Category: Consciousness and Qualia

Mind without Consciousness?

David Brightly in a recent comment writes,

[Laird] Addis says,

The very notion of language as a representational system presupposes the notion of mind, but not vice versa.

I can agree with that, but why should it presuppose consciousness too?

In a comment under this piece you write,

Examples like this cause trouble for those divide-and-conquerers who want to prise  intentionality apart from consciousness with its qualia, subjectivity, and what-it-is-like-ness,  and work on the problems separately, the first problem being supposedly tractable while the second is called the (intractable) Hard Problem (David Chalmers). Both are hard as hell and they cannot be separated. See Colin McGinn, Galen Strawson, et al.

Could you say a bit more on this?

I’ll try.  You grant that representation presupposes mind, but wonder why it should also presuppose consciousness.  Why can’t there be a representational system that lacks consciousness?  Why can’t there be an insentient, and thus unconscious, machine that represents objects and states of affairs external to itself? Fair question! 

Here is an example to make the problem jump out at you. Suppose you have an advanced AI-driven robot, an artificial French maid, let us assume, which is never in any sentient state, that is, it never feels anything.  You could say, but only analogically, that the robot is in various ‘sensory’ states, states  caused by the causal impacts of physical objects against its ‘sensory’ transducers whether optical, auditory, tactile, kinaesthetic . . . but these ‘sensory’ states  would have no associated qualitative or phenomenological features.  Remember Herbert Feigl? In Feiglian terms, there would be no ‘raw feels’ in the bot should her owner ‘feel her up.’  Surely you have heard of Thomas Nagel. In Nagelian terms, there would be nothing it is like for the bot to have her breasts fondled.  If her owner fondles the breasts of his robotic French maid, she feels nothing even though she is programmed to respond appropriately to the causal impacts via her linguistic and other behavior.   “What are you doing, sir? I may be a bot but I am not a sex bot! Hands off!” If the owner had to operate upon her, he would not need to put her under an anaesthetic. And this for the simple reason that she is nothing but an insensate machine.

I hope Brightly agrees with me that verbal and nonverbal behavior, whether by robots or by us, are not constitutive of  genuine sentient states. I hope he rejects analytical (as opposed to methodological) behaviorism, according to which feeling pain, for example,  is nothing more than exhibiting verbal or nonverbal pain-behavior.  I hope he agrees with me that the bot I described is a zombie (as philosophers use this term) and that we are not zombies.  

But even if he agrees with all that, there remains the question: Is the robot, although wholly insentient, the subject of mental states, where mental states are intentional (object-directed) states?  If yes, then we can have mind without consciousness, intrinsic intentionality without subjectivity, content without consciousness.

Here are some materials for an argument contra.

P1 Representation is a species of intentionality. Representational states of a system (whether an organism, a machine, a spiritual substance, whatever) are intentional or object-directed states.

P2 Such states involve contents that mediate between the subject of the state and the thing toward which the state is directed.  Contents are the cogitata in the following schema: Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum-res. Note that ‘directed toward’ and ‘object-directed’ are being used here in such a way as to allow the possibility that there is nothing in reality, no res, to which these states are directed.  Directedness is an intrinsic feature of intentional states, not a relational one.  This means that the directedness of an object-directed state is what it is whether or not there is anything in the external world to which the state is directed. See Object-Directedness and Object-Dependence for more on this.

As for the contents, they present the thing to the subject of the state. We can think of contents as modes of presentation, as Darstellungsweisen in something close to Frege’s sense.     Necessarily, no state without a content, and no content without a state.  (Compare the strict correlation of noesis and noema in Husserl.) Suppose I undergo an experience which is the seeing as of  a tree.  I am the subject of the representational state of seeing and the thing to which the state is directed, if it exists, is a tree in nature.  The ‘as of‘ locution signals that the thing intended in the state may or may not exist in reality.

P3 But the tree, even if it exists in the external world, is not given, i.e., does not appear to the subject, with all its aspects, properties, and relations, but only with some of them. John Searle speaks of the “aspectual shape” of intentional states. Whenever we perceive anything or think about anything, we always do so under some aspects and not others.  These aspectual features are essential to the intentional state; they are part of what make intentional  states the states that they are. (The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press, 1992, pp. 156-157) The phrase I bolded implies that no intentional state that succeeds in targeting a thing (res) in external world is such that every aspect of  the thing is before the mind of the person in the state.

