Consciousness and its place in nature
Rebecca Lann
[Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail
Panpsychism? by Galen Strawson and et al * Imprint Academic, 285 pp,
GBP17.95]
by Jerry Fodor -- Consciousness is all the rage just now. It boasts
new journals of its very own, from which learned articles overflow.
Neuropsychologists snap its picture (in colour) with fMRI machines,
and probe with needles for its seat in the brain. At all seasons, and
on many continents, interdisciplinary conferences about consciousness
draw together bizarre motleys that include philosophers,
psychologists, phenomenologists, brain scientists, MDs, computer
scientists, the Dalai Lama, novelists, neurologists, graphic artists,
priests, gurus and (always) people who used to do physics. Institutes
of consciousness studies are bountifully subsidised.
Meticulous distinctions are drawn between the merely conscious and the
consciously available; and between each of these and the preconscious,
the unconscious, the subconscious, the informationally encapsulated
and the introspectable. There is no end of consciousness gossip on
Tuesdays in the science section of the New York Times. Periodically,
Nobel laureates pronounce on the connections between consciousness and
evolution, quantum mechanics, information theory, complexity theory,
chaos theory and the activity of neural nets. Everybody gives lectures
about consciousness to everybody else. But for all that, nothing has
been ascertained with respect to the problem that everybody worries
about most: what philosophers have come to call 'the hard problem'.
The hard problem is this: it is widely supposed that the world is made
entirely of mere matter, but how could mere matter be conscious? How,
in particular, could a couple of pounds of grey tissue have
experiences?
Until quite recently, there were two main schools of thought on this.
According to one, the hard problem is actually very easy: the answer
is that consciousness 'emerges' from neural processes. This succeeds
in replacing 'what is consciousness and how is it possible?' with
'what is emergence and how is it possible?' But it doesn't seem to get
much further; many find it less than satisfactory. According to the
other view, the hard problem is so hard that it can't be real:
consciousness must be some sort of illusion. Many of this persuasion
tried hard to convince themselves that they are, in fact, not
conscious, but few of them succeeded. Centuries ago, Descartes
suggested, plausibly, that the attempt is self-defeating.
There is, I should add, another way to respond to the hard problem.
One might hold that the world isn't made entirely of matter after all;
there is also a fundamentally different kind of stuff - mind-stuff,
call it - and consciousness resides in that. Notoriously, however,
this view has hard problems of its own. For example, if matter-stuff
and mind-stuff are of fundamentally different kinds, how are causal
relations between them possible? How is it possible that eating should
be caused by feeling peckish or feeling peckish by not eating? For
this and other reasons, mind-stuff has mostly fallen out of fashion. I
won't dwell on it here.
That, then, sets the stage for Galen Strawson's *Consciousness and Its
Place in Nature*, which consists of a lead essay by Strawson,
commentaries by 18 other philosophers, and Strawson's extensive
comments on the comments. The book is very rich. On the one hand,
Strawson has the kind of expansive metaphysical imagination that used
to be at the heart of philosophy, but which positivism and analysis
succeeded for a long while in suppressing. Also, the commentaries are,
almost uniformly, insightful, informative, sophisticated and
excellently argued. It is very rare for a book with this sort of
format to be so complete a success, or so much fun to read. I must
warn you, however, that Strawson's way with the hard problem is wildly
at odds with the views current in most of philosophy and psychology.
Many readers will find them too wild to swallow; I'm not at all sure
that I don't.
There are three philosophical principles to which Strawson's
allegiance is unshakeable.
The first is that the existence of consciousness (specifically, of
conscious experience) is undeniable; that we are conscious is
precisely what we know best. (To be sure, we can't prove that we are
conscious; but that is hardly surprising since there is no more secure
premise from which such a proof could proceed.)
