Consciousness and Qualia – Page 3

Consciousness is an Illusion but Truth is Not?

From an interview with Daniel Dennett in the pages of The Guardian (HT: Dave Lull):

I was thinking that perhaps philosophers are exactly what’s needed right now. Some deep thinking about what is happening at this moment?

Yes. From everybody. The real danger that’s facing us is we’ve lost respect for truth and facts. People have discovered that it’s much easier to destroy reputations for credibility than it is to maintain them. It doesn’t matter how good your facts are, somebody else can spread the rumour that you’re fake news. We’re entering a period of epistemological murk and uncertainty that we’ve not experienced since the middle ages.

Dennett is currently much exercised over Donald Trump's alleged lies, exaggerations, unverifiable speculations, and whatnot. But I don't recall Dennett taking umbrage at the unprecedentedly brazen presidential lying of Barack Obama or the seemingly congenital lying of Hillary Clinton. He is a typical uncritical Left-leaning academic. Still, he is right to take aim at postmodernism. Read on:

There’s a perception that philosophy is a dusty discipline that belongs in academe, but actually, questions such as what is a fact and what is the truth are the fundamental questions of today, aren’t they?

Philosophy has not covered itself in glory in the way it has handled this. Maybe people will now begin to realise that philosophers aren’t quite so innocuous after all. Sometimes, views can have terrifying consequences that might actually come true. I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts. You’d have people going around saying: “Well, you’re part of that crowd who still believe in facts.”

So far, so good.

Yes and one’s true and the others are false. One of those narratives is the truth and the others aren’t; it’s as simple as that.

Is it really so simple? Dennett is suggesting that his naturalist narrative is not a mere narrative, but the true narrative. If so, then there is truth; there is a way things are in themselves apart from our stories and beliefs and hopes and desires. I agree that there is truth. But I wonder how consistent it is for Dennett to hold that there is truth given the rest of his views. This is a man who holds that consciousness is an illusion. He explains consciousness by explaining it away. Now I would say that the urge to explain and understand is the central animating nerve of the philosophical project. As Dennett says,

I put comprehension as one of my highest ideals. I want to understand everything. I want people to understand things. I love understanding things. I love explaining things to myself and to others.

My question, however, is how consciousness could be an illusion but not truth. I say neither is an illusion. Consciousness cannot be an illusion for the simple reason that we presuppose it when we distinguish between reality and illusion. An illusion is an illusion to consciousness, so that if there were no consciousness there would be no illusions either.

This is because illusions have a sort of parasitic status. They are ontological parasites, if you will, whose being is fed by a host organism. But let's not push the parasitological comparison too far. The point is that, while there are illusions, they do not exist on their own. The coyote I wrongly take to be a domestic dog exists in reality, but the domestic dog does not. But while the latter does not exist in reality, it is not nothing either. The dog is not something in reality, but it is something for consciousness. If in the twilight I jump back from a twisted root on the trail, mis-taking it for a rattlesnake, the visual datum cannot possibly be regarded as nothing since it is involved in the explanation of why I jumped. I jumped because I saw (in the phenomenological sense of 'see') a rattlesnake. Outright hallucinations such as the proverbial pink rat of the drunkard are even clearer examples. In dreams I see and touch beautiful women. Do old men have nocturnal emissions over nothing?

Not existing in reality, illusions of all sorts, not just perceptual illusions, exist for consciousness. But then consciousness cannot be an illusion. Consciousness is a presupposition of the distinction between reality and illusion. As such, it cannot be an illusion. It must be real.

But here comes Danny the Sophist who asserts that consciousness is an illusion. Well, that is just nonsense sired by his otherwise laudable desire to explain things coupled with an uncritical and not-so-laudable conceit that everything can be explained. If consciousness is an illusion, then it is an illusion for consciousness. But then our sophist has moved in a circle, reinstating the very thing he was trying to get rid of. Or else he is embarked upon a vicious infinite regress.

Calling Dennett a sophist is not very nice, even though I have very good reason to impugn his intellectual integrity, as you will discover if you read my entries in the Dennett category. So let me try to be charitable. Our man is a naturalist and an explanatory rationalist: he is out to explain everything. But not everything can be explained. Consciousness is not only presupposed by the distinction between reality and illusion, it is also presupposed by the quest for explanation. For where would explanations reside if not in the minds of conscious beings?

So I say consciousness cannot be an illusion. One cannot explain it the way Dennett wants to explain it, which involves explaining it away. For details, see Can Consciousness be Explained? Dennett Debunked.

But if consciousness, per impossibile, were an illusion, why wouldn't truth also be an illusion? Consciousness is an illusion because naturalism has no place for it. Whatever is real is reducible to the physical; consciousness is not reducible to the physical; ergo, consciousness does not exist in reality: it is an illusion.

By the same reasoning, truth ought also to be an illusion since there is no place for it in the natural world. Note also that Dennett obviously thinks that truth is objectively valuable and pursuit-worthy. Where locate values in a naturalist scheme?

Wouldn't it be more consistent for Dennett to go whole hog and explain away both consciousness and truth? Perhaps he ought to go POMO. There is no truth; there are only interpretations and perspectives of organisms grubbing for survival. What justifies him in privileging his naturalist narrative? It is one among many.

I say consciousness and truth are on a par: neither can be explained away. Neither is eliminable. Neither is an illusion. Both are part of what we must presuppose to explain anything.

Nietzsche had a great insight: No God, no truth. For the POMOs there is neither. For me there is both. For the inconsistent Dennett there is the second but not the first. Again, there is simply no place for truth in a wholly material world.

For an argument from truth to God, see here.

Continue reading “Consciousness is an Illusion but Truth is Not?”

More Scientistic Bullshit

Yet another exercise in silly scientism. Shut up already with this stuff. I've refuted this genre of crap too many times before. Here is a sample: Bull Meets Shovel: Could Consciousness be a Conjuring Trick?

The Metaphysical Subject :Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.63

I take Wittgenstein to be saying at 5.63 that the seeing eye is not in the visual field. I can of course see my eyes via a mirror. But these are seen eyes, not seeing eyes. The eyes I see in the mirror are objects of visual consciousness; they are not what do the seeing.

That is not to say that the eyes I see in my visual field, whether the eyes of another person or my own eyes seen in a mirror, are dead eyes or non-functioning eyes. They are living eyes functioning as they should, supplied with blood, properly connected via the neural pathways to the visual cortex, etc. The point is that they are not seeing eyes, subjects of visual consciousness.

If you insist that seeing eyes are indeed objects of outer perception and empirical study, then I will challenge you to show me where the seeing occurs in the eye or where in the entire visual apparatus, which includes eyeglasses, contact lenses, the neural pathways leading from the optic nerve to the visual cortex — the whole system which serves as the causal basis of vision. Where is the seeing? In the pupil? In the retina? In the optic nerve? Somewhere between the optic nerve and the brain? In the visual cortex?Where exactly? Will you say that it is in no particular place but in the whole system? But this is a very big system including as it does such instruments of vision as sunglasses and night goggles. And let's not leave out the external physical things that are causing certain wavelengths of light to impinge on the eye. And the light itself, and its source whether natural or artificial. Will you tell me that the SEEING is spread out in space over and through all of these items? But then how do you explain the unity of visual consciousness over time or at a time? And how do you explain the intentionality of visual consciousness? Does it make any sense to say that a state of the eyeball is of or about anything? If you say that the SEEING is in the eye or in the brain, then I will demand to know its electro-chemical properties.

I could go on, but perhaps you get the point: the seeing, the visual consciousness-of, is not itself seen or see-able. It is not an object of actual or possible experience. It is not in the world. It is not a part of the eye, or a state of the eye, or a property of the eye or a relation in which the eye stands or an activity of the eye. The same goes for the whole visual system. And yet there is seeing. There is visual consciousness, consciousness of visual objects.

Who or what does the seeing? What is the subject of visual consciousness? Should we posit a self or I or ego that uses the eye as an instrument of vision, so that it is the I that sees and not the eye? No one will say that his eyeglasses do the seeing when he sees something. No one says, "My eyeglasses saw a beautiful sunset last night." We no more say that than we say, "My optic nerve registered a beautiful sunset last night," or "My visual cortex saw a beautiful sunset last night."* We say, "I saw a beautiful sunset last night."

But then who or what is this I? It is no more in the world than the seeing eye is in the visual field. Wittgenstein's little balloon above depicts the visual field. Imagine a Big Balloon that depicts the 'consciousness field,' the totality of objects of consciousness. It does not matter if we think of it as a totality of facts or a totality of things. The I is not in it any more than the eye qua seeing is in the visual field.

So far I am agreeing with Wittgenstein. There is a subject, but it is not in the world. So it is somewhat appropriate to call it a metaphysical subject, although 'transcendental subject' would be a better choice of terms, especially since Wittgenstein says that it is the limit of the world. 'Transcendental' is here being used in roughly the Kantian way. 'Transcendental' does not mean transcendent in the phenomenological sense deriving from Husserl, nor does it mean transcendent in the absolute sense of classical metaphysics as when we say that God is a transcendent being. (That is why you should never say that God is a transcendental being.)

But Wittgenstein also maintains that the transcendental subject is the limit of the world. This implies, first, that it is not nothing, and second, that it is no thing or fact in the world. "The world is all that is the case." (1) "The world is the totality of facts, not of things." (1.1) It follows that the subject is not a thing or fact outside the world. So all the self can be is the limit of the world.

We have to distinguish the world from worldly things/facts. The world is a totality of things or facts, and a totality is distinct from its members both distributively and collectively. So we shouldn't conflate the world-as-totality with its membership (the world taken in extension). So if the metaphysical or rather transcendental subject is the limit of the world as per 5.632, then what this means is that the subject is the limit of worldly things/facts, and as such is the world-as-totality.

This is why Wittgenstein says "I am my world." (5.63)

I take it that Tractatus 5.63 is the central inspiration behind Butchvarov's solution to the Paradox of Antirealism which, in an earlier entry, I formulated as follows:

PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)

The world cannot depend on me if I am a (proper) part of the world. But if "I am my world," then the problem would seem to dissolve. That, very roughly, is Butchvarov's solution.

