Science through the Male Lens, Part 1
“I know I am conscious, it is the only thing I can know”. I paraphrase the assertion heard from a highly respected, genial neuroscientist in 2014. This scientist was and remains a person I hold in high esteem, whose talk on consciousness those years ago, held in a fairly intimate setting, I eagerly looked forward to. But that premise, that starting point for the study of consciousness left me stunned. I think I even raised my hand to proffer the danger of solipsism to first person accounts of consciousness, but it was (kindly) dismissed.
The problem of Cartesian Consciousness
The famous Cartesian edict “I think, therefore I am”, is a statement of privilege, perhaps thoughtful for its time, or over high school cigarettes, but somewhat simplistic and contrived for our day. So when a 21st century scientist of some renown, repeated the assertion a few hundred years later, my “am” was troubled, incredulous, aggrieved and jealous. My “I” could not relate to his. My “I” had never – and would never- know the luxury of certainty in herself. So it was with some relief that I read Herzog et al.’s recent paper challenging first-person accounts of consciousness (as it relates to the starting point of integrated information theory, one of the leading theories of consciousness).
Beyond talk of phis and networks is a very simple, sobering fact: for many people, presumably conscious, their first-hand experience of knowledge of themselves is not self-evident. For large swaths of the human population, there is no such certainty of consciousness, of selfhood, because any such notion has been so consistently challenged that the edges of that self are blurred. In other words, for so many people, their knowledge and experience carries the brutality (and to some degree honesty) of self-doubt. We enter a quandary then, where these people (and they arguably outnumber others), by dint of being unable to afford full, undeniable self-knowledge, must then, by the measures of Cartesian Consciousness, be less conscious than those that do.
Consciousness in Childhood
There is no need to engage in thought experiments to challenge Cartesian consciousness. I will simply call on the reader’s memory of childhood. Can none of us remember stating a feeling, a statement of fact to us, and being dismissed by another, an older sibling, parent or teacher? Some of you may be able to recall episodes from more liminal states of childish consciousness, perhaps before the age of 5, when declarations of selfhood were clearly false (“I’m a doggie!”). One could even (and I believe some philosophers do) argue that the child is not a fully conscious entity. Yet, I ask you to consider some of your memories, perhaps an incident that you knew to be true, that was challenged by another consciousness, and thereby put into question by your very self.
Consciousness in Marginalized Individuals
Objecting to first person accounts of consciousness may not even require empirical experiment. Consider rather a simple field experiment. Observe the following: individuals whose experience of racism, sexism and marginalization are questioned. Freud’s patients were dubbed hysterical, for potentially disclosing sexual abuse. Marginalized, but yet healthy people, with no evidence of psychiatric dysfunction, regularly find their reality questioned, challenged and at times nullified. Patients, often female or black, whose pain, that most intimate of quale, is discounted.
Aren’t we also other people?
The consequence of having our consciousness challenged by another is a smudging of the boundaries of we initially held to be true. More importantly, excluding racism, misogyny and other injustices, should our lines not be blurred by others? It is reasonable to consider the unitary self as molded and decorated with several other selves, which leaves open the possibility that we don’t quite know that we are. We pick up mannerisms and sayings from people via mimicry and social contagion, phenomena that underlie the porous nature of the self, and therefore consciousness. Some more recent work has explored this dialectical nature of the self, acknowledging that we are, we must be, other people too.
Not just false, but dangerous
If I’m venturing into an argument just outside of my scientific expertise, it’s because I see a danger in accounts of Cartesian Consciousness. Consciousness, and neuroscience general, has an appeal to the public, more so than other disciplines and so we must take on a moral responsibility in our research. What happens to a self that is so firmly anchored in itself? Perhaps I misunderstand some of the nuances of first-person accounts of consciousness, to which I heartily invite discussion. But it would seem that adhering to Cartesian notions of selfhood would invite hubris. And there is a danger to hubris. Who can afford hubris? The most powerful among us, the ones surrounded by sycophants perhaps; at the cost of the most powerless among us. Individuals who have suffered unfair assaults on their conscious experience are not allowed to adhere to the same first person accounts of consciousness. Is their consciousness then lesser? It is more likely that a normative account of first person consciousness is false. These questions trip over themselves of course: the talk that left me rattled did so because it challenged my experience of my own self-consciousness, leaving us all in a hall of mirrors and underlining a common criticism of IIT, its lack of falsifiability.
What about learning
Here, I dare to go into the more familiar territory of neuroscience. Observational learning is a key feature of human learning and it’s not limited to periods of early development. Individuals calibrate their assessments to match others’, even when it is less optimal. That calibration of the self can be seen as a form of error-driven learning, which I understand would be a feature of the unfolding argument as it relates to recurrent networks. If you are so you –immutable in that quality- and you know you are you –where does that leave error-driven learning, which we currently think may be a near continuous process between the self and its environment?
In sum, I ask you to consider the Cartesian statement through the lens of something other than a privileged man. Try perhaps to assume the view of the marginalized self mentioned above. In the wise words of Ice Cube, as you go about your day, thinking your thoughts and acting upon them, “chickity check yourself before you wreck yourself”.