just bypass the issue. Joseph Levine, again of the explanatory gap, wants a bridge principle explaining how and why the brain and consciousness occur and coexist – what say you here?

Susan Blackmore: I think you haven't understood what I was saying about modelling. I'm most definitely talking about experience here but what I'm trying to do simply avoids the hard problem. Experience should not be framed in a way that says there is a material external world in which there are physical objects that can either have or not have consciousness i.e. from which consciousness can ‘arise’ or not ‘arise’. Instead we shift to the models themselves and when we ask ‘What is it like to be a mental model?’ we can answer that it's like whatever the model says it is like, so experience becomes the description - that is what experience is.

In my view we don't need to look any further than this. You just mentioned a broad spectrum of work and a lot of researchers. I just want to note Michael Graziano because I agree with him about the relevance of the attention schema to consciousness. Like other creatures, we need an attention schema as well as a body schema but in our case we build great big complicated self-models that describe ourselves, wrongly, as a powerful inner being that has consciousness and free will, and has the power of directing attention. And this illusion shapes what our experience is like at any given time.

However, he and most other people would not take the leap I'm making – that is to say that it is the models themselves that are the subjects of experience. I still don't know whether this leap really works, and I won't be surprised or upset if you completely disagree with me, but I think this idea has a number of real advantages.

First, if we ask, ‘what is it like to be a bat, or a horse, cow, person, or even a robot equipped with an attention schema?’ we can give an answer: it is like whatever the models those creatures are building say it is like. These active models depict a shifting world, with everything changing, attention shifting and the precision weighting going up and down in parts of the modelling machine. That's what experience is like. The brain is constantly guessing at things that it's paying attention to. Right now I am talking to you, my brain is involved in thinking and talking, I am also noticing some trees outside and so on. So the nature of experience is constantly shifting and this brings me right back to one of the things I've said about delusionism.

When we ask ourselves difficult questions about consciousness, especially if we ask ‘Am I conscious now?’ our consciousness changes. In trying to answer this simple question, we pay more attention to what is happening now; we become more mindful, more present in the moment, and then we make the mistake of thinking that consciousness is always like this. It isn’t. It is a mass of different models all going on simultaneously in parallel without a unifying self-model saying ‘I am conscious now’. This is just one way in which we can be deluded. I love William James’s insight that introspection is like ‘turning up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks’. Asking ‘Am I conscious now?’ is like turning the inner light on to try to see the darkness that is our usual distracted, dispersed mind.

Tony Sobrado: I remember when we spoke years ago, you mentioned to me that you really dislike the ‘What it is like’ aspect behind conscious experience and apparent qualia and that’s a good example you make therein terms of ‘Are you conscious right now?’ You said to me previously that no one actually really walks down the street thinking to themselves ‘What is it like to walk down the street,’ you just walk down the street and this is largely true.

Now after walking down said street you can then look back on that experience and think ‘Well I was obviously conscious just then’ but what does that mean? Because as you reflect on the past experience, you are aware of it even though you may not have been thinking to yourself during the direct experience itself ‘I am conscious right now’. So what does this mean? Well it means that essentially that conscious memory is only the function of working memory. Your consciousness of being conscious at the previous time, or thinking what it is like only occurs post fact. Therefore conscious experience and what it is like a cognitive function of memory and this is adhered to by proponents of illusionism like Dennett and Frankish and your reference to Attention Schema Theory echoes this sentiment as well.

I now want to focus on something that you said earlier on and recap. From your perspective if you look at the hard problem of consciousness as traditionally packaged by David Chalmers – ‘Why is it that there's any conscious experience at all?’ in a sense asking ‘What is it that causes this experience?’ And to this your retort is ‘Well I can tell you why there's experience, because experience is essentially elements of a model and so the what it is like aspect of experience is simply what the model dictates it is’. The model and thus experience of a homo sapiens is different than the model and experience of a bat. For you, once you've packaged experience and models together like that you don't need to ask ‘Where does this experience come from?’ or why some things have experience and others do not because the reason we have experience is because of the neurological models themselves and so ultimately we don’t need to address ‘how consciousness ‘arises’ from the ‘brain’.

