Philosophers on Consciousness: Talking about the Mind 9781350190429, 9781350190412, 9781350190450, 9781350190436

Table of contents :
Cover
About book
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Illustrations
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Preface
Chapter One Why Consciousness Matters
Introduction
Waking up
The zombie implant
You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone
Where does this leave us?
Afterthoughts
Questions to consider
Recommended reading
Chapter Two The Grand Illusion
Introduction
A psychological approach
Being a bat
The hard problem
The evolution of consciousness
The illusion of continuity
Afterthoughts
Questions to consider
Recommended reading
Chapter Three The Hard Problem
Introduction
The hard problem
A science of consciousness
Solving the hard problem
The zombie train
Afterthoughts
Questions to consider
Recommended reading
Chapter Four A Change of Heart
Introduction
Leaving the room
The appeal
Resisting the siren’s call
Afterthoughts
Questions to consider
Recommended reading
Chapter Five The Given
Introduction
Consciousness and phenomenology
Awareness of awareness
Types of phenomenology
Sticking to our senses
Afterthoughts
Questions to consider
Recommended reading
Chapter Six A Biologist’s Perspective
Introduction
How philosophy does (and does not) make progress
There’s something about Mary
Zombieland
Megamind
Consciousness as an evolved biological phenomenon
Matter matters
Afterthoughts
Questions to consider
Recommended reading
Chapter Seven The Hornswoggle Problem
Introduction
Neurophilosophy
Zombies and neuroscientists
Humdinger solutions
The right pathway
Afterthoughts
Questions to consider
Recommended reading
Chapter Eight Illusionism
Introduction
The old woman and the beetle
The hard problem
Three options
Does illusionism deny consciousness?
Putting the ‘illusion’ in illusionism
Is illusionism self-defeating?
‘They’re real, dammit!’
Walking away
Afterthoughts
Questions to consider
Recommended reading
Chapter Nine Closing the Theatre
Introduction
Out of the armchair
Third-person phenomenology
The Cartesian Theatre
The knowledge argument
Panpsychism
The silliest claim ever made
Afterthoughts
Questions to consider
Recommended reading
Chapter Ten The Denial
Introduction
The silliest claim
Real naturalism
Knowing consciousness
Panpsychism
Afterthoughts
Questions to consider
Recommended reading
Chapter Eleven Galileo’s Error
Introduction
The error
False starts
The scientific revolution
A world of value
Afterthoughts
Questions to consider
Recommended reading
Chapter Twelve The World as Consciousness
Introduction
Apples and bananas
The grand competition
Two views, two problems: the micropsychists and the cosmopsychists
Berkeley’s Boulevard
Panpsychist idealism
Grab the cosmic popcorn
The cognisensory deprivation tank
Coming home
The world as consciousness
Afterthoughts
Questions to consider
Recommended reading
Notes & Sources
Index

Citation preview

This book is for everyone who is in the least philosopho-curious. Amateurs like me, thrashing about in the shallows, usually have to read every sentence in a book on philosophy, however apparently simple, at least four times before understanding it (and then forgetting it all the moment we have turned the page). Not so with Philosophers on Consciousness. Here are some of the world’s most notable and respected thinkers, each adding their thoughts on the field known as ‘philosophy of mind’, most especially on the famous ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, and all communicating with remarkable clarity and approachable ease. Jack Symes guides us charmingly and authoritatively through, introducing and summing up the contributions, filling the role of interlocutor and interviewer, distributing delightful inline ‘info-boxes’ offering explanations of concepts, characters and context as you read. He does so with a wit and freshness that enlivens without trivializing. It cannot be common to find Toblerones, Paul Rudd and Adam Sandler sharing pages with the most distinguished philosophers alive. This is a book that everyone interested in the human mind will fall on like . . . like a hungry student on a Toblerone. – Stephen Fry

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Talking about Philosophy Talking about Philosophy is a series of introductory philosophy books comprising interviews and essays from the world’s leading philosophers. Here you can read the words of major thinkers such as Susan Blackmore, Patricia Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Frank Jackson, Steven Pinker and Peter Singer in connection to a single focused and knotty philosophical issue such as: how does the brain produce consciousness? How can we build a better society? Is it reasonable to believe in God? Based on The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast, each book takes the wisdom from the show’s guests and puts their thoughts on the page, alongside and against one another. The series remasters the most pertinent and engaging selections from the conversations, presenting them alongside original essays from philosophy’s biggest thinkers, and tying them together through the editor’s expositions and critical commentaries. Brought to life by the podcast, these are jargon-free introductions to the perennial questions in philosophy. Jack Symes Jack Symes is the producer of The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast and editor of the Bloomsbury series Talking about Philosophy. He is currently a teacher and researcher at the University of Liverpool and previously a teacher of religion and philosophy at King Edward VI High School for Girls. Forthcoming titles include Philosophers on God: Talking about Existence Philosophers on How to Live: Talking about Morality

www.thepanpsycast.com

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Philosophers on Consciousness Talking about the Mind Edited by Jack Symes

Assistant Editor: Casey Logue

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Jack Symes and Contributors, 2022 Jack Symes has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Louise Dugdale Cover image: ‘Sabras’ by Geordanna Cordero/Unsplash All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Symes, Jack, editor. Title: Philosophers on consciousness : talking about the mind / edited by Jack Symes ; assistant editor, Casey Logue. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Series: Talking about philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021037600 (print) | LCCN 2021037601 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350190412 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350190429 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350190436 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350190443 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Consciousness. | Philosophy of mind. Classification: LCC B808.9 .P49 2022 (print) | LCC B808.9 (ebook) | DDC 128/.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037600 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037601 ISBN:

HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3501-9042-9 978-1-3501-9041-2 978-1-3501-9043-6 978-1-3501-9044-3

Series: Talking about Philosophy Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents Illustrations Contributors Acknowledgements Preface 1

