The Disunity of the Unconscious

 

 

Consciousness has enjoyed the limelight for some time now. It is time for its neglected sister, Unconsciousness, to be let out of the attic and investigated in her own right. One question we can ask is whether the unconscious mind has the kind of unity possessed by the conscious mind. I shall suggest that it does not: what is called “theunconscious” is a motley collection with no internal unity. There is an irreducible plurality of types of unconscious mind exhibiting nothing we could describe as unity. The usual way of talking of “the” unconscious results from modeling unconscious mental states too closely on conscious mental states. We are thus not forced to choose between one kind of unconscious and another; we can accept that there are many types of unconscious mental reality, each co-existing with the others. We are splintered when it comes to the unconscious. We are not as mentally integrated as we might naively suppose.

            Let us start with Freud, because he exemplifies the kind of singularity assumption I am questioning. Freud speaks of the unconscious, meaning the kind of unconscious he took himself to have discovered—mainly concerned with psychosexual relations within the family and beyond. Under his influence that is what many people today would refer to with the definite description “the unconscious”. The Freudian unconscious consists mostly of psychic materials disturbing to the person, and hence repressed; its content shows up in dreams, neurotic symptoms, jokes, and slips of the tongue. Erotic desire for the mother and competitive hatred of the father are part of its disturbing content. The Freudian unconscious is thus conceived as an autonomous, potentially disruptive, psychic system concerned with affect and personal relations—that is what the Freudian unconscious is about. As we would say, that is its intentional content. I am not aware that Freud thought there was any other unconscious apart from this one—though it is perfectly logically consistent to suppose that there is. What he did believe in, however, was what he called the “preconscious”, by which he simply meant mental states not currently present to consciousness—such as ordinary memories or desires not currently attended to. These are accessible to consciousness by means of exercises of will, unlike the contents of the unconscious proper, which are not so accessible, but which can only be brought to light by the practice of psychoanalysis (using, say, free association).

Yet these preconscious mental contents are still unconscious, just not deeply so. So we can say that Freud really believed in two unconscious mental systems: those accessible to consciousness easily and those not accessible easily. He should have spoken of two types of unconscious mental state—the superficial unconscious and the deep unconscious. The former is in many ways much wider than the latter, since it can contain memories of all kinds, not just those that cause anxiety in the person whose memories they are. Since Freud took his unconscious to be primarily sexual, and so limited to that subject matter, the preconscious unconscious includes a great deal more than the sexual—its intentional content can concern anything that can be remembered. In the vast ocean of the unconscious, thus broadly conceived, the specifically Freudian unconscious is quite limited and contained, even if it exerts a strong hold on the person’s conscious mind. It is not that everything mental is fully conscious except for the Freudian unconscious; there are two separate systems of unconscious mental reality existing side by side. And these two systems have quite different functional roles within the overall psyche, as well as different intentional contents: they are not unified in their modes of operation or general significance. In addition to the preconscious Freud also allowed that there are what he called “archaic remnants” of our evolutionary past that are inherited and which are also unconscious. These have a different kind of etiology from that of his own “dynamic” unconscious, and they do not play the kind of role that repressed memories and emotions play in his theory. They are not derived from encounters with the mother and father but stem from our deep biological past. So strictly they do not belong in the same psychic network as the contents of the Freudian unconscious—they are not repressed to start with. If it is difficult to access these archaic remnants, that is not because they are disturbing; rather, they are simply deeply buried and a matter of theoretical speculation. Thus Freud really postulates three unconscious systems—and yet he routinely designates only one of them as “the unconscious”. It is as if he thinks the other two do not quite count as the genuine article–while fully accepting that they are not conscious. He is making what I called the singularity assumption.

