Consciousnes As the Only Reality

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Consciousness As The Only Reality

 

 

The belief that only consciousness is real (really real) is deeply ingrained in philosophy, both western and other. To many people it has seemed as if something like this must be true—that there is no coherent alternative. Consciousness undoubtedly exists, and it is all that exists. The doctrine is usually called idealism, though that label is not…ideal: it is not a form of idealism in the sense of a moral vision, and it is not the view that only ideas exist—that is too restrictive. But it is hard to find an alternative label, so I will stick with this one, with the stipulation that “idealism” means “the doctrine that only consciousness is real”. My question is what the source of this doctrine is: why is it found attractive, even inescapable?

            Evidently we need to be clear what is meant by “real” and “reality”. The word is used in many ways (“real estate”, “real time”, “real number”, “real leather”, “keeping it real”), but the philosopher has something metaphysical in mind, captured by the OED definition: “relating to something as it is, not merely as it may be described or distinguished”. For “reality” the entry is: “existence that is absolute or objective and not subject to human decisions or conventions”. The dictionary is contrasting the real with something else, located in the human subject—that which is merely described or distinguished, or that which is a matter of decision or convention. Reality is what does not depend on such human acts or attitudes. The real may thus be contrasted primarily with the fictional—that which is invented or postulated or imagined. Philosophers sometimes speak of “logical fictions” intending these to contrast with real entities. So the doctrine of idealism can be understood as the doctrine that everything except consciousness is fictional or imaginary or postulated: consciousness is real and anything non-conscious is unreal. So it is not that everything is consciousness (fictional things are not)—just that everything real is consciousness.  [1]

            The doctrine, then, is that every real thing is an instance of consciousness, though there may be unreal things that are not—fictional things. We could imagine or postulate things that are not instances of consciousness, but they would not be real. Idealism is the view that all actual things are instances of consciousness. So it is intentionally more restrictive than the view that everything we can think about is an instance of consciousness; the quantifier is more limited. Among all the things we can think about or refer to some are real, and these are all cases of consciousness; but there may be other things that are unreal and are not cases of consciousness. This point is important because there are certain things about which the idealist (of one stripe) is not inclined to claim consciousness—things she will agree not to be instances of consciousness. For instance, the entire physical world: that world may be regarded as non-conscious but unreal.  [2] That is, the physical world (the world as described by physics) is a postulated world, a world we imagine or hypothesize; it is not a real world existing independently of all human construction and description. There is such a world—we can talk about it—but it is not real (like the fictional world). Thus the idealist distinguishes between what is real (consciousness) and what is unreal (the physical world): the former is not imaginary or postulated, while the latter is. Alternatively: we create the physical world, as a theoretical construction, but we don’t create the world of consciousness.

            Why does the idealist think that the physical world is unreal? One possible answer is that we cannot knowthe physical world: we can only know the world of consciousness, not any world that lies beyond it. Any such world is a matter of inference and uncertainty, not knowledge. The physical world is subject to skepticism. But this is a bad answer: why should the contents of reality be limited by what we can know? Physical objects might be real enough but unknowable (we might all be dreaming but there is a real physical world). Surely the deep roots of idealism don’t depend on skepticism. A better line of thought is this: nothing except consciousness is conceivable. More exactly, we may be able to refer to the physical world, but we can’t conceive of it (compare Kant’s noumena). We can’t form a conception of the physical world comparable with our conception of consciousness. When we try to conceive of that world we come up with nothing but a bare mathematical skeleton devoid of substantial content—while in the case of consciousness we get the actual thing before our mind.  [3] We postulate a world that we cannot conceive—not really conceive. Don’t reply that we can surely conceive of tables and chairs, cats and cities: the idealist will insist that we can only conceive of such things as they are presented to consciousness. What we can’t do is conceive of things independently of how they might appear to consciousness. When we conceive of a brown table, say, we are conceiving of consciousness, because we are conceiving of the appearance of the table toconsciousness; we are not conceiving of what lies behind all conscious experience. We cannot conceive of that as we normally conceive of a table; we need a new mode of conception, such as physics purports to provide (the “absolute conception”).

            Now I am not aiming to defend idealism; I am merely trying to diagnose its undeniable attraction. My own view is that the physical non-conscious world does exist, is real, can be referred to, and is completely mind-independent; but I agree that there is a question about its conceivability. It is not conceivable in the intrinsic revealing way that consciousness is conceivable. I thus believe in an inherently inconceivable (except abstractly) physical reality. But I can see how someone might jib at that, insisting that everything real must be conceivable. It is then a short step to idealism. I picture the idealist straining to form a conception of the world as it exists independently of how it appears to consciousness, coming up short, and then concluding that there is no such (real) world. Any such putative world must be at best fictional and unreal, though describable. The idealist equates reality with conceivability (not an absurd equation) and concludes that only consciousness is real. That may be wrong, but it is not merely eccentric. Idealism is an eminently intelligible position with perennial appeal. Consciousness is the only reality because it is the only thing we can really get our minds around; anything else is at best imaginary or a “logical fiction”. The so-called physical world is just an airy abstraction devoid of positive content. Everything except consciousness is elusive, wispy, insubstantial, skeletal, schematic, formal, and colorless. The “absolute conception” of the physical world is scarcely a conception at all, more of a sketch of we-know-not-what, a shadowy simulacrum. By contrast, consciousness is present, full-blooded, throbbing with life, pregnant, substantial, concrete, and shot through with color. It seems real: there is no way it could be imaginary or fictional or just a useful way to organize our thoughts. Nothing else is like that, so nothing else is real–really real. Anything else is either not real at all or not as real as consciousness.  [4] Idealism is the expression of these powerful undercurrents of thought, which is why it has been around for so long. It is not just an outmoded curiosity from a bygone age.

