A question is being asked a lot lately: how can the most prominent position held by scientists and philosophers be that consciousness doesn’t exist? Obviously consciousness exists. It’s literally the only thing you can know with absolute 100% certainty. “I think, therefore I am.” Cartesian knowledge. That you are experiencing certain things right now is literally undeniable. Your sense of “self,” what you are thinking and feeling, sights and sounds integrated into a unified sensory field, your ability to reason in a stream of connected thoughts and be aware that you are doing so. That you are experiencing these things when you are cannot be denied. What that means, of course, can be doubted. Does it mean there is a physical world, that you are the operational product of a complex wetware computer called a brain? Or is anything you are experiencing real at all, as opposed to just a fantasy or hallucination or lucid dream? Is solipsism true? Or are we just brains in a vat? Does our consciousness prove we have a disembodied soul? Or that anyone even could?
I’ve already covered the question of how we know the external world is real and all that jazz, and that our consciousness is communicating information to us and not just making everything up (see my discussion of Cartesian Demons for a start). And most people get that distinction, how consciousness can be a construct yet still be communicating information about reality apart from it. But the question seems to be now that experts are claiming that even the construct doesn’t exist, that “consciousness its very self” doesn’t exist. An example of a work going around leading people to think that this is what’s being said is Daniel Dennett’s “Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 23 (2016). Dennett himself never uses any language like “consciousness doesn’t exist.” That is usually formulated by people opposing his point, because they fail to get his point. But in common English saying “consciousness is an illusion” is saying “consciousness doesn’t exist.” And this failure to appreciate everyday semantics is an all-too-common error in academic philosophy today. I’m here to correct that mistake.
Philosophers Need to Start Taking Colloquial Semantics More Seriously
I’ve had issues with this entire trend in philosophy called Eliminativism, where all sorts of things are claimed not to exist that actually do—like “truth” or “propositions.” This is actually just shitty semantics; no one who actually advances such a view actually means these things don’t exist at all, but only that they are different things than is usually assumed. So they shouldn’t be using words and phrases like “eliminativism” (no, you have not “eliminated” truth and propositions; you’ve simply redefined what you think they are, which is not the same thing) or “doesn’t exist” (no, you mean, the thing as traditionally conceived doesn’t exist; but that something does very much exist, it’s just a different thing than commonly thought). I’ve already explained this point before with respect to “truth” and “propositions” (and even “beliefs”) as claimed “not to exist” by the otherwise-excellent philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland (see “Giving the Churchlands a Fairer Shake” in my Critical Review of Reppert). Tl;dr: they actually just argue these exist as different things than usually thought, not that they don’t exist “at all.” So, honestly, that’s what they should have frackin said.
I discuss an early example of this in Sense and Goodness without God (index), for common parlance regarding a “life force.” The traditional and common superstition that this is some force that hovers around living things like a magnetic field and that has powers conveying vitality is indeed false. But what the phrase “life force” was keying on (what people actually observe when saying it is present or absent) does exist: a certain emergent behavior of active metabolic systems defining life vs. nonlife or even death. We have simply explained that entirely now as a system of chemical and electrical interactions sustained by a material platform (usually consisting of genes and cells, which reduce to atoms, arranged in a certain way). There is no “force” or “field” corresponding. But the physical system can generate standard physical forces, and thus make decisions, move around; in a word, live. Vitality is real. It does exist. It just isn’t a seperate physical substance or fundamental force. Just as heat is real, yet isn’t a distinct substance as once we thought, but the emergent effect of a complex system of physical causes among things none of which by itself is “heat” or even meaningfully “hot.” That still doesn’t mean we can say heat “doesn’t exist.” We just have a better idea now of what it is and what causes it.
The Semantics of Illusionism
So when philosophers talk about consciousness not existing or being only an illusion, I think this is a semantic mistake. Which is a common error in academic philosophy these days, due I think to the total abandonment of Ordinary Language Philosophy as a trend without salvaging what it got right (just like the foolish abandonment of the entirety of Logical Positivism without, again, salvaging what it got right), one of many wrong moves the field has made of late. Though many of the propositions and insistences and conclusions of OLP were wrong (or at least wrongheaded), it had some key positions entirely correct. Among them: ordinary everyday language is fundamental to philosophical analysis and must always be attended to and not abandoned, not under any excuse. Yes, jargon and formalisms are useful. But if you cannot immediately tie them to how most people ordinarily speak and understand words, you have failed them, and thus failed one of the most essential goals of philosophy as an enterprise.
Accordingly, one should never write a whole, lengthy paper about how consciousness is an illusion and never qualify that by explaining that this does not mean to say consciousness doesn’t exist. Because an Ordinary Language Philosopher doing their job would recognize that in popular colloquial English “it’s an illusion” and “it doesn’t exist” in most contexts mean the same thing, and therefore to not qualify contextually what you mean is to forget how ordinary English works and therefore cause all manner of ubiquitous misunderstanding. That even professional philosophers are thereby confused by it only makes the point worse—as you can’t then retreat behind “fuck ordinary people; I only care about what the ivory tower thinks” either. Because, well, even the ivory tower is failing to get your point. And that’s on you, buddy. Attend to plain language. That will correct most of this. (Yes, many people, lay and expert, are also bad at language and fail to understand even clear sentences in English, but you can’t fix every problem in the world by speaking clearly.)