The solution implies that the philosophical as opposed to the ordinary indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun, those uses that figure into the Augustinian Si fallor sum, the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum, the Kantian Das 'ich denke' muss alle meine Vortsellungen begleiten koennen, the Cartesian Meditations of Husserl, and the debate about realism and antirealism are really impersonal, despite what Augustine, Descartes, Kant, and Husserl think. For then the philosophical uses of 'I' refer to the world-as-totality and not to a person or to something at the metaphysical core of a person such as a noumenal self.

This notion that the philosophical uses of the personal pronoun 'I' are really impersonal is highly problematic, a point I will come back to.

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*People do say things like: "My brain said, 'Stay away from her,' but my little head said, 'Go for it, man!'" Such talk is of course nonsense if taken literally.

Posits or Inventions? Butchvarov and Geach on Intentionality

One philosopher's explanatory posit is another's mere invention.

In his rich and fascinating article "Direct Realism Without Materialism" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. XIX, 1994, pp. 1-21), Panayot Butchvarov rejects epistemic intermediaries as "philosophical inventions." Thus he rejects sense data, sensations, ways of being appeared to, sense experiences, mental representations, ideas, images, looks, seemings, appearances, and the like. (1) Curiously enough, however, Butchvarov goes on to posit nonexistent or unreal objects very much in the manner of Meinong! Actually, 'posit' is not a word he would use since Butchvarov claims that we are directly acquainted with unreal objects. (13) Either way, unreal objects such as the hallucinated pink rat are not, on Butchvarov's view, philosophical inventions.

But now consider the following passage from Anscombe and Geach's 1961 Three Philosophers, a passage that is as if directed against the Butchvarovian view:

But saying this has obvious difficulties. [Saying that all there is to a sensation or thought of X is its being of X.] It seems to make the whole being of a sensation or thought consist in a relation to something else: it is as if someone said he had a picture of a cat that was not painted on any background or in any medium, there being nothing to it except that it was a picture of a cat. This is hard enough: to make matters worse, the terminus of the supposed relation may not exist — a drunkard's 'seeing' snakes is not related to any real snake, nor my thought of a phoenix to any real phoenix. Philosophers have sought a way out of this difficulty by inventing chimerical entities like 'snakish sense-data' or 'real but nonexistent phoenixes' as termini of the cognitive relation. (95, emphasis added)

Butchvarov would not call a nonexistent phoenix or nonexistent pink rat real, but that it just a matter of terminology. What is striking here is that the items Geach considers chimerical inventions Butchvarov considers not only reasonably posited, but phenomenologically evident!

Ain't philosophy grand? One philosopher's chimerical invention is another's phenomenological given.

What is also striking about the above passage is that the position that Geach rejects via the 'picture of a cat' analogy is almost exactly the position that Butch maintains. Let's think about this a bit.

Surely Anscombe and Geach are right when it comes to pictures and other physical representations. There is a clear sense in which a picture (whether a painting, a photograph, etc.) of a cat is of a cat. The intentionality here cannot however be original; it must be derivative, derivative from the original intentionality of one who takes the picture to be of a cat. Surely no physical representation represents anything on its own, by its own power. And it is also quite clear that a picture of X is not exhausted by its being of X. There is more to a picture than its depicting something; the depicting function needs realization in some medium.

The question, however, is whether original intentionality also needs realization in some medium. It is not obvious that it does need such realization, whether in brain-stuff or in mind-stuff. Why can't consciousness of a cat be nothing more than consciousness of a cat? Why can't consciousness be exhausted by its revelation of objects? This is the Sartrean, radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness that Butchvarov espouses. I don't advocate it myself, but I don't see that Geach has refuted it. That derivative intentionality requires a medium does not show that original intentionality does. No picture of a cat is exhausted by its depicting of a cat; there needs to be a physical thing, the picture itself, and it must have certain properties that found or ground the pictorial relation. But it might be otherwise for original intentionality.

Bewusstsein als bewusst-sein. Consciousness as being-conscioused. Get it? If memory serves, the neo-Kantian Paul Natorp has a theory along these lines, although the word I think he uses is Bewusstheit which, to coin an English expression, is the monadic property of consciousedness. Perhaps there is an anticipation of Sartre/Butchvarov in Natorp.

But this is not the place to examine Butchvarov's direct realist conception of consciousness, a conception he finds in Moore, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Sartre, and contrasts with a mental-contents conception.

Butchvarov’s Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl’s Paradox of Human Subjectivity

From Kant on, transcendental philosophy has been bedeviled by a certain paradox. Here again is the Paradox of Antirealism discussed by Butchvarov, as I construe it, the numbers in parentheses being page references to his 2015 Anthropocentrism in Philosophy:

PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)

As I was mulling this over I was reminded of the Paradox of Human Subjectivity discussed by Edmund Husserl in his last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, in sections 53 and 54, pp. 178-186 of the Carr translation. Here is the paradox in Husserl's words:

PHS: How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?

The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole world and thus itself too. What an absurdity! Or is this a paradox which can be sensibly resolved . . . ? (179-180)

What is common to both of the paradoxical formulations is the idea that we are at once objects in the world and subjects for whom there is a world. This by itself is not paradoxical. For there is nothing paradoxical in the notion that we are physical parts of a physical world that exists and has the nature it has independently of us, and that our knowing ourselves and other things is a physical process. Paradox ensues if (A) the world is a product of our accomplishments (Leistungen) as Husserl would have it, or a product of our formation (via both the categories of the understanding and the a priori forms of sensibility, space and time) of the sensory manifold, as on the Kantian scheme, and (B) we, the subjects for whom there is a world, are parts of the world. For then the entire vast cosmos depends for its existence and/or nature on transient parts thereof. And surely that would be absurd.

Dehumanizing Subjectivity

Interestingly, for both Butchvarov and Husserl, the solution to their respective paradoxes involves a retreat from anthropocentrism and a concomitant 'dehumanization' of subjectivity. For both, there is nothing specifically human about consciousness, although of course in "the natural attitude" (Husserl's natuerliche Einstellung) humans are the prime instances known to us of 'conscious beings.' For present purposes, consciousness is intentionality, consciousness-of, awareness-of, where the 'of' is an objective genitive. For Butchvarov, consciousness-of is not a property of (subjective genitive) human beings or of metaphysical egos somehow associated with human beings. It is not a property of human brains or of human souls or of human soul-body composites. It does not in any way emanate from human subjects. It is not like a ray that shoots forth from a subject toward an object. Consciousness is subject-less. So it is not a relation that connects subjects and objects. It is more like a monadic property of objects, all objects, their apparentness or revealedness.

Husserl and Butchvarov: Brief Contrast and Comparison

Husserl operates in a number of his works (Cartesian Meditations, Paris Lectures, Ideas I) with the following triadic Cartesian shema:

Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum

Subject ——————–> object (where the arrow represents a directed cogitatio, a mental act, an intentional Erlebnis, and where 'object' is in the singular because the noema of a noesis is precisely trhe noema of that very noesis. Got that?)

Butchvarov's schema is not triadic but dyadic along the lines of Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness (where the arrow does not represent a mental act but monadic universal 'of-ness,' Sartre's "wind blowing towards objects" and where 'objects' is in the plural because subject-less consciousness is one to their many):

——————————->objects.

For Butchvarov, following Sartre, consciousness is no-thing, no object, other than every object, not in the world, and thus not restricted to the measly specimens of a zoological species. The relevant text is Sartre's early The Transcendence of the Ego, directed against Husserl, according to which the ego is not an 'inhabitant' of consciousness but a transcendent item, an object alongside other objects. (Personal anecdote: when I first espied this title as a young man I thought to myself: "Great! A book that will teach me how to transcend my ego!")

Bear in mind that the phenomenological notion of transcendence is transcendence-in-immanence, not absolute transcendence.

Of course there is a paradox if not a contradiction lurking within the Sartrean, radically externalist, anti-substantialist conception of consciousness: consciousness is nothing, but not a 'mere nothing,' inasmuch as it is that without which objects would not be revealed or manifested or apparent. It is both something and no-thing. It is something inasmuch as without it nothing would appear when it is a plain fact that objects do appear. That objects appear is self-evident even if it is not self-evident that they appear to someone. It is not clear that there is a 'dative of appearing' though it is clear that there are 'accusatives of appearing.' Consciousness is nothing inasmuch as it is no object and does not appear. This apparent contradiction is to my mind real, to Butchvarov's merely apparent. It is clearly a different paradox than the Paradox of Antirealism. It is a paradox that infects a particular solution to the Paradox of Antirealism, Butchvarov's solution.

How does Husserl dehumanize subjectivity?

Here is a crucial passage from Crisis, sec. 54, p. 183:

But are the transcendental subjects, i.e., those functioning in the constitution of the world, human beings? After all, the epoche has made them into 'phenomena,' so that the philosopher within the epoche has neither himself nor the others naively and straightforwardly valid as human beings but precisely only as 'phenomena,' as poles for transcendental regressive inquiries. Clearly here, in the radical consistency of the epoche, each 'I' is considered purely as the ego-pole of his acts, habitualities, and capacities . . . .

[. . .]

But in the epoche and in the pure focus upon the functioning ego-pole . . . it follows eo ipso that nothing human is to be found, neither soul nor psychic life nor real psychophysical human beings; all this belongs to the 'phenomenon,' to the world as constituted pole.

Contra Husserl

Husserl is a great philosopher and one cannot do him justice in one blog post or a hundred; but I don't see how his position is tenable. On the one hand, each transcendental ego functioning as such cannot be a human being in nature. For nature and everything in it including all animal organisms is an intentional formation constituted by the transcendental ego. But not only can the world-constituting ego not be a physical thing, it cannot be a meta-physical spiritual thing either. It cannot be a res cogitans or substantia cogitans. As Husserl sees it, Descartes' identification of his supposedly indubitable ego with a thinking thing shows a failure fully to execute the transcendental turn (transzendentale Wendung). The Frenchman stops short at a little tag-end of the world (ein kleines Endchen der Welt) from which, by means of shaky inferences, he tries to get back what his hyperbolic doubt had called into question.