Here is where Jung is interesting. Jung also believed in an unconscious largely concerned with family and social relations, with less emphasis than Freud on sexual impulses. But he emphasized something Freud did not—those archaic remnants. For Jung, each person has two unconscious systems: the “collective unconscious” that consists of inherited archetypes and is universal among humans; and the “personal unconscious” which reflects the particular history of a given individual. The latter is more like Freud’s notion of the unconscious in that it reflects the course of a person’s history (it is acquired not inborn); the former corresponds to the inherited biological make-up of the species. No doubt these two forms of unconscious mentality interact, but for Jung they have a different kind of causation (one acquired, the other innate) and also have different intentional contents (the inherited archetypes are deemed unspecific compared to what they become under the impact of personal experience). For my purposes, what matters here is that Jung, more explicitly than Freud, accepted the plurality of the unconscious mind: he believed there were two distinct types of unconscious material (and no doubt he would also have accepted Freud’s preconscious). And again, this is so even though he was considering only certain aspects of the mind in his dual theory of the unconscious—those relating to human society, art, mythology, and so on. He was not considering the full range of human experience or cognitive capacity. 

Let us then range more widely and see how many other kinds of unconscious we need to accept. Once we do so the plurality multiplies. Perhaps the earliest recognition of the unconscious occurs in Plato’s theory of anamnesis, in which he proposes that we are born with knowledge of the forms acquired in a previous life, but forgotten. This knowledge, before it is elicited by experience, exists in us unconsciously, like ordinary inactive memories, but more inaccessibly. The Platonic unconscious is abstract and cognitive, quite unlike the Freudian unconscious, though both model the unconscious on memory—either repressed memories or simply lost memories. Knowledge of mathematics is what Plato wants to account for—not dreams, neuroses, and slips of the tongue. There is no reason at all why Freud should have any objection to Plato’s postulation of his mathematical unconscious, and it would be odd to insist that only his own unconscious should be called the unconscious. There are two separate domains here, both deserving to be called unconscious. It is not as if they are disagreeing about the same thing—as if there were only one unconscious and the question is what it contains (sex or geometry). There are simply two unconscious systems existing side by side, with nothing to unify them. Descartes and Leibniz, following Plato, also postulated an innate and unconscious level of mental reality in their general theory of knowledge. This rationalist unconscious is much wider in scope than anything dreamt of by Freud and Jung, taking in most of human thought. The Freudian unconscious (if it exists at all) is just one small island in the vast and compendious sea of the human unconscious.

Then there is the linguistic unconscious, cheek by jowl with the mathematical unconscious. The linguistic unconscious contains specific kinds of grammatical knowledge, and we are born with it. We have “implicit knowledge” of the rules of language, not “explicit knowledge”—these being alternative ways of speaking of unconscious and conscious knowledge. If we adopt the language of modularity, the linguistic unconscious is regarded as a module separate from the module of mathematical knowledge—and certainly separate from the Freudian unconscious module. The modules might occasionally interact—as repressed feelings might cause slips of the tongue—but the underlying systems are quite distinct and unrelated. In each of these cases we have a conscious expression of what lies beneath—we have conscious emotions or mathematical thoughts or experiences of grammaticality—but there is an unconscious module that regulates what occurs in consciousness. However, whereas the conscious events are unified in a single consciousness, the unconscious activities are not so unified, each proceeding in its own separate sphere. No unconscious module “knows” what the other modules are up to. They are like individual workers on an assembly line, each contributing to the final unified product of a total conscious state, but not communicating with each other. They mind their own business and speak their own language.

We must also add unconscious systems of knowledge suggested by the linguistic case: moral competence, knowledge of “theory of mind”, common sense physics, basic principles of biology. In each of these cases domain-specific cognitive modules have been proposed, usually with an innate basis. The competence in question is taken to exist in the mind before it becomes conscious during learning and maturation.

In addition we have the perceptual unconscious, as championed by Helmholtz and many later psychologists. Helmholtz spoke of “unconscious inference” in connection with perceptual illusions, where the inferences could not be deflected by conscious reasoning—as when our eyes can’t help concluding that the sun sets even though we know quite well that it is not moving but we are. Then there is subliminal perception in its many varieties, as well as the production of perceptual constancies, stereoscopic vision, and so on. None of these important processes are conscious; they are all unconscious. The systems that achieve conscious perception are specific and modular, operating automatically and without input from other systems, conscious or unconscious.

