Ted Honderich, Actual Consciousness remarks We all believe in the objective physical world, sometimes called
the scientific world. That in brief is the world that is there independently of
any consciousness of it. We believe in an objective physical room, which
will still be right here when we have all left. Philosophers and scientists of
consciousness have always thought about consciousness, sometimes called the
mind, in some connection or relation or other with objective
physicality. You can take time and enumerate various characteristics of it,
starting with its taking up space, being in what you can call the inventory of
science, and so on. Some philosophers and scientists, the persisting mind-body dualists,
maintain that consciousness is not physical -- they just tend to say not
physical, without any adjective. They take it as spiritual, or abstract, or
mystifyingly subjective, or as in the paralysing novels of Virginia Wolff or
the allusions or constructions of some psychoanalysts and other deep thinkers. Some other philosophers and scientists, the many persisting objective
physicalists, say the very opposite, that consciousness is objectively
physical. In our human case it's just neural states and events. The mind, they
say, is just the brain. Smaller lots of thinkers about consciousness include the naive
realists, given that name by Freddie Ayer, who once presided in this room
with Isaiah Berlin. The naive realists, now on the rise, and now calling
themselves the direct realistis, say something about the consciousness in
perception in particular, consciousness in seeing and so on. The naive or
direct realists leave perceptual consciousness as a seemingly mysterious
relation between you or something internal to you and the objective room. A whole industry of other philosophers and scientists, Freddie among
them too, regard themselves as definitely not naive. They say that all
consciousness, including consciousness in perception, is a matter of stuff of a
certain character, stuff that is something like ordinary words such as the ones
you are hearing and which could be recorded, and ordinary images like the ones
around us on these walls. All consciousness consists, that is, only or purely
in what they call representations, and maybe better called aboutnesses.
You, being of the sensible cognoscenti that frequents book launches, know that
is absurd. Consider any one of those paintings on the walls of this
Morning Room, say that portrait of Garrick right there. It sure is a
representation, it's of something. It's about something. But the
room bloody well I trust you. You know the room isn't a representation. You can
tell the difference between a picture, a kind of aboutness, and the room
itself. The room doesn't stand for anything. Here, I brazenly say, skipping past a lot, is the the first fact instead
about consciousness. Each of us has a hold on his or her own
consciousness. As a result we think and say things about it, 31 of them on
my list. Your being conscious is the having of something, not in the
literal way you have ankles or money. It's something being given. It's
something present, something right there, something immediate,
something not deduced or constructed anything like that. And so on. That is
data, a database. You can sum it up or anyway label by saying consciousness is something's
being actual. That is true of consciousness in perceiving and also
consciousness in kinds of thinking and kinds of wanting -- so in all of the
three kinds or sides of consciousness: perceptual, cognitive and affective
consciousness, so much more different than my fellow-worker in consciousness
these days are inclined to assume. Your consciousness right now in seeing this room is a room's being
actual -- it's actual consciousness, one kind of it. That, and all
of the data, is indeed metaphorical or figurative, like so much in which
theories in the whole history of science started. And a room's being actual turns out on analysis or explanation to be a
room existing, its being subjectively physical, a room just as much out
there in space as the objective physical room. Your perceptual consciousness is
therefore primarily a fact not internal to you but external to you, outside
you. It is an external fact dependent on two things -- on the objective
physical world out there and on you neurally. Its being one of a myriad number
of such transient things makes it no less real. Indeed, in senses of that
shifty word, it is more real than the objective physical world.
For a start, it's the one we live in. I save
you a very different line or two to which I was tempted -- on what is happening
in Gaza, about the endings on a beach of four small subjective physical worlds
yesterday. I leave that different philosophy about humanity to Twitter, where
indeed you will find it, and persist with consciousness in general, or and
now the two other kinds of it. As against perceptual consciousness, there is that consciousness of
thinking and wanting, cognitive and affective consciousness. They are
different. They are a matter of internal representations. But they
aren't the boring representations of that whole industry of philosophers and
scientists, like just lines of type and just silicon sequences in computers.
Conscious representations are representations that are actual
representations, uniquely subjectively physical, if differently so from
subjective physical worlds. That's enough philosophy, enough rearranging of reality, which
pedantically I didn't want to leave out even in this mixed company, so as to be
true to the book. Actual Consciousness is definitely philosophy. It has what I sometimes take to be my only
virtue, which is diligence. It never stops doing mainstream philosophy, which
is always just concentrating on the logic of ordinary intelligence. So it is
ongoing argument, with that database, and with checklists of characteristics of
the objectively physical and other worlds, sets of counterpart
propositions related but not identical, and passing references to a host of
other philosophers, and some comradely superiority, and worry about consensus,
which after all, despite some scientists, is the unsettling thing that is democracy
about truth. God knows there is a living author in the book. In conversation, not
lecturing. And with some awareness of more than the imperatives of philosophy.
There is attention to personal existences, including that of the guide. There
is attention to dawns, my seeing them from a window. By way of dear Will's
perfect line about morns, in
russet mantle clad, walking o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill -- in my
case the one with Ally Pally on it, that people's palace of London. Is the
literary pretence of a conversation, thinking along together, a little silly?
Could be. But it may remind a reader or two that their own attention to
themselves, their consciousness, their thinking along for and about themselves,
is essential. And that in reading a book by a philosopher they are not in touch
with a higher being, but more likely a lower. I confess to early mornings in
the sunrise of having aspired to be the Darwin, the Gibbon, the Bach, of
consciousness. Midmorning always came, thank God. Poor Ted instead, just trying
hard. I thank
lovely Ingrid Coggin Honderich, gardener, botanist and earth mother, for all
that tolerance of me learned in Dartington Hall, that school of schools. I
thank all of OUP, starting with Peter Momtchiloff and Ellie Collins, who are on
hand. They and their predecessors have waited 24 years for this book. All of
them served an author's needs to the extent that that is compatible with the
high purposes of the greatest of academic publishers. Including the high
purpose, I may say, of a secret detail of the jacket that can be seen only by a
very sharp eye that knows its pictures. Thank you
too for listening along. |