GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Humanity presupposes the deferral of violence; society presupposes shared norms enhancing and regularizing the capacity to defer violence; civilization further presupposes entire zones of existence in which the deferral of violence can be taken for granted, which is to say that means of deferral and rules for their deployment, need not be posited, even tacitly. This is the way most of us live now—for almost anyone reading this, if you were to invite me to your home, there would be absolutely no need for either of us to be aware that certain motions, phrases, or expressed desires, would trigger a physical confrontation. This is extraordinary, even though we take it for granted; indeed, its utter unremarkableness is part of what makes it extraordinary, and also part of what makes it fragile.

In order to create such violence free zones, the most pervasive form of human violence needed to be so thoroughly uprooted that we have become unaware of its existence. That form of violence is that characteristic of honor societies: the vendetta. The vendetta is far more intuitive than our everyday peaceful interactions, even though most of us feel spontaneous disgust at exposure to it—much like the disgust we would feel at seeing the cow whose flesh we are to eat as “steak” slaughtered and carved up at the dinner table. When someone transgresses against you, the obvious response is to answer that transgression in kind; a further development of this principle is to answer in kind “plus” so as to defer by deterring the next violent act in advance. But which side can out-deter the other? This can’t be known in advance, since it depends upon non-quantifiable factors like anger, courage, shame, patience and so on. So, social organizations emerge that oscillate between bouts of tit-for-tat violence and periods of peace once all sides agree that the price to be paid for continued escalation is too high—until someone decides, once again, to try their luck. The periods of peace, though, involve their own forms of violence, perhaps in their way even more disgusting: for example, each side is obliged to take care of its own transgressors, or to turn them over, so as to demonstrate their commitment to maintaining the peace; each side must control its own so as to limit the possibilities of potentially uncontrollable provocations—I assume that the most horrific manifestation of honor society, the honor killings of young girls who have transgressed the strict sexual norms of honor societies, even by being raped—follow from this need to demonstrate that possible disruptions will not come from one’s own side, whether through weakness or carelessness.

Under such conditions, everyone’s protection is bound up through family ties to the honor system in such a way that it is very difficult to see how change is possible. And, indeed, change is only possible through much greater violence, that exercised by the “Big Man” who rises from the pack of petty lords and overawes all the rest, destroying those who resist and subjugating and defanging those who submit. From this process emerges “courtesy,” the beginning of “manners,” which doesn’t so much defer violence as involve us all in a shared pretense that violence is so far from our minds that we experience only those desires that can be satisfied without risking it. The kind of human subjectivity that emerges can be understood by analogy to the distancing of eating from the processes of slaughtering I just alluded to—just as we eat our meals, and can only eat our meals, without giving any thought to millions of penned up, systematically slaughtered, chopped up, chemically preserved, shipped, packaged, etc., animals, we freely interact in our violence free zones on the condition that rather massive forms of violence lie in wait for those who cross certain boundaries, not only of legality, but of normality—and that it will never be me who is caught in those traps.

I don’t really need, I think, to tout the virtues of civilization, although a brief expression of gratitude is appropriate—without civilization, trade, art technological innovation and all the rest of our human created cocoon would be impossible. Only breaking what we can now see as the “addiction” to tit-for-tat violence has made our world possible. But the work of civilization is never complete (international relations, for all the efforts of internationalists and pacifists, still works largely on various systems of deterrence), and civilization generates its own resentments (what Freud called its “discontents”), along with fantasies of a thoroughly completed civilization and the return to a carefree, egalitarian primitivism (with the two seemingly opposite fantasies often synthesized into one—modern views of “free love” being such a synthesis, I think). Most dangerous of all, though, is the oblivion induced by civilization, an oblivion much explored by Lee Harris, which, as Harris has argued, makes the category of the “enemy” seem a pathological symptom of the diseased thinking of some of our less civilized compatriots.

I have one question: can we imagine a form of civilization without that oblivion? To do so, we would also have to imagine a civilization without the state, which, for all its democratization, liberalization, and taming through human rights protocols, is still the direct descendent, and still shares the cultural DNA, of those absolutist monarchies that first established civilization throughout Europe. The state, going back to the absolute monarchs of early modern Europe, civilizes and barbarizes, displacing violence from the center to the margins, the imperial margins then and the biological margins now (as the state increasingly deploys health policies to distinguish between more and less worthy forms of life) and, most importantly, imposes oblivion upon us by claiming to have always already (through its control of intelligence, military, financial, punitive, scientific, etc., levers) made us safe. At this point, it would be hard to imagine the results if the state were to simply turn to us, its citizens, and say, “here are the kinds of security I can directly and measurably provide; the rest is up to you”—such straightforwardness would induce massive panic.

