ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

ONE difficulty has long beset neurophysiology and psychology: there
appears to be no place in the brain for consciousness or mind. This conundrum
has led many scientists to conclude that mind does not exist as a separate
entity. Psychology and psychiatry suffer from this exclusion: they lack
a theoretical framework in which to explain and investigate consciousness.

To understand this, it is important to see how consciousness came to
be pushed out of the picture. Science as we know it arose in the 17th century,
at the time of Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, Galileo, Bacon and Newton.
Up to that point, explanations of the external world were based on the authorities
of Aristotle and scholastic theology. What the new science did was to propose
models of the world that fitted with observed physical data and could be
checked by further observations. The success of the scientific method gave
rise to the reductionist science we know today – one in which everything
in the Universe can be explained ultimately in terms of physics.

In 1623, Galileo asserted that science is concerned only with primary
qualities, those qualities of the external world that could be weighed and
measured. Secondary qualities – beauty, love, meaning, value – fell outside
the realm of science. A few years later, Descartes expressed the same idea
as the difference between primary and secondary qualities. He maintained
that there are two radically different kinds of substance. The first, physical
or extended substance (res extensa) has length, breadth and depth, and can
therefore be measured and divided. The second, thinking substance (res cogitans)
is unextended and indivisible. The external world, of which the human body
is a part, belongs to the first category, while the internal world of the
mind belongs to the second.

These philosophical distinctions between primary and secondary qualities,
between mind and matter, subjective and objective, led to the exclusion
of consciousness, or subjective experience, from the scientific picture
of the external world. In each case, explanations had to move from the outside
to the inside – matter giving rise to mind. In this context, as the historian
E. A. Burtt remarked, ‘man was not a subject suitable to mathematical study’,
and was gradually excluded from the ‘real world’ of science as ‘hardly more
than a bundle of secondary qualities’.

Along with the exclusion of consciousness went the abandonment of final
causality and purpose: the subject matter of science was ‘how’, not ‘why’.
Newton himself, quite rightly at that time, supported this restriction in
his ‘Rules of Reasoning’.

With the rise of experimental psychology in the 19th century, and the
understanding that the brain was responsible for the appearance of consciousness,
scientists hoped that by studying the structure and function of the brain
they would come to understand the nature of consciousness. By the end of
the 19th century, such hopes had faded. It became clear that neurophysiology
was unlikely to give us any information about the nature of consciousness,
although it might well give some information about its mechanism.

The enchanted loom

In 1942, the neurophysiologist Sir Charles Sherrington summed up current
thinking in the Gifford Lectures, Man and his Nature. ‘Where it is a question
of ‘mind’ the nervous system does not integrate itself by centralising upon
one superpontifical cell. Rather it elaborates a millionfold democracy whose
each unit is a cell.’ He described this process poetically: ‘They weave
as every-changing pattern, never an abiding pattern, the workings of the
enchanted loom.’

Sherrington was at as much of a loss to explain consciousness as his
predecessors were: ‘For instance, a star which we perceive. The energy-scheme
deals with it, describes the passing of radiation thence into the eye, the
little light image of it formed at the bottom of the eye, the ensuring photo-chemical
action in the retina, the trains of action potentials travelling along the
nerve to the brain, the further electrical disturbances in the brain . .
. as to the perceiving of it by the mind, the scheme puts its finger to
its lips, and is silent.’ Sherrington added that ‘though living is analysable
and describable by natural science, that associate of living, thought, escapes
and remains refractory to natural science. In fact, natural science repudiates
it as something outside its ken.’ Thoughts, he held, lie outside the matter/energy
concept. Researchers hoped that eventually neurophysiology would explain
the true nature of consciousness, if only it could be made complex enough.
This has not yet happened.

Physics in the 20th century has brought the recognition that the universal
mechanical laws of Newton must give way to the laws of general relativity
for the very large, and to the statistical laws of quantum mechanics for
the very small. Once again, some thinkers hoped that consciousness could
be found lurking in some corner of our mechanical universe. Recent work
by physicists such as David Bohm heightened these expectations. During the
1960s and early 1970s, with the big bang theory gaining ascendancy among
cosmologists, it seemed possible that the conditions in the first few seconds
of the Universe had to be precisely chosen for the Universe to evolve in
the way that it has done. Some suggested that these conditions could not
have happened by chance. Since the conditions at the time immediately preceding
the expansion of the Universe could never be known (technically, this is
known as a singularity, a point at which the laws of physics break down),
consciousness and a consciously directed Universe remained possible in the
sense that they could not be disproved.

