YOUR
BEING CONSCIOUS
by Ted Honderich
Mind-Body
Dualism, and Objective Physicalism
The greatest French philosopher Rene Descartes
of the 17th Century, so wonderfully superior to his merely literary French successors
today, set out to escape doubt and find certainties. From the simple premise
that he was thinking something, whatever it was, even if it was false, he
argued to what he took to be the certain first conclusion that he existed. Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I
exist. But there is a problem. As the physicist Georg Lichtenberg said,
Descartes seems to be going further in his first conclusion than he really can.
All he could conclude with certainty from his thinking something was not that
he existed, but that there was thinking
going on. I agree with that myself. Don't you?
Not that it leaves us without another
problem, a great problem. What is thinking? What is it for someone or something
to think? A little more widely, what is what you can call cognitive consciousness? There are also, you may be ready to agree,
two other kinds of consciousness or sides or groups of elements of consciousness.
One is consciousness in seeing something or in any other kind of perception,
say hearing. Call that perceptual
consciousness. The third consciousness has to do with wanting or desiring
things, and what goes along with that, say intending to get things. Call that affective consciousness. What are each
of these three sorts of consciousness?
And there is also the all-inclusive
question of the nature of consciousness in general. What is it? What is the
common factor or character of the three sorts?
Most past and present philosophy
concerned with consciousness deals with or tries to deal only with this general
or levelling question, not its three parts. But you might wonder, as a first
tentative impulse about all this, whether that is right. Isn't there a lot of
difference, maybe fundamental, between seeing and thinking, and between seeing
and wanting? Can a single general or levelling answer be useful? Be right? Could
it be that the general question has to be answered adequately, so to speak, in
terms of different answers to the three particular questions?
Isn't there a pretty good additional
reason for attending to different answers to the three particular questions? There
been an awful lot of philosophy and science,
in particular psychology, concerned only with what it takes to be very different
from thinking and wanting -- perception. Isn't that separate concentration likely
to have been justified? There's something to be said for consensus in
philosophy and science isn't there, even if you are as resistant as I am to
what can be called democracy about truth?
Descartes is as well known to many philosophers
now for something other than cogito ergo
sum, indeed better known for something else. He believed that consciousness
is not physical. That is the truth of the general fact of it. Your being
conscious right now in any way is not an objective physical fact. It has a
nature quite unlike, say, that of the chair you are sitting on. In particular,
your consciousness is different in kind, another sort of thing, from
objectively physical neural states and events in your head, that soggy grey
matter, that electrochemical activity.
So for Descartes there are basically the
two kinds of things. There are objective physical things like chairs and there
are things that are not physical -- conscious states or events. What is true
about reality is a dualism -- there
are the two large kinds things. There are chairs and neurons and the rest, and
there is what you have in seeing something, and your thinking right now, maybe
your attending to something in particular that you are seeing, and your various
stuff related to wanting or desiring. For Descartes and many or some of his
successors, including a few scientists, consciousness is something you can call
spiritual. The philosopher of science
Karl Popper and the neuroscientist John Eccles wrote a book together with the
title The Self and Its Brain.
If Popper and Eccles seemed to me to
have been engaged in pomposity in their title, Descartes' mind-body dualism, as
it is called, persists. It is not only a
belief or attitude in religion or spirituality. It has been and is in ways
defended by neuroscientists and scientifically oriented philosophers. In fact it
is concealed in standard cognitive science or computerism about the mind.
This outlook and little industry, in
short, is to the effect that there are neural or brain events in functional or
causal connections, which of course are objectively physical, but they
themselves are not the events or states of consciousness. Those conscious
events are somehow or other connected with the events in persons and other
animals that have the general nature of the chair you are sitting on -- but the
conscious events themselves do not have that nature. As is often said, they
just supervene on the grey matter in
your head. We'll be coming back to this neighbourhood.
You won't need telling that there are
people on the other side from mind-body dualism, a lot of them. Most contemporary
philosophers of mind, many of them being philosophers of consciousness rather
than what we call both conscious and unconscious mentality, take it that
consciousness is physical. They say
plainly or they strongly imply, although they do not slow down to think about
what it is to be objectively physical, that consciousness is objectively
physical. I suspect that even more scientists of mind than philosophers hold
that consciousness is objectively physical, the kind of thing that is taken as the
subject of physics and physical science.
