Consciousness and the Origin of Philosophy

What causes philosophy—the subject—to exist? I shall argue that consciousness is what causes philosophy to exist, or rather consciousness-in-the-world. The consciousness-world nexus is the origin of philosophy. It isn’t the world by itself or consciousness by itself; it’s the situation of consciousness in the world, or the situation of the world in consciousness. It’s the relation between them. I will give two obvious examples: the mind-body problem and the problem of knowledge. In the mind-body problem, we seek to understand how the mind relates to the body: we know we have a mind (consciousness) and we know we have a body (part of the external world), but we can’t see how they are situated in relation to each other. In the case of knowledge, we seek to understand how our consciousness manages to know the world outside of it: how can this(consciousness) know that (the world)—how is the knowing relation to be understood? It’s all about the consciousness-world relation: we are looking for relational knowledge in seeking philosophical knowledge. That is the basic thesis. In order to obtain this knowledge, we will need to understand both consciousness and the world, but the motivation for that comes from the problematic relation in question. In the philosophy of perception, say, we want to know how perceiving consciousness relates to the world perceived: is the world seen directly or is the relation mediated? Hence: what is seeing and what is the thing seen? I know myself and I think I know the world; what I don’t know is how one relates to the other—that is opaque and not contained in the two separate pieces of knowledge. Put bluntly, I don’t know how I am related to it. It is the juxtaposition that puzzles me.[1]

This doesn’t sound like too daring a proposal; it might even sound truistic. But notice how it sets philosophy apart from other subjects. In the sciences we want to understand the world (reality) not our relation to it—the physical world, the biological world, the psychological world. We use our consciousness to do that, but we don’t mention it. The results of science are not a set of relational truths about consciousness and the world, and the method is not to scrutinize that relation. In science we focus on the world side of the relation (this includes psychological science). The same is true for history, economics, and English literature. In philosophy we focus on the relation because it is not clear—not conceptually or logically clear (we are not concerned here with empirical facts). The relation suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity—intelligibility. We can’t make senseof it. This meta-philosophy contrasts with the one standard in twentieth century philosophy, namely that philosophy arises from language, or the relation between language and the world. Either language is about the world but we don’t know how, so we need to get clear about meaning; or language is defective and misleads us about the world, so we need to correct it. So, language is the origin of philosophy: it exists because of language—not because of the world or the mind or their relation. Now it may be true that some linguistic puzzles lead to philosophical rumination, but au fond the problem lies deeper—in our grasp of the consciousness-world relation. We would be confronted by philosophical problems even if we had no language. The problems lie at the level of ontology not semantics. That, at any rate, is the view I am defending.