The Kantian unconscious must be mentioned: Kant believes in a noumenal self, analogous to the noumeal world outside, and we are quite unconscious of its nature. It is the hidden face of human nature, and no less real for its inaccessibility. This unconscious self must be presumed to play a role in generating how we perceive and think about the world (it is often pointed out that Freud and Jung were good Kantians who would be well aware of Kant’s hypothesis of a psychic world removed from our ordinary phenomenal awareness).

Adding an extra dimension to this already lengthy enumeration we have what might be called the Darwinian unconscious. The idea is familiar from evolutionary psychology and is an expression of Freud’s “archaic remnants”: we carry within us, as an evolutionary legacy, the psychological apparatus of our ancestors, still preserved (we could say pickled) in our modern brain. This general idea can be taken to varying degrees of remoteness, depending on how far back we care to go. It is often said that our current conscious lives are conditioned by the inheritance of a mind-brain adapted to the African savannah, but we could also postulate remnants of the earlier period of hominid tree dwelling. These could co-exist in the present human brain, occasionally manifesting themselves in our behavior and attitudes. We might go even further back and find remnants of our very distant past, say back to the placoderms: just as we inherited the basic body structure of these armored fish, so we inherited their basic psychological structure—and this may exist in us in unconscious form, perhaps never emerging into the light of day at all. Thus there may be multiple Darwinian unconscious minds lurking somewhere in the folds of our brains, some entirely dormant. We might have dozens of unconscious minds inherited from past species.

Now I have not attempted to argue for all of these varieties of the unconscious, and certainly some are more controversial than others, but the general point should be clear and uncontroversial: the domain of the unconscious is plural, heterogeneous, disunited, and disorganized. There is nothing like co-consciousness or a single conscious self to unify the disparate states and activities that constitute the range of unconscious systems that exist within us. If it is of the essence of consciousness to be a unity, then it is of the essence of unconsciousness to be disunity. We should not speak of “the unconscious” at all, unless we mean simply to refer to the totality of separate unconscious mental systems; certainly we cannot model unconscious mental reality on “the conscious”, where the definite article is fully warranted. The unconscious is eminently divisible, consisting of an assembly of separate systems, unlike consciousness as traditionally conceived. In this respect the unconscious is like the body, but with even less unity—it is made up of distinct organs each performing distinct functions (and some performing no function at all). Just as the lungs work differently from the heart, so one kind of unconscious organ works differently from other kinds. The whole of what we call “the mind” is thus like a colony of minds. Our unity is apparent only at the level of consciousness; behind the scenes we are fragmented and disunited.

Does this mean we consist of many selves? Are there as many selves as there are unconscious modules? My view is that there is no such thing as an unconscious self—all selves are conscious selves. So there is not an unconscious self that is specific to each unconscious system—as it might be, a mathematical self, a linguistic self, a moral self, a perceptual self, a libidinous self. Rather, we can say one of two things: either that the mental states in question have no self as their subject, or that they do but that self is just the familiar conscious self we encounter every day. That is, either there is no “I” for the unconscious systems, or each person can truly say “I am now in unconscious state S”. Of course, I won’t typically know what my unconscious mind is doing at any given time, though I may have indirect theoretical knowledge of such matters; but it will still be true to ascribe the underlying mental states to me. In much the same way, I have kidneys and a liver—though these are not components of my consciousness. If we choose to say the former, we abandon the principle that for every mental state there must be a subject, while we keep that principle if we choose to say the latter. It seems to me not to matter much what we choose to say; what is important is that no one possesses unconscious mental states in the way they possess conscious mental states. There is certainly nothing it is like for someone to possess an unconscious mental state—as there is for a conscious mental state. If there is any “phenomenology” to the unconscious, it is not a phenomenology that is like anything for its bearer—since there is no bearer. In any case, we don’t need to multiply selves in order to account for the plurality of unconscious systems. In the normal course of events, we have just one self and it is conscious; we don’t have in addition a gang of little unconscious homunculus selves. If we like we can say, “I unconsciously inferred that the sun went down”, as we can say “I digested my food”, but we must remember that all these statements mean is that certain unconscious activities within me can be ascribed to one individual rather than another (it wasn’t you who made that inference or digested that food). Conscious mental states must have a bearer, but unconscious mental states don’t have a bearer, except in the trivial sense just mentioned.

