July, 2024 - Colin McGinn

Conscious Matter

July 5, 2024/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Colin McGinn

Conscious Matter

I will pose a question I don’t think has been posed before: Why can’t there be conscious matter, but only conscious mind? A mental state can be either conscious or unconscious, passing from one condition to the other, but an unconscious material state can only be unconscious. Consider a state of the brain that is not a mental state; it is unconscious and it cannot become conscious. A mental state of the brain, however, can become conscious, even if it is unconscious, temporarily or permanently. A merely physical state can never become conscious. Of course, it is possible for such a state to become an object of consciousness: you might pass from not seeing it to consciously seeing it. But that is not for it to become conscious, i.e., to be a conscious state. It is necessarily not a conscious state given that it is a non-mental state. This is compatible with it already being a mental state, as the identity theory contends: C-fiber firing might be identical to pain, and thus may be a conscious state (ditto desire and belief). But if a physical state is not a mental state at all, then it cannot become conscious—though it can clearly become an object of consciousness. The shape of the brain cannot become conscious, or its chemical composition, or its microanatomy—just as for other physical states of the world. A chair’s being made of wood cannot become a conscious state of the chair—unless it is first made into a mental state (don’t ask me how). In other words, it is a necessary condition of the possibility of being conscious that a state be a mental state: only mental states are candidates for consciousness. Not that mental states are always conscious—they are not—but rather their potential for consciousness is dependent on their being already mental. Consciousness is reserved for the mental; it cannot spread to the non-mental. A state has to qualify as mental before consciousness can admit it.

That sounds eminently reasonable, even indisputable, perhaps trivial; but actually, it raises a serious puzzle. For we may ask why it is so: what is it about being mental that makes a state eligible for consciousness? Consciousness is not inherent in the mind—much of the mind is quite unconscious—and yet being mental is indispensable to the possibility of consciousness. There must be something about the mental that explains this fact, that grounds the necessity. The problem is that no good answer comes to mind—hence the puzzle. Call this the “consciousness-mind puzzle”: what is it about being mental that allows non-conscious mental states to become conscious but not non-mental states? A simple higher-order thought theory runs up against this problem: one would have supposed that one could just add a thought to a non-mental state of the brain and it would thereby become conscious; but no, it stubbornly resists becoming a conscious state. It lacks a nature that permits it to make this transition. But why then does a mental state that is unconscious, perhaps permanently and necessarily, possess the secret ingredient? It may never be conscious, like a purely physical state, but it has what it takes to be conscious, unlike the physical state—it passes the consciousness test. It seems to possess a magic power, the power to metamorphose into a conscious state (assuming that it does or could). It must somehow possess the seeds of consciousness, even though the seeds may never actually sprout. So, what do these seeds consist in—from what does the power derive?

Several ideas suggest themselves. The first is that mental states, even unconscious ones, have a phenomenology, unlike purely physical states, and this provides the fertile soil in which consciousness may take root.[1] Granted, these states can be completely unconscious—the subject has no awareness of them—but (it may be said) they are blessed with phenomenological features and these make them at least conducive to consciousness. The trouble with this suggestion, striking though it is, is that the features in question will either constitute a type of consciousness or will be so attenuated that they fail to supply what is needed. We either build consciousness (“what-it’s-likeness”) into the mental state or we play with an idea that raises the same question again, viz. why should those features provide the necessary ground? The suggestion is either too strong or too weak. Also, is it true that all unconscious mental states have genuine phenomenology in some colorable sense—what about the syntactic tacit knowledge postulated by Chomsky-style psycholinguistics? Does it feel some way to perform a syntactic transformation unconsciously? Is there something it is like to have tacit knowledge of deep structure? A second suggestion fastens onto propositional content: what equips a mental state to rise to the level of consciousness is that it is a propositional state. The difficulty with this is apparent: why should propositional content qualify a state to become conscious? What has the one got to do with the other? It seems neither necessary nor sufficient: pains don’t have such content, though they clearly can be conscious; and sub-personal computational states arguably possess it, yet can’t become conscious (they are like non-mental brain states). Consciousness and propositional content are clearly not the same property, so why should the latter be a necessary condition of the former? It is the same with the property of intentionality: being about something is not necessarily linked to being conscious (not necessary and not sufficient), so why should it be the required basis? The puzzle is beginning to look deep, intractable. At this point desperation is apt to set in: perhaps the right thing to say is that there are no unconscious mental states—then there is nothing to explain. If all mental states are necessarily conscious, then it is trivially true that mental states are inherently equipped to be conscious. Physical states can’t be conscious because they are not already conscious, unlike mental states. Here the objection is that this is flying in the face of much science and common sense: there really are unconscious mental states, lots of them. Then there is this maneuver: the question is purely verbal—we simply decline to say, as a matter of convention, that anything non-mental can be conscious. We just stipulate that the word “conscious” shall apply only to things to which the word “mental” applies; there is nothing about the things referred to that underpins our linguistic practices (our “language game” with the words “mental” and “conscious”). About this I will simply say: haven’t we got over this kind of nonsense?