Such contemporary scientific
philosophers who are not physicalist in this way, say David Chalmers, the brave
author of The Conscious Mind, are out
on a limb. Of course they believe and argue that that is exactly where they
ought to be. Chalmers adds that exactly
the relation between conscious events and brain events is what he is known for
calling the hard problem -- as
against what turns up inthe rest of the science and philosophy of mind. The
philosopher Colin McGinn used to say, by the way, that we have as much chance
of solving it as chimps have of doing Quantum Theory.
The
Strengths and Weaknesses of Dualism, Objective Physicalism, More Theories
What is the main strength of dualism? That
seems to me pretty clear. We are all convinced, as I have said or already, that
consciousness is different -- it's
different from chairs and neurons. We are convinced partly or mainly because
each of us has a hold on his or her
consciousness, a hold that used to be condescended to by being called
introspection, maybe misunderstood as a funny kind of inner seeing. There
really is a difference we know about between your being conscious right now and
the chair and everything else that is part of the objective physical world.
Dualism goes to town with that true idea. That has been its strength.
But there is an awful difficulty with
dualism. Consciousness has physical effects. Arms move because of desires,
bullets come out of guns because of intentions. Piles of people are dead
because of the thinking of politicians, including some politicians of our
hierarchic democracies. How could such indubitably physical events have causes
that are not physical at all, for a start things not in space? How could
consciousness cause those things if it itself isn't physical?
Some philosophers used to try to accomodate
the fact that movements have physical causes by saying conscious desires and
intentions aren't themselves causal, but they go along with or correlate with or, as you've heard, supervene on
brain events. Epiphenomenalism, as it is called, is true. Conscious perceptions
and beliefs and wants themselves do not explain, say, where your cup of tea is right
now or your stepping out of the way of muscular
joggers bearing down on you .
But epiphenomenalism, although in my
view it was fallen into accidently by the distinguished American philosopher
Donald Davidson, is now mainly believed only in remote parts of Australia,
where the sun is very hot. I know only one epiphenomenalist in London,
sometimes seen among the good atheists in Conway Hall. Very nice man, but
dotty.
No doubt I shouldn't say those things,
but maybe there is room for a little passion in philosophy, anyway a little
mockery. My only passion within philosophy, putting aside political philosophy,
is that epiphenomenalism is, as my teacher Bernard Williams used to say, up the
stump. He stopped somebody getting a lectureship who believed it.
So, if we abandon dualism, do we have
to embrace objective physicalism? Well, it certainly has to be said for it that
it isn't involved in denying that what makes my fingers press keys on a
keyboard is what I am thinking. But that is not the end of the story. You've already
heard from me what we all believe, and what is another kind of axiom in all
this, that consciousness is different.
Not just in degree. Not just in terms of some fancy distinction -- or maybe
unfancy distinction, maybe between the category of consciousness together with such
things as thermometers as against the wide category of the rest of what there
is, as I take it Dan Dennett supposes.
The trouble with the existing
physicalisms in philosophy and science is that they just don't adequately register
the difference of consciousness. Of course they try, and claim to have
succeeded, but in my view and that of many others they haven't.
But disagreement about consciousness
is the basic idea of a lot more than the confrontation between dualists and
objective physicalists. There are a good many very different and more
particular theories or analyses of the nature of consciousness -- very different
answers to the question of what consciousness is.
To go back to a main one, functionalism,
which also turns up in cognitive science, it has one source in the fact that we
ordinarily understand particular conscious states partly in terms of their
causes and effects. Fear is what is owed to a kind of cause and results in a
certain kind of effect. So with love, no doubt, and so on. But, for a start,
that leaves something out. When I have that feeling when my heart lifts at
seeing the rosy dawn over yon eastern hill, that sure is more than only effect
and cause. There's more to it, indeed the main thing. Functionalism leaves
something out. There are various arguments along this line.
Mixed up with a lot of functionalism
is the idea that a kind of emotion, say fear again, doesn't go with just one
kind of neural state but rather quite a few different ones. There is what is
called variable realization. Sometimes fear in animals other than us is
mentioned, maybe snakes. So the fear, obviously, can't be identical with any
one of those neural states. That leads to taking it, confidently, as what is
called an abstract sort of thing.
What's that? Well, I guess, not physical. So, I put it to you, the advanced
thinkers of the abstract functionalist kind are in the same sinking boat with
the dualists to which they are so calmly superior.
