God, Consciousness and Idealism

II - On the hard problem and the inevitability of theism

Winslow Homer, Moonlight (1874)

Bid him remember of this world unstable.
Galahad, Le Morte d’Arthur

In Him we live and move and have our being
Acts 17:28¹

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(This is Part II of a three part essay, read part I here if you missed it, part III will be published Thursday.)

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Many scientists find themselves frustrated or perplexed with David Chalmers’ formulation of the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. Mark Solms commented that when he and Friston first published their paper on the Free Energy Principle (FEP) and consciousness and the reaction did not suggest applause that they had dispensed the hard problem, Friston wrote to Solms that the reason was that for many people the hard problem was to be “revered not solved.”²

The point both make in their initial paper is that the ‘hard problem’ formulates that a causal link needs to be provided which explains how physical properties cause conscious properties, not just that shows that physical properties have conscious properties, which gives no explanation as to why they should. Friston and Solms simply object that a causal description of the processes that involve both already describe both, and so the problem is solved via dual aspect monism, or rather the problem is dissolved because this is essentially a statement that they don’t accept the formulation in the first place. Their claim is that by explaining how feelings are what consciousness is and that feelings have a functional role that relates to the FEP, they have thus explained consciousness as much as needs to be explained.³

They have a point in a way. One problem with Chalmers’ formulation of the hard problem has always been that it has dualism baked into its axioms, and this makes it unsolvable without dualism as a solution. It begins with the premise that there are material things and conscious things and that we have to explain how one makes the other, which by definition excludes the obvious objection that they are just different ways of describing the same thing. Friston and Solms are genuinely within their rights to object that their theory of function does not have to explain how physical things make conscious things since all science is really doing is explaining the thing that both of them are.

But underneath this remains a philosophical problem. Friston and Solms assume dual aspect monism, which argues that mind and matter are simply observational positions of the same underlying substance, but in a way this constitutes a kind of non-position, less of a philosophical solution and more of a wish that the problem would run along out of the way.

And it’s also not entirely good enough when many of the claims of the FEP involve circular definitions about being: existing is simply defined by being a system with a statistical boundary, as if that offers some kind of necessary conception of selfhood. While a philosopher has no bones with statistical abstract tautologies, the entire argument involves a blending of statistical or mathematical terms or concepts with philosophical ones, such that a self-organising system with a Markov blanket can be described as a primal form of “selfhood” or “subjectivity,” as if the words are describing the same thing. If resorting to dual aspect monism means a licence to conflate terms like this then it’s simply a questionable use of a philosophical position to over-extend a mathematical theory’s explanatory scope.

The question for the philosopher then is if reality can contain or is both mind and matter, what way of understanding that unified ground is parsimonious with what we know? In spite of my above criticisms, the appeal to dual aspect monism that Solms and Friston make is in some ways refreshing in theory in that it does not appeal to reductionist’s denials of consciousness itself or does not leave consciousness as an epiphenomenon of material interactions but places it exactly where it should be, as a real and active part of our embodied being rather than an abstraction to be ignored.

But does their argument actually support dual aspect monism, or could it? The problem is that the theory itself still defines consciousness as something emergent in a system of a certain degree of complexity. In spite of the fact that the FEP applies to everything from bacteria to brains, Solms defines consciousness as something formed by certain structures of the brain stem, and emergent only in systems of similar complexity. He doesn’t see it as limited to a biological substrate, in fact he claims at the end of his book that a fully conscious machine can and should be developed, and that when sufficient stages of complexities are reached it will be conscious.

It’s hard not to resort to dualistic language here or to evoke Chalmers. Defining affect as consciousness is circular and doesn’t describe why affect is conscious, given even the substrate is interchangeable from biology to silicon. Biological existence gives us value, but that value is quantitative. Even the ranking of internal competing values such as hunger/fatigue is categorically quantitative, it is only consciousness that facilitates our experience of anything as qualitative. Solms is right that you cannot have an unconscious feeling because feelings are valanced, qualitative and felt, but he’s wrong to simply say that that should be so. If the brain is a system explainable by mathematical and statistical principles of particle interaction then the invoking of consciousness as a just-is leap from the quantitative to the qualitative is unjustified and does require explanation. As frustrating as its dualistic implications may be, Chalmers still has a nagging point.

Then there is the problem that the claim that consciousness and feeling are just the same thing doesn’t stand up to introspection. Consciousness is a field of awareness, I am aware that I am feeling, I am aware that I am seeing. Even if the case is made neurologically that affect arouses mental visual traces, in the sense that all qualia are the result of feeling something about something, with a preconscious representation being aroused in the cortex by affect, ‘consciousness’ would not be synonymous with the feeling that generates it, it would be synonymous with the coming together of both. You may say any conscious representation is impossible unless it is aroused by affect, but that doesn’t make it reducible to affect, even if this was true anyway. Given that other neuroscientists disagree with Solms on the degree to which the brainstem is responsible for consciousness,⁴ and studies show for example recovery from coma is best measured by connectivity in cortical networks,⁵ the whole thing has shaky foundations. His claim that because of subliminal processing we can learn unconsciously is questionable even to me as a non-expert, and there is studied evidence to suggest otherwise.⁶

In a way then it seems to collapse back into a need for a parsimonious philosophical description of what consciousness is from the outset, not just in terms of identification with some property or function but ontologically.