Why Consciousness Matters Gregory Miller 2 The Grand Illusion Susan Blackmore 3 The Hard Problem David Chalmers 4 A Change of Heart Frank Jackson 5 The Given Michelle Montague 6 A Biologist’s Perspective Massimo Pigliucci 7 The Hornswoggle Problem Patricia Churchland 8 Illusionism Keith Frankish 9 Closing the Theatre Daniel Dennett 10 The Denial Galen Strawson 11 Galileo’s Error Philip Goff 12 The World as Consciousness Miri Albahari & Jack Symes Notes & Sources Index

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1 11 25 39 49 63 75 89 101 113 127 141

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Illustrations Change blindness Duck–rabbit Rotating the image Cartesian Theatre

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All illustrations were created by Charlotte Mudd and are original to this work. Copyright of all illustrations is held by Jack Symes and Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

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Contributors Miri Albahari is Lecturer of Philosophy at the University of Western Australia. Susan Blackmore is Visiting Professor of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, UK. David Chalmers is Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and Codirector of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University, USA and Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Canberra. Patricia Churchland is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at University of California San Diego, USA. Daniel Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University and Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. Keith Frankish is Honorary Reader at the University of Sheffield, UK, Visiting Research Fellow at The Open University, UK and an Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme at the University of Crete, Greece. Philip Goff is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, UK. Frank Jackson is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Canberra. Casey Logue is Teacher of English at The Grange School, UK. Gregory Miller is a freelance philosopher specialising in philosophy of mind. Michelle Montague is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Massimo Pigliucci is K. D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York, USA. Galen Strawson is President’s Chair of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Jack Symes is Teacher and Researcher of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, UK. xi

Acknowledgements I would like to thank all of the contributors who have supported Philosophers on Consciousness. Firstly, thank you to Yujin Nagasawa for convincing me to pursue this project and to Gregory Miller for his support in developing the proposal. I am especially grateful to Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley and Gregory Miller for conducting the interviews in this series. Without their dedication, optimism and bad jokes, this book would not be possible. Thank you to Charlotte Mudd for illustrating the book. A special thank you to Casey Logue for preparing the original interview transcripts and for all of her literary advice throughout the editing process. To all of the authors and interviewees, I extend my deepest gratitude. Each of them has freely given up their time to participate in interviews, write essays and edit revised versions at length. I am blessed not only to present the work of twelve of the world’s leading thinkers, but some of the most thorough, reliable and kind-hearted people I have worked with. On behalf of the contributors, thank you to Susan Blackmore, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, David Godman, Jonathon Hawkins, Remco Heesen, Andrew Horton, Chris Letheby, Casey Logue, Oliver Marley, Gregory Miller, Garrett Mindt, Galen Strawson, Maddison Symes and Stevie Symes for their invaluable comments on all or part of the text. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers at Bloomsbury for their insightful and constructive feedback throughout the project’s various stages. A tremendous thank you to all of those who have supported the work of The Panpsycast over the past five years. In particular, thank you to Westhill Endowment and our patrons who have graciously funded this and related projects. On a personal level, I am also grateful to Hockerill Educational Foundation and the University of Liverpool – with special thanks to Barry Dainton and Daniel Hill – for supporting my research and writing. A heartfelt thank you to Michelle, Gary, Alvin, Stevie, Maddison, Samuel and Casey for their patience and love. Most of all, thank you to Colleen Coalter and Becky Holland at Bloomsbury for their faith and guidance throughout all stages of the book’s development. On behalf of everybody involved, I thank them and the editorial board at Bloomsbury for making this book a reality. xii

Preface Imagine the smile on your parent’s face as you rush to meet them at the school gates, the soft heat of the sand between your toes on a first holiday, waking up in the haze of a late afternoon after dancing all night, the drop in your stomach when you realize you’ll never hear their voice again. These are conscious experiences. Without them, what is there to life? In this sense, we all know what consciousness is – there’s nothing we know more intimately – yet it remains one of life’s greatest mysteries. Despite the incredible advances made in physical science, it doesn’t seem like we’re any closer to an explanation of where consciousness comes from. How is it, exactly, that the brain’s 86 billion neurons give rise to conscious experience? As we’ll see, our answer to this question will not only shape our understanding of the human mind, but the fabric of reality itself. The interviewees and authors in this book are some of the most influential and innovative thinkers in the world. Fortunately for us, they’re also experts in communication. Whether you’re already an expert in the field or approaching philosophy for the first time, I hope you find this book accessible, entertaining and insightful. The twelve proceeding chapters are a mixture of essays and interviews, weaved together to guide you through some of the most exciting and promising ideas in philosophy of mind. The interviews in this book are based on conversations which have taken place on The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast. Let me assure you: you do not need to know anything about The Panpsycast. Each interview has been completely remastered for the written page. The ideas have been updated to ensure they reflect the latest developments in the field, and many of the words have been changed to make the content as clear and engaging as possible. Additionally, where multiple interviewers conducted the original interviews, the format has been converted to one-on-one conversations. All of the essays are original to this book. The authors have gone to great lengths to ensure that complex and challenging ideas are explained in simple terms, without compromising the integrity of their philosophy. The goal was simple: to ensure that you – the reader – no matter who you are, can access the latest, most influential ideas in philosophy of mind. From this point forward, when you see this heavier font being used, this means that I am talking to you or the interviewee. When the font is lighter, you’re xiii

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reading the words of the philosopher who is credited at the beginning of the relevant chapter. You’ll also see some infoboxes dotted throughout the book. Think of The info-boxes look like this. You can’t miss them. them like philosophical speed cameras. When the ideas are moving too fast – when they risk leaving some people behind – the info-boxes slow down the discussion and bring everybody up to speed. If you don’t like speed cameras, feel free to ignore them. As you move through this book’s pages, I encourage you to reflect on the nature of your own experience. Don’t take it for granted. Don’t forget that your conscious mind is both the greatest mystery and the most important feature of your existence. Not convinced? Then let our journey begin.

