Actual Consciousness: Database, Theory,
Physicalities, Criteria
Abstract
Despite five leading ideas, is disagreement about consciousness owed to no
adequate initial clarification of the question?
Your
being conscious in the primary ordinary sense, to sum up a wide
metaphorical database, is to be initially clarified as something’s being
actual – clarified as actual consciousness.
Philosophical
method like the scientific method includes transition from the metaphorical to
the literal.
Physicality,
the objective physical world, has specifiable general characteristics, 16 of
them, including spatiality, lawfulness, being in science, connections with
perception, and so on.
Actualism, the literal theory or analysis
of actual consciousness, is that actual consciousness has counterpart but
different characteristics.
Actual
consciousness is thus subjectively physical – consciousness in the case of
perception is only the existence of a subjective external physical world out
there, often a room.
But
thinking and wanting, cognitive and affective consciousness, are internal --
subjectively physical representations with attitudes, representations that are
actual.
Actualism
uniquely satisfies criteria for an adequate theory or analysis, including
naturalism and fully explaining both the reality and the subjectivity of
consciousness.
Actual
consciousness is a right subject and is a necessary part of any
inquiry whatever into consciousness.
cf. lecture handout
1
NEED FOR ADEQUATE INITIAL CLARIFICATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS?
You are conscious just in seeing this room
you are in, conscious in being aware of it in one ordinary sense of that latter
word. 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 enough true, that
you are also 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, about what you are reading.
You are conscious, thirdly, in having
certain feelings, maybe the hope that everything is going to be clear as a bell
in the next half-hour, maybe in intending to say so 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 three parts, sides, or
groups of elements? As I shall be remarking later in glancing at existing
theories of consciousness, the known main ones try to answer only the general
question. Could you really get a good general answer without getting the
particular answers?
These are the questions of a line of
inquiry and argument (Actual
Consciousness, OUP, 2014) of which this lecture is the short story. We can
ask the three particular questions and the general question, as we shall, in
mainstream philosophy. That in my view 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, then, that philosophy is thinking about
facts as distinct from getting them?
Another main 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 generally speaking in the primary ordinary sense, in what a
good dictionary also calls 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 consciousness 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 – anyway slightly mad
to me. But how much more virtue does Searle’s common sense definition have? Awareness
obviously needs defining as much as consciousness. Certainly there seems
to be uninformative circularity there.
Each of us also has something better than
a common sense definition. Each of us has a hold on her or his
individual consciousness. That is, each of us can recall now the nature of
something a moment ago, perceptual 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 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 event
or state of consciousness a moment ago, say the look of a thing or a passing
thought or an urge.
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, but ended by saying an awful lot less.
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, a pile of conflicting
theories, owed at least significantly to one fact? Is it owed to 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, not
asking the same question? In a sense, of course, that is not disagreement at
all, but a kind of confusion.
Here and still more hereafter, by the way,
indeed as before now, this lecture is a sketch of a sketch – a bird’s-eye view
of a big book, with the bird flying high and fast. I worry that someone once
said to Van Quine of Karl Popper that Popper lectured with a broad brush, to
which Quine mused that maybe he thought with one too.
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. 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. Others disagree in several ways with that.
Do we get an adequate initial
clarification of the subject of consciousness here? No. (1) There is only what
you can call a conflicted consensus about what these things are to be taken to
be. (2) In this consensus, worse, 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. (3)
Another thing mostly agreed is by itself fatal to the idea of an adequate
initial clarification -- that qualia are only part of consciousness. There's
the other part, which is propositional attitudes - related to my
cognitive consciousness.
Something it's like to be a thing
That idea of Tom 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. What else could we being told? Also, you can worry, no reality
is assigned to consciousness here. Can there be reality without what Nagel
declined to provide, an assurance of physicality?
Traditional or familiar
subjectivity Here, whatever better might be done about
subjectivity, and really has to be done, 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 enough 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 argues otherwise, valiantly but 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 Dave Chalmers. This is said by Block, not wonderfully usefully, to be
'just experience', just 'awareness'. Circularity. 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. Nagel sure wasn’t on about access
consciousness -- or what has it as a proper part. How many more instances do we
need in support of that idea about the explanation of disagreement?