This proposal faces two kinds of objection, both serious. The first is that it implies that if there were no consciousness there would be no philosophy; the second is that it implies that if there were no world, only consciousness, there would be no philosophy. The second objection is easier to deal with: if we only had concepts of our own consciousness (per impossibile), we would lose the vast majority of philosophical problems and it is not clear what would remain; our conceptual scheme would be just too impoverished. Would we even have the concept of truth, let alone objectivity and subjectivity, self and other? How could we ask whether the will is free in an objective deterministic world, or how the mind is related to the body? We need concepts of the world if we are to formulate standard philosophical problems, not just concepts of consciousness.  The first question is tougher: is it really true that without consciousness philosophy is impossible? Couldn’t an intelligent being devoid of consciousness entertain philosophical questions? For many problems concern the world as it is in itself—necessity, existence, identity, causation, space, time, right and wrong, and so on. Couldn’t these problems be considered by an alien being that thinks only unconsciously and has no concept of consciousness? Such a being might have a language that has no conscious expression but can formulate philosophical problems about these things. This objection is not to be lightly dismissed, strange as it is, but I think it has an answer. The problems are only philosophical if they spring from an awareness of consciousness and its objects; they would not be our philosophical problems in the absence of consciousness. They would not trouble the alien intellect as our problems trouble ours. For they would not arise from a felt mismatch between how things consciously seem and how they are in themselves: their subjective appearance and their objective nature. Causation strikes us a certain way consciously, as manifesting necessity, but we are at a loss to find a counterpart for this in objective causal reality (constant conjunction etc.). Our hypothetical aliens would merely suppose that causation consists in constant conjunction, having no conscious impressionof causal necessity. If they had no conscious impression of existence, wouldn’t they take it to be unproblematically such-and-such (say, spatial occupation)—a question of science. It is existence as we experience it that forms the philosophical problem of existence.  If they had no consciousness of freedom, wouldn’t they just assume it was impossible?  The subject of philosophy as we know it would not exist, though some allied subject might. The general form of a philosophical problem is that consciousness makes it seem that such-and-such but reflection on reality seems not to confirm this. It consciously seems to us that right and wrong are simple moral categories yielding truths and falsehoods, but when we turn to the world it is hard to find anything to back this up—hence moral philosophy. Without consciousness the world is philosophically flat not philosophically taxing. Color seems like an external feature of things so far as consciousness is concerned, but when we reflect on the world it is hard to find a place for it. Space and time are not problematic for consciousness, but considered as real external things they fail to live up to what consciousness suggests (or unimaginably exceed it). To paraphrase Russell, consciousness contains the metaphysics of the Stone Age (right or wrong); the answer, he thought, was to discard that metaphysics. But that is none too easy a thing to do. It’s the clash between consciousness and the world that powers philosophy. Without consciousness philosophy as we know it does not exist. Thinking philosophically requires thinking of consciousness, and hence thinking consciously; not so science. Science can in principle be carried out by unconscious beings (“insentient intelligence”).[2]

The way to think of it is this: consciousness depicts the world in a certain way, but the world may have other ideas. We have thoughts about both and can appreciate tensions and disharmonies and outright disagreements. In this intersection philosophy arises—not from each alone, nor from language or science or dreams or politics or history. It arises from a certain cognitive predicament that distinguishes philosophy from other subjects. Thus, we get attempts to reduce the world to consciousness or to eliminate consciousness altogether or downplay it. There is a kind of competition at work here, and philosophy is the upshot. So, philosophy has deep, primitive roots, and yet is a sophisticated performance, requiring a specific cognitive structure on the part of the philosopher. It is not essentially a linguistic product. Even kids can do it. Every department of it demands an oscillation between mind and world, a consideration of both in tandem. The problem of perception is perhaps the most characteristic area of philosophy, because it expressly considers consciousness on the one hand and the external world on the other—and the problem is remarkably recalcitrant, almost defiant. What is the relation of perception, that most basic of consciousness-world relations? This is a quintessentially philosophical problem. But the same basic pattern runs through everything in philosophy: knowledge, action, realism and anti-realism, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of science and mathematics, philosophy of language and logic, phenomenology. We could describe philosophy succinctly as the study of conceptual problems of mind-world relations and not be too wide of the mark.[3]

[1] Exactly why that juxtaposition is so problematic is a further and difficult question; I won’t consider it here. It probably has something to do with evolution.

[2] Artificial intelligence, as it now exists, is incapable of properly philosophical thought, but it might be capable of scientific thought (unconsciously). There is no such thing as unconscious philosophy.

[3] It is a popular idea that philosophy is a kind of pre-science, but if what I say here is correct this is a misconception. Philosophy is distinctively concerned with conceptual problems of the consciousness-world nexus not with the world considered in itself (including the mind), so it isn’t doing the same kind of thing as science. It could be called the science of this nexus, but then it is not continuous with the other sciences. Also, when people say that philosophy is about conceptual problems, they omit to specify what kind of problem; the current proposal fills in that lacuna. At last, we have an answer to the question of what philosophy is—the conceptual study of mind-world relations. For example, meta-ethics is the conceptual study of the relation between ethical consciousness and ethical reality. Notice that this definition need not include everything that is traditionally taught in philosophy departments—that is another question.