 

  [1] Obviously we must let our quantifiers range over the unreal as well as the real in order to makes these distinctions, as we do when speaking of fictional objects generally.

  [2] There are different types of idealism as there are different types of materialism: some types deny the existence of such ordinary objects as tables and chairs (“eliminative idealism”) while others claim to provide an analysis of what such objects consist in (“reductive idealism”). Berkeley’s idealism is an instance of the latter, but I want to make room for the former more radical position too. What unites the two is the thesis that the only real things are instances of consciousness.

  [3] I won’t go into the reasons for maintaining this: see Eddington, Russell, and others on why physics is purely mathematical and structural. Their basic point is that the intrinsic objective nature of matter is not disclosed to our epistemic faculties, so that we can grasp only extrinsic relational aspects of matter, mathematically described. Our conception of matter is like the blind man’s conception of color—remote and sketchy.

  [4] Nothing is as real to us as consciousness, so consciousness is naturally taken to be the sine qua non of reality. In a sense we don’t even have to conceive of consciousness to be struck by its reality—it just hits us between the eyes—whereas our thought about the external world of physics is a willed conceptual construction. Idealism says that what is real to us is what is real tout court, viz. consciousness. Nothing is more real to consciousness than consciousness itself.

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Deciding to be Good

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Deciding to be Good

 

 

I start with an imaginary case to oil the wheels of thought. Suppose there are people who go through a specific schedule of moral development: around the age of ten their moral thinking crystallizes around the question, “Should I be a good person?” At this time they become able to think in these general moral terms, whereas before that their thinking concerned specific moral situations; they explicitly acquire the concept of personal virtue and become able to ask about exemplifying that concept. Let’s suppose that this time is a “sensitive period” for moral development: what happens around and within the child then has a particularly significant role in fixing his or her moral character. We may imagine that they have encountered adults of different moral caliber, some good, some not so good; the question then is apt to be, “Should I be like A or B?” Think of the question as like one of those Big Questions that people sometimes ask in their lives, such as what career to pursue or who to marry or whether to make an effort to stay fit and healthy. The outcome of the decision will have a considerable influence on the person’s future, their character and actions: if they decide to be good, this will take them down a certain road, while if they decide that being good is a mug’s game or not in their best interests, this will have an opposite effect. We can suppose that they frame the question in terms of winning and losing: “Do I want to be a winner who is not afraid to step on a few toes in order to win, or should I stick to what is right even if means I sometimes lose?” And let’s suppose that a certain percentage go one way and a certain percentage go the other way—50-50 just to be concrete. As a result, the decision made at age ten substantially affects the distribution of virtue in the lives of the people involved: you can’t really go back on it once it is made (you lose that flexibility later in life), and it produces two distinct types of individual. The adult population will consist of two different moral types, depending on how they made that fateful decision—it will not consist of a continuous spectrum of moral quality. There is a sharp dichotomy in the population, resulting from the way the individual chose at the sensitive period. It is possible to influence the decision that is made by setting an appropriate example or by discussion, so moral education is particularly important at this juncture—and educators may angle for one type of decision or the other (with some urging that selfishness is the right choice to make). Thus moral development results in large part from the outcome of an early childhood decision; it is certainly not beyond the scope of the will of the individual. It’s a bit like deciding at age ten whether to be a nerd or a jock and pursuing your life accordingly. A crucial part of moral psychology for these people results from a kind of existential decision—a life-determining decision.

            Now let me report something empirical: I recall around the age of ten having just such thoughts. The question of virtue presented itself to me with unusual clarity—it had never struck me before. I could see that there were two possible ways to go—possible in principle if not in practice. It is not that I felt tempted by the non-virtuous option, but I could see that it existed as a theoretical possibility. I don’t recall any particular experience that triggered the question, though there may well have been one—did it come from school teachings on Christianity? I have the sense that it arose spontaneously in me as a result of moral maturation, but it may have had an environmental trigger. In any case, the question occurred to me explicitly and forcefully; and it seemed to me obvious which way to go, though the choice (if it really was a choice) struck me as momentous. I have never heard of any developmental psychologist inquiring into whether such broad questions are common in children, though there has been a good deal of study of childhood moral development (Piaget, Kohlberg). I think it is worthy of empirical study: are such self-interrogations found in all children in all cultures, at what age do they tend to occur, what kind of outcome do they typically have? It may in fact be that human children follow the pattern described in my imaginary case—which would be useful to know if you are interested in moral education. Based on an informal survey, my own experience is not unique: other people to whom I have spoken also recall entertaining such general thoughts at around ten years old, though the questioning took different forms in different individuals. If that is so, there is an interesting empirical question as to the long-term effects of this kind of early moral reflection: in particular, does it lead to a sharp dichotomy of moral types in the adult population–do we find moral discontinuity instead of degrees of variation in people’s moral character? And what proportion of this traces to early childhood decision-making? What if some children respond to their moral self-questioning by affirming their commitment to living a virtuous life, while others find themselves wishy-washy on the issue or even downright skeptical (”Why should I be good?)? How much did this early ratiocination affect their future moral lives? Is it possible to intervene at the critical time so as to encourage the choice of virtue?

