Dear professor Colin McGinn,

Problems of Consciousness

Think back to the time when we had very little knowledge of the brain, but substantial knowledge of consciousness and the mind generally. We didn’t even know that the brain is the organ of the body responsible for the mind, or that any bodily organ is (it might emanate from an astral plane or some such). It is a mystery which bodily part is bound up with the mind. Is it the heart or the stomach or the brain? Then it is discovered that the brain is the organ in question, whatever that mysterious organ is. We gradually begin to unravel the brain mystery: the brain consists of cells called “neurons” (they could have been called “quarks”) that have a distinctive structure (nucleus, dendrites, axons), visible under a microscope. We even discover the nerve impulse and begin to figure out how it works (electrochemical processes of inhibition and excitation). Another mystery solved, or partially solved. So, now we know what implements conscious processes in the brain: we know what underlies mental phenomena, as well as which organ is responsible. We are beginning to map the correlates of consciousness in the brain. Good progress so far; we might reasonably hope that other remaining mysteries will be solved, especially given the progress we are making in understanding the physiology of other organs of the body.

But other mysteries remain that call for even more strenuous intellectual efforts: for example, why does consciousness exist? What does it do for its possessor in furthering its life prospects? Here we may turn to the idea of behavioral complexity or flexibility or adaptability: the mind is what enables animals to behave in intelligent complex ways. Then the question becomes how the brain enables this property of mind. Admittedly, this is a steeper problem—even a full-blown mystery. But some genius comes up with a promising idea: the brain consists of an enormous number of these neuron thingummies and they communicate with each other. Other organs may also have enormous numbers of constituent cells, but they don’t talk to each other the way neurons do—they don’t transmit information across the entire organ (think of the corpus callosum). Complex intelligent behavior is based in the complex communicative processes of the brain. Now this is admitted not to remove all perplexity about consciousness in relation to behavior, but it looks like a feasible explanation of one aspect of consciousness. We know why consciousness exists, given that it allows for adaptive complexity; and the brain is what confers this power on it. The powers of the mind are rooted in the powers of the brain as a multicellular holistic rapid-fire processor of information, or so our genius assures us (and it sounds plausible enough). If we go on to ask why all this behavioral fancy footwork, we can appeal to evolutionary theory—complexity aids survival. Thus, we have solved many mysteries of consciousness (as well as the unconscious); in particular, we have solved the problem of the means by which the mind exerts its remarkable behavioral powers. It looks as if we have got consciousness under good explanatory control—as good as the heart, lungs, stomach, etc. Those old mysteries have now disappeared.

But one mystery still stands stubbornly out—the how mystery. How does the brain, in all its holistic informational complexity, produce consciousness? How do those blessed little neurons, numerous and talkative as they are, give rise to (conjure up) the rich pageantry of conscious experience? How does the cheap plonk of the brain get transformed into the exotic cocktail of the mind? Gee, that’s a tough one (much head scratching ensues). In other words, the adamantine core of the mind-body problem has not been solved. We know the which, the what, the when, the means, the why, and the to-what-end—but we don’t know the how. Isn’t that odd? All that impressive mystery-solving and yet no progress with this mystery! Shouldn’t we have solved the how-problem long ago? Thus, we are faced with a meta-mystery: the mystery of why the how problem is so mysterious. It makes one think that nature can’t really be behaving very mysteriously with respect to this problem; the mystery is not a de re metaphysical mystery, but a human-intellect mystery, i.e., a function of our peculiar mental set-up. It’s a blind-spot, a scotoma, an area of cognitive paralysis, a mote of dirt in the mind’s eye. It’s the work of the Devil not God. It’s a bug in the human cognitive system not a sign of the miraculous. The mystery is boring, considered objectively. This is my positive solution to the philosophical mind-body problem: it’s an artifact of our biological nature as finite flawed limited creatures—like back pain or the appendix or the vagus nerve. It’s not a symptom of our intrinsic amazingness. Consciousness is no more objectively amazing than fur or teeth; indeed, less so, because the lack of knowledge in this area serves no discernable purpose. We just happen to be dumb about the how-problem of consciousness, that’s all, though not so dumb about the other problems of consciousness. It isn’t deep or profound or earth-shattering. It isn’t as if the neuron is coated with invisible other-worldly glitter. The brain is as dull as the liver sub specie aeternitatus. The severity of a problem has nothing intrinsically to do with its ontology, but everything to do with its cognitive psychology. No doubt the brain is more than we currently suppose, but that more is not a step into the Land of Oz. Nature is natural, tautologically so. The mechanism (I use the word advisedly) that explains how the brain produces consciousness is not one of those with which we are already familiar: the lungs extracting oxygen, the stomach exuding acid, the kidneys filtering, the bowels pulverizing, the hand squeezing. But it is not in principle of a different metaphysical order; after all, it has only neurons to work with. So, let’s not go all gooey and dualistic over it, godly and spiritual. The consciousness of a frog is no less natural than its moistness or warty skin. But we are damned if we can see it that way. The problem lies in the eye of the beholder.

