Ted Honderich
Actual Consciousness
A Lecture

17 April 2014


1   Need for adequate Initial Clarification of Consciousness?

       You are conscious just in seeing this room you are in, conscious in an ordinary sense of being aware of it. That is not to say what is different and more, that you are seeing or perceiving the room, with all that can be taken to involve, including stuff about your visual cortex and maybe retinas. To say you are conscious just in seeing this room is not itself to say, either, what is often true, that you are attending to the room, fixing your attention on it or on something in it.
 
        You are now conscious, secondly, I am sure, in having certain thoughts, no doubt about what you are hearing.

        You are conscious, thirdly, in having certain feelings, maybe the hope that everything is going to be clear as a bell, maybe in intending to leave early if it isn't.
 
        What are those three states, events, facts or things? What is their nature? What is the best analysis or theory of them? What is what we can call perceptual consciousness, cognitive consciousness, and affective consciousness?

        There is also another question, as pressing. What is common to the three states, events or whatever? What is consciousness in general? What is the kind of state, event or whatever of which perceptual, cognitive, and affective consciousness are parts, sides, or groups of elements? As I shall be remarking later in glancing at existing theories of consciousness, the known main ones answer only the general question. Is that a good idea? Is it a possible idea if you want the philosophy of mind to be better?

       We can ask the particular questions and the general question in mainstream philosophy. It is a greater concentration than that of science on the logic of ordinary intelligence: (i) clarity, usually analysis, (ii) consistency and validity, (iii) completeness, (iv) generality – generalness. Is it safe enough to say that philosophy is thinking about facts as distinct from getting them?

       Another preliminary. There are ordinary and there are other related concepts of things, ordinary and other senses of words -- say stipulated or technical ones. Let us ask what it is to be conscious in the primary ordinary sense, in the core meaning of the word -- and 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? Assume it is and wait for an answer in the end.
 
       We have what Searle rightly calls a common sense definition, something he calls unanalytic, of what seems to be this ordinary consciousness -- presumably must be ordinary since it is common sense. This consciousness in the definition is states of awareness that we are in except in dreamless sleep. That has the virtue of including dreaming in consciousness, which surprisingly is not a virtue of all definitions, notably a slightly mad Wittgensteinian one. But how much more virtue does the common sense definition have? Awareness obviously needs defining as much as consciousness.

       Each of us also has something better than a common sense definition, a hold on her or his individual consciousness. That is, each of us can recall now the nature of something a moment ago, consciousness of the room, or a thought, or a feeling. I guess that is what has been called introspection, and doubted because it was taken as a kind of funny inner seeing, and people or subjects in psychology laboratories were asked to do more with it than they could. Forget all that. We can be confident right now that each of us can recall that thing of consciousness a moment ago.

       There are lesser and greater pessimisms about our answering the general question of consciousness. Greater pessimists have included Noam Chomsky, Tom Nagel, David Chalmers -- and Colin McGinn, who began by saying we have no more chance of getting straight about consciousness than chimps have of doing physics.
 
       Here is a first question for you, a first piece of this lecture. Are those pessimisms and also, more importantly, the great seeming disagreement about what consciousness is, owed at least significantly to one fact? The fact that there has not been agreement on what is being talked about, no adequate initial clarification of the subject matter, people talking past one another? In a sense, of course, that is not disagreement at all, but a kind of confusion.
 

2   Five Leading Ideas of Consciousness

       I'd say there are five leading ideas of consciousness. They are about qualia, something it's like to be a thing, subjectivity, intentionality, and phenomenality. Fly through them with me, in fact over them.

       Qualia  Dan Dennett says qualia are the ways things seem to us, the particular personal, subjective qualities of experience at the moment. Tom Nagel says qualia are features of mental states. Very unlike Dennett, he says it seems impossible to analyse them in objective physical terms, make sense of them as objectively physical. Ned Block has it that they include not only experiential properties of sensations, feelings, perceptions, wants, and emotions. They are also such properties of thoughts, anyway our thoughts that are different from the sort of thing taken to be the functioning of unconscious computers -- computation or bare computation.
Do we get an adequate initial clarification of the subject of consciousness here? No. (i) There is only what you can call a conflicted consensus about what these things are to be taken to be. (ii) In this consensus one thing that is very widely assumed or agreed. Qualia are qualities of consciousness, not what has the qualities, consciousness itself, maybe its basic or a more basic quality. (iii) Another thing agreed is itself fatal to the idea of an adequate initial clarification -- that qualia are only part of consciousness. There's the other part, which is what are called propositional attitudes.
 
