What are the mechanics of consciousness and subjectivity?

My latest column for Meridian Magazine has appeared: “What Is FAIR? Inside the 2025 Conference on Latter-day Saint Apologetics”  I hope that you can make it for all or part of the meetings, whether virtually or in person.  Invite friends!  Bring relatives!  A fun time will be had by all.  (Up until the final speaker, anyway.)

I posted a passing comment here a few days ago in which, as I’ve done before, I wrote of the benefit of planting, or sponsoring the planting, of trees and other plants for preventing fires and combating global warming.  I return to the theme again, briefly, with this link to an interesting article in The Atlantic:  “Like AC for the Outdoors: To survive a heating planet, humans need shade—lots of it.”  The article is adapted from a new book, entitled Shade: The Promise Of A Forgotten Natural Resource, that was written by Sam Bloch.

Obviously, important decision makers are reading this blog and heeding what I say.  A few days ago, I posted a comment here that I titled “How The Left Ended Up Disbelieving The Science.”  You can easily see the impact that it’s already having from this article, published in National Review:  “Kaiser Permanente to Pause Transgender Surgeries for Teenagers Nationwide.”

These stories are all at least somewhat related to each other:

• I always read Valerie Hudson’s columns in the Deseret News.  Her perspective is invariably worthwhile, as it is once again here: “Perspective: Birthrates are falling but Elon Musk does not have the solution: Musk is among people talking about why the world needs more babies. But not every form of pronatalism is worthy of celebration”  And, by the way, what kind of a father names his son X Æ A-Xii?  What impact is such a name likely to have on the kid’s life over time?
• The always interesting Jacob Hess, writing in the Deseret News:  “Analysis: The U.S. birthrate has dropped to its lowest level ever: Why should we care? With the exception of a handful of countries in Africa, most countries in the world are not having enough children to replace the adults raising them”
• Princeton University’s irreplaceable Robert P. George, in National Review:  “Tracing the Sexual Revolutions: Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy, by Conn Carroll (Bombardier Books, $19.99)”

I’m about to head to the airport and board a plane, so ‘ll now share some adjacent passages that I marked a while back while reading Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, a book written by the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat:

For all the advances in brain mapping, the mind itself is still irreducible, an enigma, a mysterious substance unto itself. Science can tell you how certain atoms in combination create water or carbon dioxide, or how mass and speed and distance combine to predict movements and trajectories, but it’s powerless to tell you how the physical elements of book and brain give rise to the personal experience of reading. The ink on the paper, arranged in certain geometries, conveyed by light to the retina of your reading eye, transformed into electrical signals, carried along the optic nerve to the brain, yielding a specific burst of activity in some particular set of neurons—how does any of that produce the feelings we call confusion, recognition, disagreement? If reading an argument makes you angry, if reading a novel makes you sad, if reading a poem stirs a sudden childhood memory, there is no material account of how that happens, how the outward act generates the inner experience. (47)

Leibniz saw Hoel’s point coming three centuries in advance. “Supposing there were a machine,” he wrote, “so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain a perception.” (48)

A confident popularizer of science like Steven Pinker can write an engaging book with the title How the Mind Works, rattling through all manner of interesting theories before conceding, at the close, that among the problems left unexplained by his efforts are “consciousness . . . the self . . . the unified center of sentience . . . free will . . . knowledge . . . meaning . . . morality.”  One could chuckle at this list—just a few small things to figure out! (50)

There seems to be no conceivable causal model, of the sort credible to modern scientific method, that could seamlessly, intelligibly explain to us how the electrochemistry of the brain, which is mechanically uniform and physically causal, could generate the unique, varied, and incommunicable experience of a particular person’s inner phenomenal world. The first-person perspective is not dissoluble into a third-person narrative of reality; consciousness cannot be satisfactorily reduced to physics without subtracting something. The redness of the red, red rose in my garden, as I consciously experience it while gazing at the rose in a poetic reverie, has objective existence not in the molecules or biochemical events that compose those petals, that stem, or those thorns, or that compose my synapses, my sensory apparatus, or the electrochemical reactions going on in my brain. The phenomenal experience is in my mind but has no physical presence in my brain or in the world around me; no visible “red plasm” detaches itself from the petals of the rose and nimbly slips in through my optic nerves and then across the axons of my brain, retaining its visible redness all along the way. . . . Yes, the rose is “red” because it has certain properties that reflect light in a way that is chromatically legible, so to speak, when translated through the human eyes and optic nerves and brain. But the real mystery lies on the other side of that process, entirely in the subjectivity that is the site of those impressions, and hence in their irreducibly subjective character. (51-52)

Suppose that you had never seen or smelled a flower, but you possessed a perfect physical-chemical-neurological map, from start to finish, of how the scent or reflected light of the rose reached Hart’s brain, how molecules and particles were translated into neural interactions. Could you ascend, from that step-by-step understanding, to anything remotely like the experience of rose-ness in Hart’s consciousness? To say nothing of the experience of “poetic reverie” that follows? Or the philosophical flights or novelistic creativity that the reverie inspires in turn.  (52)

Again, you could potentially identify some of the physical states associated with these experiences—identifying heightened activity in this part of the brain when Hart spies the rose, diminished activity over there when he lapses into a meditative spell, a sudden spark over there when his consciousness begins to generate a new fantastic story (or a denunciation of his theological opponents). All of that, our science can do already to some degree, and will be able to do with increasing proficiency—perhaps even with an assist from artificial intelligence along the way. The problem, the hard problem, is that there is no measurable material correspondence between these physical states and our experiences and thoughts, no sense in which knowing more and more about the molecules or electric impulses tells you more, or really anything at all, about what it’s like to be David Bentley Hart. (53)

Posted from Arlington, Virginia