Mind-Body Connection

Now that we see that both consciousness and physicality (mind / body) are ethereal in nature, what is their relationship? According to some discussions of mind-body dualism, it seems as though mind and matter are radically different kinds of stuff lying as the root of reality. However, due to their ethereal nature, it’s not as though we need to extract water from rocks in order to explain their connection. In order for mind and body to interact, they must be rooted in the same deeper reality, and share a common language.

A significant aspect of the mystery about the mind-body problem is the question of how the brain can know and think about consciousness if it’s just an epiphenomenon.¹ Some may suggest that conscious experiences are like jigsaw puzzles put together by God alone, in which God interprets physicality, then paints an independent conscious experience with its metaphysical brush. However a lack of feedback from consciousness to the brain would leave the brain in the dark regarding the idea of consciousness. In that case, it could not knowingly form the confident, correct, consciously-perceived, seemingly-human, language-specific claim that, “I am conscious.” That would leave God itself as the only one able to do so, but then why would it, on such a selective basis? This one-way modification would also prevent us from being able to read and write about consciousness, because reading and writing occur via physical recordings, symbols, behaviors, languages and perceptions mediated by physical brains.

Furthermore, if God is interpreting brain states, God may have a hard time figuring out or interpreting exactly what a brain is perceiving, because it would need to make sense of a complex and arbitrary set of chemical, biological and neural signals in order to create a clear and detailed sensory experience. What exactly in your brain looks like the experience of seeing of your own hands, even from God’s perspective? What about when a cat sees your hand? Does God have to learn to interpret the brains of every species of animal? Does the same strategy work for aliens? Mental representations of a brain without any shared information to translate between mind and matter could look like static on an analog TV screen, or chaotic, uninterpretable waves in a boundless ocean.

I propose the idea that there could be an application programming interface (API) to consciousness: a simple set of rules connecting one complex system to another. One of these systems would provide an additional set of computational features that integrate or process information distributed throughout the brain, either on a fine grain or broader scale. Creatures who use this computational system more effectively than their peers would gain an evolutionary advantage, which would lead to skilled use among evolved creatures. Such advanced use would require passing coherent and compatible information through the interface mediating both systems, which could then be interpreted when forming conscious states. This relationship would allow conscious states to reflect a sensible representation of the world, with physical interactions and data flowing in both directions.

Because physics is mathematical, and computation can be physical, another way to think of the additional computational system is simply as another part of physics. The interface that also informs consciousness would essentially be a cross-sectional monitor between various physical states and behaviors. This would be similar to how a computer running a simulation program might monitor certain variables or streams of data flowing between two parts of the program, then use those values to generate a graph in the second part, and feed its data back to the rest of the simulation for further processing.

One might wonder why we don’t see these effects when we take high-level brain scans, or when we look at slices of animal brains under a microscope. I suggest that this is likely because the interactions are distributed, and occur on small scales, making their appearance unobvious or hard to measure. Already a single neuron is incredibly complex, such that there is much about it that we have yet to learn. The fact that this hypothesis proposes additional laws of physics which we have not yet discovered, or at least not completely understood, is generally a positive feature, because it points to the possibility of a scientifically testable hypothesis some day. However the problem stands that I don’t know what those testable behaviors are, and am doubtful that a being embedded in our cosmos could witness and compare more than one independent conscious state simultaneously for the sake of experiment.

While knowing the precise relationship between mind and matter is likely very difficult, physics is at one end of the spectrum continuous with it, and has a good track record of analyzing its domain. To help with that goal, computers may some day improve our understanding of consciousness by associating their conscious states with knowledge of their own carefully designed and manufactured Silicon-based bodies. Whether we could ever understand descriptions of their actual mind states is unknown.

We should also wonder whether all physical forms in this system have access to the conscious API, even if they have not evolved to use it meaningfully. Are rocks, bugs and bacteria conscious too? As far as I’m concerned, it may be that the entire cosmos is interpreted by consciousness. If a brain or other physical subsystem is not signaling to the API in a meaningful way, then experiences may be very simple in nature, or even blank, much like the human visual perception of empty space between two objects. In truth, we don’t know what it’s like to be anyone or anything we’re not already, especially beings that aren’t human.²

While the idea of an interface, and the conscious interpretation of that interface, may seem strange, it does allow for there to be meaningful mental and physical link, without the requirement of vast amounts of interpretive insight into the behavior and workings of chaotically evolved brains. It also preserves the possibility for humans to think about the fact of our own consciousness. If the theory shared here turns out to be false, I hope that a better theory would attempt to answer these questions too.