Category: Dennett

A Response to my Post on Semantic Engines

Here is long-time reader TB’s e-mail response to what I said yesterday.  (TB works in AI and/or adjacent fields; I didn’t press him on his employment details.) I told TB that I need a better understanding of what goes on ‘under the hood’ of these amazing engines to be sure that I am not ‘blowing smoke’ when I assert that they are not truly intelligent but merely simulate human intelligence. I have bolded a couple of key sentences and made some minor edits. It is wonderfully clear and — as far as I can judge — accurate.

……………………………..

You are 100% correct in your post in my view. I read Nagel’s most recent defence of the reality of first person consciousness a few years ago. He could have made his argument in about half the words, but he is right. Dennett and friends claim that consciousness is an illusion; there is a theory that the mind plays this trick whereby all stimulus from without gets converted to a sort of realtime stream of imagery / impressions that we mistake for consciousness. This ‘illusion’ argument seems to forget what ‘illusion’ means – first person experience. Each person’s illusion is his own. And then we realise that calling it an ‘illusion’ is meant to make us dismiss it as not real. So I think your closing comments are exactly right – the deniers want to argue that the first person experience we really are having is a) really there (something has to be there, since something is fooling us into thinking there is something there), but it’s an illusion, so ‘not real’, while simultaneously telling us b) that it (i.e. conscious experience) is not really there at all.

A few things on AI. You have undoubtedly understood that there is something called a Large Language Model (LLM). LLMs are trained on the whole internet, and in addition vast numbers of (generally illegally obtained) PDFs of physical books that the AI companies obtain, destroy the spine, and scan. All of this is the ‘training base’. Each sentence of every document, web page etc, is ‘tokenised’ and each each token is ’embedded’ in a high dimension vector space, such that concepts that frequently co-occur or appear to be used as near synonyms in similar documents, end up as vectors that are close, i.e. whose normalised mathematical projection (cosine) is close to 1.0.

Tools like ChatGPT work as follows: they take your prompt, prepend a bunch of other info, including things it has learned about you from prior use (name=vallicella; professional philosopher; tradition = analytic / anglo / German; location = Phoenix AZ, . . . etc, plus a summarised version of prior queries), and it returns text that it scores highest as being an appropriate response (i.e. ‘prediction’ of what is likely to come next in this kind of exchange). There is other functionality wrapped around the core, that will prevent it getting into profanity, discussions of the kind that KKK or Hamas types might enjoy, and also pro-woke censorship.

If you ask it a question like ‘how many biological sexes are there in mammals’ it prevaricates, with hedged language, and very quickly gets into subjective woke BS like ‘However it is important to realise that there are many sexual experiences in reality, beyond merely male and female…’ etc – I can send you the result of having done this last year.
Nevertheless, if one stays away from radioactive subjects like trans / race +IQ / Islam etc, tools like ChatGPT are surprisingly good.
Recently, I asked it the following (see below [omitted- BV]). It produced a lot more text than I have reproduced below. But you can see that it went straight to the right place: Russell, Frege, modern set theory, etc. I followed up with more Qs, and it was able to produce very coherent output.
All of this is happening not only with no built-in reasoner, but no internal ontology of conceptual relations. What appears to be reasoning is mainly achieved by more text prediction. Remember, it has been trained on the entire visible textual output of humanity, including all the debates found in comments below articles in the NYT or somewhere on Facebook. Plus 100 books on formal logic, so it knows what (say) modus tollens and modus ponens are. You can ask it about syllogisms, subsumption, or go into Husserl, or (if you’ve been smoking something), into Derrida – anything you like. You can ask it what’s a good washing machine to buy in Brazil, to fit in a certain sized space. It can find such contemporary data using something called RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) – – what it means is that it is going to the web and tearing through online shopping sites for you, looking for data sheets for washing machines that are a depth of less than 62 cm. It has to do this extra ‘retrieval’ because its training set (from say 1y ago) doesn’t have up to date info on washing machines that you can buy in Brazil.
There’s no subjective first-person experience going on with any of this – an LLM has no body, no identity, no mind-embedded-in-a-body, no way of experiencing qualia; simply no experiential dimension at all. But it makes it look like it’s doing all of this – just by communicating in ways that another human might – except the other human has the whole of human knowledge (including tons of noise, i.e. garbage from Facebook or whatever) in its head.