I want now to consider briefly four questions arising from the discussion so far. First, can any mental state that is conscious also be unconscious? It seems clear enough that many conscious mental states can take an unconscious form, notably beliefs and other propositional attitudes—memory by itself demonstrates that. According to psychoanalysis, emotions and desires that are conscious can also exist in unconscious form. There are many who would insist that conscious perceptual experiences can also exist unconsciously—as with subliminal perception. The case that has been most controversial is that of bodily sensations like pain: is it possible to have an unconscious pain? It is certainly possible to have an unattended pain, but there is some intuition that an intense pain at least can never be had unconsciously. Granted that all other types of conscious mental state can also be unconscious, it would be odd to find this one exception; but it may be that some mental states cannot exist in unconscious form in their very nature. Still, the general rule appears to be that what is conscious can also be unconscious. If we hold to anything like a higher order thought theory of consciousness, we get that result easily, since all that is necessary to produce an unconscious mental state is to remove the higher order thought. From the point of view of this paper, the interesting point is that states that must be part of a unity when conscious are not part of a unity when unconscious—yet it is the same state. Consciousness imposes unity on its contents, rather than reflecting a unity already found in the mental states as such. If I am consciously thinking about philosophy and at the same time seeing a red object, the two experiences will be unified in my consciousness; but if those same two mental states were to occur unconsciously, they would not be so unified. They would not exist for a single self and they would not be “co-unconscious”.

Second, is there some sort of hierarchy of unconsciousness? Are some forms of the unconscious more unconscious than others? Might one unconscious have another unconscious as its unconscious? All that seems perfectly possible. Freud would allow that some unconscious mental contents are harder to access than others, because more repressed; and the same would be true of other types of unconscious material. That is likely for the Darwinian unconscious, as ancestral forms of mind become ever more remote. Unconscious knowledge of universals, as envisaged by Plato, seems easier to access than unconscious knowledge of universal grammar, as envisaged by Chomsky: the former is elicited by experience, but the latter is not so elicited (or else linguistics would be much easier than it is). The deep Jungian archetypes appear particularly hard to access compared to their particular cultural manifestations. These might count as the unconscious of an individual’s personal unconscious—what lies behind and shapes the idiosyncratic personal unconscious formed by someone’s particular history. 

Third, can there be a totally inert and insulated unconscious? Generally speaking, an unconscious is posited because there is behavioral or conscious evidence for its existence—the unconscious is never encountered “directly”. But is that necessary? I don’t see why, though it would be difficult to find any evidence to make a specific attribution of such a sealed off type of unconscious (there might in principle be evidence from brain structure). What if some ancient ancestral form of mind persisted in our brains by dint of heredity but never revealed itself—it just sits there quietly minding its own business. It might still have psychological reality, just no effects on behavior or consciousness. That seems quite conceivable. And couldn’t the causal links between an unconscious system and behavior be abolished, so that the unconscious system no longer made any difference to behavior? Would that mean the states no longer exist? I don’t see why. If there were such an unconscious system, it would be even more isolated and autonomous than what we find with the systems we know about: it would be a mental world unto itself, with no interaction with anything else. Imagine severing the nerve fibers that connect the Freudian unconscious with the conscious mind and behavior: that would render it impotent, but not less real (this would be a simple surgical way to rid ourselves of the disruptive unconscious–no more bad dreams, neuroses, and slips of the tongue).