So here’s the antidote. Consciousness is certainly an illusion, in the same way colors and mirages are illusions. But illusions still exist. To confuse “that mirage is an illusion” with “that mirage doesn’t exist” is a semantic error that (inexplicably) even many expert philosophers are making here. A mirage exists. Indeed, it even physically exists outside the mind: it’s refracted light on a radiated heat differential, forming a pattern similar to reflections from water. It just isn’t water. The illusion is as to what it is, not that it exists. Colors are a good example: nothing in the world has a color. Nothing is red or green. Our brains made that up as a way to represent a much more complicated fact (patterns of photon-frequency reflections and refractions and the like) in a simple enough way to make practical use of. But that does not mean colors don’t exist. They are illusions, yes. We are being tricked into thinking things in the world have those colors, and it took us centuries of sophisticated science to discover that fact. Even Newton believed colors were things in the world, that light was “colored.” But it was later shown that light is just photons vibrating at certain frequencies; color is then manufactured in the brain as a fiction to represent that. But this still means colors are real; the brain really is inventing them, you really are experiencing them. That is in fact the whole point of colors: if they didn’t exist, we couldn’t make use of them in the way we do.
Consciousness is an illusion in the same sense: it is a model our brains build of what’s going on “in” our brain, and in so doing it might invent some things that serve roles as colors do, things that don’t exist apart from the model or the system building it, but that are useful for representing something else that does exist (neurons, information processing, and the like). For example, our sense of time is actually constructed out of 1/10th-to-1/20th-second moments, such that we are “tricked” by film reels into not seeing the walls on each cell of film and instead seeing continuous motion. Illusion—but still a real thing that’s happening. And indeed, here the illusion is obviously intentional. We are supposed to understand continuous motion is occurring (even though it isn’t). That’s the point of setting film frame rates at 1/24th-a-second. So, yes, that we are seeing continuous motion when we watch a movie or TV-show is an illusion. But the illusion itself remains real: it is actually happening, we are actually experiencing it, and that is the entire point of creating the illusion. To borrow Dennett’s analogy, that the magician just sawed a women in half is an illusion, yes; but there are still a saw and two boxes, one with a woman’s head popping out, and another with feet, peculiarly resembling hers. There is still something that exists here. It just isn’t what we are meant to believe is there.
I think the best way to “translate” what Dennett and the like are trying to say that doesn’t make a hash of the English language, is that anything “experienced” in our mind does indeed exist, but as a trick our brain pulls on us, and not some sort of Platonic second substance we have to account for with some weird ontology. Tricks still exist though. So to say it is a trick is not, in ordinary language, to say it doesn’t exist. That would be a semantic mistake. And anyone making that mistake easy to make, or outright making it, is failing at philosophy. To be fair, Dennett is not the worst offender here, he just buries this information in hundreds of words that beat around without ever clearly getting to this crucial point that illusions still exist, they are still real—as illusions. And indeed, that is what he is trying to explain: how “qualia” (the philosopher’s catch-all word for all the particular possibles of experience, from colors to sounds to smells to feelings and thoughts and the whole show) come to exist. They exist as illusions. Like the two boxes, one with a smiling assistant peaking out, the other with some mannequin feet wearing her same shoes, and a saw in between. To think anything more has happened is like thinking this woman was just actually cut in half—or that some magical quantum portal must connect the two boxes. Instead, those are dumb theories. Likewise most attempts at explaining consciousness.
One way to frame this in a way that’s more helpful than you might be encountering is to think of qualia in the context of the p-zombie problem. A “p-zombie” is a “philosophical zombie,” a conceptual entity wherein we have an exact copy of you (exact same brain, down to every exact same synapse and neural behavior, same chemical interactions, same electrical signals) that differs from you in only one respect: they don’t experience qualia. So, for example, they can discriminate, even name and identify, colors exactly as you do, but they don’t “experience” colors. They have no idea what “red” looks like. They experience nothing. They just exhibit the requisite knowledge and behavior. The attempt to insist qualia are independently real (and not a trick or illusion) has indeed been to posit a p-zombie. But this actually fails to work as they want; in fact, their own thought experiment verifies everything Dennett is saying.
I’ve already explained this in detail before in my section on zombies in On Hosing Thought Experiments (which gives many more examples of academic philosophers making similar semantic mistakes as I am fixing here, illustrating the problem is endemic and not just particular to this topic; indeed, note how the entire Free Will debate can be characterized as deriving without remainder from a singular semantic mistake of similar kind: see Why Syllogisms Usually Suck: Free Will Edition and Free Will in the Real World … and Why It Matters). Tl;dr: to make it work as described, the p-zombie would have to either lie when asked if it experiences qualia (which would be a difference of behavior, with observably different brain functions, ruling it out as a p-zombie) or actually sincerely believe it is seeing qualia when it is not (since reporting it does not, would be a difference of behavior again, with observably different brain functions, again ruling it out as a p-zombie). But what’s the difference between merely believing you are experiencing qualia, and actually experiencing qualia? Dennett is saying there is no difference, so there is nothing more left to explain.
This is not actually saying qualia (the experiences themselves) don’t exist; it is rather saying that some other thing—let’s call it “pqualia,” the David-Chalmers-style “second substance” thingamawhatsit everyone thinks is some extra thing we have yet to explain—doesn’t exist. There are no pqualia. There are only qualia. Just as there is no phlogiston and no fundamental life force (and no Libertarian Freewill and no Platonic Forms and so on and on). And those saying this are right. All evidence does point to this. Pqualia is an epicycle, angels pushing the planets. “We have no need of that hypothesis.” Qualia as useful illusion is the simplest explanation that fits all the facts, and thus indeed, as Dennett says, should therefore be the default; and the burden then put on pqualia advocates to prove their harebrained thing even exists. But one should not confuse that for saying qualia don’t exist. Because illusions still exist; and something still is creating them.
