The Argument from Consciousness – Response to
Rationality Rules
Introduction
Rationality Rules is an atheist youtuber who often creates
‘debunking’ videos of popular apologetics arguments. In the video I will be
reviewing (The
Argument from Consciousness - Debunked (Consciousness Proves that god Exists -
Refuted) - YouTube) and showing where RR makes a number of mistakes.
1 – Commentary
RR opens the video by saying…
“The phenomenon of
consciousness is no doubt extraordinary. To be aware of and responsive to our
surroundings is arguably the most mysterious and important aspect of our
lives…but is it so extraordinary, so special, that it must be the product of
divine intellect?”
The first big error here is how RR seems to be defining and
classifying consciousness. Consciousness is much richer than the simple ability
to be aware of and responsive to our environment. What makes the problem of
human consciousness so hard to solve is (1) the wealth of neuroscientific
evidence which calls in to question the assumption that the brain produces
consciousness, and (2) the explanatory challenge of explaining how the brain
produces qualitative sensations such as qualia. Both of these aspects have
called into the question that all consciousness is is just an organism being
responsive to their environment. Robots are aware of (in a diminished sense)
and responsive to their environment but we do not say that they have
consciousness.
At 0.56, RR then presents the argument in its syllogistic
form which he presents as follows…
1.
It is a fact that human consciousness
exists.
2.
This fact can be adequately explained
within a theistic framework, whereas it cannot be adequately explained within a
naturalistic (or materialistic) framework.
3.
Hence, there is a fact that only theism
can explain.
4.
Therefore, God exists.
I have simply quoted this directly in order for the argument
to be laid out in its syllogistic form and to avoid accusations of straw
manning.
Next, at 1.33, RR defines consciousness as…
“the state of
being aware of and responsive to one’s surroundings.”
However this is a totally inadequate definition of
consciousness and is a definition that is never used by proponents of the
argument from consciousness for God. RR seems to have gotten the definition
from, you guessed it, Google. As mentioned before, human consciousness is much
more complex than this simplistic and exclusive definition. Nobody in
neuroscience and philosophy of mind has been able to come up with a fixed, all-encompassing
definition of consciousness, so if RR seems to think that he has ‘the’
definition then I suggest he publishes a paper and goes and gets his Nobel
prize. The faculties of human consciousness such as introspection and qualia
are much harder to make sense of under materialism, but have been conveniently
omitted from RR’s definition.
At 1.47, RR then goes on to accusing theists of defining
consciousness as something that it isn’t…
“many proponents
of the argument from consciousness attempt to implicitly define it to mean
something that it’s not. Such as ‘a transcendent part of the human
personality’, and in doing this they’re attempting to immaterial and unnatural
properties into the definition of consciousness, which is essentially a
backhand way of Begging the Question.”
After an extensive research, I could find no philosophical
paper or entry in anywhere on the internet in which a proponent of this
argument defined consciousness as “a transcendent part of the human
personality”. I have no clue where RR got this theistic definition from but no
theist or non-physicalist I have ever read, come across or seen through
research has ever defined consciousness this way. As such, his accusation of
begging the question holds no water because he is attacking straw-man theism.
What makes it even worse is that RR has also defined consciousness as something
which it isn’t, in order to make it easier to explain under
naturalism/materialism. Talk about begging the question.
Then at 2.09, RR says the following…
“they [theists]
must first acknowledge that every shred of evidence has so far supported the
statement that consciousness is a product of the mind, which in turn is a
product of the brain – there’s absolutely no evidence to suggest that our
consciousness is independent of our bodies…none.”
First point I want to address that despite his confident
tone, RR gave no evidence whatsoever in either his video or his video
description to support this statement. He didn’t even give any neuroscientific
papers a mention. Maybe RR should watch this video by Inspiring Philosophy just
to whet his appetite (Neuroscientific
Evidence: Irreducible Mind (Part 1) - YouTube) and then purchase these
books : Irreducible Mind (2009), Beyond Physicalism (2019) and Consciousness
Unbound (2021). RR’s proposition here also seems to conflict with his earlier
definition of consciousness. Before he said that consciousness is simply the
ability to be aware of and responsive to one’s surroundings, but now he says
that consciousness is a product of the mind. You could have a brain which helps
an organism respond to its environment and be aware of it without any mental
states, qualia, introspection and intentionality at all. If consciousness is
produced by the mind then why do we have a mind?