P4 Intentional states are therefore not only necessarily of something; they are necessarily of something as something.  And given the finitude of the human mind, I want to underscore the fact that  even if every F is a G, one  can be aware of x as F without being aware of  x as G.   Indeed, this is so even if necessarily (whether metaphysically or nomologically) every F is a G. Thus I can be aware of a moving object as a cat, without being aware of it as spatially extended, as an animal, as a mammal, as an animal that cools itself by panting as opposed to sweating, as my cat, as the same cat I saw an hour ago, etc.  

BRIGHTLY’S THEORY (as I understand it, in my own words.)

B1. There is a distinction between subpersonal and personal contents. Subpersonal contents exist without the benefit of consciousness and play their mediating role in representational states in wholly insentient machines such as the AI-driven robotic maid.  

B2. We attribute subpersonal contents to machines of sufficient complexity and these attributions are correct in that these machines really are intentional/representational systems.

B3. While it is true that the only intentional (object-directed) states of which we humans are aware are conscious intentional states, that they are  conscious is a merely contingent fact about them. Thus, “the conditions necessary and sufficient for content are neutral on the question whether the bearer of the content happens to be a conscious state. Indeed the very same range of contents that are possessed by conscious creatures could be possessed by creatures without a trace of consciousness.” (Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness, Blackwell 1991, p. 32.

MY THEORY

V1. There is no distinction between subpersonal and personal contents. All contents are contents of (belonging to) conscious states. Brentano taught that all consciousness is intentional, that every consciousness is a consciousness of something.  I deny that, holding as I do that some conscious states are non-intentional. But I do subscribe to the Converse Brentano Thesis, namely, that all intentionality is conscious. In a slogan adapted from McGinn though not quite endorsed by him, There is no of-ness without what-it-is-like-ness. This implies that only conscious beings can be the subjects of original or intrinsic intentionality.  And so the  robotic maid is not the subject of intentional/representational states. The same goes for the cerebral processes transpiring  in us humans when said processes are viewed as purely material: they are not about anything because there is nothing it is like to be them.  Whether one is a meat head or a silicon head, no content without consciousness! Let that be our battle cry.

And so, when the robotic maid’s voice synthesizer ‘says’ ‘This shelf is so dusty!’ it is only AS IF ‘she’ is thereby referring to a state of affairs and its constituents, the shelf and the dust.  ‘She’ is not saying anything, sensu stricto, but merely making sounds to which we original-Sinn-ers, attribute meaning and reference. Thinking reference (intentionality) enjoys primacy over linguistic reference. Cogitation trumps word-slinging. The latter is parasitic upon the former.  Language without mind is just scribbles, pixels, chalk marks, indentations in stone, ones and zeros. As Mr. Natural might have said, “It don’t mean shit.” An sich, und sensu stricto.

V2. Our attribution of intentionality to insentient systems is merely AS IF.  The robot in my example behaves as if it is really cognizant of states of affairs such as the dustiness of the book shelves and as if it really wants to please its boss while really fearing his sexual advances.  But all the real intentionality is in us who makes the attributions.  And please note that our attributing of intentionality to systems whether silicon-based or meat-based that cannot host it is itself real intentionality. It follows, pace Daniel Dennett, that intentionality cannot be ascriptive all the way down (or up). But Dennett’s ascriptivist theory of intentionality calls for a separate post.

V3. It is not merely a contingent fact about the intentional state that we our introspectively aware of that they are conscious states; it is essential to them.

NOW, have I refuted Brightly ? No! I have arranged a standoff.  I have not refuted but merely neutralized his position by showing that it is not rationally coercive.  I have done this by sketching a rationally acceptable alternative. We have made progress in that we now both better understand the problems we are discussing and our different approaches to them.

Can we break standoff? I doubt it, but we shall see.

More on the Unity of Consciousness: From Self to Immortal Soul?