There is a libertarian anarchist argument to the effect that the state has always been an agent of barbarism, and that civilization has always been the result of free exchange within and between peoples—free exchanges that the state has always interfered with and exploited. There is a grain of truth to this argument, but I believe it is ultimately wishful thinking—what would have protected peaceful traders from the whims and rivalries of the various honor societies, if not a monarch interested in the wealth of the realm (to, yes, of course, wage war on his fellow monarchs, and to commit other barbarisms we might not like to think about too much)? It would be nice to think that in transcending the state we would be returning to a more natural human existence, one that has been deformed by the state. In fact, a civilized society, especially one as advanced as ours, without a state, would be an innovation, or the result of a series of innovations, as significant and improbable as human history has seen.

A series of innovations, in the social realm, means a series of renunciations. Here, what would need to be renounced is the invocation of the state on one’s side in conflicts with others (without, needless to say, regressing to the level of the vendetta). This would place the onus of keeping peace on all of us, all the time, a thing that is only possible if the responsibility we, and we alone, would bear for failure were to be present with us constantly. The difficulty of such a renunciation should not be underestimated, now that the state has interposed itself in every conceivable human conflict: between husband and wife, parents and children, school and parents, doctors and patients, etc., not to mention within the human conscience itself, that is, our quarrels with ourselves. Such a renunciation would be the moral equivalent of the early Christians’ self-extrication from the debasements of Roman society, involving the establishment of new institutions, including legal ones. It would be far more difficult than the veganism that results for many from the shattering of our oblivion regarding our uses of animals. There would be no point in predicting the likelihood of such a development (even if it is worth pondering which conditions might make them more or less likely), but that doesn’t change the fact that there is no other way of abolishing the oblivion that civilization can no longer survive, because both the enemies of our civilization, and those who aid those enemies because they consider us not civilized enough, are preying upon it.

The paradox of civilization is that renunciation leads to benefits. This must be true even of earlier social forms, what our forefathers insensitively called “barbarism” and “savagery,” to some extent—among hunter gathering communities, for example, the man capable of exhibiting patience and discipline on the hunt would surely acquire “followers” and hence prestige and power. But only in a civilized order does this relation between renunciation and benefit become an open ended dialectic—starting with the rise of the ‘Big Man,” that precursor of civilized order, the possibility of accumulating wealth through renunciation becomes ever more unlimited.

For a civilization to get off the ground and then sustain itself, this relation between renunciation and benefit must be generalized: most everyone must believe that their own renunciations will yield corresponding benefits. But there is another paradox here, one related to the moral problem Kant tried to solve through his “categorical imperative”: for Kant, if you did good in order to be rewarded in heaven, you weren’t really good; goodness was only goodness if pursued for its own sake. This conception has its own perversions, which become evident if one reflects on what would be involved in assuring oneself (first of all) that one only loves goodness and not any praise or love or wealth that comes from its exercise. For the civilized order, though, those pioneers in renunciation who founded the order were not looking for benefits: they were renouncing forms of desire that they perceived led to self-defeating violence including violence to self; their renunciations are acts of liberation in their own right, which others are welcome to follow. Hence the paradox of the charisma emanating from such moral innovators, and the power, wealth and prestige that accrues, if not to them, than to those who most credibly “inherit” their “kingdom of ends.”

Once the model is generalized, though, the relation between renunciation and benefit is subjected to a much more hard-headed cost-benefit analysis. And here two things go wrong. First, once people start asking themselves how much renunciation is strictly necessary for the potential benefits, it is likely that some will decide that the renunciation isn’t worth it, and others will seek out easier ways to the benefits. (They will often be the same people.) This unraveling becomes more likely the wealthier the civilization in question, and the more it can tolerate transgressors and support deadbeats. Second, the relation between renunciation and benefits among those with the most benefits becomes more obscure—to those who have shall be given seems to be the principle, and it makes sense to ask, if they have benefits, and far more than I ever will, without any signs of renunciation, why shouldn’t the rest of us? There is a threshold at which this cynicism breaks the articulation of renunciation and benefit altogether, and that is the point at which civilization becomes impossible, regardless of how long it takes before it collapses.