But perhaps we have not run out of wacky ideas. One idea would be that it is simply a mystery about mental states that they, and only they, can be conscious. Mental states possess an unknown property, call it C, that explains their availability to consciousness. But this seems unduly panic-stricken: surely it should be possible to detect something in mental states, and only mental states, that suits them to attaining consciousness, given that it is so plainly true that only the mental can be or become conscious. This isn’t the mind-body problem! So, let’s not declare defeat just yet; after all, the question I am trying to answer has only just been broached. It’s a brand-new question, a freshly minted puzzle, so we should give it a while to marinate (we can declare defeat in a couple of hundred years, if necessary). And there is a possibility we have not yet explored: what I will call psycho-functional role. I intend no commitment to traditional functionalism with its emphasis on physical behavior; I mean to be speaking of functional role within the mind (which can include action). Each type of mental state has a characteristic place in the overall functioning of the mind, which is complex and often obscure—its processes, procedures, laws, quirks. This includes folk psychology, scientific psychology, and whatever else about the mind that may lie hidden or alien to our existing conceptual scheme. I am talking about the sum-total of mental interactions and connections. Then the idea is that this psycho-functional role is the key factor in equipping mental states with the wherewithal to merit the appellation “conscious”. Indeed, it is largely this role that underlies our use of the word “mental” (or “psychological”): a state of the organism counts as mental just in so far as it plays this kind of role in the organism’s mental life. Now, a purely physical state has no such psycho-functional role; it is detached from the mind, wholly or partially. Therefore, it cannot enter the realm of the conscious, because to be a conscious state is also to play a certain psycho-functional role—not the same role but a connected one. The only things that can be conscious must have a role that suits them to be conscious, and only mental states have that role. We have role match-up. For example, to be a desire a given state must function in a certain way in the organism’s psychology; and to be a conscious desire the state must preserve this role and possess a further role, namely that appropriate to its being conscious. The unconscious mental state must have a role that fits its conscious expression; it can’t lack that role and yet expect to be capable of achieving conscious expression. Thus, non-mental states can’t become conscious states. To have a role in the conscious mind, an unconscious mental state such as desire must have a role in the mind as a whole—for instance, its mode of interaction with beliefs and intentions. These roles must be in the nature of the things that have them, thereby generating necessities. Accordingly, only mental states can become conscious, because only they have the kind of psycho-functional role that conscious states of their type possess. This explanation requires us to take on board a conception of mind and consciousness that recognizes the centrality of function in fixing the nature of the mental; it isn’t all introspective qualia and what it feels like from inside (though it is partly that). What a mental state, conscious or unconscious, does is key to its identity. We need a notion of phenomenological function as well as phenomenological quality (as well as sub-phenomenological function to accommodate the unconscious mind). It is true that much remains mysterious about this as an answer to our question, but it has the right form to constitute an answer. The notion of psycho-functional role is somewhat obscure, though not horribly so, and what consciousness does to modify the unconscious mental state is a matter of unbridled speculation almost alchemical in its logic. Still, we have the beginnings of an account of how the conscious and the unconscious manage to hook up; it begins to seem less puzzling why only the unconscious mental can penetrate the boundary that marks the extent of consciousness. Consciousness is actually quite demanding in what it will grant entrance to. It might even be that some precincts of what we think of as the mind are too cut off from the rest of the mind to slot into a place in the conscious mind, so that they are destined to remain always in an unconscious state. The conscious mind does not recognize them as mental in any sense it can understand (I am thinking of some aspects of pre-conscious visual processing). After all, the conscious mind is just one compartment of the mind among others, not all of which function in the same way. The borders of what we call the mind are likely to be indeterminate.[2]

[1] This is a view defended by that devotee of the Freudian unconscious, Richard Wollheim. I remember discussing it with him circa1980 in Katherine Backhouse’s office.

[2] There are many types of unconscious and many types of unconscious state, at least as various as the types of conscious and conscious state. It is hard to bring them all together into the natural kinds Conscious Mind and Unconscious Mind. Not surprisingly, then, some items will hover at the edges of these broad categorizations. What should we say about early-stage perceptual processing or the innate form of human universal grammar? What about the motivations of mollusks and ants? What about libidinal urges in monkeys and sharks? What about aliens?