       Something it's like to be a thing  That idea of Nagel in his paper 'What It's Like To Be a Bat', however stimulating an idea, as indeed it has been, is evidently circular. Searle in effect points to the fact when he says we are to understand the words in such a way that there is nothing it is like to be a shingle on a roof. What we are being told, it seems to me, is that what it is for something to be conscious is for there is something it is like for that thing to be conscious. Also, you can worry, no reality is assigned to consciousness here. Can there be reality without a positive assurance of physicality?

       Traditional or familiar subjectivity   Here, whatever better might be done about subjectivity, there is circularity. Consciousness is what is of a subject, which thing is a bearer or possessor of consciousness. There is also obscurity. Further, a subject of this kind is a metaphysical self. Hume famously saw off such a thing, didn't he, when he reported that he peered into himself and could not espy it?
 
       Intentionality   The idea was brought into circulation by the German psychologist Brentano in the 19th Century and has as its contemporary defender and developer Tim Crane. It is usually and better spoken of as aboutness, where that is explained somehow as also the puzzling character of spoken words and seen images. There is the great problem that when intentionality is made clear by way of likeness to words and images, it is evident that it is only part of consciousness. As is often remarked, it leaves out aches and objectless depression. Crane says otherwise, to me unpersuasively.

       Phenomenality   Block speaks of the concept of consciousness as being hybrid or mongrel, and leaves it open whether he himself is speaking of consciousness partly in an ordinary sense. He does concern himself, certainly, with what he calls phenomenal consciousness, as does David Chalmers. This is said by Block, not wonderfully usefully, to be 'just experience', just 'awareness'. I add in passing that he takes there to be another kind of consciousness, access consciousness, which most of the rest of us recognise as what we call unconscious mentality, say brain-workings. Here, I remark in passing, is a first and striking instance of philosophers or scientists definitely not meaning the same thing as other philosophers or scientists. How many more instances do we need?

       A last remark about the five ideas. It is notable that Chalmers takes them to come to the much the same thing, one thing, to pick out approximately the same class of phenomena. He is not alone in that inclination. But evidently the five things are different. Those five lots of thinkers are indeed talking about differentthings, as indeed they say. And can their various disabilities conceivably add up to something clear and useful?
 

3   Something's Being Actual

       Is confession good for a philosopher's soul? Well, some from me might help out with your getting an early hold on a lecture. I sat at a table some years ago and said to myself stop reading all that madly conflicting stuff about consciousness. You're conscious. This isn't Quantum Theory or its worldly interpretation, let alone bafflement about moral and political truth. Just answer the question of what my being conscious right now is, more particularly what your being conscious of the room is, your being conscious in just seeing the room. Not thinking about just seeing. Not liking it or whatever. You know the answer in some sense, don't you? You've got the hold.
 
       The answer, lucky or unlucky, was that my being conscious was the fact of the room being there. Later on, as you will be hearing, I preferred to say that a room was being there.

       You will be more reassured, I'm sure, to hear that that I do not just discard all that philosophy of mind just glanced at -- the five leading ideas, and a lot more. On the contrary, it must be that there is something in it all. It's hard to have a view about the value of consensus in philosophy, or in science, about what you can call democracy about truth. But who can say there isn't any value at all?

       If you go through the philosophy on qualia, what it's like, subjectivity, intentionality, and phenomenality, you can have what is the first of three or four main things in this lecture. You find all those philosophers using certain terms and locutions. Suppose, as you very reasonably can, that they or almost all of them are talking about consciousness in the primary ordinary sense. They think about it in a certain way, have certain concepts, use certain language for it. It is shared with philosophers and scientists otherwise concerned with consciousness and with what they call the mind. I am confident that it is shared with you.

       If you put together the terms and locutions you get what we can certainly call data. You get a database.

