Intrinsic Primacy: Consciousness, the Impetus of Man
Review of The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science by Erik Hoel
Our mental lives are a whirling cacophony of complexity. These streams of consciousness, our internal narrations, incessantly counsel, direct, and distract us. They appear to be the essence of being human, rendering our subjective experiences, our identities, our intrinsic perspectives. But from whence does this inner voice, this continuity of mental experience, emanate from? Where in the brain can we find it? There certainly isn’t a homunculus under our direction that can flit from nerve to nerve and trigger the right action potentials. No, everything we’ve ever learned about the brain from “normal science” suggests we are fancy organic machines. We do the bidding of the closest proximal physical causes, simply an automaton deluded by the illusion of choice. This is the consciousness as epiphenomenon model. But neuroscientist and author Erik Hoel dissents from this and the broader determinist model, arguing that human agency has emerged as a product of evolution.
To give the anti-free-will brigade their due, here is a pithy explanation from one of its most prominent popularizers, Sam Harris:
Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn’t choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime — by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from?
Harris is obviously right about a number of things. There are many important parameters of life beyond individual control. But Harris takes this so far as to say that even our internal states our beyond us. Harris’ allegation is that the self as we know it is a deception constructed by the brain. Harris also believes this discovery can be arrived at by anyone willing to traverse altered conscious states, whether by meditation or psychedelic substances. As a partisan of the intrinsic perspective, Hoel rejects this vision after more than a decade on the frontlines of consciousness research. Hoel turns to hundreds of years of human art and wields insights from numerous fields spanning science and philosophy to present an alternative vision. One that elevates internal states of mind as relevant causes unto themselves in the world, The World Behind the World, if you will.
Phenomenology or consciousness or what it’s like to be someone is mysterious. It has befuddled even the sharpest of minds for millennia. It exhausts semantic limits and frustrates with indissoluble paradoxes. Many a careful thinker has been seduced into obscurantism and mysticism in attempts to explain it. The brain itself, often impenetrable to the standard toolbox of science, offers little way forward. Neuroscience has run awkwardly forward with strange accidents and other ghastly maladies (i.e. epilepsy) often providing the most illuminating insights. Of course, there are now advanced imaging techniques that do allow for the observation of the brain at work, but even then, these experiments are troubled by other methodological issues or unearth just tiny pieces of a prodigious puzzle. And the likely reason, consciousness is such a conundrum is that it asks us to bridge the gap between subjectivity and objectivity. In Hoel’s words, the intrinsic with the extrinsic.
The Two Perspectives of Man: Intrinsic and Extrinsic
In Hoel's telling, we now divide our world into the intrinsic and extrinsic: art and science, immaterial and material, subjectivity and objectivity. The intrinsic perspective is “the frame we take on when discussing the events that occur only within the mansions of our minds.” Hoel argues it reaches its apotheosis in our highest literature exemplified by deeply introspective characters like those you’d find in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry James, or George Eliot. Meanwhile, the extrinsic perspective is viewing the world “as consisting of machinery, mechanisms, formal relationships, extension, bodies and elements. and interactions.” It is the perspective of modern science - that the world is material and reducible to its constituent parts and that those constituents explain the world in total.
Hoel alleges these perspectives have matured with man. They weren’t bequeathed by our biology as presets - at least not in their full glory. From this starting point, the history of the intrinsic and extrinsic is traced from antiquity to the Enlightenment to contemporary neuroscience. Our intellectual fecundity begins with the nascent intrinsic perspective and expanded into formal epistemologies like philosophy and then science, the pinnacle of the extrinsic perspective. This is because evolution likely gifted humans full blown consciousness (Hoel explores a cult classic book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind that argues otherwise as a contrasting device), but our understanding of consciousness needed to be cultivated so that eventually “the view from nowhere,” Thomas Nagel’s phrase for a position of true objectivity, could develop.
Hoel produces some excerpts from ancient and then more modern texts to try and show this trajectory. This effort isn’t entirely convincing or it’s incomplete in unsatisfying ways, but I understand what he’s getting at. Alternatively, I would argue that there were a lot of social technologies and institutions that humans learned to build via cultural evolutionary processes, a product of constructive interactions between conscious beings, cooperation. Essentially, we expanded our intelligence by crowd-sourcing it and compressing wisdom into various customs, rituals, and norms. Eventually, enough foundational work was done for the rewards to be reaped via the scientific method. Thus, our material paradise. “We stand on the shoulder of giants,” a favorite adage of scientists echoing Sir Isaac Newton, could be amended to “we’ve cumulatively pooled the cognitive experiences and discoveries of generations untold and unnamed,” though this is less evocative.
