The Mind-Brain Problem, Part II
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If the "materialist presupposition" describes the human brain and its direct biological supports in the human body as the material and only necessary basis for the human mind/consciousness, what is the alternative? There are probably a few. The only one I've encountered which I'd vouch for as fitting a wide-variety of evidence scattered throughout the development of post-enlightenment science and even contemporary research would be that the brain is a splendidly complex limiting / focussing / filtering device, a receiver of sorts. The brain, like a radio or television set, does not produce the phenomenon it seems to hold and present so much as it delicately limits, focusses and filters an underlying matrix, substrata or a deeper underlying pool of consciousness to produce individual experience and consciousness, in a somewhat similar way that a television or radio device tunes to a particular frequency to present what it offers to a perceiver. As they develop their understanding of the world and the reality into which they have been born, young children of course sometimes mistake what's going on with these devices. They think the images and sounds of people, creatures and characters transmitted through them either indicate that these people, creatures and characters are locked within these mechanical devices behind the glass screen or speaker or are being produced by them. They do not understand that the devices are instead the mere conduits of transmissions that are accessible via the tuning / limiting / filtering of the sea of transmissions that bathe us all in their near ubiquity, all of which are otherwise unseen and unheard without our requisite receiving audio-visual communication devices.
Like all analogies, this one is certainly imperfect ("map is not territory") but the radio / television receiver idea helpfully and simply frames this notion about individual consciousness in face of the dominant materialist paradigm in a way to which we can return to resist the pull of that current paradigm in limiting our thinking about at least one other possible explanation for the existence of consciousness. When considering this alternative model, the fact that a wide variety of brain damage and injury reliably interferes with consciousness then is no more "proof" that the brain creates consciousness than destroying a single or few parts of a television set interrupts or destroys its transmission could be seen as "proof" that the images and sounds are originally produced within the television itself. And, if we witnessed the television set sometimes self-organizing in response to injury or deficiency (see "neuroplasticity") to restore the images and sounds formerly or normally produced, our skepticism of the television-solely-produces-its-own-images-and-sounds hypothesis might increase...
What are the further implications of this? Again, are we then simply Liebnitz's monads, limited perception points of a much greater unified consciousness ... or are we irreducible individual consciousnesses experiencing this world/realm/reality via the avatars of our brains and bodies from some other underlying world/realm/reality? Who knows? While fun to think about, that's all even more speculation built upon this alternative paradigm which is itself a product of speculation. But - and here's why I care about it and why I think it has important implications for the development of artificial intelligence - the model itself, believe it or not, is at least somewhat testable, if true or if it approximates truth, and it is not without its highly provocative supporting evidence.
I am fully aware this alternative idea / paradigm will sound completely nuts to some. That's okay. While I won't hide a hope that it is right, I can certainly also admit that it may not be. But, I do think the evidence weighs for an alternative model like this (or related derivations of it) more than it weighs against it. I do find it to be rational and actually quite likely. My cards are on the table. I'll save the "why" I see the scales tipped for it for subsequent posts.
Again, it's fair to ask: what's all this got to do with artificial intelligence? Well, I think getting the model exactly right for how consciousness is produced is a wise foundational prerequisite for playing with the further development of artificial intelligence. In light of the prospect of pairing an unimaginably powerful artificial intelligence with willful self-aware consciousness, the topic of what exactly creates or allows for willful human self-aware consciousness becomes something more consequential than restive navel-gazing or something which can be dismissed as irresolvable mystery. Indeed, the mystery will necessarily be solved if artificial super intelligence is achieved. Certainly, if it is possible to produce a functional replica of the human brain, virtual or otherwise, it could be reliably expected to be coupled with willful self consciousness in the same way that fully functional and "normal" human brains reliably produce evidence of being coupled with willful self consciousness, every time. But, if this alternative model is correct, and the brain is not the exclusive and sole source of the consciousness with which it's coupled, and is rather some sort of limiting/focussing/filtering mechanism, opening a portal into our reality for a somehow pre-existant individual consciousness, then we don't have even the small amount of control we think we do under the materialist paradigm over what is produced/allowed/permitted entrance and what is to be given unimaginable power through our efforts if the materialist paradigm turns out to be completely incorrect or even just flawed or incomplete.
Just how confident are we, then, in the explanatory power of the materialist paradigm in addressing all the available evidence? In fairness, I can see why it's the dominant paradigm and can acknowledge tons of evidence for it. However, there exists some pretty intriguing evidence for both some form of preexistence of consciousness as well as its survivability, at least for the short term, following clinical brain death. Considering the sheer volume of this evidence (it's not yet very much, at least when compared to the evidence for the materialist paradigm), it could be that paying attention to this periphery evidence is an epistemological mistake - it could be that that it all only appears to be anomalous and ultimately could be successfully explained away without any adjustment to the materialist paradigm. But, the quality and even volume of some of the evidence is becoming more difficult to explain away and most epistemologists are now only too familiar with the power of a paradigm, especially a ubiquitous/dominant one, to obscure and hide countervailing evidence and/or prohibit questions that challenge it from even being asked in the first place. Such as it is with the general area of "psi" or paranormal studies - which are so often immediately dismissed out of hand as woo-woo. The vast majority of it no doubt is - but a vanishingly small portion of it seems to hold water scientifically and has long found consistent refuge, even to this day, within the institutional halls of academic and scientific respectability. More in the next installment of this somewhat tangential (but important!) thread...
Part III (in coming weeks): humble beginnings - the alternative model emerges out of 19th century seance, ectoplasm and table rapping