Chapter One

Why Consciousness Matters Gregory Miller

Introduction Our story begins with a simple question: why should we care about consciousness? In the eyes of many, philosophy of mind is just another example of immaterial thinking which will have no impact on the daily lives of ordinary people: ‘There are lots of grand theories and fancy speculation, but what’s the point in any of it?’ I don’t think this is an unreasonable thing to ask. Our time on Earth is precious, and we shouldn’t waste it thinking about questions that don’t matter. In this chapter, Gregory Miller tells us exactly what we need to hear: why consciousness matters. An expert in his field and a rising star in philosophy of mind, Miller’s work isn’t confined to dusty libraries and pompous academic journals. Greg has spent much of his career interviewing the world’s biggest philosophers of mind, making their research relevant and accessible to the general public. If you asked the average philosopher why consciousness matters, they’re likely to give you an abstract answer. Among the most common seems to be that consciousness matters because it goes beyond the limits of science: ‘No matter how much science can tell us about the brain, it will never be able to explain consciousness!’ Miller thinks there’s a lot more at stake here. Consciousness, he says, might be the most important thing in the world. Without it, we’d have no life, no values, no ethics and no meaning. Why does consciousness matter? Because without it, nothing would.

Waking up Every morning, billions of people wake up from dreamless sleep. Their evening turns from total inner darkness to the rich light of the day. When this 1

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routine occurrence of awakening takes place, something important happens to each person. Each regains consciousness. What is ‘consciousness’? When you taste the bitterness of bad coffee or hear the sound of a barking dog, they’re both conscious states. When you watch a flock of starlings dance in fluid unison across the sky, or when you dream of a werewolf chasing you across the Yorkshire Moors, they’re conscious states too. When you think about the ending of your favourite film or how many bald men you know, they’re conscious experiences too. However complicated, however simple, however dull or exotic, these are all types of conscious subjective experience. Following the philosopher Thomas Nagel, we can say that there is something that it’s like to be in these states, and, for any being undergoing such a conscious mental state, there is something that it’s like to be that being.1 That is what consciousness is: consciousness is experience. George Orwell once said, ‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.’2 In a way, this is true about consciousness. Because it follows us everywhere we go, we often take its importance for granted. However, I think that if we imagine a life without consciousness, then we’ll be able to see just how important it really is.

The zombie implant In his famous thought experiment, the Robert Nozick (1938–2002) philosopher Robert Nozick asked his was a leading political readers to imagine a hypothetical machine philosopher of the that could simulate the perfect reality. twentieth century. In his If you plug yourself into the machine, book Anarchy, State, and you’d live in a virtual world with all of Utopia (1974), he introduced the ‘experience’ the pleasurable experiences you could or ‘pleasure machine’ to ever want. Once you’d stepped inside his attack hedonism (the belief ‘experience machine’, you’d have the perfect that the maximization of life. Nozick then asked the question: given pleasure is the only goal the choice, would you plug yourself into the worth pursuing). machine? He said no; nobody would want to give up their real life. And, from this, he concluded there must be something more valuable to us than pleasure alone: an authentic life.3 I think a similar story can reveal some deep and important truths about consciousness. Nozick imagined the real world being taken away, and that showed us its value. Let us

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instead imagine consciousness being taken away, and from this, we’ll see why consciousness is valuable. Imagine that at the same lab where the experience machine was built, a team of mad scientists decide to create a ‘zombie implant’. The zombie implant is a small, silicon chip that can be surgically inserted into a patient’s brain, just above the brainstem, which would turn them into a zombie. All of the same information from the nervous system would still make it to the brainstem, and all of the same relaying of that information to the cerebrum and cerebellum would still happen. However, the zombie implant would stop that information from becoming conscious. Because all of the same information is being processed – in just the same way – patients with the zombie implant can do everything they could do before. They can rock climb, play the piano, tell jokes and run marathons (they can do all the boring stuff too – bills, tax returns, wait in line at the post office). Nevertheless, because the information isn’t conscious, there would be nothing it is like to be them; they’d have no inner, conscious lives.

Zombies are widely discussed in philosophy of mind. A zombie is a hypothetical creature that looks and behaves like any normal human being but isn’t conscious.

The brain is made up of three parts: the brainstem, the cerebrum and the cerebellum. The brainstem runs from your brain into your spine.

The cerebrum is the main part of the brain. It’s that big, large bit in the top of your head which allows you to think, ‘Why the hell am I watching an Adam Sandler movie?’

These mad scientists need people to test out their new microchip. Their hope is Your cerebellum (Latin for ‘little brain’) is in the lower that the implant might help them shed back of your head. It light on the mystery of consciousness, but controls all of your until they’ve got the patients and the voluntary actions, e.g. it results, they won’t know for sure. The allows you to turn off the problem is, once the patients have had the television when Adam Sandler appears. implant, there’s no going back – they’ll be zombified forever! So, as an incentive, the scientists offer the patients a deal: get the implant and you’ll be given everything that you could ever want. Do you want to spend the rest of your life travelling the world, exploring jungles, climbing mountains and relaxing on beaches? They’ll give you that. Do you want a vast fortune, a giant home

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and the world’s best chefs to cook your meals? They’ll give you that too. Anything you want, no matter how big or small, they’ll give it to you. Now, here’s the million-dollar question: would you take the implant, become zombified and live the perfect life? Or would you turn it down and continue to live your conscious life as it is? Take a moment . . . think about it. Do you take the implant and accept the inner darkness? Or do you keep the lights on? The answer seems to be a no-brainer. You’d reject the implant. You would not sacrifice your inner conscious life for any amount of worldly riches. No matter how much your life would be improved, you wouldn’t let the mad scientists turn off your consciousness.4

You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone The zombie implant allows us to see why consciousness is important and the role it plays in our lives. As Joni Mitchell told us, ‘you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone’.5 The same is true of consciousness. So, what does the zombie implant show us about consciousness? First of all, it shows us that consciousness is necessary to living a life. This doesn’t mean If the world didn’t have the that consciousness is necessary for the phenomenal music of Joni biological process of life, far from it: there Mitchell, we might as well are plenty of biological organisms that we have the zombie implant. Joni wouldn’t be too happy don’t think are conscious. For example, with that joke . . . after all, in very few people think that buttercups and her hit song Yellow Taxi, she oak trees are conscious. Think of it like tells us that we shouldn’t this: if somebody is so lazy that they can’t take the natural world for be bothered to get off the couch, turn off granted. the television and experience the real world, we’d probably say that they’re not really living. Well, without consciousness, we wouldn’t be experiencing anything! Nozick tells us that ‘we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them’ in a machine, but we can go further than this.6 We can say without consciousness, you’re not really doing anything. If there is no consciousness to illuminate one’s inner mental life, it’s hard to see how a life would be there at all. The zombie implant doesn’t just tell us about lives, it also tells us that consciousness is intimately tied up with the ‘self’. Without consciousness it becomes very hard to see how it would be you continuing to live once the