The idea of the ‘anthropic principle’ developed, in its modern form,
from an awareness of these coincidences. This principle is still the subject
of fierce debate. In its strongest and most contentious form, it says that
the evolution of human consciousness must have been written into the laws
of physics from the beginning – that the Universe is tailor-made for human
observers (see Martin Rees’s article, ‘The anthropic principle’, New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´,
6 August 1987). A logical extension of this was the picture of an implicit
unfolding order that becomes manifest during the evolution of physical laws.

It now seems, however, that some modern theories of physics have closed
even those gaps that seemed to allow for consciousness. A variation on the
anthropic principle suggests that our Universe is part of a greater ensemble
of possible universes, and that the Universe evolved the way it did either
by chance or because it was the most probable of the set of all possible
universes. And so once again, consciousness has been excluded. We can no
longer appeal to the ‘God of the Gaps’; modern physics does not leave any
gaps to be filled.

But this analytical scheme, for all its formidable coherence, runs counter
to everyday experience. We know that we live in a world where love, beauty,
meaning and value are part of our daily lives, indeed are the most important
aspects of our world. This subjective experience is what we call consciousness,
and even if the physicists find no place for it, it still has to be reckoned
with.

To understand this deficiency in reductionist science, we need to look
at the basic assumptions on which it is built. The primary qualities of
Galileo excluded subjectivity, making the data of science objective. But
how can science be totally objective when scientific observation is carried
out by subjective scientists? Our modern understanding of brain function
may help to explain this paradox, and why it is not more clearly seen by
scientists.

The external world comes into consciousness through the mind-brain mechanism.
Everything but the brain itself – the rest of the body and the outside
world – is part of the mental model created by the brain. As the physicist
Arthur Eddington observed: ‘Mind is the first and most direct thing in our
experience, and all else is remote inference – inference either intuitive
or deliberate.’ Although we experience the outside world as a series of
sensory objects, what actually comes to our senses is energy in the form
of vibrations of different frequencies, very low frequencies for hearing
and touch, higher frequencies for warmth, and higher still for vision. These
radiations carry no subjective information and have only objective value.
As Sherrington said, they are part of the energy scheme. Modern physics
would describe them simply as heaps of statistical probabilities.

These radiations trigger neural codes, which are made by the brain into
a model of the external world. This model is then given subjective value
and, by a trick of brain functioning, projected outwards to form the subjective
world. We normally call this mixture of subjective and objective components
the ‘objective world’. But it is not objective. The external world, whether
we are looking at the meters that monitor the occurrences of resonances
in high-energy particle accelerators (the data of quantum mechanics), or
the ricocheting of two billiard balls (the data of Newtonian mechanics),
is only a subjective mental model created within our brains. It need not
have objective validity, although it usually does. This trick of the brain
has led us to misunderstand the true nature of objectivity and subjectivity.

The important point is that any experience that arises in consciousness
is a subjective experience, and is not part of an independent external world.
This independent external world is a fiction generated for us by the brain,
which we have mistakenly taken as real. The fact that many people see a
similar external world has to be attributed to a similarity in the processes
underlying the mental model. We can deduce from the fact that we see a similar
‘objective’ external world only that we have similar models. A similarity
of models does not necessarily imply the uniformity of the world that gives
rise to those models.

These mental experiences are data for our scientific experiments. When
we look down microscopes at cells from our bodies, study brain waves as
traces written out by an EEG machine, or examine the chromatographic paper
which tells us about processes within the cell, we are not making independent
observation of an objective world, but subjective models of our consciousness.
Modern reductionist science slots these subjective perceptual models into
its theoretically objective and independent world. Science then expects
to find consciousness in this outside world, but it has been excluded from
the start. Our current scientific models can therefore lead only to theories
that are by definition devoid of consciousness. There is no place for consciousness
in a reductionist world. Reductionist theories of evolution, for example,
must by definition rest on mechanical and deterministic principles.