I am speaking to Karl Friston at UCL about this. He has a similar model when it comes to overall functionalism. For him the Free Energy principle is why we have subjective sensations which are ultimately elements of a functioning brain and so experience is a composite part of a biological mechanism’s survival apparatus. So it is now clear why you have an issue with ‘How consciousness arises from the brain’ and how the hard problem of consciousness thinks about experience in the wrong way to think about it because experience and ‘What it is like’ can be better thought of as the role it plays within models.

I now want to turn in a different direction, perhaps the most complex and difficult one. There is a material and physical world (the brain) that's producing the modelling machinery and so we have experience. Earlier you mentioned elements of idealism and panpsychism. Now idealism goes back to the philosopher Berkeley. It posits that only the mental exists. In the contemporary world idealism is not particularly subscribed to. Not more so because of the physical sciences and the definition of realism. Scientific realism states that elements, properties, things etc. exist even when they're not being observed by the conscious human mind. For example, before our species emerged on our planet, the planet existed before us regardless of our observation. Panpsychism also says that everything is mental but it says something distinct to idealism. It says that primarily everything is mental and that all things - elements, properties, things etc. do exist but they too are conscious. Our tables and chairs are conscious. Idealism flat out denies the existence of the physical and matter – so idealists do not readily have to contend with a combination problem (the physical and the mental) or the problem of emergence.

The combination problem first needs to marry the physical with the mental realm. Some just eliminate the mental as a formal ontological category, eliminativists, illusionists, and to some certain neuroscientists, generally do this. However, if you do believe in both realms you have a combination issue, consciousness being produced by the brain (I appreciate you don’t actually see it like that) but if you are a panpsychist you've got the reverse problem of emergence. Instead of asking ‘How the mental comes out the physical?’ you've now got ‘How the physical comes out of the mental?’ So tell me your thoughts on panpsychism.

Susan Blackmore: My own view could be seen as a kind of panpsychism in the sense that there's something it is like to be all active mental models– that is what experience is. But I don’t really have a good name for it. ‘’Representational panpsychism’ doesn't exactly fit because I'm not including static representations. And because I'm talking about active mental models, this is not bottom-up panpsychism in which everything from subatomic particles to human beings is conscious. As for idealism, I am not saying that absolutely everything is mental because I think there is some kind of underlying structure that explains why we can agree about the world. We can never directly see this structure but only build ever better models of it as some physicists are trying to do.

The problem is why we can do science at all if, as you say, everything is mental so yes, we must ask why the world is the way it is. Why is science possible? When I speak to Deepak Chopra, for example, he says all kinds of wonderful-sounding things based on the idealism of Vedanta but it's not very helpful to me. Bernardo Kastrup says that the world is like it is by making an analogy with ripples on water – there are ripples on the one mind and the ripples come out looking this way. Bernardo’s work is an interesting analogy but a weak one and I am left wondering.

This is why I turn to the questions that physicists like Donald Hoffman are asking. I'm not as familiar with his work as you are but one idea that underlies this thinking is that time and space are not fundamental. This can seem obvious in certain altered states. For example, in deep meditative, psychedelic, or mystical experiences, time and space can simply dissolve. I'm familiar with experiences in which it suddenly becomes obvious that time and space are just another part of the construction or model. Hoffman and a few other physicists are asking whether there is some kind of mathematical structure underlying all of reality that gives rise to what then appears, to us, to be objects moving in time and space? This is all to say that I’d love to know but I don’t have any real answers to why the world is understandable.

Tony Sobrado: I don’t think anyone has a definitive answer to 1. Why the world is? And 2. Why it is understandable? We have covered many overlapping and complex issues from different fields already here. I was fortunate enough to work with Donald Hoffman on the book, The Case Against Reality. So just a comment on Donald Hoffman’s work and how it pertains to the constructs of time and space. Yes, time and space isn't fundamental in Hoffman’s work and linking it to elements of idealism and a panpsychism- that everything is mental - I think what you said earlier, and what most people would agree with, is how then can we can do empirical science? How is it that everyone sees the same table in front of them? There is something external and physical about the world that can be manipulated and intervened on (the latter being a classic dimension of causal interventionist theories in philosophy of science and scientific practice itself) and an extreme example is a plane flying, you actually put your life on this when you think about it.