Division and Diversity

July 2, 2024/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Colin McGinn

Division and Diversity

Professional pundits often say that the trouble with contemporary political culture is that we are too “divided”. The remedy is to “bring people together” by recognizing that “we have more in common than we think”. This is completely wrong: the problem isn’t division; it’s error. If people have contradictory opinions, one side has to be mistaken; these conflicting opinions can’t be “brought together”. That’s just logic. The errors are of three kinds: factual, practical, and moral. People can be wrong about what the facts are, about how best to rectify an undesirable situation, and about what is morally right and wrong. These errors arise largely from prejudice and propaganda (combined with credulity). The only solution to error is correction, but that can be hard to achieve, especially where stupidity reigns. At present we are facing an epidemic of error among a large section of the population. There is a lot of factual falsehood, impractical ideas, and moral blindness. For example, concerning crime: about who commits it, about the best way to handle it, and about what is the morally correct way to treat criminals. There is no particular problem with division as such: people can be divided about many things, sometime passionately, but it doesn’t lead to turmoil, violence, and misguided policies. They can be divided over the team they support, the music they like, the philosophical opinions they espouse: but this doesn’t have to spill over into hatred, violence, hostility, blacklisting, ostracizing, etc. The problem today is that political differences have become magnified and tribalized. People need to be less hysterical, more civilized, more tolerant of political differences (politics isn’t easy). The problem isn’t division as such but attitudes towards division, especially susceptibility to error through ignorance and dogmatism. People have to stop being hooligans and idiots. Division will then take care of itself.

It is also frequently maintained that the problem with universities and many other organizations is that they are not “diverse” enough. This too is wrong. There is nothing wrong with uniformity as such—sameness along certain dimensions. It all depends on what this uniformity stems from and produces. It is good if it produces progress, creativity, truth, goodness, and beauty; it is bad if it produces dullness, lack of progress, lack of creativity, falsehood, badness, and ugliness. Notice that all these terms are evaluative: diversity must be judged by evaluative criteria; we can’t determine our values according to diversity or its absence. There is no value-neutral way to assess an organization like a university. Diversity per se is not a value; it all depends on what it leads to. If it leads to what is good, then let’s by all means do it; but if it doesn’t, commit it to the flames. There is absolutely no value in difference as such: mere difference never adds up to quality. Variety may be the spice of life, but it isn’t a guarantee of merit. Intelligence, knowledge, diligence, hard work, creativity—these are the signs of a good university not its degree of diversity (whatever exactly this is supposed to mean). To be concrete, if it turns out that women make the best mathematicians, by all means let them run the mathematics departments; if men make the best athletic coaches, let them coach women’s basketball.

The problem with both the approaches I have criticized is that they try to substitute non-values (“facts”) for values. The fact of division is held to be inherently undesirable; the fact of diversity is held to be inherently desirable. These facts, however, are only evaluatively relevant if they conduce to other things deemed valuable in themselves, such as truth or moral rectitude; and they are at best only loosely correlated with such values. Agreement is only good if it is agreement in what is true and right; diversity is only good if it leads to creativity and progress. Fascists can easily agree with each other and be completely wrong; a diverse group of people can be a dull and incompetent lot. We should not be in the business of reducing difference of outlook or promoting diversity considered as ends in themselves.[1]

[1] Apologies for the obviousness of these remarks (it was tedious to write them down), but sometimes the obvious needs stating. Memes like “diversity” have to be subjected to critical scrutiny.

Knowledge of the Unconscious

July 2, 2024/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Colin McGinn

Knowledge of the Unconscious

We have two minds: the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. These two minds differ in respect of the distinctive mark of consciousness (“what-it’s-likeness”) and in their accessibility to knowledge. The unconscious mind lacks the mark of consciousness and isn’t known in the way the conscious mind is. We know what is in our conscious mind but not (generally) what is in our unconscious mind. If we had equal knowledge of both, Freudian psychoanalysis and Chomskian linguistics would be a lot easier. We would know the contents of our dynamic emotional unconscious and the contents of our syntactic cognitive unconscious. But there is no direct route from the unconscious to the epistemic faculties; we have to resort to inference and postulation. Thus, we are naturally ignorant of what resides in the unconscious. It is the same for other species of unconscious—perceptual, creative, dream, memory-related.