The next criticism of RR’s idea here is that just because
there is no evidence of consciousness outside of an appeared body, it does not
follow that it is product of the brain. RR has himself committed the
non-sequitur fallacy. In my idealistic framework, the brain and the body are
the extrinsic appearances of conscious and unconscious mental processes. This
hypothesis is entirely suitable with his claim that there is evidence of
consciousness being independent from our bodies. Even this claim however can be
called into question with cumulative research into near death experiences.
Check out another video (Near Death
Experiences: Irreducible Mind (Part 5) - YouTube). I would recommend that
RR looks into the near death experience of Pam Reynolds as well.
The actual criticism of the argument begins at 2.34 where RR
says…
“the first
objection to be stated is that premise three [Hence, there is a fact that only
theism can explain] doesn’t follow from premise two, making the entire argument
a non-sequitur. Even if we were to assume that theism can adequately explain
consciousness, and that naturalism can’t, it by no means follows from this
alone that only theism can explain consciousness.”
This criticism I completely agree with but it is more
targeted at the formal structure in which the very specific presentation of the
argument has been presented. Yes, there are several non-theistic alternatives
that can explain consciousness. The argument should have been formatted in more
Bayesian terms to say something to the effect of : ‘non-naturalistic hypothesis
can offer better explanations of consciousness therefore we should favour
non-naturalistic theories over naturalistic ones’. However, both of the
alternatives that RR brings up, deism and pantheism, are both subsets of theism
so they are not actually non-theistic alternatives. They should have been
phrased as ‘non-Abrahamic theistic alternatives’ because this seems to be what
his point is. Other possible options to mention are panpsychism, dual-aspect
idealism, analytic idealism, absolute idealism, etc…
RR then goes on to say that the argument commits a black and
white fallacy, which it does and I wholly agree with his criticism there also.
Next, at 3.44, RR raises another critique…
“A third flaw to
raise is that even if the conclusion of the argument was valid, all it would
prove is that theism alone can explain consciousness…it wouldn’t even suggest,
let alone prove that a specific religion is true.”
However, the argument was never set out to do this. The
subtitle of RR’s video is “Consciousness Proves that god Exists – Refuted). The
argument from consciousness never set out to prove that a specific deity exists
or that a specific religion is true. This criticism is completely irrelevant to
the point here.
At 4.12, RR levels another criticism of the argument, and
here is where the major disagreements will come in…
“A fourth
spectacular flaw that the Argument from Consciousness commits is a giant
argument from ignorance. If we cut to the core of what’s being asserted, it’s
essentially that because we can’t explain consciousness from a naturalistic
framework (which by the way we can), theism must be correct. Or put more directly,
the argument from consciousness is founded on the statement that ‘we don’t know
how to explain consciousness, therefore God.’”
This is a common talking point from materialists and
atheists, that the explanation has to be natural or it’s an argument from
ignorance because everything we have discovered is natural so based off
induction we should infer natural. Firstly, this argument can be reversed into
a much stronger argument for idealism by saying that everything we experienced
and been aware of is ultimately qualia, sense experience and consciousness
therefore we should infer that everything is qualia, sense experience and
consciousness. Secondly, proponents of the argument aren’t just waving their
hands and shouting that naturalism cannot explain consciousness at the moment,
they are arguing that the very metaphysics of materialism and naturalism,
cannot even in principle begin to tackle the hard problem of consciousness or
the quantitative/qualitative distinction. It’s much more than just the muddled,
confused cry of theists. Maybe read these books to understand the depth of the
problem…
·
Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonus
(Berkeley, 1713)
·
The Conscious Mind (Chalmers, 1996)
·
The Mysterious Flame (McGinn, 1999)
·
Why Materialism is Baloney (Kastrup, 2014)
·
The Idea of the World (Kastrup, 2018)
The “we don’t know therefore God” objection is explicitly
assuming naturalism and materialism in this argument and RR needs to hold his
burden of proof to defend these metaphysical presuppositions. His argument is
basically “it has to have a natural explanation or it’s an argument from
ignorance”.