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implant is inserted. Once consciousness has been removed, and the possibility of it returning is gone forever, is there really a ‘self’ left? I don’t think we’d say there is. The lights aren’t on and there’s nobody home. Nozick tells us that ‘plugging into the [experience] machine is a kind of suicide’.7 I think we can say the same for the zombie implant: to take the zombie implant is to kill the self. It’s true that there will be the same body, the John Locke (1632–1704) same beliefs and desires, and there may be was one of the most memories of days past. For example, there influential figures of the could be the same memories about a tenth Enlightenment. Miller gives birthday and the same lifelong desire to a standard reading of Locke climb Mount Everest. This may lead some here, but what Locke ‘actually’ thought about to say that there is a self after the microchip personal identity remains a is implanted. In fact, that’s exactly what fiercely debated question John Locke would say. Locke thought that amongst philosophers and as long as you have the same memories and historians. beliefs as your past self, then you continue into the future.8 But, if none of these things were conscious (memories of tenth birthdays and desires to climb Everest), it’s hard to see why they’d matter. If those memories are never going to be consciously relived and experienced again, do they really belong to a self? I don’t think they do. The zombie implant also shows us that consciousness is a – if not the – source of value and meaning in the world. Without it, it’s incredibly hard to see why anything in the world could be meaningful or valuable. Galen Strawson has argued that for life to be interesting (which it certainly is), we’d need a special type of experience called ‘cognitive phenomenology’.9 I think we Cognitive phenomenology can go further. For there to be anything is just a fancy way of saying ‘conscious thought’. meaningful, we need consciousness, not just conscious thought. If you couldn’t grasp the punchline of a joke, understand words of poetry or feel the sadness of minor chords, then those things (jokes, poems, music) would be devoid of meaning. The chord couldn’t be sad, the poetry couldn’t be beautiful and no joke could be funny if they’re not consciously experienced.With consciousness, these otherwise meaningless entities (soundwaves and scribbles) are imbued with meaning. Without it, they’re nothing (they’re not even soundwaves or scribbles).10 Finally, I think the zombie implant shows us that having consciousness is intimately tied up with being an ethical subject. Think about this in the context

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of ‘you’ before and after the experiment. When bad things happen to the postIf something’s an ‘ethical implant zombie-you, it seems to matter subject’, it means we should much less compared to when these things consider it when we’re making moral decisions. happen to the pre-implant, conscious you. To understand the point, just imagine the zombie-you is off on one of their lavish globe-trotting adventures. One moment they’re rock climbing, and the next . . . their harness breaks and they’re plummeting towards the ground from the top of the rock face! They fall from a great height, hitting every tree branch on the way down, and when they eventually crash to the floor, they’ve broken every bone in their body (that’s no less than 206 broken bones). How much do you think the zombie-you has suffered? How bad is it, morally speaking, that this happened? I wonder, if the pre-implant you were to fall from the cliff, would that have been different? There is a sense in which both you and the zombie-you suffer. You both break 206 bones, which stops you from fulfilling your plans and projects – you certainly can’t go rock climbing any time soon. Because of that, some philosophers would say that you’ve both suffered. But there is a glaringly crucial distinction, one which seems to make all the difference: you feel the pain, agony, fear and anxiety that goes with breaking 206 bones and having all your future plans ruined. The zombie-you doesn’t. The idea that consciousness is linked to being an ethical subject is not a controversial one. The movement to recognize the moral status of nonhuman animals is built on the recognition that they are conscious. Humans thought that animals weren’t conscious, and then we came to realize they were. This recognition, coupled with our acknowledgement that consciousness endows moral status, meant that we had to expand our sphere of moral concern to include other creatures. Once we recognized other beings’ consciousness, we realized that their consciousness limits our actions towards them. Inevitably, some creatures will have a different status to others – most of us would rather kill a wasp than a dog – but when push comes to shove, all conscious creatures matter on some level. Ultimately, they matter because they’re conscious.

Where does this leave us? The more we think about the zombie implant, the more these powerful intuitions take hold. Consciousness is the wellspring from which meaning,

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value, persons and ethical subjects are brought into the world. Without consciousness, the world would be an empty, meaningless wasteland. This leaves us with a fundamental tension to resolve. We know that consciousness is the source of meaning, persons and value, but we don’t know why it exists. No matter how much scientific progress we make, it seems that the mystery at the heart of the matter will remain: why do neurons in my brain feel like anything? In other words, what makes us conscious beings, rather than zombies? This is the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, and it’s just as hard now as it has always been.

Afterthoughts It’s hard to disagree with Miller’s thinking here. A world without consciousness looks dystopian. Without it, there’s no thrill of falling in love, no warmth to a friend’s embrace and no grief when these things wither away. Perhaps consciousness is the most important thing in the world. If you’re still not sure, then take a moment to reflect on the things which matter to you most. If you couldn’t experience them, would your life be worth living? Of course, there’s another side to this story. For many people, consciousness is the source of great suffering. Ultimately, it’s consciousness that fills us with anxieties, sorrows and – in some cases – depression. Is Miller right to say that rejecting the zombie implant is a ‘no-brainer’? If somebody was suicidal, would they accept the microchip if it meant that they could continue to exist without the suffering? One particularly interesting takeaway is Miller’s reflection on ethics. If we figure out where consciousness comes from, we might have to change how we behave in our day-to-day lives. For example, if it turns out that consciousness is just the product of a human brain, then maybe it’s okay to kill and eat non-human animals? If it’s not, then how far does consciousness go? Are jellyfish, butterflies and coconut trees conscious? What about computers and robots? Knowing where to draw the line – if anywhere – is something we’ll need to work out if we want to make the world a better place.

