I came across an interesting example of a physical model of consciousness the other day: an automobile. My automobile is equipped, as most autos are, with a dashboard indicator of engine trouble. There are sensors on the engine block and in the oil pan to detect engine temperature and oil temperature. These senses are connected by nerves — I mean, wires — to an indicator light on the dashboard. When the engine is in an overtemp condition, the indicator turns on, glowing a bright red.
This is pain. Admittedly, the car doesn’t scream, but it is feeling pain. The light is like a brain cell, an on-off switch that either registers a condition, or does not. When a neuron is activated, neuro guys in the brain sciences like to assert that the neuron is doing what conscious beings do: feel, think, experience, know, remember… that whole panoply of mental phenomena we associate with brains, comes down to little brain cells turning on or going off. But obviously the little red light on the dashboard is an on-off indicator, too. So if a brain cell can BE an experience, there is nothing special about cell physiology that makes it so, and there is nothing about an indicator light that keeps it from being so. So the car feels pain.
There are other examples of devices that can experience pain. Normally, a person’s house does not have sensory experiences, but that can be changed. Install one of those self-contained, battery powered fire detectors. Then, when the little machine thinks it’s burning, it will let out a loud hooting sound to vividly register its anguish. Hopefully, people will come to its aid and save the house.
I expect that few neuro guys would consider houses and cars examples of neural activity and consciousness, but why not? All the correlates of consciousness are there: the signals, the sensing apparatus, the flip-flop registers to indicate a brain state, even the connection paths. But perhaps we want the experience of pain to be something more than one on-off indicator that merely registers the condition; we’d like a more complex system which not only registers the condition, but reacts to it. So, we might suppose a brain registering pain also responds to the pain, and that this response is part of the consciousness, maybe an essential part. Clearly, the next step in car evolution is to hook up the red light to an audible alarm. Then it will be conscious, or at least more evidently so.
Why is it we can’t take brain science seriously? Because science cannot understand the problem of subjectivity. It goes beyond merely registering signals, and that’s all circuit diagrams can be objectively seen to do. The aspect that’s missing is the Heideggerian sense of Being, that of being “present” to the phenomena in a way that isn’t the phenomena themselves. The car has no Being. Other than that, it’s just as much a sensing, experiencing system as any brain.
Perhaps, though, brain science is not interested in the deeper problem of Being. As usual, science is only an attempt to understand how something works, so that we can repair it when it’s faulty, and enhance its functionality. If so, it is similar to making a shop manual for a car, that explains everything we need to know to maintain the car in proper working order, but it never deals with the design concepts that resulted in the car you see before you, or why anyone wanted to build it in the first place. And it certainly does not explain how the car participates in the Being of the world.
Wait. I have to go. The alarm on my cook stove in the kitchen is buzzing.