A last remark about the five ideas. It is
notable that Chalmers takes them all 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 they’re different. Certainly the essential
terms aren't what he calls synonyms. Those five lots of thinkers are indeed
thinking about different things, as indeed they say.
And a last question. Is it not only the
case that none of the five ideas provides an adequate initial clarification of
consciousness, but also that a comparison of them in their striking variety
indicates directly the absence and lack of a common subject?
3 SOMETHING'S BEING ACTUAL
Is confession good for a philosopher's
soul? Well, it might help out with your getting an early sight of a
lecture.
I sat at in a room in Hampstead some years
ago and said to myself stop reading all this madly conflicting stuff about
consciousness. You're conscious. This isn't Quantum Theory, let alone
the bafflement of moral and political truth. Just answer the question of what
your being conscious right now is, or more particularly what your being
conscious of the room is, 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 in my case, lucky or
unlucky, was that my being conscious was the fact of the room being there,
just 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 get to 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. Further, this 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 following:
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,
hence the experience in the sense of the experiencing of something,
something being in contact, met with, encountered, or undergone,
awareness of something in a suggestive sense,
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, which is different,
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, certainly not a disposition to later 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 even the French. Probably Latvians.
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 kind of common
talk, 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 – which certainly
isn’t open to the objections of circularity. We can also say that what we have
is an initial 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?
This start immediately raises two general
questions. What is actual with this consciousness? And what is it for
whatever it is to be actual? And, remembering this consciousness has
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 what will
be eight -- for an adequate theory or analysis of ordinary consciousness, for 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 current 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, which goes back a long
way before Descartes? This dualism, often taken as benighted, is the
proposition that the mind is not the brain. That, in a sentence only slightly
more careful, is to the effect that all 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 in some sense dualists. Chalmers is one. There are other more
metaphysically explicit dualists, including Howard Robinson. Has
Block 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, which it sure is. And that it
has the great failing of making it not a reality. Your being conscious,
rather, 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, to go back to the
first point, 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, and
should do it more with politicians and our hierarchic democracy.
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 to me as hopeless. There is a place within other and
very different theorizing for what you can call physical functionalism,
which is better, partly because it puts aside the very dismissible multiple
realizability, which has been too popular by half, but that too is not a
subject for right now.
5 OTHER THEORIES, MORE CRITERIA
There are more existing theories and sorts
of theories of consciousness than dualism and abstract functionalism. Note that
like dualism and abstract functionalism, they make the nature of
consciousness or at least principally or essentially or primarily
uniform as, incidentally, do the five leading ideas -- despite our own
initial division of consciousness into the perceptual, cognitive and affective
kinds, sides, or groups of elements.
My own list of existing theories and sorts
of theories has on it Non-Physical Intentionality and Supervenience, Davidson's
Anomalous Monism, the Mentalism of much psychology and science as well as
philosophy, Block's mentalism in particular running together conscious and
unconscious mentality, Naturalism, the important and in a way dominant
Representational Naturalism, such Aspectual Theories as Galen Strawson's
Panpsychism and Double Aspect Theory, Russell's Neutral Monism, the different
Physicalisms of Papineau, Searle, Dennett, and of neuroscience generally, the
Higher Order Theory of Locke and Rosenthal, the audacity of the Churchlands
seemingly to the effect that it will turn out that there aren't any beliefs or desires,
the wonderful mystery of Quantum Consciousness, certainly the explanation of
the obscure by more than the more obscure, and the 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 one way or another with the
physical, physical reality, they do not slow down to think about it. They
do not come close to really considering what it is, going over the ground. Was
that reasonable? Is it 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?
Plainly not.
A third thing is important, indeed
crucial, for anyone who believes, as I do, that despite such original tries as
Frank Jackson's there are not proofs of large things in philosophy,
which is instead a matter of comparative judgement between alternatives. The
thing 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. Also criteria additional to two others aleady announced to you, that a
decent theory of consciousness will indeed have to recognize and explain (3)
the difference of consciousness from all else. It will also have to
recognize and explain (4) the reality of consciousness and the connected
fact of its being causally efficacious.
A further condition of adequacy is (5) something
just flown by so far in this talk -- subjectivity, some credible or
persuasive unity, something quite other than a metaphysical self or homunculus.
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 the relation or
relations of consciousness to a brain or other basis and to behaviour and
also other relations.
