Tom Jonard's Privacy of Consciousness Page
We
are only ever directly aware of one consciousness and one mind -- our
own.
We are completely isolated from directly knowing the thoughts and
feelings
of another. It is a gap that we bridge only partly with
language.
Others report to us their thoughts and feelings and we conclude aided
by
other evidence of their likeness to us that they too have conscious
minds
like ours. What a remarkable situation and one to which unless we
think about it we are totally unaware!
If
I think of a cup of hot chocolate but tell no one about it then I am
the
only one who knows about that thought. No one else has any way of
knowing that thought. If I never tell anyone about that thought
then
I am the only witness to its existence. If I died bearing this
secret
it would be to the rest of the world as if that thought never
existed.
Nevertheless it is not true in this case that it did not exist only
that
I never revealed its existence. In this way our thoughts and
feelings
are ultimately private.
Even
if I report what I have thought I do not give you the thought that I
have.
You may hearing my report construct in your own mind another thought
with
similar content. But it is not the same thought. If for
instance
I neglect to mention that my chocolate was in my favorite cup you might
think it in your favorite cup. Even if we resolve all the
permutations
of the thought of a cup of hot chocolate (if we could) our respective
constructions
will always remain as separate and unique as our minds.
The
same is true of our feelings and perceptions. We may both see a
cup
of hot chocolate on the table between us but the perception of that cup
in each of our minds is not the same. Each perception is a
construct
-- a fact which is obscured by the additional fact that both constructs
are related to a single external independent artifact.
Nevertheless
we are not talking about what is on the table but what is in our minds.
Perception
seems a simple act but it is not. Just like describing a thought
perception is a negotiation between the external stimulus of that
thought
and the construct we build for it in our minds. It is not an all
at once event, complete and without refinement over time. The
longer
we look at the cup the more we notice. The more we notice the
more
revisions we make to the construct. The process is similar to the
verbal exchange in which I related my mere thought of the cup to you.
Another
example is the experience of pain. We do not experience the pain
of another though we might experience another type of pain in the
presence
of their displayed agony. Alleviating pain is a doctor's
dilemma.
With no direct experience of what their patients are going through, no
objective measure of pain and perhaps not even any personal experience
of pain under similar conditions they have little guide as to what or
how
much to do. Their power to help is frozen by the subjectivity of
experience.
If
science fiction is any guide it is a good thing that we can not
directly
sense the thoughts and feelings of others. Science fiction is
replete
with stories of the social and practical dilemmas such a sensitivity
would
supposedly bring. To me it seems such concerns are mostly naive
and
lacking in imagination. In part this seems to me to be a
consequence
of confusing the working of the human mind with that of a
computer.
A computer program mimics human mental processes in many ways but it is
a limited and therefore misleading model.
At
some level given similar hardware and operating software a computer
program
runs the same on two different computers. By this I mean that
logic
elements and signal states will change in exactly the same way on the
two
machines so paired. The Psycho-Neural
Identity (PNI) model of the mind is based on experiments which show
that the same areas in individual brains are active when performing the
same mental functions. So it seems that PNI and the computer
model
both support an identity of structure and function for individual
brains.
PNI
however is based on observation of large structures of the brain and it
is reasonable to ask how identical in function individual brains are at
the level of neurons and synapses. It is unlikely for instance
that
individuals have the same structure at these levels in their visual
processing
cortex. So it is unlikely that individual processing of the same
visual input involves identical complexes of neurons and
synapses.
Without negating the insight of PNI it is possible to see how mental
experience
could have a unique element tied to the unique neural and synaptic
structure
of individuals.
Computers
are the end product of a design and manufacturing process whose goal is
to produce identical machines that replicate the behavior
desired.
We know how computer logic elements work and how they can be aggregated
to produce such automated calculating machines. On the other hand
brains are the end state of a long evolutionary process. We don't
know how or why the brain behavior that we observe developed. We
don't know how neurons work to produce that behavior. Our ability
to understand computers and brains and explain their functions are
arguably
different.
Human
development is an evolutionary process in miniature. The basic
plan
is genetically given but the expression is subject to years of
influence
by outside factors. Thus the brain that results does not have the
same neurons and neural connections as another. Just as the brain
is not laid down like a computer chip from a master design the
"program"
of consciousness is not crafted by a single master craftsman and
replicated
in to biological equivalent of a file copy. It too is evolution
and
development working hand-in-hand.
The
computer metaphor for brain function does not extend to how brains get
to be brains and therein lies its limit.
It
is naive to think that when I think of a cup of hot chocolate I have
the
same identical brain state in terms of neurons and synapses as another
thinking the same. It is much more plausible that this is not
true.
Indeed the same mental state in someone else might represent something
entirely different to me -- a green sports car for instance. This
would solve all science fiction conundrums of telepathy and mind
reading.
If we sensed other's thoughts and feelings what we sensed might only be
a cacophony of apparently random thought or meaningless noise.
Telepathy
might be possible but mind reading impossible. Indeed we could
all
be telepathic -- learning to ignore the random and disjointed mental
images
produced at an early age.
If
it is true that the way our brains represent our thoughts and feelings
is unique to each of us then our mental processes are private in a more
fundamental way than implied by our separateness as individuals.
That separateness results in privacy only because we cannot directly
share
our thoughts and feelings with another mind like a computer can share a
file. In the latter case if we could somehow find a way to share
thoughts and feelings this way we would nevertheless find that they
were
unintelligible -- like two different brands of computers trying to
share
files coded in proprietary formats.