Suppose I see a black cat. The act of visual awareness in a case like this is typically, even if not always, accompanied by a simultaneous secondary awareness of the primary awareness.  I am aware of the cat, but I am also aware of being aware of the cat.  How does the Humean* account for one's awareness of being aware? He could say, plausibly, that the primary  object-directed awareness is a subject-less awareness. But he can't plausibly say that the secondary awareness is subject-less.   For if both the primary awareness (the awareness of the cat) and the secondary awareness (the awareness of the primary awareness) are subject-less, then what makes the secondary awareness an awareness of the primary awareness? What connects them? The two awarenesses cannot just occur; they must occur in the same subject, in the same unity of consciousness.

Suppose that in Socrates there is an awareness of a cat, and in God there is an awareness of Socrates' awareness of a cat.  Those two awarenesses would not amount to there being in Socrates an awareness of a cat together with a simultaneous secondary awareness of being aware of a cat.  But it is phenomenologically evident that the two awarenesses do co-occur. We ought to conclude that the two awarenesses must be together in one subject, where the subject is not the physical thing in the external world (the animal that wears Socrates' toga, for example), but the I, the self, the subject.

What I have just done is provide phenomenological evidence of the existence of the self that Hume claimed he could not find. Does it follow that this (transcendental) self is a simple substance that can exist on its own without a material body? That's a further question.  To put it another way: do considerations anent the unity of consciousness furnish materials for a proof of the simplicity, and thus the immortality, of a substantial soul?  Proof or paralogism? 

__________

*A Humean for present purposes  is one who denies that there is a self or subject that is aware; there is just awareness of this or that. Hume, Sartre, and Butchvarov are Humeans in this sense.

AI and the Unity of Consciousness

Top AI researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton, the "Godfather of AI,"  hold that advanced AI systems are conscious.  That is far from obvious, and may even be demonstrably false if we consider the phenomenon of the unity of consciousness.  I will first explain the phenomenon in question, and then conclude that AI systems cannot accommodate it.

Diachronic Unity of Consciousness, Example One

Suppose my mental state passes from one that is pleasurable to one that is painful.  Observing a beautiful Arizona sunset, my reverie is suddenly broken by the piercing noise of a smoke detector.  Not only is the painful state painful, the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one is itself painful.  The fact that the transition is painful shows that it is directly perceived. It is not as if there is merely a succession of consciousnesses (conscious states), one pleasurable the other painful; there is in addition a consciousness of their succession.  For there is a consciousness of the transition from the pleasant state to the painful state, a consciousness that embraces both of the states, and so cannot be reductively analyzed into them.  But a consciousness of their succession is a consciousness of their succession in one subject, in one unity of consciousness.  It is a consciousness of the numerical identity of the self through the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one.  Passing from a pleasurable state to a painful one, there is not only an awareness of a pleasant state followed by an awareness of a painful one, but also an awareness that the one who was in a pleasurable state is strictly and numerically the same as the one who is now in a painful state.  This sameness is phenomenologically given, although our access to this phenomenon is easily blocked by inappropriate models taken from the physical world.  Without the consciousness of sameness, there would be no consciousness of transition.

What this phenomenological argument shows is that the self cannot be a mere diachronic bundle or collection of states.  The self is a transtemporal unity distinct from its states whether these states are taken distributively (one by one) or collectively (all together).

May we conclude from the phenomenology of the situation that there is a simple, immaterial, meta-physical substance that each one of us is and that is the ontological support of the phenomenologically given unity of consciousness?  May we make the old-time school-metaphysical moves from the simplicity of this soul substance to it immortality? Maybe not! This is a further step that needs to be carefully considered. I don't rule it out, but I also don't rule it in. I don't need to take the further step for my present purpose, which is merely to show that a computing machine, no matter how complex or how fast its processing, cannot be conscious.  No material system can be conscious.  For the moment I content myself with the negative claim: no material system can be conscious. It follows straightaway that no AI system can be conscious.

Diachronic Unity of Consciousness, Example Two

Another example is provided by the hearing of a melody.  To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of Mi.  For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody.  (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence.)  But now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3.  When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap.  In which act is the hearing of the melody?  A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody.

This is because the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal)  intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1.  Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody.  This implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention.  The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion.  This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them.  Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of them.  This unitary self is co-given whenever one hears a melody.  (This seems to imply that all consciousness is at least implicitly self-consciousness. This is a topic for a later post.)