Written out of the picture

It may well be that both the Universe and evolution are mechanical,
but for theoretical reasons, this can never be proved by reductionist science.
Scientific models of brain function can explain subjective experience only
as a mechanical process: anger as activation of neural impulses in specific
areas of the brain, the amygdala-hypothalamic structures; love as activity
in those neurological systems that underpin mood; transcendent experiences,
when the world is experienced as universal love, as the dysfunction of the
temporal lobe. Some scientists would argue that if we were to understand
brain function fully, we could explain consciousness by a moving flux of
electrochemical processes within the brain. Even the synthesis of new qualities
arising from the complexity of brain structure, as in the models of artificial
intelligence, still makes use of scientific thinking, and therefore excludes
consciousness. Reductionist science posits an external world that is independent
of ourselves, but uses a subjectively contaminated mental model to assess
it.

Although psychology has not yet developed the science of Galileo’s secondary
qualities, physics has already begun to recognise that the objective and
subjective cannot be separated. Theorists of quantum mechanics include the
observer in the observation, for example, where a particle appears is dependent
on the collapse of the wave equations that specify it. Until they collapse,
the position of the particle cannot be precisely specified. Thus, observer
and observation are intimately related; that is, unless it is observed,
the particle has no precise location.

Is it possible to evolve a science of secondary qualities and of consciousness
so that reductionist psychology need no longer explain phenomena beyond
its terms of reference? And if so, what consequences would this have for
psychiatry and psychology? We might reformulate the matter along the lines
suggested by Brian Goodwin, of the Open University, who used the term ‘a
science of qualities’ in an essay on David Bohm. The current approach might
be called quantitative science, to be complemented by the development of
a qualitative science. In this way we remove the bias inherent in the use
of the words primary and secondary.

Both Galileo and Descartes pointed the way to this science when they
split off the objective world from the subjective. The study of secondary
qualities must be the science of subjective experience. The aim of such
a ‘qualitative psychology’ or ‘new dualism’ should be the analysis of consciousness
and its content. It takes as its data only subjective experiences, is consistent
within itself, and sets up theoretical models about subjective experience.
It sets out to explain the relationship between different subjective phenomena,
just as reductionist science does for the objective world. This science
progresses as does reductionist science, by the setting up of a hypothesis,
its testing, possible falsification and reformulation. In this sense, it
is a true science, as defined by the philosopher of science Karl Popper.

Psychoanalysts made early efforts in this direction by attempting to
study the content of consciousness. Their weakness was that they failed
to set up a science of consciousness; each theory explained everything and
could not be tested. Their strength was the attention that they drew to
subjective experience.

Before we can determine the nature of the new dualism, we must define
the laws of mind and consciousness. This can be done only by the detailed
observation of subjective experience with the evolution of a coherent schema
of the properties of mind and consciousness. Much of the work of psychology
at the turn of the century could again become valid, although viewed from
a different perspective. Wilhelm Wundt, for instance, founded a school in
Leipzig devoted to intense introspection as a way of examining the immediate
contents of consciousness uncontaminated by previous knowledge or anticipation.
William James, the American psychologist, studied concepts such as choice
and purpose through introspection. The new ‘qualitative’ science would be
concerned only with consciousness, not with the structure or function of
the brain, which are in the domain of the reductionist science.

We can expect that the study of our everyday consciousness would provide
a set of general laws, just as the study of the everyday world has done
in physics. These laws would change when the level of consciousness altered,
just as they do in physics when the scale alters from the very large to
the very small. Under this scheme, transcendant and mystical experience,
both spontaneous and induced by special circumstances such as near-death
experiences, would be seen as valid descriptions of the world. We can then
see consciousness as the ground structure of the Universe from which all
else arises. Study of these experiential states would lead to a more complete
understanding of the Universe and the rules that govern it. These two views,
one through the primary qualities (physics) and the other through the secondary
qualities (subjective experience) might then be related to make a unified
whole. Brains could then become conscious.

Peter Fenwick is consultant neuropsychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital
in London and David Lorimer is director of the Scientific and Medical Network.