Debate: The Brain-Only mind

Construct or Consciousness

The Ramifications of Ramachandran’s
Brain-Only Mind

“If the substance of those sensory objects were other than consciousness
They could not both be a single entity.
A non-manifesting immaterial awareness
Does not create material substance.
Therefore, a relationship where the latter arises from the former, could not exist.
With this view that sensory objects are other than consciousness,
It will become illogical for sensory objects to appear from consciousness
Because they would have no connection.”

Transcending Ego: Distinguishing Consciousness from Wisdom - A Treatise of the Third Karmapa

-Yogachara (Mind-Only) analysis of mind-matter connection

In the question time for his second Rieth lecture Ramachandran is asked whether he considers consciousness to be a construct of the brain. Ramachandran eagerly assures his questioner that he does. Now this leaves us in a very peculiar situation. Just about every, invariably metaphorical, explanation, or elucidation, that Ramachandran resorts to in order to pursue his vision of how this ‘construct of the brain’ is connected, or correlated, to the brain involves masses of invocation of the kind of intentional activity that really only belongs to the world of consciousness. This means that Ramachandran is claiming to explain consciousness by explaining the structure and activity of the brain it terms of consciousness!

In his elucidation of some bazaar behavioural phenomena based on a defective interaction between the right and left hemispheres we are treated to a, metaphorical of course, fairy story of how the right brain ‘thinks this’ but then ‘remembers that’ whilst the left one is off shopping or whatever. Now it seems to me that this is an extraordinary crude and ad-hoc, and completely inadmissible, way to be attempting to convince us that consciousness is nothing more than the banging around, in some complex manner of course, of bits of unconscious matter. If this is so then why are we not treated to any indication of how the actual quality of conscious awareness arises from an unconscious material base. The actual details, or accounts, of brain damaged people attacking mirrors in order to grasp the reflection of a pencil for example, are nothing more than a kind of intellectual freak show illustrating a correlation between damage to the, supposed, material base of ‘consciousness’ and crazy behaviour. It says and indicates nothing about ‘consciousness’ in itself. Or is it the case that there are two ideas about how the word consciousness is to be used. To my mind (or consciousness – whichever you prefer) the term consciousness has its primary conceptual location within the realm of first hand awareness of knowledge, meaning, feeling and other inner, directly experienced experience, so to speak.

If someone claims to be able to tell me something of fundamental import concerning that nature of consciousness, as Ramachandran does, I expect to hear something about what consciousness actually is or, failing that, might be. Ramachandran clearly fails to do this or even try to do it. So why is he making the claim in the first place. The answer would seem to lie with his conviction, articulated in passing in the first lecture and emphasised at greater length in the second, that the problem of ‘life’ no longer exists since the discovery of DNA. It seems that he really believes that achieving a great enough mass of correlations between brain activity/configurations and outward behaviour (and perhaps inner thought etc.) will render the question as to what consciousness is superfluous.

This view requires the belief, usually already assumed by the purveyors of the brain-only theory of consciousness, that consciousness is an illusion. To see why this view is totally confused and unacceptable we can consider what Ramachandran says about his stance of ‘neutral monism’. Apparently ‘neutral monism’ is the view that there are not two kinds of stuff, presumably mind and matter, but only one kind. What he does not explicitly say is that the one kind of stuff that he believes is ontological effective, i.e. the real stuff, is matter. However, as in the previous lectures the issue of what consciousness is is not pursued. It cannot be pursued for if it were the ludicrous implications of his position would become obvious. If there seems to be two kinds of stuff, consciousness and matter, and there is in reality only one, and that one is matter, then consciousness does not exist.

In order to cover up the problems with this ‘brain-only’ view philosophers usually grant the realm of consciousness a kind of provisional illusory status. However even such an illusory status is problematic. Actually consciousness should not even exist as an illusion. A mirage, for instance, is an illusion. But it is an illusion which has a, materially based, explanation. We know how the illusion functions and comes into being. This, however, is not the case with consciousness. If it were a material illusion it has no possibility of being demonstrated as being such. Ramachandran, and materialist thinkers like him are quite aware of the impossibility so they simply have to bully their audience into accepting without any evidence the illusion that consciousness is an illusion.

Lets us look at an example of how Ramachandran’s employs judicious use of language to advance a discredited philosophical paradigm within a new formulation, actually saying exactly the same thing, but appearing to say something far more deep, weighty and abstruse. Any aspiring philosophers who wish to learn techniques of defending an argument by advancing it on context shifting grounds of justification should read on with alacrity. At the very outset of his lecture Ramchandran directs our attention to the ‘transformation’ which is ‘nothing short of a miracle’ of ‘two tiny upside down distorted images inside of your eyeballs’ into the ‘vivid 3-D world out there’.