Husserl's thinking in sections 10-11 of Cartesian Meditations seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn, and avoids the supposed mistake of Descartes, one is left with nothing that can be posited as existing in itself independently of consciousness. Everything objective succumbs to the epoche. No absolute transcendence is reachable: every transcendence is at best a transcendence-in-immanence, a constituted transcendence. Everything in the world is a constitutum, and the same holds for the world itself. If Descartes had gone all the way he would have seen that not only his animal body could be doubted, but also his psyche, the psychophysical complex, and indeed any spiritual substance 'behind' the psyche. He would have seen that the cogito does not disclose something absolutely transcendent and indubitable. For Husserl, everything objective, whether physical or mental, ". . . derives its whole sense and its ontic validity (Seinsgeltung), which it has for me, from me myself, from me as the transcendental ego, the ego who comes to the fore only with the transcendental-phenomenological epoche." (CM, p. 26. I have translated Seinsgeltung as ontic validity which I consider more accurate than Cairns' "existential status.") In Formal and Transcendental Logic, sec. 94, along the same lines, we read: "nothing exists for me otherwise than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness."

One problem: just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung? Does it exist? And in what sense of 'exist'? It cannot exist as a constituted object for it is the subjective source of all constitutive performances (Leistungen). But if it is not an indubitable piece of the world, then it cannot existent transcendently either.

Descartes thought that he had reached something whose existence cannot be bracketed, eingeklammert, to use Husserl's term, and that that was himself as thinking thing. He thought he had hit bedrock, the bedrock of Ansichsein. Husserl objects: No, the ego's existence must be bracketed as well. But then nothing is left over. We are left with no clue as to what the transcendental ego is once it is distinguished from the psychological or psychophysical ego who is doing the meditating. To appreciate the difficulty one must realize that it is a factical transcendental ego that does the constituting, not an eidos-ego. The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not an eidetic reduction. It would be a serious mistake to think that the re-duction (the leading back, the path of regress) from the psychological ego to the transcendental ego is a reduction to an eidos-ego, an ideal ego abstractly common to all factical egos.

Here is another approach to the problem. The transcendental-phenomenological reduction regresses from everything objective, everything naively posited as existing in itself, to the subjective sources of the ontic validity (Seinsgeltung) and Being-sense (Seinssinn) of everything objective. This radical regression, however, must leave behind everything psychological since the psychological co-posits the objective world of nature. But how can Husserl execute this radical regression and yet hold onto words like 'ego' and 'cogitatio' and 'cogitatum'? How does he know that it is an I or an ego that is the transcendental-phenomenological residuum? In simpler terms, how does he know that what he gets to by the trans-phen reduction is something that can be referred to by 'I'? How does he know that it is anything like a person?

After all, indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun are used by human beings to refer to human beings.

Husserl and Butchvarov: Similarities and Differences

1. Both philosophers espouse versions of antirealism, albeit very different versions.

2. Both philosophers face versions of the Paradox of Antirealism.

3. Both philosophers solve the paradox by retreating from anthropocentrism and advocating the 'dehumanization' of consciousness.

4. Both philosophers oppose (Berkeleyan) idealism if that is the view that "all reality is mental" (Butchvarov, p. 213), a view that entails that "the perception of a tree and the tree perceived are no more distinguishable than are a feeling of pain and the pain felt." (213)

5. Both philosophers hold that there are specifically philosophical indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun.

6. Both philosophers agree that the existence of such uses is, in Butchvarov's words, "evident from the intelligibility of Cartesian doubt. . . ." (196)

7. Both philosophers hold that these uses are referring uses.

8. Both philosophers hold that these referring uses do not refer to human beings.

9. Both philosophers oppose Descartes in holding that the specifically philosophical uses of the indexical 'I' do not refer to anything in the world.

10. Husserl and Butchvarov disagree on what these uses refer to. For Husserl they refer to the factical transcendental ego, which is the constitutive source of everything worldly as to its Seinsgeltung (ontic validity) and Seinsinn (ontic sense or meaning). For Butchvarov, they refer to the world itself, not things in the world, distributively or collectively, but the totality of these things. Butchvarov's theory is essentially that of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "I am my world." (5.63) There is no metaphysical subject in the world. (5.633) There is an ultimate philosophical I but it is not in the world; it is the limit of the world (5.632), or rather the world itself.

11. Husserl and Butchvarov agree that, in Wittgenstein's words, "there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way." (5.641) But of course the ways in which the two philosophers talk about the self non-psychologically are radically different.

12. Another major disagreement is this. Husserl sticks with the Cartesian Ansatz while attempting to radicalize it, but he never succeeds in clarifying the difference between the transcendental and psychological ego. Butchvarov abandons (or never subscribed to) the ego-cogito-cogitatum schema of Descartes, and of Kant too, and in a sense cuts the Gordian knot with Sartrean scissors: there is nothing psychological or egological or 'inner' or personal or subjective about consciousness. And so there is no problem of intersubjectivity such as bedeviled Husserl in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation and elsewhere. Butchvarov goes 'Hegelian.'

There is much more to be said, later. It is Saturday night and time to punch the clock, pour myself a drink, and cue up some oldies.

Sartrean Consciousness as Nothing and as Something: Contradiction?

I put the following questions to Professor Butchvarov:

1. Are you troubled by the following apparent contradiction to which you are apparently committed, namely, that consciousness is both nothing and something? This (apparent) contradiction comes out clearly in your 1994 Midwest Studies in Philosophy paper "Direct Realism Without Materialism," p. 10.

2. You say above that your metaphysical picture is compatible with physicalism. How so? Consciousness for you is real, albeit impersonal. Your "direct realist conception of consciousness" (Midwest Studies, p. 9) suggests that there is something physicalism cannot allow, namely, consciousness. After all, your conception of consciousness, while externalist, is not eliminativist: you are surely not maintaining that consciousness just is (identically) its objects.

3. Consciousness in your sense has no subject or subjects. But must it not have a 'site,' i.e., must it not be tied to animal organisms in nature? And what is the nature of this 'tie'? Or does consciousness 'float free' of all organisms and objects generally?

Butchvarov's Replies with My Rejoinders

1. “Consciousness is both nothing and something” is Sartre’s view, which I endorse. It’s no more self-contradictory than Meinong’s “there are objects concerning which it is the case that there are no such objects” or Wittgenstein’s that a sensation “is not a something, but not a nothing either.” They are attempts to convey a radically new thought. Even in everyday life we often hear sentences like “He is and he is not,” “I like it but also I do not.”

BV: We will agree that Meinong's paradoxical formulation involves no formal contradiction. He chose to express himself in that way for literary effect. What he is saying, of course, is that some objects do not exist. To be precise, he is saying that some objects neither exist, subsist, nor enjoy any mode of Being whatsoever. Pace van Inwagen and many others who toe the Quinean line, there is no formal contradiction involved in maintaining that some objects do not exist. The apparent contradiction in Meinong's formulation is shown to be merely apparent by distinguishing two senses of 'there are,' one existentially noncomittal, the other existentially loaded.

What I don't understand, however, is what the Meinong example has to do with Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness. It is no contradiction to say of the golden mountain that it is something and nothing: we can read this as saying that it is some item but nothing that exists, or subsists for that matter. It is a contradiction, however, to say of consciousness that it is something and nothing — unless one can make a distinction, parallel to the distinction made in the Meinongian case — one that shows that the contradiction is merely apparent. What would that distinction be?

In the everyday cases that Butch cites, it is clear that they can be read as non-contradictory. But again, what does this haveto do with Sartre? Agreed, Sartre is aiming to convey a radically new thought. But the question is whether it is a contradictory thought. (Side point: a case could be made that the thought is already in Heidegger.)

Consciousness is not nothing, but neither is it a thing. “[Consciousness] ‘exhausts’ itself in its objects, [Sartre] wrote, precisely because it is nothing but the revelation of them: ‘consciousness is outside; there is no ‘within’ of consciousness.’ It has no inhabitants. Whether perceptual or conceptual, consciousness is not a ‘thing.’ One may even go so far as saying that it is nothing. To use a word Heidegger had applied, consciousness is only the ‘lightening’ of its objects, like the coming of dawn, which lightens, reveals, the rocks, bushes, and hills that had been invisible in the darkness of the night, but is not itself an object of sight” (page 204). See also 2 below.

BV: I agree with this as a description of Sartre's theory. But it leaves us with the problem. Consciousness, although other than every object and every entity, is not a mere nothing, a nugatory nothing, ein nichtiges Nichts to borrow a phrase from Heidegger. Why not? Well, it is is the 'light' in which objects appear and without which they would not appear. Although this 'light' does not itself appear as an object of sight as Butch well explains, it is not a mere nothing: it is in some sense or other 'real.' Note also that while Butch is surely right to describe Sartrean consciousness as exhausting itself in its objects, this 'exhaustion thesis' is not an eliminativist claim to the effect that consciousness just is its objects such that there is no distinction at all between consciousness and objects. There is this distinction and so its terms must be 'real': consciousness on the one hand and its objects on the other.

2. Physicalism denies the existence of mind and consciousness as they are usually understood, and so do I. It asserts that there are only physical things. Consciousness is not nothing, but neither is it a “thing” (see 1). On page 235 I explain: “[C]onsciousness has no intrinsic nature and no “inhabitants,” not even an ego…. there is just the world. Hence, there is some plausibility of the physicalist picture of the world as matter. But, unlike it, ours does not exclude consciousness – it merely does not include it, much as a group portrait of a family usually does not include the photographer” (235).

BV: Butchvarov is telling us here that his picture neither excludes nor includes consciousness. I am afraid I find this as contradictory as the claim that consciousness is both nothing and not nothing.

3. As I just said, my picture of the world “does not exclude consciousness – it merely does not include it.” I deny that consciousness is a thing in the world, that “the photographer is included in the photo.” This is why I say nothing about its site or ties to animal organisms in nature.

Of course, I do not deny that sometimes I have a headache, that sometimes I am hungry, that usually I remember what I read yesterday, that I need eyeglasses to see better, that what other people say often makes sense to me, etc. In these everyday or scientific contexts we may speak of consciousness as tied to animal organisms, though the word is seldom used. They may involve nonphysical, “mental,” events, but these events would hardly be bits of consciousness rather than just objects of consciousness. Biology, psychology, and linguistics may tell us what they involve. I doubt that philosophers have special knowledge of such essentially empirical matters. But it is exactly in these contexts that to
hold, as only philosophers might, that consciousness shapes or makes the world would be especially absurd.

One of my aims has been to question philosophical claims, especially in ethics and epistemology but also in philosophy of mind and metaphysics, to knowledge of what can only be empirical
matters.

A full answer to this excellent question, however, would require a whole book — or several books!

