Too hard for our kind of mind?

Letters

Vol. 13 No. 14 · 25 July 1991

From Arthur C. Danto

The concept of consciousness is certain to remain intractable for as long as philosophers persist in regarding its solution in terms of providing answers to any variant of Thomas Nagel’s question ‘What’s it like to be a bar?’ Just think, to begin with, how hard pressed we would be to answer what it’s like to be us. There may be something it’s like to be me, and I may be able, more or less, to put this into words, enabling others to know, through understanding those words, what it’s like to be A.C.D. Or there may be something untransferable to words, in which case others will never know. But either way, the problem is one of epistemology, of a piece with the old Lockian questions about such things as the taste of pineapples for those who have never tasted them. There are further complications, one might think, of counter-identity: any of us might hope to taste pineapple one day, but I alone can be me. But that presupposes that there is, in each of our cases, an ineffable isness that floods consciousness, when there may be no such thing. I can begin to communicate what it’s like to be me with lists of things I believe, fear, want, remember, hope, crave, am turned on by. Some of the beliefs at least will be shared with others, but how much of this whole complex of propositional attitudes comes into consciousness at any one time? In any case, I would have much the same task of reconstructing the picture of myself as I would have for constructing pictures of others. So there is an initial disadvantage in supposing there has to be some phenomenological given, which consists in the being of me, and to which I alone have access. Whatever the case. Nagel’s question leads into the familiar morasses of epistemology and phenomenology – the Problem of Other Consciousness, perhaps, but not the problem of consciousness construed as a natural product.

As for bats, there probably isn’t anything it’s like to be them, though I conjecture Nagel was led to his essentially Lockian formulation by pondering the mechanisms of ecolocation. But if bats are conscious of anything, it will almost certainly not be this feature of their relationship to the world, the processing of which is too essential to the bat’s survival for anything like conscious computation to occur: if it were up to consciousness, bats would long since have dashed their brains out against cavern walls, and perished as a species.

Jerry Fodor (LRB, 27 June) quite properly marks progress in the philosophy of mind as due in part to the loosening of consciousness as the criterion of the mental, beginning with Freud’s postulation of the UCS system, and proceeding to computational processes taking place without their hosts being conscious of their happening (otherwise, they could hardly have been discovered). It was Nietzsche who first observed that most of mental life can take place without any conscious registration of its going on, which led him to the question of what the use could be of something so demonstrably useless for most purposes minds are supposed to serve. Since it is fairly certain that the whole of the bat’s mental life takes place without the dubious benefits of consciousness, there is nothing in the case of the bat we fail to know about through our alleged incapacity to say what it’s like to be one. But Fodor seems rather too ready to identify consciousness with sentience, and perhaps the next stage in the progress will be to acknowledge that a great deal gets sensed without there being any conscious awareness of the content of the sensations. When an oyster contracts under the stimulus of lemon juice, it may sense without feeling, or, if that sounds awkward, feel without being conscious of what it feels, and the entire process can be understood as an unbroken chain of electrochemical events. There is certainly nothing mysterious about sentience, which is what activates the computational systems Fodor makes so central to his own writings on psychology. Which signals to respond to will be determined by evolution and inheritance, and none of it need obtrude into conscious awareness. Consciousness would in any case be the next step up, and in its lowest form, i.e. the awareness of sensory contents, so that creatures may be motivated by largely aesthetic considerations, preferring certain tastes to others.

Nagel’s question, in any case, begins to have application here: namely, what it’s like to be conscious of certain sensations – what it’s like to taste pineapple or, in case this seems to matter, what it would be like to taste pineapple if one were a member of another species conscious of such tastes, but not merely sentient of them, as flies attracted to pineapples might be. But we are, with this question, on familiar philosophical turf: it is the turf of Other Consciousnesses, and a suburb of the capital of Philosophical Scepticism.