Strawson's second principle is a kind of monism: everything that there
is is the same sort of stuff as such familiar things as tables, chairs
and the bodies of animals. This, however, leaves a lot of options open
since Strawson thinks that nothing much is known about that kind of
stuff 'as it is in itself'; at best science tells us only about its
relational properties. What is foreclosed by Strawson's monism is
primarily the sort of 'substance dualism' that is frequently (but, he
thinks, wrongly) attributed to Descartes.
The third of Strawson's leading theses is a good deal more tendentious
than the first two; namely, that emergence isn't possible. 'For any
feature Y of anything that is correctly considered to be emergent from
X, there must be something about X and X alone in virtue of which Y
emerges, and which is sufficient for Y.' But Strawson holds that there
isn't anything about matter in virtue of which conscious experience
could arise from it; or that if there is, we have literally no idea
what it could be. In particular, we can't imagine any way of arranging
small bits of unconscious stuff that would result in the consciousness
of the larger bits of stuff of which they are the constituents. It's
not like liquids (Strawson's favourite example of bona fide emergence)
where we can see, more or less, how constituent molecules that aren't
liquid might be assembled to make larger things that are. How on
earth, Strawson wonders, could anything of that sort explain the
emergence of consciousness from matter? If it does, that's a miracle;
and Strawson doesn't hold with those.
It's his refusal to budge an inch on any of this that makes his
discussion so interesting. Whatever you think of his metaphysical
conclusions, all three of his assumptions are pretty plausible, so
it's well worth asking what's entailed if one agrees to them. Strawson
is prepared to follow the trail to the very end. I, for one, think
that's how philosophy ought to be done. You can't make metaphysics out
of fudge.
So, then, if everything is made of the same sort of stuff as tables
and chairs (as per monism), and if at least some of the things made of
that sort of stuff are conscious (there is no doubt that we are), and
if there is no way of assembling stuff that isn't conscious that
produces stuff that is (there's no emergence), it follows that the
stuff that tables, chairs and the bodies of animals (and, indeed,
everything else) is made of must itself be conscious. Strawson, having
wrestled his angel to a draw, stands revealed as a panpsychist: basic
things (protons, for example) are loci of conscious experience. You
don't find that plausible? Well, I warned you.
Nor, having swallowed this really enormous camel, does Strawson
propose to strain at the gnats. Consider, for example: he thinks
(quite rightly) that there are no experiences without subjects of
experience; if there's a pain, it must be somebody or something's
pain; somebody or something must be in it. What, then, could it be
that has the experiences that panpsychists attribute to ultimate
things? Nothing purely material, surely, since that would just raise
the hard problem all over again. So maybe something immaterial? But
monism is in force; since the constituents of tables and chairs are
made of matter, so too is everything else. So, Strawson is strongly
inclined to conclude, the subjects of the experiences that basic
things have must be the experiences themselves. Part of the surcharge
that we pay for panpsychism (not, after all, itself an immediately
plausible ontology) is that we must give up on the commonsense
distinction between the experience and the experiencer. At the basic
level, headaches have themselves.
Similar lines of thought lead to a forced choice between Strawson's
panpsychism and the traditional distinction between things and their
properties. Contrary to naive intuit-ion, 'Fodor's headache' doesn't
express a relation between something more or less permanent (Fodor)
and something more or less transient (his headache). If that's so,
however, it threatens to make nonsense of counterfactual
hypotheticals; ones which say what would be the case if a given thing
had properties different from the ones it actually does ('Fodor would
have been happy if his headache had gone away'). And finally, having
somehow got all those camels down, it's not clear that Strawson has in
fact arrived at an answer to the hard problem. Suppose that the little
bits of me have (or are) conscious experiences. How does that account
for my being conscious? If you have one experience and I have another,
the total of our experiences comes to two; there isn't a third
experience of which the first two are the constituents. Well, if
that's true of you and me, why isn't it also true of me and the little
things I'm made of? How does their having their headaches help to
explain my having mine?