            My own feeling on these questions is that researchers (all adults) tend to underestimate the ratiocinative powers of children, assuming some kind of automatic or unreflective mode of moral development (all predetermined stages and stimulus-response, like anatomical development), while actually children are capable of quite sophisticated moral reflection at a relatively early age. We know that young children are capable of asking and understanding philosophical questions, and this may be just one among them. Maybe it is literally true that children “decide to be good” (or decide not to be) at a particular period, and that this shapes their entire lives. There may be some backtracking or rethinking later, more or less extreme, but the lines could be laid down early on: you decide your moral character around the age of ten and it remains pretty fixed going forward.  [1] Why should this not be so?

 

C

  [1] Of course, a variety of factors will influence your decision, particularly your social environment (and possibly also your genetic endowment); but this doesn’t mean that it is not a genuine decision, i.e. an act of will. From a phenomenological point of view, you are faced with a decision; causally, that decision may have a large impact on your future life. The fact that it may now be completely forgotten doesn’t negate these psychological realities. Isn’t the question bound to arise in the mind of any normal human, and isn’t it likely to arise sooner rather than later?

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Philosophy as Logical Analysis

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Philosophy as Logical Analysis

 

 

The method of philosophy is sometimes described as “conceptual analysis”. This is not wrong, but it can mislead and it carries unwanted baggage. The phrase makes it sound as if the philosopher’s object of interest is a mental entity not an objective feature of the world. If you are a skeptic about mental entities, this description makes philosophy about nothing (same for “meanings”). I would say that the philosopher is interested in de re essences that can be revealed by logical investigation.  [1] I take this to be committed neither to the analytic-synthetic distinction nor to the idea that philosophy discovers a priori truths (or can be undertaken from the “armchair”)—though in fact I subscribe to both of these.  If you believe that logic is continuous with empirical science, you can still accept that philosophy is logical analysis; it will also be continuous with science. Holding that philosophy is logical analysis commits you to very little, because the notion of logical analysis is itself pretty neutral (unless you already buy into certain views of the nature of logical analysis).  [2] The import of the phrase is just that philosophy is not empirical analysis—the kind of thing done in chemistry. We needn’t get too exercised about quite what logic is in order to accept this characterization. Similarly, linguistics involves “grammatical analysis”— also an anodyne statement before we enter into controversies about the nature of grammar (it is certainly not chemical analysis).

            What is the import of “analysis”? Easy: analysis is resolving a complex entity into its constituent elements. I take this to mean that a complex attribute (or sometimes object) is broken down into its constituent attributes (or objects). For example, the complex attribute of knowledge is resolved into the constituent attributes of truth, belief, and justification (let’s simplify matters and assume that these are the only attributes composing the attribute of knowledge). So my view is that we achieve this kind of analysis by logical means (not by chemical means); and this tells us the essence of knowledge. Presumably, the concept of knowledge maps onto the attribute of knowledge in a systematic way, with a constituent-to-constituent isomorphism; but that is not our primary concern—which is the nature of the attribute itself (what the fact of knowledge consists in). We find out the constituent structure of a fact by logical methods, whatever these methods are exactly (thought experiments, knowledge of entailment, use of logical apparatus). The process is like analyzing truth-functional connectives by means of truth tables: we spell out the nature of conjunction and negation (say) by employing logical analysis.

            Sometimes the project of logical analysis is formulated in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions; nothing wrong with that, but it is important to see that necessary conditions are the central thing. We want to know what is essential to a given attribute—what has to be instantiated for that attribute to be instantiated. Whether we can supply sufficient conditions is a separate question: even if no (non-circular) sufficient conditions can be specified, that does not impede the provision of necessary conditions. The viability of logical analysis does not depend on the existence of specifiable sufficient conditions. Truth, belief, and justification could all be necessary conditions of knowledge without being jointly sufficient for knowledge—there may be further necessary conditions to be added, or it may be that there are no (non-circular) sufficient conditions. It is also possible that knowledge has only these three constituent elements but that they combine in a fashion that cannot be captured by simply conjoining them. The whole might be more than the sum of its parts, because the parts have to form a synthesis that can’t be captured by a mere list. The parts have to fit together in a certain way if the whole attribute is to exist (as the parts of an engine have to fit together for the engine to exist). In any case, the project of articulating necessary conditions is not committed to the possibility of providing sufficient conditions. In addition, sufficient conditions are of little interest unless they incorporate necessary conditions: it is a sufficient condition of something x being a number that x be divisible into a pair of equal whole numbers, but this is obviously not a necessary condition of being a number (not all numbers are even). Likewise, it is sufficient for knowing that p that one has learned that p or that one remembers that p, but these are not necessary conditions of knowledge, since not all knowledge is learned or remembered (consider innate knowledge). What makes a sufficient condition interesting is that it is the summation of a set of necessary conditions: the necessary conditions are where the philosophical action is. Necessary conditions tell us what belongs to the essence of a thing—what it logically requires. Sufficiency is another matter.

            You might want to object that this conception of philosophy is too narrow, because it limits philosophy to the bare examination of the essence of attributes—what about solving philosophical problems, producing philosophical arguments, inventing philosophical theories? We don’t just analyze things for the sake of it; we disagree over the nature of things and try to provide theories of them. Thus we try to solve the mind-body problem or the problem of free will or the problem of skepticism. I agree—we don’t just provide a laundry list of dry logical analyses and then gaze fondly at them. But when we try to solve a problem or argue for a position we necessarily employ logical analyses of what we are talking about. There is no future in trying to solve the problem of consciousness without an analysis of what consciousness is, even if the analysis is quite primitive; you will not make headway with the problem of free will unless you have some idea of what free will amounts to; and you will never discover whether skepticism is refutable unless you have a decent analysis of what knowledge requires. Of course, not all concepts (or attributes) will be complexes consisting of simpler concepts (or attributes)—some will be logically simple—but that is not an objection to the method of logical analysis, for in that case the concept is analyzable by means of itself. Logical analysis merely recommends that we analyze what can be analyzed, i.e. what has non-trivial necessary conditions. And it can be an interesting discovery that a concept admits of no analysis (e.g. G.E. Moore on “good”).