At 4.00, RR goes on to give his explanation of how naturalism
can explain consciousness by saying…
“To state it very,
very simply, the nervous system evolved to orchestrate movement, feelings
evolved to move organisms towards or away from stimulus, awareness evolved to
make sense of these feelings, and consciousness evolved to allow organisms to
respond more efficiently to their feelings.”
However, this is far from any explanation of consciousness
and how the brain is responsible for producing qualia and introspective
abilities and meta-cognition. Simply slapping evolution onto consciousness
doesn’t suddenly explain it away. It didn’t work for Dennett and it certainly
won’t work for you. RR says that the “nervous system evolved to orchestrate
movement” which is partly true but you also need a muscular system, respiratory
system, cardiovascular system and a skeletal system in order to move along with
a nervous system (in humans anyway).
RR then says that “feelings evolved to move organisms
towards or away from stimulus”. This is simply false. A stimulus response is
needed but none of this necessitates the inner qualia associated with a
feeling/response to stimulus. Chalmers brings this point up by saying that all
of evolution could work equally well “in the dark”. We still don’t have an explanation
for why it doesn’t work in the dark. Robots can move towards or away from a
stimulus but it does not follow that they have feelings. RR seems to have
watched this one 18 minute video to get this information (Why evolution invented
consciousness (and how to make the most of it): Bjorn Grinde at TEDxLSE 2014 -
YouTube). The person leading the talk is Bjorn Grinde – a biologist. He is
not a philosopher of mind, nor is he a neuroscientist or cognitive scientist. I
don’t think RR picked his source well for this video. I plan to create a blog
post responding to Grinde’s hypothesis at a later date.
RR then says, “awareness evolved to make sense of these
feelings”. Again, since there is no reason why these ‘feelings’ or stimuli
responses can not work as effectively in the dark, as Chalmers would put it,
not explaining feelings leads us into this non-answer. It has no explanatory
power because until it can be substantiated that the brain produces the qualities
of feelings from stimuli then the idea of awareness is irrelevant. He has built
his hypothesis on a sand-castle and the tide is coming in.
Finally, simply saying that it ‘evolved’ also has no
explanatory power. How did it evolve? How did brain structures change over time
to create the emergence of qualitative experience from brain tissue and
environmental stimuli? When did humans become conscious or is consciousness a graduated
scale? RR seems to think that name dropping evolution by natural selection does
all the explaining but it doesn’t. If he seriously thinks that this is a solution
to the problem of consciousness then he, like Dennett, is living in magic fairy
tale land.
There are many organisms which do not have consciousness but are incredibly adept at survival. The tardigrade is a microscopic organism but it is extremophilic. It can survive in a wide variety of temperature and pressure conditions and can respond to its environment appropriately. It is extremely good at surviving. However it does not have anything like human consciousness or cognition. I would hope that we can both agree that tardigrades do not have meta-cognition or emotions like we do. If RR's hypothesis is correct, then we should expect to see only organisms with our level of consciousness or something comparable to it being the best at surviving and reproducing. However this is not what we see.
This is the end of my commentary because the rest of the
video is just a recap and him thanking his subscribers for subscribing.
2 – Conclusion
RR’s video on the argument from consciousness is to me an
extremely poor quality video. The first reason for this is that he presented an
extremely bad version of the argument. I agree with his analysis of a few
fallacies within the argument since the argument he presented is deductively
invalid. The second reason for me thinking the video is poor quality is because
of his complete ignorance of the complexity of the problem of consciousness and
its surrounding microproblems. If RR thinks that his 40 second rundown of
evolution solves the problem of consciousness, then he has a lot more to learn.
In short, whilst informative in parts, this video needs serious revision to be
considered any “debunking” of the argument from consciousness.
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