Actual Consciousness -- A Fuller Summary
13 July 2014
What has been called the mind-body problem,
and persisted for four centuries, apparently the relation between two things, has in fact been at least primarily one of them. It has been the mind problem, at least primarily the
consciousness problem. What is the fact or state of being conscious? What is
its nature?
Ted Honderich is known for work in the philosophy of mind, a resolution of the
issue of determinism's relations to the freedoms, and argument for social ends and
political means. He is Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and
Logic of University College London, and editor of The Oxford Companion to
Philosophy.
In Actual Consciousness, Oxford University Press, 213,000 words, six years in the writing, he gives plain but cumulative argument for a new theory or analysis of what it is to be conscious in the primary ordinary sense. If he does not claim to have solved all of the consciousness problem, or dreamed of replacing the science of consciousness, he has provided a novel line of argument for a theory that is a place for further work and maybe a liberation in both philosophy and science.
He proposes that 'the hard problem' of
consciousness
identified by David Chalmers does not exist, and that other pessimisms,
say
Chomsky’s, are escapable.
This unrelenting if informal book is a conversation with a reader, a
reminder that both parties are uniquely well placed to think about the
subject. Conscious is what they both are. The book first seeks
agreement
what it eventually claims to have established. This is that
philosophical and
scientific disagreement or supposed disagreement about
consciousness has been
owed mainly to not talking about the same thing, asking different
questions.
Despite five leading ideas of consciousness -- qualia, Tom Nagel's idea
of what
it is like to be something, traditional subjectivity having to do with
a self, Brentano's and Tim
Crane's ideas of intentionality or aboutness, and Ned Block's idea
of
phenomenality -- despite these leading ideas, there has been no
adequate
initial clarification of a single subject.
Actual Consciousness, perhaps more respectful of science than
philosophy, rests on a database -- linguistic and hence conceptual data
provided en passant by all us
possessors of consciousness, we who have a hold
with respect to our own consciousnesses, and in particular data provided in passing by the proponents
themselves of the five leading ideas. Just a little of the data is of
consciousness as being something's being had in a certain sense, given,
encountered, experienced, undergone, something's being apparent, present,
manifest, provided, something's being for or to something
else, in touch, something not deduced or constructed, something's being open, presented, close,
naked, something being transparent in the sense of being unconveyed through anything else,
something's existing, being real, something's occurring, something's being content or object, something's being right there.
This overlooked database, both epistemic and ontic in character, is not a notion of elusive entities, or a philosopher's apercu or single good idea, or a
traditional obscurity, or a too narrow idea perhaps prompted by thinking about language, or an elusive amalgamation – or any
bundle of these things, or of course any circularity in them. It is of course metaphorical or otherwise figurative. It can be
encapsulated in the general and still figurative idea that consciousness in the
primary ordinary sense is something being actual. This is the case in
one way with consciousness in (i) seeing and other perception. It is the case in
two other different ways with (ii) thinking along with the rest of cognitive
consciousness, and (iii) with wanting along with the rest of affective
consciousness.
All of which issues in two principal questions. What is actual? What is its
being actual?
What is actual with your perceptual consciousness right now is very likely only
a room, a part or stage of a subjective physical world.
What is
actual is certainly not any kind of representation of a room, or an
aboutness,
or an inner content or object, or a room inside your head, or qualia or the like, or what is called
mental
paint, or a traditional self, or the causal or other relations between things that are the stuff of functionalism and
cognitive science -- whatever part representations and the other things
play in
unconscious mentality.
The subjective physical world in your
case now, one a myriad number of such worlds, and whose existence is put in no doubt whatever by
that fact or by its transience, is both physical, in a way that can be fully articulated, and also subjective,
in a sense or rather senses that can be quite as fully explained. Its being
actual is exactly those facts of physicality. Out of the figurative data
and the figurative encapsulation of it comes this literal and explicit analysis.
There is progress from the figurative to the literal, of a kind familiar and
documented in the history of science, and in the inception and construction of
theories generally.
More particularly, a room is out there in ordinary space and time, internally
and otherwise lawfully connected, within the method and inventory of science,
different from different points of view, bound up with perception, and so on. This
fact of a room is constitutive of your perceptual consciousness now.
What it is to be perceptually conscious is for a subjective physical
world to exist. One of its lawful dependencies is on the objective
physical world, more particularly a counterpart of the room in the
objective physical world, which world is as much in need of different
articulation. A second lawful dependency is on facts of you, facts also within the
objective physical world.
The objective physical world and the subjective physical worlds together
comprise two parts of the physical world. In place of generalities about the two parts, there are counterpart checklists of 16 characteristics of each of them. To
repeat, that there are a myriad number of subjective physical worlds, each
identified by way of a particular perceiver, is perfectly consistent with each
of them having such characteristics as noted. Each takes up space, is causal,
and so on. Nor are such facts about a subjective physical world at all
inconsistent with the two dependencies. Patently what has dependencies can take
up space, be causal, and so on.