            The point I have wanted to impress on the reader is that the method of conceptual analysis is more anodyne (less freighted) than it is commonly reputed to be: it is really a truism about the nature of philosophy. There is nothing in it to make anyone recoil into some dimly defined idea that philosophy is really of a piece with empirical science—as if there is nothing else that it could be. It is not committed to some kind of psychologism about the subject matter of philosophy, and it does not assume that necessary and sufficient conditions can be supplied (these are rarely obtainable). Nor does it have anything to do with ordinary language philosophy: it isn’t about language at all and it concerns all of reality not just the part that is spoken of by the ordinary person (so it includes science). It is simply the idea that in philosophy we characteristically proceed by the logical analysis of whatever it is that interests us: from ethics to physics, from mind to causality, from necessity to identity.  [3] In chemistry we perform chemical analysis on the chemical substances of the world; in philosophy we perform logical analysis on any aspects of reality that engage our philosophical interest. Chemistry is not thereby limited to breaking things down (it uses chemical analyses in formulating theories and explanations), and neither is philosophy. Chemistry employs analysis because it deals with complex entities (chemical substances) made up of simpler entities; philosophy employs analysis because it too deals with complex entities (attributes, objects, concepts) made up of simpler entities. There is nothing suspect or unscientific about logical analysis as the method of philosophy: that is simply the name we give to what we distinctively do. We analyze things logically.

 

  [1] I defend this position in Truth By Analysis (Oxford University Press: 2012).

  [2] Even Quine believes in logical analysis, though he sees no sharp distinction between logic and empirical science.

  [3] Not all of logical analysis should be viewed as the educing of constituents; it may also involve tracing necessary links between separate concepts. I have not gone into these qualifications here, but see chapter 7 of Truth By Analysis for a survey of types of conceptual analysis. Let me emphasize that the point of providing conceptual analyses, of whatever type, is often to advance arguments and solve problems; by no means are we limited to merely describing the make-up of a concept or thing.

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Knowledge and Reasons for Belief

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Knowledge and Reasons for Belief

 

 

Suppose I believe that you plagiarized me. Suppose that it’s true that you plagiarized me. Suppose also that I have irrefutable evidence that you plagiarized me, in the form of my exact words appearing in a paper of yours (this evidence exists precisely because you plagiarized me). So I have a true justified belief that you plagiarized me, where my justification is not accidentally connected to the truth of what I believe. Do I then know that you plagiarized me?

            What if I have always hated you and feel a strong sense of professional rivalry with you? I will believe anything against you no matter how flimsy the evidence may be. I would jump at the chance to accuse you of plagiarizing me. However, I am not consciously aware of these negative feelings and dispositions; I believe that my animus towards you is based purely on objective facts (you plagiarized me!). Suppose that the reason (cause) I believe that you plagiarized me is this unconscious animus; I would have believed it even in the absence of the evidence I have. That evidence rationally justifies my belief, but it is not the reason I have that belief. In fact, I care little about whether my belief concerning you is true—what I care about is that it makes me feel good to hold negative beliefs in your regard. The evidence I have is convenient for convincing other people of your culpability, but it plays no role in the formation of my belief (in fact the evidence is not as conclusive as I could wish, since you might have just forgotten where you got the ideas in question). My belief is caused by my unconscious attitudes and not by the objective evidence. There are good rational reasons for my belief and I am in possession of them, but they are not the operative reasons for me. My reasons are actually bad reasons for belief. I am forming my beliefs about you in a defective manner; I fall well short of epistemic responsibility.

            It seems to me that in these circumstances I don’t know that you plagiarized me. My belief is true and justified, and the justification is properly connected to the truth, but still I don’t know. Anyone else in possession of the evidence I have would know, but I don’t know. They would have their belief shaped by the evidence, rationally so, but not me: the reason for their belief would be the evidence, but in my case that is not the reason for my belief. In order for me to know the evidence would have to be the reason for my belief. Thus the following conditions are necessary conditions for knowledge: the proposition must be true, you must believe it, you must be justified in believing it, and the justification must be the reason you believe it.  [1] Simply put, the justification must cause the belief; alternatively, you must form the belief rationally. Irrational belief formation is logically consistent with possession of a rational justification, and in such a case knowledge is not possessed. True, you plagiarized me, and I have eminently good reasons to believe that you did: but I don’t know it, because I didn’t form my belief responsibly and rationally. Knowledge is rational true justified belief. Psychology must recapitulate epistemology.

 

  [1] Whether these conditions are sufficient is another question, about which I remain agnostic.