Fourth, is it true that every conscious faculty has its corresponding unconscious subsystem? Freud and Jung suppose that our conscious life of social and sexual relations has an unconscious substructure. Plato thinks that our conscious knowledge of mathematics rests upon recovered memories. Descartes holds that we could not have conscious thoughts without first having unconscious innate ideas. Helmholtz conjectures that there can be no perception without unconscious inference. Chomsky contends that we can only consciously use language because of an innate unconscious grammatical competence. So many conscious faculties require an unconscious foundation. But is the same true of our conscious knowledge of history and geography? Is it true that I have unconscious knowledge of historical dates and national capitals? Well, I do have such knowledge in my unconscious memory—but do I have any such unconscious knowledge before learning history and geography consciously? That sounds distinctly dubious; here the unconscious features only trivially, not foundationally. I certainly did not know that Paris is the capital of France unconsciously before learning it consciously. However, there is room for a weaker thesis, namely that conscious historical and geographical knowledge rest upon a foundation of unconscious cognition concerning time and space and the general nature of the material world. If such basic knowledge is innate, then at some point it was unconscious—and it is a necessary condition of acquiring conscious knowledge. It is therefore plausible to suggest that it is on the order of a psychological law that every conscious system depends on an unconscious system—that the conscious mind needs the unconscious mind. Whenever something is going on upfront there is always machinery whirring away behind. As a general rule, the conscious mind presupposes the (or a) unconscious mind.

What is the right image of the mind, viewed in this pluralist way? Just as people tend to a dualism of mind and body, so they tend to a dualism of mind and mind—the conscious mind, on the one hand, and the unconscious mind, on the other. The inner architecture of the mind is like railway tracks, or a pair of horses tethered together, or a married couple. But that dualism should be replaced by a plurality of minds: the conscious mind and its many unconscious partners (or rivals). Thus the architecture is more like a colony or a hive or an extended family. Many separate agencies work together, or ignore each other, or even oppose each other; there isn’t some simple dualism warranting the phrase “the unconscious”. The varieties of the unconscious are as extensive as the varieties of bodily organ or the varieties of animal species. Each of us contains mental multitudes.

 

 

 

 

Necessity and Truth

 

 

It is generally assumed that necessity implies truth: from “Necessarily p” we can infer “It is true that p”. In possible worlds terms, if a sentence is true in every world, it is true in the actual world. This is taken to be self-evident and to my knowledge has never been questioned. We can certainly never infer falsehood from necessity! But have we considered the full range of cases? Take the sentence “Necessarily the king of France is a monarch”: is that sentence true or false or neither true nor false? It is a false sentence according to Russell’s theory of descriptions and neither true nor false according to Strawson’s theory. But it seems to me to be true; it might be said in reply to someone who claims that the king of France could fail to be a monarch. At least it has a reading on which it is true (“Being king of France logically implies being a monarch”). Yet the sentence “The king of France is a monarch” might not be true: it might be false or neither true nor false, depending on which theorist you agree with. Asserting that sentence either entails or presupposes that there is a king of France, but asserting the necessitation of it does not entail or presuppose that (on one reading). Intuitively, the necessitation says merely that if any object answers to the description “the king of France” it must also fall under the predicate “is a monarch”. The necessity operator cancels the implication of existence carried by the embedded sentence (the same might be said of the belief operator). So the modal sentence can be true without the embedded sentence being true.

            Or consider ethical sentences, such as “Genocide is wrong”. Can we not assert, “Necessarily genocide is wrong” as a way to emphasize the universality of the moral proscription, while maintaining that ethical sentences are not strictly true or false? It may or may not be plausible to maintain that ethical sentences lack truth-value, but surely it is consistent to hold that they suffer that lack while being ready to assert the necessitation of an ethical sentence. To say that the wrongness of genocide couldn’t fail to be so in any world is not to commit oneself to the meta-ethical position that ethical sentences have truth-value. There is a logical gap here. If we take the modal sentence to mean something like, “It is undeniable that genocide is wrong”, that could be true without it following that the sentence that is undeniable is itself true—it might just be morally unquestionable. An emotivist might be happy with assigning the modal sentence a truth-value but deny that the non-modal ethical sentence is thereby a bearer of truth. There may be no circumstances in which someone can legitimately assert that genocide is right and yet “Genocide is wrong” might not be a true sentence.

