The Intersection of Qualia with Theory and Cultural Development, Part 1
Theories of Consciousness
As psychology and neuroscience progress, theory rapidly expands in its capacity to model and predict mental phenomena, but while practical for the field of medical treatment and instructive as we attempt to make our knowledge of the world and our place in it more profound, this growth in mechanistic explanations has only deepened the mystery surrounding interiors of consciousness. Philosophy has termed components of this internal domain ‘qualia’, the perceptual elements or qualitative contents of experience as contrasted with conventionally physical matter, and they have proven highly intractable to rational analysis, even the rigorous empiricism of science. Why is the brown color of a table brown and not simply a light wave, why is thought not merely synapsing neurons and nothing more, what is this supramaterial substance of consciousness that scientific instruments seem unable to detect and to which all our mechanistic theorizing has traditionally been incapable of adding, even when individuals can report these occurrences to each other so casually that we do not even have to think about them in the majority of circumstances? Scientific understanding of mechanistic particles and parts seems difficult to reconcile with intuitions about our own minds, and it ordinarily makes hardly any difference at all, truly a strange situation.
Analysis has approached this theoretical paradox from various angles. The treatment that currently predominates is the physicalist model, which claims the mind can be exhaustively explicated by scientific procedures operating in the context of a knowledge of the physical world. Whatever first person experience is, it will be subsumed someday by materialistic theory, whatever this matter turns out to be, becoming functionally though perhaps not pragmatically obsolete, subjected to causal explanations based solely on theoretical and technological data, as if the brain is a machine or computer shrouded in mystery, the definitive principles of which are still to be revealed. This is the most rhetorically prevalent tact: science discovers that specific kinds of neuron firing correlate with a phenomenon like emotion, so emotions are essentially neurons firing in some way that will soon be further described. It has never made much headway in philosophy, as this discipline wants to get to the bottom of everything rather than making preemptive assumptions or propagandistic claims, though philosophy’s speculative rationations cannot really match the clout of scientific modeling with its surpassing practicality.
Two contemporary approaches to qualia suggested by philosophers are strong and weak supervenience. Strong supervenience claims that subjectivity-based descriptions and physicalist science provide equivalent definitions of the mind, so that materialism will never antiquate its rival. “I feel sad” will never be less valid, accurate or certain than “neurons of the frontal lobe have synapsed” or something similarly mechanistic. Weak supervenience proposes there are mental phenomena that cannot be explained by physicalist science because of either the observational complications of experimenting with cognition or the possibility that mind is an entirely different sphere of causality with its own natural laws, so our theories of qualitative consciousness will never be matched or exceeded by mechanistic theories, which would be something like mental health counseling replaced with or superseded by neuroscience.
An older proposal reverses the orientation of matter to mind, with the material world being content of a spiritually aware cosmos of much greater though mysterious scale, perhaps with our relatively narrow perception existing in the mind of God. This is a common view of many ancient mysticisms and traditional strains of religion; it was elaborated in some depth by George Berkeley, an influential 17th century Irish philosopher, and continually surfaces in all kinds of ruminations on consciousness. By contrast, behaviorism propounds the opposite kind of idea, that asserting anything at all about a realm of mind and its supposedly distinct operations is unnecessary for explanatory purposes, with research on overt behavior providing all the knowledge we need to understand and predict human action. In this framework, any concepts of mind itself, as its own causal domain, are subsidiary and possibly dispensable in relation to theories of the conditioning operative upon organisms.
A newer theoretical approach is computational modeling, which is based on the principle that activity of the brain exists in its characteristic forms to fulfill particular functions, and these recurring tasks can be simulated in different mediums such as powerful computer programs, enabling researchers to assemble features of cognition without understanding microscopic matter and biochemical processes down to the last detail, something that may very well be impossible without huge unforeseen advances. We may not be able to fabricate an actual brain in total, but computers can perhaps approximate many brain states studied in research settings, like those concurrent with specific kinds of thought or fear response, holding much technological promise.
A further research trajectory concerns itself with mental phenomena that have not been documented in any substantial way up to this point, such as telepathy, synchronicity, all kinds of paranormal perceptions and experiences, but which ignite widespread interest and have allegedly been glimpsed in enough fringe investigations to deserve attention from science. It seems that verifying and theorizing in this largely untapped field of examination could potentially revolutionize our concepts of mind, matter and evolution.
The Cultural Relevance of Qualia
A major concern in the investigation of qualia is the extent to which individuals differ, and also the degree that divergent lineages correspond to qualia discrepancies, of course having implications for race relations with all the prejudicial baggage involved. This issue is challenging to deal with in the current state of knowledge, as genetics and comparative anatomy are at a relatively early stage, though even so the historical record, physiology, biochemistry and DNA analysis tell us a lot, and have already called into question assumptions about the supposed distinctions between races, while suggesting that interbreeding was common throughout much of history and seemingly also prehistory, though it should be emphasized that many interpretations of the facts have not acquired incontrovertible status.