 

Semantic Engines, Consciousness, Intentionality, and Understanding

John Haugeland:

The basic idea of cognitive science is that intelligent beings are semantic engines – in other words, automatic formal systems with interpretations under which they consistently make sense. [This puts]  psychology and artificial intelligence on a more or less equal footing: people and intelligent computers [are] different manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon. (p. 15)

“The basic idea of cognitive science” is what John Searle calls Strong Artificial Intelligence.  “On the Strong AI view, the appropriately programmed digital computer does not just simulate having a mind, it literally has a mind.” (Mind: A Brief Introduction, Oxford UP 2004, p. 66) Searle does not, however, endorse Haugeland’s view. The latter — call it H — implies that there is no good reason to think that the  (natural) intelligence in us  must be any different  in kind from the (artificial) intelligence that is now present in some computers.   My view is that there is good reason to doubt it, and what’s more, deny it.

But if I have reason to deny (H), then it is incumbent upon me to explain why. No bare assertions allowed. (Quod gratis asseritur gratis negatur.) I will defend what Hauegeland calls the Hollow Shell Strategy.  The following quotations are from an  accurate summary of Haugeland’s above-cited article, a summary  written by someone else.

Hollow Shell: however well a semantic engine acts as if it understands, it can’t really do so because it’s missing some vital ingredient “X”. A robot based on a semantic engine would be a sham no matter how good it got. Candidates for “X” are consciousness, original intentionality and caring.

I will consider in this post just consciousness and original intentionality.

X = Consciousness: however smart computers might seem, they can’t really understand anything because they aren’t conscious. It’s natural to suppose something difficult and important has been left out. Haugeland responds by saying that no one understands consciousness – it’s mysterious regardless of your viewpoint. So, how do we know (a) that understanding is impossible without consciousness or (b) that semantic engines won’t ever have consciousness?

NON-INTENTIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The first step  is to distinguish between consciousness (non-intentional consciousness) and consciousness-of. The latter is what philosophers call intentionality or object-directedness.  A conscious state need not be an intentional or object-directed state.  Felt sensations of pain and pleasure, for example, needn’t present an object: they needn’t be of or about anything in the way my noticing that the door is ajar about the door’s being ajar. I have found that it is very difficult to get this distinction across to some people. I’ll try once more.

You are pedaling your bike and you feel  something you describe as ‘pain in the right knee.’ Is that felt pain literally in your knee? No.  What is literally inside the knee is at most the cause of the felt pain:  an X-ray reveals that you are ‘bone-on-bone’: the meniscus has worn away and the femur is grinding against the tibia.  The X-ray reveals the cause. The cause is physical; the pain you feel is not physical, but mental. Follow me so far?

The felt pain — the pain as sensory quale — does not show up on the X-ray slide, nor will the felt pain be empirically detected by an orthopedic surgeon who cuts into the knee and looks around in there.  The point is this: the felt pain is a conscious state that is not an intentional state.  The conscious state has no intentional object;  it is not object-directed; it does not present an object to the person in the state; it does not ‘take an accusative.’ These are four different ways of saying the same thing.

So far I have made two simple distinctions. The first is between the physical/material cause of the felt pain and the felt pain as mental /conscious sensory quale. The second is between conscious states that are not object-directed and those that are.

What is a conscious state? A conscious state is an occurrent episode of awareness. I have just alluded to a third distinction between the occurrent and the dispositional.  Another technical term is ‘act,’ not to be confused with ‘action.’ (A fourth distinction.) An act is an occurrent episode of awareness (consciousness) that takes an object. No act without an object and no object without an act.  ‘Object’ in this context means intentional object, where such an object may or may not exist without prejudice to its being an intentional object.  So we distinguish between merely intentional objects and intentional objects that also exist in reality, i.e., extra-mentally. (I’ve just made a fifth distinction).  If I ever get a tattoo, it will read Distinguo ergo sum.