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Panpsychist Phenomenalism

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                                                Panpsychist Phenomenalism

 

 

Phenomenalism analyzes material-object statements in terms of the actual and potential experiences of perceivers: for a table to exist is for table-type experiences (“sense data”) to exist—say, for it to look as if there is a table. This has the consequence that there can be no material objects unless there are perceivers. But there is another type of phenomenalism that has never to my knowledge been mooted: the thesis that for material objects to exist is for them to have certain experiences, actual or potential. Given the truth of panpsychism, we have the resources to account for existence in experiential terms: it is the table itself that has table-type experiences. The table feels itself to be a table—in some sense modality or other. If the table is round and brown, then it has experiences of itself asround and brown. Thus the table doesn’t depend on our experiences in order to exist; it depends on its own experiences—which can exist independently of ours. Material objects, on this theory, are self-perceiving beings, and in this self-perception lies their existence. Once we allow that material objects have an inner psychic dimension, we can put this dimension to work in formulating a phenomenalist theory. Someone attracted to phenomenalism but unhappy with the traditional version might welcome this new version: everything turns out to be mental, but human experience is not the root of all being. Given panpsychism, it is natural to infer that the experiences inherent in all objects are experiences of the objects they inhabit—what other kind of intentionality would they have? Not of stars and bars, to be sure. Panpsychism can thus claim (a) to solve the mind-body problem, (b) to answer the question of the ultimate nature of matter, and (c) to provide the foundation for a phenomenalist view of the objective world. Nice work! As a bonus, we provide an answer to the question of what kind of mental properties material objects possess—they are best understood as perceptions of those objects themselves. A round object, say, will be analyzed in terms of sense data of roundness—sense data had by the object itself. The general shape of the theory is idealist, since concrete reality is constituted by mental properties, but these properties are not instantiated by us. The world is a world of Other Minds.

            Panpsychism might, however, not be true (I don’t think it is true myself): does that rule out panpsychist phenomenalism? Perhaps surprisingly, it is not clear that it does: for we can avail ourselves of counterfactual conditionals in the traditional manner. Phenomenalism does not require actually existing experiences but only potential experiences—the kind you would have if you perceived the object in question. The existence of a table requires only the possibility of experiences—the kind you would have if you gazed at a table (“permanent possibilities of sensation”). So why not say that the existence of a table consists in the counterfactual circumstance that if the table had experiences they would be table-type experiences? We don’t have to assert that objects actually have a psychic dimension; we merely assert that if they did it would be thus-and-so. Thus we analyze material-object statements by means of conditional statements that refer to possible experiences in the antecedent: if the table had experiences, they would be table-type experiences (not Labrador-type experiences). Logically, this is just like saying that the existence of a table consists in the fact that if I had perceptual experiences now they would be table-type experiences—but I might not actually be having any (my eyes are shut). A blind man could analyze table statements in terms of statements about visual experiences he could have if he were sighted—they needn’t actually exist. Similarly, the resourceful panpsychist phenomenalist could claim that for a round brown table to exist is for the following conditional to hold: if the table had an inner psychic dimension, it would have experiences as of a round brown table. That is, this ingenious theorist analyzes material-object statements in terms of counterfactuals about possible experiences in material objects–he doesn’t have to claim that objects in fact have such experiences. He analyzes ascriptions of properties to objects in terms of hypothetical psychic properties. He can thus claim to give an account of the so-called material world that invokes nothing beyond (possible) mental facts. We can imagine this determined phenomenalist haughtily challenging us to refute his theory. He is like a traditional phenomenalist who allows the possibility of material objects in a world in which no one has any perceptual experiences: he appeals to the fact that such experiences are possible in principle, and his theory is that objects reduce to the possibility of experiences—those you would have if you had senses. Just so, the new kind of phenomenalist could claim that material-object statements can be analyzed in terms of statements about the experiences that objects would have if (contrary to fact) they had any experiences.

            If phenomenalism ever comes back into fashion, its adherents might welcome the addition of this new type of phenomenalism, especially if they have been persuaded that panpsychism is attractive on other grounds. If we have to accept panpsychism anyway, we may as well go the whole hog: mind-body problem, intrinsic nature of matter, and analysis of material-object statements.

 

Col

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Degrees of Consciousness

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Degrees of Consciousness

 

 

Think of the last time you sat opposite someone you know well and talked for a while. You had all sorts of conscious experiences: the look of the person’s face, the sound of his or her voice, and so on. At some point you may have said his or her name and simultaneously heard it. Were you conscious of the person’s name during this period? You certainly were at the moment of uttering it, but were you the rest of the time? We can say that you knew the name all the while, and not in any weak or reduced sense. Was the name on the tip of your tongue? No, but it was hovering somewhere nearby; you were not like someone struggling to recall the name, or someone who had never learned it. I am inclined to say that you were conscious of the name during the period in question—as much as you were conscious of other aspects of the person (his or her lip movements, eye color, accent). You weren’t paying attention to these things, but you were conscious of them—they were within your field of consciousness.  [1] Yet your consciousness of the name was not like actually hearing the name, either perceptually or in the form of an auditory image. There were no “name qualia”, though a name was consciously present. Were you as conscious of the person’s name as you were of his or her face? Probably not, unless you kept recurring to it, but it would be incorrect to say that you were unconscious of the name—that your knowledge of it was unconscious knowledge. You were entirely aware of the name at all times (not unaware)—it was an element of your overall state of conscious awareness. It was like your awareness of the sex or nationality of the person.

            Was there anything it was like to be conscious of the name during this time interval? No—there was no subjective impression of the name, no qualitative feel (except when you uttered the name). It was not part of your sensory field. Nor was there any conscious episode of thought involving the name—no inner act of speech containing it (“George is looking handsome today”). The name did not “pass before your mind”. So consciousness does not require these kinds of occurrence: things can exist in consciousness without existing in those ways. It is quite wrong to say that unless an item belongs to consciousness in either of those two ways it is simply unconscious; on the contrary, the name was an aspect of your current total consciousness of the world—you were conscious of the fact that you were speaking to a person called “George”. This is not a fact of which you were unconscious, like the forgotten fact that you once saw George on the subway, or the Freudian fact that you unconsciously hate him. Similarly, you were conscious of your own name during the conversation, though it likely never crossed your mind—as you were conscious that you exist, are a person, are sitting in a restaurant, and so on. Your consciousness can be populated by many things that go beyond the subjectively sensory and the cognitively episodic: it is not all sensory qualia and inner speech–of what passes before and through consciousness. Consciousness is more capacious than that, more inclusive.