He then asks, in a very authoritative and assured manner which implies that the goal and purpose of his lecture is to answer this very question: ‘How does this come about?. The audience settles down, with great expectancy, to hear the answer, we have been told that what we are about to hear will have ‘stunning’ implications. However, apart from the next few sentences in which he throws a completely fallacious, confused and disreputable sophistic smokescreen in to the faces of his expectant listeners, nothing in his lecture contributes to the kind of understanding we have been led to expect both by the publicists for the lectures and Ramachandran himself.

So how does the ‘miraculous transformation’ came about? Well, according to Ramachandran, the reason for this miracle is that the transformation is caused by a, wait for it, ‘transform’. I couldn’t believe that he was going to get away with this but he did. No-one pointed out to him that he has said absolutely nothing. Suppose you asked a theologian ‘how did Jesus manage the miracle of transforming water into wine?’ and he replied ‘Well, isn’t it obvious, it was a transform!’ Would you accept this throwing back at you of the word ‘transform’ as an explanation or elucidation. Or wouldn’t you fall about laughing at the incredible cheek that someone had tried to pull such a cheap philosophical trick and expected you to fall for it. And yet this is precisely the level of the philosophical content of what we are offered in the prestigious Rieth lectures and no-one is questioning it!

Why? Well perhaps I maybe asked to deliver next years lectures on the important topic of what Wittgenstein called ‘notations’. The concept of a ‘notation’ is that of a manner of speaking which says nothing but makes every one feel comfortable because it remains within the confines of expectations and habitual ways of viewing reality. Another image that Wittgenstein employed for such linguistic situations was that of someone employing words as if they were cogs which rotated whilst nothing rotated with them. This method of ‘notational exposition’, which depends upon the listener’s habitual, consensual and tacit agreement to a formulaic manner of exposition is routine within the wild borders of brain-consciousness scientific discourse. With this weapon you can go far, as Ramachandran is living proof, in certain areas of academia. Welcome to the ramifications of the brain-only mind.

Lets look at Ramachandran’s claims a little more deeply. He first refers to what is generally the logical absurdity of the homunculus picture of brain functioning. This picture, as he says, involves an infinite regression of little men all inside the brain all viewing an inner screen, an obviously ludicrous manner of trying to come to terms with the way in which a pure material configuration becomes the inner awareness of seeing. It is this transformation into ‘inner awareness’ that is the crucial issue for the elucidation of how the brain gives rise to consciousness. If this had not been the case the problem of the inner homunculus would not have proved to be so intractable.

Ramachandran’s approach to the homunculus problem is to murder it and hope that no one notices! Well perhaps we should say he attempts to render it redundant by employing another word picture, a picture in which all homunculi are banished, or should we say hidden. We have to ‘get rid of the idea of images in the brain and think in terms of ‘transforms or symbolic representations’. Ramachandran tells us that “just as little squiggles of ink, print or writing, or dashes or dots of morse code can symbolise or represent something’ so, too, patterns of firing within the neurons of the brain represent objects and events in the external world even though they don’t resemble them. Neurobiologists are to be considers as ‘cryptologists’ cracking the codes of brain representation.

This all sounds very nice but it is fallacious, not to say fraudulent. Why? Because it in no way does this sleight of mind solve the ‘problem of perception’, or contribute to understanding the ‘problem of self’, both of which are claims made by Ramachandran. The neurobilogist Antonio Damasio, in his book The Feeling of What Happens says that “The general problem of representing the object is not especially enigmatic”. Like Ramachandran, Damasio believes that “the object is exhibited in the form of neural patterns in the sensory cortices appropriate to map its characteristics”. The crucial piece of fraudulent conceptual mystification takes place when both these thinkers feel confident and justified in identifying such purely mechanical mappings with “the relationship play of consciousness”.

Actually all that Ramanchandran has done is to replace an internal screen which needs a homunculus to view it with an internal symbolic picture which is equally in need of an internal viewer. This isomorphism between the two pictures is masked by the conceptually overloaded use of the term ‘representation’. The term ‘representation’ has a use in two, connected, ‘conceptual landscapes’. The first, and primary, locus of use is in the field of consciousness. A ‘representation’ is a representation to consciousness. It needs a conscious entity in order to interpret the symbolic representation. ‘Squiggles of ink’ represent nothing unless they are intended too. Writing is the conscious, intentional use of ‘squiggles of ink’ to represent something other than ‘squiggles of ink’. Morse code is an intentional ‘transform’ of ‘squiggles of ink’ into patterns of long and short electronic pulses.