The Ontology of Consciousness
The objection is usually made that this can’t be true. Consciousness can’t be an illusion, because all these other illusions (colors etc.) are being presented to someone; illusions still require an observer. That “someone” can’t themselves be an illusion. But the fact that that isn’t true is precisely Dennett’s point. There is no literal “someone” to whom things are being “presented.” There is no little homunculus inside you watching your thoughts like a theater. That you feel like there is is the illusion. But that feeling, the experiencing of things in that way, remains real. It’s actually happening. Consciousness thus exists. It just isn’t the thing you thought it was. Like all those other things we had mistaken ideas about (from heat to life force to free will to abstract objects and beliefs and propositional knowledge and beyond).
Consciousness is a construct, a computational model—and as such, it is an illusion of something else. For example, that you are a single unified person observing all things from a single Cartesian point. That’s fake. Useful. But fake. “You” are actually spread out over dozens of disparate information processing systems and data storage registers across your brain that don’t operate in perfect simultaneity much less exist at a single point or even have a common purpose. And qualia (the entire content of consciousness, from colors to feelings to thoughts) don’t exist outside your mere belief that they do. They are not located at any point in spacetime; they have no mass or energy; they are not made of anything. They simply are what it is to process information a certain way. It “feels” like it feels, and that’s it. There is no more substance to it. Hence this is all an illusion insofar as this computation tricks us into thinking there is more to it than that (see The Bogus Idea of the Bogus Mysteries of Consciousness). For example, that colors exist outside our mind; they don’t. Or that emotions are something more than the product of independent information processing neural circuits separated from much of the rest of what constitutes us; they aren’t. And so on. Even the sense that our mind could exist without the brain, that it could leave the body and continue working. Nope. That’s an illusion. Our brain is tricking itself into thinking that’s the case, by creating the illusion of this singular disembodied person watching it all. We experience consciousness this way because our brain’s computations make us think we do. And for no other reason.
So when someone says “but illusions require an observer,” this is to conflate “observer” with “consciousness of observing.” My computer’s motion sensing system is an observer of events in my room; it is not conscious. Even worms and robots count as “observers.” We are not here trying to explain observers. We are here trying to explain consciousness of being an observer, the “what it is like” aspect of it; hence, qualia (which includes emotions and thoughts, everything “experiency,” not just sensory perceptions). There is no “person” inside my computer observing me move cross the room; yet it is observing me cross the room. There is no “person” inside a fly observing a light across the way; yet it is observing a light across the way. The peculiar thing is not “there are observers.” The peculiar thing is “why it feels the way it does to be an observer.” In humans, a distinct part of that is a self-model: our brains build a model of a unified system of goals and perspectives, which represents the brain as a whole being an observer. That is made-up. Useful. But made-up. We feel like this is the case, because our brains compute that it is the case.
For example, in our brains we have separate systems processing sound and vision; but our brains then unify them into a single integrated model. That integration is a construct; it does not exist apart from the information processing that produces it. More importantly (as science has conclusively proved by now) it does not exist in some separate place all its own—there is no point in the brain where we can say “the unification occurs there.” The unification is occurring across the whole brain. Likewise, all your thoughts, emotions, motivations: your brain invents a coherent model of all those disparate things and integrates it into the sensory field produced, making you feel like there is a single point-observer watching it all. That’s fake. Useful. But fake. No such single point-observer exists in the brain. There is no place you can point to. It’s an output spanning multiple brain systems, a perspective that the brain as a whole has stitched together, manufactured, as a useful fiction (see The Mind Is a Process Not an Object: On Not Understanding Mind-Brain Physicalism).
Indeed, we know it takes about half a second to process this fiction; hence, fact is, we already made a decision and processed the why of it half a second before we become aware that we made that decision and why. “We” as in the whole of us (our memories, reasoning, character, personality, skills, attitudes, values, etc.) still made that decision, and usually indeed for the very reasoning we then become conscious of. But our awareness of that, as a unified and coherent model of what just happened, is a computed product of the brain, one that as such took it time to complete and render. “But you’re saying it didn’t render it ‘to’ anyone.” No. Who it rendered “to” is you, the brain as a whole. The feeling of what this is like, of sitting at the center watching it all, like someone in the audience separate from it, is all a construct, a useful fiction. The experience is the illusion. Not what it is an experience of. That’s real. No one actually means to say consciousness is just our brain making everything up all willy nilly. There is a real you with real thoughts and feelings and real perceptions. It’s just how it is presented, what it feels like, that is fictional. And the illusion, too, is also real. No one is actually intending to say the illusion doesn’t exist either. You really are feeling like that. It’s just that we don’t require anything more to explain that than that you believe you are. And we don’t require anything more to exlain that, than that your brain has computed you are. That’s Dennett’s point. There is no “extra something” required. That computed “belief” is all there is.
Conclusion
Again to be clear (as Dennett sometimes is not), to call all this a fiction is not to say that its content (what it represents) is false or that its referents don’t exist. There is a brain; it shares a volume in your head; it occupies and operates one and only one body; and it’s thinking and evaluating, and moving around in a world arranged more or less like you think it is. So to simulate this with a fiction of a unified perspective, a singular observer “to whom” everything seems presented, is not wholly inaccurate. But it does mislead in respect to its core attribute, which is why so many philosophers (and so many more laypeople) still have confused themselves into thinking qualia must be some magical second substance and consciousness some real central entity that merely sits aside and observes what the brain presents it, and then gives it instructions. Thus the illusion of consciousness has misled us into thinking there must be something “more” to make this possible, that there must be some extra separate entity “to whom” this is all presented. But that’s precisely the illusion being created. It isn’t what’s actually happening.
