What is generally called “consciousness” has baffled philosophers and physicists for centuries because of its seemingly mysterious, metaphysical qualities.
I have suggested that “consciousness” is straight physics: stimulus —> response —> response —> response, with each response, in fact, being the stimulus for the next response, in an endless chain.
Everything responds to stimuli, which means that everything possesses some degree of consciousness—whether living or inanimate, animal or plant. Humans, dogs, trees, and even AI can be considered conscious, with the main difference being the degree of consciousness, measured by the quality and quantity of stimuli and responses.
Because the term “consciousness” carries mysterious, unmeasurable connotations, I propose using “responsiveness” instead.
Objections to “responsiveness” may arise because it doesn’t encompass the sensation of consciousness. I submit that this sensation itself is not only an illusion, but that this illusion serves a significant purpose.
The brain and body together comprise the translation machine that makes stimuli intelligible. Without such translation, the world would be a confused mix of signals. For instance, read the following:
SDRAWKCAB DAER OT DRAH YREV SI SIHT
What does it say? It says,THIS IS VERY HARD TO READ BACKWARDS
The photons — i.e. the stimuli — you receive are quite similar in both examples, but the brain has not learned to translate backwards spelling.Redness is the brain’s interpretation of signals from the eye. The electromagnetic wave itself is not “red.” It’s just radiation with a certain wavelength. The color is created by our nervous system, and is not in the light.
When you see something that does not exist, it is called an illusion. Color is a species-wide illusion. If you close your eyes, you will see phosphenes, the visual sensations that occur without light entering your eyes. They, too, are illusions
The sense of taste operates in a similar way. A compound known as PTC (phenylthiocarbamide) tastes bitter to most people, but about 25% of individuals do not experience any taste from it. For these people, the bitterness simply does not exist.
For the 75% who can taste it, bitterness is not an inherent quality of the substance; rather, it is an illusion produced by the interaction between the brain and the taste buds.
Stick your finger with a needle, and you may feel pain, unless your finger has received an anesthetic. Pain is not an intrinsic property of a needle. Touch the needle against a fingernail, and you may feel nothing.
It is the pain receptors in your finger that send a signal to your brain, and that signal is translated to pain. Pain is one of the illusions created by the brain/skin combination (or other parts of the body and brain).
When infrared light hits your skin, you may feel a pleasant warmth, or a painful burning sensation, or nothing at all, depending on the intensity of the radiation, the duration of the stimulus, skin sensitivity, and the starting temperature of the skin. All of these responses are illusions created by the brain/skin system.
If you attend a rock concert, you may hear loud music. Afterward, you may hear a buzzing in your ears, especially in a quiet room. All are illusions of the sound waves touching the tiny bones in your ears, as translated by your brain. Waves of air have no intrinsic sound.
People are able to smell different odors.
The reason is genetic variation in olfactory receptors. Humans have about 400 functional odor receptor genes, and individuals vary in which ones work.
For each person, what is reality? Is odor real, or is it an illusion conjured by the brain?
If you watch television, you experience, not pictures, but thousands of flashing points of light. All else is illusion. A movie is the same. A photograph, too, is an illusion.
You cannot see a tree; you can only detect light rays reflecting off it. Your brain interprets these signals and identifies them as a tree. But those light rays merely are electromagnetic waves, not a tree. Your brain provides you with the “tree” illusion.
Everything you see, hear, feel, taste, or smell is an illusion, created by your brain and the rest of your body. If you lost those senses, you would live in a quiet, dark world, and that would be your reality — unless, for instance, you could sense magnetism like a migratory bird. Or a sea turtle. Or a monarch butterfly. Or a salmon. Or a shark.
Many birds have a light-sensitive protein called cryptochrome in their retinas that may enable them to perceive magnetic field direction as faint visual patterns. One wonders what a magnetic field looks like to a bird.
Does it have a color? Does it make a sound? Does it itch? Does it smell? The reality is that a magnetic field has no such intrinsic properties. Whatever a bird senses is a product of its brain and body — an illusion that may have no parallel in human cognition.
And then we come to dreams. Many animals dream, and we know that for humans at least, some dreams can feel terrifyingly real. Yet, of course, dreams are illusions created by the brain/body sensing system.
