On aliens and consciousness

It is probably safe to assume that ten thousand years ago, when humans hadn't yet developed any writing systems and, presumably, were not too philosophically sophisticated, concepts such as consciousness or mind hadn't even occurred to them. Imagine that at that time in human (pre-) history a group a highly evolved, super-intelligent, science-loving alien researchers had visited the Earth and studied all there was to study about humans. They cracked our genome and understood how it worked, not roughly as we currently do, but exactly, as a computer programmer knows how a program works. They did the same with brain function, to the extent that they could create accurate computer simulations of the activity of the brain. The aliens quickly learned the languages spoken by the human communities they were studying and enjoyed socialising with them and learning about their culture.

You get the picture, right? And now let's get to the point. The striking thing about this story is that when our extraterrestrial friends went back to their distant planet thinking that their understanding of humans was complete, they had missed something of the utmost importance: consciousness. The aliens hadn't realised that some of the brain activity of those endearing creatures generated subjective experience or, to use a more unequivocal term, qualia. This wasn't due to a careless mistake; nobody skipped the consciousness item in the checklist. There simply wasn't such an item. These aliens didn't have subjective experience themselves and had never heard about anything remotely similar. Why would they look for it? Moreover, there was nothing in the behaviour of humans that pointed to it, nothing unaccounted for. They already had a full and satisfactory explanation of all the phenomena they could observe in humans. And yet, consciousness not only exists, but is the most astonishing thing there is. Isn't it remarkable that these incredibly developed and knowledgeable aliens didn't have any reason to suspect its existence?

Let's now fast-forward several thousand years to the present time. The aliens decide to come back to our planet and find out how we're getting on. They're happy about our technological progress and are delighted that human culture has grown so varied and rich; that'll give them something to keep themselves entertained for a while. They devour all the information they can lay their hands on: all of Wikipedia, entire libraries, etc. They find some of our beliefs amusing, but they don't have any difficulty explaining them. They understand why people believe in gods, demons and homeopathy. They understand what we mean when we talk about beauty and morality. But there's an idea they're having a hard time with, which is, of course, consciousness. Not only do they struggle to explain why we believe in it; they don't even know what we mean by it! They talk to some philosophers that specialise in the field of consciousness and that only makes things worse. They have a coffee with David Chalmers, a philosophical hero of mine, who, failing miserably in trying to make them understand what consciousness means, concludes that these aliens must be philosophical zombies, i.e. they do not have subjective experience. The aliens then go on to meet with Daniel Dennet, Paul and Pat Churchland and Susan Blackmore, who are thrilled to talk to this enlightened beings who believe, as they do, that consciousness must be some kind of illusion, but their attempts to explain to the aliens what consciousness means are a complete failure.

The aliens, dejected, conclude that consciousness must be a bug in the software run by the human brain, although a unique one. They had previously explained superstition and religion as bugs, but at least they could understand what the concepts involved in them (luck, god, fate, morality, heaven, soul, etc.) meant. In the case of consciousness, however, they cannot even begin to understand the meaning of that alleged illusion, and nobody can explain it to them. The funny thing is that even people who, like Dan Dennet, believe that consciousness is an illusion and that the very concept of qualia doesn't make sense, know perfectly well what qualia are, yet they can't make our aliens understand it because they (qualia) don't exist. That is some serious bug.

As you might have gathered, I think that the existence of qualia is perfectly obvious, and that the only reason why some people are committed to the view that they must be an illusion (albeit one which nobody has a clue how to explain) is their having faith in a materialistic world view. But what I actually wanted to say in this blog post is not that consciousness exists; I'm taking that for granted. What fascinates me is the possibility that, in the same way these fictitious super-evolved aliens didn't detect consciousness when they first came to visit us, and couldn't understand it when they found out about it several thousand years later, there be other kinds of stuff (for lack of a better word) which, being as real and meaningful as consciousness, we are fundamentally unable to detect, let alone comprehend. We perhaps observe some of the effects that kind of stuff had on the kinds of stuff that we do know about, in the same way that the aliens eventually knew about consciousness only because humans told them about it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not justifying wacky New Age beliefs. I'm just saying that it is plausible that there is much more to reality than what we are able to know. What that might be, I don't know — you figure that one out yourself — but I would hope it would somehow make the universe a better place, just as consciousness does.

Appendix

Two alternative outcomes of the research programme conducted by the aliens:

1. On their first visit to planet Earth they notice that some of the neural activity in the brain of humans doesn't quite conform to physical laws and they hypothesise the existence of some hitherto unknown kind of "stuff" which they can only infer by its effects on the workings of the human brain. Seeking to gain some insight into the problem, they try discussing it with the most intelligent humans they could find, but to no avail, as the latter, being completely incapable of grasping the concept of "physical laws" with their prehistoric minds, can't even begin to understand what the aliens are talking about. In their second visit they learn about consciousness and, although not being able to understand what it means, they recognise that it probably is what's causing the abnormalities they'd observed in the neural activity of the brain.

2. The aliens are conscious, understand consciousness, and have the means to detect it, as they indeed do on their first visit. On their second visit they congratulate David Chalmers for being on the right track and reveal to him what consciousness is and how it works. Chalmers, clever as he is, can't get to grips with some of the fundamental concepts the aliens use in order to explain consciousness, so he officially declares the cognitive closure of the human mind on the hard problem of consciousness, sets off for India and becomes a famous mystic poet, a kind of Australian Rumi.