This is still a useful illusion, though, because every aspect of it corresponds to something true about you and the world. Just like colors: they are fictions, but useful because our brain attempts to correlate them with real information about the external world. They are simply a convenient way to represent and analyze information. The information is still real. What it corresponds to is still real. And what it feels like to compute it is still real. The room you are in is layed out as you think, the objects in it really are where you think, and so on. The colors, the representation of objects as solid, these are fictions your brain uses to model all these things. And this can mislead you (as it did almost all humanity until relatively recently) into thinking objects in the world really look like that—really have colors (rather than only reflecting or refracting electromagnetic field quanta), really are solid (rather than almost entirely empty space), and so on. But even once we know that, it’s still all usable data about real things. Thanks to the repulsion of the electromagnetic force, we really can’t walk through objects we perceive as solid; visible-light photons really aren’t passing through them; and so on. So calling colors an illusion, fictions invented by our brain, is not sayng they don’t exist, nor even that they don’t correspond to any real thing.
Hence, likewise, the “Cartesian Theater” illusion does represent some key information correctly, and only fabricates the “theater” perspective so as to compute all that information conveniently. You are a single brain in a single body and thus all parts of you do share some common interests and goals, and organizing those into a singular focusable purpose is useful in precisely all the ways we observe it to be. Obviously. Just look at everything we can and have accomplished with this ability, as persons and a people. This illusion continues to create information as well, as the more you “think about yourself and your life” a certain way, the more this becomes narrative memory stored in the brain and thus becomes even more a part of you. You are thus not a random jumble of reactions, feelings, perceptions, and desires. You, as a definable person, an individual, a “self,” do indeed exist; indeed your brain has been building this personal identity since birth. You exist as all the stored information about “you” in your brain, and its physical neural interconnections; and you get to experience informational reports about you (what “you,” as in your brain, are thinking, seeing, feeling, deciding), as your brain computes them; and those computed outputs do indeed become inputs in future reasoning and thinking and causal development of you as a person. Thus all of this exists. It just doesn’t exist as what it superficially seems or feels like, just as colors do not. But just as colors are useful and represent real things apart from them, so is your conscious self-model, your experience of what it is like to be you.
Thanks for this analysis of consciousness as a self-in-the-world reality model, not a second substance or entity. What illusionists like Dennett and Keith Frankish claim doesn’t exist, but only seems to exist, is phenomenal consciousness, aka phenomenality: the qualitative “what it’s like” to see red, be in pain, taste something sweet, etc., what philosophers call qualia. About colors, a species of qualia, you say
“They are simply a convenient way to represent and analyze information. The information is still real. What it corresponds to is still real. And what it feels like to compute it is still real.”
This is realism about phenomenality. The feel is arguably the representational content carried by the neural vehicles engaged in representing states of the world, including the body. Why Dennett denies phenomenality escapes me, especially since he accepts the existence of conscious representational content. About which see “Dennett and the reality of red,” https://naturalism.org/philosophy/consciousness/dennett-and-the-reality-of-red
I think you are misreading Dennett. Even in the article I link to, he makes clear he is only arguing against substance dualism, and actually accepts “what it is like” really is just as it seems (we really do see the color red; because we believe we are, and there is no observable difference between believing we are seeing red, and seeing red).
Second to last paragraph in Dennett, “Illusionism”:
Dennett is thus not saying the phenomena don’t exist in any way at all; he is saying they aren’t “made” of anything, but are just things you’ve been tricked into thinking you are seeing. But that is exactly the same thing as seeing those things; indeed, that’s his point: there being no discernible difference, there is no need of any further explanation. Hence, no need of “figment.” It’s all just computation.
I’ll grant he is very confusing about this, though, as he often writes poorly and convolutedly. He could do with more attention to Ordinary Language when composing his explanations.
For instance, Dennett attends poorly to what the phrase “phenomenal properties” means in colloquial English (he assumes it means more than just the fact of thinking we experience what we experience), confusing everyone (most of whom mean by phenomena the thing to be explained, not some extra explanans for something else).
Dennett thus says “illusions of phenomena” exist, yet in ordinary English, that would be the phenomena. It’s this failuire to speak plain English that causes the problem. I encounter the same semantic failures in the Churchlands when I “retranslate” what they are actually saying back into ordinary English. It’s the failure to simply speak English that causes everyone’s misunderstanding of what they are saying.
I think it’s pretty clear that Dennett’s illusionism, which explicitly endorses Frankish’s position, is more than the denial of substance dualism or “figment,” namely the denial of phenomenal qualities (qualia). He concludes his article saying:
In the same article he says “…you can’t be a satisfied, successful illusionist until you have provided the details of how the brain manages to create the illusion of phenomenality.”
In his book From Bacteria to Bach and Back he says “…you must resist the alluring temptation to postulate a panoply of special subjective properties (typically called qualia) to which you (alone) have access.” p. 365
And his 1991 book Consciousness Explained is a sustained attack on the existence of phenomenal consciousness.
I attended his Tufts seminar on consciousness a couple of years ago and he left no doubt about his qualia irrealism. Whereas we are qualia realists who hypothesize that the mostly likely explanation of phenomenality is that it’s a species of representational content. Phenomenality – the existence of qualitative states in consciousness – is, contra Dennett, no illusion.
Again, I think you are misreading him, because he and you are not using the words “phenomena” and “phenomenology” and “phenomenality” the same way. And you can tell by paying attention to everything else he does say, where he repeatedly affirms, in very detailed particulars, the existence of what you mean by the word. So when he denies things pegged by that word exist, he must mean something differently than you do. And when you go looking for what that might be, always it’s substance dualism (and there are many clear statements of this across his works; you just have to look for them, and indeed I just quoted one at you above).