To sum up: consciousness is mostly not mysterious (anymore), and what remains a mystery cannot be inherently and objectively any different. It is, however, a mystery why it is a mystery; the existence of the mystery is itself a puzzle. It seems to have something to do with our means of acquiring knowledge of empirical reality, i.e., by the senses plus some rules of inference. But knowledge is quite mysterious too, so we lack a clear explanation of the existence of the how-mystery of consciousness. We know the mystery is there, but we are ignorant about what leads to it. We thus suffer from a meta-mystery. Many things about the conscious mind are not mysterious, or not totally mysterious, but one thing is—and that fact is something of a mystery. We have the how-mystery and the mystery of that mystery.[1]

[1] What if the mind-brain relation were not a mystery at all, like the stomach-digestion relation, but that one organ of the body was deeply mysterious to us because of some quirk in our cognitive psychology, say the lungs? Wouldn’t that seem extraordinary? But the mystery would be skin-deep, so to speak, given that the lungs work in the way we know they do. It would be misguided to adopt a dualist metaphysics of the lungs, regarding them as proof of God’s existence. The lungs and the brain are biological products, no matter how hard they may be to understand (in some respects). The case is rather like trying to understand a non-human language with a human brain, or see a color outside of the normal human range with human eyes.

Fetal Philosophy

What kind of philosophy would an intelligent fetus develop? We ourselves don’t have much active intelligence in the womb, but what if we did? What if instead of nine months we had nine years? What if the brain was fully formed by the second year of life, but we were still unborn? Surely our philosophy would reflect our situation. Let’s suppose that we received some input from outside in the form of muffled noises, as well as sensations of touch, taste, smell, and even vision—just very limited. We don’t know we are fetuses or that we have a mother and father; we have no idea that we will one day be born. Then I think it is obvious that we would be rationalist mysterians: we would think that most knowledge is a priori and innate, and that many problems are insoluble by us (despite our excellent reasoning capacities). For we have precious little in the way of sense experience, but full access to our innate endowments. We would be accomplished logicians, mathematicians, and conceptual analysts; but we would know hardly anything of the world beyond the womb by sensory means. Empiricism would not seem like an attractive doctrine. As to mysterianism, we would clearly lack most of the concepts by which we now understand the world. True, we would be womb experts and know a bit about our own bodies and minds, but we would be ignorant of the vast world existing outside the womb. We would be like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, only worse. We would be scientific ignoramuses: no physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, etc. We would be rational beings, by hypothesis, so we would recognize our highly limited range of knowledge. The history of fetal philosophy would accordingly be very different from the history of our normal human philosophy. It would be a history of thwarted knowledge.