I leave it to you to think about what
is called the variable realization of emotion and so on. Think with your boots
on.
Another theory, mentalism, brings together conscious and unconscious mentality, but
then conceives or anyway talks of the whole caboodle as consciousness. That
fails to deal with the question of what consciousness is in the primary
ordinary sense, the core sense in a good dictionary -- which I trust is the
question you have in mind. Certainly it's the one I've had in mind. Another
theory or kind of theory, Naturalism,
congenial to many, is vague, but has to do with a necessary respect for science.
Aspectual theories such as
panpsychism, advocated by distinguished thinkers in the past and present, including
David Chalmers and Galen Strawson, strong son of a distinguished
philosopher-father, do not detain the rest of us.
Disagreement,
Leading Ideas, Different Questions
It's my idea that this extent of
disagreement about consciousness is partly the result of philosophy being
harder than science. Philosophy doesn't have proofs in it, anyway of big
things. But the disagreement, including the disagreement between the dualists
and their adversaries, and all the rest of it, seems to me to have a lot to do,
a lot more, with what you can call leading
ideas or attempted initial clarifications of the subject-matter of
consciousness. And thus the fact that people are disagreeing, or in fact not
really disagreeing, strictly speaking, but just conflicting, because they are really
answering different questions.
One leading idea is to the effect that
consciousness is a matter of qualia
-- elusive properties of consciousness. Another is that it that what it is for something to be conscious
is for there to be something it is like
to be that thing. A third idea is that consciousness is a matter of aboutnesses or representations -- of conscious things that are about other things,
in some such way as these very words on this page are about things. Another idea
is that consciousness is all involved in something called subjectivity -- where that is mixed up with an inner self in you,
an inner thing, a homunculus or small inner person, what is sometimes called a
metaphysical self.
Such initial clarifications, it seems
to me, have pretty obvious shortcomings. There is considerable disagreement about what qualia as qualities of consciousness are, say between the leading
philosophers Ned Block, Chalmers, Dennett, and Tom Nagel. In any case, since
qualia are only qualities of
consciousness rather than consciousness itself, and since consciousness is
allowed also to include the non-qualia that are called propositional attitudes,
qualia cannot give us an adequate initial clarification of consciousness.
The second idea,
being conscious is there being something it's like to be a thing -- is surely
circular and uninformative, like defining a horse as a thing that is horsey. We
are in fact being told that what it is for something to be conscious is for
there is something it is like for that thing to be conscious. If so, not much use.
The third idea, about aboutnesses or representations, sure
has to say something about the big difference between the words on this page,
the lines of type, and your conscious thoughts, maybe the thoughts you have in
reading the page. And, by the way, is all
consciousness somehow representative? No, there is consciousness generally accepted as non-representational,
notably aches and objectless depressions, which aren't at all word-like.
The fourth supposed initial
clarification, subjectivity, I propose to you, is again circular. This talk of
subjectivity brings in a subject or self, and one of those, however you think
of it, is being taken as a conscious thing.
An Adequate Clarification, Settling the Question,
Objective Physicality Again
Mainstream
philosophy in my idea is an equal partner to science. It is a greater
concentration than science on ordinary logic -- on clarity, consistency and
validity, completeness, and accurate generality. Despite a history of
disagreement, failing theories and resulting pessimism about understanding
consciousness, it seems to me this philosophy can argue its way to an adequate
theory or analysis of what it is to be conscious in the primary ordinary sense.
But in my view we have to start again
-- really clarify our subject at the start, settle the question of
consciousness we are asking.
Let us stick to something already
mentioned, a really prior matter, that our question is what it is to be
conscious generally speaking in the primary
ordinary sense, the core meaning of the word -- and also
what it is to be conscious in each of the three ways in the primary ordinary
sense. Do you ask if that is the right
question? Should we be asking it? Does some science ask another one? I won't get
around here to to defending our question, but let me say quickly it's a
question that has the unique recommendation that it is necessary to any inquiry into what is called
consciousness, including what people call the unconscious mentality.
What we need now in order to get going
is a really adequate initial clarification of this ordinary consciousness.
Despite my objections to the five
leading ideas glanced at above, there is something very important to be said
for them -- and for a great deal of other thinking and writing about
consciousness. In the leading ideas and elsewhere
there are various characterizations of consciousness that hang together, quite
a pile of them.