Questions to consider 1. Are there any circumstances in which you’d accept the zombie implant? 2. Is consciousness an essential feature of the self?

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3. How do we know whether or not other creatures are conscious? 4. Is it morally wrong to push a zombie off a cliff? 5. If everybody took the zombie implant, would life be meaningless?

Recommended reading Advanced Barry Dainton and Tim Bayne, ‘Consciousness as a Guide to Personal Persistence’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 83, no. 4 (2005): 549–71. The inspiration behind Miller’s conviction that consciousness is intimately tied up with our sense of self. Here, Dainton and Bayne give a short, in-depth account of the self as ‘experiential continuity’. John Searle, ‘Minds, Brains, and Programs’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 3, no. 3 (1980): 417–24. Here, Searle introduces his famous Chinese room thought experiment. He argues that a machine could translate English to Chinese, but it couldn’t understand the meanings behind its inputs, outputs and the rules which it applies. This is essential introductory reading for anybody interested in consciousness and artificial intelligence. Intermediate Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–50. Nagel tells us that no matter how much we learn about a bat’s biology and behaviour, we’ll never know ‘what it’s like’ to be a bat. Consequently, Nagel suggests that it’s unlikely that a purely physical theory of the mind will be able to explain where this ‘what it’s like-ness’ (consciousness) came from. Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (London: HarperCollins, 2016). Godfrey-Smith blends natural history with philosophy of mind to explore the inner lives and evolution of one of the world’s most alien creatures: the octopus. It’s a thrilling read – great for the general reader. Beginner Suzanne Simard and Brandon Keim, ‘Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees’, Nautilus, October 2019, www.nautil.us/issue/77/underworldsnbsp/ never-underestimate-the-intelligence-of-trees. In this brilliant interview, leading forest ecologist Suzanne Simard explains why plants and trees are intelligent creatures that can learn, remember and experience emotions.

Why Consciousness Matters Peter Singer, ‘Are Insects Conscious?’, Project Syndicate, May 2016, www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/are-insects-conscious-bypeter-singer-2016-05. In this short piece, ethicist Peter Singer asks whether we have moral responsibilities towards the world’s insects. Although we can’t determine if they’re conscious, Singer suggests that – like Jain monks – we’d do well to treat them with compassion.

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Chapter Two

The Grand Illusion Susan Blackmore

Introduction Consciousness is the lens through which we see ourselves and the world around us. In fact, as Miller explained in the previous chapter, consciousness might be the very thing that makes us who we are. Our lives appear to us as a string of experiences: each linked, each connected, from the moment we’re born to the moment we pass away. Life is consciousness, or so it seems . . . It’s with great pleasure that I introduce our first interviewee, Susan Blackmore. With hundreds of publications, in over twenty different languages, it’s safe to say that Blackmore is one of the world’s most influential psychologists,1 and a true global thought leader.2 Susan’s success is owed not just to her exciting and accessible style, but her rich psychological insights and her cross-disciplinary approach. Blackmore asks: what can psychology teach us about the nature of the world? What philosophical lessons can psychology teach us about consciousness? Blackmore’s career is fascinating for many reasons, one of which being that she witnessed the dawn of consciousness studies as a student in the 1970s. In the opening of this interview, Susan guides us through this topic’s history and developments. She then talks us through some of psychology’s biggest philosophical lessons, all in the context of one of life’s greatest questions: what is consciousness? I encourage you to stay vigilant throughout this chapter. Susan’s ideas are compelling, but they’re also radical. If she’s right, there is no such thing as a ‘conscious self’; there is no such thing as an inner ‘you’ who experiences their very own stream of consciousness. ‘Your life, as a string of conscious thoughts’, says Blackmore, ‘is an illusion.’ 11

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A psychological approach With the rise of disciplines like psychology and neuroscience, do you think that philosophy still has a part to play in understanding the mind? This is a big issue! I will never forget Francis Crick telling me, ‘If you ask how many cases in the past has a philosopher been successful at solving a problem, as far as we can say there are no such cases.’3 Crick got a lot of things right, but I don’t think this was one of them. I would rather agree with his student, Christof Koch, who was much less dogmatic. Koch would say we need philosophy to help us ask the right questions and to make us think about the assumptions we’re making.4 So yes, I think philosophy is still important.

Francis Crick (1916–2004) was one of the world’s most influential scientists. Alongside the molecular biologist James Watson, Crick made a groundbreaking discovery when he uncovered the structure of DNA. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.

Much of your career has been spent exploring philosophical questions through the lens of psychology. Do you think that psychology has changed the way philosophers approach the topic of consciousness? Yes. Until the late twentieth century, Christof Koch is one of the philosophy of mind was full of world’s leading incomprehensible and highly abstract neuroscientists. Koch is theories. Today, more and more widely associated with philosophers are embracing psychology ‘integrated information theory’, the view that and neuroscience. This is one reason why conscious experiences Daniel Dennett has been one of my arise when the information heroes; he brings philosophy back down within a system (such as a to evidence. And philosopher Patricia brain) is deeply Churchland has weighed in, applying interconnected. some amazing findings from neuroscience to questions about the mind, changing the way we think philosophically. Another brilliant thinker who, long ago, brought philosophy and psychology together was William James. James is probably my greatest intellectual hero.5 Indeed, my all-time favourite book is his 1890 Principles of Psychology – I love my first edition copy, bought for a few pounds in 1981 and heavily