There are other points to be made but I must move on.

If we use ‘qualia’ to refer to the non-intentional conscious states one of which I  have just  described, then Daniel Dennett is a qualia-denier. His opposite number is Thomas Nagel, a qualia-affirmer. To put it bluntly and polemically: Thomas Nagel is for me the real thing as philosophers go; Daniel Dennett is a brilliant sophist. But he is indeed brilliant and creative and his work cannot be ignored. His work functions as a very useful and richly elaborated foil against which to develop saner and sounder theories, theories that have a chance of being true.

Killer Quotation from Nagel from a  NYRB review.

I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”

That’s right. When a line of reasoning issues in an absurdity such as the absurdity that consciousness and its deliverances are illusions, then what you have is a reductio ad absurdum of one or more of the premises with which the reasoning began.  Dennett assumes physicalism and that everything can be explained in physical terms.  This leads to absurdity. But Dennett, blinded by his own brilliance — don’t forget, he counts himself one of the ‘brights’ — bites the bullet. He’d rather break his teeth than examine his assumptions.

Another thing struck me. Dennett makes much of Wilfrid Sellars’ distinction between the manifest and scientific images. ‘Image’ is not quite the right word. An image is someone’s image. But whose image is the scientific image? Who is its subject? It is arguably our image no less than the manifest image.  Nagel quotes Dennett as saying of the manifest image: “It’s the world according to us.”  But the same, or something very similar, is true of the scientific image: it’s the world in itself according to us.  Talk of molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, and strings is our talk just as much as talk of colors and plants and animals and haircuts and home runs.

The world of physics is the world as it is in itself according to us.  Arguably, the ‘according to us’ gets the upper hand over the ‘in itself’ relativizing what comes within the former’s  scope much like Kant’s transcendental prefix, Ich denke.  Das ‘ich denke’ muss alle meine Vorstellungen begleiten koennen . . . .  “The ”I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations.” (KdrV, B 131-2)

Arguably, the world of physics is a mind-involving construct arrived at by excluding the mental and abstracting away from the first-person point of view and the life world (Husserl’s Lebenswelt) it reveals.  I am alluding to an idealist approach to the problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view.  It has its own problems. But why is it inferior to a view like Dennett’s which eliminates as illusory obvious data that are plainly not illusory?

Time was when absolute idealism was the default position in philosophy. Think back to the days of Bradley and Bosanquet. But reaction set in, times have changed, and the Zeitgeist is now against the privileging of Mind and for the apotheosis of Matter.  (But again, matter as construed by us. Arguably, the scientific realist reifies theoretical constructs that we create and employ to make sense of experience.)  Because idealism is out of vogue, the best and brightest are not drawn to its defense, and the brilliant few it attracts are too few to make much headway against the prevailing winds.

Now I’ll tell you what I really think. The problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view is genuine and perhaps the deepest of all philosophical problems. But it is insoluble by us.  If it does have a solution, however, it certainly won’t be anything like Dennett’s.

Although Dennett’s positive theory is worthless, his excesses are extremely useful in helping us see just how deep and many-sided and intractable the problems are.

IS CONSCIOUSNESS MYSTERIOUS?

Haugeland says it is, above.

My response is that consciousness is mysterious only if you insist on trying to understand it in materialist or  naturalist terms.  For if you try to understand it in these terms, then you are approaching it from a third-person point of view and are bound to miss it.  From the first-person point of view, it is self-evidently certain that there is consciousness.  Nagel 1; Dennett 0.

It is also self-evidently certain that there is consciousness of objects. ‘Consciousness of objects’ is a genitivus objectivus. So consciousness of objects = object-directed consciousness.  If something is appearing to you, you are conscious of it.

Is anything appearing to you right now?  How about the computer in front of you, the desk upon which it sits, and so on.  Plenty of objects are appearing. This is undeniable.  The question is not whether appearing objects exist apart from their appearing. The question is whether any objects are appearing. You will miss the simple point I am making if you think that consciousness, to be real, must itself appear as a particular object among objects.  It does not and cannot since it is what makes possible the appearing of objects in the first place.

