On Explaining Consciousness Away

It is very often claimed that the existence of consciousness poses a problem for physicalism, the idea that only physical things (fundamental particles, forces between them, etc.) exist. If there is a creature who looks and behaves like an ordinary human, it seems to many as though there is nevertheless a further question as to whether the creature is conscious, i.e. genuinely has a first person point of view and is not just a convincing automaton. We may, it seems, suppose a creature would, if harmed, act as though it is in pain, although it would lack the exclusively first-personal feeling of pain which ordinary humans purportedly have. Such a being would be physically identical to me (in the relevant respects) but lacking consciousness, and so consciousness must be something non-physical if such a being is possible­¹. In short, consciousness seems to have mysterious properties which make it seem as though it can’t be physical; it seems as though there is something to pain that is over and above all of the physical goings-on, something which cannot be known except through first-person acquaintance.

There are three common ways of responding to this issue­­². First, one can accept the intuition and abandon physicalism. Second, one can hope that further investigation into the nature of the human mind will show us that the mysterious properties really can be accounted in some manner for without postulating anything non-physical, thus adopting a reductionist position. Finally, one can adopt a deflationist position by claiming that consciousness does not have these supposed mysterious properties and that they are illusory. This, of course, is not to say that there are no mysteries surrounding consciousness—the human brain is enormously complex and, needless to say, not fully understood. The deflationist, rather, denies that there are any mysterious properties of the sort that can be problematic for physicalism—she denies that consciousness contains that “something extra” over and above all the physical goings-on. Such a view is held by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett and Keith Frankish, and defending it will be the focus of this post.

Views similar to Dennett’s and Frankish’s have a very bad rap among many philosophers. They are often seen as merely avoiding the problems which warrant explanation and simply ignoring plainly observable phenomena; it is not uncommon to see people deridingly refer to Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained as “Consciousness Explained Away”. It is widely (and incorrectly) claimed that they believe consciousness doesn’t exist, which would be an absurd and false position indeed. Rather than substantively engaging with their arguments, many see it fit to dismiss them out of hand on the basis of such claims.

Now, I want to ask, why would it even be absurd to deny consciousness exists or that I am feeling what I think I am when I am in pain—so absurd that the possibility can be dismissed without further consideration? One cannot justify such an attitude merely on the basis of strong intuitions. Legitimate hypotheses have counterintuitive consequences all the time, as can readily be seen in physics. I don’t think many people are claiming that this alone is the problem with the deflationist view. Rather, what is claimed is that it denies something that we cannot, in principle, be wrong about—that is to say, something about which we are incorrigible. There is certainly a lot of debate to be had about the existence of mental states to which the bearers have privileged access, but that doesn’t concern me here. I hereby take for granted that there are indeed mental facts that we are incorrigible about, such as that consciousness exists, that I am in pain (we may suppose), etc.

This leaves us with a puzzle, though. How on Earth could incorrigible knowledge possibly exist? I take myself know a lot of stuff, but in most cases I can imagine coming across some new evidence that would cause me to abandon my belief. Let p be a proposition about which I am incorrigible. This means that I believe p and the belief is such that I cannot possible be wrong about it. In other words, it is necessarily the case that if I have this belief then p is true. An easy way this could happen is if p is necessarily true. That case doesn’t concern us though, since e.g. that I am in pain is not going to be necessarily true. So, suppose p might have been false. If my belief is to be incorrigible, then we must ensure that in any case that p is false, I don’t have my belief. I’m simplifying here for the sake of brevity, but basically, there are two possibilities—either p being true is what’s making me believe p, or my belief is what makes p true. Suppose the former is so. The view is that my belief is just an accurate response to my being in a certain state—in other words, the belief is causally dependent upon my being in the state in question. This, unfortunately, is not going to give us incorrigibility though. The reason is that the effects of a given cause can always be disturbed or replicated by intervening factors. My throwing a ball might cause a window to break, but even if I don’t, some other factor—someone punching the window, say—can replicate the effect. If my belief that I am in pain is merely caused by my being in pain, then it will be possible, in principle, for the latter to be present without the former if some weird stuff happens in the middle. The belief will no longer by incorrigible, contrary to hypothesis.

Thus we are forced to assume that it is my belief in p that makes p true. Again, this cannot be a mere causal connection between the two, for we can just apply the above argument in reverse—an intervening influence can prefect my belief from causing p to be true. There is, rather, a constitutive connection between the two: my believing p is criterial of p being true.³ This is to say that the special incorrigible properties of my experience, such as my being in pain, are constituted by my believing that my experience has that property. Contrary to what we might have initially thought, the actual properties of my experience are not grounded in some independently existing “qualia” that lie in a “phenomenal field” which are intrinsic to the experience itself and that I somehow have perfect access to; rather, my experience is simply what I take it to be. This is, in a nutshell, an argument made in Dennett’s essay “Why you Can’t Make a Computer that Feels Pain.” He notes that our ordinary notion of “pain” has two roles to play, two roles that are in great tension so that no particular thing can fit them both perfectly. On the one hand, we want to be incorrigible about our pains—if I believe I’m in pain, then I am. On the other hand, we want “being in pain” to be identified with some underlying physical state independent of my beliefs, i.e. one necessarily manifested in behavior in a certain way. But it is in principle possible to be in the latter sort of state without believing such, so we’re forced to give something up.­⁴

This is, also, the main lesson of Consciousness Explained­⁵—that, in “explaining consciousness,” we do not need to explain the existence and properties of some “phenomenal field” or “Cartesian theater” where all of an individual’s experiences “come together” and are then reported by that individual. Rather, we only need to account for why people report their experiences the way they do. This, in a nutshell, is what falls out of Dennett’s “heterophenomenological” methodology.

I should stress, this is a view about what grounds the “actual nature” of a being’s experiences; this is not to say that experience itself is an illusion or doesn’t exist. Frankish often faces this sort of criticism because he dubbed his position “illusionism,” as in the title of his essay “Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness.” People who accuse him of believing that consciousness itself is an illusion evidently failed to read past the title, for in the abstract he makes it absolutely clear that it is phenomenality that is illusory, not consciousness is general. People often respond to this by saying that consciousness is essentially phenomenal, so that denying phenomenality exists constitutes denying consciousness exists. This simply begs the question against those who think the a proper theory of consciousness does not involve phenomenality.

In summary, my main goal is to clarify “deflationist” or “illusionist” approaches in the philosophy of mind. They are often characterized as denying what we know best, namely, the nature of our own experiences, so that they can be dismissed without further engagement. I have argued (all too briefly, I must admit) that, in contrast, adopting views about experience similar to Dennett’s is the only way to save our supposed incorrigibility about the properties of our experiences, something that had to be posited in order for one to have any hope of justifying dismissiveness towards his position.

 

Footnotes:

­¹David Chalmers frequently advances this sort of argument.

­²This taxonomy is adapted from one use by Paul Churchland (with respect to “folk psychology”), see e.g. Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, section 15.

³A similar point is made by Nicholas Georgalis in The Primacy of the Subjective, albeit about intentional content.

⁴To clarify, although I have for the purposes of this post been taking incorrigibility for granted, Dennett is skeptical of the theoretical utility of states that we can be incorrigible about, although he does not make a definitive judgement.

^­5For this way of understanding main lessons of the book (and, consequently, much of the way in which I now understand these issues), I am indebted to my friend Joseph Clark.