Diachronic -Synchronic Unity of Consciousness

Now consider a more complicated example in which I hear two chords, one after the other, the first major, the second minor.   I hear the major chord C-E-G, and then I hear the minor chord C-E flat-G.  But I also hear the difference between them.   How is the awareness of the major-minor difference possible? One condition of this possibility is the diachronic unity of consciousness. But there is also a second condition. The hearing of the major chord as major cannot be analyzed without remainder into an act of hearing C, an act of hearing E, and an act of hearing G, even when all occur simultaneously.  For to hear the three notes as a major chord, I must apprehend the 1-3-5 musical interval that they instantiate.  But this is possible only because the whole of my present consciousness is more than the sum of its parts.  This whole is no doubt made up of the part-consciousnesses, but it is not exhausted by them.  For it is also a consciousness of the relatedness of the notes.  But this consciousness of relatedness is not something in addition to the other acts of consciousness: it includes them and embraces them without being reducible to them.  So here we have an example of the diachronic-synchronic unity of consciousness.

These considerations appear to put paid to the conceit that AI systems can be conscious.

Or have I gone too far? You've heard me say that in philosophy there are few if any rationally compelling,  ineluctably decisive, arguments for substantive theses.  Are the above arguments among the few? Further questions obtrude themselves, for example, "What do you mean by 'material system'?"  "Could a panpsychist uphold the consciousness of advanced AI systems?"

Vita brevis, philosophia longa.

Searle, Dennett and Zombies

Another in a series of Substack uploads debunking the brilliant scientistic sophistry of the late Daniel Dennett. 

I have over a thousand dollars in pledges. Should I monetize or not? It seems rude and arrogant not to graciously accept gifts. On the other hand, philosophy for me is a labor of love, a vocation, a high calling . . . . 

Galen Strawson on Nicholas Humphrey on Consciousness

Substack latest.

Strawson is right against Humphrey, but his own theory is worthless.

See also: The Problem of Consciousness and Galen Strawson's Non-Solution

UPDATE (10/3).  A friend referred me to this article which I judge to be very bad indeed. See if you can make out what is wrong with it.

Age Quod Agis: Agent and Awareness

Too much attention is wasted on what we did do and what we will do, and not enough on what we are doing. Age quod agis. "Do what you are doing."  A excellent maxim. A non-philosopher will take it as such and then move on. The philosopher lingers and goes deeper.

Verbally a tautology, the admonition expresses a non-tautological truth: attend to what you are doing.  I cannot fail to do what I am doing, but I can fail to attend to what I am doing. The admonition is in the same logical boat with "Be here now!" and "Live in the present!"

How could I fail to be here now? Where else would I be? And when else would I be? But that would be to miss the point. The tautological form of words expresses a non-tautological thought: Attend to the moment and be aware of your situation.

For a human being, to be is not merely to exist as a thing among things, but to be aware. The Being of a human being involves an element of material facticity — you are this indigent material thing right here — but also an element of transcendence in that, as aware, you are way beyond the miserable chunk of matter your awareness inhabits. You are way beyond it by being aware of the not-self. The not-self includes not only everything other than your body, but also your body inasmuch as your body and its parts are objects of awareness and thus not identical to you as subject of awareness. You are not merely a thing in the world, but also, as the subject of awareness,  a being  for whom there is a world.

As for living in the present, this is not a mere biological living. As a bit of nature's fauna, how could you biologically live other in the temporal present? To live in the present, as per the admonition, is to attend to the present, to impede the outward scatter of your thoughts, to bend back the outward intentionality (object-directedness) of mind to the present moment and its contents. You draw in your thoughts from the diaspora of the past and the future and the elsewhere in space and the elsewhere in general and bring them home. You could call it 'bringing it all back home.'  You could call it spiritual intro-version, or swimming upstream to the Source of thought's river. ("Man is a stream whose source is hidden" (Ralph Waldo Emerson).

The Being of the human being is a living, but not a merely biological living, not a mere living as understood by the objectifying natural science of biology. The ineluctable subjectivity ingredient in the Being of human beings cannot be understood from the point of view of biology.