            But names are not always consciously present in this way—ripe for the picking. They do not always trip off the tongue with the greatest of ease, as if crossing a perfectly permeable threshold—as if the transition to full consciousness were nothing. Sometimes names are hard to recall, even impossible to recall. In fact, names vary widely in their ease of recall, as everyone knows: sometimes it can take a whole day to recall a name. It is thus natural to say that different names are more or less accessible to consciousness–they can vary in their proximity to conscious awareness. Just as a name can be conscious and yet not at the center of consciousness, so a name can be only faintly conscious compared to another name (sometimes you can recall only part of the sound of a name). That is, we can introduce the notion of degrees of consciousness to mark these distinctions: we replace the idea of a sharp dichotomy between conscious and unconscious with the idea of gradations of consciousness shading into complete unconsciousness. This is not to say that the mind shades into the material world and so has no distinctive reality (whatever that may mean); it is merely to say that the traditional bifurcation into the conscious and the unconscious mind is simplistic and dispensable. What is called “the conscious mind” is more amorphous, more heterogeneous, than people tend to suppose, merging as it does with memory, language mastery, and background knowledge. The proper metaphor is the penumbra not the spotlight (though all such metaphors are misleading). It is misleading to focus on momentary states of sensory consciousness and assume that these are paradigmatic—they are merely one variety of consciousness. Don’t focus on the bat’s current echolocation experience to the exclusion of all else; remember everything that shapes the bat’s total awareness of the world, including such things as its knowledge of where it lives, of the existence of other bats, and of its own bodily orientation. There are boundaries to consciousness, but they are not so narrow as to exclude everything except the “phenomenal” and the “cognitively episodic”. Knowing someone’s name can be perfectly conscious without being either of these things.  [2]

            Part of the point of recognizing degrees of consciousness—or rejecting a sharp division between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind—is to question the idea that only certain types of mental phenomena pose a serious challenge to science and philosophy. It is not as if anything not conscious in the restrictive sense is not a deep theoretical problem: the mind as a whole is a problem not just some segment of it—that which we are currently conscious of in some limited sense. Relying on the model of perceptual sensations gives a distorted picture of the terrain, since these are just one part the mind, and not characteristic of the whole. That is why I picked on the case of knowing a person’s name, which doesn’t fit the model. Being aware of someone’s name in the normal course of speaking to him is just as much an instance of consciousness as anything else, even if such awareness can come in degrees. It isn’t that the mental differs only in degree from the non-mental; rather, mental states can differ from each other in their degree of consciousness. There is no sharp line separating the conscious mind from the unconscious mind but a kind of interpenetration and continuity; this dichotomous terminology itself encourages a false antithesis. Don’t picture the mind as a radiant conscious region adjacent to an unlit unconscious region; picture it instead as an overlapping series of more or less illuminated regions—from bright to dappled to shady to crepuscular to inky. A name can occupy any of these contiguous regions: from the clearly heard to the explicitly known to being on the tip of the tongue to the momentarily elusive to the maddeningly buried. In our efforts to highlight consciousness we should not oversimplify it or assimilate it to one class of mental phenomena; nor should we suppose that what is designated unconscious belongs to a different family from what is designated conscious. These terms are just rough labels for a more complex reality; they should not be allowed to dominate and distort our discussions of the mind.

 

Co

  [1] Of course, you were not perceiving the name, as you were other aspects of the person, but that does not prevent you from being conscious of it—as you would be if you kept saying it to yourself inwardly.

  [2] The same might be said of our knowledge of language as a whole, but I won’t go into this—the case of names suffices for my point.

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Phenomenology of Memory

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Phenomenology of Memory

 

 

We didn’t need Proust to teach us that memories can be remarkably vivid and emotion-laden, even distant memories. All of us experience those Proustian moments when we are pierced by the dagger of memory—pleasantly or unpleasantly. This is when “it all comes back as if it were yesterday”: there is that uncanny sensation of reliving the past, of re-experiencing what is long gone. Sensory imagery is gloriously vivid and old emotions re-emerge as if from nowhere. The act of remembering has an unmistakable phenomenology that can be as intense as perception. But what does that tell us about the nature of memory itself? What does it tell us about the form in which memories are stored?

            I suggest it shows that memories themselves have a phenomenology. Clearly the original experience had a phenomenology, and clearly the act of remembering that experience has one too—so how could the intermediate stage of stored memory lack a phenomenology? Logically speaking, it could lack a phenomenology, being merely an insentient brain state: but surely the best explanation of the Proust effect is precisely that the persisting memory itself has a phenomenology. The remembering has the phenomenology it has because the underlying memory does—the very phenomenology that is revealed in the act of remembering. The taste of the Madeleine persisted in the memory of tasting it and so did its emotional associations; there wasn’t some kind of gap in the psychological stream from past to present, as if the memory trace had no mental aspect. Phenomenology did not yield to mere physicality over the time interval: the phenomenology bubbled away quietly waiting for its moment in the sun. The reason the act of remembering has the vividness it has is that the preceding memory harbored the very phenomenology that emerges in the remembering. For why should it be thus vivid if the memory itself lacked all phenomenology? Memories such as this are laid down in impressionable children, saturated by charged affect, and they retain the phenomenology of the moment: they don’t lose their pungency just by disappearing from conscious awareness, as if that pungency could be deleted by the mere fact of not being consciously thought about. Indeed, they may exercise a powerful influence on their possessor from their position of unconsciousness (nostalgia, regret, alienation). They do so in virtue of the phenomenology that is intrinsic to their nature as experiential remnants. What else could explain it?  [1]