What would our ethics be like? It would not include other people, except imaginatively. I conjecture it would be egoistic, i.e., not really ethical. We would have no ethics worthy of the name, because there would be no need for it. The womb-world is a pre-ethical world, i.e., ethical bliss. Fetal consciousness is not troubled by ethical concerns. What would the meaning of life be for the fetus? Being warm, cozy, and well-fed, presumably, that being the limit of fetal experience—though some restless souls might yearn for escape. I suspect life’s meaning wouldn’t be much of an issue for them, especially if they had no idea of death, having never seen it happen. In general, their emotional life would be free of anxiety, since they experience nothing to be anxious about. The bad things of life would have no reality for them, assuming they suffered no illness or physical trauma. These are non-issues for them, though all-consuming for us. Life inside the womb is not the gauntlet it is outside of the womb.

What about the problem of other minds? It too would not really exist, except as a speculative hypothesis. For the fetus encounters no being for whom the question could arise; it is the only mind so far as it is concerned. It has no problem of other-fetus minds. We could consider the question of inter-fetus contact, but assuming this not to exist in our thought experiment, we can take it that the question does not cross the solitary fetus’s mind. It is doubtful that the fetus is aware that it has a mother in whose womb it passes its days (the question of its origin is a mystery to it). It might just think this is the whole of reality—a womb universe. The fetus is a natural solipsist.

What is its philosophy of action and free will? These too are nugatory or negligible: action is very limited and freedom just a word. Does the fetus ever feel imprisoned? Doubtful, because it has no conception of a prison. Does it yearn to run free, climb mountains, ride a horse? Surely not. It isn’t being held against its will; on the contrary. But it does have a philosophy of mental action, as in imagining and thinking; so, the concept of intention enters its thoughts. Its philosophy of action is largely a philosophy of mental not bodily action, though we can suppose it moves its body a bit. It has no inclination to believe in behaviorism. The fetus is more of a mental being than a born creature is. It is disembodied before it is born. What is its philosophy of the afterlife? It finds this mystifying, but I suspect inclines to something like a cosmic mind theory. It has no attraction to materialism. It has no concept of its brain.

Does the fetus have any objective conception of the world? Can it transcend its subjective viewpoint? It will have a view of its immediate environment—warm, moist, and soft—but will this view be detached from its own modes of awareness? It will not: it won’t have a bleached-out abstract physical-biological conception of the enveloping womb. Indeed, it won’t have any objective conception of physical reality at all, given its sensory and intellectual resources. It will be totally immersed in its own subjectivity. It will have nothing like an empirical science. No distinction between primary and secondary qualities, or anything like that. It will be unable to transcend its own subjective viewpoint.

How different is our post-natal situation from the situation of the fetus? Isn’t it really a matter of degree? After all, we were all once fetuses who were removed from the womb. And isn’t planet Earth just another version of the womb, but bigger and less hospitable? The womb was once our environment, and then the Earth took over. There is no sharp line; consider the marsupial pouch. The mother feeds and protects the infant when it is no longer inside her body (we can call this the extended womb). And it isn’t as if the womb is proof against fatal catastrophe.[1]

[1] General lesson: our philosophy is not the only kind that would be produced by any intelligent being (this is not to say that philosophical truth is relative). Just as a caterpillar might have a different philosophy from a butterfly, so a womb creature might have a different philosophy from an ambulatory creature.

