|
"Consciousness - the need for a new paradigm."
Until relatively recently, the ordinary language tradition in philosophy has remained wary of engaging with the topic
of consciousness, preferring to relegate discussion of such a romantic chimera to its interminably fanciful phenomenologist
cousin. For so long, the workings of the mind have remained unfathomable even to science and for the post-verificationist
orthodoxy, any subjects lacking empirical foundation could be dismissed as dangerously speculative, lest they raise the ugly
spectre of metaphysics. However, as the scientific study of the mind has grown ever more sophisticated, and such illustrious
figures as Francis Crick have felt confident enough to enlighten us at to, 'why neuroscience might be able to explain consciousness,'
analytic philosophers have swept down upon it like a plague of locusts. Eternally the handmaidens of science, the questions
they ask are banal in their predictability; 'How can we account for consciousness?'... 'What causes consciousness?'... 'How
can we make consciousness fit into our existing frameworks?' Even those who defend the concept of consciousness, such as John
Searle and Ned Block, do so primarily in an attempt to refute functional and computational models of mind. Consequently, everybody
remains almost entirely ignorant as to what this thing 'consciousness' might be, a target so nebulous that inconsistency persists
even amongst its supporters.
The classic vindication of consciousness in modern philosophy of mind, which had for so long previously been in thrall
to texts such as Gilbert Ryle's 'Concept of Mind,' came by way of Thomas Nagel's paper, 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' As
a foundational description of consciousness, it has possibly never been superseded within the tradition. Nagel refers to the
'subjective character of experience,' and asserts that '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.' He elucidates this by drawing attention to
our inability to even conceive how it must a feel to be a bat, a creature whose mode of perception is so radically removed
from our own that our wildest imaginings are insufficient for the task. Whilst in the case of a bat the difficulty is especially
pronounced, we are similarly unable to access the experiences of fellow humans. We can believe that they have experiences,
but there is no guarantee that they will qualitatively resemble our own. Notice that Nagel's account embraces the totality
of experience, a holistic notion of what it is like to exist as a being inside any given moment. Other defences, such as Jackson's
have narrowed the focus to 'certain features of the bodily sensations especially... of certain perceptual experiences,' which
have been dubbed 'qualia.'
Block, meanwhile, has distinguished between access-consciousness, the subjective control of thought or action, and phenomenal-consciousness,
which refers to the same qualitative, experiential state as Nagel. He believes that this condition 'outruns' the 'intentional,
functional and the purely cognitive,' and presents a special difficulty for computational theories of mind, labelling it the
'hard problem.' Opponents of such computational models argue that the existence of phenomenal consciousness appears to leave
the mind-body problem untouched. For whilst we can point to, say, the firing of neurons at a particular frequency as responsible
for conscious states, there is such a gulf in resemblance between the features of brute physical facts and our individual
experience of consciousness, that it is almost impossible to understand how the reference can be the same. The disparity
is so marked that there is no reason to think that these neuronal firings are anything more than correlates. It could be
that they perform exactly the same function as an LED on an electric circuit, reporting that the current is there, but playing
no role in either its cause or flow.
Any relationship we might posit between consciousness and brain states is purely contingent. Nothing neuroscience
can point to necessitates our subjective experience, for it is entirely possible to conceive of organisms whose physical composition
is like ours in every respect, but who lack conscious states. Yet since we manifestly enjoy such states, it follows that a
purely materialist concept of mind fails to include something fundamental. Such theories are not necessarily wrong, they do
not commit any logical error, rather, they simply make an important omission. This has led many defenders of consciousness
to accept that functional or representational hypotheses may well play a role in the working of the mind, but that such explanations
cannot offer the comprehensive account which is apparently the objective of Western science and philosophy.
The most vociferous opposition to the 'hard problem' of consciousness comes from Daniel Dennett. Just as supporters
of the concept do not deny that functional processes might play their part, Dennett does not seek to eliminate consciousness
as an instrumental concept, but instead denies that there is anything special about it. Whilst those who argue for such uniqueness
think the wonder of consciousness lies in its transcendence of the physical, Dennett considers that the true marvel is precisely
the capacity of the physical to produce such a phenomenon. He asserts that our subjective experience is an 'user-illusion'
produced by our status as language-users and subsequent construction of an infinitely complex cultural web. As such, Dennett's
theory of consciousness appears especially tempting. It does not discount our visceral intuition of subjective experience,
as Nagel cautions against, but mounts it in the terms of our familiar paradigms, with which many feel comfortable, especially
those who are dazzled by the ostensible omniscience of the natural sciences.
Unfortunately, whilst Dennett offers an alluring argument, the methods by which he attempts to deflate the transcendence
of consciousness are based on a fundamental misconception of its character. Consequently they fail to bridge the explanatory
gap or demonstrate the superior viability of his hypothesis. Whilst he accuses defenders of consciousness of proceeding from
a pre-theoretical notion which leads them into error, Dennett himself departs from a materialist prejudice which means that
his imagination cannot conceive of conscious fully, beyond the relational terms which functionalism demands. He claims that
if we analyse our conscious experience, it is impossible to isolate it from 'mere accompaniment, contributory cause or by-product,'
and the problem is not that we cannot perform such a task with any reliability, but that there is anything to isolate in the
first place.
