Thoughts about Consciousness

An interesting theory rolled into my head randomly not too long ago. I must say, the theory is simply too interesting not to be true, unless, or course, it’s counterfactual, in which case I’d have to say it’s baloney. Anyway, it’s a theory relating computers, consciousness, and the Buddhist concepts of anatta (no-self) and shunyata (emptyness).

Is there intelligent life out there, sentient life other than humanity? On the surface, it would appear that there isn’t, at least not within a large range of parsecs. But what do we look for when we look for sentient life? Creatures that talk, speak, write? It might be possible that some of the species that we live amongst are as intelligent as we are, but are simply so completely different in their ways of thinking that it doesn’t appear to us to be intelligence at all.

How do we even know that other people are conscious? Why do we believe that others are conscious as are we, rather than resorting to a philosophy of complete solipsism? Induction, obviously. Consciousness is a subjective phenomenon, and since we can’t directly experience the consciousness of others, we assume that they are as self-aware as we are based on other similarities such as physical habits. I think that this inductive knowledge is the strongest form of verification that we can get about consciousness. That is, I hypothesize that one could never physically detect the consciousness of another. It’s an “emergent phenomena” of sorts—you cannot explain consciousness in terms of the biological and chemical processes of the brain.

This idea that our consciousness is somehow an “emergent phenomena”, arising from but not completely reducible to in physical law is rather similar to the Buddhist concept of shunyata—that there is no constant principle or factor that underlies the mind, and that it is simply created as a factor of all surrounding circumstances. To sum this up, consciousness is only consciousness from a subjective point of view, and is assumed from the third person perspective only through induction. Also, I hypothesize that you could never read someone’s mind. Ever. There’s nothing objective to detect, since qualia are only directly detectable from a subjective perspective.

Personally, I think that the inductive inference that other humans are conscious is a good one. But why is it that we assume that termite colonies, or the wind, or forests aren’t conscious? We cannot “detect” the consciousness by viewing it under a microscope, but neither can we detect such consciousness in other humans. The inductive inference from the observation that another human looks and acts physically similar to us may be sufficient grounds to assume that they have consciousness, but it does not follow automatically that all phenomena quite dissimilar to us are not conscious. Could not the wind, in some incomprehensible way, be like a large computer, thinking thoughts so different from ours that they would be unfathomable even if we did know them? I am not, of course, asserting that this is the case, or even likely, but it is interesting to think about nonetheless