BV: I would insist that it is legitimate to ask about the relation of consciousness as Butchvarov conceives it and what goes on in us when we think, perceive, imagine, remember, feel, and so on. Granted, consciousness is not a thing in the world, and so it cannot be identified with or reduced to any events that transpire in human animals or their brains when they perceive, imagine, remember, and so on. I also grant that empirical matters should be left to empirical scientists. But that does not change the fact that consciousness in Butchvarov's Sartrean sense is involved when a man sees a tree or imagines a tree or remembers a tree. Suppose a man sees a tree. This cannot be accounted for without referring to consciousness in whose non-physical 'light' the tree appears. Butchvarov will of course grant this. He will surely not maintain that the 'lightening' that he mentions above can be accounted for by the empirical sciences of vision. Consciousness is a transcendental condition of the revelation of objects; as such, it is not something that can itself be investigated objectively by empirical means.

Given all this, is it not legitimate to ask how consciousness, as Butchvarov conceives it, is related to animal organisms, or at least those who we describe in ordinary language as conscious? Butchvarov maintains that consciousness is subject-less. But it doesn't follow that we can ignore the question of how consciousness is 'tied to' animal organisms.

One possible answer is that consciousness is not tied to animal organisms at all: it floats free. Not a very satisfactory answer! Where did it come from? Another answer is that it is an emergent. Doesn't Sartre speak of the "upsurge" of the For-Itself?

In any case, I don;t see that this question can be evaded in the way that Butchvarov evades it by reiterating the point that consciousness is not a thing in the world. I grant that!

The Paradox of Antirealism and Butchvarov’s Solution

In his highly original Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism (Walter de Gruyter 2015) Panayot Butchvarov argues that philosophy in its three main branches, epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics, needs to be freed from its anthropocentrism. Philosophy ought to be “dehumanized.” This entry will examine how Butchvarov proposes to dehumanize metaphysics. These Butchvarov posts are exercises toward a long review article I have been commissioned to write for a European journal.

Anthropocentrism in Metaphysics

In metaphysics, anthropocentrism assumes the form of antirealism. Antirealism is the view that the world, insofar as it is knowable, depends on us and our cognitive capacities. (6) Bishop Berkeley aside, metaphysical antirealism has its source and model in Kant's transcendental idealism. Contemporary antirealism is “the heir of Kant's transcendental idealism.” (189) On Butchvarov's view there can be no return to a pre-Critical, pre-Kantian metaphysics. (225) But surely the world cannot depend on us if 'us' refers to human animals. Butchvarov's task, then, is to develop a version of metaphysical antirealism that is free of anthropocentrism. A central question is whether the characteristic antirealist thesis that the world depends on us and our cognitive capacities can be upheld without 'us' being understood in an anthropocentric way. To answer this question is to resolve the Paradox of Antirealism (PA), a paradox that I would maintain is endemic to every form of transcendental philosophy from Kant, through Husserl and Heidegger, to Butchvarov:

PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)

Some will reject the paradox by rejecting its first limb. But that would be to reject antirealism. It would be to dissolve the problem rather than solve it. Let's see if Butchvarov can solve the paradox while upholding antirealism. But what version of antirealism does Butchvarov espouse?

Butchvarov's Metaphysical Antirealism

Metaphysical antirealism is so-called to distinguish it from antirealism in ethics and in epistemology. It is the view that “The world insofar as it is knowable by us depends on our capacities and ways of knowing, our cognitive faculties.” (111) I would have liked to have seen a more careful unpacking of this thesis, but I take the point to be, or at least to imply, the substantive (non-tautological) proposition that the world is not intrinsically knowable as an Aristotelian realist would maintain but knowable only in virtue of certain contributions on our part. If this is not the point, then it is difficult to see how contemporary antirealism could be “the heir of Kant's transcendental idealism.” (189)

Metaphysical antirealism divides into cosmological antirealism and ontological antirealism. A cosmological antirealist denies the reality of the world, but needn't deny the reality of the things in the world. Note that 'world' has multiple meanings and that now we are distinguishing between the world as a sort of totality of what is and the world as the members of the totality.

Butchvarov takes his cue from proposition 1.1 of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus wherein Ludwig Wittgenstein stipulates that by 'world' he means the totality of facts (die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen), not of things (nicht der Dinge). Now if the world is the totality of facts, then one who denies the reality of facts denies the reality of the world, and is thereby a cosmological antirealist. (113) Such an antirealist need not be an ontological antirealist, i.e., one who denies the reality of things. Since Butchvarov does not question the reality of things (169), he is not an ontological metaphysical antirealist. He is a cosmological antirealist who advocates a form of logical antirealism according to which (i) “there are no logical objects even though logic is present in all thought” (114), and (ii) the “cognized world” depends on the logical expressions of our language rather than on our “mental faculties” as in Kant. (189)

At a first approximation, when Butchvarov says that there are no logical objects what he means is that the logical connectives, the quantifiers, the copula 'is,' and whole declarative sentences do not designate or refer to anything. In old-fashioned terminology, they are syncategorematic or synsemantic expressions. Consider the sentence, 'Tom is tall and Mary is short.' As I understand Butchvarov, he is maintaining that the sentence itself, both occurrences of 'is,' and the single occurrence of 'and' are all logical expressions while the proper names 'Tom' and 'Mary,' and the predicates 'tall' and 'short' are non-logical expressions. There are no logical objects corresponding to logical expressions. (This bald assertion needs be qualified in a separate post on semirealism. Butchvarov takes a semirealist line on facts, the logical objects corresponding to some sentences.) That there are no logical objects is perhaps obvious in the case of the propositional connectives. Few will say that 'and,' 'or,' and 'not' designate objects. The meaning of these words has nothing to do with reference. But while there are no logical objects, there can be no “cognized world” without language, or rather human languages. With this we are brought back to the Paradox of Antirealism. Even though the things in the world do not depend on human animals, the world itself does so depend inasmuch as there would be no world at all without language.

Consider the generic sentence, 'Men are taller than women.' For Butchvarov, many generic sentences are true, but there is nothing in the world that makes them true: they have no corresponding logical objects. And yet without truths like these, and other sorts of truths as well, there would be no world. In this sense, the world, but not the things in it, depends on language-users. Butchvarov's position is roughly similar to Kant's. Kant held that one can be both a transcendental idealist and an empirical realist. Butchvarov is like a transcendental idealist in that he holds that the world depends on language and thus on us; but he is like an empirical realist in that he holds that the things in the world do not depend on us. Like Kant, however, he faces a version of the Paradox of Antirealism: surely it is as absurd to maintain that the world depends on the existence of human animals as to maintain that the things in the world depend on human animals.

Butchvarov's Solution to the Antirealism Paradox

The solution involves a re-thinking of the role of the personal pronouns 'I' and 'we' as they function in philosophical as opposed to ordinary contexts. (See article referenced below.) The idea is that 'I' and 'we' as they figure in the realism-antirealism debate do not refer to anything in the world, and so they do not refer to human beings; these grammatically personal pronouns refer impersonally to a view or "cognition" of the world, one that is not owned by any person or group of persons. This view of the world, however, just is the world. Therefore, the world does not depend logically or causally on the view of the world or on us: "the world and our cognition of it . . . are identical." (191) To grasp the thought here, you must realize that "cognition" is subjectless: it is not anyone's cognition.

Now let's dig into the details.

Butchvarov's theory can be divided into negative and positive theses. On the negative side, he claims that (i) "there is no such entity as the philosophical, metaphysical, self or ego." (191) Nor (ii) is there any such thing as consciousness as a property or activity of the metaphysical self, or as a relation (or quasi-relation) that connects such selves to their objects. (191) (ii) is a logical consequence of (i). For if there is no self, then it cannot have properties, stand in relations, or exercise activities. It also follows from (i) that (iii) there is no act-object distinction. Butchvarov would claim phenomenological support for the first and third claims: no self appears and no mental acts appear. Phenomenologically, he is right. But this doesn't decide the matter since there is also a 'dialectical' assumption at work, something like a Principle of Acquaintance:

Only that with which we are or can become acquainted, only that which can be directly experienced or singled out as an object, can be credited as real and as a possible subject of true and false predications.

This Principle of Acquaintance (my formulation) is a bridge principle that connects phenomenology to ontology, and makes of phenomenology more than a study of 'mere appearances.' It would therefore be fair to classify Butchvarov as a phenomenological ontologist along with Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. As opposed to what? As opposed to what could be called a metaphysical ontologist who essays to peer behind the phenomenal scene into a realm of 'positive noumena' to use a Kantian phrase, where God and the soul count as positive noumena. Butch of course will have no truck with positive noumena, nor even with Kant's negative noumenon, the unknowable Ding an sich. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Butchvarov neither affirms nor denies the negative noumenon.

One sort of move that the Butchvarovian approach rules out is a transcendental inference from what is given to transcendental conditions of the given's givenness that cannot themselves be brought to givenness. Someone might say this:

Granted, the subject of experience does not itself appear as just one more object of experience. But this failure to appear is precisely what one ought to expect: for as a necessary condition of any object's appearing it cannot itself appear as an object. The fact that it does not and cannot appear is no argument against its existence. For it is precisely a transcendental condition of objectivity. Just as there must be an 'accusative of manifestation,' something that appears, there must also be a 'dative of manifestation,' an item to which an appearing object appears, but which does not itself appear.

To which Butchvarov might respond that this begs the question by its rejection of the Principle of Acquaintance. The principle disallows any posits that cannot be brought to givenness. No ego appears, and so there is no dative of manifestation. And since there is no ego, appearing is non-relational: it is a monadic feature of that which appears. Objects appear, but not to anything.

But of course this does not end the discussion since one can ask what validates the Principle of Acquaintance. Why should we accept it given that it cannot be brought to givenness? Hume claimed that all meaningful ideas derive from sensory impressions. But what about that (propositional) idea? Is it meaningful? Then which sensory impressions does it derive from? It appears that here we end in a stand-off.

Butchvarov's Sartrean position is opposed to the triadic Cartesian schema that Husserl presupposes:

Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum.

For Butchvarov, there is no ego and there are no cogitationes; there are only the cogitata and their appearing. He speaks of objects and their "lightening" and "revealing." (205) He mentions Sartre by name but alludes to Heidegger as well for whom the world is not the totality of things or the totality of facts but the illuminated space wherein things appear.

For Butchvarov, then, the structure of consciousness is not triadic but dyadic: there is just consciousness and its objects. But it is impersonal: it is not anyone's consciousness. It is the sheer revelation of things, but not to anyone. Consciousness is exhausted in its revelation of objects: it has no inner nature. This is a radically externalist, anti-substantialist view of consciousness. Butchvarov is a Sartrean externalist about consciousness.