The only thing that can fend off collapse or, failing that, make regeneration possible in its wake, is renewed commitment to renunciation. On the part of some—how many is impossible to say in advance. This doesn’t necessarily mean that people should start building monasteries (although that wouldn’t hurt!)—there can be many forms of renunciation, and to be politically and civilizationally meaningful, they will need to have a public side. Every renunciation begins with an imperative—a resounding, overwhelming imperative that cannot be refused: the individual who engages in even the simplest renunciations (quitting smoking, going on a diet) hears a voice, more or less literally, saying “you must stop!” The imperatives that found civilizations are more imposing, but take the same form (“you must no longer sacrifice your children to Moloch”).

In a fully developed civilization, these imperatives evolve into multilayered interrogatives, the basis for religions, philosophy, art, and culture (there can be many ways of “sacrificing” one’s children, for example)—but the original imperative remains active underneath, or the questions themselves would not be meaningful. The imperatives that take must emanate from within some crux in the pre-civilized or existing, but decadent civilized order: it is not too hard to see how the Judaic and then Christian imperatives involved renunciations of participation in the depraved violences of Middle Eastern and then Roman imperial civilizations.

It follows from these reflections that politically redemptive activity today (and no other political activity makes any difference now) must be located at the nexus of the victimary (where benefits are demanded and renunciation, seen as a sham, is replaced by denunciation) and a largely rigged globalized political and economic order, where benefits accrue out of any proportion to renunciation. The two poles are in fact closely connected, as the global elite freely uses victimary hysteria to deepen control of economies and the everyday life of people. It’s not for any person to pronounce on what these new renunciations might be (and, to be honest, I don’t have any idea), but one imperative I can take upon myself is speak and write in such a way as to confer responsibility all around, and to resist the corrosions of language that lead us to absolve “victims” of responsibility, to attribute the decisions of the elite to “social forces” presumably beyond their control, and to treat the middle class as itself nothing more than a victim of these pincers squeezing it on both sides. If we lose this civilization, we will all play our role in losing it.

It is a marker of the deadening of thought, not increased moral sensitivity, that it is now commonplace to condemn or support one side in a war based on which side suffers the greater number of casualties, military or civilian. If one side wins by having the most civilian victims, then an incentive is created for that side to generate as many civilian victims as possible. As is often the case, what looks like scrupulousness is really a justification for barbarism.

Wars have aims—generally the surrender of the other side, and its agreement with your terms, or, if necessary, the destruction of the other side. Proportionality in war means that you use the amount of force needed to attain those aims, and no more—if a certain amount of force is needed to bend the other side to your will, you shouldn’t use more than that for reasons, say, of revenge. The notion that “proportionality” refers to the proportion of force used by, or available to, the respective sides, is degradation of thought to the level of imbecility.

Those critical of Israel’s response to Hamas’s rockets and tunnels might be asked what kind of response they would find legitimate. If the response they would allow is one that would leave the rockets and tunnels in place, they are arguing that no Israeli self-defense is permissible. If no Israeli self-defense is permissible, then the only conclusion to be drawn is that Israelis should allow themselves to be slaughtered. In other words, the critic of Israel is a genocidal anti-Semite.

War is obviously not the answer! Israel bombs and invades Gaza and then in a few years Gaza rebuilds its means of violence and Israel has to do the same thing all over again. Clearly, the problem is not being solved, and we need another approach. Maybe, but we keep putting murderers and rapists in prison and, nevertheless, people continue to rape and murder. Do we need another approach here as well, to stop the cycle of violence between violent criminals and civilized society? Or could it be that, for the forseeable future, the Palestinians will find no way out of their resentments other than fantasies of Israel’s destruction, just like people will continue to murder and rape and that, nevertheless, in both cases forceful responses can prevent things from getting much worse than they might otherwise be?

The left’s propaganda offensive in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision affirming the religious rights of business owners to not subsidize forms of birth control that violate their convictions involves arguing, as blatantly as they feel they can, that the Supreme Court (or, better: 5 men; or, even better, bleaching Clarence Thomas: 5 white men) has outlawed birth control. It’s easy to treat this as crazy, or breathtaking brazenness, a desperate bid to boost voter turnout amongst the stupidest elements of the Democratic base. The 2012 election, though, after months of assuring myself that no one, of course, could be stupid enough to believe that “War on Women” actually means something, much less that the Republicans were waging one, has taught me to take such assertions very seriously because, clearly, many others do. The assertion that “5 guys” have outlawed birth control is very similar to the insistence that, not only must “marriage equality” be immediately, universally and uniformly imposed, but that no decent person could bear to be exposed to anyone whose attitude towards it is anything other than acclamatory (dissenting opinions seem to have the status of second hand smoke in such discourses). The logic is the same in both cases: I am only allowed to do something only if everyone supports and celebrates my doing it.