Something else I should provide here,
since I know where this lecture is going, is a scandalously speedy reminder of
the theories that are the externalisms. Putnam said meanings ain't in the head
but depend on science. Burge cogently explained by way of arthritis in the
thigh that mental states are individuated by or depend on external facts,
notably those 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 different
externalism.
6 THE OBJECTIVE PHYSICAL WORLD
To make a good start on or towards the
theory we will 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 is objective
physicality. I ask again whether they come to be judged for their still passing
by the subject. I hope so.
Anyway, having spent some time on that
database, and flown over a lot of existing uniform theories of consciousness,
and put together the criteria for an adequate theory or analysis of
consciousness, let us now spend even less 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. I’m
for walking around, going over the ground. Not that it will be done here and
now.
Here 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, the objectively physical world. I boil it down into a fast
checklist of characteristics. 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 truth dear to
me 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
And, to consider objectivity rather than
physicality, the properties of the objective physical world have the following
characteristics.
10. They are in a sense or senses separate
from consciousness.
11. They are public -- not in the
consciousness of only one individual.
12. Access to them, whether or not by one
individual, is not a matter of special or privileged access.
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 inner fact or
indeed unity or other such 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 could be said about all
that. You will be hearing about two counterparts to this checklist. It
will guide us in two other locales.
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. A good idea not get out of sight of them, though.
7 PERCEPTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS – WHAT IS AND ISN’T ACTUAL
On we go now from that database, the
encapsulation of it, the pile of theories of consciousness, the
criteria, and objective physicality. It seems to me and others that if we learn
from the existing pile of theories of consciousness and the resulting criteria,
and to my mind 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 naive subjects or to demote ourselves to
membership of the folk -- of whom I am inclined to believe that they are
distinguished by knowing quite a few large truths about consciousness. We
do need to concentrate, for a good start, on those two general and main
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 the room, what it will
turn out to be 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.
What is actual with you and me now,
so far as perceptual consciousness is concerned, is a room, most certainly not
a representation of a room or any such thing whatever, called content or
whatever else. We can all very well indeed tell the difference between a sign
and a thing that isn't one. Perceptual consciousness is not just or even at all
about that room, but in short is that room. No metaphysical self is
actual either, or direction or aboutness, or any other philosophical or funny
stuff. What is actual is a subjective physical world in the usual 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. There is reason for the rhetoric,
sense to be given to it.
Is a subjective physical world, certainly
not a world inside your head, just a phantom world? Is it insubstantial,
imaginary, imagined, dreamed up? If you are caught in a good tradition of
philosophical scepticism, maybe scepticism gone off the deep end, and feel like
saying yes, making me feel sorry for you, hang on for a while. Hold your
horses. This is philosophy in English, not deep, not literary.
8. PERCEPTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS – SOMETHING'S BEING ACTUAL IS IT'S 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 -- ways guided by what was said of the objective physical world. This
existence of a room is partly 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 or anyway
glanced at, 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. Note in passing that this clarifies something mentioned
before, the both epistemic and ontic character of our data.
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. I speak of a room, of course, not at all to diminish it
or to allow that it is flaky, but mainly just to distinguish it from that other
thing.
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 course of
many parts, of the single all-inclusive world that there is, the physical
world, that totality of the things that there are. Here is a summary table
of these and other facts. It also covers what we will be coming to, cognitive
and affective consciousness.