I should emphasise that none of these objections has escaped
Strawson's attention. To the contrary, I've borrowed most of them from
him. Having been up front about his problems, Strawson considers
various strategies in response to them. Perhaps, for example,
commonsense metaphysics really does have to be abandoned; perhaps, in
particular, the object/property distinction will have to go. Strawson
reads some such moral as already implicit in what's been going on in
recent physics; maybe he's right to do so. And maybe there are
mysteries we must learn to live with; goings-on that we just aren't
built to understand (or that our logic isn't). Maybe the composition
of big experiences out of little ones is among those.
In a way, I'm quite sympathetic to all that. I think it's strictly
true that we can't, as things stand now, so much as imagine the
solution of the hard problem. The revisions of our concepts and
theories that imagining a solution will eventually require are likely
to be very deep and very unsettling. (That's assuming what's by no
means obvious: that we are smart enough to solve it at all.)
Philosophers used to think (some still do) that a bit of analytical
tidying up would make the hard problem go away. But they were wrong to
think that. There is hardly anything that we may not have to cut loose
from before the hard problem is through with us.
Still, all else being equal, whoever gives up least is the winner; so
it matters whether Strawson has abandoned more than he needs to. I'm
not convinced that we will have to throw overboard as much as he
thinks we will. In particular, we might try denying the claim, cited
above, that if Y emerges from X, then there must be something about X
in virtue of which Y emerges from it. Why not just say: some things
are true about the world because that's the kind of world it is;
there's nothing more to make of it. That sounds defeatist perhaps; but
it really isn't since, quite plausibly, it's the sort of thing that we
will have to say sooner or later whether or not saying it would help
with the hard problem.
Typical scientific explanations appeal to natural laws. Some natural
laws are explained by appealing to others, but some aren't; some of
them are basic. So, roughly, the laws about molecules explain the laws
about liquidity; and the laws about atoms explain the laws about
molecules; and the laws about subatomic bits and pieces explain the
laws about atoms and so on down, but not so on down for ever.
Eventually, we get to laws about whatever the smallest things are (or,
perhaps, to laws about the fundamental structure of space-time); and
there we simply stop. Basic laws can't be explained; that's what makes
them basic. There isn't a reason why they hold, they just do. Even if
basic physical laws are true of everything, they don't explain
everything; in particular, they don't explain why, of all the basic
laws that there might have been, these are the ones there actually
are. I don't say that's the right way to look at things, but it's a
perfectly respectable and traditional way. At a minimum, it seems that
the various sciences form some sort of hierarchy, with physics (or
whatever) at the bottom. That's much as one might expect if the sort
of view I'm discussing is at least approximately true.
Maybe, however, there's something wrong with this view and we'll
finally have to do without it. Maybe the hard problem shows that not
all basic laws are laws of physics. Maybe it shows that some of them
are laws of emergence. If that's so, then it's not true after all that
if Y emerges from X there must be something about X in virtue of which
Y emerges from it. Rather, in some cases, there wouldn't be any way of
accounting for what emerges from what. Consciousness might emerge from
matter because matter is the sort of stuff from which consciousness
emerges. Full stop.
It would then have turned out that the hard problem is literally
intractable, and that would be pretty shocking. The idea that the
basic laws are the laws about the smallest things has been central to
the 'scientific world-view' ever since there started to be one. On the
other hand, as far as I can see, it's not any sort of a priori truth.
I suppose one can imagine a world where all the big things are made
out of small things, and there are laws about the small things and
there are laws about the big things, but some laws of the second kind
don't derive from any laws of the first kind. In that world, it might
be a basic law that when you put the right sorts of neurons together
in the right sorts of way, you get a subject of consciousness. There
would be no explaining why you get a subject of consciousness when you
put those neurons together that way; you just do and there's the end
of it. Perhaps Strawson would say that in such a world, emergence
would be a miracle; but if it would, why isn't every basic law a
miracle by definition? I have my pride. I would prefer that the hard
problem should turn out to be unsolvable if the alternative is that
we're all too dumb to solve it. All I ask is that the kind of
unsolvable that it turns out to be has respectable precedents.