To believe consciousness a mystery is to have allowed the problem of mind to have been usurped by the Problem of Other Minds. Fodor may or may not be right that this latter is immune to the various strategies of dissolution philosophers have generated in order to deal with one another’s puzzles, but he is perfectly right in thinking that these strategies will not dent the problem of consciousness, which is scientific, after all, and not philosophical. As a simple mental experiment, think only of what will have happened to the Problem of Other Consciousnesses when the scientific problem of consciousness is solved. Well, what happened to the paradoxes of Zeno when we demonstrated the possibility of space travel by going to the Moon?

Arthur C. Danto
Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy,

From Colin McGinn

The friendliness and fairness of Jerry Fodor’s thoughtful review of my book The Problem of Consciousness, despite its variance with some of his own doctrines, makes me dither at the doors of dissent, but there are one or two points it might be helpful for me to comment on, if only for the real enthusiasts out there.

First let me correct a slight inaccuracy in his description of the book: it doesn’t consist solely of previously published articles, but contains two new pieces (the best ones!) that together add up to about two-fifths of the book: ‘Consciousness and the Natural Order’ and ‘The Hidden Structure of Consciousness’.

More substantively, Fodor makes three philosophical points with which I disagree – though, as he says, the issues here are hardly settled. First, he suggests that someone with my realist views about the qualitative properties of experience ought to allow for the possibility of inverted spectra, thus pulling apart content and qualia. I think myself, in opposition to this, that inverted spectrum cases are precisely cases in which representational content is changed, so that it fits qualitative character; it thus follows, for me, that the (semantic) content of experience is not fixed simply by causal relations to environmental objects – a consequence I welcome because of the special status of secondary qualities.

Second, I don’t think it’s quite correct to describe my position as materialist, except in the mildest sense – indeed, this would rather go against my claim that the problem of consciousness is epistemically closed to us. My view is that consciousness arises from the brain, which is a material object all right, but the properties of the brain that enable it so to arise are not going to be physical properties in any non-trivial sense: they will belong to a science radically discontinuous with any science we have available.

Third, Fodor says, I think rightly, that the notion of a miracle is ‘self-cancelling’, so that it is conceptually impossible for consciousness to be miraculous. Fine, that’s my position too, but it doesn’t follow that the notion of the miraculous exerts no hold over the philosophical imagination, making it seem like a real alternative to the transcendental naturalism I favour. It can’t be the case that consciousness is an objective miracle, but it can seem as if we are driven to this impossible position, unless we recognise that what is inexplicable by us can still be perfectly natural.

Colin McGinn
New York

From John Skoyles

Mental phenomena present embarrassing questions. Or do they? Maybe it is philosophers who make such questions appear so impossible. Take Jerry Fodor’s first question: ‘How could anything material be conscious?’ Is it so intractable? It depends how you ask the question. Consider this thought trail. Science has showns that, like ancient Cretans, the brain is a notorious liar – particularly about bodily experience and the outside world. Take your hands. Do they exist? The brain is economical with the truth. It persuades us that they are as material as the things they touch and grasp. But this experience of ‘reality’ is an intricate illusion. (A good illusion, since it makes the cognitive problem of experiencing what and where we are neuro-computationally tractable – which is why it evolved.) The illusion reveals itself in odd ways: sever your arm, and, as Descartes and modem neurologists (such as Oliver Sacks) have observed, the arm is still felt to exist – what we take to be our material extension is a phantom superposed on a material reality, a virtual reality moving normally in step with reality which can become out of step with it. The illusion shapes the world we experience. Perception is full of illusions, and not just visual ones – they touch our very sense of materiality. For instance, if a person feels a coin with their hands while seeing it through a distorting lens which makes it appear oval, their hands will feel it to be oval, not round. What the brain thinks it sees dominates what it thinks it feels. The scientists of the mind have something to tell philosophers: the brain does not experience the actual world – it experiences its own invented one. But it is an illusion and our intellectual questioning should respect this: there is not so much a mind-body problem as a mind/virtual body/actual body one. The pessimists will observe that we now have to account not only for how anything material can be conscious, but for how anything material can create a virtual and illusory sense of material existence. The optimists will observe that the second problem looks more tractable: crack it, and we will be in a good position to answer the first.

John Skoyles
Department of Psychology,