This is what I mean by philossophers fucking up plain English when discussing these things. They keep using words in weird ways and don’t attend to why they shouldn’t do that or what they should be doing instead; or besides, if they still need to for some reason. The result is exactly the kind of misunderstanding you are laboring under.
P.S. Likewise “representationalism.” I think he and you are using that word differently. When he uses it, he means that it signifies qualia are separate from their observer and thus “represented to” the observer, as in they exist in object-subject relation. Which entails substance dualism. His position is that there is no difference between the object and subject and therefore can be no such relation, and thus qualia cannot be some separate “thing.” To process information a certain way simply is to experience it a certain way. Qualia are never actually separate from their “observer.” Experiencing them simply and only is what it is to be a certain kind of observer. This is not saying no one experiences this and therefore qualia don’t exist in any sense whatever. He only ever says they don’t exist as some separate thing from the state of being someone experiencing them.
How is this related to the idea that Jesus (or God) exists? Clearly the Jesus as literally portrayed in the Bible did not and does not exist. But the experienced phenomena of Jesus often exist, such as the experience of relief in being forgiven, or the sense of community in breaking bread with other believers. These phenomena are often (but not always) real, even as they are illusions in Dennetts sense. I respect my Christian friends who experience these phenomena.
I maintain that it is an error to state categorically that Jesus doesn’t exist, especially to people to whom Jesus is phenomenally real. Indeed, I myself love Jesus, occasionally talk to him inside my head, accept his forgiveness, and forgive him of his many sins as well—even though I am sure he is a myth. After all, as an educated person my head is populated by such quasi-fictions from literature, science, and history. I perceive my challenge as not always taking such fictions literally, by “seeing through them” even if I sometimes “see with them.”
I fail to get your point.
Maybe you only mean here that imaginary friends are real insofar as they are inside your mind as quasi-persons you construct and fantasize interactions with. But this is actually what I mean by “Jesus doesn’t exist,” i.e. Jesus was not ever a real human man walking around Galilee, but was only ever imagined to exist in the minds of Christians—even from the very beginning, in dreams or hallucinations, as reported by Paul.
So maybe you don’t understand what I mean by “Jesus didn’t exist.” I don’t mean “no one ever imagined having conversations with an eternal space alien.” I mean, there was never any such space alien apart from the imagining of one. Imagining things does not make them exist outside the imagination (hence, qualia are not a second “substance” that exists apart from the imagining of them either). And almost the whole of modern Christianity is based on claiming otherwise, which is what makes it false.
Indeed, there is a wing of progressive Christianity that proposes to accept Jesus is merely a conceptual metaphor and nothing physically real outside of that, but its genuine adherents are so rare they tend actually to hide this fact about their belief for fear of being expelled from their communities for admitting to it. (See my discission of the Westar Seminar on the Future of God.)
As for any attempt to argue that an imaginary hero is always right about anything you imagine them to say, meanwhile, see my rebuttal to the Argument from Religious Experience and the corresponding Moral Argument (as you would presumably already be rejecting their Argument from Superman).
Just recognize the conceptualizing mind.
Past is conceptualizing mind.
Future is conceptualizing mind.
People are conceptualizing mind.
Sorry. Don’t know what that means.
Hi Richard. Thanks for this article, and for its helpful links. You raise the question of “what is it like …?”, which Nagel put in terms of “what is it like to be a bat?” So, in relation to qualia, we could ask “what is it like to see red?” and so on. I wondered if you thought this question has any answer, or indeed if you think it has any meaning. Is the answer to Nagel’s question, “well, it isn’t like anything … it is just what it is”? Would it make any sense to say instead, “well, it’s like being a flying mouse” – how helpful is that really? In other words, can we say anything more than “the individual qualia I have aren’t like other individual qualia, but (to me) the redness quale I have when looking at a strawberry is kinda like the redness quale I have when looking at a stop light”?
Yes. Basically. An important rebuttal to Nagel is Cottrell’s nearly as famous article “Sniffing the Camembert,” on which I wrote in Mind Is a Process:
Likewise, “I see a particular shade of red and I see nothing.” This does mean there must be something physically different about the neural circuitry that produce that experience, that differs from “green” or “other shades of red” or “sound” or “smell” or “different emotions” and so on, and that difference must fully explain the specifics of their differences. This is what philosophers resistant to the conclusion get hung up on: they can’t imagine what that could be, so they conclude it can’t be. Which is a basic fallacy of lack of imagination. Just like “we can’t imagine what would make quantum mechanics true” or “we can’t imagine how Relativity and Quantum Mechanics could both be true at the same time,” where obviously if we could imagine it, we’d have solved those scientific problems by now; likewise qualia. So I don’t see any evidential weight in “we can’t think of how.” We expect we can’t think of the how of anything—until we’ve actually figured it out. So this really just becomes a tautological description of the frontiers of science.
Meanwhile, as I explain in Mind, the circumstantial evidence makes quite clear it’s going to be some physical explanation anyway, because we have already explained so much that people thought couldn’t be explained about human experience and thought, with entirely physical facts and models. So the trend-line is clear.
We also know why we “haven’t gotten there yet.” Because we need certain fundamentals sorted before we can even begin to formulate testable hypotheses, e.g. we need accurate synaptic and neuronal I/O maps of human (or at least mammalian) brains to even know what the physical differences in all these circuits actually are. And we are nowhere near even that rudimentary step.
One thing we will then get to be able to do is say whether there are finite qualia in a domain or infinite, e.g. once we know what makes the physical difference between color and sound circuits and between one color and another, we will know if there are infinitely many color circuits possible or a finite number owing to the limits of the IP geometry. But that’s still another whole step away from answering a question like “why does this specific information processing feel like smelling cinnamon?” for example.
