Is it Moral to Prefer Mates who are Attractive

Simplifying the Hard Problem of Consciousness

Evan Louis Sheehan

How is it that Santa Claus can visit hundreds of millions of homes across many different continents all in the course of a single evening? And by what physical processes do reindeer fly? These are the most profound questions of our time. At least, they are profound questions for children who believe in Santa and his reindeer. But to an adult who believes that Santa is merely a myth, the questions are not profound at all; they are meaningless.

Many authors of science have proclaimed that the emergence of human consciousness from physical brain matter is the most profound question of our time. But I happen to believe the question will become meaningless when we eventually realize that consciousness, like Santa, doesn’t really exist – at least, not in the sense that we think it does. Even though we strongly believe we have freedom of will, it is an unfounded belief. And, even though we strongly believe we have conscious ‘feelings’, I’ll argue that those feelings amount to nothing more than innate beliefs.

Understanding just how physical brain processes give rise to the subjective experience of conscious feelings is a confounding issue. How is it possible that a set of deterministic brain circuits can feel something like pleasure? This conundrum has been described by David Chalmers as “the hard problem.” Feelings, sometimes referred to as ‘qualia’ (for qualities of experiential states), are so ethereal in nature that they are virtually indescribable. For instance, how could I possibly describe in words the feeling I get when I see blue, or feel hot, or get hungry? Perhaps feelings are indescribable because they don’t really exist. Perhaps, when I feel pain, I only believe I feel pain.

The situation may be analogous to how an observing alien might wonder why we humans place so much value on money. Suppose an alien were to declare that “the hard problem” is determining what it is about those printed slips of paper that gives them their intrinsic value. Indeed, the value of pleasure may be no more difficult to understand than the value of a dollar. Just as a dollar has value only because we believe it has value, I’ll argue that a feeling of pleasure also has value only because we believe it has value. This simple realization allows us to model consciousness as merely a system of beliefs, and beliefs are easy to implement computationally.

Scientists have been desperately searching for the source of human consciousness. But, from Roger Penrose’s quantum coherence in microtubules to Douglas Hofstadter’s strange loops and mental vortices, explanations have gotten ever more perplexing, yet still fail to bridge the gap between physical circuits and subjective feelings.

We may gain an immediate understanding of conscious feelings through a simple change in wording that leads to a much more tractable perspective on the issue. Instead of my saying that occasionally I feel pleasure, it is indisputably more accurate for me to say that occasionally I believe I feel pleasure. The inter-mediation of belief turns an intractable problem into an obviously solvable one.

While feelings are impossible to program into machinery, beliefs are easy. While we cannot imagine how to program a computer to feel pleasure, we can easily program a computer to have a belief system, and we can easily install a belief in pleasure that becomes true when certain circuits are active. We cannot understand how a thermostat could possibly feel cold, but we can easily understand how a computerized thermostat could hold a belief that it feels cold.

We may easily validate this simple idea by realizing that one cannot feel pain without believing that one feels pain. And neither can one believe one feels pain without actually feeling it. It seems that a feeling of pain and a belief in the feeling of pain are intimately associated, if not identical. Consider also that a hypnotist can sometimes eliminate one’s feeling of pain by simply installing a countervailing belief. And consider that a psychosomatic pain can result from a simple belief in illness. It is even true that a psychosomatic pain can be reduced by a simple belief in the effectiveness of a pill that is in fact just a placebo.

Apparently, we may treat conscious feelings as mere beliefs and thereby simplify the understanding of conscious feelings considerably. From this simple perspective, let us look back at evolution and speculate on why natural selection might have preferred for humans to have these sorts of beliefs in feelings.