And that is not, in fact, illogical at all. Only liberalism finds it outrageous. By “liberalism,” of course, I mean the traditional variety, which starts political reflection with the assumption that there is something pre-politically inviolable in the individual, that this inviolability implies a series of rights that the individual bears with him or her in entering political society, and that the main business of politics is cataloguing those rights, setting up hierarchies amongst them, figuring out how best to protect them, to prevent their exercise from leading to one colliding into another, and so on. Only a liberal in that sense can say “I may disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it,” even if very few liberals have ever gone anywhere near death defending ideas they consider obnoxious (even the ACLU tends to protect only those ideas that the middle class finds obnoxious).

But maybe liberalism is wrong. Or was right, for a limited time, in certain places, among certain sectors of the population. And maybe is no longer. The abstract freedoms advanced by liberalism suited the rising middle classes in their struggle against feudalism (and slavery and absolutism) perfectly, and then gained new life in the struggle against Communist and fascist totalitarianism. Liberalism’s victory in these struggles enabled it to be sold as a set of eternal principles (and to disguise its basic emptiness), but maybe these enemies were very contingent and time bound. I’m not sure that the “great debates” of the liberal order ever amounted to more that liberal ridicule of, and conservative prudential or sentimental defense of, some element of pre-modernity that persisted into modernity. Pre-modern elements having been thoroughly routed, liberalism no longer seems to provide a frame for the main disagreements in today’s social order. This would mean that liberalism has done its work. But the work of liberalism would, then, have been a very localized one, which was to fend off outmoded and especially dysfunctional alternatives to capitalist modernity—absolutism, slavery and the varieties of totalitarianism, which can be shamed merely by being brought into open debate among mobile, self-reliant people. Once all the pre-modern forms have been abolished and the more genocidal forms of totalitarian rule discredited, what, exactly, remains of liberalism? Does anyone close to power today propose a model of governance beyond local technocratic fixes to increasingly dysfunctional systems?

The issues that we have today don’t seem to lend themselves to the debating society model of liberalism. We don’t, for example, seem to have a vocabulary for discussing the rights and wrongs of the kind of statistical surveillance the NSA has been conducting since 9/11: on the one hand, developing algorithms for determining that certain individuals should be probed more closely (e.g., someone who has called Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia hundreds of times over the past few months, to numbers that dozens of other people have called hundreds of times) seems reasonable; on the other hand, it’s very hard to fit this practice into any traditional notion of a court sanctioned search and, on the other hand, accepting it requires a reservoir of trust in the government’s genuine interest in protecting us from attack and nothing more, a trust which few feel and fewer will admit—in large part because the government itself has abandoned even a show of liberal neutrality. But, of course, when there is a terrorist attack, most people will blame the government, the pendulum will swing wildly in the other direction, and objections will be vehemently dismissed, at least until the attacks become a distant memory (which seems to happen increasingly quickly). Or, maybe, we will stay steadfast in our libertarian and victimary convictions and absorb attack after attack, continuing to demonize anyone who suggests even the most general connection between Islam and terror. Either way, we have nothing resembling a traditional liberal “conversation” (and one starts to wonder to what extent we ever really did) over great questions of freedom and authority, war and peace, and so on. In the case of the NSA surveillance, it seems that either the government will do what it needs to do in order to fulfill responsibilities it claims have been delegated to it, regardless of how such actions can be squared with rights talk; or, there will be sufficient pushback, which will simply mean that “we” have rejected the government’s assertion of responsibility and have chosen to distribute it in a new way, or to just be irresponsible. In the end, more precisely, the government will find a way to operate in secrecy because bureaucrats and elected official prefer the fleeting obloquy of exposure to the delegitimation and loss of power actual attacks will bring; or, on the other hand, hackers and leakers and their friends in the media will make secrecy impossible—either way, these decisions are not being made in any recognizable liberal or democratic way. Other issues regarding privacy, innovations in health care and the biological sciences more generally, and intellectual property, for starters, seem equally immune to classically considered “debates”—these differences over the ambivalences of what is usually blandly called universal “interconnectedness” but might better be considered universal contagion or hostage-taking, seem more likely to be decided by unilateral initiatives which create irreversible facts on the ground, followed by ratcheting effects of one kind or another. For individuals and groups the choice will be stark: be inside or outside, and if you want to be inside play by the rules or find yourself outside; and you’d better not be caught outside unless you can manage to create a new inside.