            If we choose indisputably true sentences to put after “necessarily” we will generate the impression that necessity implies truth, but if we choose other types of sentence that appears not to be the case. We cannot therefore affirm that truth follows from necessity across the board; we need some restrictions if we want to maintain the logical truth of “If necessarily p, then it is true that p”, to the effect that p has to be a truth-bearer. The mere fact of necessity does not entail the truth of what is necessary.  [1]

 

  [1] We can say that Sherlock Holmes is necessarily a man, but can we say that it is true that he is a man? Fictional sentences can express necessities without expressing truths. We might hold that mathematical sentences have no truth-value while also holding that they express necessities. The concept of necessity does not itself imply truth. We could dispense with the whole idea of truth but retain the concept of necessity.

                                                The Concept of a Person

 

 

I have come to the conclusion that the concept of a person, as philosophers employ that concept, is a bad concept. It leads to the formulation of bad questions that have no answers. The concept does not pick out any natural kind and is quite misleading. It should be abandoned as a concept in philosophy, except in a very restricted setting.

            What counts as a person? We typically apply the word to ordinary adult humans of sound mind, assuming a certain set of mental characteristics—intelligence, consciousness, self-reflection, self-governance, memory, etc. But what about children: when does a human child become a person? Is it at the age of sexual maturity, or when the child starts to walk and talk, or at birth, or in the third trimester, or at conception? Opinions differ radically. According to the standard Lockean definition, in terms of conscious self-reflection, persons must have advanced cognitive skills, so that personhood only begins when the mind reaches a certain level of sophistication—possibly around puberty or later, depending on the individual. So many human children are deemed non-persons—though they have human bodies, minds, language, and will. What about those suffering from various forms of mental deficit—are they persons? Is an autistic adult a person? Does Alzheimer’s destroy personhood? Does coma eliminate the person? Are you a person while asleep, or just before you die in your sleep? And is there a science of persons? Is this concept useful in biology, or psychology? Why do we have the concept? What does it do for us?

            We are apt to restrict the concept of a person to the human species—only humans are said to be persons. Our pets are not deemed persons, nor are our closest biological relatives. Would we call other hominids persons if they still existed—Neanderthals, Homo erectus, et al? Didn’t some people once deny that individuals of other races are persons? But are we just wrong to impose these restrictions—might we discover that gorillas, say, really are persons after all? What would such a discovery involve? Might their DNA make us accept that gorillas are persons, as it might make us accept that they belong to the same family that includes lemurs? Could their personhood be a scientific discovery? And if they are persons, what about other primates, other mammals, or even reptiles—might they too be persons for all we know? Is it that we know empirically that crocodiles are not persons, as we know they are not warm-blooded? Is that a scientific fact? Is it conceivable that turtles might turn out to be persons—but not the shark or the octopus? And when did the biological kind persons evolve? Might we stop calling ourselves persons if our mental faculties drop below a certain level (“we used to be persons but now we don’t measure up”)?

            There is a philosophical subject called “personal identity” in which we strive to find what constitutes the continued existence of a person. The subject involves many ingenious thought experiments, and it is difficult to come up with a satisfactory theory. Presumably the question is not supposed to include non-persons: we are not seeking the conditions of non-personal identity—the question is supposed to be exclusively about persons as such. So we are not interested in young children and members of other species, since they don’t count as persons. But the same thought experiments, and the same theories, can be applied to these non-persons too. A human child, say three-year-old Jill, persists through time, and we can ask what her persistence consists in—what makes this child Jill. Is it her body or brain or memories or consciousness or personality—or none of the above? We can envisage swapping her brain for Jack’s brain, or dividing her brain in two, or erasing her memories—the usual philosophical moves. Yet none of this is about personal identity, Jill not being a person (yet), as we may suppose. Or if you think human children do count as persons, even going as far back as the fetus, what about cats and dogs—what does their identity through time consist in? What makes Fido, Fido? We can swap Fido’s brain, zap his memories, tinker with his personality, and subject him to teletransportation—the philosophical works. Yet none of this concerns a question of personal identity—just canine identity: “Is it the same dog?” not “Is it the same person?” But surely these questions about non-persons are really the same as questions about the identity of persons—we have not got two philosophical problems here, one about persons and the other about non-persons. So the question of personal identity, as it is normally pursued, is not really a question about personal identity as such—that is a misnomer. The concept of a person is not the concept we need to pursue these kinds of questions: it is too restrictive.