            If this is right, we can dissociate phenomenology from consciousness. The memory of the Madeleine was not conscious, unlike the original taste and its subsequent recollection, but the phenomenology was continuous—it did not cease when consciousness did. The recollection merely reflects the phenomenology inherent in the memory. The phenomenology was psychologically real during the period of memory storage—just as the intentionality of the memory was psychologically real during that interval. It is not that the intentionality ceased with the initial conscious experience and then magically reappeared at the moment of recollection; it persisted in the interim, encoded in the memory. The memory was about something (the taste of a Madeleine): similarly, the memory retained the subjective “feel” characteristic of both the original experience and its subsequent recollection. This is not the miraculous resurrection of a long-dead item of phenomenology, but merely the reemergence of what had been smoldering all along. Why does the remembrance feel as it does after all this time? It’s because the feeling had never left the memory; it had merely temporarily disappeared from consciousness. Surely that is the natural and plausible thing to say about what happened—not that the remembrance somehow traveled back in time to the moment the Madeleine was tasted, and not that a mere insentient brain state persisted over the interval. The phenomenology was compressed into the memory, considered as a psychological unit–ready to spring forth when the right stimulus came along. It rejoined consciousness after being separated from it for a time, unchanged in its inherent nature. This is why the conscious recollection has the phenomenological character that it has—because it is the expression of a pre-existing phenomenological substrate.  The Proustian kind of case makes this vivid by reminding us of extreme examples of phenomenological persistence.

            By thus separating phenomenology from consciousness we bifurcate the mind-body problem: now we have the problem of phenomenology as well as the problem of consciousness. The former problem can apply to unconscious mental states. In principle we could solve the phenomenology problem without solving the consciousness problem (and maybe vice versa). At any rate, we are dealing with two problems not one. Both are hard: both pose deep problems of theoretical unification. We are dealing with a double mystery.      

 

  [1] We could put it this way: memory is not a zombie—memory is a part of the mind. But what could this amount to if not the phenomenology that characterizes mental imagery and emotion? It is experiential memory, after all.

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Universals of Consciousness

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Universals of Consciousness

 

 

“There is something it is like to be a conscious being”: let’s examine the logical form of this statement. There are two possible readings of it, depending on the scope of the quantifiers: one reading says, “For any conscious being B, there is something L it is like to be B”; the other reading says, “There is something L it is like such that for any conscious being B, B has L”. That is: we can either mean that there is a unique thing it is like for any conscious being, or we can mean that for any conscious being there exists some thing it is like to be that being (not necessarily the same thing in each case). It is clear that those who use this phrase typically intend the narrow scope reading of “something”: they wish to allow that different conscious beings can have different things it is like to be them (hence the bats). The claim is not that every conscious being is identical with respect to what it is like to be them: that would be empirically indefensible and conceptually narrow. Thus the standard employment of the phrase recognizes the variability of consciousness from one conscious being to another—there is no universal thing it is like to be conscious. If we introduce a modal operator into the picture, the claim is, “Necessarily for any conscious being there is something it is like to be that being”, but not, “There is something it is like such that necessarily for any conscious being that being has that something”. In fact, there is nothing it is like to be any conscious being—nothing specific or universal or unique. It could be that conscious beings vary from individual to individual in what it is like to be them, with nothing shared.

            But this leaves open the question of whether there are any universals of consciousness: is there any property of consciousness such that every case of consciousness instantiates that property? Compare belief: every believer has some set of beliefs, but there is no set of beliefs such that every believer has it. But isn’t there something in common to all believing beings over and above the fact that every believer has some set of beliefs? Can’t we say that all beliefs are propositional or involve assent or are potential elements of reasoning? Can’t we even say that all belief systems concern an objective reality, indeed an objective spatiotemporal reality? Where is the parallel for the case of consciousness? All we are told is that there must be a thing it is like to be a conscious being, but we are not told what unites the class beyond this. Is it that nothing further can be said about what consciousness is generally? Contrast other attempts to characterize consciousness: consciousness as intentionality (Brentano, Husserl), consciousness as nothingness (Sartre), or consciousness as an inner process (lots of people). These are features held to characterize every conscious state equally, while accepting that the contents of consciousness can vary from case to case. What plays this role for the “what it’s like” characterization? The obvious answer is that each type of conscious “likeness” has something in common with the others—that there is a universal property of “likeness”. But what is this? The question comes down to whether all senses (actual and possible) share a single phenomenological feature. Without considering the question in detail, I suggest that the only possible answer will rely on some other approach to what consciousness is—say, that it is intentional, or is nothingness, or is inner. Perhaps the most immediately plausible answer is that all senses are presentational: they present a world of perceptual objects to a subject. But then consciousness is being defined in terms of the notion of presentation: to be a conscious being is to be presented with a world. The idea of what it’s like has disappeared from the definition in favor of a kind of intentionality definition. The problem is that we either rest content with a disjunctive definition of consciousness or we resort to another sort of concept in the definition: either we disjoin all the specific things it is like (bats, humans, octopuses, etc) or we find some common property such as presentation. There is no single “likeness” property that runs through all the cases and unites them: each sense has its own proprietary set of qualia, its own distinctive “feel”—there is no universal subjective property common to all senses. There are irreducibly many things it is like.