Archaic psychology of human reproduction may be inaccessible to us without a huge train of advances in our theoretical understanding of the causality and history of evolution, but we can confidently claim the plasticity in human brains and consequent cultural adaptability make it likely that our social groups have at all times been highly compatible cognitively and behaviorally, with intermingling between long divergent lines of descent being frequent, even customary. Before overpopulation and pandemic incidence of sexually transmitted disease, promiscuity between tribes and races of the historical period as well as intermarriage were typical, even a cornerstone of diplomacy, though we must be cautious about extrapolating this back in time tens or hundreds of thousands of years without solid proof. At any rate, human interbreeding was probably facilitated by all kinds of activity: large-scale migrations, long-standing customs of exogamy, divergent populations undergoing genetic drift and then combining their traits during resumed relations or even merging into a unified reproductive entity, and all the innumerable variations on these possibilities.
Of course not all cultural associations are reproductive or even cordial, as many social groups attempt to subjugate others, sometimes with a high degree of segregation. This opposing social approach is surprisingly attractive, and together with periods of cultural openness we have culminated in a globally integrated population holding technology and its application in common (aside from a small collection of guarded sectors such as cutting edge energy production, military capability and communications technology), but with often stringent beliefs about race, religion, sexual orientation and economic status that form the basis for epochs of persistent divisiveness.
In order to understand the perpetual resumption of class and cultural conflict, we have to identify the impetus for a continual effort at dominance that has always been demolished, undergone implosion or become decadent. We must discern why a large contingent of the human population is committed to a rising and inevitable fall of hegemony, set on being the next Roman empire or upper class, even though the most successful political forces in history have never really been safe, ending sacked, pillaged, denuded and helpless like every prolonged quest for power. Education tells us that wealth, control, legacy, the battle for cultural or religious preeminence, and security all motivate conquest and oppression, but discord could also derive from differences in qualia; at least this is a tacit belief of many ethnicities, with race-based stereotypes existing almost everywhere. We see all the variety in personality, intellect and physique distributed amongst humans, with some of this capable of being traced to particular regions of the world having distinct hereditary histories, and it is easy to make the dubious leap towards an anticipation of discovering deep, even comprehensive qualia divisions along racial lines.
As the hominin and early human concept of reproduction probably evolved from an intuitive role in social bonding and status symbolism towards more protoempirical concepts of heredity, all kinds of physiognomy notions cropped up everywhere, implicit during the historical period in literary stereotypes, policies of institutions, and also the tendency for growing settlements to form districts inclined to those of particular ethnic or cultural origin. Majority and more moneyed ethnicities became increasingly pernicious to less mobilized groups as the reach of centralized power structures and influence of consolidating information distribution expanded. As rivalries arrived at maximum tension, spurned on by overcrowding and weaponry advances such as firearms and explosives, modern science was born, consisting of rigorous fact-finding procedures, official documentation of findings, and the controlled experiment.
Controlled experimentation was the first facet of modernizing empiricism to achieve massive success, transitioning into theoretical physics and analytical chemistry, with corresponding increase in the efficiency and volume of manufacturing as well as invention of all kinds of new materials. In these sciences of inanimate laboratory matter, a series of hours-long experimental sequences could revolutionize technology in only months, while analysis of environmental settings, especially ecosystems, required much more time and reflection due to the daunting aggregate of information to be considered. Biological evolution was not substantially postulated until naturalists, notably Darwin, had spent years travelling the world, many decades contemplating and hypothesizing about the entirety of biology, and this merely to make an introduction to the topic.
Before the concept of evolutionary change and a sense for gigantic timescales involved, historical knowledge had been subordinate to the simple act of telling stories, a recreation and central tradition that vanished backwards into the mists of ancient myth and fantasy. At some point in the development of academia we associate with the modern period, inspired heavily by Greek antiquity, history transformed from an activity of imagination and idiosyncratic insight into a collection of assertions that should be proven true or false. Modernity’s revitalized pursuit of analyzed and verified history probably arose at least partially from the existence of multiple sources and their discrepancies. This must have coincided with ubiquitous availability of written materials as well as systematized education — international universities, public schooling — that was more accessible for all citizens and societies.