Do you understand the sentences you are now reading? You do. So  the  sentences and the words  in them are  appearing.   If there were no object-directed consciousness, you would not understand anything you are reading or hearing.  Indeed, you would not be reading or hearing at all. Are the words appearing to a Cartesian res cogitans, an immaterial thinking substance? I didn’t say anything about that. I am simply pointing out the obvious phenomenological fact that objects are appearing. The words you are reading are appearing to you as objects of visual consciousness.

So the answer to (a) above in the second quotation is this:  we know that understanding without consciousness is impossible because  without consciousness nothing would appear that could be understood or not understood.  ‘Consciousness’ here is of course  consciousness-of.

As for (b) — How do we know that semantic engines (automatic formal systems) won’t ever  have consciousness?  — the question makes no sense since it contradicts the very idea of a semantic engine.  For Haugeland, a semantic engine is one in which the “semantics takes care of itself” once the proper syntactic operations are up and running. But there is no semantics in such a contraption and the semantics cannot “take care of itself” because you cannot get meaning from merely syntactic manipulations of uninterpreted symbols.   What makes a symbol a full-fledged symbol is its interpretation by an Original Intender (an Original Sinn-er, to make Fregean pun out of it).

Computers running programs are wholly meaning -free in and of themselves. All meaning originates from us.

X = Original Intentionality: a semantic engine’s tokens only have meaning because we give meaning to them; their intentionality is derivative, and they don’t mean anything by their tokens any more than books do. Genuine understanding is intentional in its own right and isn’t derived from something else. Haugeland’s response is that actions prove intentionality. Books don’t act, so their intentionality is the author’s, but this isn’t a real counter-example. Robots might be made which act in an intelligent, self-motivated and responsive manner – and seem to act on its opinions, defend them or modify them, which would suggest that they were the robot’s own opinions. So, the response is similar to the last one; original intentionality depends on whether the object has a suitable structure and / or dispositions relative to its environment, so how do we know semantic engines can’t have it?

Haugeland’s response to the objection from original intentionality gives me no good reason to change my view.  He allows that the derivative intentionality of a book comes from the original intentionality of its author but disallows books as counterexamples because they don’t act. That’s true of most books: they just ‘sit’ on the shelf and don’t do anything.  But audio books speak to us, thereby acting.  Will Haugeland say that audio books are self-motivated and act in an intelligent way?  I hope not. As for robots, all Haugeland is able to show is that robots SIMULATE human actions and SIMULATE human thought processes. Beyond that, he is simply begging the question.

I do grant, however, that it really would be wonderful if we could understand the mind-brain relation in us as just a special case of the relation of software to hardware /wetware in a machine running a program. It it easy to understand how cognitive scientists got unduly excited over the prospects of this research program.

The fundamental error of Dennett, Haugeland, et al. is the mistake of thinking that an exhaustive understanding of everything is achievable from a third-person point of view.  And so Dennett attempts the absurd task of explaining consciousness by explaining it away — which issues in the self-refuting claim that consciousness is an illusion.  I explain this in detail in my Substack article Can Consciousness be Explained? Dennett Debunked.

Original and Derived Intentionality, Circles, and Regresses 2.0

I dust off, revise, and expand this old entry in connection with discussions with Malcolm Pollack, Dmitri D. et al. about artificial intelligence. One of the questions is whether AI systems are subjects of intrinsic intentional states.  I incline to the view that they are not. Since intentional states are meaning-laden, I further incline to the view that no AI system, not even the most advanced LLMs, understand language or anything else.  They are merely syntactic engines.

………………………….

1.  Intentionality: Original and Derived

All will agree that there is a distinction to be made between original (intrinsic) and derived intentionality. Intentionality is aboutness. For example, a map is not the terrain it maps; the map is about the terrain. What makes the map about the terrain? A map is not about a chunk of terrain and its geological features just in virtue of the map’s physical and geometrical properties. Consider the contour lines on a topographical map. The closer together, the steeper the terrain. Closer together means  steeper. But surely the lines and their arrangement have no representational power in themselves. That closer together should mean steeper is a meaning assigned by map-makers and agreed to by map-users.  