The Neuroscientists Are Not Alright
Neuroscience, in Hoel’s view, is a special field where the intrinsic and extrinsic meet. It is at the bleeding edge for questions about ontology and epistemology. Unfortunately, it is a field that’s ailing. Hoel, a neuroscientist himself, catalogues the many missteps of the field: the hype around weak and near meaningless or dubious findings like mirror neurons; lazy methodological practices that result in false positives like the association between polymorphisms in the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTPLR and depression; and other foundational issues with experimental paradigms. Hoel asserts that most studies in neuroscience only aver to measure “epiphenomena” of the brain, mere statistical constructs, rather than how neural physiology actually translates into thoughts and feelings. There is a glaring inability to coherently distinguish between conscious and unconscious neural activity.
“Nothing in the brain makes sense except in the light of consciousness” ~Erik Hoel rephrasing Theodosius Dobzhansky’s famous quote about biology and evolution
To contextualize his critique, Hoel reviews a famous scientific dialectic: Karl Popper’s falsifiability algorithm whereby scientists sequentially test hypotheses making incremental progress (thesis); Thomas Kuhn’s argument for revolutionary paradigms of disruptive creativity that uproot and displace tired models (antithesis); and Imre Lakatos’ core principles mixed with a periphery of shifting principles or “refined falsificationism” (synthesis). His point in doing this is to argue that neuroscience needs a new paradigm, one that recognizes that consciousness is “ brain-wide frame of reference for every other cognitive function.” Neuroscience needs a principle-based system that builds on three fundamentals: 1) Biological mechanisms of the brain underlie cognition 2) The learning rules of the brain are specified in a high-parameter space of evolved neuronal connections 3) the brain’s high-parameter space provides conscious experience in “lawful” ways.
A Conflict of Visions: Francis Crick Vs Gerald Edelman
Before we’re made privy to a lawful model of consciousness, we get a brief history of consciousness research. After a long period in the wilderness in which consciousness research was sidelined as the purview of cranks, theologians, and philosophers. Scientists began to turn their serious attention to the issue in the late 20th century. Two eminent figures Francis Crick (a discoverer of DNA structure) and Gerald Edelman (a discoverer of antibody structure) founded two separate approaches. Crick advocated for an incremental empirical approach that would carefully compile the “neural correlates of consciousness” until the whole picture materialized in full focus. Edelman advocated for a quantitative grand theory that he called “neural Darwinism” in that he believed a set of concepts in the brain were forged by evolution. The differential approaches basically boil down to empiricists versus theorists. Hoel points out the limitations inherent to both approaches, but believes the theory first approach is needed for an empirical approach to provide anything meaningful on this question. I’m not sure I’m convinced on this point, but find nothing to object to as both these lines of research will certainly continue in parallel and hopefully cross-pollinate fruitfully.
From within the Edelman lineage, a theory was built by Giulio Tononi called integrated information theory (IIT). Tononi was Hoel’s mentor in his graduate studies, which Hoel quite specifically sought out. Thus, Hoel worked intimately with IIT, a set of axioms about the nature of conscious experience.
Integrated Information Theory (IIT)
Inspired in part by Euclid’s geometry, IIT is a set of claims that are self-evidently or assumed to be true and build a descriptive systems for consciousness:
Consciousness exists
Consciousness is informative (experience is specific)
Consciousness is composed (experience differs in content and structure)
Individual experience is integrated (the gestalt of conscious experience is irreducible to components)
Consciousness is definite (there is a particular flow and particular elements that bound conscious experience)
In a denser section of the book, we are also made privy to the companion mathematics that accompany and formalize these assertions. Hoel then explores some of the uses and criticisms of IIT. He’s sympathetic to critiques of IIT, which shows admirable epistemic humility given that scientist are often quite protective of the ideas. The most salient criticism is the realization that IIT underdetermines consciousness, suffering from a kind of vapidity. The axioms shed no light on the subjective aspects of experience. Qualia remain ever elusive.
I Think, Therefore I Am… But I Am A Strange Loop
In his disappointment with the limitations of IIT, Hoel turns to philosophy and its clever thought experiments in an attempt to tackle this “hard problem” of consciousness. He recounts the famous zombie argument developed by David Chalmers, which explores the conceivability of whether human activity could be recapitulate by a zombie version of humanity, i.e. one where subjective experience is extinguished. He also explores Rene Descartes’ mind-body rumination via his correspondences with perspicacious Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. Other various quagmires of thought are outlined, such as infinite recursion; if the brain is a map of the world then presumably it must contain itself and on and on. The tour of these perplexing lacunae of logic serves to highlight a growing concern of Hoel’s. Maybe science is incomplete in the way that mathematics has been shown to be by Kurt Gödel. And in fact, we do have some evidence that the quantum level of the world is incomplete and indeterminate, invoking a similar kind of recursion.