Consider now the sentence 'I am hungry' asserted by BV.  It is true now at 12:45 PM.  What is it about? It is about BV, a publicly identifiable person. What does it predicate of BV? It predicates the property of being hungry. The predicational tie is signified by the copula 'am.' Does this copula express merely the object BV's instantiation of the property? No, it also expresses the speaker's awareness that he himself is hungry. Property-possession in a human being is more than a merely objective relation. This fact complements the earlier one about the ineluctable subjectivity of the Being of human beings. Both the Being and the Being-propertied of human beings is unlike anything else in the world.

The Grain Problem

Ed Buckner writes,

Here is another problem that needs to be carefully phrased.

I want to say that the pitch of a musical note is continuous through time. I mean, at any point in continuous time, i.e. time as specified by the real numbers, the pitch of the note (e.g. middle C) is the same.

However, the “physical” property that grounds the pitch is not continuous, but rather a cycle of different events.

That strikes me as a problem for the kind of physicalism according to which qualities “as we perceive them” are identical with the properties that ground them. For pitch is temporally continuous, the oscillation that grounds it is not temporally continuous, ergo etc.

It is a problem indeed, Ed, although I have questions about your formulation of it.

The problem is known in the trade as the Grain Problem. Whether it surfaces before Sir Arthur Eddington, I don't know, but he raises it, or at least anticipates it with his question about the 'two tables.'  A lot of work was done on the Grain Problem by the great American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, son of the rather less distinguished Roy Wood Sellars, but nonetheless a quantity to be reckoned with in his day.

Sellars Wilfrid IntentionalityHere is Sellars fils  in his seminal essay, "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," reprinted in his Science, Perception, and Reality (Routledge, 1963). The portion I am about to quote is from pp. 35-37. I take the text from Chrucky's online version.

It is worth noting that we have here a recurrence of the essential features of Eddington's 'two tables' problem — the two tables being, in our terminology, the table of the manifest image and the table of the scientific image. There the problem was to 'fit together' the manifest table with the scientific table. Here the problem is to fit together the manifest sensation with its neurophysiological counterpart. And, interestingly enough, the problem in both cases is essentially the same: how to reconcile the ultimate homogeneity of the manifest image with the ultimate non-homogeneity of the system of scientific objects.

BV: Whether we are discussing colors with Sellars or sounds with Buckner, it is the same problem, that of reconciling the homogeneity of the manifest or phenomenal sensory quality with the non-homogeneity of the underlying  scientific explanatory posits. For Sellars, of course, these posits are not mere posits but ultimately real, as you will see if you read below the fold.

Buckner's formulation above leaves something to be desired, however. He cites the continuous perception over time of the same note, middle C, let us say. But then in the very next sentence he reverts to a rarefied mathematical concept of continuity, thereby mixing phenomenological description with a mathematico-scientific construct.   He thereby conflates phenomenal continuity with mathematical continuity.  When I hear middle C sounding from an organ, say, over a non-zero interval of time, five seconds say, do I hear a series of points of time — a series of temporally extension-less moments — the cardinality of which is 2-to-the-aleph-nought? No. (The cardinality of the set of real numbers (cardinality of the continuum) is) 

And then Ed goes on to say that "the 'physical' property that grounds the pitch is not continuous, but rather a cycle of different events." But that is not right either. Middle C depicted on an oscilloscope shows up as a sine wave:

Middle_C _or_262_hertz _on_a_virtual_oscilloscope

Obviously the sine wave is continuous. What Ed wants to say, of course, is that the heard sound, the phenomenal sound, does not fluctuate as does the physical reality does, the physical reality that "grounds the pitch." Ed is equivocating on 'continuous.'

But I know what he is getting at, and it is a genuine problem. I am merely complaining about his  formulation of it. Now back to Sellars, whose solution to the problem is not clear to me.

 

Continue reading “The Grain Problem”

The Phenomenal Principle

Ed Buckner sends this:

“If there sensibly appears to a subject to be something which possesses a particular sensible quality then there is something of which the subject is aware which does possess that sensible quality”. (Howard Robinson, Perception, 1994, London: Routledge, p. 32)

That is the question. If it sensibly appears to Jake that there is a green after-image, does it follow that there is something green of which Jake is aware?

I’m inclined to answer yes. But then we have the problem that there is nothing green and physical outside Jake’s brain, nor inside Jake’s brain. So what is it that is green? We agree that it can’t be a physical item, if Robinson’s Principle is true.