But how deep does this ignorance go? We don’t know what is in the unconscious, but do we know what it is to be unconscious? Do we have an adequate conception of the state of unconsciousness? We do know what it is to be conscious of something, since our consciousness is hooked up to our faculty of knowledge, even if we don’t know much scientifically or philosophically about consciousness. But there is no such hook-up between the unconscious and knowledge, so it is a question whether we know what we are talking about when we use the words “unconscious mind”. Do we know what this peculiar condition consists in? We have neither introspection nor perception of the unconscious, so we have no natural mode of presentation of it. What kind of being does it have? It might be thought that this question poses no great puzzle: we simply subtract consciousness and are left with a purely physical or functional state—and we know what they are. I know what a brain state is—I’ve seen them and read about them—and an unconscious mental stare is just a brain state. But this is exactly wrong: an unconscious mental state is precisely a mental state—a desire, a belief, a piece of knowledge (“tacit knowledge”), a visual perception, a memory. We mustn’t confuse an unconscious mental state with a non-conscious physical state such as the state of being magnetized or having a mass. Similarly for functional states. No, we must remove consciousness but still be left with something distinctively and recognizably mental—but what is that exactly? Isn’t our whole positive conception of a mental state shaped and formed by our awareness of our conscious mental states. Surely, we cannot be thinking of our unconscious mental states as somehow implicitly conscious—as it might be, faintly conscious. So, unconscious mental states cannot be merely physical nor un-merely (as it were) conscious—but what else is there? Aren’t we just thinking by analogy to the conscious mind while disavowing the analogy? The unconscious mind is not there for the subject, as the conscious mind is, so what is its mode of existence? Isn’t the whole concept of the unconscious something cobbled together from unsuitable conceptual materials, a mishmash of the purely physical and the frankly conscious? If we had a way of directly knowing about it, we could use this to form a conception of what we are referring to, but that is precisely what we lack. We just have a word derived from negating the word “conscious” not a positive substantive conception of its reference. No wonder, then, that the unconscious was a relatively late discovery in human thought and perpetually in peril of denial (though evidently real)—it is actually a “mystery of nature” (in Hume’s phrase). It is something we need and can talk about, even formulate theories of, but not something of which we have any clear and distinct idea (rather, it is unclear and murky). Nor is the case like that of the unobservable constituents of matter: we dohave a clear idea of imperceptible constituents of matter, because we can model these on bits of matter we can see and touch—we don’t need to step outside the circle of physical concepts.[1] But the unconscious mind is a concept that radically extends our other concepts, being neither a physical concept nor a concept of consciousness. It can feel like a pseudo concept (compare the putative concept of immaterial substance).

The underlying question is whether we have a concept of the genuinely mental that leaves the concept of consciousness behind. The general concept of the physical will not do because it is too general; ditto for the concept of the functional. Nor will the concepts of the informational or dispositional or computational help us, since they are also too general and reductive. How can we form a concept of the mental that is non-reductive and properly specific that contains no hint of the conscious mind? The whole point of the notion of an unconscious mind is that the mind is not confined to its conscious compartment and is not dependent on it; it is a realm of mentality in its own right. How, then, can it require the concept of consciousness in order to be made sense of—except by beings (such as ourselves) that have no other conceptual resources to go on? When God looks into our minds, he sees the unconscious part for what it is, not as a kind of wan reflection of the conscious part; but that is not a perspective we can aspire to. We are epistemically cut off from the nature of the unconscious, even though we possess an unconscious and can refer to it in our theories. The unconscious is thus at its heart a necessary mystery. To be unconscious is to be naturally unknown (i.e., not a subject of acquaintance). The unconscious is, in fact, rather like the bat’s conscious experience as far as we are concerned. The bat’s experience differs from our experience in such a way as to be conceptually alien to us; but much the same is true of our own unconscious in that we can’t form an adequate conception of that either—such a conception is unavailable to us. It is as if we have an alien mind living in our head, one that eludes our modes of understanding (apprehension). It’s like having a bat mind existing side by side with our ordinary conscious mind, in regular contact with it but different in nature. The conscious mind is just one form that mind can take, though it dominates our thinking about the mind, and its unconscious partner is really very different from it, intrinsically, ontologically. Yet both fall equally under the concept Mind. Things are always stranger than we tend to suppose from our limited standpoint.[2]

[1] It might be thought that quantum physics provides an analogy to the case of the conscious and the unconscious, in that we also have to make a conceptual leap from the observable classical physical world to the non-classical quantum world. It is as if the quantum world is the macroscopic world’s unconscious—a world for which we require different concepts and different rules of operation. However, I don’t think the leap from classical to non-classical physics is as wide and abrupt as the leap from the conscious mind to the unconscious mind, since we are still dealing with a spatiotemporal world of extended objects subject to the same forces in the former case, while in the latter we are asked to jump from the conceivable conscious to the inconceivable unconscious. Also, it’s never wise to place much reliance on analogies to quantum physics!

[2] I think the case of the unconscious is one of those cases in which we are compelled on theoretical grounds to postulate things that lack clear roots in our given conceptual system (rather like Hume on causation or Newton on gravity). The resulting theory is not strictly intelligible (to humans) but it may be the best we can do and serves many of our purposes. So, I am in no way deriding the unconscious or our theories of it, just noting a conceptual lacuna or shortfall. The unconscious is inherently theoretical.