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annotated by me ever since. For James, philosophy and psychology worked together to understand the mind. Then, sadly, psychology was overtaken, first by Freud’s largely useless ideas and then by behaviourism. It was another century before psychology and philosophy came together again. What’s behaviourism? Behaviourism is a doctrine based on the idea that the only valid way to study psychology is through observing and measuring overt behaviour. It takes many forms, but the two main founders were John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner who, William James (1842–1910) from the early twentieth century, began was a philosopher and psychologist. His exhaustive studies of learning in rats, masterwork, The Principles pigeons and other animals. They developed of Psychology (1890), was methods for studying different types of committed to the scientific learning, including what we now call study of the mind. James is ‘classical conditioning’, in which two stimuli widely considered one of the founding fathers of become paired together, such as the way modern psychology. the sound of the dentist’s drill makes you tense up in expectation of pain to come, or the smell of good food makes you salivate. Then there is ‘operant conditioning’ in which you learn to repeat actions that are rewarded and avoid actions that are punished. These are important processes in human behaviour, but the problem with behaviourism was its insistence that this alone could tell us all we need to know. Notions of beliefs, understanding, hopes, fears, imagination or even love, were all to be rejected. Consciousness, of course, had no place within this behaviourist paradigm. When I was studying psychology at Oxford in the 1970s, you couldn’t talk about consciousness. If you mentioned ‘consciousness’ in class, you were quickly slammed down by your lecturers! ‘Consciousness’ was just a word used by weirdos like Susan Blackmore, you know, those people like me who took to reading tarot cards, staring into crystal balls and having mystical experiences. God forbid! Today, psychologists don’t just research behaviour, they look at the ‘mind’ as well. In fact, more recently, psychologists have started studying mystical experiences and the effects of psychedelic drugs! How did this change come about? Experiments started showing that the behaviourist model was inadequate, for example, that people and other animals could learn without being rewarded or punished. This was called ‘incidental learning’. One example was

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Edward Tolman’s work studying rats in mazes.6 He showed that when they learn to find the food they have not simply learned to turn right or left at each The work of Edward Tolman (1886–1959) had a huge junction: they are building a ‘cognitive impact on twentiethmap’, an idea of where the food is. It may century psychology. In his sound obvious now, but this was one of book Purposive Behavior in the first studies to challenge behaviourism Animals and Men (1932), by showing that we need to consider what Tolman rejected mainstream behaviourism. Many is going on inside animals’ heads. It was psychologists were unhappy a long way from this to the study of with his conclusions; they consciousness, but it was a start, as were worried it would lead us to later experiments on imagery, imagination, attribute complex thoughts thinking and decision-making. From to animals like rats and pigeons. these, psychology was able to move on to asking about our inner worlds and the peculiar problems of what it means to be conscious.

Being a bat So, what does it mean to be conscious? How should we define consciousness? Amazingly, there is no right answer. The problem here is not the medical question of whether we are awake, alert and responsive – that’s relatively easy to measure. The problem is what Qualia (singular: quale) are philosophers sometimes call ‘qualia’: our the subjective, qualitative private experiences of taste, touch, smell properties of experience. or sight. If these are what we think of as making up our conscious experience, does this help us to define consciousness? This is still not easy. The closest we come to defining consciousness starts with Thomas Nagel’s famous paper, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’7 Two important ideas came out of that article. The first is that you cannot know what it is like to be a bat. To illustrate the point in my lectures, I often ask students to come up to the front and pretend to be bats. Some do brilliantly, standing on their

Thomas Nagel (also known as ‘the Batman’) has made enormous contributions to a range of philosophical topics. His bat thought experiment is probably the most discussed idea in contemporary philosophy of mind.

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heads and squeaking loudly! Others have no idea; they just stand around vaguely flapping their hands. Whatever they do is fine by me, because the point is this: they haven’t really become a bat. They are just pretending – just guessing what it might be like to experience the world through echolocation. Alternatively, if they could be magically turned into a real bat, they would lose their power of language and be unable to understand the question, let alone answer it! So, we cannot know. How does our inability to imagine the inner world of a bat connect to a definition of consciousness? Well, this is the second important point of Nagel’s paper: it gets more directly at what we mean by ‘being conscious’. As Nagel points out, if there is something it is like to be the bat – anything at all – then that is what we mean by ‘being conscious’. If there is nothing it is like to be the bat, then we say that the bat is not conscious. What is it like to be a pair of scissors? Nearly everyone would say that it’s not like anything at all because scissors have no sensory apparatus. The same goes for rocks, tables and cups of tea. But what about slugs, snails or fish? What about thermostats, mobile phones or computers? What about dogs, chimpanzees or babies? To find out what my students think, I sometimes collect some objects I can find at home and lay them out in what I call the ‘consciousness line’. I might have a stone, a calculator, a woodlouse in a jar, a potted plant, a doll to represent a baby – I might even ask a student to bring in their dog! Then I ask which ones they believe are conscious. The variety of answers is fascinating. But who has the right answer? We have no idea and cannot find out because we have no way of detecting consciousness. Here again we confront the mystery.

The hard problem Biologists, philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists – experts from lots of different disciplines – are now investigating the mystery of consciousness. What caused this upsurge of interest? The turning point came when, twenty years after Nagel’s bat-paper, a young Australian philosopher called David Chalmers coined the phrase the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. At the first ever conference on ‘Toward a Science of Consciousness’ in Tucson, Arizona he gave a long and complicated philosophical paper, most of which is long forgotten. What we remember is his

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attempt, at the start, to distinguish between the ‘easy problems’ and the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness: the latter he defined as the problem of how subjective experience arises from objective events inside a brain. This is essentially a modern version of the ancient mind–body problem – the problem of the apparent dualism between mind and brain. It was almost as though, at last having a name to call it, researchers from many different fields longed to dive in and be the one to solve it. But things are not so simple. Soon philosophers and psychologists became divided in their views on the hard problem. Some think we’ll never solve the hard problem, others that we’ve already solved it, and some that it isn’t a real problem at all!

The mind–body problem is the problem of trying to explain how minds are related to bodies.

Dualism is the view that the mind and the brain are separate substances or properties. This position is widely associated with René Descartes (1596–1650), who thought that the mind interacted with the body through the pineal gland: a very small organ in the centre of the brain.

Why would someone think we’ll never solve it? Because it seems perplexing, and I think perplexity is the right attitude to have because there is no easy answer. Mysterians take this feeling very seriously. They say, ‘It’s just too difficult. Just as a dog can never understand Steven Pinker is a popular how to read the newspaper it carries in its cognitive psychologist. In 1997, Pinker mouth, so are our brains incapable of claimed that nobody – understanding consciousness.’ Steven including philosophers, Pinker captures this view nicely: ‘Beats the neuroscientists, biologists 8 heck out of me!’ This isn’t unreasonable, and psychologists – has but personally, I don’t want to give up. a defensible answer to the hard problem of Mysterians aside, everyone else falls into consciousness. one of two camps. Probably the majority think that the hard problem has to be solved and are trying to solve it. Others, like myself, think the whole idea is totally misconstrued, it’s based on a vestige of mind–body dualism, a lurking belief in a soul or inner conscious self that doesn’t really exist. The question is whether we can escape from duality.

