A peek into the world behind the world

Part 2, where I read a book all about what consciousness researchers have been failing to do for the past 30 years.

(Part 1 is here.)

We left this story faced with two thrilling questions. (1) Having concluded that consciousness was the greatest scientific problem we currently face, why did I turn down an offer to do a PhD on it? (2) When am I going to get around to talking about the book by Erik Hoel, who did study consciousness in his PhD?

Now for the answers.

Despite much hand-wringing and procrastination and lack-lustre attempts at soul searching, I finally decided not to do a PhD on consciousness for one main reason. The topic simply was not mature enough. No-one could say clearly what consciousness was, let alone provide an explanation of it. When I looked further into the research topics at this particular institution they mostly involved looking at the behaviour or the biology of insects or birds (I can't remember which). To learn what? I can't remember that, either, but whatever it was, it looked a hell of a long way from the question of consciousness. All I could think was: "Whatever the explanation is for human consciousness, these guys aren't going to find it. And if I get myself tied up with the minutia of insect biology, I'm not going to find it, either." If they didn't know what problem they were solving, then presumably no-one did. To get involved in this field, I concluded, was a fool's errand.

This may strike you as a poor piece of self-justification, and perhaps it was. Another way of putting it would be: a brand new and largely undefined field needs scientists who are fearless and eager to take risks. I, on the other hand, was pedestrian and cowardly.

To build a proper science of consciousness out of what looked to be almost nothing would require a genius and a revolutionary, and when it came to the crunch of making a major career decision, I could not summon the conviction that I was either. But I wouldn't have been at all surprised if over the next decade such a visionary did appear, and taunted me with an explanation so simple that it would look like it should have been easily within my grasp.

No such figure appeared. Not in the early 2000s. Not in the 2010s. And not, so far, in the 2020s. I have spent almost thirty years expecting to be told, "Oh yes, that problem was solved ages ago. You just weren't paying attention."

A few years ago I went along to the local neuroscience institute to hear a talk with consciousness in the title, fully expecting to hear about the incredible progress and fascinating insights that I had been missing out on. I was, of course, partly hoping to have my old decision vindicated by the confirmation that a true understanding of consciousness still eludes us, but I was horrified by just how negligible — indeed, non-existent — progress had been. They still couldn't provide even an agreed-upon scientific definition of consciousness.

By that time I had worked my way far enough down the Pretentious Dick reading list to have read Kuhn's "Structure of scientific revolutions", and for all its flaws and oddities, I felt it nailed the problem perfectly: with no consensus on what consciousness is, or what problem it is scientists should try to solve, in other words, no "paradigm", this was not yet a science. That didn't mean that it wasn't valuable work, or that it wasn't necessary to eventually lay the foundations for a true scientific study of the problem, but it did mean that until that foundation was laid, there would be no meaningful progress. Zero. The revolution might come next year, or next decade, or next century, but in the mean time anyone leaping into this topic at the beginning of their career should accept that they might retire at the other end with no better understanding than when they started.

Or maybe it was just a bad seminar?

This was what I hoped to learn when I ordered Erik Hoel's book, "The World Behind the World". He had been bold enough to leap into this field, and he had been willing to squelch around in the philosophical mud of trying to formulate questions at the same time as answering them. I was eager to hear his report. Since he had left formal academia to be a dazzling intellectual-at-large, I had hopes that it would be more honest and critical than the typical popular science book, i.e., not merely a two-hundred-page press release to drum up more funding.

Hoel starts off by talking about the "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" perspectives. I don't know if he came up with these terms, or if they come from someone else — I spend plenty of time worrying about correctly citing people in my own field, and one of the great pleasures of reading a book about a different field is that I feel absolved from giving a damn who did what first. Anyway, it's a nice way of splitting human knowledge, and I stole it for the opening of my previous article: there's the world outside our heads, which has received a huge amount of attention in the last few thousand years, and about which our understanding has vastly increased century on century, and then there is the "intrinsic perspective", the "world behind the world", what we see when we look inwards to our own minds, and that has received less attention, and we've learned far less.

Except — and this is a very nice insight — in the world of literature. Hoel makes the lovely point that the greatest technological advance for exploring our inner life is the novel. One can even make the case that it's possible to trace progress in the study of the psyche through literature, from barely any mention of inner thoughts in ancient writings up to the detailed psychological expositions of 19th- and 20th-century novels.

