Nietzsche, baseball, and the question of supervenience

Does consciousness serve any purpose in our lives? Does it do anything?

What is consciousness? It’s hard to pin down.

Many neuroscientists today argue that consciousness does not exist at all – or at the very least, it cannot participate our physical world. Thought by its very definition is not physical but instead something immaterial. And there has been no mechanism proposed to-date that could explain how any immaterial mental state could possible interact with the physical world. As a result, most neuroscientists do not believe that consciousness exists or plays any role in our world.

Because it is difficult to state exactly what consciousness is, many of those considering the question have instead opted to describe the phenomenon in terms of what it does.

Grounded in an understanding of physical reality, scientists have no way of integrating the notion of immaterial consciousness into their worldview. But philosophers have begun to attack the problem. Because it is difficult to state exactly what consciousness is, many of those considering the question have instead opted to describe the phenomenon in terms of what it does.

Nietzsche's view

Interestingly, Nietzsche argued that consciousness “constitutes a danger to the organism” because it “gives rise to countless mistakes that lead an animal or human being to perish sooner than necessary.” This statement implies that consciousness is actually doing something. But he did not completely follow this logic that conscious states, when manifested, could influence the actions of the body in the material world – a shame, considering that a human being having such power would abolish nihilism, the other problem that occupied Nietzsche.

The concept that mental processes may have causal efficacy – with thoughts actually influencing events in the physical world – is called supervenience. It supposes that conscious information processing can somehow be transposed to matter and energy. A full theory of supervenience will require the fields of information theory and modern physics to be combined with cell-level and network-level neuroscience, in order to create a mechanistic explanation for such a phenomenon.

Yet despite major advances in these relevant fields since the nineteenth century, the concept of supervenience has not been greatly explored. Instead, the debate has largely turned toward whether the phenomenon of consciousness exists at all. In the rare occasions that supervenience is broached, it is usually argued against – on the basis that we are essentially zombies whose behavior is completely deterministic.

Kim's view

Someone else who has given a great deal of thought to this problem is Jaegwon Kim, a philosopher who works on the theory of mind. He sits firmly in the emergence camp, contending that the qualitative aspect of mental states cannot be reduced to physical matter or processes. “Phenomenal mental properties are not functionally definable and hence functionally irreducible,” Kim has argued. He suggests instead that consciousness is likely an epiphenomenon, present but incapable of influencing the physical realm.

Kim’s argument against supervenience, the causal efficacy of mental states, is based on the principle of causal exclusion, which holds that no event can have more than one sufficient cause. Simply, a behavior cannot have as its cause a physical event and a supervening mental event, without resulting in a case of overdetermination. This would constitute a violation of the principle of causal exclusion. As a result, Kim concludes that physical causes simply exclude mental states from any causal contribution to behavior.

However, this interpretation misses the probabilistic nature of neural function. The world may present some constraints on behavior, but it is not always fully deterministic. Many studies have demonstrated that neural activity at a molecular, cellular, and network level is in fact probabilistic. There remains some degree of freedom here, which allows and may even require the intervention of supervening mental states.

Let’s consider an example situation.

Baseball: A thought experiment

Imagine that a baseball is flying toward you at 80 miles per hour. The visual information you are receiving is useful for coordinating muscle activity in order to take evasive action.

Now imagine that you have a mitt on your left hand and memories of playing ball while growing up outside Greenville, South Carolina. You’re currently positioned in left field, heart thumping. It’s the bottom of the first inning of Game 7 of the World Series. The visual information you are now receiving is useful for coordinating muscle activity to take effective action.

Many philosophers, using the principles of reductive materialism, would argue that your prior experience defines your current state. An entity with no qualitative or subjective understanding of the situation, with no supervening power – a perfect zombie – could handle this situation. The task is simple: If you are not trained to catch, not wearing a mitt, not in the context of a baseball game, you duck. If you are a trained athlete, you are wearing a mitt, and you are in the context of a baseball game, you try your damnedest to catch that ball. There is no choice, only a deterministic outcome provided by your neural networks and your contextual cues.

This logic may work for some situations, but not all.

Let’s call this scenario ‘The Eigenstate of Shoeless Joe Jackson’. An eigenstate is a state of uncertainty that remains until it is resolved by some action. A number of behaviors are possible here, and perhaps even equally probable.