A TABLE OF PHYSICALITIES
PHYSICALITY |
/
\
/
\
SUBJECTIVE
PHYSICALITY
|
/
/
\
/
/
\
|
OBJECTIVE PHYSICAL WORLD |
SUBJECTIVE PHYSICAL WORLDS: Perceptual Consciousness |
SUBJECTIVE PHYSICAL REPRESENTATIONS: Cognitive and
Affective Consciousness |
|
|
|
|
|
ITS PHYSICALITY |
THEIR PHYSICALITY |
THEIR PHYSICALITY |
1 |
in the inventory of science |
in the inventory of science |
in the inventory of science |
2 |
open to the scientific method |
open to the scientific method |
open to the scientific method |
3 |
in space and time |
in space and time |
in space and time |
4 |
in particular lawful connections |
in particular lawful connections |
in particular lawful connections |
5 |
in categorial lawful connections |
in categorial lawful connections, including those with the objective
physical world and conscious thing |
in categorial lawful connections, including those with the objective
physical world and conscious thing |
6 |
macroworld perception, microworld deduction |
constitutive of macroworld perception |
not perceived, but dependent on macroworld perception |
7 |
more than one point of view with macroworld |
more than one point of view with with perception |
no point of view |
8 |
different from different points of view |
different from different points of view |
no differences from points of view |
9 |
primary and secondary properties |
primary and secondary properties |
no primary and secondary properties |
|
|
|
|
|
ITS OBJECTIVITY |
THEIR SUBJECTIVITY |
THEIR SUBJECTIVITY |
10 |
separate from consciousness |
not separate from consciousness |
not separate from consciousness |
11 |
Public |
private |
Private |
12 |
common access |
privileged access |
privileged access |
13 |
truth and logic, more subject to |
truth and logic, less subject to? |
truth and logic, less subject to |
14 |
open to the scientific method |
open to the scientific method despite doubt |
open to the scientific method despite doubt |
15 |
includes no self or unity or other such inner fact of subjectivity
inconsistent with the above properties of the objective physical world |
each subjective physical world is an element in an individuality that
is a unique and large unity of lawful and conceptual dependencies including
much else |
each representation is an element in an individuality that is a unique
and large unity of lawful and meaningful dependencies including much else |
16 |
hesitation about whether objective physicality includes consciousness |
no significant hesitation about taking the above subjective
physicality as being that of actual perceptual consciousness |
no significant hesitation about taking this subjective physicality as
being the nature of actual cognitive and affective consciousness |
Just attend, first, to the left hand
column in the lower section of the table. You will not need telling that
summarizes what was said earlier of objective physicality. Subjective
physical worlds, our present concern, characterized in the middle column,
are one of two subsets of subjective physicality. That subjective
physcality, like objective physicality, subjective physicality, as already
remarked, is a subset of physicality in general. You will know that I pass
by an awful lot of stuff in the table and in all of what I have to say here in
my hour. Very broad brush.
Subjective physical worlds are about as
real, I repeat, in pretty much the sum of decent senses of that wandering word,
as the objective physical world, that other sequence. This is so however
and to what limited extent the objective physical world is related to
subjective physical worlds. It is because of the dependencies on the objective
physical world and 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. They also
take perceptual consciousness to be a lot more than just the existence of
a room. Evidently the characteristics of subjective physical worlds clarify
and contribute content to what was said earlier of the epistemic and ontic
character of our data as to ordinary consciousness.
If you fancy aphorisms, you can also say
about perceptual consciousness 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 subjective physical
worlds, we're not discovering a new thing, a new category. We're just
noting and not being distracted from and using an old thing, putting it
into a theory of perceptual consciousness, making a theory of perceptual
consciousness out of it. 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 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 just 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 cursorily 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. And what it is for it to be
actual is for it to be subjectively physical, differently subjectively
physical than with a room. Cognitive consciousness, further, is related to
truth. To come to these propositions, of course, is to come away entirely from
the figurative to the literal.
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. For both cognitive and affective consciousness,
as already anticipated, see the the right hand column of that table. Note in
passing, not that the point is as simple and without qualification as too much
in the philosophy of mind, that given the differences between (1) perceptual
consciousness and (2) cognitive and affective consciousness, we do not have the
whole nature of consciousness as uniform or principally or essentially or primarily
uniform. That in itself is a recommendation of Actualism, a theory's truth to
your hold of your consciousness. You know, for a start, how different
consciousness in seeing is from thinking and wanting.
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 getting 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 that you might want to bring up, a list of subjects having to do
with representation -- a list with just a comment or two added.
Universal, Pure,
and Other Representationism. My representationism, as you know from what has
been said of actual perceptual consciousness, where there is no representation
at all, is not universal representationism. As you will be hearing in a minute
or two, it is definitely is not pure. The representation in cognitive and
affective consciousness necessarily is with something, one element of
the fact.
Our Knowledge of Thinking
and Wanting, Our Holds -- and the essential comparison with Linguistic
Representations.
Linguistic
Representations -- a Simple Classification from the excellent work of Austin,
Searle and others. A large and worthy subject on which we depend .
Languages of
Thought. A lot more than Fodor's one, mentalese, intriguing though it is,
starting with English .