Such symbolic patterns would never have had any meaning without the intentional activity of consciousness to give them meaning. As a further development of this idea of conscious representation, by metaphoric extension, it has become accepted within a certain type of academic discourse to consider that two patterns can represent each other if they can be mapped on to each other. However to called the mapping itself, without reference to the consciousness that performs the mapping, is actually just a short hand (or ‘notation’) way of looking at things. In reality without a conscious observer there is nothing and everything. Without the link of meaning awareness anything can map into anything! There no-one to care!

However, because these two usages of the term ‘representation’ are current, the two meanings can be conflated in a manner which gives the illusion that a mechanical representation accounts for consciousness. It is quite a neat trick to explain the, supposed, illusion of consciousness by using a linguistic illusion. I wonder whether Ramachandran got the idea from any of the illusions displayed on the Radio 4 web site!

The idea of ‘transformation’ which Ramachandran is appealing to has its home in the field of mathematical mappings. All such transforms, however, are between ‘externalised structures’. There has never been an instance of any such ‘transform’ becoming magically aware of itself because it was moved into a new medium. And, here is the crucial point, ‘matter’ is, and always has been within the western scientifically based philosophical tradition, considered to be unconscious or, to be more precise, non-conscious. That is to say within the current conceptual landscape of this terminology ‘matter’ has no qualities in common with ‘consciousness’.

It follows, quite clearly, that if the aspect of conscious awareness, which is the hallmark of consciousness, does not inhere in the stuff of matter, to be activated, so to speak, by the structure being represented, then, consciousness can only be a matter, excuse the play on words, of the structure itself. The brain can have nothing extra to add in the way of conscious awareness because the brain is matter and matter is non-conscious, has no capacity for consciousness. It therefore follows that the structures must be consciously aware of themselves wherever they exhibit themselves. In other words any structure we can be consciously aware of, must be consciously aware of itself before it gets inside our brain.

Do you think this is nonsense? If you do then you are correct. But it is a logical consequence of the brain-only position. This was clearly understood by brain-only thinkers who actually propose the ridiculous idea that if we wrote down every thought a person had in symbolic form it would, in reality, be his mind! If you wish to be a little more subtle and claim that it is a function of the electromagnetic interaction of the brain neurons which are the cause of conscious awareness then you are actually claiming nothing extra. At the quantum level matter is nothing more that electromagnetic interaction. In fact at this level there are deeper problems because at this level matter as we commonly know it appears to dissolve and, although quantum physicist do not like to admit it, at the quantum level there, from one cogent point of view, is nothing but “the relationship play of consciousness”.

Any serious philosophically authentic, to use a Sartrian term, analysis of the current problems within the fields of the investigation mind and matter lead ineluctably to the Yogachara Madhyamika view that it is ‘illogical for sensory objects to appear from consciousness because they would have no connection’. According to Yogachara philosophy if we define the realms of consciousness and matter, as Descartes did, to have no common nature then there cannot be any connection. Concepts with no conceptual overlap, which is to say aspects of reality indicated by the concepts are not considered to have a common nature, cannot interact with, or effect each, other in any way. For Buddhist philosophy this is a given base for any sensible discourse about reality. As the sixth century Buddhist philosopher Chandrakirti says in his magnificent Introduction to the Middle Way:

“If something can arise from something other than itself,
Well then, deep darkness can arise from tongues of flame,
And anything could issue forth from anything.”

The context of this discussion is causality but the same principle applies to relationship. Without a common nature, a relationship, as pointed out by the third Karmapa above, cannot exist.

If thinkers such as Ramchandran were to simply say that they were in the business of showing how structures of the external world are, in some way, mechanically mapped into the neuronal firing activity of the brain we could have no argument with them. This is the picture of their field they will often appeal to when questioned deeply about the philosophical basis of claims regarding their ability to elucidate the phenomenon of consciousness. When people are not monitoring them too closely, however, they will immediately revert to the kind of language which implies they are on the road to solving the problem of an explanation of consciousness. When they are allowed to spread their wings in fanciful philosophical flight their claims tend to soar accordingly.

Ramachandran quite openly says that he thinks that the work he is engaged in will explain the evolutionary necessity for consciousness. His view, however, is internally inconsistent, depending on what Wittgenstein would have called a ‘metaphysical’ mistaken application of language, using the term ‘consciousness’ in separate, although connected, conceptual landscapes as if they were identical. If his basic brain-only position is correct then consciousness cannot be an evolutionary necessity. Everything could proceed, as it does now, without the luxury of conscious awareness. All there would be is bits of brain matter banging around mirroring other bits of matter banging around externally.

If you believe this then you deny your own consciousness. What could you possibly mean when you use the term ‘consciousness’. Do you know? Are you conscious of what you mean by ‘consciousness’? Ramachandran does not seem to know. He has had two lectures on the subject and he has still not really told us. Perhaps he really believes he has only got a brain-only’ mind!