Moral Knowledge and Moral Language

Moral knowledge is one thing; moral language is quite another. The two topics need to be treated separately. I am mainly concerned here with the language question, but I will make some prefatory remarks about moral knowledge. Moral knowledge comprises knowledge-that, knowledge-how, and knowledge-what: we know (say) that genocide is wrong, we know how to reason about moral questions, and we know what various moral categories are (the right, the good, the virtuous). This knowledge is a priori, largely innate, and arises spontaneously in the human mind (but not in the animal mind, except rudimentarily, if at all). We have a good grasp of various moral natural kinds—lying, stealing, promise-keeping, beneficence, etc.—as well as very general moral kinds such as good and bad acts. These are not like natural kinds whose real essence may be unknown to us. Importantly, moral knowledge is not subject to traditional skepticism: there are no brain-in-a-vat scenarios to contend with (the inhabitants of the Matrix are not morally deluded). Thus, we are justifiably certain of what we claim to know. Also, we are not tormented by the limits of our moral knowledge—it has comprehensive scope. We are not cognitively closed to certain identifiable moral questions as a matter of principle. All in all, our moral knowledge is in good shape; arguably, better than our knowledge of the external world (let alone the past and future). We get an A for moral knowledge—and we didn’t have to study for the test.[1] We might suppose, given our epistemic credentials, that our moral language would be similarly distinguished—that our linguistic moral competence would reflect our epistemic moral competence. We should be expert moral speakers.

But, alas, it isn’t true; indeed, our moral language has struggled to express our moral knowledge. We have trouble verbally articulating our moral understanding. Not to point too fine a point on it, our moral language is inadequate, dubious, slipshod, and metaphorical; it is easy to poke holes in it and lament its imperfections. Logically perfect it is not. The linguistic moral turn is a turn towards the dark, clumsy, and impoverished. First, the moral word “good” has to share its form with the non-moral “good” (and similarly for “right” and “ought”). Second, it is hard to find true moral generalizations: we can’t say lying is always wrong, or promise-breaking, or stealing, or killing. We can’t even say that maximizing happiness is always right (it can conflict with justice). Thus, we are treated to tortuous formulations like “Lying is prima facie wrong”, which even its author (W.D. Ross) feels the need to apologize for. Or we are urged to adopt the imperative mood to express our moral knowledge: “Do this, don’t do that!” But the imperative mood has nothing essentially to do with morality and is wheeled in in a vain attempt to capture the normative force of moral truth—truth, mark you, not obedience. Imperative sentences have nothing logically to do with moral principles or precepts. Moral truths need no commanding authority to give them force (even God). Moral knowledge is not commandment knowledge—that applies to the military not the moral. To act immorally is not to disobey orders (that is neither necessary not sufficient). Nor will categorical propositions do: “Generosity is good”, “Lying is bad” etc. For these are wide open to counterexample and much too strong; they breed skepticism about the force of morality. We all know that morality is not so simple, that such statements must be taken with a grain of salt; but how should they be amended so as to correspond with our moral thought? Should we insert a ceteris paribus qualifying clause? But then, we have to be able say when the generalization breaks down. We just don’t seem to be able verbally to hit the nail on the moral head, to find the moral mot just. The case is somewhat like aesthetics and laws of nature: here too the facts, and our knowledge of them, seem difficult to fit into linguistic form. Our aesthetic knowledge is extensive and sophisticated, but our aesthetic vocabulary is comparatively limited. The word “beauty” has to do a lot of heavy lifting. No doubt this is partly because aesthetics is an affair of the senses for the most part, and our sense experience is notoriously rich compared to our vocabulary. The beauty of a landscape is hard to put into words, as we all know. Likewise, laws of nature are real and known and yet their linguistic formulation is much disputed—how exactly should we frame them? Are they universal generalizations over particulars, or modalized versions of same, or statements about universals, or not statements at all but truth-less predictive devices, or summaries of observations? We find it difficult to put our knowledge of natural laws into words (some of it is knowledge-how). Morality is like this: our knowledge of morality pre-dates our language for it, and our language lags behind, or is inherently unsuitable for the task assigned to it. Morality verges on the ineffable. We can make individual judgments well enough, but we find it difficult to formulate general principles. We can’t even say what grammatical mood best expresses it. We are a bit like Tarzan in the jungle: “Jane, good, snake bad”.

