At Vox, Oshan Jarow, a staff writer who focuses on consciousness, is skeptical about the title question. But, in a recent article, he profiles theorists and researchers who are giving the idea a shot at using math to describe experiences words cannot describe.

One of them is mathematician and physicist Johannes Kleiner based at the LMU Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. In outline, his approach would work like this:

For example, words could offer you a poem about the feeling of standing on a sidewalk when a car driving by splashes a puddle from last night’s rain directly into your face. A mathematical structure, on the other hand, could create an interactive 3D model of that experience, showing how all the different sensations — the smell of wet concrete, the maddening sound of the car fleeing the scene of its crime, the viscous drip of dirty water down your face — relate to one another.

Oshan Jarow, “Why is it so hard to describe consciousness with words? How math might help us capture our experiences,” Vox, Apr 10, 2024

That, in Kleiner’s view, would make consciousness easier to study, though it is unclear how such a system would capture everything that is happening, when so much is still unknown.

Evolutionizing ineffability

Inevitably, some researchers apply evolution theory to the question. AI specialist Mica Xu Ji argues that evolution baked “ineffability” — the indescribability of experiences — into consciousness because simplifying situations enables us to cope with new experiences better, thus helping us survive.

She and her colleagues offered one approach to measuring ineffability in a recent open access paper.

Her paper argues that to gauge ineffability, all you’d need are two variables: the original state and the output state. The original state could be a direct measure of brain activity, including all the neural processing that goes on beneath conscious awareness. The output state could be the words you produce to describe it, or even the narrativized thoughts in your head about it (unless you have no inner monologue).

Then, comparing those numbers would give you an approximation of the ineffability.

Jarow, “Capture our experiences”

So then the researchers would have a number that means nothing. Individuals differ in their ability to have experiences and use words to describe them and the experience itself remains a barely describable personal event.

The team makes clear in the paper that their approach is physicalist; the brain, on that view, consciousness is nothing more than the workings of the physical structure of the brain:

In our framework, the richness of conscious experience corresponds to the amount of information in a conscious state and ineffability corresponds to the amount of information lost at different stages of processing… While our model may not settle all questions relating to the explanatory gap, it makes progress toward a fully physicalist explanation of the richness and ineffability of conscious experience—two important aspects that seem to be part of what makes qualitative character so puzzling.

Xu Ji, Eric Elmoznino, George Deane, Axel Constant, Guillaume Dumas, Guillaume Lajoie, Jonathan Simon, Yoshua Bengio, Sources of richness and ineffability for phenomenally conscious states, Neuroscience of Consciousness, Volume 2024, Issue 1, 2024, niae001, https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niae001

Jarow comments,

But language, maybe by design, will never capture the full richness of consciousness. That might be to our benefit, helping us generalize our experience in an ever-uncertain world. Meanwhile, more precise mathematical structures to describe conscious experience could also bring welcome benefits, from grasping just how intense pain can be to conveying the most blissful of pleasures.

Jarow, “Capture our experiences”

Maybe a math fix will help in some ways. But it also carries the risk that researchers will imagine that, once they have a measurement, however derived and whatever it really measures (if anything), they know things that they don’t actually know. And we will be encouraged to believe their reports and interpretations.

How evolution theory stands in for knowledge

Incidentally, “evolution” theories play an important role generally in the manufacture of non-knowledge posing as knowledge. For example, Jarow offers, “So maybe ineffability isn’t just a problem that locks away the full feeling of our experiences, but is also an evolutionary feature that helped us survive through the ages.” But nothing“locks away” the full feeling of our experiences. Rather human language focuses on things we can share and, by definition, we can’t share things like what it is to be us.

There is no plausible account of the evolution of specifically human consciousness — if any such evolution even occurred. What actually happens is that a hypothesis about its evolution, like “ineffability aided survival,” stands in for actual knowledge for the purpose of generating a research project.

All well and good for the purpose of getting papers published. But we will never know the extent to which the generation of physicalist hypotheses is getting in the way of actual knowledge of the human mind. That said, it is easy to see why many researchers prefer things this way.

You may also wish to read: The human mind has no history. There is no good reason to assume that human intelligence evolved from mud to mind via a long slow history. When we look at the human past, we see lights flashing on suddenly. Technology evolves but not the mind as such.