That there is only approved behavior and disapproved of behavior seems much less counter-intuitive than the liberal claim that there is disapproved of behavior that we nevertheless allow, i.e., approve of. Less counter-intuitive and undoubtedly far more universal. The problem is that liberal society has upended the clear boundaries between approved and disapproved. What we are seeing now may be an attempt to restore those boundaries, which might be necessary, in the sense that human life is ultimately untenable without them. The difficulty lies in the lack of any consensus over what is to be approved. The solution is simple, if difficult—secession, partition, into smaller communities which can arrive at such a consensus. The only meaningful conversations we might be able to have in the near future will be over the terms of such a partitioning, and if there is anything to hope for it is that the last act in the liberal order will be to partition out of it into a new anti-federalism with some modicum of grace and a minimum of violence. (The problem of maintaining the viability of overlapping local communities would presumably then generate a new politics.) (I am encouraged by the news that California will be voting this year on a proposition to break the state up into 6 states. I assume it will fail, and Congress has to approve any such move even if Californians vote for it, but I believe once the idea is out there, and secession is de-stigmatized, we will see much more of it.)

Capitalist modernity! I used the term with ease a couple of paragraphs back, as a convenient other to feudalism, absolutism, slavery, communism and fascism. Capitalism has really only been tried in a few places, for brief periods, and most people seemed to have found it terrifying—what we have had mostly is corporatism. As soon as one starts to say that capitalism is the true way, we just haven’t gotten it right, one starts to hear echoes of identical arguments made in the name of socialism and communism. The free market is real, grounded in the reciprocity constitutive of the originary scene, and we can study its operations and promote its spread, but it would probably be realistic to resign ourselves to the fact that there is only sufficient popular support for the free market in carefully regulated and administered doses (and, regardless of popular imagination, it more often comes arbitrarily and crookedly regulated and administered doses), even though, fortunately, important innovations sometime sneak through before the bureaucrats have a chance to figure out what happened. Maybe what we have come to call modernity is the less grandiose fact that, for some time, there has always been some faction (and sometimes several at cross-purposes) that finds it in its interest to support the free market to some degree. The end of liberalism might also be the end of at least “Enlightenment” modernity, whose slogans were always just a battering ram to use against feudalism, and which has gradually lost its legitimacy as the self-proclaimed moderns continued to find more and more “pre-moderns” to denounce, hector and, when possible, outlaw. The only thing, though, that would prevent the upcoming partitioning from becoming a new dark age would be sufficient (define “sufficient”! I confess, I can’t, not sufficiently) recognition within and between communities of the need for free markets. But while some modernities have touted markets as vehicles of freedom and prosperity, the disciplinary order would equally stress the market as disciplinary agent, inculcating practically the realization that nothing will come from nothing. Indeed, an index of the health of any social order is the number of people who oppose restrictions on free exchange even if doing so benefits neither them nor anyone in particular as far as anyone can tell. If you want a genuine “veil of ignorance,” there you have it, and a very practical one available at any time: no one can tell who will benefit beyond the very short term by removing obstacles to free trade. Those who willingly reside behind that veil are the ballast of social order.

The way to act within the new, “disciplinary,” order, then, is as the representative of a discipline, which one advances unwaveringly and unquestioningly, at least to those outside the discipline; guarding the boundaries of the discipline, though, makes one a better participant in the market by leading one to respect all the other disciplines, which is to say to withdraw behind the veil of ignorance of the broader conditions of possibility of one’s disciplinary activity—a veil of ignorance which is also the condition of possibility of the local knowledge of surrounding disciplines constitutive of one’s own. Of course, anyone participates in several disciplines, which overlap and perhaps antagonize each other in varying degrees. This will be the source of ethical dilemmas in the disciplinary order. But it will be silly to complain of violations of rights which are not simultaneously rights of the discipline, just as it would be ridiculous for a doctor to complain that his free speech rights are violated by the fact that no hospital will allow him to carry out an unvetted form of surgery that strikes his colleagues as bizarre—the doctor proposing something new only has the right to complain that members of the profession fail to follow or reasonably revise their own protocols for approving new procedures. Disciplines are radically different from tribes, insofar as they are less exclusivist, make variable claims on the individual’s loyalty and make claims to knowledge and institute procedures for arbitrating and encouraging such claims, but they are more like tribes than they are like the polity of the liberal modernist imaginary insofar as they recognize no rights that are not constitutive of the discipline itself. And that, in fact, is the only coherent way of thinking about rights.