Evolutionary Causalism, also known by other names, for
example as Biosemantics and Teoleological Semantics. Hopeless in my not wholly
humble view.
Relationism
or computerism, with some physical rather than abstract functionalism in
it. Also hopeless with actual consciousness. Hard to believe it has ever been a
clear-headed answer to a clear question about anything like actual
consciousness.
Lingualism as I
call it -- philosophy of language applied to philosophy of mind. Must be part
of the truth..
The Durable Truth of Some
Representationism or Other in the philosophy of mind. It has to be there.
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 precisely
Actualism. I myself say so.
So much for the
list of subjects having to do with representation that you might want to bring
up. I say one other thing in passing. As with functionalism, dualism and the
raft of other theories we glanced at, all of these important subjects make or
at least tend to make consciousness uniform. It isn't.
10 COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS – BEING ACTUAL
IS BEING SUBJECTIVELY PHYSICAL IN A WAY
Put up with just a few words more on some
of that pile of subjects, the representational theories of and related to
cognitive and affective consciousness. They 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
this by itself can work. Searle, admire him as I do, can't succeed in reducing
any consciousness to this. Absolutely plainly, there is a fundamental and large
difference between (1) a line of print on a page or a sequence of sounds and
(2) a conscious representation or a sequence of such things. The relation of a
conscious representation to language is only part of the truth..
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 me be hopeful in
my own different endeavour. In fact I take it there is
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, only a parallel to language, 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.
That is the fundamental difference between a line of print and conscious
representations. Representational consciousness consists in more than a
dyadic relation. It is not purely representational, not to be clarified by pure
representationism.
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.
Yes, 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. Zombies
could satisfy them, as Bob Kirk explained. 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 at all?
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
indeed be, in this different setting of reflection, just one of those things
we’ve heard about in other contexts, a zombie ? Put aside the stuff in zombie
theory about metaphysical possibility and all that, which I myself can do
without pretty easily. Do you say there 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 lunch table in a 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 my diabetes propositions about
myself in relation to the 16 propositions on the checklist on the physicality
of representations and hence on cognitive and affective consciousness, and the
previous 16 counterparts with perceptual consciousness. Is it an illusion that
our 16 propositions do not capture the nature of consciousness in its
three sides? Is it an illusion that there is something else or more
to consciousness? If you fortidudinously do a lot of reading of what this
lecture comes from, that bloody book, will you share with me at least on most
days the idea that a persisting elusiveness of perceptual consciousness really is
an illusion? That it really is an illusion that there is more to
consciousness than we have supposed, more that we have got hold of? I hope so.
Keep in mind that there are more kinds of illusion than personal
ones.There are illusions of peoples, cultures, politics, philosophy, and
science. Hierarchic democracy for a start.
Is it possible to say something more
useful quickly about and against the more-to-consciousness illusion? Well, Let
me gesture at another piece of persuading. You need
to keep in mind all of the characteristics of perceptual consciousness
and the other two kinds of consciousness. But think right now just of our large
fact of subjectivity. In Actualism, it is a unity that is individuality,
akin to the living of a life. A long way from a ruddy homunculus. Think in
particular of the large fact itself that your individuality includes and
partly consists innothing less than the reality now of a subjective physical
world, certainly something out there.
Now add something pre-theoretical. It is pretty
certain, and I'd say ordinary reflection proves it, if you need what you
bravely and too hopefully call a proof, that there is at least strangeness
about consciousness. Consciousness is more than just different. It is different
in a particular and peculiar way. When you really try to think of it, it pushes
rather than just tempts you to a kind of rhetoric, in line with but beyond our
database. You want to say consciousness somehow is an assertive, confronting
fact, for a moment or for a while a big-screen and mesmerizing fact. Actualism
explains this, doesn’t it? Consciousness for Actualism is those things,
is on the way to mesmerizing, because in its fundamental part it is no
less than the existence of a world. Actualism has this special and I’d say
great recommendation that goes against the temptation of the zombie objection.
You get a suitably whopping individuality with Actualism which I have not
slowed down to talk about. You get an individuality that brings in an
individual world -- a real individual world not of rhetoric or poetry or
Eastern mysticism but of plain propositions. It can be said, although the words
aren't exact, that with Actualism you are a unity that includes the size of a
world. That definitely isn't to leave something out.