Anyhow, Strawson is right that the hard problem really is very hard;
and I share his intuition that it isn't going to get solved for free.
Views that we cherish will be damaged in the process; the serious
question is which ones and how badly. If you want an idea of just how
hard the hard problem is, and just how strange things can look when
you face its hardness without flinching, this is the right book to
read.
(C) LRB Ltd, 1997-2007
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Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used for the educational
purposes of research and open discussion. Content and/or links do not
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commentary: http://www.waggish.org/2007/05/18/jerry-fodor-on-galen-strawson-on-consciousness
Kay
[Consciousness and Its Place in Nature
Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? by Galen Strawson et al. Imprint
Academic, 2006]
Review by Ed Brandon -- When I learnt philosophy in the late '60s, I
think it is fair to say that most philosophers were very much still
under-labourers, in Locke's phrase, clearing away the nonsense that
besets our thinking but not advancing many novel ideas of their own.?
Now, however, they explore realms of supposedly actual possible
worlds, or even impossible ones; they contemplate the possibility that
some contradictions are true; maybe some even count the number of
angels on the end of a pin.?
This volume presents arguments for and against another bizarre, but
strangely prevalent idea: panpsychism, the notion that the fundamental
stuff of the universe is somehow conscious.
Commonsensically, we think of consciousness or sentience as a matter
of having a specific and very complex set of physiological
structures.? We can map the sensors that are responsible for our
tastes, say, and we can discover that cats lack a sense of sweetness.?
(I am indebted to Arthur Bowen's website for what little I know about
the physiology of taste.)? When things lack such features, we take it
that they lack any form of consciousness.? We deny that stones can
think about Vienna, to take logical positivism's example of nonsense,
or can even have any sort of awareness of "what it is like to be a
stone."? Even less are we inclined to think that whatever may be the
ultimate stuff of the universe is characterised by any sort of
consciousness.? Importantly, but perhaps easily overlooked, is the
fact that we also think we are sometimes not conscious: when
anaesthetised, perhaps also when in a deep sleep or severely
inebriated.
But that is common sense.? Things begin to look different when
philosophers start messing around.? Galen Strawson, advancing beyond
Tom Nagel's (1979) cautious revival of interest in the view, has in
recent years moved from a familiar naturalistic stance regarding our
mental life to embrace and here argue very extensively for a form of
panpsychism as the only sensible option for anyone who takes reality
seriously.? This volume, which seems to be the Journal of
Consciousness Studies Vol.13, No.10-11 in all but name, contains an
introductory essay by Strawson, followed by 17 commentaries and then
an almost 100-page reply. ?(A detailed list of contents can be found
here.? Thanks to Leopold Stubenberg's review for the Notre Dame
Philosophical Reviews.) ?There is much too much here to be covered in
this review: I shall concentrate on Strawson's arguments and what seem
to me the major objections raised against them.
Strawson starts from what few would deny: the existence of conscious
experience.? If we are physicalists we must then include conscious
experience among the things that are real, that we hope to capture in
our explanatory theories of how things are.? Here he distinguishes his
own physicalism from that meant by most who use the term: that present-
day physics and the other sciences have got the full range of things
that concretely exist pretty much right.? Since human experiences are
signally absent from what physics and the rest account for, such
physicalists are then confronted with an apparently insoluble problem
of fitting experience within the physical world so understood: the
well-known mind-body problem.? Strawson suggests that one reason for
this stance is that most card-carrying physicalists think they know
quite a lot about the nature of physical reality; but they don't.? All
we have are mathematical structures; we have no idea what the
intrinsic nature of physical stuff is like.? The only case where we do
have some sort of access to the intrinsic nature of something is our
own being, and voil?, that is conscious.? Strawson follows Eddington
in claiming, rightly, that there is therefore no incongruity in
supposing that all the stuff of the universe shares such a feature.