The point is that a map’s meaning is not intrinsic to the map qua physical object. The meaning derives from us. There has to be one or more meaning-assigners and meaning-apprehenders external to the map to give the map a meaning and determine what that meaning is.  The map’s intentionality is derivative: it derives, or has it source in, our intentionality, which is original.   

So some things, maps for example, derive their semantic properties from other things, map-makers and map-users, for example.  Semantics has to do with sense and reference.  ‘Meaning’ covers both.  Setting sense aside for now, the reference or referent of a map is that to which it purports to refer.   

But note that a map needn’t actually refer to anything to be a map.  It need only purport to refer. This is a well-known characteristic feature of intentionality or aboutness or object-directedness: the existence in reality of the intentional object does not follow from the fact that something intends it.  Thus the existence in reality of a chunk of terrain does not follow from the existence of a map of it.   The map below purports to refer to something extra-cartographically real, but fails in its purport. It is no less a map for all that.

Suppose I draw you a map so that you can find my camp in the extra-cartographically real Superstition Wilderness. I use the Greek uppercase Φ to mark my camp and the Greek uppercase Ψ to mark the camp of a heavily-armed crazy man that you are well advised to avoid. I intend that Φ designate my camp, and Ψ his. That intending (narrow sense) is a case of intentionality (broad sense). I am the meaning-assigner.  I assign a referent to the Greek symbols, thereby making those inscriptions mean (refer to) something, symbolize something.

A symbol may be viewed for certain purposes as a purely syntactic unit. To view it this way  is to abstract  from its semantic properties. A symbol in use, however, a symbol that symbolizes, a symbol that exercises its symbolic function, is a syntactic unit that means something other than it, and is therefore more than a merely syntactic unit.  A syntactic engine is a machine that manipulates symbols qua syntactic units, ‘tokens’ is what the AI guys call them.   A computer is just a syntactic engine.  The same is true of the most advanced AI systems. The manipulation of symbols as mere syntactic units cannot confer meaning upon them.  Such ‘manipulation’  is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for meaning.

Or at least this is a question we need to consider. I incline to the view that, just as you cannot squeeze blood from a stone, you cannot squeeze semantics from syntactics.  No AI system, not even the most advanced LLM,  can by itself, mean anything or understand anything.  

It is also important to note that the very distinction between syntax and semantics presupposes languages and understanding, and thus presupposes the antecedent ‘marriage’  of  the syntactic and semantic. How then can we reduce the latter to the former?  I’ll spell this out in later posts.

I have said enough to make clear the difference between derived and original intentionality. The symbols on my map derive their intentionality or aboutness from my intentionality which, relative to theirs, is original. But if the origin of their intentionality is in me, and not in them, might it not be the case that my intentionality is itself derived? After all, it does not follow from the fact that I am the source of the intentionality of the symbols on my map that my intentionality does not itself have a source. But if so, then a regress threatens which appears to be both infinite and vicious. But before discussing this further, I need to bring in another point.

2.  Ascriptivism Versus Realism

Daniel Dennett appears to hold an ascriptivist or projectivist or imputationalist or instrumentalist theory of intentionality: nothing is an intentional system intrinsically or an sich; a system is intentional only in virtue of someone’s assigning intentional states to it. Thus there is no intrinsic intentionality in my computer (when it is running a chess program or any program).  But it may be nonetheless useful to take up the “intentional stance” vis-a-vis the computer and impute to it beliefs and desires (e.g., the desire to inflict mate) in order to explain its behavior. Given the computer’s complexity, the intentional stance promises an easier explanation than the physical and design stances do.

A realist about intentionality, on the other hand, is someone who holds that some systems really are intrinsically intentional: their having beliefs and desires and other object-directed states is not a matter of anyone’s viewing them as having such states.  I am a realist: some systems are intrinsically intentional.  But there are two ways to be a realist.

One way  is by being a reductive realist. Such a person admits the reality of intentional states but identifies them with something believed to be more fundamental such as brain states. If you believe, with Fred Dretske, that intentionality does not need naturalizing, but already is a natural phenomenon in the natural world, then you are presumably a reductive realist about intentionality. You are saying this: there is intrinsic intentionality, but it is physical in nature.