There is a lot more science to be done to get there. But this is not a sound argument against “there” being fully in accord with physicalism. All signs point toward it being so. And no alternative even contains a competing explanation anyway, No form of substance dualism gives any intelligible reason why cinnamon smells like cinnamon either; not even theism, as “God just picked at random” is not an explanation. Why was that even an option for God? How did “smell of cinnamon” exist or even come to his mind as possible to make exist? (Never mind “How could God make such a thing exist?” as omnipotence is also really a lack of explanation; “How does God make anything?” “He just does” is actually, literally, the lack of an answer to the question.)
I wonder if your discussion here causes any problems for your ethical theory, which seems to be fundamentally based on consciousness. In recent posts, for example, you argued that harming or killing most animals is substantially less of an evil — and sometimes not even an evil at all — than doing those same things to humans, on the grounds that, unlike humans, animals (with some exceptions) are not aware that they are anything. In the comments there, you said the same thing about fetuses: that before they develop the mental machinery that is required to make them self-aware, a harm to them is not a harm in any meaningful sense, because the thing being harmed is not yet conscious of itself.
A few challenges. 1) Isn’t it circular to frame our moral sense of what is harmful in terms of consciousness? To me it seems very self-serving and logically circular: we, who are conscious and value being conscious, decide that the measure for all moral actions depends on the presence and nature of consciousness in others. Suppose someone doesn’t accept that premise. Can you convince them? Or do you just have to say: “well, we value consciousness, so consciousness is valuable.”
2) Isn’t it a problem for you that consciousness is, as you argue here, an emergent property, an imperfect model of the world, and can exist in degrees? Dogs may not be self-aware, but in their actions they exhibit a desire to live and they can feel it when they suffer or prosper. Why should their moral status depend to a significant degree on whether or not they are fully aware of themselves?
And 3) If consciousness is so important to you, why doesn’t the potential to become conscious matter more in your ethics? A fetus may not be conscious in the first trimester, but it will grow into consciousness on its own: it needs only to be provided with an environment and nourishment (which is what all small children require) and to be given the time to do so. And yet you seem to believe that it is no moral harm at all to abort it in those early stages, given that it is not yet self-aware. To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s fully a person at that point. But it still seems that a fetus, with its potential to become conscious, would have to have more value on your worldview than you seem to be willing to grant it. A simple way to pose this challenge: is aborting a fetus in the first trimester morally equivalent to cutting off a lock of hair, excising a tumor, or squeezing out a pimple? If not, why not?
Not in any pertinent sense. All definitions are circular, so that can be no fault of them. It just so happens that pain and pleasure, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, the only reasons to ever do or care about anything (and thus the only basis any moral system could have), are fundamental products of consciousness. That’s not a circular argument; it’s a statement of empirical and ontological fact. If consciousness didn’t exist, neither could moral facts. Moral facts are facts about consciousness. Although I don’t frame this in that vocabulary in my chapter on moral theory in The End of Christianity<, I do demonstrate it there. So that may be a place to start in analyzing this point.
It’s possible you are confusing consciousness with qualia here. I can’t tell, but if that’s what’s happening, then I should note that my moral system is not dependent on qualia, but on consciousness (the awareness and understanding of things). I do happen to believe these are logically inseparable, but we haven’t formally proved that yet, so it is at least conceptually possible they are separable and there could have been a world without qualia but with conscious understanding and satisfaction and dissatisfaction states and the like. If such a world exists, my moral theory would still follow there. Because it follows from the ability to comprehend and care about things. If no such ability exists, neither could any moral propositions be true.
What would that even mean? Someone who insists an entity incapable of caring about anything should care about something? That would be a self-contradictory position to maintain. Perhaps you need to read The Objective Value Cascade.
If instead you mean “someone who cares about something different than the rest of us and insists everyone else should care about it too” then we’re back in metaethical theory, asking what is true. And all moral truth really follows from reasons to care about a thing, reasons every individual must share for it to be true that everyone should care about that thing. Those reasons have to be factually true, or arrived at without fallacy from premises that are factually true. Otherwise, by definition, you can have nothing factually true to say about morality (or any imperatives at all).
That again I prove (even by formal syllogism) in the chapter I just referenced above. If someone wants to prove some other moral conclusion should be reached about, say, stones or plants or animals or certain animals etc., they have to do it the same way as anyone else: present factually true premises, and derive their conclusion from them without fallacy. If they can do that, they will persuade me. If they can’t, they have nothing capable of legitimately persuading anyone.
Remember knowledge, including moral knowledge, is justified true belief. So if you can’t even get the “justified” part to work, you can’t claim to know anything about what’s actually moral or not.
(And as for the “true” part, this is a digression here, but that ultimately has to be an empirical case to a probability, i.e. the only truths we really have access to as knowledge are the approximate epistemic probability of a belief’s truth given the information available to us, which still has to be proved without fallacy, which gets us back to the “justified” part.)
Not at all. Emergent properties are real properties and have real effects on the world, which could thus include effects on what is morally true or not. And imperfect modeling is merely an epistemic issue, the same as all moral theories must cope with, and indeed all knowledge of anything whatever. (And degrees of consciousness are an ontological fact, and different physical facts should be expected to make differences in moral facts, not the other way around.)
No one has absolute certain knowledge—not even a God could, as even a God could be tricked by a Cartesian demon into falsely believing he is infallibly omniscient. Thus, all knowledge, hence moral knowledge as well, exists only by degrees of epistemic probability. This is true of all moral theories and systems. Therefore, it can be no peculiar defect of any. Just as with all other domains of knowledge.
