Consciousness & happiness

Friday, February 17, 2006

Elan vital and consciousness

Gotta start somewhere.

How about this. Two hundred years ago, it was obvious, self-evident, that something left a body at death, a vital spark, the "élan vital". This belief is called "vitalism."

Nowadays, we understand that life happens--it can't help it!--as a result of complex and interrelated biological functions, which stop functioning when something dies. Science did away with the need for a spirit, or soul, or something extra in additional to the physical organism. Not to say there isn't an extra ingredient--just that it's unnecessary to explain life.

...the recursive intricacies of the reproductive machinery of DNA make élan vital about as interesting as Superman's dread kryptonite. (Dan Dennett)

Maybe consciousness will turn out to be like this. There's this thought experiment involving zombies. Not Haitian undead B-movie zombies, but rather philosophers' zombies. These are folks just like you and me, completely undistinguishable from us, except they don't have a sensation of consciousness, they have no "inner life." Sure, they talk about their feelings, sensations, loves, memories and all that. The thought experiment is that there's absolutely no difference between "you" and "zombie-you" discernable from the outside. But that inside it's blank.

I'll look later at how it's possible to divide consciousness-philosophers into two camps, those who think such beings are (in theory--remember this is a thought experiment!) possible, and those who don't. For now, pretend they are possible.

Then it would seem that "you"--good old regular, reading-this-blog you--has something extra that "zombie-you" doesn't have. Call it "consciousness."

So the question is, might this property "consciousness" turn out to be like the old élan vital? That is, in a few years, or a few hundreds of years, we'll convince ourselves that consciousness is inevitable when you have a complex organism with a trillion-neuron brain, like us? Nothing extra: you get a fancy body and brain, you're conscious. Nothing more to explain.

Great, that's the first one down! How am I doing?

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