If this externalist view is correct then one can understand why Butchvarov thinks he has solved the Paradox of Antirealism. If consciousness is no-thing, then it is no thing upon which anything else can depend either logically or causally. The paradox arises if the things in the world are made dependent for their existence, nature, or intelligibility on any transient parts of the world such as human animals. The paradox vanishes if consciousness is no thing or things.

Toward a Critique

But wait a minute! What has now become of the first limb of the paradox? The first limb reads:

On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189)

Surely consciousness as no-thing, as a Sartrean wind blowing towards objects, as Mooreanly diaphanous, emanating from nowhere, without a nature of its own, not anchored in a Substantial Mind or in a society of substantial minds, or in animal organisms in nature, ever evacuating itself for the sake of the revelation of objects — surely consciousness as having these properties cannot do any shaping or forming. It cannot engage in any activity. For it is not a substance. It is only in its revelation of what is other than it. All distinctions and all content fall on the side of the object: none come from consciousness itself. On a radically externalist, anti-substantialist view of consciousness/mind, it can't do anything such as impose categorial forms on the relatively chaotic sensory manifold.

Kant is the main man here as Butch well appreciates. Kant's thinking operates under the aegis of a form-matter scheme. Space and time are the a priori forms of sensibility, and the categories are the a priori forms of the understanding. These forms are imposed on the matter of sensation. The vehicle of this imposition is the transcendental unity of apperception. All of this is our doing, our transcendental doing, whatever exactly this means (which is part of the problem). Our making of the world is a transcendental making: it is not an immanent process within the world such as a literal making of something out of pre-given materials — which would presuppose the world as the where-in of all such mundane makings and formings. Nor is this transcendental making a transcendent making by a transcendent deity.

Now who is it, exactly, who does the forming of the sensory manifold? Who imposes the categorial forms on the matter of sensation? It cannot be human animals or their brains. It cannot be anything in the world. Nor can it be anything out of the world either. And what, exactly, is this activity of forming? It cannot be an empirical process in the world. Not can it be a transcendent process such as divine creation. What then?

These problems are part and parcel of the Paradox of Antirealism. The paradox cannot get off the ground without the notions of forming, shaping, imposing, etc. whereas Butchvarov's solution to the paradox in terms of an impersonal, subjectless, non-substantial consciousness without a nature does away with all forming, shaping and imposing. Mind so conceived cannot impose forms since all forms, all distinctions, all content determinations are of the side of the object. How can Mind be spontaneous (a favorite Kantian word) and active if Mind is not a primary substance, an agent?

My suspicion, then, tentatively proffered, is that Butchvarov does not solve the Paradox of Antirealism; he dissolves it by in effect rejecting the first limb. It is clear to me how he removes anthropocentrism from metaphysics; what is not clear to me is hgow what is left over can still be called antirealism.

There is also the question of whether the philosophical uses of 'I' and 'we' that are essential to the formulation of the realism-antirealism debate are really impersonal uses. To that issue I will return in a later entry.

Galen Strawson on Zombies and Whether ‘Physical’ is a Natural Kind Term

1. What is a zombie?

You will have gathered that a zombie is a creature of philosophical fiction conjured up to render graphic a philosophical issue and to throw certain questions in the philosophy of mind into relief. A zombie is a living being that is physically and behaviorally exactly like a living human being except that it lacks (phenomenal) consciousness. Cut a zombie open, and you find exactly what you would find were you to cut a human being open. And in terms of linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior, there is no way to tell a human being from a zombie. (So don't think of something sleepy, or drugged, or comatose or Halloweenish.) When a zombie sees a tree, what is going on in the zombie's brain is a 'visual' computational process, but the zombie lacks what a French philosopher would call interiority. There is no irreducible subjectivity, no qualitative feel to the 'visual' processing; there is nothing it is like for a zombie to see a female zombie or to desire her. (What's it like to be a horny zombie? There is nothing it is like to be a horny zombie. Indeed, there is nothing it is like to be a zombie, period.)

2. Where do zombies come from?

Zombies surface within the context of discussions of physicalism. Physicalism is an ontological doctrine, a doctrine about what ultimately exists, what exists in the most fundamental sense of 'exists.' The physicalist is committed to the proposition that everything, or at least everything concrete, is either physical or determined by the physical. To be a bit more precise, physicalism is usefully viewed as the conjunction of an 'inventory thesis' which specifies physicalistically admissible individuals and a 'determination thesis' which specifies physicalistically admissible properties. What the inventory thesis says, at a first approximation, is that every concretum is either a physical item or composed of physical items. As for the determination thesis, what it says is that physical property-instantiations determine all other property-instantiations; equivalently, every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes on physical property-instantiations. This implies that all mental facts supervene upon physical facts. So if a being is conscious, then this fact about it supervenes upon, is determined by, its physical properties. This implies that there cannot be two beings, indiscernible with respect to all physical properties, such that the one is conscious while the other is not. This in turn rules out the possibility of zombies. For, if physicalism is true, once the physical properties are fixed, the mental properties are also automatically fixed.

3. What useful work do zombies do?

If zombies are metaphysically (broadly logically) possible, then physicalism is false. That's their job: to serve as counterexamples to physicalism. For if zombies are possible, then it is not the case that every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes upon a physical property-instantiation: a zombie has all the same physical properties as its indiscernible non-zombie twin, but is not conscious. The possibility of zombies implies that consciousness is non-supervenient, something in addition to a being's physical makeup. So one anti-physicalist argument goes like this:

1. If physicalism is true, then every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes upon a physical property-instantiation.
2. If zombies are possible, then it is not the case that every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes upon a physical property-instantiation.
3. Zombies are possible.
Therefore
4. Physicalism is not true.

This is a valid argument the soundness of which rides on premise (3). Here is where the fight will come. Without questioning the validity of the argument the physicalist will run the argument in reverse. He will deny the conclusion and then deny (3). In effect, he will argue from (1) & (2) & (~4) to (~3). He will deny the very possibility of zombies. He will insist that anything that behaves just like a conscious person and has the 'innards' of a conscious person JUST IS a conscious person.

Now I find that absurd: it is a denial of that subjectivity which is properly accessed only via the irreducible first-person singular point of view. Nevertheless, I will have a devil of a time budging my materialist-functionalist interlocutor. Materialists are objectivists: they think that anything that is not objectively accessible in the third-person way just isn't there at all, or it if is 'there,' is not to be taken seriously.

Can one support (3) in a manner so compelling as to convince the recalcitrant materialist? After all, (3) is not self-evident. If it were self-evident, then we would have a 'knock-down' argument against physicalism. But there are few if any 'knock-down' (absolutely compelling) arguments in philosophy.

Now zombies are certainly conceivable. But it is not clear whether conceivability entails metaphysical (broadly logical) possibility, which is in play in (3). So it is not clear whether the conceivability of zombies is a compelling reason to reject physicalism. The question of the relation between conceivability and possibility is a difficult one. There is some discussion of this in the conceivability category.

Now here is what Galen Strawson has to say:

4. Strawson on Zombies.

It is, finally, a mistake to think that we can know that ‘zombies’ could exist—where zombies are understood to be creatures that have no experiential properties although they are perfect physical duplicates (PPDs) of currently experiencing human beings like you and me.

The argument that PPD-zombies could exist proceeds from two premisses—[1] it is conceivable that PPD-zombies exist, [2] if something is conceivable, then it is possible. It is plainly valid, and (unlike many) I have no insuperable problem with [2]. The problem is that we can't know [1] to be true, and have no reason to think it is. To be a materialist is, precisely, to hold that it is false, and while materialism cannot be known to be true, it cannot be refuted a priori—as it could be if [1] were established. ‘Physical’, recall, is a natural kind term, and since we know that there is much that we do not know about the nature of the physical, we cannot claim to know that an experienceless PPD of a currently experiencing human being is conceivable, and could possibly (or ‘in some possible world’) exist.

This is just blatant question-begging on Strawson's part. We can't know that it is conceivable that zombies exist?! That zombies are conceivable is a very weak claim, and of course we can know it to be true, just by conceiving a zombie, whence it follows that we have excellent reason to think it is true. Strawson simply begs the question by assuming that materialism is true. He also begs the question by claiming that materialism cannot be refuted a priori. If you grant [2], as Strawson does, then what we have is an a priori refutation of materialism.

Strawson tells us that 'physical' is a natural kind term. What a strange idea! 'Water,' 'gold, 'tiger' are uncontroversial natural kind terms. They succeed in referring to what they were introduced to refer to despite our knowledge or ignorance of the nature of what they refer to. The ancient Greeks thought water was an element; Dalton held it to be HO; we take it to be H₂O. Water turned out to be a lot different than we thought, without prejudice to the reference of 'water.' So if 'physical' is a natural kind term, then it too can refer to things very different in nature than what we might have supposed. And so Strawson thinks that 'physical' can refer to what is irreducibly mental or experiential in whole or in part. In fact, Strawson allows that the physical — that which physics studies — could be wholly mental.

I don't know what this means. Perhaps Vlastimil can explain it to me.

Does Matter Think?

If matter (wholly material beings) could think, then matter would not be matter as currently understood.

Can abstracta think? Sets count as abstracta. Can a set think? Could the set of primes contemplate itself and think the thought, I am a set, and each of my members is a prime number? Given what we know sets to be from set theory, sets cannot think. It is the same with matter. Given what we know or believe matter to be from current physics, matter cannot think. To think is to think about something, and it is this intrinsic aboutness or original intentionality that proves embarrassing for materialism. I have expatiated on this over many, many posts and I can't repeat myself here. (Here is a characteristic post.)

But couldn't matter have occult powers, powers presently hidden from our best physics, including the power to think? Well, could sets have occult powers that a more penetrating set theory would lay bare? Should we pin our hopes on future set theory? Obviously not. Why not? Because it makes no sense to think of sets as subjects of intentional states. We know a priori that the set of primes cannot lust after the set of evens. It is impossible in a very strong sense: it is broadly logically impossible.

