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Sensorimotor consciousnessSensorimotor consciousnessWhy Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell Kevin O’Regan Like many books on consciousness this functions better in demolishing other writers’ pronouncements on consciousness than it does with establishing a plausible theory of its own. O’Regan is relentless in driving home to his audience the failure of neuroscience to uncover a mechanism for consciousness, and the failure of artificial intelligence to construct anything much like a conscious robot. He is also determined not to be deflected by the attempts of both philosophers and scientists to get round the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. He is not convinced by the attempts of Dennett and others to suggest that the qualia of subjective experience do not exist, and he is not prepare to accept attempts to create a fudge between processes correlated with consciousness and the actual cause of consciousness. The author is also interesting in discussing vision and the other senses. He argues quite convincingly that vision is not a photograph but a sampling of the visual environment, and he applies this argument to the other senses, particularly the sense of touch which is rather over emphasised at the expense of other senses. His main theme is that the senses are an interaction with the environment or in some cases a response to changes in the environment. He argues against the orthodoxy that it is the brain that produces experience and consciousness, ascribing it instead to the interaction with and sampling of the environment. Exactly how this works in terms of qualia or conscious experience is less convincing. The author accepts the orthodoxy that the results of, for instance, tactile interaction with the environment, is transmitted to the cortex. Because he quite reasonably does not see anything in neuroscience’s description of brain processes that could cause this to result in consciousness, he looks for another explanation. Like others before him he looks for an explanation in the self or sense of self. The author finds the self in the ability to detect the distinction between an entity such as an organism or a robot and its environment, and also to reason in an adaptive or self-preserving way about itself and its relationship with the environment and other agents in the environment. The author does not manage to conclude a discussion as to how far this would constitute consciousness, but he does not appear to think it is enough by itself, and in fact the task of sensing a boundary between an entity and its environment and monitoring the environment is not in principle alien to the non-conscious machines that abound in modern technology. The author wants to achieve consciousness by putting together the interactions with the environment that are fed to the somatosensory and other areas of the cortex with the self. However, there is no argument in this book as to how signals to the brain that do not produce consciousness and a non-conscious self can be linked together to produce consciousness. This looks like a 0+0 = 1 sum. For the non-conscious self exploration of and interaction with the environment has no need of anything more than the non-conscious signals that other machinery and communication equipment relies on. Even to achieve this theory of consciousness requires an unbalanced view of conscious experience that is hard to justify. Any experiences that do not involve direct physical interaction with the environment are down played. Thinking is effectively excluded from conscious experience. It is described as being the same as the majority of autonomic processes such as breathing and digestion that we are not conscious of. This is clearly untrue given that there is a large element of thought that is conscious. It is suggested that the ‘raw feel’ of physical sensations is never matched by non-sensory consciousness such as thought. This is highly questionable. The thought of a meeting with a lover or an exotic holiday might well create a much more pronounced impression than the interaction with the neighbouring table and chair or the sight of rain falling outside the window. The treatment of emotion, which is given only two pages in this book is similarly unsatisfactory. Here two there is the suggestion that these are not as real as the ‘raw feel’ of physical interaction. Here again the argument looks to be more case by case. The emotion produced by a row with a lover is likely to produce much more intense impact than the mundane surroundings of a room. More seriously the book engages with only an element of emotional processing in terms of the amygdala and then mainly of fear. There is no mention of the more recent research into the reward/punisher evaluation of sensory inputs in the orbitofrontal or the connection of the orbitofrontal and the amygdala to mainly dopamine based reward functions via the basal ganglia. This evaluation and the related reward system looks to require subjective consciousness for its effectiveness, and is much more likely to give a lead to what actually produces consciousness. |
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