Actual Consciousness, by
Ted Honderich A review by Roberta Locatelli, Times Higher Education, 9 Oct 2014. The
reviewer is a doctoral research student at the University of Warwick
and at Universite Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne. Her research thesis is A Naive Realist Account of Hallucination. ROBERTA LOCATELLI ON AN AUDACIOUS VENTURE TO ELUDICATE REPRESENTATIONS OF THOUGHTS AND DESIRES The debate about consciousness is haunted by the idea that consciousness
is an unsolvable mystery. Moreover, even when optimism prevails, little
consensus can be found. Ted Honderich, Grote professor emeritus of the
philosophy of mind and logic at University College London, disagrees with this
pessimism and identifies the source of the obscurity surrounding the study of
consciousness with the failure to adequately clarify the subject matter of the
enquiry. His first endeavour is thus to circumscribe the object of his study to
what he takes to be consciousness in its primary ordinary sense: “seeing,
thinking, wanting in the ordinary sense of the verb”. No doubt clarifying the
phenomenon one undertakes to elucidate is commendable, yet it is unclear
whether we can identify, in ordinary language or even in the intellectual
enquiry, a primary sense of “consciousness”, and (if any) whether this
corresponds to what Honderich suggests. Still, arbitrary circumscription is
probably a step forward from the confusion and vagueness plaguing so much of
the debate on consciousness. Honderich’s proposal is very ambitious: he wants to provide an analysis
of consciousness in terms of something else. His main complaint against
competing theories is that they fail to do so, by sneaking into the definition
of consciousness something that presupposes it. Nevertheless, it seems to me
that most of the authors he scrutinises do not intend to provide an analysis of
consciousness – and this is not because of the particular intractable nature of
consciousness, but because many philosophers nowadays do not share Honderich’s
trust in conceptual analysis, at least for most concepts (can you define, for
instance, “red” in terms of something else?). The book’s early chapters offer a survey of the leading ideas and
theories in the study of consciousness. Doubtless as a side-effect of the
impressive amount of material covered – and the author’s determination to
entertain the reader with an informal dialogic style – blunt criticism and
caricatures of opponents’ views prevail too often over substantive arguments. What of Honderich’s proposal? “Being conscious”, he says, “is for
something to be actual.” If this does not strike you as particularly
informative (if what is actual is what exists in fact, this seems to apply to
many things that have nothing to do with consciousness), things become clearer
when Honderich explains what it is that is actual in different types of
consciousness. In sensory perception, what is actual is a subjective physical
world: something that is physical (like the table out there) but that also depends
on facts about the subject (those facts being physical through and through,
such as its neural states and its location). What is actual in thought, desire
and the like are representations. For Honderich, representations inhabit the
subjective physical realm too and, as such, are both physical and subjective. The notion of a subjective physical world offers an ingenious new
solution to the problem of consciousness – a solution that promises, among
other things, to overcome the classical opposition between dualism and
materialism and to preserve both the subjective nature of consciousness and its
causal efficacy. Despite this, the details and the implications of such a view
remain largely unexplored here. The reader is left wondering how the objective and
subjective physical world relate, and what the spatial and temporal location of
representations might be. |