First, imagine a computer which includes complete monitoring of every internal electro-magnetic event, the transistors and memory and so on. We can see the physical arrangement and what happens in the circuits, and, initially, we can compare it to what is shown on the screen. Our task is to predict what is being shown on the computer screen simply on the basis of the computer’s internal activity. The idea here is that we can see all the switches going on and off, the ones and zeros, and we have to find the code to translate that activity into what is visible to the user. I would guess that this would be a fairly easy task for someone with the right skills. One would start by figuring out the basic ASCII computer code and then working up to the higher level codes.

Now imagine that we could somehow monitor every electro-chemical action of the human brain at any one moment and over time. The latest issue of MIT Technology Review (July/August 2014) describes some remarkable advances along this line. A new technique calls “optogenetics” provides a much more detailed view of cell activity than the fMRI. We’re still far from a complete picture, of course, and I doubt that it’s even possible to provide a complete picture of all significant brain activity in time. This is a thought experiment. Note that initially we also have access to everything the person reports is going in their consciousness. So, for example, when he or she remembers a particular event, we could compare the reported memory with the specific brain activity. Our problem then would be to try to figure out what was going on in the person’s consciousness from observing the neuro-chemical action of the brain alone.

First of all, we should note that comparing brain activity to what the person is doing, their health, and so on, would be enormously helpful for doctors trying to find cures, especially for mental health or brain-centered health problems like autism. Existing brain research, neuromania aside, has already generated valuable medical results.

But the larger question is whether we would be able to reach the point where we would be able to look at the brain activity by itself and say exactly what the person is thinking or feeling or doing. Would we be able to actually predict what the person is going to do next?

David Talbot reports on some experiments by Gabriel Kreiman which suggest that brain activity in key areas of the brain actually precede conscious decisions by “anywhere from hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds” (“Searching for the ‘Free Will’ Neuron” in MIT Technology Review July/August 2014: p.65). These results allow scientists to claim that brain events actually cause so-called “free will” choices. We should note, however, that the test results rely on the time difference between when the subject presses a button and when particular neurons “related to decision-making” fire. There is the problem that an electrical impulse from brain to finger takes time, time which might account for the supposed lag between brain activity and conscious decision. There is also the problem of identifying which particular neurons actually “cause” a decision.

Going back to our thought experiment, I assume that we would be able to learn a lot from knowing the correlation between brain activity in specific areas and conscious thoughts and feelings and perception. First of all, we could nail down specifically which parts of the brain are responsible for exactly which functions. We would be able to correlate certain patterns of brain activity with specific emotions and memories and perhaps even ideas. Eventually we would be able to predict, purely on the basis of recorded brain activity, what the person is feeling or thinking—but only, I would guess, in a general way, not precisely.

My understanding is that the brain doesn’t operate according to a fixed code like a computer. The brain is, in effect, constantly reprogramming itself. Of course, all inputs from the environment have the effect of reprogramming the brain—a la Pavlov’s dogs, and in much more sophisticated ways. But I would suggest that the brain, in effect, “consciously” and unconsciously programs itself in various ways. There’s what I call an “X-Factor” which would make it impossible to correlate brain activity precisely to the contents of consciousness.

Existing research suggests that everything that happens in consciousness (and unconsciousness for that matter) has correlated brain activity—which is not to say that this correlation operates in any predictable way. The existence of the unconscious, btw, complicates the attempt to sort out cause and effect in decision making and brain activity. It’s not clear that the unconscious operates by any kind of deterministic process. Our dreams, for example, are creative and unpredictable. In sum, I don’t think we can ever break the code that correlates brain activity to consciousness.

In evolutionary terms, consciousness is a way for an organism to negotiate its environment. I think we have to content ourselves with a functional explanation or have recourse to a spiritual one. The function of the brain in terms of the organism as a whole might help explain why we can’t break the brain-code: we have to deal with the unpredictable, and perhaps an unpredictable organ is best capable of doing so.

Finally, it’s not clear that human consciousness is qualitatively different from animal consciousness. We have a peculiar social awareness that makes for conscience and self-consciousness, but this is arguably only an expansion of consciousness to new contents.