What makes consciousness so interesting anyway?
Scientists and philosophers seem obsessed with this problem of consciousness. It isn't all that interesting the way they approach it and they're chasing gold at the end of a rainbow.
Do we know what we’re talking about when we try to define consciousness?
That’s the question that the always-interesting
addressed recently over at .
Do we have a definition of consciousness? Erik believes we (for some value of the plural pronoun) do, borrowing from Thomas Nagel’s well-known claim that consciousness concerns a peculiar what it is like-ness. Here it is in Nagel’s own words:
the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. There may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism- something it is like for the organism.
Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
All well and good. The trouble appears a few paragraphs later:
If physicalism is to be defended, the phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account. But when we examine their subjective character it: seems that such a result is impossible. The reason is that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.
Last line bolded for emphasis.
Subjective phenomena are essentially connected with a point of view, while objective physical theories have to abandon subjective points of view.
Now, let me head off a complaint. You might read Erik’s article and think, this is all well and good Matt, but you've missed his point. Erik does not deny that our best scientific theories of consciousness are deeply troubled. What he's saying is that, despite the many troubles and disagreements, there is an agreed-upon definition.
Indeed. And this is exactly what I dispute on the basis of Nagel's words.
Asserting that conscious experiences entail the existence of a subjective point of view is not a definition.
Why is this not a definition? There’s a technical reason and a mundane reason.
First the technical. To have a definition of X is to be able to give the necessary and sufficient conditions for X. To have a fire, you need oxygen, heat, and fuel. Each of these is necessary for fire, and together (allowing artistic license for example’s sake) they are sufficient.
Other times, we just point and say “that’s X” in an act of ostensive definition. That won’t work here for reasons I’ll get to.
In science they sometimes use an operational definition, which means that there are some reproducible conditions, procedures, or measurements that would reliably get you that thing in an experimental setting. Certain patterns of data received from a particle accelerator gets you a Higgs boson, though nobody could ever “see”, much less define, such a thing in the ordinary way.
Examples abound in the history of science. Favorites include explanations of oxygen, lightning, water, and the mechanisms of biological inheritance. There’s some entity or process which we have some awareness of, however dim, and then science takes that sucker apart to discover the hidden operating principles.
There’s a key difference in these phenomena and consciousness.
As described, consciousness itself is not so much a phenomenon as it is a condition on the appearance of phenomena. If things show up, which is what makes them a phenomenon (an appearance), they show up for someone.
This is not a definition because there are no conditions or criteria beyond the superficial description. While I’m more than sympathetic to Nagel’s description of subjectivity, for scientists aspiring to the objective, perspective-neutral status of physical theories, this simply won’t do.
If Nagel is even close to right, then any objective theory of consciousness would have to abandon the subjective viewpoint that it purports to explain. And that creates a problem.
The point of an objective theory of X is to “save the phenomena” of X. Any objective theory of the irreducibly first-personal could only come off by sacrificing the phenomena in the act of creating the theory.
Color me unconvinced.
It’s worse than that, though.
There’s a considerable gap between being able to recognize and identify a thing, and being able to give a definition of it.
A good portion of Plato’s early dialogues tell of Socrates showing how little the average citizen understands the words they use all the time. When pressed for a concrete definition of even simple notions, most anyone (and this often enough includes Socrates himself) will get stuck.
The usual response is to say “see, aren’t we ignorant?” But there’s a real case to make that the lesson is, so much the worse for definitions. We get by just fine, thank you, without knowing the precise definitions of our words. Why should anyone be bothered by this supposed ignorance when even children can demonstrate effortless competence with language?
We recognize phenomena that we don’t understand and can’t explain, and if you spend time thinking on this, you find that this is the norm and not the exception.
Consider how effortlessly you can recognize a friend you’ve known for 30 years. Could you define that person, with a simple list of conditions or criteria? Could you list all their attributes that you recognize when you recognize them? Not likely. What we recognize when identifying phenomena outside of trivial cases is not at all clear, and certainly not in the complexity of ordinary life.
Breaking out pieces of experience in order to understand them in reflective thought and experimental science is bizarre. But our culture is organized around the conviction that the bizarreness is ordinary, plus an implicit faith that our species knows and controls far more than we actually do.
I once read an anecdote about C. S. Lewis who was pleased at a young student of his. She had observed that an eye ripped from its living body in order to study it on a dissection tray is also ripped from its context of activity that makes it an organ of sight. The dead eye may be seen and therefore studied as an object, but it’s no longer an eye as it cannot see.
Lewis described the differences of these mental attitudes as one of contemplation, as one observes, measures, and prods the inert object, and one of enjoyment, as one enjoys seeing a beautiful sunset. You can’t work back to enjoyment out of contemplation.
When Nagel tells us that there is a something it is like to be this or that kind of organism with conscious experiences, understand that this “something” is not the usual sort of thing we could indicate by a noun or proper name in the sense we speak of material objects. Conscious experiences are appearances connected essentially with a point of view, which must be enjoyed. To contemplate the thing is to euthanize it.