So amid all the cultural chaos and conflict together with empowering effects of modernizing science, the state of our knowledge at the beginning of the 20th century was this: experimental methods requiring mere months to make paradigm-busting progress; a body of conflicting theoretical proposals about economics, politics, and society in general that had originated analysis of recent history; a burgeoning intuition of the universe as operating according to evolutionary principles yet to be explained in their specifics; a scientific discipline of biological evolution that would require centuries to offer deep, conclusive proof about almost anything within its scope, though this complexity had not yet been unveiled; a boiling cauldron of racial and class tensions; worldwide competition for dwindling resources as well as a race to innovate new ones; unprecedented concentration of power and financial influence in competing national governments; and a prevalence of crude, sometimes archaic notions of hereditary relationships and mechanisms preceding an in any sense mature science of genetics by a hundred years.
Antiquation of Traditional Status-centric Culture, the Rise of Reason, and the Origin of Science
The chronology of events that led to modernity’s social crisis and administrative nightmare began in B.C.E. times when local leadership traditions — patriarchs, chiefs, shamans and the like — gave way to acquisitive governments intended to facilitate wars and control of foreign territory in the most fertile and crowded regions of the world, such as ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, the Far East, Minoan Crete, Olmec Mexico and Chavin Peru. As infrastructure advanced in many locations, with roads, the wheel, and domestication of animals for purposes of transport, it became possible to occupy rival lands, export political institutions to serve one’s own interests, and maintain a superiority in wealth by dictating parameters of trade.
Financial inequality imposed by imperial governing concentrated riches in the hands of what at first were ethnicity-based ruling castes, the most obvious example being Mesopotamia, as Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Hittites and Assyrians rose to supremacy at various times via conquest, and as these tribes formerly separated by geographic distance merged into more homogeneously ethnic cultures, racial divides gave way to enduring distinctions based upon prestige, political power and economic status. Antiquity’s many cultures took their turn invading and conquering, migrated on large scales in peacetime, and ultimately blended, but as economies and underpinning technology diversified, populations differentiated into more complex forms of social organization including socioeconomic stratification — classes — accompanied by legal criteria defining status in a plethora of social contexts. Civilized living required increasingly specialized skills, dividing subcultures internally due to a multiplying of professions and additional roles, especially in mid to lower labor demographics, a disunity that allowed upper classes, which had originated as conquering plunderers, to opportunistically refashion their armed pursuits into institutions for enforcing economic and political authority.
Infrastructure capacity continued to expand in some areas along with advancements in technology, and as it did the reach of imperial ambitions grew vaster, enabling converged races and cultures of the first politically large-scale civilizations, such as Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, China and India, to make contact and establish trade relations as well as an exchange of ideas, apexing as the Roman, Indian and Chinese empires, which loosely connected almost all of what has become modern Europe, the Middle and Far East, paving the cultural landscape for contemporary efforts to integrate commerce and disseminate institutions worldwide. Globalization has of course been a two millennium marathon with frequent setbacks such as the collapse of governments and destruction or abandonment of academic commitments, but enough centers of culture weathered each cataclysm to safeguard a continuous though often suppressed progress from ancient to current knowledge in civilization.
Despite fervid efforts of many rulers and reformers, political stability and advancement often flagged. This was certainly true of Europe, as decline and fall of the Roman empire in the 5th century C.E., and then the Frankish empire in the 9th, brought a formerly leading region of the world to the verge of intellectual ruin, a regression in literacy, invention and overall organization that without the rise of Arab influence and their preservation of ancient academic achievements would have nearly obliterated four thousand years of groundbreaking theory. With the sometimes tenuous assistance of Christian unification, Europe extracted itself from a 10th century dark age, degenerative enough that written records for this period do not exist, and reembarked on a religion-inspired exertion towards logical understanding of the cosmos and humanity’s agency as well as a renewal of rational institution-building. During the Middle Ages and on into the modern period, technological invention escalated, and revivification in infrastructures of progress allowed Europe to regain its economic status, which had actually sunk below the level of Asian empires governed by Ottoman Turks, Chinese, Indian and Mongol cultures. Diminishing authority of a rancorous, fracture-prone universal church eventually put power back in the hands of imperial transitioning to national governments, inciting five hundred years of almost constant war between European armies along with continental and colonial realignment played out on both the civil and international stage, only abating as the world witnessed the ominously destructive force of nuclear bombing.
Asian cultures had fallen behind Europe in technological development during its post-Renaissance modernizing, especially in industry and military strength, being unable to match Europe’s tapping of resources in distant parts of the world, and while subject to foreign political and economic control for a span of time starting around the mid-19th century and lasting until the mid-20th, the need for strong allies in a volatile European balance of power put contemporaneous weaponry and political machinery in Asian possession. These countries did not waste much time proving their aptitude as they ultimately rivaled the Western world’s formidability, in the case of Japan in mere decades.