Being
conscious is a having of something --
a usage you have heard already from me (7th paragraph above) and I am sure you
didn't jib at. Being conscious is something's being given, its being experienced
or undergone, its being for or to something, something not deduced, inferred, posited or
constructed from something else. It is something's being present, somehow existing, being transparent,
being right there, being close or open, being a content or
object, being something real in
some sense of the word, something in the case of perception loosely called a world, and so on.
All
that is data as to consciousness, a database owed to our holds on it. It is
a lot more than a philosopher's apercu.
All of
it can be summed up in the general initial clarification of consciousness as something's being actual.
There
are objections to the clarification having to do with circularity, its being a
laundry list, and its being metaphorical or otherwise figurative, as indeed it
is. The objections, I think, can be met. The last one can be met by remembering
that what is well known to have happened throughout the history of science.
That is exactly progress from the metaphorical or otherwise figurative to the
literal.
At this
point in our reflections, having glanced at dualism, objective physicalism, and
other previous theories of consciousness, which all have some relation or other
to objective physicality, and having come to an initial clarification of
consciousness as something's being actual, you may agree it is at least
apposite to look at a certain matter. It is at least apposite to do what I
think is not done by any of the various past theorists and what is prompted by
talk of actuality. That is getting a little clearer about objective
physicality. It's a good idea to slow down and take some time thinking more
about this dominant understanding of the physical in science and philosophy. A
decent account has two parts, about which I'll be very quick.
(1)
What is objectively physical has physical
characteristics, having to do with science's inventory, scientific method,
space and time, particular lawful connections, categorial lawful connections,
ordinary or macrocosmic physical things being perceived, microcosmic and other
things being related to them, ordinary things being in points of view,
resulting differences, primary and secondary properties.
(2) As
for objective characteristics, these
have to do with separateness from consciousness, not being private, not being
in anyone's privileged access, related in a way to truth and logic, scientific
method again, no inconsistent metaphysical selves, hesitation about
consciousness in the primary ordinary sense having all the above
characteristics of the objectively physical.
That is
more than you get in existing theories of consciousness.
The Actualism Theory of Consciousness -- Subjective
Physicality
Everything
so far issues immediately in two questions about consciousness. What is actual?
This being actual is what? Consider perceptual consciousness first.
What is actual now with my and probably
your perceptual consciousness is only a
room. Much that is often assigned to consciousness or conscious mentality,
neither adequately initially clarified, is indubitably not actual -- qualia, inner representations or aboutnesses, what is
called mental paint, something it's like to be something, metaphysical self or
inner subject. Nor, to mention a couple more candidates put up by philosophers,
does what is actual include a vehicle
of consciousness, which Colin McGinn drives around in, or medium of it, or any neural properties explanatory of what is
actual.
In general, what
is actual with perceptual
consciousness is only a subjective
physical world -- more particularly a piece, stage or part of one -- say a
room. No content or object that is other than exactly such a world.
Actualism in its
denials having to do with qualia is of course in open to historic objections
having to do with a similarity of perceptual consciousness to illusion and
hallucination. It defeats them. But I skip past that. Actualism is not naive
realism, however, and despite a relation to it doesn't come from it, and also
isn't what can be called indicated consciousness.
Now what is it
for subjective physical worlds to be
actual? It is for them to be subjectively physical.
The
characteristics of subjective physical worlds, more particularly parts of them,
are open to literal specification. They are counterparts
of the characteristics of the objective physical world, some identical, some
not. Such a subjective world is physical in being within science's inventory
and method, spatial and temporal, lawful, etc. That such a world has such
physical characteristics is in no way put in doubt by its also having
subjective characteristics -- inseparableness from consciousness, privacy, and
so on. No quick assumption there or loose talk.
Such worlds are
no less real for being myriad in number and each having lawful dependencies not
only on the objective physical world but also on the neural or other machinery
of perceivers. Such worlds are specifically real, of course, in sharing
characteristics with the objective physical world. They are also real in other
senses -- in one of them more real than the objective physical world. Objections
to this completed theory of perceptual consciousness have to do with
circularity, consensus, unbelievability, two rooms, rhetoric, supervenience and
so on. I think they can be met.
So, in short,
your being perceptually conscious right now is
the existence of a world out there, very likely a piece of it that is a room.
That, I repeat, is not some rhetorical or poetical or feelingful verbiage but a
real fact that can be made very clear.
