I was just reading some of John R. Searle’s remarks on the nature of consciousness in his book, “Mind.” The relevant part for my post is on pp. 116-120 where he says consciousness is a higher level biological process, like digestion, or the secretion of bile from the gall bladder. Of course, digestion and secretion are indeed higher-level processes which are decomposable into more micro-level activities, and on that smaller scale, digestion and secretion are not apparent, just as the overall form of a chair is not evident when examining a speck of wood with a scanning electron microscope. He goes on to suppose we would find a similar situation with brain-thingies, that while consciousness can be observed on an organismic level, at the detailed level of neuronal firings, there’s no sign of consciousness to be seen.
Without attacking this position of his directly, I was thinking about other kinds of processes and their higher-level abstractions. Would it be fair, for example, to ask how the electronics of a calculator gives rise to arithmetic? Admittedly you can punch in numbers and hit operator keys, and use the device to solve arithmetic problems, but I dare say, monkeys pressing keys randomly would mostly not get sums out of it. In fact, “arithmetic” as such does not arise from the calculator’s electronics or parts, not at all, even though they are the substrate for its operation.
A more poignant example: can you ask how life emerges from the biological processes of cells? Maybe not, because viruses are usually considered a life form rather than a toxin, and yet viruses are mostly devoid of biological or cytological processes. Even with cells, though, it’s a common claim in the biological sciences that the study of biology has dispelled the old myth of “elan vital,” the life force. There is no such thing in cells. There are only chemical processes. So we have problems trying to define “life” in the modern scientific world; on close examination, nothing that is life as such can be found, so we have to make up criteria, like respiration, ingestion, reproduction, etc., in order to try to identify it.
Or try one more silly little example: does the succession of still images on a movie film give rise to motion? Is motion actually a process of still images played rapidly?
These are just thinking points, right now, but we can see that supposing consciousness must be a biological process is a chancy proposition, rather like supposing motion is a composite of still frames, or arithmetic is a higher-level view of electronics.