       It is that in the primary ordinary sense, in any of the three ways, your being conscious now is:

the having of something, something being had -- not in a general sense, the sense in which you have ankles,

hence something being held, possessed or owned,

your seeing, thinking, wanting in the ordinary active sense of the verbs,

the experience in the sense of the experiencing of something,

something being in contact, met with, encountered, or undergone,

awareness of something,

something being directly or immediately in touch,

something being apparent,

something not deduced, inferred, posited, constructed or otherwise got from something else,
 
something somehow existing,

something being for something else,

something being to something,

something being in view, on view, in a point of view,

something being open, provided, supplied,
 
something to which there is some privileged access,
 
in the case of perception, there being the world as it is for something,

what at least involves an object or content,

an object or content's coming to us, straight-off,

something being given,

hence something existing and known,

something being present,
 
something being presented,

something being shown, revealed or manifest,
 
something being transparent in the sense of being unconveyed by anything else,

something clear straight-off,

something being open,

something being close,

an occurrent or event, not a disposition to such events,

something real,
 
something being vividly naked,

something being right there,
 
in the case of perception, the openness of a world.

       That, I say to you, is data, and I sure bet you it exists in other languages than English. We can await reassurance from the Germans and no doubt trouble from the Frogs. It is a database. To glance back at the five leading ideas, it's not a mediaeval technical term in much dispute, or a philosopher's excellent apercu but still an apercu, or a familiar or traditional idea, or an uncertain truth based on words and images, or an uncertainty about consciousness that seems to slide into unconsciousness.

       Without stopping to say more about generalizing about the database, except that in character it has to do with both existence and a relationship, is both ontic and epistemic, we can of course note that certainly it is metaphorical or figurative. To say consciousness is given is not to say it's just like money being given. There is an equally figurative encapsulation of it all, which I will be using. It is that being conscious in the primary ordinary sense is something being actual. We can also say that what we have is a conception of primary ordinary consciousness as being actual consciousness. Can we follow in the history of so much science by starting from but getting beyond metaphor?

       It immediately raises two general questions. What is actual with this consciousness? And what is it for whatever it is to be actual? And, remembering what has is being supposed about three parts, sides or group of elements of consciousness, there are the questions of what is actual and what the actuality is with each of perceptual, cognitive and affective consciousness.

       So the first two criteria – of 8 -- for an adequate theory or analysis of ordinary consciousness, a literal account of its nature, is the theory's giving answers to those questions about (1) what is actual and (2) what its being actual comes to. Certainly we have to get to the absolutely literal. We will get better answers, however, if we look at a few other things first.
 

4   Functionalisms, Dualisms

       It is prudent, whether or not required by a respect for consensus, for democracy about truth, to consider existing dominant theories of anything. If you take the philosophy and science of consciousness together, certainly the philosophy and science of mind, you must then consider abstract functionalism and its expression in cognitive science -- computerism about consciousness and mind, which of course might be or anyway might have been right.
 
       Could it be that abstract functionalism is usefully approached in a seemingly curious way, approached by way of what has always been taken as an adversary, traditional dualism? This dualism is the proposition that the mind is not the brain. That, in a sentence only slightly more careful, is to the effect that consciousness is not physical. It is, as maintained by many who have followed Descartes, spiritual. There are, of course, reputable and indeed leading philosophers and scientists of mind who are dualists. Chalmers is one. There are other more metaphysically explicit dualists, including Howard Robinson. Has Block himself been a fellow traveller?
    
       You may excuse me saying of dualism, since I have a lot of my own fish to fry, that it has the great recommendation of making consciousness different in kind, and the great failing of making it not a reality. Your being conscious is something with a history that began and will end. Who now has the nerve to say it is out of space? It is now real. It now exists. It's a fact. Evidently all this is bound up with the clearer and indeed dead clear truth that it has physical effects, starting with arm movements. This is only denied in Australia,where the sun is very hot. Elsewhere there is the axiom of the falsehood of epiphenomenalism. But, however, as the dictionary says, mind is somehow different from matter -- or from some or much matter.

       There is no more puzzle about what, in general, abstract functionalism is. Certainly the elaboration of it in cognitive science has been rich. Abstract functionalism is owed to a main premise and a large inspiration. The large inspiration is that we do indeed identify and to an extent distinguish types of things and particular things in a certain way -- by their relations, most obviously their causes and effects. We do this with machines like carburettors, and with kidneys, and so on.

       The premise, more important now, is the proposition that one and the same type of conscious state somehow goes together with or anyway turns up with different types of neural or other physical states. This is the premise of what is called multiple realizability. We and chimps and snakes and conceivably computers can be in pain that goes with quite different physical states.

       My own short story of abstract functionalism, my own objection, which I skip past, is that a conscious state or event is itself given no reality in this theory that allows it to be a cause of actions etc. It goes together with traditional dualism in this respect, and is therefore as hopeless. There is a place within other and very different theorizing for what you can call physical functionalism, but that too is not a subject for this evening.