If light of certain wavelengths can create the illusion of physical objects, and dreams do likewise, in the context of reality, where is the line between what we see when awake and our eyes are closed and what we see when we are asleep?
The line is in the source of constraint. When we are awake, external physical signals dominate. When we sleep, internally generated neural activity dominates. But the machinery producing the experience is the same brain system in both cases.
The brain is always simulating the world. When awake, the simulation is continuously changed by outside stimuli. When dreaming, it runs on its own. And none of it is reality (just electromagnetic and pressure waves).
We never experience the world directly. We experience a brain/body-generated interpretation of stimuli, and what we think of as “consciousness” is the totality of our responses to those stimuli.
That is why I prefer the term “responsiveness” vs. “consciousness.” With responsiveness, you have no mysterious, unmeasurable qualia, no subjective, intangible “feeling,” no nonscientific “self” floating outside your body.
There only are your responses to the stimuli that impact your brain/body sensing system.
And this brings us to the subject of free will. For free will to exist, there would need to be a separate agent within the brain that can choose independently of physical structure, prior causes, and incoming stimuli.
Neuroscience has not found evidence for such a mechanism.
The illusion of free will is very powerful, but it’s no more powerful than the illusions provided by all our other senses. Just as we feel sure of our ability to see a red apple, hear music, smell perfume, taste chocolate, and feel an itch, we also are sure of our ability to make independent choices.
All our experience is a constructed interface. What we take to be direct contact with the world is produced by the brain’s interpretation of signals and internal states. The experiences are not properties of the external world itself. They are useful representations —illusions that serve an important purpose.
Every second of your life, you are bombarded with trillions of stimuli from both inside and outside your body. Consider, each second, how many photons strike your eyes and skin, how many sound waves reach your ears, how many molecules give you scent and taste, and how many atoms your skin encounters.
Which are the important stimuli and which can be ignored? Which affect your survival? Your happiness? Your comfort?
All of this information must be processed by your three-pound brain while it simultaneously manages and regulates your complex metabolism.
To handle that staggering task, your brain must use shortcuts, and those shortcuts are the illusions that seem so real. No need to analyze each of the trillions of stimuli coming from those objects ahead of you. One’s a tree. It’s an oak tree. It’s not in your path. It’s no danger. Ignore it. Or wait. It’s starting to fall. Run!
And all that analysis of illusions occurs in a fraction of a second.
Every day, we must divide our responsiveness among thousands of simple tasks, from waking up, getting up, brushing our teeth, eating, digesting, dressing…
Think about one simple task: driving to work. Have you ever wondered why car companies have invested billions in training computers to perform a straightforward task that millions of us do without much thought?
They use cameras to sense and then evaluate the photons coming from all sides of the car. Are those photons from another car or from the picture of a car on the side of a bus? Are those turn-signal photons or just stopping photons? Reflected photons from a wet street? An icy street? And, is that a pond or a mirage on the street ahead?
You navigate without analyzing those trillions of stimuli that hit you every second, the vast majority of which represent illusions. As the scientists put it, “The certainty of experience doesn’t guarantee its ontological status,” but it speeds the response time and reduces the brain’s workload.
That’s the primary purpose of any form of practice. To eliminate the need for time-consuming, energy-consuming thought.
So here I am: Everything I sense is an illusion. Everything I decide is based on illusion tempered by stimuli. And my body consists of one giant analytic brain making decisions that feel like free will. The whole process commonly is called “consciousness,” but I have suggested the term, “responsiveness” as more in tune with reality.
The remarkable thing is that this interface is so convincing that it feels to me like direct contact with the world and independent agency, even if the underlying processes are fully physical and causal.
Yes, the illusion is so powerful even I feel (accent the word “feel”) that somehow, somewhere there is a separate “Rodger” inside my brain making independent decisions not affected by microbes in my gut or chemicals in my nose.
So, I don’t blame you for feeling the same way. We are human, after all, and wrong as it may be, that is how humans feel.
But the reality is far different. You and I live in a world of illusion, brilliantly created by nature to help us cope with what nature throws at us.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
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