Here, then, we step into more difficult territory and the point at which I am going to hesitatingly invoke theism. Although strangely it’s not actually me who invokes it first but Mark Solms himself in his book outlining his affect theory of consciousness, The Hidden Spring:

The assumption alone — that there was a dawn of consciousness — obliges us to find a physical explanation for it. If there was a dawn, there must have been something prior to consciousness that explains it. The alternative notion — that consciousness preceded life and the universe — doesn’t fit the facts as they appear to be, and moreover it sounds unhelpfully like the idea of God.⁷

Questions of consciousness are always somewhat entangled with the idea of God. If you are attempting to explain some feature of the digestive system, you require nothing other than the assumptions already handed to you by science. If we are to explain consciousness, Solms himself seems to admit that there are unavoidable questions that knock at the door. The terms in these sentences, “dawn of consciousness,” “physical explanation,” “prior to consciousness,” “God,” are reflections of the fact that explanations of consciousness are bound to the nagging question of ontology.

And it may be that we will never untangle the question of consciousness from the idea of God. Indeed, the idea of God is reflected by the extent to which we relate our own consciousness to the universe at large. What Solms reveals here is that his rejection of even the scent of panpsychist explanations is too close to the “unhelpful” idea of God. The only alternative is a “physical explanation.” Solms solution is to attempt to redefine consciousness as affect and claim this dissolves the problem, but as we have already discussed, even if consciousness could be defined as affect, it just doesn’t.

And even panpsychist attempts at an explanation are often clumsy attempts to evoke a kind of pantheism by transferring mental categories like ‘qualia’ onto material categories like ‘atoms’ by a kind of back projection, such that people like Philip Goff or Annaka Seth can claim that electrons have conscious experience, which the latter speculatively says might feel like “the feeling you have when you’ve walked across a carpet and you get an electrical shock.”⁸

There is a legitimate objection from the perspective of neuroscience, which makes Solms and Friston’s ideas a better explanation than claiming atoms already have consciousness: Qualia have content that is affective, informational and contextual. There is no reason for an electron to feel like carpet burn and so the explanation is more nonsensical not less. Consciousness has a property to it that is transcendental, it is a ground for knowing because it is composed fundamentally of content as information and valence.

I share the position with Solms that consciousness can’t be reduced to a state before our own embodied consciousness unless that state contains all of the above things, which panpsychist accounts of consciousness do not. I do not share his view that a prior physical cause conjoined to conscious experience by a waving of dual aspect monism is anything other than a restating of the problem.

To be a conscious being is to exist in a reality that by definition means we must self-reflect and act, this is the basic premise of the FEP, but its statistical grounding gives no reason for why that “subjective” state should actually exist in the form of experience, since consciousness is not just emotion but rather that which knows that it is and is experiencing emotion.

But if informational content and valence are made actual through being, that actuality is a form of participation. In the same way that any self-organising system only exists because its structure participates in a reality that nests it in physical laws, conscious experience itself can only exist within a ground that makes reality intelligible and that brings the value said physically structured system naturally contains into actuality as affective experience.

To suggest that what we call God is the ground of all mental experience is no more of a hand wave than the resort to dual aspect monism. The latter is simply meant to banish philosophy from the conversation, but we must object that if the two are observationally equivalent, the idea of God authorises a reality that contains intelligibility, agency, awareness, coherence, abstract conceptualisation, purpose and morality. Even if we don’t yet invoke God, we must admit the need for a ground of intelligibility, as Plato argues there must be something that gives reality its ability to be known transcendentally in the same way the sun gives objects their ability to be seen by our eyes. That reality is mind, or spirit.

Our mind’s ability to engage in abstract conceptualisation in particular is important here. One of the stupefying and essential features of consciousness is our ability to reflect consciously upon consciousness itself. Plato’s Republic and its famous allegory of the cave were the formulations of a human brain, in Friston’s terms a statistically self-organising system with a Markov blanket acting to reduce its free energy by minimising prediction error. Yet it is conscious experience and its transcendental capacity that allows said brain, system, person, to contemplate consciousness itself and come to the conclusion that the neoplatonists and unending theologians throughout the history of religious thought would come to: that the ground of our ability to comprehend reality is also the end of our desires.

Or to put it more simply, the desires that we have, according to millennia of introspective philosophy but also according to the basic axioms of the theories I have discussed, have no ends in anything finite. Yet conscious reflection itself produces an awareness of that desire in which we come to realise that our needs, urges and impulses must be fleetingly satisfied and frustrated until entropy inevitably outruns us, or that we must seek an end beyond and in all desires. So it is that throughout history the religious have retired to remote monasteries and denied their physical needs, and believers have gone out into the world in acts of self-sacrificing charity, all in the sake of the beatific vision of a God who grounds all desire in his infinite being and asks us to move towards Him in self renouncing love. Are these just errors of self-organising systems failing to pursue their purposes? I do not believe so. So in the third essay I will look more seriously at desire.

1. Paul in Acts 17 is quoting Epimenides of Crete.

2. Solms, The Hidden Spring, 2021

3. Full paper: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10057681/1/Friston_Paper.pdf

4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11164026/

5. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aat7603

6. https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2017/1/nix015/4107416

7. ibid

8. Harris on Alex O’Connor’s Within Reason podcast