The current conundrum: understanding the role of consciousness in a world of machines.
Now, what is specific about consciousness and what gives it a very special place in our scientific vision of the world, is that we have no place for her. We know, in our daily struggle, that consciousness makes a big difference to our behavior, to our understanding. We try to improve our consciousness, we try our sons and daughters to be as aware and "smart" as possible, we want to live in a society where everyone is as conscious as he/she can be. We know what it is like to be tired and sleepy, we know how it allows us to do repetitive tasks but also how it prevents us from learning or solving a problem that really needs our attention. A state of clear consciousness might be relatively useless for repetitive tasks, those tasks that we have already learned and are now doing by heart. But, on the other hand, it seems essential to other tasks that involve inventiveness, learning, to do new things, to go into previously unexplored territory. In short, consciousness is no good if we just want to obey, but it is absolutely necessary to create order out of chaos, to introduce some new "intelligent" organization, vision or technique, where there was none.
So, in the light of our daily experience, consciousness as a very strong role to play in our behavior, given time and energy enough, it leads to clarity, of vision, understanding and action. If we had just our inner experience to guide us we would certainly say that consciousness interacts with matter, or at least with automatic processes, transforming a chaotic event into something that expresses intelligent organization. So, for instance, if I don't know how to walk, my body will just rumble about, in uncoordinated movements, but the fact that I apply my consciousness, my will, to get up, to maintain some equilibrium or at least to control my bodily gestures, will lead, in time for the selection of those neural pathways that do in fact lead to successful behavior, that is, the behavior that I desired. It is as if consciousness has the physical ability to reinforce or suppress the activation of certain neural pathways in the brain, without which the body would simply be like a machine without a conductor: it would just ramble in the worlds of chaos and random chance.
But when we look into the world from a physical perspective, we see no place for consciousness to play this role. We have a place for every instrument in the vast orchestra of the human body, we see how they are finely attached to one another. If we look at the brain we can see the inputs going in from the senses and the output going out to the many motor nerves. Inside the brain we imagine a vast computer-like circuit, able to make of all this information something coherent, the inner world each of us can experience. But brain cells seem physical organisms, we have study them very hard hand what we find are molecules making up the cell walls, and, many different chemicals, we can see how the electrical and chemical reactions of the cells affect them. We can see all these "physical" phenomena, but where is the "spirit" that we feel controlling our body and mind? Is it in the calcium atoms, in the electricity, in some anatomical or functional arrangement of the brain?
As we can see the problem is not to explain what is consciousness, by the contrary, what troubles us about consciousness is a much more specific problem, not what consciousness is, but that we cannot fit these two pictures of it together. From an internal standpoint, from our conscious experience, the first person perspective, consciousness seems to have a major role in determining our behavior. But from a physical perspective, the third person perspective, the knowledge of what can be said by language, consciousness seems to be entirely absent from the physical (chemical and electrical) mechanisms that we can find in our brain. Where is it? We can feel it but we cannot see it or detect it with our instruments or see its effects in practice. How does it affect our behavior? Is perhaps some kind of material in the brain more susceptible to this "spirit" influence? How do we gain control of the body?
All of these questions are quite clearly about the relation between mind and body. This is not some ancient metaphysical question that has always afflicted philosophers. In fact, it does not even afflict many people today, just those who are scientifically minded, for these are the people that find a contradiction between their internal experience (of consciousness having an important, frequent and easily assessable role and the view that science gives of themselves as entirely mechanical objects, working like computers. That is why the problem of consciousness that faces us today has only impressed people who have believed for some reason or other, that we are like automatons (like the ancient Greek atomists Leucippus and Democritus or the Renaissance philosopher Thomas Hobbes). The fact that our scientific explanations of the world, that are based on explanations where "spirits" play absolutely no credible part, have advanced so much, to the point that they are the only ones that are credible today, makes this particular problem of consciousness a problem common to all people that are "well-educated" even if only in basic science.
In fact we do not need current science to be suspicious that people's "free choices" are in fact determined by their education and society. When we see a community of Muslim girls anxious to have their clitoridectomy, a large majority of Parisian women following the current fashion trend, or everyone buying a yo-yo when it comes fashionable again, we clearly see that most of us are guided by motives of which we are not aware and reasons we do not fully examine or understand. It is a bit more difficult to apply that reasoning to oneself. But if one becomes accustomed to see others as the product of their genetic inheritance and environment, we are almost inevitably drawn to the conclusion that all our research and doubts are also the product of our genes and environment and that all our apparent "choices" and willful thoughts and actions are after all just the product of a rambling body and brain executing in perfect detail an infinitely complex program that our deterministic world embodies. Even the indeterminacy introduced though quantum mechanics does not seem to help, first because it seems to be irrelevant at the scale of living organisms, and also because we are not really interested in chance but choice. In sum, seeing others as manipulatable, whose actions are like the product of a machine, leads us, almost inexorably, to think we are automatons too. The only difference is that now we realize how the true nature of our being is just being a machine.
This is all very dramatic, almost tragic, and we could derive great pleasure from this "fall of man": in fact I am just a machine, but I must carry on with my life, why? To care for the ones I love? But my love is just a program in the machine? Does it matter? No. So why do something, whatever I do, I think it is my choice, but I am just carrying out a program in which I had no choice in the making... etc, etc, etc... all very romantic and full of intense feelings and doubts and existential questions... who am I, etc, etc. But in all this we forget the obvious: is it true? Is it true that we are machines? Are we the mere product of our genes and environment? Is free will just a mass illusion? Or is there something akin to a "spirit" (for lack of better word) that does indeed have a role to play, that guides the body and turns the chaos into order and blindness into vision? To all these questions we must answer a definite: we don't know! For we, as a society, do not in fact know. Our neuroscience is in its infancy, we are like the Egyptians looking at the skies, they had no telescopes, we have no way to probe deep into the brain and see what the brain cells are doing, how they respond to one another in a living, healthy brain. Only when we can see what happens at an almost molecular level, can we hope to see if there is any "spirit" intervention or not. But today we can't even study the whole brain with a fine enough resolution to see the behavior of individual cells. We have several methods to probe into the brain, each with its own advantages and disadvantages, but one thing is certain: we do not know how it works. So the all thing must stay on the realm of possibilities.
If we want to live the drama of being just an automaton, that is fine, but let us not assume as a truth. It is just a belief that we choose to uphold for certain reasons. Some of us might want to uphold the opposite hypothesis, the one that resembles more closely our inner experience of consciousness, and they might want to believe that there is in fact some strange way in which the physical brain is influenced by some mysterious (regarding the concepts of today's science) influence, which somehow is more wise than matter. But, whatever we choose to upholds as our favorite truth, we should always concede that, although our choice may be based on many strong arguments, ultimately, we simply do not know.
So, being clear about consciousness implies at least distinguishing between the perennial problem of knowing what consciousness is (or matter, or causality, or space and time, etc) from understanding how our inner picture of consciousness as something non-physical acting on the physical, may be harmonized with the current scientific paradigm of seeing the world as entirely composed by physical and blind (having no experience) elements that have no experiential abilities and whose behavior can be entirely explained recurring only to these physical and blind elements. It is this contrast or fight between these very different views that creates today's peculiar problem of consciousness. The perennial mystery is, in a sense, much less worrisome, for it's solution would imply the solution of many other problems (like, proving that solipsism is false).