“I can only have a high degree of confidence x is moral” does not entail “therefore no moral facts exist” nor that “therefore no moral knowledge is accessible to us.” Any more than the same would follow for any other knowledge. For example, that I can be wrong about what city I am in right now (however unlikely) does not make for there being no fact of the matter where I am, nor does it make for my having no knowledge whatever as to where I am. Ditto all moral facts. Imperfect modeling is just one way this spectrum of epistemic probability has to be navigated, one more fact to account for in epistemic equations regarding what we can or can’t be confident of. Which is a fact in every possible epistemology. Hence it can be no peculiar fault of any.
Good question. Can you answer that question? Without fallacy or falsehood? If no, then you have no reason to believe the answer is anything other than I have arrived at myself. If yes, then you should be able to outperform Paul Bali, who despite ample opportunity, failed to produce any such case. By contrast, I provided an ample case there for my answer to this question, as to why dogs don’t have comparable moral standing, because we have less reason to care about their lives than we do fully sentient beings. All of the reasons we have to care about people the way we distinctively do, simply aren’t factually true about dogs. That’s where things stand. Until someone can change that state of affairs with a sounder case than Bali. The failure to ever produce such a case, after thousands of years of trying, stands so far as evidence no such case can be made. If you want to change that state of affairs, you have to actually do it. Possibly never gets you to probably. And knowledge only exists in the probable.
Because by logic potential persons can only have potential rights, not actual rights. There is a reason burning my blueprint of a house yet to be made is not prosecutable as the crime of burning down my house. Potential things have potential, not actual, properties. Hence, I cannot ruin or destroy the satisfaction state of someone who doesn’t exist yet (like Mark Twain said, “I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it”). There have to actually be satisfaction states to ruin or destroy, or a future certainty of them. Not merely hypothetical ones whose possibility of existence is itself being decided.
If you want to argue otherwise, again, you need a non-fallacious conclusion derived from factually true premises. It’s been thousands of years of trying, again, and still no one has ever come up with such a case for first-trimester fetuses. That doesn’t bode well for the thesis. It certainly gives us no confidence in it.
This is distinct from the fact that a first-trimester fetus can have personal value (e.g. a mother and father can value it and its potentials). That is not moral value. Moral value is a value everyone logically and evidentially should share (which means, they would share it, if adequately informed and reasoning without fallacy). But personal choices as to whether to care about a particular possibility do not make for universal imperatives. A mother and father can just as readily and justifiably not value their own fetus and its potentials, or value more the waiting for a better time to raise a child or the support of others doing so instead (and thus choosing which hypothetical children should come to actually exist). There is no case to be made that they “should” value anything about a hypothetical person; until the future existence of that person is a certainty.
Hence one can make a case for valuing future populations, because they will always exist (to a high degree of certainty), so your choices today will actually (not just potentially) affect them; but that case does not commute to specific hypothetical individuals, because almost all of them will not exist (by far most logically possible fetuses never even get made in the first place, and most that do miscarry naturally), and deciding that one shall not exist does not commute back into deciding to kill the entirety of future humanity, precisely because of variance in personal value and circumstances across the population (e.g. everyone who aborts a fetus is correct in their knowledge that millions of babies will still be born and raised). This may lead to bizarre life boat cases where one can debate whether, say, the last woman alive should abort their child or not, but such cases do not track reality (no one today is in that scenario, so what one would conclude in it is irrelevant).
Happy holidays, Richard. BTW, as a reminder, in addition to using JSTOR, readers of your blog may do well to subscribe to Academia.edu where many on topic papers and even PDF books are available for free download.
That’s true about academia.edu but they are a bit too shady for me to confidently recommend. Yes, I maintain a page there. But their manipulative marketing tactics and money grubbing (and poor back-end design) incline me to avoid them as much as humanly possible. I would rather we had a replacement. JPASS is at least honest, competent, reasonable, and straightforward.
I must say re David Chalmers that I have never been very convinced about panpsychism. For starters, and maybe I´m being very facile here, I´ve always thought of it as a very ad hoc explanation, which when you boil it down is pretty much “consciousness is weird and hard to explain, therefore it must be its own substance”.
I agree with you, it´s much more likely the case that at a certain level of complexity, computers/brains will start to generate internal computations. Indeed, I would have just thought it´s simple probability that if someone has the same physical makeup as you more or less that they probably experience qualia more or less as you do.
I think another issue with panpsychism is that when you look at humans versus animals, they clearly have very different mental abilities, and different levels of consciousness, and panpsychism doesn´t really have an answer to this in my view. It seems evidently clear that matter arranged in different ways produces different levels of mind and I think panpsychism has no decent answer to the question as to why a human child can think but not a stone.
It’s true pansychism is a bit like god as an explanation, a kind of theoretical Mary Sue that actually doesn’t explain anything at all, but allows someone to stop having to ask why anything works the way it does and pretend they already answered that question when they haven’t.
“Yes, many people, lay and expert, are also bad at language and fail to understand even clear sentences in English, but you can’t fix every problem in the world by speaking clearly”.
This cannot be overstated and I find it very frustrating. And it’s really embarrassing when it applies to experts, such as professional philosophers.
I’m going to speculate here, but maybe some confuse “hallucination'” with “illusion”. During a hallucination there’s no external counterpart to what one experiencing in their head, whereas during an illusion there is. So if one says, “consciousness is a hallucination”, that would mean that it literary doesn’t exist in any sense. I know that can’t be since one would need to have consciousness to hallucinate, but you get my point.
Moreover, do you think “I think therefore I am” was meant to be taken as a deduction or an intuition? There’s a debate in philosophy on this issue and apparently Descartes meant it as an intuition.
What matters to me is that it’s a valid deduction (and I think it clearly is).
I am not sure what point you mean to make here.