I’m a realist too, but a nonreductive one: I hold that intentionality is irreducibly real: it cannot be reduced to, or identified with, anything else. It is what it is and not some other thing. It is what it is and it is spiritual in nature. Part of the reason I believe this is because the alternatives are quite hopeless.  But what on earth or in heaven does ‘spiritual’ mean?  This is a challenge I face.

3. The Ascriptivist Regress 

Back to Dennett. Suppose one takes the ascriptivist line. Then an infinite regress appears unavoidable. Suppose I ascribe intentionality to my chess playing computer. Quite obviously, my ascribing, projecting, imputing, is itself an intentional state or a series of such states. So if ascriptivism is true, then my acts of ascribing must themselves be ascribed — otherwise they are intrinsic and Danny’s game is over. This launches us on a regress that is obviously infinite since at each level, one can “kick it up a notch.” It is also clear that this regress (unlike the truth regress) is vicious since at no level is the explanation of intentionality complete.

One might think to avoid the regress by embracing a circle: I ascribe intentional states to the computer and it ascribes intentional states to me. But surely this is even more of an absurdity for reasons that needn’t be belabored.

The upshot is that pure ascriptivism is incoherent, an utter non-starter. Dennett’s actual view is a bit different. 

4. Adulterated Ascriptivism : Homunculism

Perhaps the solution is to mix some realism in with the ascriptivism. Maybe it goes like this. I have a head full of homunculi. These little men and women, working together, ascribe intentionality to me. But each homunculus has its intentionality ascribed to it by other, stupider, homunculi which are constituents of it. The stupider homunculi, in turn, are composed of even stupider ones, and so on until we get to the level of individual neurons which aren’t ‘about’ anything. The base level homunculi are so stupid that one could say that they don’t even rise to the level of being either stupid or intelligent.

Does this avoid the dilemma of having to choose between a vicious infinite regress and a vicious circle? What Dennett is proposing is a finite regress that terminates with something naturalistically acceptable, namely entities that lack intrinsic or original intentionality.

Admittedly, this proposal gets rid of the infinity of the regress, but not its viciousness: we still have no explanation of intentionality. Consider the base-level homunculi. They are so primitive as to lack all intentionality. How then can they ascribe intentionality to their colleagues one level up? Surely it is obvious that the ascribing of intentionality is itself an intentional act or series thereof.

The point is quite simple. If the regress terminates with base entities utterly devoid of intentionality, then no higher level entities will be intentional. For the higher-ups get their intentionality only from the ones lower down in the hierarchy. If the ones at the very bottom have no intentionality, then they can’t transmit it up. But if, on the other hand, the ones at the very bottom possess intentionality, then it is false that all intentionality is derived.

In the final analysis, Dennett is an eliminativist about intentionality. His position amounts in the end to the denial of intentionality. To see this, you just have to think clearly. Dennett is saying that all intentionality is derivative, none is intrinsic or original. But that makes sense only if one embraces an infinite regress. But in this case an infinite regress must be vicious. On the other hand, a regress that terminates either terminates with entities that are intrinsically intentional or entities that are not. If the former, the game is over. If the latter, no intentionality gets transmitted up and Dennett is an eliminativist about intentionality just as he is an eliminativist about consciousness and qualia.

Searle, Dennett and Zombies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, but that it is nevertheless wholly material in nature! Some matter is sentient and some matter thinks. My euphoria is literally inside my skull and so are my thoughts about Boston. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

This strikes me as bluster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once More on Whether Consciousness Could be an Illusion

The following just in from a Scandinavian reader:

Thank you for your great blog, I’ve been a regular reader for some time!

You have often made the point, that it is incoherent to say that consciousness in an illusion, because it is a presupposition to the distinction between appearance and reality. In an interesting article defending the thesis that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, Keith Frankish has a response to this. (“Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness”, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23, 11-12, 2016, pp. 11-39.) I’m not convinced, but I have the feeling that I don’t even understand what Frankish is saying here. (Well, if Frankish is right, this feeling is an illusion, so I should be alright.)