Imagine the unfortunate birth of a human having a genetic defect that causes it to forever lack the experience of consciousness – no feelings of pain or pleasure, no feelings of cold or heat or hunger, and no vivid sensations of color, such as redness. Imagine that our consciousless human – let’s call him Otto, the automaton – is normal in every way, except he has no feelings of qualia. We can learn a lot from contemplating this unfortunate imaginary fellow. For instance, at what point in Otto’s life would his parents likely become aware of his genetic deficiency? Certainly, the parents wouldn’t suspect a thing for the first few months. Baby Otto would automatically suck on anything placed into his mouth. A baby needn’t feel any sort of conscious experience to respond in such an automatic manner.

So then, at what point in Otto’s life would his parents detect the lack of conscious feelings? How about when he touches a hot stove? No, an automaton needn’t be consciously aware in order to vigorously react to extremes of temperature. Thermostatically-controlled furnaces and air conditioners do it all the time, but we don’t suspect that they consciously ‘feel’ anything. Even without an accompanying feeling of pain, a child could still be genetically programmed to avoid temperature extremes and automatically cry out for parental help when burned. And the responsible genes would certainly benefit from such programming.

Perhaps Otto’s genetic aberration would become obvious when his parents teach him the words for different colors. No, even though a digital camera doesn’t ‘feel’ redness or blueness, it can certainly discriminate between them. Different colors simply translate to different numbers inside a digital video camera.

Humans don’t need to feel compassion to show compassion under proper conditions; they don’t need to feel love to show love; and they don’t need to feel pleasure or pain to show typical reactions to the things that inspire those feelings. Neither humans nor computers need to feel anything like consciousness in order to show all the characteristics of being human.

So, while a consciousless human would not have feelings like the rest of us, it could still have all the circuitry that allows it to respond to and learn from stimuli just like the rest of us. The salient point that should be dawning on us is that the feelings we conscious humans experience don’t seem to be necessary for genetic perpetuation. But then, why would they have evolved? If Otto’s lack of consciousness could go undetected for his entire lifetime, what is the survival value of consciousness? As it turns out, the answer is quite simple when considered from a gene’s perspective. Otto’s deficiency will become apparent when he begins to analyze his own plans.

Before earthly life gained the ability to construct plans that involve investment of effort for future gain, all individual instances of life lived only ‘in-the-moment’. Brain circuitry responded immediately to the detection of important situations in the environment. There would have been no evolutionary reason for the development of conscious feelings. Immediate responders don’t need associated feelings to be effective. But the ability to create and assess plans based on expectations of the future does require certain beliefs in conscious feelings.

I suspect that all lower species of life – those incapable of predictive planning – don’t have feelings, even though they may seem as though they do. Consider a chicken that has just had its head cut off. If you’ve ever seen it happen, then you know that sometimes a beheaded chicken frantically runs around for minutes even without its head. We know that such a chicken’s body feels no pain, because such a feeling, if felt at all, must be felt in the head, which is no longer attached. Yet the headless chicken appears to be in great pain and distress.

It was the evolutionary development of intelligent planning that required the accompanying development of conscious feelings. From a gene’s-eye-view, a good plan is a string of activities that, when performed, will be expected to enhance genetic survival and propagation. We humans construct our plans so that they will bring pleasure and avoid pain in the future, but it is our genes that define the things that ultimately cause pleasure and pain. It is no coincidence that our fundamental sources of happiness – eating, staying comfortable and healthy, finding attractive mates, having sex and raising children – enable the perpetuation of our genes. A rational being, able to construct plans, needs something to link the goals of its plans to the goals of its genes, otherwise, the genes that provide the planning capability will not statistically benefit from the plans. Our human feelings are those links between our goals as individuals and the goals of our genes.

Have we really defined an evolutionary need for feelings? Couldn’t the genes have programmed humans simply to maximize the neural activity at whatever neural site corresponds to pleasure, without ascribing any sort of feeling to it? The answer is ‘no’, as I’ll now explain.