 
5   Other Theories, More Criteria

       There are more existing theories and sorts of theories of consciousness than dualism and abstract functionalism.
My own list has on it Non-Physical Intentionality and Supervenience, and Davidson's Anomalous Monism, and the Mentalism of much psychology and science as well as philosophy, Block in particular, that runs together conscious and unconscious mentality, and Naturalism, and the important and in a way dominant Representational Naturalism, and such Aspectual Theories as Panpsychism and Double Aspect Theory, and Russell's Neutral Monism, and the Physicalisms of Papineau, Searle, Dennett, and of neuroscience generally, and the Higher Order Theory of Locke and Rosenthal, and the audacity of the Churchlands maybe now recanted to the effect that it will turn out that there aren't any beliefs or desires, and the wonderful mystery of Quantum Consciousness, and finally the general Externalisms -- Putnam, Burge, Noe, Clark.

       I save you consideration of and incidental objections to these existing theories of consciousness, and say only a few things.
 
       One is that while all of these theories are crucially or at least centrally concerned with the physical, physical reality, they do not dwell on it. They do not come close to really thinking about what it is. Was that reasonable?

       And just in passing, do these theories concern themselves with the same question? For a start, was supervenience about the same question of consciousness that representational naturalism was about?

       A third thing is important, indeed crucial, for anyone who believes, as I do, that there are not proofs of large things in philosophy, which is a matter of comparative judgement between alternatives. It is that a good look through those various theories gives us more criteria for a decent theory or analysis of consciousness -- additional to answers to the questions you’ve heard of (1) what is actual and (2) what the actuality comes to.
 
       A decent theory of consciousness, as I have already announced to you, will indeed have to recognize and explain (3) the difference of consciousness from all else. It will have to give us an unfactitious difference. It will also have to recognize and explain (4) the reality of consciousness and the connected fact of its being causally efficacious. Another condition of adequacy is something just flown by so far in this talk -- (5) subjectivity, some credible or persuasive unity, something quite other than a metaphysical self. Another is (6) the three parts, sides or kinds of elements of consciousness. It is surprising indeed that the existing general theories of consciousness do not include in their generality the distinctness of perceptual, cognitive and affective consciousness. Another requirement  (7) is that of naturalism, essentially a relation to science. A last one (8) is making sense of the relation or relations of consciousness to a brain or other basis and to behaviour and also other relations.
 
       A last thing I should provide here, since I know where this lecture is going, is a scandalously speedy reminder of just a little more of the theories that are the externalisms. Putnam said meanings ain't in the head but depend on science. Burge explained by way of arthritis in the thigh that mental states are individuated by or depend on external facts, notably that of language. Clark argued that representation with respect to consciousness is a matter of both internal and external facts – minds are extended out of our heads -- and Noe theorizes that consciousness partly consists in acting.

        There is a very, very different externalism.
 

6   The Objective Physical World

       To make a good start on or towards the theory we can call Actualism, think for just a few minutes, whether or not you now suppose this is a good idea, about the large subject of the physical, the objective physical world. The existing theories of consciousness, from dualism and abstract functionalism to the externalisms, do one way or another include presumptions about or verdicts on consciousness having to do with physicality -- by which they always mean and usually say objective physicality. Will they come to be judged for their passing by the subject? I hope so.
 
       Anyway, having spent some time on a database, and flown over a lot of existing theories of consciousness, let us now spend very little time on the objective physical world, on what it is for something to be objectively physical. If there are a few excellent books on the subject, notably those of Herbert Feigl and Barbara Montero, it is hardly considered at all by the known philosophers and scientists of consciousness. Or they take a bird’s-eye view, far above a pedestrian one. Here I’m for walking around, going over the ground.
 
        Let me report convictions or attitudes of mine owed to a respect for both science and philosophy. I abbreviate what is a substantial inquiry in itself into the objectively physical to a fast list of characteristics -- which you will find in the left-side column of the table on the lecture handout  [or Powerpoint]. They are properties that can be divided into those that can be taken as having to do with physicality, the first nine, and those having to do with objectivity, the other seven.


                                                                     Physicality

       1. Objective physical properties are the properties that are accepted in science, or hard or harder science.

       2. They are properties knowledge of which is owed or will be owed to the scientific method, which method is open to clarification.