Here is a recent version of my argument in which I have that brilliant sophist, Daniel Dennett, in my sights:

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. 

Back to my reader:

Frankish says that this ”no appearance-reality gap” objection to illusionism is ”far from compelling”. His reason seems to be something like this: According to illusionism, when we are having, say, a greenish experience, we introspectively represent ourselves as having a greenish experience, and this can be done without having a greenish experience. This is because “the content of introspective representations is determined by non-phenomenal, causal or functional factors”. So when one sees green, and there something it is like to see green for that person, he is in fact mistaken; there is nothing it is like to see green. The mistake is generated by a non-veridical introspective representation. The “feelyness” of this is an illusion. But the illusion itself is not a case of phenomenal consciousness, because it is possible to represent oneself as having a state of phenomenal consciousness, without actually having such a state. And thus the “no appearance-reality gap” objection to illusionism fails.

Is must confess that I don’t understand this point. Even if phenomenal consciousness is an illusion generated by non-veridical representations, there is still this illusion of seeming left, and thus the “no appearance-reality gap” objection is not refuted. Am I missing something?

I haven't read the article in question so I will have to go by the reader's report.  From what he says, the account sounds like question-begging gibberish: "when we are having, say, a greenish experience, we introspectively represent ourselves as having a greenish experience, and this can be done without having a greenish experience." Unsinn!

Here is a Killer Quote from Thomas Nagel  directed against Dennett that sums things up nicely:

I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”

That's right. When a line of reasoning issues in an absurdity such as the absurdity that consciousness and its deliverances are illusions, then what you have is a reductio ad absurdum of one or more of the premises with which the reasoning began.  Dennett assumes physicalism and that everything can be explained in physical terms.  This leads to absurdity. But Dennett, blinded by his own brilliance — don't forget, he counts himself one of the 'brights' – bites the bullet. He'd rather break his teeth than examine his assumptions.

Another thing strikes me. Dennett makes much of Wilfrid Sellars' distinction between the manifest and scientific images. 'Image' is not quite the right word. An image is someone's image. But whose image is the scientific image? Who is its subject? It is arguably our image no less than the manifest image.  Nagel quotes Dennett as saying of the manifest image: "It’s the world according to us."  But the same, or something very similar, is true of the scientific image: it's the world in itself according to us.  Talk of molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, and strings is our talk just as much as talk of colors and plants and animals and haircuts and home runs.  

The world of physics is the world as it is in itself according to us.  Arguably, the 'according to us' gets the upper hand over the 'in itself,' relativizing what comes within the former's  scope much like Kant's transcendental prefix, Ich denke relativizes what comes within its scope.  Das 'ich denke' muss alle meine Vorstellungen begleiten koennen . . . .  "The ''I think' must be able to accompany all my representations." (KdrV, B 131-2)

Arguably, the world of physics is a mind-involving construct arrived at by excluding the mental and abstracting away from the first-person point of view and the life world it reveals.  I am alluding to an phenomenological-idealist approach to the problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view.  It has its own problems. But why is it inferior to a view like Dennett's which eliminates as illusory obvious data that are plainly not illusory?

No philosophy is worth anything that gets the phenomenology wrong, or simply ignores the phenomenology. For that is where we must start if we are responsible philosophers, as opposed to apologist for theories we accept without critical examination.

Time was when absolute idealism was the default position in philosophy. Think back to the days of Bradley and Bosanquet. But reaction set in, times have changed, and the Zeitgeist is now against the privileging of Mind and for the apotheosis of Matter.  (But again, matter as construed by us. Arguably, the scientific realist reifies theoretical constructs that we create and employ to make sense of experience.)  Because idealism is out of vogue, the best and brightest are not drawn to its defense, and the brilliant few it attracts are too few to make much headway against the prevailing winds.

Now I'll tell you what I really think. The problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view is genuine and perhaps the deepest of all philosophical problems. But it is insoluble by us.  If it does have a solution, however, it certainly won't be anything like Dennett's.

Although Dennett's positive theory is worthless, his excesses are extremely useful in helping us see just how deep and many-sided and intractable the problem is.