Of course, the common sense view refrains from such a gigantic leap.?
It supposes some sort of emergence: to use Strawson's example, just as
liquidity at normal human temperatures is a feature of water but not
of its component molecules, so consciousness attaches to the complex
neurological structures I mentioned earlier but not to the individual
cells or atoms or quarks that make them up.? So Strawson's next move
is to argue that we can make no sense of such a case of emergence.?
The key difference between these examples is alleged to be that in the
case of the liquidity of water we can specify how the mathematically
expressed properties of individual molecules lead to the
mathematically specified state of liquidity, so while liquidity is a
new, emergent property in one sense, it is really just the resultant
of fundamental properties in another.? But in the case of
consciousness, we have no way of doing anything similar.? There is no
way we can derive consciousness from the physiological, chemical,
physical or other acknowledged properties of human or feline tissue.?
And, Strawson argues, we cannot just say, well that's how it is.?
Emergence cannot be brute -- "there being absolutely no reason in the
nature of things why the emerging thing is as it is" (p. 18).?
Strawson notes that the emergence of Y from X is usually now assumed
to involve the supervenience of Y on X: a lawlike correlation between
the two features.? Brute emergence would imply that there is nothing
about X in virtue of which Y should emerge from or accompany it.? It
would, he thinks, be some sort of miracle, but paradoxically a lawlike
one.
So, he concludes, any emergent mental phenomena must emerge from
something that is itself in some way mental.? He admits to the
difficulty that still remains of adding up many subjects of experience
to become a single subject of experience such as we are, or at least
seem to be.? But he allows himself the out that we may never
understand such things.? Still, they constitute the only
metaphysically respectable type of account that we could accept.
Or do they?? 15 of his 17 commentators don't think so.? As one would
expect of Philosophy, virtually every move I attributed to Strawson,
and several I omitted, are questioned by his commentators.
None deny his starting point, but several question his interpretation
of it (Peter Simons floats the idea that there is no common feature
that our 'experiences' share, p. 149).? While our senses reveal their
connection with, if not their dependence on, various parts of our
bodies, ordinary thinking and awareness of what it is like to be us
does not do so.? Thus Aristotle could hold that thinking depends more
on the heart than the brain, and indeed that some thinking could occur
without any material basis, and nothing in the phenomenology of
thinking would reveal his error.? Strawson's assurance that this
apparent separation of mental properties from anything physical, their
non-derivability from the non-experiential physical word (though not
their actual interdependence on such things as brains), is in fact a
revelation of the actual situation depends, as Philip Goff (pp. 55-7)
and David Papineau (p. 102) argue, on his assumptions that thinking is
transparent, and that it reveals not only the truth, but the whole
truth, about itself, at least in this regard.? It is for Strawson one
of the main intuitions rather than conclusions in his overall
argument. ?George Rey appeals to phenomena such as blindsight (p.
115), and also refers us to experiments on visual illusions (pp.
111-112), while David Rosenthal mentions priming experiments (pp.
119-120), to suggest that our reflective grasp of our mental life is
not in fact as reliable as Strawson supposes, and thus that it could
in fact be rooted in the physical without undue strain.? Carruthers
and Schechter, for their part, offer a way of indirectly getting
around the gap between the experiential and what common sense regards
as non-experiential:? most of our concepts are tied up with others and
reflect our complex bodies of beliefs about the world, our phenomenal
concepts, however, are purely recognitional and so float free; no
other sorts of concepts will entail descriptions using them, so we can
easily but mistakenly suppose that consciousness itself is floating
free of the rest of the world, not the kind of thing that could ever
be physical.? They go on to argue that the same fact about phenomenal
concepts undermines Strawson's hope for panpsychism as a way of
bridging the gap, in principle if not in actual detail: however much
sentience we attribute to the bits that make us up, we could always
wonder why we end up sentient.