I can say that switching the word to “hallucinate” does have some utility. It would be an example of using forced perspective to better understand something.
We actually can objectively define the difference between a real experience and a hallucinated one. In a real experience, the construct is built out of, and trying to reliably interpret, actual sensory data; and a hallucinated experience is when that happens without actual sensory data.
So turn this onto the mind itself: would it make sense to say there is a difference between constructing a self absent any relevant data, and making a good effort at constructing one out of real data?
Here it becomes clear consciousness cannot be a hallucination, because it is literally a construct from real data (that’s the only way it can even exist). This is why anything you ask about yourself is usually (not always, but more often than not) true. Real memories. Real desires. Real point of view (both in its vantage and its blinds). Even the stuff that is more frequently false than the rest—like beliefs about your character or abilities—is still being built out of real data (your computer is just drawing the wrong conclusions from that data).
When someone completely fantasizes a self, we get personal delusions (“I am Napoleon”), which we recognize as mental illness and not the normal mode of anyone’s brain. Everyone else has the ability to fact-check and correct-towards-actual their beliefs about themselves, and thus become more self-aware and more self-actualized. That that is possible (and that there is a difference between being that and not) proves consciousness is real and thus not a hallucination.
But it is still an illusion in various respects, for the reasons explained in this article.
I can’t speak to what Descartes himself thought (that is a question for experts in the history of Enlightenment philosophy or even in Descartes specifically). For example, Charles Miceli has a piece on this. And Wikipedia has a detailed article.
But as a philosopher asking the question on his own, I believe this is a false dichotomy. Insofar as an intuition is any direct apprehension without further ground (a basic belief), obviously the premises of his argument (“I think” and “thinking is a kind of existing”) are intuitions. But insofar as the argument is formally framed, obviously the conclusion is a deduction (if “I think” and “thinking is a kind of existing” are both true, then it is deductively necessary that “I exist”). So it’s both.
Indeed, the argument is, like all deductions, simply an articulated tautology: insofar as we define existing a certain way, then everything that is thinking by definition is existing.
I don’t find this dispute useful or productive, however. It doesn’t matter what is or isn’t an intuition or a deduction. That’s a semantic distinction of no relevance to anything significant in itself. Because both intuitions and deductions can be false or true. And what matters is what is or isn’t true, and what can or can’t be known. And my take based on that framework is covered in Epistemological End Game.
Meanwhile my take on intuition more broadly is covered in Sense and Goodness without God (see the index; my inspiration there is a syncretism of the intuitionist epistemology of Polanyi and the analytical epistemology of Ayer) and my take on deductionism more broadly (I don’t consider it all that reliable; we need it but it has severe limitations) was recently articulated in Why Syllogisms Usually Suck.
I don’t think that your color analogy is broken since you might have used a different definition of color but oxford dictionary defines color as “the property possessed by an object of producing different sensations on the eye as a result of the way the object reflects or emits light.” . If you use oxfords definition, wouldn’t color be a physical property of objects but only a property in the sense that its how objects affect how we perceive them?
That isn’t what people colloquially mean most of the time by color. They mean the experience. Yes, you can “redefine” the world to exclude the experience, but that won’t answer to what people experience, and thus is no longer referring to consciousness at all.
Dr. Carrier wrote [in What Does It Mean to Call Consciousness an Illusion?]:
Agreed. And the reason is not only might it confuse experts in the field, but most certainly people that don’t have the background and expertise to grasp or have an understanding of what the person might really mean.
They are drawing on their limited knowledge/experise in that area and a standard (common) vocabulary.
On that point I think that when atheists suggest the possibility of our Universe arising from “Nothing”, that they don’t actually use that single term. Say “essentially nothing” or “”virtually nothing” (anything but “nothing”).
But leave the term “nothing” to mean the thing that common people understand (or try to imagine) it to be. Because if you start out calling it “nothing”, and then try to explain that you actually meant something different than that, it gives the appearance of a disengenious bait and switch, even if that wasn’t at all intended.
Another example which confused and then frustrated me was when Sam Harris would insists that atheist could have “spiritual” experiences. He admitted that many of his fellow atheists objected to that. And for good reason I would argue. Because despite what he actually means or his intentions with be his use of that word, most people (myself included), recognize that the root word of spiritual is “spirit”. Sam Harris has already clarified that he doesn’t believe such things as a spirit. His justification for use of that word is that there simply isn’t a better word to describe the experience. But in my mind the solution is so simple. He should refer to it as a “spiritual like” experience. Then his readers would quickly grasp that he isn’t describing an experience that is literally “spiritual”. Instead he creates a problem and confusion for everyone (including Christians), with his insistance that atheists can also have “spiritual” experiences.
Or simply explicate what you mean by nothing. But, yes.
The problem arises then that they have no coherent understanding of this. Nor any in common. Everyone conceptualizes nothing differently. Most think of it as just empty space, for example (which is not what theologians mean at all). And those who try to think of it as lacking even that, often go too far and conceptualize a state of nothing that is logically impossible (whereby no rules exist, but a rule exists that nothing can result; or whereby no actual things exist and yet no potential things exist, even though the absence of all actuals logically entails the presence of all potentials).
So it really isn’t possible to just leave the term to mean what “common people” understand. No one agrees on what it means, and many have unworkable ideas of what it means. Explication is therefore the only recourse.
I would say the same for the word “spiritual.” There simply is no functional way to use it except to explicate it (either explicitly or by provided context).
Theists will exploit this fact to quote people out of context, ignoring their explication, and falsely attribute some other meaning to their words than they stated. But that is their sin, for which they must be caught and called out. There is no way to “prevent” them doing this but by shaming and embarrassing them for doing it.