Deciding to be Good

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

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

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

C

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

Knowledge and Reasons for Belief

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

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

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

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

Degrees of Consciousness

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

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

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

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

Co

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

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

Universals of Consciousness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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