Several other commentators appeal to the seeming impossibility of
adding up sentient bits to yield the kind of consciousness we know.?
Goff (p. 54) claims that Strawson cannot avoid the bruteness he
rejects in his own hope for some such emergence.? Sam Coleman, one of
the few willing to follow Strawson in embracing panpsychism, suggests
that it would be easier to reject the notion that experience requires
a subject of experience (pp. 49-50), but he also has to accept that
the emergence in question remains problematic.
Most of the commentators who mention it agree with Strawson's appeal
to Russell and Eddington on science's inability to say anything about
the intrinsic nature of its fundamental entities.? Rosenthal, however,
questions it, by saying in effect that we should take physics to be
saying 'electrons are such that they obey these mathematical
regularities'.? Others wonder whether the fundamental entities might
not simply have relational properties without any intrinsic nature to
go with or ground them.? William Seager reminds us of the difficulties
in specifying informatively what intrinsic properties might be,
contrasts mathematical examples where occupying a particular place in
a structure seems plausibly to exhaust the nature of the abstract
entities in question with the case of physical or concrete objects,
and concludes with several strong objections to the structuralist view
of such things.
Does Strawson's rejoinder take us any further?? It certainly sets out
to revise the standard view of Descartes, with quite a lot of
discussion of Locke, Leibniz and Spinoza as well.? It also allows
Strawson to enunciate some of his metaphysical views such as, using
Kant's words, 'in their relation to the object, the properties are not
in fact subordinated to it, but are the mode of existing of the object
itself' (p. 198).? It shows Strawson's doubts about the utility of
many common metaphysical notions and draws attention to the very weird
things scientists have said about the nature of physical reality, of
space-time, etc., from which obscurity he hopes perhaps to garner at
least the right to respect for his own pet theory.? He makes many
rejoinders to his commentators and provides reformulations of the
basic arguments, but my own reaction was that none of these really
take us much further to being able to agree that some sort of
emergence is utterly impossible.? Emergence is perhaps the core issue
that gets short shrift in his lengthy reply, an explicit decision
since none of the commentators really explored its problems, though
many admitted that work needs to be done (Simons says "emergence is
one of the most eel-like of metaphysical concepts". There has to my
knowledge never been anything approaching a decent analysis of what it
means" [p. 147]).? One might note, however, that the explanatory
properties of our fundamental entities will have brute properties (we
just have to accept that electrons have spin, say; if strings now
explain spin they in turn will have properties that we just have to
accept as doing what they do, in a lawlike way but, I would say,
unmiraculously).? I suspect we need much more detailed examination of
cases of what we take to be emergence (Seager, for instance, claims
that we don't yet understand how high temperature superconductivity
emerges, though we have ideas about how it must go [p. 134]) before we
can conclude so readily that emergent properties cannot be brute in
the same or some other way.
Another respect in which detailed examination of the scientific facts
might be pertinent can be seen by noting that the commonsense ideas I
started with are hardly ever mentioned and certainly not
systematically explored.? But it seems to me that one of the lessons
of discussions of realism, say, in the philosophy of science is that
we don't want (even if we could produce) all-embracing general
metaphysical arguments, but rather empirical arguments about
particular cases: we have good reasons for thinking atoms are real,
but those reasons do not tell us anything about a sea of virtual
particles.
Overall I think one can agree with various commentators that Strawson
has put panpsychism on the table as a view that needs to be
acknowledged and that those inclined to naturalism have to contend
with.? As a book version of a journal this volume comes with a pretty
good, but by no means complete, index.?
References
Nagel, T., 1979. 'Panpsychism' in Mortal Questions: Cambridge
University Press.
(c) 2007 Ed Brandon
Ed Brandon is, by training, a philosopher, and now is working in a
policy position in the University of the West Indies at its Cave Hill
Campus in Barbados.
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