To turn to cognitive consciousness, what is actual with you right now, say your
just thinking of your mother or the proposition of there being different
physicalities, or your attending to a room or something in it, is
a representation or a sequence of representations. Cognitive consciousness is
differently subjectively physical than with a room. Cognitive consciousness is, further, related to
truth -- truth in a clear sense. With respect to affective as against cognitive consciousness, say your
now wanting a glass of wine, what is actual is also representation,
subjectively physical, but related to valuing, at bottom wanting, rather than truth.
An adequate account of these two kinds of conscious representation, called for
by Jerry Fodor and others, whatever needs to be said of languages of thought,
is supplied exactly by their being representations that are also actual.
Representations in general are things characterized in a good lingualism,
which is to say by a relation to speech and writing, not as in the theory of evolutionary
causalism. Conscious representations are not only or purely representations, as are words on paper, but are also actual representations,
which is to say exactly and only representations that are subjectively physical
in their explained ways. The theory is not what is called relationism
or computerism, and it is related to other work including Searle's impressive lingualism and
his admirable Chinese room thought experiment.
So the theory of Actualism, a discriminating externalism-plus-internalism about
consciousness, so consistent with our experience in its three sides, and
familiar in the history of psychology, is put in place of both any flattening
internalism or cranialism about all consciousness and also in place of any flattening or
uncertain externalism. It is put in place, too, of any universal or any pure
representationisms, say those of Crane or William Lycan. It is evidently a
physicalism, a different one, very different indeed from the exemplary
ones of Searle, Daniel Dennett, David Papineau, and others. It does not impose on consciousness a false uniformity.
If Actualism is a theory of consciousness uniquely owed to data, it is
also
offered as most in accord with a battery of criteria for judging
theories of
consciousness. These are got mainly from previously existing theories,
notably
existing physicalisms and the computer-inspired abstract functionalism
in
cognitive science and artificial intelligence, say the abstract
functionalism of Block, as against physical functionalism, which has a
role elsewhere in Actualism. Abstract functionalism, by the way, is
argued for the first time to be essentially equivalent to nothing other
than
the traditional mind-body dualism of Descartes -- and the dualism of such
successors today
as Chalmers, Howard Robinson, in a way Jaegwon Kim, and Jonathan
Lowe.
Above all, Actualism satisfies the criteria of making consciousness both real,
partly since causal, and also different. Consciousness is real and
different in explicit and unfactitious senses. Further, the theory necessarily
gives full content to the endless and correct preoccupation with subjectivity
in connection with consciousness. In particular, subjective physicality includes
an individuality, bound up with personal identity. Actualism also pays enough attention to what should be
the slightly fraught matter of consensus in science and philosophy, of
democracy about truth.
Right or wrong, the theory is an unanticipated departure from the existing philosophy
and science of consciousness in general. It does indeed respect the differences
we all know, between consciousness in seeing and consciousness of thinking and
wanting -- in fact differences strikingly respected in philosophy and
science themselves now including psychology whenever the general nature of consciousness
is not the question. It is perhaps the first general and developed theory that
is explicitly both an externalism and an internalism, which particular
difference is also as true to our experience. It begins wholly differently and
it goes well beyond the previous externalisms of Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge,
Andy Clark, and Alva Noe, and their supporting scientists.
The conclusions are the result not of proof, for which philosophy as against
science is said to be too hard, but of the weight of argument and judgement.
Actualism, it is hoped, is a case of satisfying Hume's hope -- an
inescapability of conclusions given prior acceptance of at least reasonable
premises. It is mainstream philosophy, a greater concentration than that of
science on the logic of ordinary intelligence -- on clarity, consistency and
validity, completeness, and generalness. Hopefully it is fertile or pregnant
thinking. Both that and also reassuring for the science of consciousness.
In the end there is also argument for the supposition at the start that
consciousness in the primary ordinary sense and hence actual
consciousness is a
right concern, that consciousness in this sense is a right question,
more right than anything else. It is in fact a necessary concern, which
supposition does not preclude inquiry and research in terms of
extraordinary
conceptions, or of course in terms of all of mentality, conscious and
unconscious together. Reason is given against Chomsky's so challenging
scepticism about the very idea of a physicalism, and against the
pessimisms
about our dealing with consciouness of which Colin McGinn's was a
dramatic one. We are not at all in the position of chimps with respect to quantum theory. Nothing like.
In the end too the fact of subjectivity as a kind of individuality,
related not only to
personal identity but to the living of a life, is further considered.
There is also
further reflection on the satisfying by Actualism of all the criteria
for a
decent theory of consciousness, including naturalism. Actualism's
relation to
Naive or Direct Realism is considered, its unlikeness, and its
fruitfulness not only for the science of consciousness, but,
for example, the question of determinism's consequences for our
freedoms, in particular free will or origination as against
voluntariness.