Of course, there is a big difference between sets and brains. We know enough about sets to know a priori that sets cannot think. But perhaps we don't yet know enough about the human brain. So I don't dogmatically claim that matter could not have occult or hidden powers. Maybe the meat between my ears does have the power to think. But then that meat is not matter in any sense we currently understand. And that is my point. You can posit occult powers if you like, and pin your hopes on a future science that will lay them bare; but then you are going well beyond the empirical evidence and engaging in high-flying speculations that ought to seem unseemly to hard-headed empiricistic and scientistic types.

Such types are known to complain about spook stuff and ghosts-in-machines. But to impute occult powers, powers beyond our ken, to brain matter does not seem to be much of an improvement. For that is a sort of dualism too. There are the physical properties and powers we know about, and the physical properties and powers we know nothing about but posit to avoid the absurdities of identity materialism and eliminativism. So instead of an ontological property dualism or an ontological substance dualism we have an epistemological property dualism, a dualism as between properties and powers we know about and properties and powers we have no idea about.

There is, second, the ontological dualism as between thinking and feeling matter and ordinary hunks of matter that do not think or feel. Even the materialist must admit that there is a huge difference between Einstein and a piece of chalk. How explain that some parcels of matter think and some do not?

It is worth noting that the reverent gushing of the neuro-scientistic types over the incredible complexity (pound the lectern!) of the brain does absolutely nothing to reduce the unintelligibility of the notion that it is brains or parts of brains that are the subjects of intentional and qualitative mental states. For it is unintelligible how ramping up complexity can trigger a metabasis eis allo genos, a shift into another genus. Are you telling me that meat that means is just meat that is more complex than ordinary meat? You might as well say that the leap from unmeaning meat to meaning meat is a miracle. Will you say that consciousness emerges from certain parcels of sufficiently complex matter? But then it is not matter any more, is it? It is an emergent from matter. Emergentism is a form of ontological dualism. What's more, the word 'emergence' merely papers over the difficulty, labeling the problem without solving it. Do you materialists believe in miracle meat or mystery meat? Do you believe in magic?

There is, third, a dualism within the brain as between those parts of it that are presumably thinking and feeling and those other parts that perform more mundane functions. Why are some brain states mental and others not?

The materialist operates with a conception of matter tied to current physics. On that conception of matter, it is simply unintelligible to to say that brains feel or think. I tend to hold that this unintelligibility is a very good reason to hold that it is not my brain or any part thereof that thinks when I think, and that it is not my brain or any part thereof that feels when I feel. (I am using 'think' in the broad Cartesian sense to cover all instances of intentionality, and 'feel' to cover all non-intentional conscious states and events.)

"But from the fact that such-and-such is unintelligible to us now it does not follow that it is not the case." True. Two possibilities. It might be the case that p even though we will never understand how it is possible that p, and it might be the case that p, even though we cannot understand at present how it is possible that p. The first is a mysterian position, the second is not mysterian but a pin-hopes-on-future-science position.

My thesis is that it is reasonable to hold that when I think and feel it is not my brain or any part of it that thinks or feels. But who knows? Maybe future science will prove me wrong. It is just that I wouldn't lay any money on being wrong.

Galen Strawson Versus Nicholas Humphrey on Consciousness

(This is a repost from February 2013 slightly emended, except for an addendum added today. Reposts are the reruns of the blogosphere. You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode just once do you?)

…………………

A couple of days ago I had Nicholas Humphrey in my sights. Or, to revert to the metaphor of that post, I took a shovel to his bull. I am happy to see that Galen Strawson agrees that it is just nonsense to speak of consciousness as an illusion. Strawson's trenchant review of Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness is here. Unfortunately, I cannot see that Strawson has shed much light either, at least judging from the sketch of his position presented in the just-mentioned review:

There is no mystery of consciousness as standardly presented, although book after book tells us that there is, including, now, Nick Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. We know exactly what consciousness is; we know it in seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, hearing, in hunger, fever, nausea, joy, boredom, the shower, childbirth, walking down the road. If someone denies this or demands a definition of consciousness, there are two very good responses. The first is Louis Armstrong's, when he was asked what jazz is: "If you got to ask, you ain't never goin' to know." The second is gentler: "You know what it is from your own case." You know what consciousness is in general, you know the intrinsic nature of consciousness, just in being conscious at all.

"Yes, yes," say the proponents of magic, "but there's still a mystery: how can all this vivid conscious experience be physical, merely and wholly physical?" (I'm assuming, with them, that we're wholly physical beings.) This, though, is the 400-year-old mistake. In speaking of the "magical mystery show", Humphrey and many others make a colossal and crucial assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of matter that gives us reason to think that it's surprising that it involves consciousness. We don't. Nor is this news. Locke knew it in 1689, as did Hume in 1739. Philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley was extremely clear about it in the 1770s. So were Eddington, Russell and Whitehead in the 1920s.

One thing we do know about matter is that when you put some very common-or-garden elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, etc) together in the way in which they're put together in brains, you get consciousness like ours – a wholly physical phenomenon. (It's happening to you right now.) And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.

The main point of Strawson's first paragraph is surely correct: we know what consciousness is in the most direct and unmistakable way possible: we experience it, we live through it, we are it. We know it from our own case, immediately, and we know it better than we know anything else. If Dennett doesn't know what a sensory quale is, then perhaps the cure is to administer a sharp kick to his groin. Feel that, Dan? That's a quale. (I am assuming, of course, that Dennett is not a 'zombie' in the technical sense in which that term is used in philosophy of mind discussions. But I can't prove he isn't. Perhaps that is the problem. If he were a zombie, then maybe all his verbal behavior would be understandable.)

In the second paragraph Strawson rejects an assumption and he makes one himself. He rejects the assumption that we know enough about the intrinsic nature of matter to know that a material being cannot think. The assumption he makes is that we are wholly physical beings. So far I understand him. It could be that (it is epistemically possible that) this stuff inside my skull is the thinker of my thoughts. This is epistemically possible because matter could have hidden powers that we have yet to fathom. On our current understanding of matter it makes no bloody sense to maintain that matter thinks; but that may merely reflect our ignorance of the intrinsic nature of matter. So I cannot quickly dismiss the notion that matter thinks in the way I can quickly dismiss the preternaturally boneheaded notion that consciousness is an illusion.

I agree with Strawson's first paragraph; I understand the second; but I am flabbergasted by the third. For now our man waxes dogmatic and postures as if he KNOWS that consciousness is a wholly physical phenomenon. How does he know it? Obviously, he doesn't know it. It is a mere conjecture, an intelligible conjecture, and perhaps even a reasonable one. After all it might be (it is epistemically possible that) the matter of our brains has occult powers that physics has yet to lay bare, powers that enable it to think and feel. I cannot exclude this epistemic possibility, any more than Strawson can exclude the possibility that thinkers are spiritual substances. But to conjecture that things might be thus and so is not to KNOW that they are thus and so. All we can claim to KNOW is what Strawson asseverates in his first paragraph.

Here is Strawson's argument in a nutshell:

1. We know the intrinsic nature of consciousness from our own case.

2. We know that consciousness is a form of matter.

Ergo

3. There is nothing mysterious about consciousness or about how matter gives rise to consciousness; nor is there any question whether consciousness is wholly physical; the only mystery concerns the intrinsic nature of matter.

The problem with this argument is premise (2). It is pure bluster: a wholly gratuitous assumption, a mere dogma of naturalism. I can neutralize the argument with this counterargument:

4. If (1) & (2), then brain matter has occult powers.

5. We have no good reason to assume — it is wholly gratuitous to assume — that brain matter has occult powers.

Therefore

6. We have no good reason to assume that both (1) and (2) are true.

7. We know that (1) is true.

Therefore

8. We have good reason to believe that (2) is false.

Further Thoughts: Strawsonian Theology? (20 September 2015)

Strawson tells us that he is assuming that we are "wholly physical beings." Now a proposition cannot be true or false unless it is meaningful. But what does it even mean to say that we are wholly physical beings given that this entails that some wholly physical beings are conscious and self-conscious? What does 'physical' mean if beings as richly endowed with mentality as we are count as "wholly physical"? There is a semantic problem here, and it looks to be a failure of contrast. 'Physical' contrasts with 'mental' and has a specific meaning in virtue of this contrast. And vice versa. So if nothing is mental, then nothing is physical in the specific contrastive sense that lends 'bite' and interest to the thesis that we are wholly physical. To put it another way, if nothing is mental and everything is physical including us with our richly endowed inner lives, then the claim that we are wholly physical is not particularly interesting. It is nearly vacuous if not wholly vacuous. It has been evacuated of its meaning by a failure of contrast. If we are wholly physical in an umbrella sense that subsumes the contrastive senses of 'physical' and 'mental,' then Strawson has merely papered over the problem of how the mental and the physical are related when these terms are taken in their specific senses.

Suppose Einstein and his blackboard are both wholly physical. We still have to account for the fact that one of them is conscious and entertains thoughts while the other isn't and doesn't. That is a huge difference. What Strawson has to say is that in us thinking and feeling beings powers of matter are exercised that are not exercised in other, less distinguished clumps of matter. Hidden in the bosom of matter are powers that a future physics may lay bare and render intelligible.

But if Strawson widens his concept of matter to cover both thinking and nonthinking matter, does he have a principled way to prevent an even further widening?

If minds like ours are wholly physical, why can't God be wholly physical? God is a mind too. Presumably God cannot be wholly physical because God is not in space and is not subject to physical decomposition. But if we can be wholly physical despite the fact that we think and are conscious — if there is nothing in the nature of matter to rule out thought and consciousness — then perhaps there is nothing in the nature of matter to rule out material beings that have no spatial location and are not subject to physical decomposition.

If an advanced physics will reveal how meat heads like us can think, then perhaps there are other properties and possibilities of matter hitherto undreamt of. Consider Christ's Ascension, body and soul, into heaven. Christ's Ascension is not a dematerialization: he ascends bodily into a purely spiritual, nonphysical, 'dimension.' Without losing his (resurrected) body, Christ ascends to the Father so that, after the Ascension, the Second Person of the Trinity acquires Christ's resurrected body. On our ordinary way of thinking, this is utterly unintelligible. God is pure spirit, pure mind. How can Christ ascend bodily into heaven, and without divesting himself of his body, enter into the unity of the purely spiritual Trinity? It is unintelligible to us because it issues in a formal-logical contradiction: God is wholly nonphysical and also in part physical. A mysterian would say it is a mystery. It happened, so it's possible, and this regardless of its unintelligibility to us.

