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The self and consciousnessVilayanur Ramachandran In:- Conservations on Consciousness Oxford University Press Ramachandran sees the self and qualia as intertwined. Without the self, he thinks that there would be nothing that experiences the qualia, and without the experiencing of the qualia there would be nothing to identify as self. Blackmore raises the objection that in altered states such as Zen meditation the self disappears but there is still experience. Ramachandran is in denial on this, claiming it is not possible, although the evidence of many accounts from meditation and other experiences in varied cultures is that this is exactly what happens. The argument here seems to be quite straightforward, it doesn't fit the pet theory, so it can't be true. To justify this difficult position Ramachandran has to defend the now unfashionable view that animals including great apes are not conscious. His exacts views on this are a bit fuzzy. At one point he's prepared to concede a raw background awareness but not a self. In this he appears for a moment to be close to being in line with the modern consensus that animals can be conscious, but with the exception of great apes and perhaps a few other species not self-conscious. But later on this doesn't seem to be what he really thinks, because he says that animals don't really experience pain, although even this comes in two versions of (1.) they don't really experience pain and (2.) they experience it but don't introspect about it, although weirdly this may also not be really experiencing pain. The non-consciousness of animals, which has thankfully become less fashionable in recent years is a necessary position for Ramachandran because his theory of qualia and consciousness is tied to the emergence of self-consciousness, which for Ramachandran only occurs in humans. The non-consciousness at least of mammals, here developed in a rather confused way, has always seemed unlikely, and may possibly be an unwitting inheritance from the Christian dogma that animals do not have souls. The notion appears improbable, given that other mammals have a similar brain architecture and nervous system to humans and their observed behaviour in the face of pain or fear is very similar, which places a heavy burden of evidence on those who claim that for mysterious reasons the response to pain or fear comes from a different source than in humans. For instance, at one point, Ramachandran seems to say that the animal response comes from the spinal cord, so he appears to be saying that the somatosensory cortex is switched off in some mysterious way in non-human mammals. Apart from anything else, like so much of consciousness studies, this discussion is light on actual science. Assertions about the mind, as in this spinal cord claim are thrown around without any reference to the underlying neuroscience. All these assertions about animal non-consciousness are necessary, because for Ramachandran consciousness emerges from the self and only humans have a self. His view of consciousness is that up to a particular point in evolution, at the point where humans emerge, there are just unconscious representations of the external world, but at the human stage comes a meta representation, or a representation of the representations, which is claimed to constitute the self, which in turn constitutes the qualia or subjective experience. The problem with this is that it is yet another version of the all too common proposition in neuroscience that if one video camera is pointed at another or a film is filmed consciousness will emerge. This is really to say that if one copies something one can add something to it without introducing any new physical process. The world would be a very different from what it is if this was true. In this situation, if the first lot of representations are unconscious, a representation of these will simply be a copy, summary or integration of the originals and therefore as true copies equally unconscious, unless a new physical process or property is introduced. This is nowhere suggested in this discussion. An easier approach is to allow animals some qualia, which all the evidence of biology and behaviour suggests that they have, and then accept that the self is part of the contents of consciousness, in that we have the subjective experience (illusory or otherwise) of being a freestanding entity. All that can really be said for Ramachandran's theory is that it one better than the papers where the self is deconstructed into narrative history and the sense of the boundaries and position of the body, and the problem of consciousness is then declared to have been solved. |
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