Questions That Don't Need To Be Asked.

Sam Harris, the neuroscientist and philosopher most famous for his strident opposition to religion, has a blog.  recently he has been talking about the mystery of consciousness.  This mystery he sums up as "that there should be 'something that it is like'"  I think it can be put more clearly that all the machinery of our brains has inputs, outputs, inner communication and so on, but it is very hard to work out why there should be some sense that there is an I that is aware at some level that there is going on.  He believes that this problem is intractable, that why there is a "sense of I" will never be worked out even if we understand completely how the brain works.

There are many other people who ask themselves what is their purpose in life.  Why am I here?  What should I do?  What is the point of this existence?  The answers that come from science, that we are here through a very long natural process based on complex chemical interactions and the survival of self-replicating chemical structures, are often considered to be unsatisfactory.

Usually people who consider these questions extend them into the Universe at large.  Why is there anything at all?  Why is that a tree and not a hedgehog?

For me, these questions all have a fundamental flaw.  They are questions prompted by the brain to produce answers that satisfy the biases of the human brain.  The human brain is biased to see patterns, meanings, stories, and actors (an entity causing something to happen).  I have talked about all of these before.

Each of these questions are 'Why?" questions.  "Why?" is a question that asks the purpose or reason for something, and the fact that there is the same word for both of these definitions is highly instructive.  This conflation of purpose and reason is absolutely at the heart of humanity, and at the edges of intellectual thought can become quite problematic.  In fact, even the word, "Reason" is a conflation of several independent ideas (how things came to be, the purpose for something coming to be, a description of a method of thinking).

Why are we here?  The reason we are here can be stated with a fair amount of assurance for it being true is "why" means the same thing as "how it came to pass".  How it came to pass that we are here, while enormously complex is a story science can generally tell.  We can answer the question.  It is a good question to ask because we can explore the evidence and come up with an answer. 

However, if the question means "what is the purpose of us being here" we have greater difficulty.  With "how it came to pass" we are going off vast amounts of data, essentially all the data there is, that the way things were in the past give cause to the way things are presently, and out present will cause the future.  From this we can assume that there is a way that things came to be, there is a how, which is merely a description.  The Laws of Nature are not actually laws, they are descriptions of how things happen.

With questions about the purpose of things we have greater difficulty because we don't have vast amounts of data that there is a purpose of all things.  When human beings make a decision to do something there is generally a purpose.  I go to the store to buy food so that I can eat and not be hungry, which is unpleasant.  What is the purpose of the vast vacuum of space, the bit with nothing in it?  Surely a purpose requires a goal, and a goal requires a plan, and a plan requires someone to make the plan.  Who made the plan for vast areas of nothing?  it seems to me quite reasonable to think that some things have a purpose, and that these things derive their purpose from someone deciding what their purpose is.  Purpose is given to things from an outside source, it isn't inherent in things.

That there is not even the beginning of a consensus on whether there is a being outside the universe, on what such a being might want, how we might be connected to that desire, how me might bring it about, or what most of the Universe is for, seems excellent evidence that the assumption that there is a purpose is at least highly questionable.  Asking, "Why are we here?" without meaning, "How did it come to pass that we are here?" seems to me to making an enormous assumption, that there is a purpose.  A scientist operating according to science should at least have some evidence that there is a thing about which there are things you can discover.  A scientist would never investigate the properties of a thing for which there is no evidence.  "Why is there...." is simply a question that shouldn't be asked without the knowledge of a someone involved who might have a purpose.  Why is this a rock, not a tree?  Because then it wouldn't be a rock, the question inherently makes no sense.  How did it become to be a rock? leads to a whole chain of causality that can be investigated.

We ask these "Why?" questions because of our biases.  We think in terms of patterns, plans, intention.  We automatically assign intention "A tree struggles towards the light so that it can receive the energy of the sun" when actually under the circumstances a tree simply must grow or not because of its nature.  A tree doesn't try to grow for a purpose.  Even though we know that this is true (the tree simply doesn't have the intellectual apparatus to try or struggle or have a goal) it is very hard to think of it in another way.

Essentially there are two directions from which human beings can approach a question.  We can come from the direction of ourselves, our minds, and look for the pattern, meaning, and purpose of an event.  We can come from the direction of describing the event and then seeing if this event has pattern, meaning, and purpose. 

I think this is the problem that Sam Harris has in his idea of a mystery about consciousness.  He starts from the idea that consciousness is a special thing, unlike everything else, essentially that it is entirely purpose.  It is the thing that is "Why?" rather than "How?"  Consciousness is what searches for purpose, and meaning.  The mistake that is made is mistaking the thing that looks for "Why?" as therefore requiring an answer to "Why?" for its existence. 

I think consciousness is simply what happens when matter is arranged in the way it is in the human (and other animals) brain.  Why is their consciousness, a sense that there is an I experiencing things?  Because it would be impossible for there not to be under the circumstances.  Why does a rock fall?  Because a rock and the Earth have mass, and mass is the inherent quality of things that attract each other.  A rock falls because it is a rock, and a rock is a thing that falls.  A human brain has consciousness because it is a human brain, and a human brain is a thing with consciousness.  There is no mystery beyond the human invention of a mystery.  The answer is intractable because the question has been constructed about something that doesn't exist.  It makes as much sense as asking 'What are the dreams of the color yellow?"

How did it come to be that human brains have consciousness?  I think it is because consciousness is simply a rather messy method of providing a feedback loop for improving the chance of survival and reproduction.  A consciousness is something that is aware of being a creature.  It is aware of the environment, of the past, can make predictions about the future, can test theories about the future, and change the way that creature goes about doing things.  Evolutionarily this is enormously useful, that the creature with the most developed consciousness is now the most successful creature on the planet speaks to this.

Just because you can frame a question, or wonder about something, it doesn't mean that there is an answer to the question, or that the something is real.  Sometimes, even though you can ask a question, there are questions that don't need to be asked because they don't make sense to ask.