I don’t see any cure for this linguistic lack, but I think I see an area of moral language that gets neglected, and which has some signal virtues. The approach is to privilege the comparative form, so I call it “comparativism”. Thus, “It is better to work than steal”, “It is better to tell the truth than lie”, “It is better to preserve life than destroy it”, etc. In this approach we mark a contrast; we situate the moral value we wish to praise and promote in the context of its opposite. It is better to do X than Y—that is the basic logical form. This doesn’t logically imply that X is good or the best; more modestly, it says that one thing is better than another. It doesn’t make an outright claim of moral goodness. We could paraphrase these formulas as “On the whole, it is better to do X than Y”, thus allowing for exceptions (stealing food in extremity, lying to save an innocent life). Such statements are calculated to ward off accusations of unreasonable absoluteness; they therefore accommodate the principled objector to more absolute formulations—they are easier to accept as true than their stronger counterparts. Note that our moral knowledge might be less qualified, because it can take in more complexity; the comparative theory applies only to moral language—to what we should say morally. In its most forthright form, the theory contends that the basic laws of morality have this comparative form: this is what we mean by saying something is good or bad; this the correct analysis of our moral talk (our thought might be different). It is a linguistic theory not an epistemological or ontological theory. Intuitively, we are saying that one thing is morally superior to another thing with which it might be in competition. It is better, for example, generally to tell the truth rather than to tell a lie. Why this should be is another question—maybe because it is more likely to generate long-term good consequences. It might also be taken to mean that truth-telling as an act of will is inherently more righteous than lying (Kant), though in certain circumstances this intrinsic superiority might be overridden (not Kant). The important point is that we use the comparative form in our verbal explications of the content of morality, i.e., our moral knowledge. They can, of course, be modified according to need and nuance, as in “It is far better to preserve life than to destroy it”. Instead of just saying, baldly, “It is (categorically) wrong to steal”, we can say “It is better on the whole to work for what you have than to steal it from someone else”. Then we allow ourselves wiggle room to append “though in certain circumstances what counts as theft legally need not be a decisive objection to stealing”. Notice there is nothing relativistic about this approach: in every society it is better to tell the truth than to lie, even if members of the society reject such a principle (say by being out-and-out ethical egoists). It is more the idea that moral concepts naturally come in pairs between which a comparison is being made. Russell once gave as an example of an a priori moral truth “Happiness is better than misery”: that seems both true and certain, and it is a comparative claim—not merely the claim that happiness is good, period. Compared to what, one wants to ask. It also allows us to say that happiness is not better than (warranted) grief on a particular occasion—it is just better on the whole. We know what is meant in the simple formulation, because our moral knowledge exceeds our linguistic resources, but the language is clumsy and potentially misleading. Our moral competence outstrips our linguistic competence, but the comparative speech act does better at conveying what morality is all about. It is better than imperatival prescriptivism or statements of prima facie duty or emotional ejaculation or universal quantification; it is truer to the heart of the matter. We might almost say it is less intellectually offensive than other formulations, especially to critically minded people looking for something they can in good conscience get behind. No one wants to put their life on the line for a false or clumsy verbal formula. Moral comparativism has the right combination of the confident and the qualified, the assertive and the modest. We don’t want to understate the strength and seriousness of morality or to overstate its strictness and universality. The language of morals has to steer a judicious line between these two extremes. Moral knowledge meanwhile can capably go its own way, resorting to verbal expression only when necessary.[2]

[1] I am quickly summarizing here, omitting many a caveat; I don’t attempt to defend these views, merely to set the stage for my discussion of moral language.

[2] Have you ever noticed how, when searching for words to express extreme moral outrage, the right moral language seems out of reach—nothing quite measures up? One resorts to animal metaphors or excremental ones. The language seems puny and inept. Our moral language is cognitively and emotionally under-powered. Attempts at general principles often fall flat. The language faculty is not properly hooked up to the moral faculty. Morality is not inherently linguistic (like laws of nature).