Consciousness as existence again by Ted Honderich | World Congress of Philosophy, Boston

Description

Perceptual consciousness, basic to all consciousness, escapes characterization in four naturalist theories, including eliminative materialism and neural functionalism. We need a new start, something different. Phenomenologically, what it is for you to be perceptually conscious is for a world somehow to exist, a changing totality of things. Partly because with consciousness nothing is hidden and all can be reported without inference, perceptual consciousness itself is literally to be understood as things existing in a way spatio-temporally. This account of consciousness as existence satisfies our conviction of the reality of consciousness -- mainly we do not think of it as ethereal or gossamer. The account also explains a fundamental kind of subjectivity, as the naturalist accounts cannot, and passes a test having to do with the mind-body problem. It is a near-naturalism. The account can be defended against objections about brains in vats, chairs in minds, and leaving out consciousness.

What is your being perceptually conscious, your being aware of your surroundings?

(1) It cannot be a string of only neural or electrochemical events. This old materialist answer, the eliminative kind, although still with us, surely leaves something out, a lot.

(2) Does it help to say instead that your being perceptually conscious is a string of events such that each of them is one thing with both neural and other properties? This different and lenient sort of doctrine is spoken of as physicalism, the mind-brain identity theory and monism, and, more enlighteningly, as event-monism. It calls out for completion by an adequate account of the other properties, the ones in which your perceptual consciousness evidently consists. Let us suppose, however, that event-monism when completed will still be somehow physicalistic.    

(3) Is there an answer to the question of the nature of your perceptual consciousness in the varieties of neural functionalism -- functionalism as limited to our species? Here, perceptual consciousness consists in causal relata that are only neural. Despite intending to preserve rather than eliminate consciousness, by way of the idea of variable realization, neural functionalism seems like eliminative materialism in leaving a lot out. Certainly an event of your perceptual consciousness, that event, does not acquire more than its neural properties by the consideration that causally speaking it might instead have had other than neural properties. (4) Finally, it now seems desperate to say that perceptual consciousness is physical properties in your head, properties not now known in neuroscience but somehow different properties that may be discovered in some future science. It is all too possible to anticipate that such discoveries would be taken as still leaving a lot out.1    

These four seemingly failing accounts all have the good recommendation of naturalism. This cannot be philosophically well understood as belief in only whatever things are allowed to exist in science, along with a commitment to scientific method. This characterization of naturalism is uninformative -- it gives only a signpost to the things rather than their nature. It is also an uncertain signpost, if only for the reason that psychology is within science and there is uncertainty about what is within psychology. Also, at best, the characterization is vulnerably tied to a current time-slice of science.    

A better philosophical understanding of naturalism is belief in only physical things, and in fitting methods of inquiry, of which scientific method is at least the dominant one. As for the physical things, given what has just been said, they must not be weakly identified as the things allowed in science. Let us understand them in something like a standard and traditional way. There are two categories of them, those taking up space and time and having perceived properties, and those unperceived but taking up space and time and standing in causal or other lawlike connection with the perceived things. Sofas go into the first category, atoms and a good deal else into the second.2    

There is another account of perceptual consciousness, a speculation that looks at the thing very differently.3 Something new certainly seems necessary in the face of our persistent philosophical failure to get agreement, outside of groups and coteries, on the nature of perceptual and other consciousness. We need a change.4 This particular different account is close to naturalism but not within it -- which particular shortcoming, if such it is, we can leave unconsidered for a while. The spur to the account, as much as the need for a change, is the so-called phenomenology of perceptual consciousness, what is called the way it seems. Here we find the first of what may be taken as four principal constraints on an adequate account of perceptual consciousness.    

Contents:

1. Phenomenology, So-Called

2. Etherealizing Consciousness, and the Reality of It

3. Subjectivity

4. The Mind-Body Problem

5. Historical Theories, Brains in Vats

6. Chairs in Minds? Something Left Out?

 

Original URL

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/ted3.htm

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/ted3.htm