The reality problem: how you were born as a naive realist part 2

Please try for a moment to inspect closely the holistic experience of
seeing and simultaneously touching the book in your hands and of feeling
its weight. Try hard to become aware of the construction process in
your brain. You will find two things: First, you cannot do it. Second, the
surface of the tunnel is not two-dimensional: It possesses considerable
depth and is composed of very different sensory qualities—touch,
sound, even smell. In short, the tunnel has a high-dimensional, multimodal
surface. All this contributes to the fact that you cannot recognize
the walls of the tunnel as an inner surface; this simply does not resemble
any tunnel experience you’ve ever had.
Why are the walls of the neurophenomenological cave so impenetrable?
An answer is that in order to be useful (like the desktop on the
graphical user-interface of your personal computer), the inside surface of
the cave must be closed and fully realistic. It acts as a dynamic filter.
Imagine you could introspectively become aware of ever deeper and earlier
phases of your information-processing while looking at the book in
your hands. What would happen? The representation would no longer
be transparent, but it would still remain inside the tunnel. A flood of interacting
patterns would suddenly rush at you; alternative interpretations
and intensely competing associations would invade your reality. You
would lose yourself in the myriad of micro-events taking place in your
brain at every millisecond—you would get lost inside yourself. Your mind
would explode into endless loops of self-exploration. Maybe this is what
Aldous Huxley meant when, in his 1954 classic, The Doors of Perception,
he quoted William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed
himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”
The dynamic filter of phenomenal transparency is one of nature’s
most intriguing inventions, and it has had far-reaching consequences.
Our inner images of the world around us are quite reliable. In order to
be good representations, our conscious models of bears, of wolves, of books in our hands, of smiles on our friends’ faces, must serve as a window
on the world. This window must be clean and crystal clear. That is
what phenomenal transparency is: It contributes to the effortlessness
and seamlessness that are the hallmark of reliable conscious perceptions
that portray the world around us in a sufficiently accurate manner. We
don’t have to know or care about how this series of little miracles keeps
unfolding in our brains; we can simply enjoy conscious experience as an
invisible interface to reality. As long as nothing goes wrong, naive realism
makes for a very relaxed way of living.
However, questions arise. Are there people who aren’t naive realists,
or special situations in which naive realism disappears? My theory—the
self-model theory of subjectivity—predicts that as soon as a conscious
representation becomes opaque (that is, as soon as we experience it as
a representation), we lose naive realism. Consciousness without naive
realism does exist. This happens whenever, with the help of other, second-
order representations, we become aware of the construction
process—of all the ambiguities and dynamical stages preceding the
stable state that emerges at the end. When the window is dirty or
cracked, we immediately realize that conscious perception is only an interface,
and we become aware of the medium itself. We doubt that our
sensory organs are working properly. We doubt the existence of whatever
it is we are seeing or feeling, and we realize that the medium itself is
fallible. In short, if the book in your hands lost its transparency, you
would experience it as a state of your mind rather than as an element of
the outside world. You would immediately doubt its independent existence.
It would be more like a book-thought than a book-perception.
Precisely this happens in various situations—for example, in visual
hallucinations during which the patient is aware of hallucinating, or in
ordinary optical illusions when we suddenly become aware that we are
not in immediate contact with reality. Normally, such experiences make
us think something is wrong with our eyes. If you could consciously experience
earlier processing stages of the representation of the book in
your hands, the image would probably become unstable and ambiguous;
it would start to breathe and move slightly. Its surface would become iridescent,
shining in different colors at the same time. Immediately you would ask yourself whether this could be a dream, whether there was
something wrong with your eyes, whether someone had mixed a potent
hallucinogen into your drink. A segment of the wall of the Ego Tunnel
would have lost its transparency, and the self-constructed nature of the
overall flow of experience would dawn on you. In a nonconceptual and
entirely nontheoretical way, you would suddenly gain a deeper understanding
of the fact that this world, at this very moment, only appears to
you.
What if you were born with an awareness of your internal processing?
Obviously you would still not be in contact with reality as such, because
you would still only know it under a representation. But you
would also continuously represent yourself as representing. As in a
dream in which you have become aware that you’re dreaming, your
world would no longer be experienced as a reality but as a form of mental
content. It would all be one big thought in your mind, the mind of an
ideal observer.
We have arrived at a minimalist concept of consciousness. We have
an answer to the question of how the brain moves from an internal
world-model and an internal Now-model to the full-blown appearance
of a world. The answer is this: If the system in which these models are
constructed is constitutionally unable to recognize both the worldmodel
and the current psychological moment, the experience of the
present, as a model, as only an internal construction, then the system
will of necessity generate a reality tunnel. It will have the experience of
being in immediate contact with a single, unified world in a single Now.
For any such system, a world appears. This is equivalent to the minimal
notion of consciousness we took as our starting point.
If we can solve the One-World Problem, the Now Problem, and the
Reality Problem, we can also find the global neural correlate of consciousness
in the human brain. Recall that there is a specific NCC for
forms of conscious content (one for the redness of the rose, another for
the rose as a whole, and so on) as well as a global NCC, which is a much
larger set of neural properties underlying consciousness as a whole, or
all currently active forms of conscious content, underpinning your experiential
model of the world in its totality at a given moment. Solving the One-World Problem, the Now Problem, and the Reality Problem involves
three steps: First, finding a suitable phenomenological description
of what it’s like to have all these experiences; second, analyzing
their contents in more detail (the representational level); and third, describing
the functions bringing about these contents. Discovering the
global NCC means discovering how these functions are implemented in
the nervous system. This would also allow us to decide which other beings
on this planet enjoy the appearance of a world; these beings will
have a recognizable physical counterpart in their brains.
On the most simple and fundamental level, the global NCC will be a
dynamic brain state exhibiting large-scale coherence. It will be fully integrated
with whatever generates the virtual window of presence, because
in a sense it is this window. Finally, it will have to make earlier
processing stages unavailable to high-level attention. I predict that by
2050 we will have found the GNCC, the global neural correlate of consciousness.
But I also predict that in the process we will discover a series
of technical problems that may not be so easy to solve.