This is why the “point and name” approach cannot succeed.
We are now far, far indeed from a definition in any classical philosophical, mathematical, or scientific sense. Not only is this is not a definition, it is only the identification of a phenomenon in the superficial sense of describing a fact about experience that we all seem to understand.
Which brings us to the other, mundane reason that we have no definition of consciousness. If consciousness so stipulated is too vague for any real science-friendly definition, it’s also too narrow a concept to be of much interest.
The idea seems to be that consciousness is some kind of mental object or property that we could discover one day if we knew enough about the brain’s fine structure and function and had the right theory to organize and explain all the facts. In principle the explanation of consciousness would be no different in kind from theories of embryology and morphology, showing how natural biological processes give rise to mental, rather than physical, characteristics. With theories in hand, we’d know all that could be known about conscious experiences.
Since consciousness figures into our generic schema of thoughts about things, objects, and causal relationships between objects, “all we need” is an explanation of what brings it about.
It sounds nice, I guess. Somebody must like it. But it doesn't work.
Here is the issue. Consciousness so described is a brute category that contains all sorts of putative objects and happenings. Possible contents of conscious experience include, by no means exhaustively:
Emotions, like anger and fear
Moods, like dread, anxiety, and joy
Bodily sensations of pain or warmth
Visual appearances, such as objects and colors
Sounds
Scents
Tactile sensations
Taste
Interoceptive awareness of visceral states or “gut feelings”
Kinesthetic awareness of bodily posture and position in space
Attitudes of believing, wanting, and intending
Imaginary objects
Hallucinations
A scientific search for consciousness would amount to a search for these mental things, like a man rifling through the pockets of his jeans looking for a stick of gum. No different in principle than tracking down physical objects in order to classify them and take them apart to learn their secrets. Any definition of the explanandum, the thing we’re trying to explain, would fall within the order of such things.
The ultimate goal is to track down the location of the invisible playhouse where the daily dramas of mind play out on the stage before an audience of one.
These metaphors of objects and location are not accidental.
Consciousness is conceived, implicitly, as a sort of container for the quasi-objects of mental life. Consciousness being the appearance of appearances naturally lends itself to metaphors of some venue where things appear for a spectator. As Nagel puts it, there’s “something that it is like”. Stress on something, indicating the noun form of a place or thing.
The problem here may not be obvious so let me bring it into the light.
Ordinary experience gives us a certain acquaintance with the world around us. That world is extremely complex, full of many sorts of happenings. Some of these happenings include our own actions, as individuals, and the actions of other human beings. And some of those actions include language, in its broadest meaning, involving any use of symbols for acts of communication. This includes spoken words and sentences, facial expressions, gestures, and posture, and uses of visual and auditory symbols like drawings and music.
Philosophical-slash-scientific theories about the mind, meanwhile, start from an entirely opposite position. They ask us to forget about all that. Forget that we are living animals with a particular sort of life, in actual situations with concrete circumstances, which include acts and practices of communicating with others of our kind.
Begin inside, in a private world, and then work outwards to recover the public world outside. Or begin outside, and work our way in.
Here’s an idea for you.
What if there is no inner mind without first having a certain fluency with that complex reality and all of the acts and happenings going on in it?
The various philosophical theories ask us to start by leaving out the vast sweep of actual experience of our own existence, and then begin investigation from a pre-existing theory.
States and acts of the mind are conceived and studied as if they were a special class of objects, not physical, but nevertheless distinct, independent things which can be classified and sorted as we classify and sort the stuff in your jacket pocket.
This, to put it flatly, is to replace our actual situation with a system of abstract ideas, and then claim that the abstract ideas are more real than the world of our most intimate acquaintance, that of which we see, touch, feel, hear, know about, and act within.
This web of refined abstractions is then labeled as “realist”, “materialist”, “objective”, and “natural”, even though it is as artificial and ideal as the ugly brutalist building downtown where the city council plots its evils.
Distortion of reality by theory is how consciousness comes to seem like a special location full of special object-like things.
The consciousness-explainers begin within the inner world of conscious experience as if this were a given fact of human nature as sure as two arms, two eyes, and two kidneys, and then reason our way around that situation.
But why is it exactly that we start here?
That’s head up the pipe backwards.
If you have any experience meditating, you may have stumbled into this discovery for yourself. The division of experience into distinct objects and qualities, which easily presents itself as a given fact of reality, is in most respects an artificial construction. We had to learn it from others around us, from common beliefs and representations, from the “common sense” attitudes of our culture. Once learning it, we reproduce it.
Among these artificial divisions include the apparent difference between the inner mind and the outer world.