A Causal Theory of Emergence
Do not fear the ambiguity of scientific incompleteness. Hoel has one remaining ace up his sleeve. It will seemingly challenge some of the fundamental ways we expect science to work, but it surprisingly still works in a physicalist framework. He’s kept it (mostly) concealed throughout the entire book up to this point: the theory of causal emergence.
“Macroscales can have causal influence above and beyond the microscales they supervene on.” ~ Erik Hoel on the theory of causal emergence
Emergence is a word with heft, but what is actually meant by it. The idea here is essentially that more explanatory information can be available at a higher order than at a lower order of complexity. This is made possible by redundancy (also called degeneracy in biological science) and randomness at the lower levels. For instance, the same mental state is possible under numerous different underlying physical configurations. This observation of emergence is a shocking qualification to scientific reductionism or the idea that understanding the basic units of a system will allow for a causal understanding of that system. In some ways, this seems to violate the truism that a whole can never be more than the sum of its parts. However, the secret door to escape this trap arises from the nature of information across differences of scale. The noise that exists due to redundancy and randomness at small scales must be corrected for at the large scale, making the effective information available greater at that larger scale.
This is a complex idea, so it bears repeating. Here’s Hoel’s phrasing:
It [causal emergence] holds that the elements and states of macroscales are reducible to underlying microscales without loss, but that the causation of the macroscale is not. At the same time, this “extra” causation is not unexplainable or mysterious. It’s just error correction.
This is a beautiful and exciting finding. It is one that Hoel uses to pry back the fatalism bolted onto discussions of free will (including the use of a brief reference to the senior thesis of one of my favorite author, David Foster Wallace). Emergence enables agency because it makes mental states matter as causal influences. This may be one of the only uses of science I’ve seen that psychologically nurtures the human condition rather than guts its vitality and denigrates its miraculousness. Maybe we really will be able to knit the intrinsic and extrinsic worlds.
At the Limits of Popular Science Writing
As an epilogue of sorts to my review, I’d like to reflect on the state of popular science writing and why it’s worth doing. Now, much of popular science writing falls into various traps and ends up being junk. These traps include small things like simple misunderstandings and misreporting. But some traps are larger, swampy quagmires: oversimplification, overgeneralization, and wanton speculation. Some offenders are worse than others, however, almost any popular work of science communication is bound to mislead a novice reader in some way. This is tolerable to the extent it inspires curiosity and deeper learning. It is less tolerable when it propagates unhelpful nostrums among those with power and influence. Nonetheless, I think experts should endeavor to make their work accessible to all curious minds and also to make their disagreements more public and accessible. If ever the ideas and understandings smelt in the forges of the ivory tower are to be carried off into the world to build it anew, they must be distributed in usable form.
In a refreshing way, The World Behind the World transcends the common pitfalls of the pop-sci genre. There are no mundane scientific facts uttered breathlessly as if they’re world-shattering epiphanies nor life hacks derived from flimsy p-hacked studies. We’re simply given a thoughtful introduction to a particular scientific approach to a major question: the nature of consciousness. Hoel defends his pet ideas, but also raises many reasonable criticisms and provides other tidbits of relevant context. In many ways, Hoel admirably demonstrates a kind of monastic mastery of cross-disciplinary concepts and insights that decorate the periphery of his intellectual inner sanctum. The limitation, perhaps an inevitable one, is that the text ventures beyond what most non-scientists will likely find digestible. These parts of the book are compact and reward re-reading, but for those non-initiates, parts may be gobbledegook.
No book is perfect. And if I was compelled to criticize The World Behind the World, I would simply wish that it was longer and more comprehensive. Hoel, himself, notes this consideration wistfully in the introductory pages, but I think it’s evident that the weight and complexity of these ideas deserve extended treatment. But I guess, Dr. Hoel has left us wanting for more. He does have a Substack to maintain after-all! He can count me as a reader.
*A shorter review of The World Behind the World can be found at my Goodreads account.
>And if I was compelled to criticize The World Behind the World, I would simply wish that it was longer and more comprehensive
Here here, the whole thing went down easy. Particularly would have liked to hear more about free will, given that is one of the biggest "updates" readers may have after reading the book. Years ago I read the SEP entry on free will and left thinking it was probably fake. Maybe my own misreading, but I think many who have given a couple hours of thought to it don't realize there is quite strong support for free will.
Emergentism is almost always the result of realising that an explanation is missing an independent direction for arranging events. A line emerges from an ink dot if it is replicated along an independent direction for arranging events. A magnetic field emerges from a current in a wire when the 4D arrangement of the charges is included. Consciousness involves at least four independent directions for arranging events because we are embedded in a universe that is at least 4D. Kant's phenomenal experience is four dimensional.
See https://mindover.substack.com/p/our-reality