Oliver Sacks’ Fabrications

I have just come across an article by Rachel Aviv in the December 15 edition of the New Yorker about Oliver Sacks’ dubious case histories, especially in Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Apparently, Sacks acknowledged that he made things up in his private journals, to which Aviv had access; I refer you to her article for details. As it happens, I reviewed Hat in the London Review of Books in 1986, explicitly raising the question of fabrication—exaggeration, embellishment, gilding the lily. You can read a section from my review below. At the time I wrote the review (I was 36) I had not met Sacks, but later in New York we became friends and stayed friends, despite some initial friction over my critical review. Now I see my well-founded suspicions amply confirmed. He never admitted to me that my strictures were justified, though he didn’t deny them either. He did, in later work, avoid this kind of inaccuracy, as well as the rather gushing nature of his prose. I subsequently reviewed both Musicophilia (New York Review of Books) and On the Move (Wall Street Journal) and found nothing similar to complain about. But this is not the main point of the present piece, which concerns the author of the article in question. No mention is made of my review in her long article, though others are cited as having comparable concerns. Why? It’s not as if my review appeared in an obscure place, or was not clear, or was by someone without credentials (I was an Oxford professor at the time). I find it hard to believe Aviv knew nothing of my review; if so, she didn’t dig very deep journalistically. Shouldn’t she have cited me, since I raised these concerns long ago, and independently of other people? And why didn’t she? Another suspicion recommends itself: it’s because of you-know-what—the disrepute cast upon my name in the last twelve years. I would like to believe this isn’t so, but my suspicions were well-founded before. So, Rachel, did you know about my review or not? If not, I suggest you read it and make the appropriate citation; if you did, why the lack of citation?

 

A Brief History of Knowledge

I will continue here what I started earlier, dwelling on the later stages of the growth of human knowledge.[1]The overall sequence is as follows. First, we have bodily sensations such as pain, pleasure, hot and cold: these may be construed as themselves instances of knowledge of the body, or we can suppose the sensation to be known in some higher-order way. This is self-knowledge, not extending beyond the body’s boundaries. Next, we have knowledge of the world outside the body—material objects in space. This is where the senses come in, i.e., perception proper. Such knowledge is pre-propositional knowledge and has nothing to do with true justified belief. This stage in the evolution of knowledge is complex and multifaceted and evolved over millions of years: sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste. It might be called distal knowledge, as opposed to the proximal knowledge provided by bodily sensation. Then we reach a quite new stage of knowledge: knowledge of other minds—what is called “theory of mind”. This includes applying the knowledge to one’s own mind. It goes well beyond the knowledge of the previous two stages. What comes next?

Here we reach a watershed, roughly coincident with the rise of humankind. We could aptly describe this phase as “new knowledge” as opposed to the “old knowledge” obtaining heretofore. I am torn between ethical knowledge and linguistic knowledge: which came first? Initially, I thought ethical knowledge came first, but now I lean towards linguistic knowledge, probably with a strong dose of co-evolution. Maybe the rudiments of ethical knowledge were present before language came along (about 200,000 years ago), but language added to that primitive stock of knowledge (e.g., not stepping of other people’s toes). In fact, I have a nice jazzy hypothesis about the crucial transition: with language came the possibility of lying, and on a grand scale; with it a censorious sentiment reared up in the human heart. Not lying was the first true moral edict. And we do find it very deplorable, almost as a reflex—“Liar!” we exclaim, red in the face. Murder, we could tolerate—we do that all the time, to animals and in wartime—but lying we really can’t stomach. Language made lying an ever-present temptation and a common occurrence; it had to be stamped down upon. So, a streak of moralism entered our cognitive nature, which was extended to other no-no’s like stealing and adultery and (yes) murder (especially when lying is involved). And there is an overlap of a constitutive nature: both are “normative”. Both concern what ought to be done and ought not to done; both are evaluative. So, language ushered in a normative type of knowledge, extendable to morality. There are rules, and rules must not be broken. Both are learned from our elders and mark out our distinctive culture. In any case, language and ethics belong together in this middle stage of the long history of knowledge. I count this stage as the major break with the epistemic past, and it corresponds to the man-animal divide. Animals have the old kind of knowledge, but this new kind is alien to them, except in the most rudimentary form. It marks the onset of civilization, which might indeed be defined in terms of the knowledge available. The speaking evaluating animal: he that has the knowledge in question (if you have no ethics and no language, you are a savage). I would add politics at this stage, a type of social cognition—knowledge of how to run societies. Hence, rhetoric and exhortation—the language and tenor of the political animal.

