Consciousness and Logical Form

Consciousness and Logical Form

Consider the sentence “It is a necessary truth that for all conscious beings there is something it is like to be that being”. If we render this in standard logical notation, we have two quantifiers and a modal operator. These generate scope distinctions and hence alternative readings of the sentence—nine in all. I will be concerned mainly with two of these, corresponding to the quantifiers: we can put the universal quantifier before the existential quantifier or vice versa. We thus obtain quantified sentences analogous to “Everyone loves someone” and “Someone is loved by everyone”: the former allows for different people to be loved, while the latter asserts that a single person is uniquely lucky in love. In the case of my sentence of interest, we might be saying either that every conscious being has some type of what-it’s-likeness (not necessarily the same type) or that there is one type of what-it’s-likeness that every conscious being has. Does the “likeness” property vary from case to case or is it constant? As commonly interpreted, the sentence is taken to mean the former thing: bats and humans have different ways that it’s like for them. That’s why we don’t know what it’s like to be a bat—because bats are different from us in this respect. Consciousness varies in its form from case to case, and what is true is that every such form exemplifies a variation in the likeness property. There is nothing in common between all the different forms of consciousness, except that there is something it is like to be conscious—not necessarily the same thing. It might indeed be maintained that there is nothing it is like that is shared by all forms of consciousness. In the jargon, there is no universally shared qualia (or quale), though there are many types of qualia. The situation, it may be said, resembles the concept of a game—there is a family resemblance between the two cases of family resemblance. Just as there is no one thing that all games have in common, so there is no one thing that all beings there is something it is like to be have in common—save that they are all games or all cases of what-it’s-likeness (in effect, this makes the concept of consciousness itself a family resemblance concept). There are many ways of being conscious but no single property common to them all—no single property that they all share. That is, there is no single feature of what-it’s-likeness that all conscious beings possess—no single subjective fact, just a motley of different types of subjective fact. There is, for example, no subjective fact in common between bat echolocation experience and human visual experience—compare chess and rugby.  More generally, there is no property of consciousness that applies universally to all cases of consciousness and that constitutes what it is like to have consciousness in all cases. There is just an irreducible plurality of ways of being conscious.

Is this true? I doubt it. Certainly, many philosophers have supposed otherwise: Brentano, Husserl, and Sartre to name three. It has been supposed that intentionality is the common thread, or subject-dependence (all consciousness has a subject of consciousness), or nothingness. These properties are held to be phenomenological properties and they are supposed necessary and sufficient for consciousness. There is something it is like to possess intentionality, or to have a subject, or to be nothingness—something that all conscious beings share. The property is introspectable, evident from inside. So it is thought. I think there is something to each of these views, but I don’t think they capture the full reality. There is a common something that all cases of what-it’s-likeness share—sentience as such—but it is markedly elusive. If we acquired bat experience, we would notice it immediately—we would not hesitate to call the new experience a form of consciousness. We would notice the intentionality, to be sure, and the involvement of the subject (“this is mine”), and maybe the nothingness; but we would also recognize a shared dimension of phenomenological reality that is not quite captured by these descriptions. It wouldn’t be like seeing a game of chess one day while hitherto only seeing rugby and football. It would strike us that this is the same as what we have experienced before (though also different). But what is the name of this common factor? That’s where the question becomes difficult: we just want to blurt out, “But can’t you see, it’s the same!”—not alien, not unrecognizable, not belonging to another family of things altogether. We might want to call it this-ness or feeling-ness or my-ness or in-me-ness—while acknowledging the inadequacy of these terms. There issomething it is like to be any subject of what-it’s-likeness: there is something it’s like for there to be something (or other) it’s like. It’s like…this. It is as if we have only demonstrative knowledge but not descriptive knowledge—acquaintance not description. Feeling pain is like seeing red, smelling vinegar is like hearing a symphony—though the experiences are also extremely different. They are all readily classifiable as falling under the same concept by noticing a shared feature; though that feature is hard to pin down, like a fast-flitting butterfly that refuses to be caught. I know that all of my consciousness belongs together under that concept, despite its enormous variety, and I know it by being aware of a common feature. However, I find it difficult to say what that feature is—though I could show you by letting you into my consciousness. It isn’t cognitively closed to me—far from it—but it does resist descriptive encapsulation. It is obvious but inarticulable. It has no name like “seeing red” or “feeling pain”; it hovers at the edge of consciousness, just out of verbal reach. It can’t even be called “nothingness”.[1]

I think, then, that there are two things it is like to have any particular conscious experience: the specific nature of that experience (e.g., seeing red) and the general property common to all conscious experience (the qualia with no name). So, both orderings of the quantifiers yield a truth—a necessary truth indeed. Every possible experience has a specific what-it’s-likeness and a general what-it’s-likeness. Both problematically relate to the brain. Both are phenomenological. Both are essential properties of any given experience. That is the architecture of consciousness as such—the specific intertwined with the general. We do know what it is like for the bat to have the general property (for we have it too), though we don’t know the specific property. We know the general nature of any form of consciousness, no matter how alien, though not the nature of specific variations on it. We know what it is like to be a bat—it’s like this (pointing to my own consciousness)—but we also don’t know (because we have no specific form of consciousness that resembles the bat’s echolocation experience). What-it’s-likeness is a two-level affair (somewhat like species and genus). The logical form of consciousness is the specific subsumed under the general. Both are given, but one is more cognitively accessible than the other.[2]

[1] An idea it might be worth trying to develop is that consciousness is always attributive. This notion is akin to intentionality but it emphasizes the property of attributing qualities to things; consciousness isn’t just of things but also ascriptive to things. Pain is ascribed to a part of the body; color experience ascribes color qualities to external objects; thought ascribes properties to individuated objects. Consciousness is ceaselessly ascribing things to things. The bat’s echolocation experience attributes spatial properties to identified particulars, as our auditory experience attributes sounds to objects located in the surrounding world. Modes of attribution are the what-it’s-like features of conscious experience. And we are aware that this is what is going on whenever we are conscious—we are consciously attributive beings.

[2] If we assume that cognitive and linguistic capacities exist only when it is useful to them to exist, it becomes intelligible that we have no concept or word for the general property, but an ample supply of concepts and words for the specific properties. For there isn’t much point in a concept or word that represents a feature of consciousness that has no use in communication or thought: how would we set about using a word for the general property in question? It is useful to tell someone you are in pain, but not to express that abstract property instantiated by all conscious states—the higher-order property of what-it’s-likeness. That property exists at a level of generality that transcends our practical purposes, even our scientific purposes. We know it, but it’s not something we are naturally equipped to talk about.