Subjective physical worlds and
their parts or whatever are plain enough states of affairs or circumstances,
ways things or objects are, sets of things and properties. These subjective
worlds are a vast subset, the objective physical world being a one-member
subset, of the single all-inclusive world that there is, the physical world,
that totality of the things that there are. They aren't made less real, say
taken out of space out there, by their being myriads of them, one per
perceiver, nor by they or their parts being temporary or fleeting. For a start,
physics is full of fleeting things.
What is to be
said not about perceptual consciousness but about cognitive and affective
consciousness? Does cognitive and affective consciousness consist only in conscious representations? Do these
consciousnesses consist only a two-term relation between a representation and
what it represents? Our holds on our own conscious representations do indeed give
us their likeness to linguistic representations
-- spoken or written representations.
So are thinking
and wanting to be understood as only or purely representations? Understood by
way of the doctrines of a language of thought, or a relationism related to
functionalism, or the persuasive lingualism of John Searle and others?
No. Conscious
representations in actual consciousness are
such signs, but with the additional essential characteristic that they are
indeed actual -- as those other
things talked of with thinking and wanting definitely are not -- say funny self,
vehicle, medium, and neural properties.
If representations are what is actual with cognitive and
affective consciousness, what is it for the representations of cognitive and
affective consciousness to be actual? The answer is just that it is for them to
be subjectively physical in their own way, differently from the subjective
physical worlds of perceptual consciousness.
Their
characteristics are again counterparts of the characteristics of the objective
physical world -- and of subjective physical worlds, some identical, more of
them not. They are within the inventory of science and its method. They are
spatial but not actual as such.Their
lawful dependencies are different, including a unique dependency on subjective
physical worlds. They are not within points of view and do not have primary and
secondary properties. They are more similar to subjective physical worlds with
respect to their characteristics of subjectivity, starting with inseparability
from consciousness. In terms of a very well-known line by Jerry Fodor, being
actual is the something else that conscious representations are in virtue of
which they are real things on which we have a hold. That is the solution to a
lot of puzzlement about representations.
So -- that,
in short, is the new and different analysis or theory of consciousness that is
actualism. It leaves secondary questions unanswered. It's not all of the final
truth. It's, then, a fertile research project for both science and philosophy.
Criteria, Individuality, Freedom
Actualism's satisfactions of eight
criteria for a good theory of consciousness, several already mentioned, are pretty obvious and in all cases very
arguable. The reality of consciousness is explicit in its physicality, and in
particular the subjective physical world that is perceptual consciousness. The difference
of consciousness is explicit and far from factitious in its subjectivity, which
includes an individuality. Its three sides are not submerged in a false
uniformity.
Evidently it is a naturalism. It deals better with questions of the relationships of
consciousness, first to brains -- there are ordinary lawful connections,
ordinary connections of natural or scientific law. The theory leaves no
explanatory gap. It leaves all of
consciousness indubitably a subject for science, with which it is well forward
and with which it faces no unique difficulties.
Come
back to Descartes. You will remember that he took himself to have proved, by
way of the Cogito, the existence in each of us of a metaphysical self. You definitely
don't get one of those with Actualism. But you do get a unity for yourself, a unity
that is a matter of lawful connections between things in it, first of all a
subjective physical world and also your cognitive and affective existence. This
is an individuality that you can also think of usefully as the living of a
life. It is a long way from an homunculus.
And
something else. Descartes believed in free will, that our choices are not
effects, not necessary upshots of chains of causes and effects. He did not
accept the truth of determinism -- that our choices are exactly such effects. As
such good philosophers as Robert Kane have argued, the mistaken impulse or conviction
of free will has its origin in the conviction that we, each of us, has a
certain standing -- that each of us,
to be rhetorical, is not just another thing,
along with the chairs.
Actualism
explains that sense of standing, doesn't it? It makes a whole subjective
physical world depend not only on another world out there, but also on you. You
are, if not a creator, a contributing demigod, one of two sources of a reality.
Cheer up if you've rationally given up on free will. Be a little proud rationally.
This article is a bird’s-eye view of a
big book with the bird flying high and fast. I worry about it that someone once
said to the famous Harvard philosopher Quine, about Popper, that Popper
lectured with a broad brush, to which Quine mused that maybe he thought with
one too. Well, I admit that everything above is at least broad-brush, and must
raise questions, but you can find some medium brushwork in a lecture that is online
-- at the website http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/