       3. They are properties that are spatial and temporal in extent, certainly not outside of space and time.

       4. Particular physical properties stand in lawful connections, most notably causal connections, with other such properties. Two things are in lawful connection if, given all of a first one, a second would exist whatever else were happening. Think about that some other time.

       5. Categories of such properties are also lawfully connected.

       6. The physical macroworld and the physical microworld are in relations to perception, diffent relations -- the second including deduction.

       7. Macroworld properties are open to different points of view.

       8. They are different from different points of view.

       9. They include, given a defensible view of primary and secondary properties, both kinds of properties.

                                                                     Objectivity
   
       10. They are in a sense or senses separate from consciousness.

       11. They are public.

       12. Access to them is public, not limited to one perceiver or other individual.

       13. They are more subject to truth and logic than certain other properties.

       14. To make use of the idea of scientific method for a second time, their objectivity, like their physicality, is a matter of that method.

       15. They include no self or unity or other such inner fact of subjectivity that is inconsistent with the above properties of the objective physical world.

       16. There is hesitation about whether objective physicality includes consciousness.

       So very much more is to be said about all that. Here and elsewhere it comes to mind to remark that philosophy is as alive and good and with as much future as science -- since it is thinking more about facts as distinct from getting them.
 


7   Perceptual Consciousness -- What Is and Isn't Actual

       Going on now from the database, and the encapsulation of it, and the pile of theories of consciousness, and the criteria, it seems to me and others that if we learn from the existing pile of theories of consciousness and the resulting criteria, and the plain thinking about physicality, we need to make an escape from the customary in the science and philosophy of consciousness. There is a fair bit of agreement about that. McGinn is one who really declares it.

        We need to pay our very own attention to consciousness, some untutored attention. We do not need to turn ourselves into what psychologists used to call


 subjects or to demote ourselves to membership of the folk. We do need to concentrate, for a good start, on those two questions at which we have arrived and respond to them directly out of our holds on being perceptually conscious. Here is an anticipation, in awful brevity, of what seems to me the right response.

       What is actual for me now with respect to my perceptual consciousness, my perceptual consciousness as distinct from my cognitive and affective consciousness, is only a room, what it is sensible to call a room, but a room out there in space, a room as definitely out there in space as anything at all is out there in space. God knows it’s not in my head. You can walk around in it, really. And its being actual is its being in certain clear and specific ways subjectively physical, its being one of the spatio-temporal parts or pieces or stages of what we can explain as and call a subjective physical world.
 
       What is actual with you and me now, so far as perceptual consciousness is concerned, I repeat, is a room, most certainly not a representation of a room or any such thing whatever, called content or whatever else. What is actual is a subjective physical world in the sense of a part of it. Saying so is comparable to familiar talk of being in touch with the world as ordinarily thought of or the objective physical world in virtue of being in touch with a part of it.

       Is a subjective physical world a phantom world, just a phantom world? Is it insubstantial, imaginary, imagined? If you are caught in a good tradition of philosophical scepticism or suspicion gone off the deep end, and feel like saying yes, making me feel sorry for you, just hang on for a while. Hold your horses.
 

8. Perceptual Consciousness -- Being Actual is Being Subjectively Physical (in a way)

       What about question 2? What is a room's being actual?
 
        It is its existing in a way not at all metaphorical or otherwise figurative, but a way to be very literally specified. This existence is mainly but not only a matter of a room's occupying that space out there and lasting through some time, and of its being in lawful connections including causal ones within itself, and of two great lawful dependencies that mainly distinguish this way of existing in particular.
 
       The first is the lawful categorial dependency of what is actual on what we have just inquired into, the objective physical world, or rather on parts or pieces or stages of the objective physical world we ordinary speak of perceiving, whatever that perceiving comes to. The second dependency with my world is a dependency on my objective properties as a perceiver, neural properties and location for a start.

       So my being perceptually conscious now is the existence of a part or piece or stage of a sequence that is one subjective physical world, one among very many, as many as there are sets of perceivings of single perceivers. These myriad worlds are no less real for there being myriads of them and for their parts being more transitory than parts of the objective physical world. Myriad and momentary things in the objective physical world do not fail to exist on account of being myriad and momentary. Nothing fails to exist because it is dependent on other stuff. Subjective physical worlds and their parts or whatever are 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 course of many parts, of the single all-inclusive world that there is, the physical world, that totality of the things that there are.

       See the middle column of the table in the handout both for subjective physical worlds and their being a subset of subjective physicality which is itself a subset of physicality in general. You will know that I pass by a lot of stuff in the table and in what I have to say here in my hour.