            And quite possibly it makes the questions needlessly intractable, because the concept itself is so vague, messy, and unnatural. We can ask what constitutes identity of body, identity of mind, and identity of animal (dog or gorilla, say), but asking what constitutes the identity of a “person” is not a very well defined question, pending some clearer idea of what a person is. What question is left over when we have answered those other questions—in particular, when we have answered the question of what dog identity or human identity is? If we have a theory of human identity over time, don’t we have all we need? In other words, why not focus on species concepts and formulate the question that way? These are sortals in good standing, unlike the putative sortal “person”, which admits of so much indeterminacy. If we find we can settle questions of animal identity—dogs, turtles, humans—why bother with the supposed further question of personal identity? Maybe this just generates pseudo-questions that simply have no answer. We can also meaningfully inquire about the identity through time of minds—what makes me have the same mind today that I had yesterday or a year ago? The answer will specify my mental capacities, as well as certain kinds of psychological continuity; and the question posed may have a clear answer. But this will not satisfy the seeker after the secret of personal identity, which is construed as a question about another kind of entity entirely—the person. For why–that seeker will ask–couldn’t the same person have a different mind at different times, and why couldn’t different persons share the same mind? Such questions appear fanciful, but they are easily generated from the assumption that there is a substantial further issue about personal identity. However, if we simply stop asking that question—that is, stop going on about the supposed category of persons—we can still cover all the ground that really matters, viz. identity of body, animal, and mind. There is really no additional question in this neighborhood worth asking–so at least the skeptic about “personal identity” will contend. There is clearly a challenge here to explain what well-defined question remains once those other questions have been dealt with. The concept of a person is really quite a recent addition to our conceptual repertoire, but surely there were questions about our identity through time before it made its entrance.

            It is suspicious that we don’t have a term corresponding to “person” for other species. Some well-meaning people suggest that we should extend the concept to other species, because of their psychological similarities to us; but that seems rather forced and stipulative. What is odd is that we don’t have a more general concept of which person is a special case, given that we recognize that animals have minds as well as bodies. We think Fido is the same dog from day to day, as we think Bill is the same human from day to day; but we don’t have a term corresponding to “person” to add to our description in the case of Fido. There is a natural kind here that subsumes both Bill and Fido, and which resembles the concept of a person, but we don’t actually have a word that does this job—hence we have to say bluntly that Fido is a non-person. We might try using “psychological subject” or “ego” or “self”, but these don’t capture the notion of a non-human but person-like being (a “quasi-person”?). What this suggests to me is that the concept of a person is not really a natural kind concept at all—it is not intended to capture significant natural traits of things. It has a completely different function. That is why we don’t have a more capacious notion of a person, despite recognizing similarities between ourselves and other species, and indeed between adult humans and juvenile humans (as well as others). The job of the word “person” is not to capture the nature of a certain kind of thing; rather, it is to enforce a certain kind of division—to stipulate a certain kind of exclusion. It is intentionally invidious.

            Locke remarked that “person” is a forensic term, i.e. a term of the law. Let me rather say that it is a political and legal term, as is the concept expressed. To classify an individual as a “person” is to grant him or her certain rights—legal, political, moral. A person is precisely someone who possesses, or is deemed to possess, these rights—a right-holder. It is like calling someone a “gentleman” as opposed to a “commoner”: the point is to indicate how such a one is to be treated, not to get at some natural essence. We don’t refuse to call children and animals persons because we think they differ fundamentally from us in their objective nature; we do it because we are marking them out as beyond the normative sphere to which normal human adults belong—the sphere of responsibility, legal obligation, ownership, and so on. True, there are real differences that underlie this kind of forensic distinction, but the term “person” is employed to abstract away from these and focus on matters of law and politics. We declarea young human a person upon the attainment of a certain position in society, as we might stipulate a gorilla to be a person if gorillas come to be accorded legal rights comparable to those applicable to adult humans. It is not that we discover these creatures to be persons by observation or analysis—though we may discover relevant facts about their minds or bodies. The term “person” is a kind of honorific or status term, intended to signify belonging—it connotes legal and political standing. It is like “citizen” or “aristocrat” or “star” or “lady”. It is not the concept of a certain kind of natural entity.