So actualism rings true to me. It gets me
somewhere with consciousness. I don't think that's because I'm too perceptually
conscious, not cognitive enough.
Do you now maybe entirely change your
tune? I've known it to happen in seminars. Do you say that this externalism
with perceptual consciousness isn't crazy, in need of exclamation marks,
too rhetorical, circular, against good sense, strange, or in one of the other
ways unsatisfactory? Those were more of Colin's McGinn'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 or somehow old hat?
That despite leaving uniformity behind what it comes to is philosophically some
familiar idea -- the idea that perceptual consciousness has content,
with the addition, no doubt already made by somebody else, maybe the acute Burge,
that the content is external?
Well, Actualism doesn't come to that, even
with just perceptual consciousness before we get to the great difference of
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 -- a content properly and differently conceived and described. In place
of perceptual consciousness as something internal in some relation to something
external, we have consciousness as something external in lawful connection with
something else external as well as something internal. And there's no more
to the fact of being perceptually conscious than dependent external content.
There's no vehicle or any other damned thing in a variety put up or glanced
at by various philosophers, including a brain-connection, sense-data, aspects,
funny self, direction or aboutness, a higher or second order of stuff, and so
on and so forth. And none of that stuff except the existence of representation
and attitude in cognitive or affective consciousness either.
Do I have to try harder here? Will some
tough philosophical character, maybe some lowlife psychologist, maybe even Ned
or Dave, 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. Even crazy. Actualism is the
contention that being perceptually conscious is itself precisely a defined
existence of an external world, not the objective physical
world. Actualism is absolutely not the proposition, say, that what the
story of perceptual consciousness comes to is bloody representation and also
the objective physical world. It is not some proposition somehow to the effect
that what perceptual consciousness comes to is some kind of represented world
-- what by the way does indeed seem to be and deserves to be called
exactly a kind of phantom world. Actualism sure isn't naive realism either,
mainly resistance to 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 -- Putnam or after. And of
course we we haven't just engaged in what is often called semantics --
just made a change to the standard use of a word for some purpose. We haven't
just more or less arbitrarily transferred the noun 'consciousness' from a state
in a perceiver or from a relation of that state to an outer thing --
arbitrarily transferred it to a kind of outer thing on the end of an explained
relation. We began from a database, ploughed on with the logic of philosophy,
and we have a different view of what is out there, its subjective physicality,
and it has no unexplained relation or anything else unexplained in it.
And to say just a word about cognitive and affective
consciousness, not only is actualism not a universal or monolithic
representationism about consciousness generally, it isn't a pure
representationism either where it is a representationism. Cognitive and
affective consciousness are not a matter just of representations. They are, to
revert to the metaphor, a matter of actual representations.
11 CONCLUSIONS SO FAR AND MORE
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. That is, we have seen something of answers to the two
questions of what is actual and what actuality is. There remain other criteria.
I pass by or say no more about all that. I just put it to you that Actualism
does very well with the criteria of reality and causation, difference in kind,
subjectivity, 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 Noam 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 greater hope, as you know,
that Actualism despite not being Naive Realism makes sense of Naive Realism,
which always seemed to have good sense in it despite mystery and the
condescending labours on sense data of Freddie Ayer and those American allies.
There is also the hope that Actualism liberates consciousness-science from a
common hesitancy or tentativeness about consciousness. It sure does, I say, put
paid to the 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?
It gives us a standing that that saves us from propounding uncausal
origination, a standing first having to do with my being a necessary condition
of a subjective physical world.
There remains a last matter for us
now. Was ordinary consciousness in the primary ordinary sense, the core 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,
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 such facts of perception as those
having to do with retinas. They can, differently, 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, as many do, in my view fatally, consciousness in general without
distinguishing our perceptual consciousness from our cognitive and affective
consciousness.
But one thing that maybe can be
said for our choice of ordinary consciousness is that no inquirer can leave out
ordinary consciousness, of which we can have an adequate initial clarification.
This consciousness must surely be, in fact 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 exactly ordinary consciousness. If Actualism
is a defensible theory of ordinary consciousness, no general theory can leave
it out. It is essential. 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 for pieces of philosophy -- an inescapability of conclusions
given prior acceptance of at least reasonable premises.