The human brain constructs plans from various beliefs it acquires during its life. For instance, all brains come to believe that things fall downward when they are dropped. We acquire a great many diverse beliefs about causality, and our brains automatically chain them together into plans that are expected to benefit our genes. All our planned activities emanate from our respective collections of causal beliefs. For instance, most of us believe that, by studying hard while we’re young, we’ll be better able to afford all the things that our genes encourage us to do when we’re older, for which they promise to reward us with happiness.

Our human genes faced a problem when they enabled our powers of reasoning to analyze the causal reasons for everything we do. A boy in college might wonder why he should care how well he performs on an upcoming test. His reasoning tells him that by failing the test he will lessen his chance of graduating, of getting a good job, of earning money, of buying good food and finding an attractive sex partner. But he then may question why he wants to eat food and have sex in the first place. What are the causal reasons for the final destinations of his plans?

If he is to serve the interests of his genes, he needs innate beliefs that the acts of eating food and having sex with fit women do actually benefit him in some manner. Those benefits come in the form of pleasurable conscious feelings. But those feelings need be nothing more than innate beliefs that anchor the plans composed by stringing together many learned beliefs in causality. Our genes apparently discovered that we humans need to believe we feel things like pleasure and pain in order to rationally justify plans that are consistent with the perpetuation interests of our genes.

The value we attach to our feelings is somewhat analogous to the value we attach to money. A one-hundred-dollar bill, made of paper and ink, has value only because we all believe it has value. Similarly, a conscious feeling has value only because the one who feels it believes it has value. All rational behaviors depend entirely on beliefs, both learned and innate, nothing more. Our genes give us value through our innate beliefs in our own feelings. They effectively pay us with feelings of happiness for acting as their agents. But recognize that our feelings quickly dissipate. They represent a currency that is unable to be saved or traded, sort of like checks written in disappearing ink. Metaphorically, our genes might laugh at how we humans value things that serve their interests.

We are now in a position to answer a question that has perplexed many: Will computers ever have feelings? Computers will most definitely have feelings when we program their belief systems to include beliefs in their own feelings. A skeptic might retort: They won’t actually feel anything – they will merely believe they feel things. But is there really a defensible distinction? Could we not make the same claim about humans?

Now, think back to Otto, our imaginary human, born with a genetic defect that prevents him from experiencing conscious feelings. The only thing he needs, to be externally indistinguishable from normal humans, is the belief that he has conscious feelings under certain situations. The critical question, then, is whether, by holding such beliefs in his own feelings, he becomes internally indistinguishable as well. If we were to ask him whether or not he has conscious feelings, he would be quite sincere in answering affirmatively, just as we humans sincerely believe we have feelings.

There is nothing about humans serving as evidence that they actually feel things in a way that is transcendent to merely believing they feel things. Our own individual beliefs in our own respective feelings provide all the evidence we have for what we believe to be ‘genuine’ consciousness. But there is now good reason to suspect that our genes were able to gain survival value by making us merely believe in the genuine nature of our feelings. All aspects of human cognition, even our feelings, come down to matters of belief.

Once we admit that this uncomfortable idea completely fits all the scientific data – with the sole exception being that it just doesn’t ‘feel’ right – then we are free to accept that human brains are deterministic, which also fits our scientific understanding of physical brain processes. We find ourselves with a very simple explanation of free will: There is no such thing. We merely believe we freely choose the courses of our lives. But unlike feelings, which actually become ‘real’ to us as individuals when we believe in them, free will remains a powerful illusion even when we devoutly believe in it.

We humans are extremely complicated beings with vast powers of computation, huge memories and wildly diverse collections of beliefs. It should not be a surprise that we would have complex and unpredictable behaviors, even though those behaviors are deterministically bound to the trajectory of physical brain processes. But there is no reason why natural selection would ever prefer a species that has the whimsical ability to freely choose a course other than that which is deemed most rational by genetically-defined heuristics. And the degree to which a mind can be rational and reliable is limited by the degree to which it is deterministic. In other words, rational thought is impossible without a deterministic mind.