I Am a Strange Loop

How does Consciousness get attached to some specific physical structure and not accidentally onto nearby pieces of matter? What kind of “glue” is used to make this attachment? Can the “glue” possibly wear out and the Consciousness accidentally fall off or transfer onto something else?

How is your Consciousness different from my Consciousness? Did our respective dollops come with different serial numbers or “flavors”, thus establishing the watertight breach between us? If your dollop of Consciousness had been attached to my brain and vice versa, would you be writing this and I reading it?

How does Consciousness coexist with physical law? That is, how does a dollop of Consciousness push material stuff around without coming into sharp conflict with the fact that physical law alone would suffice to determine the behavior of those things?

A Sliding Scale of Élan Mental

Now some readers might say that I am not giving élan mental (a.k.a. Consciousness) enough respect. They might say that there are gradations in the dispensation of this essence, so that some entities receive a good deal of it while others get rather little or none of it. It’s not just all-or-nothing; rather, the amount of Consciousness attached to any given physical structure is not precisely one dollop but can be any number of dollops (including fractional amounts). That’s progress!

And yet, for such readers, I would still have numerous questions, such as the following:

How is it determined exactly how many dollops (or fractional dollops) of Consciousness get attached to a given physical entity? Where are these dollops stored in the meantime? In other words, where is the Central Consciousness Bank?

Once a certain portion of Consciousness has been dished out to a recipient entity (Ronald Reagan, a chess-playing computer, a cockroach, a sperm, a sunflower, a thermostat, a leaf pile, a stone, the city of Cairo), is it a permanent allotment, or is the size of the allotment variable, depending on what physical events take place involving the recipient? If the recipient is in some way altered, does its allotment (or part of it) revert to the Central Consciousness Bank, or does it just float around forevermore, no longer attached to a physical anchor? And if it floats around unattached, does it retain traces of the recipient to which it was once attached?

What about people with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia — are they still “just as Conscious” as they always were, until the moment of their death? What makes something be “the same entity” over long periods of time, anyway? Who or what decreed that the changing pattern that over several decades was variously known as “Ronnie Reagan”, “Ronald Reagan”, “Governor Reagan”, “President Reagan”, and “Ex-President Reagan” was “one single entity”? And if it truly, objectively, indisputably was one single entity no matter how ephemeral and wispy it became, then mightn’t that entity still exist?

And what about Consciousness for fetuses (or for their growing brains, even when they consist of just two neurons)? What about for cows (or their brains)? What about for goldfish (or their brains)? What about for viruses?

As I hope these lists of enigmas make clear, the questions entailed by a Capitalized Essence called “Consciousness” or élan mental abound and multiply with out end. Belief in dualism leads to a hopelessly vast and murky pit of mysteries.

Semantic Quibbling in Universe Z

There is one last matter I wish to deal with, and that has to do with Dave Chalmers’ famous zombie twin in Universe Z. Recall that this Dave sincerely believes what it is saying when it claims that it enjoys ice cream and purple flowers, but it is in fact telling falsities, since it enjoys nothing at all, since it feels nothing at all — no more than the gears in a Ferris wheel feel something as they mesh and churn. Well, what bothers me here is the uncritical willingness to say that this utterly feelingless Dave believes certain things, and that it even believes them sincerely. Isn’t sincere belief a variety of feeling? Do the gears in a Ferris wheel sincerely believe anything? I would hope you would say no. Does the float-ball in a flush toilet sincerely believe anything? Once again, I would hope you would say no.

So suppose we backed off on the sincerity bit, and merely said that Universe Z’s Dave believes the falsities that it is uttering about its enjoyment of this and that. Well, once again, could it not be argued that belief is a kind of feeling? I’m not going to make the argument here, because that’s not my point. My point is that, like so many distinctions in this complex world of ours, the apparent distinction between phenomena that do involve feelings and phenomena that do not is anything but black and white.