On Strawson's approach there needn't be any mystery here: some parcels of matter have amazing powers. For example, we are wholly material and yet we think and feel. It is truly amazing that we should be thinking meat! If so, God might be a parcel of matter that thinks, feels, and — without prejudice to his physicality — has no spatial location and is not subject to physical decomposition. If so, the Ascension is comprehensible: Christ ascends bodily to join the physical Trinity. It is just that he sheds his particular location and his physical mutability. He remains what he was on earth, an embodied soul.

The same could be said of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven. She too entered bodily into heaven. On a Strawsonian theology, this might be rendered intelligible without mysterianism.

To sum up. If matter actually thinks and feels in us, as Strawson holds, then he has widened the concept of matter to embrace both 'ordinary' matter and sentient, thinking, 'spiritual' matter. But then what principled way would Strawson have to prevent a further widening of the concept of matter so that it embraces God, disembodied souls, angels, and what not?

Sophistry in True Detective: On the Supposed Illusion of Having a Self

The other day I referred to the following bit of dialogue from the new HBO series, True Detective, as sophistry. Now I will explain why I think it to be such. Here is the part I want to focus on. The words are put in the mouth of the anti-natalist Rustin Cohle. I've ommitted the responses of the Woody Harrelson character.

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Sorting through this crap is as painful as reading the typical student paper. Where does one start with such a farrago of Unsinn? But here goes. The main points made above are these:

1. The emergence of consciousness and self-consciousness in human animals is an accident, a fluke of evolution.

2. We are each under the illusion of having, or being, a self when in fact there are no selves.

3. We have been programmed by nature to suffer from this illusion.

4. The honorable thing to do is to deny our programming, refuse to procreate, and embrace our extinction as a species.

Each of these theses is either extremely dubious or demonstrably incoherent, taken singly, not to mention the dubiousness of the 'is'-'ought' inference from (3) to (4). But in this entry I will address (2) alone.

'There are no selves' is what our anti-natalist means when he say that everybody is nobody. For it is a Moorean fact, undeniable even by our anti-natalist, that every living human body is some living human body or other. He is not denying that plain fact but that these living human bodies are selves.

Performative Inconsistency

Now 'There are no selves,' if asserted by a being who understands what he says and means what he says, is asserted by a conscious and self-conscious being. But that is just what a self is. A self is a conscious being capable of expressing explicit self-consciousness by the use of the first-person singular pronoun, 'I.' Therefore, a self that asserts that there are no selves falls into performative inconsistency. The very act or performance of asserting that there are no selves or that one is not a self falsifies the content of the assertion. For that performance is a performance of a self.

The claim that there are no selves is therefore self-refuting.

Assertion is a speech act. But we get the same result if one merely thinks the thought that one is not a self without expressing it via an assertive utterance. If I think the thought *I am not a self,* then that thought is falsified by the act of thinking it since the act is the act of a self.

The point can also be made as follows. If there are no selves, then I am not a self. But if I am not a self, then I do not exist. Perhaps some living human body exists, but that body cannot be my body if I do not exist. What makes this body my body is its connection with me. So I must exist for some body to be my body. My body is my body and not my body's body. So I am not identical to my body. I have a body. 'This body is this body' is a tautology. 'I am this body' is not a tautology. If I exist, then I am distinct from my body and from any body.

So if I am not a self, then I do not exist. But the thought that I do not exist is unthinkable as true. Only I can think this thought, and my thinking of the thought falsifies its content, and this is so even if 'I' picks out merely a momentary self. (I am not committed by this line of reasoning to a substantial self that remains numerically the same over time.) So we have performative inconsistency.

This reasoning does not show that I am a necessary being, or that I have or am an immortal soul, or even that I am a res cogitans in Descartes' sense. What it shows is that the self cannot be an illusion. It shows that anyone who carefully considers whether or not he is a self can attain the certain insight that he is at least as long as he is thinking these thoughts.

Soviel Schein, soviel Sein

There is another way of looking at it. If each of us is under the illusion of having a self or being a self, then who is being fooled? To whom does this false seeming appear? There cannot be illusions in a world without conscious beings. An illusion by its very nature is an illusion to consciousness. So if consciousness is an illusion, then it is not an illusion. The same holds for the self. If the self is an illusion, then the self is not an illusion.

There cannot be Schein (illusion) without Sein (being). "So much seeming, so much being."

Husserl’s Critique of the Image-Theory of Consciousness

Suppose I am conscious of an object in the mode of visual perception: I see a bobcat in the backyard. Does it make sense to try to analyze this perceptual situation by saying that 'in my mind' there is an image or picture that represents something 'outside my mind'?

In the Fifth of his Logical Investigations, Edmund Husserl refutes this type of theory. One point he makes (Logical Investigations, vol. II, 593) is that there is a phenomenological difference between a genuine case of image-consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) and ordinary perceptual awareness. Suppose I am looking at a picture of a mountain. The picture appears, but it refers beyond itself to that of which it is a picture, the mountain itself. In a case like this, it is clear that my awareness of the object depicted is mediated by a picture or image. Here it makes clear sense to speak of one thing (the picture) re-presenting another (the mountain). But when I look at the mountain itself, I find no evidence of any picture or image that mediates my perceptual awareness of the mountain. Phenomenologically, there is no evidence of any epistemic intermediary or epistemic deputy. So on phenomenological grounds alone, it would seem to be a mistake to assimilate perceptual consciousness to image-consciousness. The two are phenomenologically quite different.

A second consideration is that consciousness of a thing via a picture or image presupposes ordinary perceptual consciousness inasmuch as the picture or painting must itself be perceived as a precondition of its functioning as an image. How then can ordinary perceptual consciousness be explained as involving internal images or pictures?

Husserl also points out that, no matter how carefully I examine the picture, I will discover no intrinsic feature of it that is its "representative character." (593) That is, there is no intrinsic property of the picture that confers upon it its reference to something beyond itself. So Husserl asks:

     What therefore allows us to go beyond the image which alone is
     present in consciousness, and to refer the latter as an image to a
     certain extraconscious object? To point to the resemblance between
     image and thing will not help. (593, Findlay trans. slightly
     emended.)

Why won't resemblance help? If picture and thing depicted both exist, then of course there will be resemblance. But it cannot be in virtue of X's resemblance to Y that X pictures or images Y. "Only a
presenting ego's power to use a similar as an image-representative of a similar . . . makes the image be an image." (594) Husserl's point is subtle. I'll explain it in my own way. A picture considered by itself is just a physical thing with physical properties. What makes it be an image? Its physical properties cannot account for its being an image. And the fact that it shares physical properties with some other thing cannot make it an image either. A painting of a mountain can be a painting of a mountain even if there is no mountain of which it is the painting. Pictures of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas are pictures of said hotel even though it has been demolished. The intentionality of a photograph can survive the destruction of its 'subject.' A depiction of Cerberus is what it is despite the dog's nonexistence.

But even if there exists something that a picture resembles, that does not suffice to make the picture a picture of a thing it resembles. Suppose I have two qualitatively identical ball bearings. In an Andy Warholish mood, I take a picture of one of them, the one closer to my computer. Gazing fondly at the photo, I say, "This ball bearing is the one that is closer to my computer." Since the photo resembles the other ball bearing as well, but is not of that ball bearing, it cannot be resemblance that confers upon the photo its intentionality.

What Husserl is saying in effect is that pictures, paintings, movie images, and the like possess no intrinsic intentionality: what intentionality they have is derived from conscious beings who possess
intrinsic intentionality. For Husserl, and for me, the project of trying to account for intrinsic intentionality in terms of internal pictures that resemble outer objects is a complete nonstarter. For one thing, it leads to a vicious infinite regress: "Since the interpretation of anything as an image presupposes an object intentionally given to consciousness, we should plainly have a regressus in infinitum were we again to let this latter object be itself constituted through an image . . . ." (594)

There are both phenomenological and dialectical reasons for rejecting the image-theory (Bilder-theorie) of consciousness. Phenomenologically, there is no evidence that ordinary perception is mediated by internal images. In addition,

   1. The image-theory interprets intentionality in terms of resemblance,
   but resemblance cannot explain the intentionality of pictures that (i)
   never had an object, or (ii) lost their object.

   2. The image-theory interprets intentionality in terms of resemblance,
   but resemblance cannot account for a picture's being of the very
   object it is of as opposed to some other one that it merely resembles.

3. The image-theory is involved in a vicious infinite regress.

   4. Since image-consciousness presupposes ordinary perceptual
   consiousness, it is impossible to explain the latter in terms of the
   former.

   5. The image-theory tries to locate the intentionality of
   consciousness in the intentionality of a picture when it is clear that
   there is nothing intrinsic to any picture that could account for its
   intentionality.

Ted Honderich is One Quirky Writer

I am reading Ted Honderich, On Consciousness (Edinburgh UP, 2004) and trying to get a handle on just what his theory of consciousness as existence amounts to. An awkward and quirky writer, he doesn't make things easy on the reader, and doesn't seem to realize that in this very fast brave new world of ours the writer must get to the point without unnecessary circumlocution if he wants to keep his reader glued to the page. Here is an example of Honderich's style, from p. 206:

The other option from spiritualism now deserves the name of being devout physicalism. You can say and write, in a career that keeps an eye on some of science, maybe two, and is forgetful of reflective experience, that being conscious or aware of something is only having certain physical properties in the head. Usually this cranialism is a matter of only neural properties as we know them — thought of computationally or with microtubules to the fore or in any other way you like.

[Note the awkward placement of "Maybe two." It belongs right after "eye."]

Nobody not on the philosophical job of trying to approximate more to some of science or horse sense believes this either. We all know, to make use of a pefectly proper and enlightening parody, that consciousness, isn't just cells, however fancily or fancifully conceived. Everybody on the job tries to give a place to or register what they know when they're not on the job. But they can't do it if they have it that consciousness has only neural properties or conceivably silicon or otherwise physical properties, no matter how they are conceived additionally.

Honderich's thought is not so much expressed as buried in the above mess of verbiage. Here is the thought which is correct as far as it goes expressed in three sentences.

Devout physicalism is the main alternative to spiritualism, or substance dualism. But only someone who fails to reflect on his actual experience could suppose that being conscious of something is a matter of the instantiation of neural properties in the brain. Both philosopher and layman know that consciousness is not brain cells, but the philosopher trying to be scientific is apt to forget it.

Here is Colin McGinn's savage review of Honderich's book. Be aware that there is personal animus between the two men.