       These perceived worlds are about as real, I repeat, in the sum of decent senses of that wandering word, as the objective physical world, that other half of the physical world, that other sequence -- however and to what limited extent the objective physical world is related to subjective physical worlds. You will guess it is because of the dependencies not only on the objective physical world but also on perceivers, and for other specific and large reasons, that these perceived worlds rightly have the name of being subjective.

       You can say, then, that my being perceptually conscious now just is and is only a particular existence of something like what most of the leading ideas of consciousness and the existing theories of consciousness half-seem to take or may take perceptual consciousness merely to be of or about, say a room.

       If you fancy aphorisms, you can also say Bishop Berkeley wasn't near to right in saying esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. The better aphorism is to be perceptually conscious is for something in a way to be.

       In talking of a subjective physical world, I'm not discovering a new thing. Just noting and not being distracted from and using an old thing, putting it into a theory of perceptual consciousness. There has certainly been talk and theory of some or other physical world being there for us, in the ordinary sense of a part of it being there. There's been sensible talk of the world as experienced. There's one for you right now, isn't there? You're immediately in touch with one of those right now, aren't you? If this familiar fact doesn't give you a proof of Actualism with respect to perceptual consciousness, it's a very helpful pull in the right direction.

       So much for an anticipation of the main body of the theory of Actualism with respect to perceptual consciousness, whatever is to be said about cognitive consciousness and affective consciousness -- including whatever is to be said of the beliefs and also the desires in which perceptual consciousness does not consist at all but by which it is often accompanied or to which it commonly gives rise.
 

9.  Cognitive and Affective Consciousness -- Theories & What Is and Isn't Actual

        To turn yet more briefly to these second and third parts or sides of consciousness, what is actual with your cognitive consciousness, say your just thinking of your mother or the proposition of there being different physicalities, or your attending to this room or something in it?
 
       My answer is that what is actual, we need to say, and absolutely all that is actual, is a representation or a sequence of representations. Cognitive consciousness, to move from the figurative to the theory, is differently subjectively physical than with a room. Cognitive consciousness, further, is related to truth. With respect to affective consciousness as against cognitive, say your now wanting a glass of wine, what is actual is also representation, subjectively physical, but related to valuing rather than truth. See the lecture handout, the right hand column.

       If there is a lot of existing philosophical and scientific theory with respect to perceptual consciousness, maybe there is still more with respect to cognitive and affective consciousness. Since I am near the end of my lecturing hour, and discussion is better, here is no more than just a list of good subjects in another pile, a list of subjects having to do with representation.

      Universal, Pure, and Other Representationism -- mine, as you know from what has been said of perceptual consciousness as against cognitive and affective consciousness, is not universal. As you will be hearing in a minute or two, it is also not pure either.
 
      Our Knowledge of Thinking and Wanting -- and Linguistic Representations.

      Linguistic Representations -- a Simple Classification.

      Languages of Thought. Fodor.

      Evolutionary Causalism, also known by other names, for example as Biosemantics. Millikan and Papineau. 

      Relationism or computerism. A whole industry.

      Lingualism, as I call it, philosophy of language applied to philosophy of mind. Searle is the champion.
 
      The Durable Truth of Some Representationism or Other.
 
      Dependency, Convention, Unicorns -- how conventions come about and so on Searle again.

      His perfect Chinese Room Thought-Experiment and whether it's an argument for Actualism.

 
10   Cognitive and Affective Consciousness -- Being Actual is being Subjectively Physical (In a Way)

       But to say just a few words of some of that, the representational theories of and related to cognitive and affective consciousness admittedly do begin from reflection on our spoken and written language, English and the rest, linguistic representations, and in effect move on from that reflection to an account of conscious representation. I report that it seems to me that none of it by itself works. Absolutely plainly, there is a difference between a line of type on a page or a sequence of sounds and a conscious representation or a sequence of such things.
 
       Actualism saves the day. The greatest of philosophers in our tradition, David Hume, began or more likely continued a certain habit of inquiry when he was in a way frustrated in coming to an understanding of something, in his case cause and effect. 'We must...,' he said, 'proceed like those, who being in search of any thing, that lies concealed from them, and not finding it in the place they expected, beat about all the neighbouring fields, without any certain view or design, in hopes their good fortune will at last guide them to what they search for'. Pity he didn't get to the right answer about cause and effect, but let us be hopeful in our own different endeavour. In fact we have more than good reason for hope.