What arrived next? I am going to say aesthetics—natural beauty and works of art. We come to know about what looks good, sounds good, tastes good: that is, we discover painting, music, and the culinary arts. Language and ethics are infused into this new type of knowledge: human culture is formed. This is a massive step forwards (religion is part of it). It builds on what came before, but expands substantially on it. This period goes on for quite a while until the next phase of the march of knowledge: science and philosophy. Now other animals are left far behind, those poor ignoramuses. This scholarly period has its ups and downs, recorded in those bricks we call books: mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, logic, epistemology, metaphysics. The next phase, taking us up to the present day, is the rise of knowledge technology: writing, books, computers, the internet. Now knowledge is no longer stored only in the head; it exists in our artifacts. It has been farmed out.

That is the general shape of the story, but I now want to draw some general lessons. What does history tell us about the dynamics of knowledge and our propensity to acquire it? We can first observe that knowledge moves from the self to the non-self: from me to other beings. It does not confine itself to my inner landscape—my body and its sensations. In this respect it is like life and the universe itself: it gets bigger all the time (the proliferation of species, the expanding universe). Animals tend to get bigger (except under exceptional circumstances). Minds also get bigger as more knowledge is stuffed into them. Correlatively, acquired knowledge tends to be retained: we know what our ancestors knew and then some. Knowledge started small (like a seed) and now it is enormous. It obeys a law of inertia and a law of expansion (like a slow explosion). It is passed on and multiplied. It grows, like a mighty tree. This is not to say that human knowledge inevitably grows; it might even diminish, because offloaded elsewhere. Our technology is the reason: it will contain the knowledge hitherto gathered and might generate more, but we will no longer harbor it. We will become more ignorant as our technology takes over from our brains; we might become ignorant sybarites while our technology takes care of our needs and desires. But the knowledge itself continues to expand even as we dwindle epistemically. Our brains get smaller, not being called upon to contain so much space-filling information (so energy consuming). It might even be that we will go extinct, perhaps wiped out by our machines, while our knowledge continues its ascent. The planet will be brimming with knowledge but with no living organisms to enjoy it (or resent having to acquire it). Knowledge will have taken on a life of its own. Or again, it too may be wiped out by some super-cataclysm, leaving the universe as it was before knowledge ever came into existence—a blank unknowing slate.

The general point is that knowledge is a living evolving thing, a chapter of biology, subject to the same laws; it had a biological beginning, a subsequent growth period, possibly a plateau, and then probably a demise. It might eventually go extinct. It underwent much transformation, happenstance, and vigorous natural selection. It began with self-centered sensation, but evolved into a mighty cognitive beast taking in the whole universe. A lot of animal physiology is designed to enable knowledge; it is a prized evolutionary adaptation. This isn’t to say knowledge is only that; it also has value, intrinsic and instrumental. It is one of evolution’s most impressive achievements. It had humble beginnings, like life itself, but it grew to be so much more—forever expanding into new territories. It is now all over the planet and penetrates every nook and cranny of reality. It seems driven by a powerful force that propels it ever onward and upward. Its history seems preordained. Could it have evolved once in some suitable slimy creature and then disappeared from the face of the earth never to return? That seems unlikely: it was inevitable and no doubt evolved in several locations (convergent evolution). Still, ancient remnants remain, tucked into the brain somewhere, telling tales of things once known and not forgotten. Itches and pains from eons ago are nestled among the most sublime products of human reason. Whenever you know something, you are bringing back traces of the distant past, when cognition breathed its first tentative breaths.[2]