What we today call consciousness was not always so. Consider how strange ancient and medieval art seems to us. Perspective doesn’t show up until the Renaissance. You find similar strangeness in written works. The novel as a popular form doesn’t really show up until the 18th century. The idea of occupying a privileged viewpoint inside the mind of a character is quite recent. Strange as it sounds to us, our ancestors did not experience themselves or the world as we do.
As Charles Taylor argues in his magnificent book Sources of the Self, the ideas and words that we use to understand ourselves have a long and fascinating history. You will find no analogs for our current anxieties about “consciousness” in Plato or Aristotle or the Roman era. Even the stirrings in late antiquity through St. Augustine and developed in the medieval Christians reveal only the primitive beginnings of our complex ideas on “what’s inside”.
Once this modern ideal of a “Self”, capital S, appears in gradual steps through the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance, it then divides into many distinct paths. The ideas of Descartes and Locke were crucial here, as were those of Montaigne and the Romantics. Nor has this process of self-elaboration come to a stop. Our cutting-edge metaphors of machines, electronics, information processors and computers, networks, and AI are all continuations of that same history of creating concepts to understand ourselves.
There’s a considerable weight of history in our mental words and concepts. Scientific psychology and cognitive science mostly ignores this because we have computers.
All of this is to say that, if it’s a mistake to over-simplify matters by replacing the complex reality with easy abstractions, then this goes for the outer reality and the inner world.
And this draws attention to a fact we don’t usually think about. A bat may or may not have inner perceptual experiences. I tend to believe they do, but I already have strange and deliberately unscientific thoughts about life and nature, so I’m not stingy with my attributions of subjectivity.
But there is a key difference between healthy human adults and all other organisms often glossed over. The essential difference is that bats do not have the capacity to learn and use symbolic language. Nor do any other living things, so far as we know, besides us humans.
Having a human point of view has a lot more to do with the capabilities and demonstrated competence of mastering uses of words than it does with bare sensations and perceptual experience.
This is already far too long so I can’t argue it here, but there’s an active component to sensation and perception that is left out of all of these theories that treat consciousness like a “mirror of nature” reflecting back what is already out there.
You would think it might be important that we are a kind of animal with a body capable of speaking and writing and moving in ways that express ourselves. The deep and profound contribution of language competence to our experiences of having a private “inside” doesn’t get any traction with the consciousness explainers.
My point is that mental phenomena don’t have to be planed down to a simple blunt category called “consciousness” as if this were a fact of mind as true as quantum physics is true of the physical world.
Many of our mental words, words for intentional action and sense perception among them, don’t play the kind of role in language and life-activity (of which language is a part) that allows us to treat them as an object, a proper name, or a noun.1
We assign these ideas and words to “consciousness” because that is, at present, how our cultural ways of talking and acting have divvied up certain parts of experience and created narratives around them.
This, I suggest, leads more to confusion than clarification. And it contributes to the on-going failure to distinguish properly between minds and the scientific stuff of brains and behaviors.
These are difficult thoughts for us. As I’ve written here before, much of what passes for “common sense” thinking about the mind has been infected by subject-object dualism for so long that its taken for granted as sure as oxygen in the air we breathe.
Erik is correct that the difficulty with consciousness is not for a lack of definition, though not for the reasons he gives. I don’t believe we have a definition of consciousness, and I don’t believe a definition is forthcoming.
This is not because the idea is too slippery, difficult, or ephemeral. The difficulty is expecting the sort of definition you’d want for a scientific theory. The difficulty is believing that there will be any in-principle reconciliation with the hard objectivity of science and the irreducible subjectivity of the first-person standpoint.
As if you could stand back and contemplate consciousness as an object among objects. That’s not what consciousness is.
Subjectivity includes acts of the mind, which parallel in superficial but important ways the acts, movements, postures, and gestures of the body. To be a subject is to engage in activities expressed by psychological verbs. Action, rather than "Cartesian thoughts" about feelings and sensations and their felt qualities, is the more interesting feature of our mental activities and experiences.
Having a point of view is not exhausted by passively seeing the redness of red, hearing the climax of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, or feeling the sharp coldness of ice against the bare skin of your stomach.
To be a subject is to have a point of view, which means being somewhere, having (in our case) a living, material body grounded in a time and place.
The mystery here, to frame it another way, isn’t why we feel, sense, perceive, and experience “inside” our minds, which is the current preoccupation of “consciousness”.
The question mark is how we can do so much with words, symbols, and gestures, how we’re able to make ourselves understood to each other using them, and how all of these intelligible acts come to exist at all.
Thanks for reading.
-Matt
p.s. If you found this valuable, interesting, funny, or it made you upset that you had to spit, I ask that you do me a favor and share it with just one person.
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For a fascinating though difficult exploration of this thought, see G.E.M. Anscombe, “The Intentionality of Sensation”. This idea recurs throughout the remarks in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
I believe human scientists are consumed with trying to define it because of the inherent and collective human insecurity. They have to prove we are self-aware but absolutely nobody else is, thereby automatically elevating humans above other mammals. But that's just me. (grin)