Now imagine that a memory comes to you as you stand in that outfield. Last night, after a heated argument in your hotel room downtown, your teammate Lefty Williams threw $5000 in cash on your nightstand then left the room, assuring you that a number of bookies and their clients knew you had this money and were expecting you to act accordingly. Maybe slow down a bit, throw short to third base, let Cincinnati score a few runs on their home turf and win the series. Keep the money, keep your mouth shut, go back home to Chicago and make love to your wife. All it means is ‘forgetting’ to be good at baseball for a day or so. This memory sticks in your mind as you stand in the grass at Redland Field in Cincinnati on October 8, 1919 and wonder what to do when that ball comes your way.

Let’s call this scenario ‘The Eigenstate of Shoeless Joe Jackson’. An eigenstate is a state of uncertainty that remains until it is resolved by some action. A number of behaviors are possible here, and perhaps even equally probable. Shoeless Joe wants to do the right thing, but that extra five grand would double his annual salary. He wants to stay loyal to his team and respect the game, but he also wants to avoid any trouble for himself and his wife, especially with these threats flying around. He has tried to chat with his team owner to find a way to shut down the fix, but Charles Comiskey refused to hold a meeting with him. Shoeless Joe is on his own.

The conundrum

In 1919, the World Series is a nine-game match. After the formidable defense Shoeless Joe and the rest of the White Sox bring to the outfield for Game 7, the series tightens. The match is now 4-3, with Cincinnati only one game ahead. Chicago still has a chance to take the next two games and win the World Series. But the money and the threats of violence are getting persuasive. Meanwhile, there is a great deal of debate in the ranks – several of the guys are conflicted as to whether they should go through with the fix, some want nothing to do with it, and some are very keen.

Tomorrow is another day and another chance for Shoeless Joe to decide his actions. Tomorrow, the game will be in Chicago. Tonight, he can travel home, discuss everything with his wife, and grow sure in his decision either way.

Ambivalence is uncomfortable, especially when it comes to batting.

Even Shoeless Joe Jackson can go a few games without hitting a home run. He knows no one would find that strange. But then, there’s no better feeling in the world than knocking it out of the park. It might even feel better than a few thousand bucks.

The analysis

The story of the Black Sox Scandal is true, although the inner thoughts of the players are speculation. There’s simply no way to know what any of the players were thinking during that time. However, behavior provides useful information. There’s no way a person hits a home run by accident, no matter how strong their training, so Shoeless Joe must have been trying to win Game 8 the following day.

Chicago still lost the game and the series. And as a result of the questionable actions on the field throughout the match, many of the players on the Chicago White Sox that year – including Shoeless Joe Jackson – were implicated in the match-fixing scandal.

However, it’s not clear that behaviors were all pre-determined here. While extensive training would have greatly influenced neural activity, it did not require that Shoeless Joe give his full effort at all times. While his early instruction may have inclined him to play a fair game, it may also have inclined him to take action that would keep himself and his wife safe in the face of threats. And while hitting a home run might feel great, getting a pile of money might feel pretty great too.

The total amount of dopamine running through the neural pathways of Shoeless Joe Jackson’s limbic system – boosted by money and fame and feats of athleticism and winning games, reduced by threats of punishment or threats of harm – could be calculated to measure the net reward of each action. Yet there is no way for that calculation to be made without information processing.

Denial of the very existence of qualia – the very fact of conscious perceptual experience – does not help us to understand it. Stating that consciousness is some sort of mysterious mystical stuff does not aid understanding either. Naming the problem does help. Articulating a phenomenon is the critical first step to discovering a mechanistic explanation for it.

Consciousness serves a purpose in our lives

What if conscious experience and thought are not merely bizarre but useless phenomena – what if they are instead mechanisms for information processing? Conifold Theory postulates the mind is a natural, emergent feature of neural networks – capable of representing information about reality, and in turn causing effects in the physical world, through the actions of neurons propagating signals to the body. As such, the mind is a system for information processing. The mind is capable of taking in data and comparing that new information with an extensive dataset held in memory. The mind then directs action in the world according to the best predictions of this mental model, in order to ensure the continued survival of the organism.

Denial of the very existence of qualia – the very fact of conscious perceptual experience – does not help us to understand it. Stating that consciousness is some sort of mysterious mystical stuff does not aid understanding either. Naming the problem does help. Articulating a phenomenon is the critical first step to discovering a mechanistic explanation for it.

It's certainly worth exploring how consciousness works, and whether mental states are truly capable of supervening in neural activity in order to direct the body toward achieving a goal imagined in the mental realm. If Nietzsche was right, and consciousness can give rise to mistakes which affect the rest of our lives, then we have great power – and a great responsibility for our actions too.

[This blog post contains an excerpt from What We Are: The Physical Basis of Consciousness by Izi Stoll, published by Triskelion Press.]