While inveterate warring made much of the modern historical era rather monotone in its political priorities, dominated by arms races, invasions and civil strife, particularly in every area under Western auspices, intellectual schools of thought underwent radical transformations. In antiquity, study of math alongside detailed examination and reflection upon the structure of existence had originated a search for theoretical explanations, with an intuition that systematic investigation of mathematics and additional areas could make the cosmos intelligible, as if civic technology, rational analysis and the natural world operate within the same logical framework. As civilizations advanced into modernity, a tradition of competing theoretical propositions, acknowledgement of both contradiction and the obsolescence of ideas, as well as cognizance of persisting uncertainty also coalesced, hallmarks of current research everywhere.
As the non-European world of the Middle Ages continued to make technical advances as well as grow its religions, Europe began a parallel process of spiritual development, the task of ordering cultural values, methods of reasoning, naturalistic knowledge, church doctrine, and the mystical experience of humanity’s soul. Christianity as regulated by Medieval papacy often resisted new ideas, with lagging progress at academies and elsewhere, but upon permanent fragmentation of high leadership and the religion’s reformation as a body of separate, less political denominations, intellectual latitude effloresced and all kinds of seminal improvements were made to theory and technology. The telescope in astronomy overturned cosmological conventions of antiquity and the Middle Ages in Europe, quantification-based empiricism as an epistemic foundation arrived on the scene, and the soul was subjected to a more analytical introspection with anatomy in mind, planting seeds of what centuries later became psychology, philosophy of mind and neuroscience.
The 18th century ushered in the European Enlightenment, a glorification of reason that sought to both illuminate the nature of human thought, finding systematic expression in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and clarify the workings of society by theorizing it as determined by coordinated thinking. Economics and politics incarnated this movement as Europe’s governments by various means became less exclusive, putting in place reforms that more universally supported the welfare of ordinary citizens, giving populaces greater opportunity for political participation, and generally steering society towards a more ethics-conscious way of life with greater equality of legal standing, beginning to transcend conventional presumptions of superiority and inferiority. The monumental accomplishment of this era was self-liberation of American colonies from the control of a British empire that fielded the most technologically and logistically dominating military force the world had ever known, then a peaceful transition to representative government crafted on Enlightenment principles, guided by the most intelligent and cultured members of the country. This landmark triumph changed the way humanity thinks about authority and inspired two hundred plus years of freedom-seeking revolutions everywhere.
While the majority of the non-European world languished, subservient to imperial dominion, excepting Latin America which had overthrown Spanish rule almost entirely by the middle of the 19th century, mainland Europe followed the lead of the United States and strove to overthrow centuries-old precedents of aristocratic leadership, monarchies that had become ridiculously lavish, nearly parasitical upon the economies of their countries. Idealism ran high, but it became evident from the repeated political chaos and abysmal dismantling of each rebellion’s professed values that the American revolution may have been an exceptional case, and preexisting conditions in a country were recognized as vital to insurrectional strategy. It was necessary to predict and anticipate inclement situations so that unity would not collapse when it was time to accommodate the general interest.
Existing parallel to these endeavors at changing culture, the sciences of physics and chemistry were materializing, putting power into the hands of average citizens with ranged weapons and making it conceivable that the general standard of living could be raised by a synthesis with incipient disciplines of biology and modern medicine. It was clear that science might become a major positive force in the pursuit of human actualization, but the sheer irrationality and impersonality of the universe it revealed could be crushing to cultural idealism. Biological evolution is the most striking example: according to this theory, phenomena of nature are largely independent of human values, stretching back billions of years before the existence of our species, with our cognition being subordinate to this process, fashioned by environmental pressures to do no better than get enough of us to sexual maturity and parenthood that our species delays its probably inevitable extinction.
As evolutionary thinking has taken root in human intuitions and imagination we have found reasons for meliorism, such as optimizing civilization, making life more comfortable for our species, launching space travel that gives us a glimmer of hope for the immortality of our existence, even participating in molding biochemistry and ecology of evolution itself with theory and technology, but as far back as the 19th century, the highly educated were realizing that Kantian reason was like a footnote to evolutionary history and the universality of anything involving human decision-making was questionable.
Theory of evolution has become central to the life sciences, but it had its moments as a young idea, so new that preliminary stages of uncertainty and for some pessimism had not even been reached let alone surmounted by the general public. Naively it was thought by many that if you want to understand human evolution simply run a breeding experiment, if you want to construct a better society redesign social structure and culture with evolution in mind, if you want to make the species more hardy in a survival of the fittest environ figure out what is superior, whether it be a race, family, way of thinking, or a country’s institutions. In a war-obsessed world under the influence of imperialist shibboleths, and with all kinds of prejudice, especially racial, class and religion-based animosity, social disasters of huge magnitude were perhaps an unavoidable but nonetheless appalling consequence of early speculation.