       Our maybe reassuring circumstance right now is that if we need to look in another field than the two-term relation of representation, we can in fact do that without going to a wholly new field. If we have to leave the field of thoughts and wants and of representation when it is understood as being somehow only a relation between the representation and what is represented, we can in fact do that, by way of another field that is not a new field.
 
       I mean we can stay right in and attend to the larger field that we've never been out of, always been in since before getting to cognitive and affective consciousness. Never been out of it since we began by settling our whole subject-matter of consciousness in general, since we settled on an initial clarification of consciousness in the primary ordinary sense -- consciousness as actual, actual consciousness. The smaller field is in the larger.

       Cognitive and affective consciousness, thoughts and wants, are not only representations as first conceived in relation to spoken and written language. They are not only such representations, most saliently propositional attitudes, attitudes to propositional contents, the latter being satisfied by certain states of affairs. Rather, thoughts and wants are such representations as have the further property of being actual. That is the burden of what I put to you. Representational consciousness consists in more than a dyadic relation.
 
       For the contents of that contention, you will rightly expect me to refer you again to that table -- to its list of the characteristics of subjective physical representations. The right-hand column.

       Questions and objections are of course raised by Actualism. One is prompted by the recent history of the philosophy of consciousness and some of the science of it. Supposedly sufficient conditions having to do with consciousness, it is claimed, fail to be such. Do you simply say about Actualism that exactly the conditions for consciousness now set out in Actualism -- say perceptual consciousness -- could be satisfied by something but the thing still wouldn't be conscious?

       There is a temptation to say a kind of replica of me or you that it could satisfy exactly the conditions specified and the replica wouldn't be conscious in the way we know about? That it would be, in this different setting of reflection, just one of those things we were got to think about earlier, a zombie ? Putting aside the stuff about metaphysical possibility and all that, which I can do pretty easily, do you say it could be something without consciousness despite it and the rest of the situation being exactly what actualism says is what being conscious consists in?

       Well, sometimes the best form of defence is counter-assertion because it is true.


       In the heatwave of the English summer of 2013, at a gents club, a medical man gave me a free opinion about diabetes. It led me, after reading up on the internet that the symptoms are thirst, tiredness, seeing less clearly and so on, to the seemingly true proposition about me that I had a lot of the symptoms. I fell into the illusion that I had diabetes -- the diabetes illusion. Think of those propositions about myself as counterparts of the 16 propositions on the checklist on the physicality of subjective physical worlds and hence on perceptual consciousness.
 
       Is it an illusion that they do not capture the nature of perceptual consciousness, that there is something else or something more to consciousness? Do you share with me at least on most days the idea that a persisting elusiveness of perceptual consciousness is an illusion? That it just is an illusion that there is more to consciousness than we have supposed, more that we have got hold of? I hope so. You may need to keep in mind all of the characteristics in the table of perceptual consciousness and the other two kinds. Keep in mind too that there are more kinds of illusion than personal ones.There are illusions of peoples, cultures, politics, political classes, philosophy, and science. Maybe it will be possible to see more in the end about the more-to-consciousness illusion.

       It is pretty certain, and I'd say ordinary reflection and the history of the philosophy of mind proves it if you need what you call a proof, that there is at least strangeness about consciousness. More than difference and uniqueness. Consciousness seems to be, they say, a trick we can't understand. McGinn again. If that's right, what you need in order to make sense of it is exactly something strange that makes sense. Something that isn't strange won't be true to the hold we have on consciousness. We aren't just ignorant. We know there is a strangeness.

       Do you now maybe change your tune? Do you say that this externalism of mine, so-called, isn't crazy, in need of exclamation marks, rhetorical, circular, against good sense, strange, or in one of the other ways unsatisfactory? Those were more of Colin's ideas about a premature predecessor of the present Actualism. Do you say more or less the opposite -- that Actualism is old hat, or at least half old hat? That what it comes to is philosophically some familiar idea -- say that perceptual consciousness has content, with the addition, no doubt already made by somebody else, that the content is external?

       Well, Actualism doesn't come to that, even with just perceptual consciousness before we get to reflective and affective consciousness. What it comes to, in terms of a headline, is that the consciousness is the fact of an existence of the content, the content out there -- a content properly conceived and described. There's no more to the fact of being perceptually conscious in this way than dependent external content. No vehicle or any other damned thing in that variety glanced at, including a funny self, direction. None of it except representation and attitude in cognitive or affective consciousness either.