I recommend Robinson’s 1994 book, and also his November 2022 book Perception and Idealism.

Ed seems to be coming around. Robinson is asking the right question, and Ed answers in the affirmative or at least is so inclined. (By the way, I read Robinson's excellent Matter and Sense: A Critique of Contemporary Materialism, Cambridge UP, 1982, when it first came out. I expect his later work, which I haven't read, is equally good.)

It is best to approach the question from the first-person point of view. A green after-image sensibly appears to me. (It appears visually and so sensibly.) Does something appear or does nothing appear? The datum is not nothing, so it is something.  It is indubitably something. And it is a describable, definite something: green, pulsating, etc. The green item is not outside my head. But it is not inside my head either. (As Bill Lycan says, if I have something green inside my head, then I am in big trouble.)

It follows that the indubitable phenomenal datum cannot be a physical item that is green, pulsating, etc. The inference is correct and the conclusion is true.  What Ed should do is simply admit that there are sensory qualia.  But he appears loathe to do so. He needs to explain why. Is he ideologically committed to materialism? I don't think that's it. 

We know that Ed reasonably rejects the characteristic Meinongian thesis that (i) some of the items to which we refer both in thought and in language have no being (Sein) whatsoever (not Dasein, not Bestehen, not intentionales QuasiSein, not any Seinsmodus) but nevertheless (ii) are mind-independent Soseine that actually (not merely possibly) instantiate properties. But this rejection of Meinong cannot be a good reason for Ed to refuse to countenance the green after-image, and this for two  reasons. First, the sensory quale in question is not mind-independent. Second, it exists. In its case, esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. The green after-image is perceived, and by the same stroke, it is/exists.

But it may be that Ed is confusing the green after-image with the green unicorn. And we did catch him in that confusion in an earlier thread. Suppose I am thinking about a green unicorn. Let's use 'thinking' in the broad Cartesian way to refer to any object-directed act of awareness, including imagining. Imagining a green unicorn, I am not imagining an image since a unicorn is an animal, not an image; I am imagining a unicorn. The object-directed act of mind purports to display a mind-independent animal,  not a mind-dependent image. 

But of course there are/exist no unicorns!  For that very reason, a sensory quale such as a green after-image cannot be assimilated to a green unicorn. What's more, unicorns are not mind-dependent. Qualia are; ergo, etc. 

Your move, Ed. Give us some good reasons why you will not admit qualia. If your reasons are neither pro-materialist not anti-Meinongian, what are they?

The Problem of Consciousness and Galen Strawson’s Non-Solution

Hi Dr. Vallicella,

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, if it interests you to write about it on your blog, on Strawson's intriguing 2021 paper "Oh you materialist!", in which he argues for a materialistic monism and a deflation of the hard problem. 
 
Here is a link to the paper: https://philarchive.org/archive/STROYM
 
Best,
Chandler
 
What follows is a warm-up for a discussion of the paper to which Chandler directs us. Galen Strawson is a brilliant philosopher with very interesting ideas.   I am not sure I quite understand him. The entry below is a slightly emended version of a post from 2018. It is based on a much earlier paper by Strawson.
 
………………………

The problem can be set forth in a nice neat way as an aporetic triad:

1) Consciousness is real; it is not an illusion.

2) Consciousness is wholly natural, a material process in the brain.

3) It is impossible that conscious states, whether object-directed or merely qualitative, be material in nature.

It is easy to see that the members of this triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  Any two of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining proposition.  

And yet each limb of the triad has brilliant defenders and brilliant opponents. So not only is consciousness itself a mighty goad to inquiry; the wild diversity of opinions about it is as well.  (The second goad is an instance of what I call the Moorean motive for doing philosophy: G. E. Moore did not get his problems from the world, but from the strange and mutually contradictory things philosophers said about the world, e.g., that time is unreal (McTaggart) or that nothing is really related (Bradley).)

The above problem is soluble if a compelling case can be made for the rejection of one of the limbs.  But which one? Eliminativists and illusionists reject (1); dualists of all types, and not just substance dualists, reject (2); materialists reject (3).  Three prominent rejectors, respectively: Dennett, Swinburne. Strawson.