Now in terms of Hoffman’s work more specifically. It ventures into, and straddles, the domain of realism and anti-realism in philosophy of science. For example, the fact that space-time isn't fundamental is not particularly surprising to many physicists. For example, the noted physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed argues that the paradigm of space-time is on its way out whilst others argue that time doesn’t really exist and so on. Another example is the paradigm of gravity has changed from Newton to Einstein. So when some physicists say that time and space isn't fundamental they're just saying it's a constructed instrument or a representational device but when people specialising in consciousness say time and space is not fundamental they mean it in the non-logical sense. I was speaking to Jacob Barandes of Harvard, a philosopher of quantum mechanics and an incredible mathematician and he said the wave function in quantum mechanics doesn't actually exist ontologically. Of course it doesn't it's just a mathematical construct so when people say time and space isn't fundamental, well yes it's not it's just a construct. Now there are other ways around this like structural realism but that is outside the scope of this discussion.

But this is all to say that when one talks of consciousness either scientifically or philosophically we are drawn into extremely loaded and profound questions such as the nature of reality, the nature of mind, the nature of physics and physicalism, the nature of the laws of physics and what questions are viable and what questions are actually answerable.

So when we talk about consciousness, we have a few options to contend with. You have a combination problem, linking physicalism with the mental - which you have already pushed back on. We can have elements of idealism and panpsychism, we can have property dualism in which both the ontological categories of physicalism and the mental exist and the latter is realised in the physical or somehow caused but it and then you have those that eliminate the mental like the Churchland’s or identicalists that sensation Y is simply brain state X.

Susan Blackmore: When I interviewed the Churchlands for my book Conversations on Consciousness they gave the following analogy: years ago their students could not accept that light simply is electromagnetic waves, but now it seems obvious to us all. In a similar way, we now find it hard to accept that consciousness just is the action of neurons in the brain but in time that will seem obvious too. However, I don’t think that analogy quite works because light is easy to detect. But we cannot detect consciousness. There are researchers even now looking for a C-meter or consciousness-detector but in my opinion that can't be done. All they can do is look for markers of consciousness and this just means looking at behaviours such as what people say and whether they respond to stimuli. This is not getting at what they call ‘consciousness itself’. This is because, in my opinion, that doesn't exist. This is one of the advantages of my way of thinking: we can stop looking for consciousness itself, and we can stop asking whether babies, or elephants, or slugs have consciousness. Instead, we can investigate the mental models those creatures are living by.

Tony Sobrado: Your example of the C meter is a great example of the issues encompassing ‘consciousnesses’ and its definitions and whether it actually exists. The C-meter of consciousness and trying to find consciousness also relates to arguments in realism.  For example, Hilary Putnam’s framework of realism is that realism dictates that it must exist independently of the human mind and can be externally observed. Now if one cannot observe consciousness independently or externally via C-meters this does beg the question of whether consciousness actually exists and I have an essay coming out on this for 3 Quarks Daily.  

So again, what is going on here with experience and ‘consciousnesses’ and the physical brain? And so what is consciousness if it cannot be located? Now what you have said about experience and models and what the Churchlands say about electromagnetism and light and how it pertains to consciousness, or when others mention the role of mental causation, may have some polemic consequences for the issue of emergence. So consciousness or experience does not need to ‘arise’ or emerge form a physical brain it is fully reducible to the physical brain, ontologically, and in more aggressive cases it is the physical brain as a form of an identical theory.

Susan Blackmore: Yes, exactly. Now I am not an expert on emergence but I am definitely not of the opinion that consciousness is an emergent property of brains. For me consciousness is more intrinsic than emergent, consciousness is basically what it is like to be a model and so it does not need to emerge. It’s already right there in what brains are doing.

***

Susan Jane Blackmore is a British writer, lecturer, sceptic, broadcaster, and a visiting professor at the University of Plymouth. Her fields of research include memetics, parapsychology, consciousness, and she is best known for her book The Meme Machine. *** Tony Sobrado is a social scientist and freelance writer focusing on philosophy, science, atheism and current affairs.

***