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The evolution of consciousness Lots of biologists approach the problem of consciousness from the perspective of evolution. Do you think we can tell an evolutionary story about the origins of consciousness? No – not if we think of consciousness as something separate from the workings of brains and bodies. Imagine somebody saying, ‘Obviously if we’re conscious, consciousness must have a function, otherwise we wouldn’t be!’ It sounds pretty plausible doesn’t it? If you ask why I’ve got fingers, elbows or a brain, you can answer those questions, so why isn’t it the same for consciousness? If we delve more deeply, I don’t think it’s so obvious that consciousness must have evolved for a purpose. Why? Wouldn’t consciousness increase our chances of survival? Aha! A famous thought experiment might help us out here! It’s called the ‘philosopher’s zombie’. Imagine a normal conscious person – let’s call him ‘Dave Chalmers’. The lights are on and somebody’s home! He experiences sights and sounds, feels happy, angry or sad, agonizes about difficult decisions and consciously acts on them. Now, imagine Dave’s zombie twin. According to this thought experiment, his zombie twin behaves exactly like the conscious-Dave; from the outside you cannot possibly tell any difference between them. If you ask zombie-Dave if he’s conscious, he’ll say, ‘Yes, of course I’m conscious. I’m seeing you, feeling hungry and wondering whether it’s time for lunch!’ So, behaviourally and physically, they’re indistinguishable. However, zombie-Dave isn’t conscious . . . on the inside, it’s all dark; he acts like a normal person, yet without being conscious of anything. So how does this tie into evolution? I like to go back in time and imagine there’s a world in which some people are conscious – I’ll call them ‘conscies’ – and some are zombies. Consider how natural selection works. Some of those people are going to live, have children and pass on either their consciousness or their zombie-ness to their offspring. Others are going to get killed (or not have children) and won’t pass this on. Now, how does this characteristic (being conscious or not) affect evolution? Remember that, by definition, a zombie is indistinguishable from a conscie in every detectable way. So, natural selection has nothing to work on. There is no evolutionary advantage or disadvantage to being conscious. It simply makes no difference. It’s very popular in writings about the evolution of consciousness

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to assume that it must have appeared at some time in the past and must have had a function or use. I think this thought experiment demolishes that idea. Despite it not having an evolutionary function, you agree that we are conscious – we’re not zombies! I wonder, do you think it will ever be possible to detect consciousness in other creatures? No. It’s a good question though, because if you believe in the ‘power of consciousness’ or that consciousness has effects, then you ought to believe it can be detected. There are some philosophers who think that if we solve the hard problem and work out how consciousness arises from brain activity, then we should be able to create a consciousness meter. I remember many years ago, when David Chalmers was a young philosopher and I was a young psychologist, David came on stage at the Tucson conference with a hairdryer; he ran around pointing it at people and saying, ‘You’re conscious, you’re not!’ Then, he very eloquently discussed the philosophical problems of whether such a consciousness meter could exist. Personally, I think it’s impossible because consciousness does nothing. But if someone makes one, then I’m proved wrong. As a scientist it’s always good to know that your views are testable – that they can be shown to be wrong.

The illusion of continuity One way that psychology can help us understand consciousness is by showing us case studies in which people’s conscious experiences differ from our own. Are there any particularly good examples of this? There are plenty, but one fascinating example comes from Oliver Sacks who describes his experiences with Jimmie G, a patient who suffered from Korsakoff syndrome. At the age of forty-nine, Jimmie still believed – in the fullest possible sense of the term – that he was nineteen. If you showed him a mirror, he’d become frantic with fear.9

The life of Oliver Sacks (1933–2015) is quite extraordinary. Not only was he a leading neurologist, but owing to his poetic writing style, he acquired an almost celebrity-like status. His books provide vivid accounts of his patients and their neurological disorders.

If you think that personal identity depends on having a non-physical soul or spirit, how do you explain cases like this, or dementia? Both of my parents had dementia. They suffered severe memory

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loss, and sometimes didn’t know where they were or what day it was. In some ways, they weren’t the same people I knew before. I could cope with that by Korsakoff syndrome is a knowing it was because their brain was cognitive disorder which deteriorating, but I don’t understand how stops a patient from laying down new memories. religious people can cope. Do they think it’s the soul that’s deteriorating and it will magically be restored in the next life? Or do they think the soul is still complete but is just being muddied over by the problems in the brain? This just leads to nonsense. Anyway, Jimmie G lost his short-term memory and could no longer form memories from a few minutes before. He and Oliver Sacks could be having a lovely, pleasant conversation in which Jimmie was actively involved, but when Sacks left the room and came back five minutes later, Jimmie wouldn’t remember that he’d ever been there. What do you think this tells us about consciousness? I think it tells us something about the ‘illusion of continuity’. The illusion is that we all think we’re the same person as that little baby that was given our name all those years ago, the same person who rolled out of bed this morning and will climb back into bed tonight. When you lose the capacity to lay down memories – like Jimmie G – you no longer have that illusion of continuity. The illusion is fundamental to living as we do, but, nevertheless, it’s false in the sense that there is no self that persists and runs your body. I’ll put it clearly: there is no ‘you’ that has consciousness and wields free will. I think the whole study of consciousness is fraught with false assumptions that we need to give up before we can make progress. One is that brain processes must be either conscious or unconscious. One of the reasons I love Dennett’s famous book Consciousness Explained – which lots of people hate – is that he showed how nonsensical that idea is.10 Another related assumption is that thoughts, feelings and emotions must be either conscious or unconscious – an idea that is deeply embedded in our language. But I say it’s false too. Let me ask you a question: are you conscious now? Yes, of course I am! Aha – but were you conscious just before I asked the question?