       Do I have to try harder here? Will some tough philosophical character say that there is no news in all this verbiage? That Actualism is blunder from Bloomsbury? Will he say that it is a truism that we all know that the world, something close to the objective physical world as defined, is part of, maybe the main thing with, perceptual consciousness as somehow ordinarily understood, with another main thing in the story of it being some kind of representation of it?
 
       Well, I don’t mind at all being in accord with some or other truism of this sort. But it would be strange to try to identify Actualism with it, try to reduce Actualism to it. Actualism is the contention that the being perceptually conscious is itself precisely a defined existence of an external world. Actualism is absolutely not the proposition, say, that what the story of perceptual consciousness comes to is the objective physical world and also representation, seemingly some kind of represented world -- what does seem to be a kind of phantom world.

       Actualism sure isn't naive or direct realism either, mainly just against sense-data and all that, and to the effect that in perception we're in some unexplained relation to the objective physical world. Actualism isn't any other externalism either. And we haven't just engaged in what is often called semantics -- just made a change in the use of a word for some purpose. We haven't just transferred the noun 'consciousness' from a state in a perceiver or from a relation of that state to an outer thing -- transferred it to an outer thing on the end of the mentioned relation.We have a different view of what is out there, its subjective physicality, and it has no relation or anything else in it.

       Further, whatever you think of it, there's a completed argument for all that stuff. Of course there's that other question. Is this the consciousness we should be thinking about? Should we be thinking about what it is to be conscious in the primary ordinary sense? Is this the right or the useful subject? You know what I say. Hold your horses.

 
11   Conclusions Past and Present

       So we have seen something of the satisfying of two criteria for a decent theory or analysis of consciousness in the primary ordinary sense, which is to say that consciousness clarified as actual consciousness. We have seen something of answers to the questions of what is actual and what actuality is. There remain other criteria. I pass by all that. I just put it to you that Actualism does very well with the criteria of reality and causation, difference in kind, subjectivity (of which I'll say just a word more), the three sides of consciousness, naturalism, and the relations of consciousness.

        It is my own attitude, then, that Actualism is a defeat of pessimism about understanding consciousness. More needs to be said about Chomsky in particular here – but that is for another day. Chalmers’s hard problem of consciousness, if Actualism works as well as I propose, is just solved. There is also the hope that Actualism makes explicit and real sense for the devotees of Naive Realism. There is also the hope that it liberates consciousness science from a common hesitancy, being baffled about science. It also sure does for slightly mad neuroscence-with-philosophy, say that of Popper and Eccles or Libet. Also, does it make more than a contribution to an old chestnut, the subject that is determinism's consequences for freedoms and responsibilities? You'll have to read the book to find out about that.

       There remains a last matter here. Was ordinary consciousness in the primary ordinary sense the right consciousness to consider? My short answer cannot be yes, since there is no possibility of showing that any consciousness is the right one.

       In the free world of philosophy, so much freer than the free world we hear more about, anyone can follow the crowd that considers the consciousness that in our terms consists in both ordinary-consciousness mentality plus mentality that is not ordinary-consciousness mentality. They can be still freer and consider consciousness where it also includes the such facts of perception as those having to do with retinas. They can consider consciousness that consists in our perceptual consciousness plus the cognitive and affective consciousness that consists in the large fact of attention. They can consider consciousness in general without distinguishing our perceptual consciousness from our cognitive and affective consciousness.

       One thing that maybe can be said for our choice is that no inquirer can leave out ordinary consciousness, of which we have a clarification. This consciousness must surely be, it is, what serves to identify the other additions, most obviously the addition of the mentality that is not ordinary consciousness. This combined subject needs to be distinguished from other explanations of behaviour, say mere musculature, and it cannot be distinguished without reliance on ordinary consciousness. If Actualism is a defensible theory of ordinary consciousness, no general theory can leave it out. I don’t think that is true of any other initial idea of consciousness

       The conclusions are the result not of proof, for which philosophy as against science is too hard, but of the weight of argument and judgement. Actualism, it is hoped, is a case of satisfying Hume's hope -- an inescapability of conclusions given prior acceptance of at least reasonable premises. It is mainstream philosophy, a greater concentration than that of science on the logic of ordinary intelligence -- on clarity, consistency and validity, completeness, and generalness. Hopefully it is fertile or pregnant thinking.