what do you mean by “consciousness”? (part 1)
The characters in Ghost in the Shell struggle to understand their “ghost” — their actual self, the real person beneath all the cybernetic enhancements in their bodies, brains and bloodstream.
Major Motoko Kusanagi: Maybe all full-replacement cyborgs like me start wondering this. That perhaps the real me died a long time ago and l’m a replicant made with a cyborg body and computer brain. Or maybe there never was a real ”me” to begin with.
Like all of us, they know that their ghost is important, they believe that it is real thing, but they don’t know exactly what it is. In a quiet moment on boat, Kusanagi tries to convince herself that she still has ghost by creating a list of many different aspects of herself.
Kusanagi: A face to distinguish yourself from others. A voice you aren’t aware of yourself. The hand you see when you awaken. The memories of childhood, the feelings for the future. That’s not all. There’s the expanse of the data net my cyber-brain can access. All of that goes into making me what I am. Giving rise to a consciousness that I call “me.”
The word “ghost” comes from “Ghost in the Machine”, a phrase coined by Gilbert Ryle to ridicule the idea that:
- The Ghost: There is a thing that exists somewhere in our bodies that gives rise to all the other important aspects of a human being.
We call this thing the “self‘ or the “mind” or our “consciousness“. In the anime, it’s the “ghost”.
Mind Uploading
The assumption is especially noticeable when someone talks about transferring consciousness from one body to another or from a body to a machine (called “mind uploading“). Here, “consciousness” is a thing at a place and then it gets moved over to a new place. In other words, it works exactly the same way ordinary “things” work.
This is completely different than the way programs or data works. You can’t actually “move” data from one machine to another — you can only copy it and then delete the original. A program isn’t a “thing” that can be moved from place to place. It’s made of information and information follows different rules.
The only way to “upload” your consciousness into a program is to create a simulation of yourself — a program that talks like you, thinks like you, remembers the same things you do, and so on. Would the simulation actually be you? Of course not. For one thing, you’re still standing right there.
If I had a perfect simulation of myself, I don’t know what I’d do with it. Maybe I’d show it to some friends and they’d say “Oh my God! It sounds just like you!” Eventually the novelty would wear off and I’d probably delete it to make room for other apps.
What do people mean when they say “my consciousness”?
Using the word “consciousness” avoids the overtly religious term “soul” or the covertly religious term “astral body”, but it’s the same idea: your “self” or your consciousness is an invisible thing inside you. It’s the real you.
Other people talk about “consciousness” as if it was kind of invisible stuff — an invisible energetic fluid. They might think of the self as being made of “consciousness”. (This reminds me of Bergson’s elan vital or life force”.) They talk about the “amount” of “consciousness” in various things or in the fabric of the universe. And there are other kinds of invisible physical stuff, like “vibrations” or “energy” or “force”. These are little less concrete, but they are still aspects of the physical world. In order to have a vibration, there has to be something vibrating — whatever that thing is, it’s invisible. Finally, there are still other people who talk as if a person’s consciousness is a thing in a different space, a space with higher and lower levels or “planes”. A space that you can’t see — an invisible space.
Why This Doesn’t Make Any Sense
Your “consciousness” isn’t an ordinary physical thing. It’s not the sort of thing that you could see or touch. It’s not some small fleshy organ somewhere in your brain. It’s not a glowing fluid you could catch a jar (although it’s shown this way in some science fiction films). It’s a not a “vibration” or, if it is, we can’t see whatever is vibrating. If it exists in some other space, we don’t know where that space is or how to get there.
Philosophers call things like this “metaphysical“. That is, it’s perfectly real, in exactly the same way as any other physical thing, but it’s invisible for one reason or another — it’s made of invisible stuff. The idea that your mind or self is made of metaphysical stuff is called “substance dualism” — and there isn’t a single modern philosopher that thinks substance dualism is correct.
The big problem is this: these invisible things have to have a way of interacting with visible things — e.g., your consciousness can make your hand move and the world affects your mind when you perceive things. If our physics is even close to being right, this would require that at least some energy is exchanged between your mind and your body, at least enough to reliably carry information from one to the other.
Unfortunately for metaphysics, physicists have become incredibly good at measuring energy, and no trace of this metaphysical “mind-stuff” has shown up in their particle accelerators or their equations. At this point they’ve measured most things to about one part in a thousand billion billion. Either: (1) Our physics is just wrong and there is a way to transfer information using less energy than we can measure. (2) There is no mind-stuff and no metaphysical basis for the self.
The Only Way I Can Think of That This Might Make Sense
You might be getting tired of snarky criticism, so, just to give it a rest, here’s what I actually think.
It’s possible that all these ways of talking about “consciousness” or the “self” are dead metaphors. A metaphor tries to say something true about something that actually exists, using language that isn’t true about something that may not exist.
A metaphysical self or consciousness-as-a-thing are incredibly unlikely to exist. But this doesn’t mean that the self doesn’t exist or that consciousness doesn’t exist or that we can’t say things about them that are true. It just means that they’re not a thing or substance.
They could be something else, something that isn’t physical: a sequence of experience, a strategy or function or algorithm that the brain implements, information, or subjective perception and subjective action. It could be a system of several aspects, like the list made by Major Kusanagi.
These are all real things in the real world, but none of these is a “physical thing”, much less an invisible physical thing like a “soul”.
But we can talk about it as if it was a physical thing. We can reify it. Sometimes we have to — it’s hard to talk about things like “information” or “experiences” or “subjectivity” without using metaphors.
You just have to be careful that a metaphor is still apt — that whatever you’re saying with the metaphoric language is still also true for the target of the metaphor, the thing you’re actually talking about. Metaphors that reify can be misleading — you’re talking something that’s not a physical thing as if it was a physical thing and there are may be significant differences between the way physical things work and the way the target of the metaphor works.
If you start to forget that you’re using a metaphor, the metaphor dies. It stops being a figure a speech and starts to seem literal. If everyone in a culture forgets the metaphor, it becomes a dead metaphor. Sometimes the literal meaning gets forgotten and all that remains is the metaphor. Sometimes the word becomes polysemous — a word with two meanings. The literal meaning and the metaphoric meaning exist side by side.
I think it’s not a coincidence that the word Neshamah (נשמה) in Hebrew means both “soul” and “breath”. I don’t know, but I imagine that at one time it just meant “breath”, and it was often used as a metaphor for “living self”. Now it means both. One of the definitions is the original literal meaning, the other is a dead metaphor.
CHARLES GILLINGHAM 