            The problem is more general. The intuitive motivation for the original definition traded upon the phenomenology of the senses, but consciousness is not confined to sensations—what about thoughts? Thoughts can be conscious, but is there something it is like to have them? Is that something peculiar to a certain class of thinkers (say, bat thinkers) or is it common to all thinkers? The question seems misguided: for thoughts don’t really have a subjective phenomenology in the way sensations do–they are not tied to a specific sense modality. If a being had thoughts but no senses, there would be nothing it is like to be that being (in the original sense of the phrase); yet such a being would be conscious. In order to cast our net widely enough we need some other way to include thoughts along with sensations; and again the notions of intentionality and innerness suggest themselves. The notion of there being something it is like lacks the generality we seek: it can’t include thought, and it fails to find a common feature for the case of sensations (except that there is something it is like to have a sensation). And this is before we get to other denizens of consciousness such as emotion, decision, and remembering. The definition only works for a subclass of conscious phenomena, and it only works well for one type of sensation at a time (we know what it is like to have a visual experience and so we grasp what visual consciousness is—but not consciousness in general). Thus the intuitive notion of “likeness” doesn’t provide a satisfactory definition of consciousness.

            It may be that the scope ambiguity conceals this failure of generality: if we hear the statement with wide scope for “something”, it says that there is something in common to all cases of consciousness (a “likeness” property possessed by every type of conscious state); but it turns out that this is not what is intended (and is not true), so we are left with a disjunctive definition. Perhaps too we have a general tendency to unify the different senses, so we easily slide into the idea that some subjective property applies to them all. But if we try to identify this property we come up empty handed or we resort to another sort of definition. For instance, we can hear the phrase “what it is like to be x” as making reference to a subject and how things seem to that subject: then we can easily suppose that what unites the different senses is the fact that each of them involves a subject being appeared-to, not the subjective quality of what appears (“qualia”). But now that is a very different kind of definition, involving subjects and the relation of being appeared to, not intrinsic features of states of consciousness. It is tantamount to saying that a conscious subject is a subject of experience, or that a conscious state is what a subject possesses in as much as it is appeared to (or some such thing). If we hear the statement in the wide scope way, it sacrifices its intuitive content as relating to specific types of sensation (what we can grasp only from a particular “point of view”); while if we hear it in the (intended) narrow scope way, it fails to capture consciousness in general, since there is nothing it is like that holds of any conscious being. In saying merely that there is something it is like to be conscious, but no specific thing it is like, we fail to unify the cases: for we cannot specify any particular “likeness” property common to all cases of consciousness. This is analogous to saying that a believing subject has some set of beliefs without being able to say generally what a belief is.

I suspect that when we consider the case of the bats we tacitly do assume universals of consciousness (at least of the sensory kind), which is why we find the definition appealing: we think of the comparable phenomenological complexity of our visual field and of our sensations of hearing echoes—we don’t assume that the bat’s experience is completely alien to us. Similarly, we unify our own sensations around such concepts as intensity, foreground and background, multiplicity of stimuli, overlap, perceptual constancy, and so on. These concepts provide a common framework for thinking about perceptual consciousness, and they are not specific to particular senses. They are what induce us to believe that we have hold of the essence of (sensory) consciousness, not the admittedly specific and parochial concepts that apply to particular sense modalities. But then the general concepts are the ones that are doing the definitional work not the specific concepts—in which case it is the wide scope reading that we need. The phrase itself (“there is something it is like”) lumps all this together, enabling us to slide from one reading to another, with the associations natural to each reading. We want to say that there is something it is like to be (perceptually) conscious, not just to be one kind of conscious subject or another; and maybe there is, but the standard formulations don’t say what it is, encouraging us to fall back on specific modes of sensory consciousness.  [1]

            My own view is that the “what it’s like” definition is a useful heuristic to move people’s intuitions in the right direction, but as a proper definition it falls short. It captures at best only certain aspects of consciousness but not consciousness in general—witness the case of conscious thought. Thoughts are not conscious in virtue of being about qualia, and they are not subjective in the sense that to grasp what they are you have to possess a certain “point of view” on the world (i.e. a specific sense modality). They have intentionality and they are also inner states or processes (private, unobservable), but these properties are a different matter. Certainly, if there is something it is like to be x, then there is something problematic about x from a materialist perspective; but that is not to say that everything thus problematic is a case of what it is like. The concept of the inner does a better job of capturing the general nature of consciousness, as well as gesturing towards the reason that consciousness is theoretically problematic. The concept “what it is like” is useful and catchy, but is not the stuff of sound definition.  [2]

 

  [1] Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is a five hundred page book on what it is like to be conscious as such, focusing on the concepts of nothingness, anguish, bad faith, temporality, and so on; it is not about human senses versus bat senses and the varieties of conscious awareness. This is the kind of thing we think we are getting when someone sets out to define consciousness in terms of “what it is like”: not what it is like to be a bat or a human, but what it is like to be a conscious being (to be “haunted by nothingness” etc).

  [2] Compare definitions couched in terms of “seems” and “feels”: “There is some way it seems/feels to be a conscious being”. That has an intuitive ring, but it is surely too narrow to capture the full range of conscious phenomena—is there some way a conscious thought seems or feels? And then there is the question of scope: are there many ways of seeming or feeling or is there some one way common to all cases? Interestingly, we do have available here a single property common to all cases, namely seeming or feeling as general properties; but in the case of “what it’s like” all we can say is that likeness is what is in common to all cases of there being something it’s like. But what is that property exactly—what is it for a mental state to have the general property of likeness? This question is obscure at best. It is telling that the “like” locution is preferred over “seems” and “feels”, which wear their defects on their face as general accounts of consciousness. The phrase “what it’s like” has just the right degree of appeal and obscurity to gain currency.

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