            If this is right, we can see what is going wrong with the philosopher’s use of the concept of a person. It is not a concept designed for, or useful in, metaphysical or scientific contexts, but in political or legal contexts. There is no such question therefore as the “nature of persons” or “personal identity through time”–though there are real questions about the nature of animals and their minds and about the identity through time of animals and their minds. We can certainly ask about minds of different levels of complexity, up to and including the Lockean conception of a self-reflective conscious being that can “consider itself as itself”. But this should not be interpreted as a division into “persons” and “non-persons”: there are just too many grades of animal (and human) mindedness for that dichotomy to be realistic. There is no such ontological subject as persons—at least as that concept is normally understood by philosophers. The kind “normal adult human with legal rights and obligations” is not a metaphysical kind, as philosophers have attempted to make it.   Philosophers have extracted the concept of a person from its natural forensic context and tried to press it into metaphysical service, by asking questions about a supposed ontological category. The failure to make much progress with these questions is an indication that this appropriation was misconceived. Let us then drop the concept of a person from metaphysics and return it to its proper place in law and politics. We can still discuss the nature of animals, humans included, and ask about the identity through time of these entities—recognizing that they are essentially embodied minds—but we will not do so under the rubric “persons” or “personal identity”. There are no persons, as philosophers have employed the concept, primitive or non-primitive, basic or non-basic, analyzable or unanalyzable.

 

Colin McGinn

                                                            Turing Tests

 

 

The classic Turing test involves a robot that passes for a conscious thinking human being. The examiner spends time with the robot, asking questions, interacting, and the question is whether it presents a convincing enough appearance of intelligence and consciousness. It is like an audition for playing the part of a normal human being. Structurally, however, the Turing test exemplifies something more general, and it is instructive to spell out what it is.

Consider the Turing* test: can we construct a virtual world that passes for a real world? An engineer is making a machine that will feed inputs into the brain and produce an impression of a world of ordinary material objects; the question is whether this virtual world can convince a tester that it is real. The tester can experiment on this virtual world, moving around, varying the angles, using different senses, and if after some suitable time he cannot distinguish the virtual from the real, we can declare that the machine passes the Turing* test. It can produce a convincing simulacrum of a real world—as a robotics engineer might produce a convincing simulacrum of a conscious intelligence.

            We could also envisage a Turing** test that concerns producing artificial plant life: can we make an object that resembles a naturally occurring plant enough to convince someone that it is really a biological plant? And we can have subdivisions of such questions: can we artificially simulate a virus, a bat, a cactus, or an octopus? The question is not specific to robots and minds at all: it is about the power to mimic naturally occurring objects by artificial contrivance. Can we make an artificial F, for arbitrary F?

            Here is an interesting question of the general type—call it the super-Turing test: Can we create a virtual world that contains robots that pass the classic Turing test? That is, we first have to create a virtual world of bodies, as in the Turing* test, and then we have to ensure that those virtual bodies behave in ways that perfectly mimic human bodies—so that they will pass the Turing test. Thus virtual robots may pass the super-Turing test, and hence be declared by testers to be conscious thinking beings. The tester has been fooled into believing he is surrounded by conscious thinking beings when he is really living in a virtual world of imaginary robots.

            Suppose the virtual robots do pass the super-Turing test test: are they then really conscious? But how can a merely virtual being be conscious, as opposed to seeming so? Are people in your dreams conscious? Clearly not—though they pass a kind of super-Turing test. Passing the Turing test is not logically sufficient to qualify as conscious, because passing the super-Turing test is not sufficient. Passing the test is enough to convince someone that there is a real thing of the type in question, if they don’t know the actual nature of thing; but that is a question about evidence and belief, not about what is metaphysically possible. Anything can pass a Turing-type test for being an F but still not be an F, since appearing to be an F is never logically sufficient for being an F. In other words, there is always skepticism to reckon with.