What It’s Like to Be You: A Reflection On The Enigma of Consciousness

What is it like to be you? To wake up every morning, look at yourself in the mirror, and go about your daily life? What is it like to think all the things you think, to feel all the things you feel? It must be at least somewhat different from being me: whoever you are, you have your own history, your own experiences, your own memories, thoughts, and desires. Your own life. Your own sense of being you.

And so we come to arguably the biggest mystery of the human brain: consciousness—our subjective experience of the world and all its perceptual contents, including sights, sounds, thoughts, and sensations. It is a private inner universe that utterly disappears in states such as general anesthesia or dreamless sleep. It is something so mysterious that we still find it notoriously difficult to understand or even define.

Many have tried. In his famous 1974 essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel asks us to imagine changing places with a bat. His interest wasn’t in bats per se, but in making the point that an organism can only be considered conscious “if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something that it is like for the organism.” We could call this the subjective experience of being a bat; a state of being that is comparable to the bat’s.

Let’s take Nagel up on his challenge and imagine being a bat. A bat’s experience must be starkly different from our own. Most bats use echolocation to navigate and find food, releasing sound waves from their mouths or noses that bounce off objects and return to their ears, informing them of the object’s shape, size, and location. Some bats glide through the air, releasing slow and steady pulses of sound, which then rapidly speed up when they swoop down on their prey. Others calculate their speed relative to their prey using the Doppler effect (the change in sound frequency that happens when the source and/or the receiver are moving; the same reason an ambulance siren sounds differently as it passes). Being a bat, I imagine, would be to live in a shadowy, kaleidoscopic world of sound, instinct, and twilight flight.

But is this really what it would be like, or have I simply tried to imagine that I am a bat? If there is, in fact, something that it is like to be a bat, is it merely a sense of bat subjectivity or something more? It’s hard to say.

In the 1990s, the Australian philosopher David Chalmers took things further, proposing a hypothetical entity called the “philosophical zombie”: an exact, atom-for-atom duplicate of a human, indistinguishable from a real person in all its behavior, but with no conscious experience whatsoever. Spooky, right?

I envision such a being to be a bit like Patrick Bateman, the protagonist villain of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel 'American Psycho", who at one point in the story reveals:

“There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.”

Bateman is terrifying not for what his mind contains but for what it lacks. And here’s the point: if philosophical zombies are possible, Chalmers argued, it follows that conscious states might not be entirely connected to brain states—that there is something more to conscious life than neurons firing inside the brain.

If bats and zombies aren’t your thing, consider Mary the color scientist. Mary specializes in the neurophysiology of color vision and thus knows everything there is to know about color perception. She knows precisely how different wavelengths of light impinge on the retina and stimulate photoreceptors. She knows how they convert light into signals that are sent up the optic nerve to the primary visual cortex in the brain. She knows all the cellular and molecular details of how the visual system eventually produces the experience of blue, green, red, and so on.

But Mary has spent her entire life in a black-and-white room. She has never actually seen any colors; she has learned about them and the world through black-and-white books and television programs. One day, Mary escapes her monochrome prison and sees a brilliant blue sky for the first time. What changes? Does Mary learn something new upon seeing blue for the first time? Or is she unsurprised, since she already knows everything there is to know about how the brain processes blue in advance? If you think Mary learns something fundamentally new about the color blue, you may consequently believe that physical facts about the world are not all there is to know.

Science still has no answer to these mind-bending thought experiments, but they are valuable because they encourage philosophers and neuroscientists to work together, reconsider previous models, and build a scientific framework for new accounts of how the brain gives rise to conscious thought. Most are essentially updated versions of the great philosopher René Descartes’ mind-body dualism.

In "Meditations on First Philosophy" (1637), Descartes concluded that the mind was immaterial, something totally distinct from the physical properties of the brain. Consciousness, from this view, wasn’t so far removed from the Judeo-Christian notion of a soul, and indeed Descartes was strongly influenced by the Augustinian tradition of dividing soul and body. The resulting “Cartesian” biology came to dominate thinking until 1949 when the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle ridiculed dualism as “the dogma of the ghost in the machine.”

Such thought experiments, however, can be misleading. Some scholars have pointed out that it is in fact tremendously difficult to imagine knowing everything there is to know—about color, for instance. Consequently, we may be tying ourselves up in philosophical knots, mistaking what is merely a failure of imagination for genuine insight.

If this all sounds terribly confusing, that’s because it is. And it will remain so until we solve what’s called the “hard problem” of consciousness: namely, why any physical processes in the brain are accompanied by conscious experience. If the brain is ultimately just a collection of molecules shuttling around inside the skull—the same molecules that comprise earth, rock, and stars—why do we think and feel anything at all? Why does our extraordinary mind spring from soggy grey matter to begin with? It’s a problem that’s been with us for centuries, as opposed to the “easy problem” of consciousness, i.e., explaining how the brain works. Examples of easy problems include the biology of neurons, the mechanisms of attention, and the control of behavior—practical problems that relate to our experience of the world and that are not as deeply mysterious as the hard problem. Problems we know we can solve, in other words.

©Malik Aaqib