On Knowledge, Consciousness, and Philosophy

On Knowledge, Consciousness, and Philosophy

Some philosophers have maintained that the proper subject of philosophy is thought. The idea is not wide of the mark (better than the thesis that philosophy is about language), but it is surely a mischaracterization. For it can hardly be true that philosophy is concerned with false thought, or incoherent thought, or unjustified thought. Putting it in terms of belief, we don’t want to say that philosophy is concerned with false unjustified incoherent beliefs as well as true justified coherent beliefs. It is much better to say it is concerned with knowledge—thoughts or beliefs that are true and justified (and anything else knowledge requires). Philosophy seeks knowledge of knowledge: it investigates human knowledge (it can’t very well investigate Martian knowledge). Humans have knowledge, or so we think, and philosophy wants to know about this knowledge. What does it want to know? It wants to know the correct analysis of knowledge, the varieties of knowledge, the scope and limits of knowledge, the possibility of knowledge. Thus, we have traditional enquiries into the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge, a priori and a posteriori knowledge, knowing-that and knowing-how, what we can know and can’t know, whether anything can really be known, etc. According to this conception, philosophy is primarily epistemology—that is its starting-point, its methodology, its sine qua non. If philosophy is the love of knowledge (“philo-sophia”), it is primarily occupied with knowledge. Not solely occupied, to be sure, since it is also interested in right and wrong, the nature of beauty, the physical world, the mind, and other matters; but knowledge is its original concern, where it begins. Even in those other areas, it may be said, we still have to do with knowledge—knowledge of right and wrong, knowledge of beauty, etc. We must look to our knowledge of reality first in order to discern whereof we know—we can’t study what we don’t know! We must examine our epistemic scheme, the components of that scheme (“concepts”), its expression in language, its macro and micro architecture, its basis in the brain, its place in human life. Even if we were convinced that meaning is the key to philosophical truth, we must concede that it is our knowledge of meaning that really concerns us—how we understand language. Historically, this has always been so: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, etc. One way or another they were all concerned with human knowledge: its basis, structure, analysis, possibility. Thus, there is a good deal of truth in the epistemological conception of the nature of philosophy. It was never really a “turn” because it was always the heart of the subject; what varied were opinions on the best way to study human knowledge—by formal logic, conceptual analysis, psychological science, phenomenology, linguistic behavior, or the brain. Epistemology is foundational, according to this view.

You might wonder how consciousness fits into this picture. Philosophy is interested in consciousness, but we don’t normally think of consciousness studies as a branch of epistemology. Consciousness is about subjectivity not objectivity, about subjective “feel”; it is something inner not externally directed. What has pain got to do with knowledge, or seeing red, or the smell of a rose? Experiencing qualia is not the same as knowing that the earth moves or that water is H2O. But this betrays an unduly narrow conception of the nature of knowledge. For we have not only propositional knowledge but acquaintance-based knowledge—the kind that comes from direct conscious experience.[1] When you consciously see red you know what red is; similarly for pain and the smell of rose. Consciousness and knowing go inextricably together. You can’t be conscious of X without knowing X. You have knowledge by conscious acquaintance. Indeed, this kind of knowledge is arguably the kind of knowledge on which all (or most) other knowledge depends: it all traces back to episodes of knowing consciousness. In fact, this feature of consciousness is recorded in dictionary definitions of the term “conscious”, as in “aware of and responding to one’s surroundings” and “having knowledge of something” (OED). The word derives from the Latin “conscius” meaning “knowing with others or in oneself”. Consciousness has information built into it; it isn’t epistemically neutral or empty. You learn something by being conscious—you become epistemically enriched. Even in the case of pain, you learn what it is like to feel pain—you come to know what pain is. This is a substantial piece of knowledge (valuable information) not available to those who feel no pain. There is a lot a zombie doesn’t know; indeed, it is not clear that a zombie knowsanything (it may behave as if it knows). A conscious state is both subjective and informationally rich, a source of knowledge. In consciousness we know ourselves qua conscious subjects. Consciousness is a way of knowing (there are other ways, unconsciously). To feel pain is to know pain. It is not an accident that philosophers have spoken of ‘sense data”: the noun indicates a type of information, a thing known. The subjective is also epistemic.

This conception of consciousness puts a new twist on old problems. Is consciousness epiphenomenal? Well, it is a vehicle of knowledge, and knowledge is not in general epiphenomenal. The conscious being knows things the unconscious being doesn’t know, and he can act on this knowledge. He doesn’t just have a mysterious glow that leads to nothing. If you know what pain is, you know to avoid it. The knowledge in question presumably has a neural correlate that affects how the brain behaves, as any type of knowledge does. Second, we can now re-frame the mind-body problem as it concerns consciousness: how does the brain contrive to generate knowledge-by-acquaintance? It doesn’t just generate what-it’s-likeness; it generates a cognitive state, viz. knowing what it’s like—something true and justified. How can brains (neurons) know such things? Can there be an identity theory of consciousness-knowledge? When I know what red is by experiencing it, what in my brain can form the intelligible basis of this knowledge? How can neural impulses add up to knowledge by acquaintance? The mind-body problem is thus partly a problem about knowledge—about how knowledge is possible in a physical organism. It isn’t just about “feelings” untethered from anything else—phenomenological danglers, as it were. It is about knowledge in a full-blooded sense. Third, there is the problem of other minds: how do I know what knowledge other people have? If I don’t know whether they feel pain, I don’t know whether they know what pain is. This doesn’t make the problem any easier (or harder), but it does indicate that it has an extra dimension—I can’t know another person’s state of knowledge. I don’t know what you know, as well as what you feel. Fourth, the question of the biological function of consciousness acquires a new wrinkle: what is the biological function of knowledge by acquaintance? Why is it in the genes’ interest to endow us with knowledge by acquaintance? It must have some purpose or else it wouldn’t be there, but its purpose is something of a mystery. Why is it biologically advantageous to know what pain is (we already know the biological value of pain itself)? Do all animals that feel pain know what it is? Is knowledge of what pain is adaptive or could animals do just as well without it?[2]

[1] The locus classicus here is Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy (1912). He doesn’t, however, make a fuss of the fact that consciousness is essential to knowledge by acquaintance: we can’t have the latter without the former. Thus, acquaintance knowledge inherits the puzzles and peculiarities of consciousness. It is one of the powers of consciousness. Here philosophy of mind and epistemology join up.

[2] It is an interesting fact that our philosophical talk of consciousness leans on emotional talk more than cognitive talk: we say that consciousness is what feels a certain way (what it’s like is what it feels like). We haven’t taken to describing it in epistemic terms—as what carries information, data, insight. To be in a particular conscious state is to have a certain kind of insight: bats have insights we don’t have; they know things we don’t know. I am morally certain this is useful information to have, but it isn’t easy to say that this usefulness consists in.