[1] See my “A (Really) Brief History of Knowledge”. This investigation could be advertised as biological history or cultural history or both; I am not much concerned with the question of what is encoded in the genes or part of “culture”. However, it is surely clear that much of it evolved by mutation and natural selection, and hence is innate and instinctual. In fact, I believe that all of the historical divisions I talk about have biological roots and are not merely learned. They are no more learned than the organs of the body are learned.

[2] This kind of biological epistemology strikes me as a healthy addition to the usual epistemological menu. It is a form of Darwinian genealogical epistemology, to be set beside conceptual analysis and the study of particular branches of knowledge. Just as linguistics is really a branch of biology, so epistemology also is. We are born knowers, as we are born speakers (and born moralists). We are genetically programmed to know. Of course, particular items of knowledge are acquired by experience, but the general capacity is inborn (as are certain specific domains). It’s not all a matter of bombardment by stimuli or impressions received. Much the same story could be told about the history of knowing-how (ability knowledge).

Coyne on McGinn

I will reply to Jerry Coyne’s comments (January 23^rd, 2026) on my blog post “A (Really) Brief History of Knowledge”. I will keep this as brief and factual as possible without restating his criticisms.

1.I am not just a philosopher of mind but have written on many philosophical subjects. I was also trained as a scientist and have two degrees in psychology.

2.I don’t “conflate” consciousness and knowledge, as a perusal of my writings will confirm. There is no mutual entailment between them, though there are complex relations.

3.I don’t define consciousness in terms of qualia.

4.Instances of knowledge are commonly acquired not innate, but I was discussing types of knowledge (cognitive capacities) not instances of it: knowledge-how, acquaintance knowledge, propositional knowledge, and knowledge of different types of subject matter, e.g., states of mind and external objects. These do evolve unlike learned items of knowledge.

5.Consciousness evolves but not its passing contents, obviously, just like knowledge.

6.I am not “dead certain” of the pain theory—see my other articles on pain and evolution, cited in the paper we are discussing. Coyne is mistaking expository convenience with (misguided) certainty. Do I ever say that the pain theory is known to be true? I just think it is a good hypothesis.

7.Pain is important because it is highly motivating and very widespread. There can be other theories, such as tactile knowledge, which would deliver different results for later knowledge. See the articles footnoted. I was simply presupposing earlier work in the present article instead of repeating it.

8.Pain is more than adaptive reflexes; it is a sensation.

9.Not all of morality is acquired, as many have argued; the case is like language (as Chomsky has pointed out).

10.Coyne is wrong to say that biologists (scientists generally) are more cautious than philosophers; the opposite is true. I am both.

11.It is odd that he ignores my mysterianism, presumably because he thinks I’m a dogmatist. Ironic really.

12.The person out of his lane here is Jerry Coyne. I can guarantee that I have studied a lot more science than he has studied philosophy to judge from these comments (I do have a first-class degree in the science of psychology and used to teach experimental psychology).

13.This was an opportunity for constructive dialogue between disciplines, but it came out as tetchy incomprehension. All I can suggest is to read a philosophy book on epistemology: Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy would be a good place to start. Coyne never sent me his comments to get my response.

14.I was expecting my readers to be philosophers, so I didn’t spell out everything for the non-philosophical reader. This is true of everything on my website; it is not for beginners and I keep it concise.

15.It would be perfectly possible to have a cultural history of knowledge to be set beside a biological history, charting the main developments recorded in human history. I wasn’t much concerned with this distinction in the essay, though I focused more on the biological history of knowledge, it being neglected by intellectual historians.