For instance, Dennett denies that we can ever distinguish between our qualitative experience of an event and the subsequent
judgement we pass on it. If I woke up one day and suddenly found that the sound of John Coltrane no longer appealed to me,
it would be impossible to assess whether it sounded exactly the same to me as it had always done and I simply judged that
I no longer enjoyed that particular sound; or whether my qualitative experience of the sound had somehow changed for the worse
and I would still judge that I liked the original experience should I enjoy it again. Any attempt to distinguish between the
two possibilities is contaminated by its appeal to memory, which is potentially unreliable. Such an argument, however, relies
upon its division of the experience into functional components like judgement and memory. What Dennett fails to perceive is
that each one of these has its own individual subjective character. My experiences of Coltrane yesterday and today are two
distinct conscious states, each of which I am introspectively aware regardless of any comparison. Moreover, my raw experience
of Coltrane today is an entirely separate conscious experience to my experience of Coltrane today and subsequent comparison
with my memory of the experience yesterday.
An even more serious accusation is that when attacking consciousness as singular entity, Dennett persistently commits
a straw man fallacy. He repeatedly charges his opponents of complicity with that long discredited doctrine, dualism, alleging
they 'create a monster - an imaginary dazzle in the eye of a Cartesian homunculus,' and that the notion assumes a 'Cartesian
theatre' in which some disembodied subject observes his mental performance. But once again, Dennett is guilty of misrepresentation.
As Colin McGinn emphasises, when we speak of conscious states we do not need to imagine an 'inner-eye that perceives' our
experience for they suffuse our entire being. Dennett is so terrified of dualism that he confuses a 'Cartesian homunculus'
for the very transparent and uncontroversial claim that there must be a subject who has conscious states. Such errors derive
from the philosophical treatment of consciousness as nothing more than a tool in a mind-body debate so desperate to distance
itself from Cartesianism that it is willing to blur the definition of anything which threatens to lead us back to it. Everybody
is so concerned with how consciousness might relate to mental causation that they have never stopped to examine it from the
inside.
Nagel was only too aware of the propensity of philosophy to offer questionable portrayals of phenomena simply because
they permit explanation within an existing paradigm. This predicament is particularly pronounced for consciousness, when
the raison d'être of our existing framework is to offer objective explanation. Any attempt to provide an objective account
must necessarily negate the subjective, but since consciousness is the first-person perspective, we are presented with a paradox.
McGinn and others, dubbed 'mysterians' have speculated that it may simply be impossible to study consciousness because we
are hidebound by our own relation to it. Nagel, however, regards it as a challenge to develop a new paradigm which can evade
such problems, for to dismiss consciousness simply because it does not endorse our existing accepted wisdom is 'the crudest
form of cognitive dissonance.'
Amongst the few fumbling towards this goal is David Chalmers who has proposed that the apparent inconceivability of
reducing consciousness to a physical process demands that it be treated as fundamental, much as physicists regard space or
charge. Doing so would hearken back to the doctrine known as pan-psychism, according to which everything participates in
consciousness to some extent and previously propounded in the metaphysics of Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead and psychologist
Carl Jung. These thinkers are treated with suspicion by most orthodox philosophers, but as Thomas Kuhn so rightly observed
when he coined the term, new paradigms will only arise from the periphery and the establishment will at least have to engage
with the fringes in search of a dialectic if a way forward is to be found. It is pure arrogance, a Platonic conceit, to believe
that Western philosophy exists in a bubble and can isolate itself from other traditions, reaching understanding through reason
alone. Eastern and esoteric thought has long made a study of consciousness, particularly with regard to evolution, which may
give pause for thought to those materialists who would eliminate consciousness on the grounds that it seemingly fulfils no
wider purpose.
For instance, meditation really ought to be of greater interest to consciousness studies, as it strives to develop
what some have referred to as pure consciousness. Zen names it No-Mind, whilst Jung described it as 'super-phenomenal.' As
all these designations suggest, meditation refines a consciousness stripped of both external intentional objects and the internal
thinking self, a consciousness which is its own content. It may be tempting for some to argue that if the state is 'super-phenomenal'
it effectively proves that phenomenal-consciousness is illusory, but this is precisely the difficulty with the restricted
notion of consciousness philosophy currently holds. An adept would accept that there is a qualitative experience of being
in a meditative state, only that it is divested of all thought. In its absence, the likes of Dennett would be unable to insist
that consciousness cannot be isolated from its components because there are none, it has performed the act of isolation itself.
Practitioners of meditation have reported a state of unity in which the boundaries between the subjective and objective realm
are dissolved. Devoid of self, Dennett could not tar this consciousness with dualism. Meanwhile, this harmonisation of the
subjective and objective could help to resolve Nagel's conundrum and potentially offer support for pan-psychism.
In its investigation of consciousness, modern philosophy of mind has proceeded purely from its role in the mind-body
problem, much as their current paradigm with its ceaseless craving for objective certainty demands. Yet consciousness has
implications not merely for materialist theories of mind, but for the whole approach adopted by the discipline. In its slavish
adherence to current scientific research, analytic philosophy has utterly failed to acknowledge the work of other traditions
of thought. To assume that the efficacy of physical science proves that it alone is up to the task is a dangerously inductive
assumption, and knowing something about neuroscience and artificial intelligence does not translate into knowing anything
about consciousness. If a genuine study is to be undertaken, all facets of consciousness must be examined, for currently the
failure to develop a well defined and holistic conception has left us with an impasse in which one side is content to misrepresent
the phenomena purely to avoid abandoning their cherished paradigm and in doing so potentially obstruct a whole new mode of
thinking.
|