I agree with Strawson that eliminativism has zero credibility.  (1) is self-evident and the attempts to deny it are easily convicted of incoherence.  So no solution is to be had by rejecting (1).

As for (2), it is overwhelmingly credible to most at the present time.  We live in a secular age.  'Surely' — the secularist will assure us — there is nothing concrete that is supernatural.  God and the soul are just comforting fictions from a bygone era. The natural exhausts the real.  Materialism about the mind is just logical fallout from naturalism.  If all that (concretely) exists is space-time and its contents, then the same goes for minds and their states.

Strawson, accepting both (1) and (2) must reject (3).  But the arguments against (3), one of which I will sketch below, are formidable. The upshot of these arguments is that it is unintelligible how either qualia or intentional states of consciousness could be wholly material in nature.  Suppose I told you that there is a man who is both fully human and fully divine. You would say that that makes no sense, is unintelligible, and is impossible for that very reason. Well, it is no less unintelligible that a felt sensation such as my present blogger's euphoria be identical to a state of my brain.  

What could a materialist such as Strawson say in response? He has to make a mysterian move. 

He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, but that it is nevertheless wholly material in nature! Some matter is sentient and some matter thinks. My euphoria is literally inside my skull and so are my thoughts about Boston. These 'mental' items are made of the same stuff as what we are wont to call 'material' items. 

(Compare the orthodox Chalcedonian Incarnationalist who says that the man Jesus of Nazareth is identical to the Second Person of the Trinity despite the violation of the Indiscernibility of Identicals. Put the Incarnationalist under dialectical pressure and he might say, "Look it is true! We know it by divine revelation. And what is true is true whether or not we can understand how it is possible that it be true. It must remain a mystery to us here below.)

Or a materialist mysterian  can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature.  Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.

If I understand Galen Strawson's mysterianism, it is of the first type.  Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible for qualia and thoughts to be wholly material.   Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson: 

Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them.  As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case).  But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists.  Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is.  ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, eds. The Mind-Body Problem, Blackwell, 1994, p. 77)

Strawson and I agree on two important points.  One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential. Dennett denied! The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.

I disagree on whether his mysterian solution is a genuine solution to the problem. What he is saying is that, given the obvious reality of conscious states, and given the truth of naturalism, experiential phenomena must be material in nature, and that this is so whether or not we are able to understand how it could be so.  At present we cannot understand how it could be so. It is at present a mystery. But the mystery will dissipate when we have a better understanding of matter.

This strikes me as (metaphysical) bluster.

An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality.  For qualia, esse = percipi.  If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means.  The very notion strikes me as absurd.  We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective.  And that makes no sense. If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.

As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness  of the experience.  And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the mental.  But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning.  His materialism is a vacuous materialism. We no longer have any idea of what 'physical' means if it no longer contrasts with 'mental.'

If we are told that sensations and thoughts are wholly material, we have a definite proposition only if 'material' contrasts with 'mental.' But if we are told that sensations and thoughts are material, but that matter in reality has mental properties and powers, then I say we are being fed  nonsense.  We are being served grammatically correct sentences that do not express a coherent thought.

Besides, if some matter in reality senses and thinks, surely some matter doesn't; hence we are back to dualism.

Why is Strawson's  mysterianism any better than Dennett's eliminativism?  Both are materialists. And both are keenly aware of the problem that qualia pose.  This is known in the trade as the 'hard problem.' (What? The other problems in the vicinity are easy?) The eliminativist simply denies the troublesome data. Qualia don't exist! They are illusory!  The mysterian materialist cannot bring himself to say something so manifestly silly. But, unwilling to question his materialism, he says something that is not much better. He tells us that qualia are real, and wholly material, but we don't understand how because we don't know enough about matter.  But this 'theological' solution is also worthless because no definite proposition is being advanced.

Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69)  Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature.  This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret.  Strawson must pin his hopes on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.

But what do the theological virtues of faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry?  It doesn't strike me as particularly  intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is mental.  It would be more honest just to admit that the problem of consciousness is insoluble.

And that is my 'solution.' The problem is real, but insoluble.  

Strawson's latest banging on his mysterian materialist drum is to be found in The Consciousness Deniers in The New York Review of Books.