Then he gets on to more recent studies of consciousness. I was aware that the topic was not taken seriously for much of the 20th century, but I probably should not have been surprised to hear that it started to get more attention in the 1990s, i.e., just as I was starting my undergraduate studies, ready to pick up on the latest cool topic.

Things whizz along quickly, and I soon have my answer to the question of what progress there has been in the last 25 years. Which is: zip. That's the same conclusion I took away from that seminar a few years ago, but now there is some more detail, which makes the story even less encouraging. In Hoel's telling, all of the fancy technology and detailed studies in the world of neuroscience fail to measure anything even remotely useful to understand consciousness. No, it's worse than that: they measure lots of things, and write lots of papers about those things, under the illusion that these things are relevant to consciousness.

They have failed to properly define the problem they care about, have substituted it for a bunch of other problems instead, and are now proceeding to fail to solve those.¹

Nonetheless, there are some nascent theories of consciousness. The one he spent some time working on is called Integrated Information Theory (IIT). His description of it sounds not so much like a theory, as a meta-description of what a theory of something — anything — might sound like. It's like a parody of a definition of a science from a Terry Pratchett book. It may not be accidental that the theory sounds hollow, because Hoel then goes on to list a series of objections, among them that the theory is hollow.

That said, there was a recent media kerfuffle over a bunch of (presumably competing) scientists claiming that IIT is not a legitimate scientific theory, and Hoel wrote an article lambasting them for a below-the-belt attack. So I take the point to be that even if this is not so much a theory as a fumbling in the hopeful direction of a theory, then that's as good as any other effort currently underway. At this stage, we need all the fumbling we can get.

At this point the book moves to Hoel's own work and its relevance to free will. This is always a potentially dodgy transition in a popular science book, where the author gets to take a free shot at wedging their own (very likely) minor contributions into the official history of their field. Is this what's happening here? I'll leave that to the experts to squabble over. Who cares? My attempt at a generous reading is: this is Hoel's own take on the state of consciousness research, and as a personal response and critique, it would be perverse if he did not offer insights from his own work.

I can see a boring editor (or a boring reviewer) objecting that the book is uneven in style and tone. There is the broad sweep of the history of the extrinsic and intrinsic perspectives. There's that bit about novels. Then, surprisingly early in the book, the criticism of neuroscience. He tells us that we don't have the tools and frameworks to study consciousness, but this is before he tells us what all the consciousness researchers have been up to. A summary of the two broad approaches to tackling the problem is followed by a very light interlude on a princess who carried on a fascinating correspondence with Descartes — why is it there? because it's a cool story! — and then bam! we're into a bunch of technical information-theory arguments about scales of scientific problems (think particle physics vs biology vs macroeconomics), emergence, and the build-up to tackling free will.

This is like being asked to take a pleasant stroll in the park, and turning a corner just past the pond to discover that it's time to scale a cliff-face in a snowstorm. Hey, I only brought my sneakers!

I can sympathise with complaints — there could have been more leg-ups on the climb, and even if this wasn't the extra-challenge route, surely there was an easier way up — but I was so keen to get to the top that I braced myself and charged up after him. I slipped a few times, but I think I got there.

On the way I loved all the fun philosophical arguments, and all the tricky information-theory explanations. This book got me thinking more about free will and consciousness than I have for many years. It was a thrilling intellectual experience, and a huge amount of fun.

So here I am, a little out of breath, but triumphantly at the summit of Chapter 11, "The scientific case for free will". What do I think of the view?

Let me rest a moment and catch my breath, and then we can get into it.

(Part 3 is here.)

1. Hoel expands on this critique of neuroscience in a recent article, where he lays the “pre-paradigmatic” charge on the entire field. I shared the article with a friend who works in neuroscience, and, well, let’s just say they did not agree. My attempt to sum up their response in diplomatic terms would be, “Most neuroscientists are trying, and often making significant progress, to solve many, many other important problems besides consciousness.” Also, I recommend never making the argument, “over beers most people agree with me.” We all know that when you’re cornered by Mr. I’ve-Got-A-Theory, the surest means of escape is to effusively agree.