A Field of Consciousness 境界

Kitaro Nishida's Topos/Basho 場所

1.

The problem of consciousness.

It’s like trying to understand the universe before the Big Bang kickstarted time. How can one think about the brain while using the brain without getting a headache? But for centuries philosophers have been trying to do just that. And not just philosophers. Scientists have also been tackling the problem of trying to reconcile a conscious mind with a physical brain…. For decades.

Fast forward to last week, when the Twitterverse was lit up after a hundred reputable scientists signed a letter declaring that one of the most popular theories of consciousness, known as IIT, is “pseudoscience.”

As researchers, we have a duty to protect the public from scientific misinformation.

IIT —or integrated information theory — is a popular theory that posits that the degree of consciousness an organism experiences is a function of brain integration. According to the theory, consciousness emerges from the way information is processed within a ‘system’ (for instance, networks of neurons or computer circuits), and that systems that are more interconnected, or integrated, have higher levels of consciousness.

The theory rejects Cartesian dualism by seeing consciousness as existing in degrees –on a spectrum–from lower to higher forms. “Souls of different sizes,” as Douglas Hofstadter described it in his most recent book I am a Strange Loop. Hofstadter even has a name for this degree, calling it “a Huneker” after the music critic James Huneker who wrote an essay that captured the attention of the young Douglas Hofstadter about Chopin’s eleventh etude Opus 25. In the essay, Huneker cautioned fellow pianists that: “Small-souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should not attempt it.” Hofstadter knows it is dangerous to entertain the idea of small and large souled men in today’s world. But he does see consciousness as existing in all kinds of organisms on a sliding scale.

I suppose it is obvious which organisms are on top. Hint": not mosquitoes.

2.

There is almost a circularity about the problem of consciousness since the language itself might be problematic. For example, if you are defining consciousness as a state of awareness or sentience, or worse, as “how it feels” like to be in that state, consciousness is hard to separate from self-consciousness. It is strongly or even necessarily subject-oriented—in language and logic.

Because of this, not unlike the universe before time, it is hard to reduce it to anything beyond itself. Or in this case, the self of the organism under observation.

Resisting a subject-focused understanding of awareness, I’ve always appreciated Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida (1870-1945), who following Zen Buddhist notions, preferred thinking about consciousness in terms of place, topos, or field 場所. This is not unlike Heidegger’s statement that there is no being without a “there.” Like how space-time is a field inseparable from the physical objects within it, consciousness, according to Nishida, is based on a boundless universal field which he calls “nothingness.” It is not reducible because it is a transcendental predicate.

Does this mean that in the same way that observations cannot be separated from the observer in QM that awareness or consciousness cannot be understood apart from the conscious mind that is trying to think about it?

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I am a fan of Erik Hoel’s Substack the Intrinsic Perspective and had by chance just finished his novel Revelations about a group of elite postdocs working at the cutting edge of consciousness research at NYU. Hoel studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under IIT-theory-pioneer, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi.

Here is my review of his book a fabulous memoir by Christof Koch, another thinker and scientist informed by IIT

Borges Library: Two Books about Consciousness