Theories about self-consciousness

Svetlana before the mirror
Painting by Karl Briuliov

As I have said in other posts in this blog, the question of self-consciousness is more philosophical than scientific. In this regard, two great philosophical theories have coexisted since time immemorial:

·         Monism: Everything we can perceive, including consciousness, can be explained in terms of a single component: matter, in the broadest sense of the term, which also includes energy. In turn, monism can be classified into two different theories:

o   Reductionist Monism: It asserts that the entire functioning of the universe has a bottom-up explanation. In other words, if we knew enough about elementary particles and their properties, we could explain everything, including self-consciousness.

o   Emergentist Monism: It asserts that the lower level does not explain everything that happens at the higher level, since there are properties (including self-awareness) that only have a top-down explanation. That is to say, complex systems can have a behavior unpredictable in the bottom-up direction.

Physics and Free Will

In the January 2021 issue of Physics World appeared an article entitled Why free will is beyond physics. This article, written by British science writer Philip Ball, is clearly anti-reductionist and says things like these:

“Free will” is not ruled out by physics – because it doesn’t stem from physics in the first place.

If physics can disprove free will, then it must override everything else too, even evolution.

But is free will really undermined by the determinism of physical law? I think such arguments are not even wrong; they are simply misconceived. They don’t recognize how cause and effect work, and by attempting to claim too much jurisdiction for fundamental physics they are not really scientific but metaphysical.

Science or philosophy

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

In a previous post, speaking about intelligence, I mentioned that there are four incompatible philosophical theories that try to explain the phenomenon of human consciousness. I summarize them briefly here:

1.     Reductionist monism or biological functionalism: The mind is completely determined by the brain and by the network of neurons that makes it. The human mind is an epiphenomenon. Freedom of choice is an illusion. We are programmed machines.

2.     Emergent monism: The mind is an emergent evolutionary product with self-organization, which has emerged as a complex system from simpler systems made up by neurons. Some argue that the underlying structures cannot completely determine the evolution of the mental phenomena. These, however, would be able to influence the underlying structures.

3.     Neuro-physiologic dualism: Mind and brain are different, but they are so closely connected that they make up a unit, two complementary and unique states of the same organism.

4.     Metaphysical dualism: Mind and brain are two different realities. The first is spiritual and non-spatial, capable of interacting with the brain, which is a material and spatial substance. Both entities can exist independently of one another, although the body without the mind eventually decomposes.