Galen Strawson versus Colin McGinn

Galen Strawson in Little Gray Cells:

The intuitive puzzle is clear, and McGinn presents it with multilayered intensity. He is right that we can never hope to understand how consciousness as we know it in everyday life relates to the brain considered as a lump of matter. But it doesn't follow that consciousness is a mystery — except insofar as everything is. This move rests on a large assumption that is almost universally held, although it is certainly false.

This is the assumption that we have a pretty good understanding of the nature of matter — of matter in space — of the physical in general. It is only relative to this assumption that the existence of consciousness in a material world seems mystifying. For what exactly is puzzling about consciousness, once we put the assumption aside? We know just what it is like. Suppose you have an experience of redness, or pain, and consider it just as such. There doesn't seem to be any room for anything that could be called failure to understand what it is. You know what it is.

BV comments: Strawson is right about one thing: we know what consciousness is from our own case. We experience pains and pleasures, and so on. (And he is also right to avoid the eliminativism that tempts many.) But he misses the problem that McGinn so masterfully presents. It is is not consciousness as we experience it that is puzzling, but how consciousness arises from the gray matter in our skulls. We understand consciousness from the first-person point of view, and our physics gives us a very good understanding of matter from the third-person point of view. What we don't understand is how matter can be conscious.

It is not consciousness that is puzzling, then, but matter. What the existence of consciousness shows is that we have a profoundly inadequate grasp on the nature of matter. McGinn agrees with this last point, in fact: with considerable speculative panache, he develops the idea that there must be something deficient in our idea of space, as well as in our idea of matter. But he still wants to stress the mysteriousness of consciousness; to which the reply, once again, is that we find consciousness mysterious only because we have a bad picture of matter.

BV: Strawson is not making sense. There is nothing particularly puzzling about consciousness, and, contrary to what he says, there is nothing particularly puzzling about brains. What is puzzling is how a brain can be conscious. He doesn't seem to grasp the problem. Besides, how can the existence of consciousness show that we have an inadequate grasp of matter? What does that even mean?

Can anything be done? I think physics can help, by undermining features of our picture of matter that make it appear so totally different from consciousness. The first step is very simple: to begin with, perhaps, one takes it that matter is simply solid stuff, uniform, non-particulate (the ultimate Norwegian cheese). Then one learns that it is composed of distinct atoms — solid particles that cohere closely together to make up objects, but that have empty space (roughly speaking) between them. Then one learns that these atoms are themselves made up of tiny, separate particles, and full of empty space themselves. One learns that matter is not at all what one thought.

Now one may accept this while retaining the idea that matter is at root solid, dense lumpen stuff, utterly different from consciousness. For so far this picture preserves the idea that there are true particles of matter: tiny grainy bits of ultimate stuff that are in themselves truly solid. And one may say that only these, strictly speaking, are matter — matter as such. But it's been a long time since the 18th-century philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley pointed out that there are no scientific grounds for supposing that the fundamental constituents of matter have any truly solid central part, and the picture of grainy, inert particles has effectively disappeared in the strangenesses of modern quantum theory and superstring theory.

Current physics, then, thinks of matter as a thing of forces, energy, fields. And it can also seem natural to think of consciousness as a form or manifestation of energy, as a kind of force, and even, perhaps, as a kind of field. You may still feel the two things are deeply heterogeneous, but you really have no good reason to believe this. You just don't know enough about matter. When McGinn speaks of the ''squishy'' brain, he vividly expresses part of our ordinary idea of matter. But when physics inspects the volume of space-time occupied by a brain, what does it find? It finds a vibrant play of energy, an astonishingly insubstantial, radiant form.

All this being so, do we have any good reason to think that we know anything about the physical that legitimates surprise at the thought that consciousness is itself wholly physical? We do not. And that is the first, crucial step that one must take when facing up to the problem of consciousness.

BV: Strawson is maintaining that the sense of the utter heterogeneity of matter and consciousness arises from an inadequate conception of matter, and that if we had an adequate conception the sense of heterogeneity would dissipate. We would then understand consciousness to be a purely material phenomenon. Now it is true that our concept of matter is pegged to the state of physics, and also true that we now have a more adequate conception of matter than we had in earlier centuries. Well, suppose the volume of space-time occupied by a brain is filled with "a vibrant play of energy, an astonishingly insubstantial, radiant form," as Strawson lyrically puts it. The problem remains: how does brain matter so conceived give rise to consciousness, not to mention thought? The problem remains on any extant conception of matter, no matter how "insubstantial." Strawson is fooling himself if he thinks that the problem arises only on the assumption that matter is the 'ultimate Norwegian cheese."

Strawson is doing nothing more than giving expression to his faith and hope that someday physics will have advanced to the point where it will become intelligible how the brain matter in animals of our complexity can be conscious. But he has no idea of what the solution will look like. He is gesturing hopefully in the direction of he-knows-not-what. Both he and McGinn are naturalists. But he is an optimist where McGinn is a pessimist. Strawson pins his hopes on future physics. McGinn has no such faith or hope. His view is that the matter-consciousness problem has a solution but it is one our cognitive architecture prevents us from ever knowing.

Both philosophers are naturalists who maintain that there is nothing non-natural or supernatural about consciousness. I am not a naturalist. But if I were I would say that McGinn's position is the more reasonable of the two. What best explains the intractability, hitherto, of the problems in the philosophy of mind? Our lack of understanding of physics, or something about our cogntive architecture that makes it impossible for us to grasp the solution? I'd put my money on the latter.

So far, then: McGinn 1; Strawson 0.

Sweet Dreams of Dennett

The following first appeared on 15 January 2006 at the old Powerblogs site. Here it is again, considerably reworked.

………..

I saw Daniel Dennett's Sweet Dreams (MIT Press, 2005) on offer a while back at full price, but declined to buy it: why shell out $30 to hear Dennett repeat himself one more time? But the other day it turned up for $13 in a used bookstore. So I bought it, unable to resist the self-infliction of yet more Dennettian sophistry. What am I? A masochist? A completist? A compulsive consciousness and qualia freak?

The subtitle is "Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness." That raises the question of how there could even be philosophical obstacles to such a science. I am not aware that philosophers control the sources of funding for neuroscience projects. And what could a philosopher say that could stymie brain science?

But let's look at a passage:

     If we are are to explain the conscious Subject, one way or another
     the transition from clueless cells to knowing organizations of
     cells must be made without any magic ingredients. This requirement
     presents theorists with what some see as a nasty dilemma . . . . If
     you propose a theory of the knowing Subject that describes whatever
     it describes as like the working of a vacant automated factory —
     not a Subject in sight — you will seem to many observers to have
     changed the subject or missed the point. On the other hand, if your
     theory still has tasks for a Subject to perform, still has a need
     for a Subject as witness, then . . . you have actually postponed
     the task of explaining what needs explaining.

     To me, one of the most fascinating bifurcations in the intellectual
     world today is between those to whom it is obvious — obvious —
     that a theory that leaves out the Subject is thereby disqualified
     as a theory of consciousness (in Chalmer's terms, it evades the
     Hard Problem), and those to whom it is just as obvious that any
     theory that doesn't leave out the Subject is disqualified. I submit
     that the former have to be wrong. . . . (p. 145)

Dennett has done a good job of focusing the issue. On the one side, the eliminativists who hold that the only way to explain the conscious Subject is by explaining it away. On the other side, those who are convinced that one cannot explain a datum by denying its existence.

What we have here fundamentally is a deep philosophical dispute about the nature of explanation, and not a debate confined to the philosophy of mind. What's more, it is not a debate that is going to be resolved by further empirical research. Not all legitimate questions are empirical questions.

It ought to be self-evident that any explanation that consigns the explanandum (that which is to be explained) to the status of nonexistence is a failure as an explanation. Eliminativist moves are confessions of failure. Any genuine explanation of X presupposes (and so cannot eliminate) the
existence of X. One cannot explain something by explaining it away. Two related points:

1. One cannot explain what does not exist. One cannot explain why unicorns roam the Superstition Wilderness, or why the surface of the moon is perfectly smooth. There is nothing to explain. In the case of consciousness, however, there is something to explain. So it at least makes sense to attempt to explain consciousness.

2. An explanation that entails the nonexistence of the explanandum is no explanation at all.

Both (1) and (2) are analytic truths that simply unpack the concept of explanation.

I once heard a proponent of Advaita Vedanta claim that advaitins don't explain the world; they explain it away. Now it is surely dubious in the extreme to think of this insistent and troubling plural world of our ongoing everyday acquaintance as an illusion. Whatever its exact ontological status, it exists. If it didn't there would be nothing to explain or explain away. And if one were to explain it away, as one with Brahman, then one would have precisely failed to explain it.

What Dennet is maintaining about consciousness and the Subject is even worse. There is some vestige of sense in the claim that the world is an illusion. It makes sense, at least initially, to say that there is an Absolute Consciousness and that the world is its illusion. But it is utterly absurd to maintain that consciousness is an illusion. The very distinction between illusion and reality presupposes consciousness. In a world without consciousness, nothing would appear, and so nothing would appear
falsely. Necessarily, no consciousness, no illusions. Illusions prove the reality of consciousness.

This is a very simple point. It is an 'armchair' point. All you have to do is think to know that it is true. But neither its being 'armchair' nor its being simple is an argument against it. The law of non-contradiction is simple and 'armchair' too.

The denigration of a priori knowledge is part and parcel of the pseudophilosophy of scientism.

Since consciousness exists, the project of explaining it at least makes sense, by (1). By (2), an eliminativist explanation is no explanation at all.

The thing about consciousness is that the only way to explain it in terms satisfactory to a materialist is by denying its existence. It is to Dennett's 'credit' that he drives to the very end of this dead-end road, thereby showing that it is a dead-end.

My most rigorous demolition of Dennett's scientistic sophistry is in Can Consciousness be Explained? Dennett Debunked.

If Dennett were right, then we would all be zombies, including Dennett. (See Searle, Dennett, and Zombies.) But then there would be no consciousness to explain and to write fat books about.

The demand that consciousness be exhaustively explained in terms involving no tincture of consciousness is a demand that cannot be met. Explanation of what by whom to whom? Explanation is an inherently mind-involving notion. There are no explanations in nature. There is no way the science of matter can somehow close around the phenomena of mind and include them within its ambit. Science, like explanation, is inherently mind-involving.