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Erm . . . You’re not sure are you! This is the first exercise I get students to do in my courses. I tell them to spend the next week asking themselves, ‘Am I conscious now?’ as many times as they can every day. Typically, many say they forgot to do it, which is fascinating. Why is it so hard when you can ask the question while walking down the street, cleaning your teeth or having breakfast? When they come back, many say that something odd happened when they asked, as though they became more conscious just by asking. So, the next week’s question is, ‘What was I conscious of a moment ago?’ and we gradually build up more and more penetrating questions about their own experience of being conscious. The point I’m trying to get at reveals the way I think about consciousness. I might be completely mad, but here goes . . . Whenever we think about whether or not we’re conscious, our attention shifts. We decide, ‘This is what I’m conscious of now: the sound of the birds, the feel of the book in my hands, my bottom on the seat.’ When this happens, I suspect that the brain brings together these perceptions along with a model of a self who is experiencing them – a false model that seems to be ‘me’ and that wasn’t there a moment ago. And what was happening a moment ago? There were just multiple brain processes going on without an illusion of self, without the illusion of continuity. Only when we are mindful is there this sense of an experiencing self. If we really practise mindfulness, even that illusion can disappear. I think consciousness is a story we tell ourselves about the way our own minds work. But the story is false. We are wrong. So, we tell ourselves we have a stream of conscious thoughts, but most of the time, we’re not conscious at all? No! You’re still thinking conventionally. I would say there is no fact of the matter about whether or not I was conscious a moment ago. This is just an idea that we construct retrospectively. Both my ‘self ’ and my idea of a continuing consciousness pop up when I ask about them, and then they disappear. They are both illusions. I don’t mean that they don’t exist but that they are not what they seem to be; they are just the brain’s constructions. With practice, especially through meditation and mindfulness, I can drop those illusions and then there can be experience without an experiencer. If ‘the stream of consciousness’ is something we construct retrospectively, we might find that quite disappointing, but in another sense, it’s quite positive! At least we’re conscious sometimes!

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Hmm, sort of. When you ask yourself ‘Am I conscious now?’ and you answer ‘Yes!’, you’re creating a self who seems to be conscious . . . but it’s often only a flash, and then it’s gone, unless you practise really hard. To be clear though, you think that consciousness is an ‘illusion’? Yes. This does not mean that consciousness doesn’t exist, but that it is not what it seems to be. We can be fundamentally wrong about our own minds. If you think there’s a self that has consciousness and free will, you’re wrong: these are illusions.

Change blindness

We can reveal some other illusions with experiments. One example involves what is called ‘change blindness’.11 In these experiments, participants are shown two slightly different pictures which quickly switch back and forth. For example, one picture might show a person sat at their desk using a keyboard, and in the next image, the keyboard isn’t there. You might expect people to notice this obvious change but most often they don’t! It seems we have the illusion that we are continuously seeing the whole detailed scene and that we would notice if something changed, but apparently, we don’t. We are deluded about the very nature of seeing.12 As you know, that still leaves us with the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness – why are we ever conscious? Can I push you on this: what are your thoughts on the hard problem? I think the hard problem is a distraction, a false problem created by believing in an experiencing self that is separate from its world – Patricia Churchland calls it a ‘hornswoggle problem’.13 I must be clear: I don’t pretend to have the answers. I don’t have my own grand theory of consciousness. All I will say is this: so far none of the theories we have sorts out the problems. I believe that what we need to do first is dismantle all the obvious and alluring assumptions that lead us astray. Only then will we be able to build such a theory, and then the hard problem will simply disappear.

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Afterthoughts I’ve long thought that Blackmore’s work demonstrates just how important psychology is to philosophy of mind, and this interview is no exception. If we’re searching for a complete theory of consciousness, then we have to account for certain features of our experience. One of the more worrying features Susan picks out here is what she calls ‘the illusion of continuity’. Typically, we think we have a constant stream of conscious thoughts, but when we ask ourselves, ‘What was I conscious of a moment ago?’, we find ourselves stumped. As you go about your dayto-day life, I encourage you to ask yourself this question as often as possible. If you do, says Blackmore, you’ll soon realize that your stream of consciousness is just a story you construct retrospectively. If we think that the stream of consciousness is what makes us the same person today as we were yesterday, we might be in real trouble! The next question we should ask is whether we can free ourselves from this illusion; perhaps the illusion is so fundamental that it’s impossible to let it go. It would be naïve to draw such a conclusion without reference to the Eastern traditions. Followers of Buddhism, for example, have spent over two thousand years attempting to overcome the illusion of self and the suffering that comes with it. If we commit ourselves to meditation and mindfulness, they say, then maybe it is possible to let go of the idea that there is a ‘someone’ behind our thoughts. This is a very popular view, but you should question it before you abandon your family and seek out a monastery. Ask yourself: does it make sense to have an experience without an experiencer? Are we not individual subjects of experience? Are we not individual experiencers? Isn’t that what makes us who we are?

Questions to consider 1. Will we ever know what it’s like to be a bat? 2. Can we draw a line between what’s conscious and not conscious? 3. Is there a reason why evolution might have favoured conscies over zombies?

4. Do cases of memory loss show that belief in a non-physical soul is unreasonable?

5. Is the ‘stream of consciousness’ an illusion?

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Recommended reading Advanced Susan Blackmore and Emily T. Troscianko, Consciousness: An Introduction, 3rd edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). Don’t be duped by the title, this is a very thorough guide to consciousness studies. If you’re looking for a detailed overview of the major theories and questions in philosophy of mind – and what biology, neuroscience and psychology have to say about them – this book will bring you up to speed. Susan Blackmore, ‘Delusions of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 23, no. 11/12 (2016): 52–64. Blackmore gives a formal and clear presentation of her approach to the problem of consciousness. The paper describes the ways in which we’re deluded about consciousness in the hope that we’ll avoid using these misguided concepts – such as consciousness having function, content and continuity – in the future. Intermediate Susan Blackmore, Conversations on Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). In 2000, some of the world’s leading thinkers gathered in Arizona for a conference on the problem of consciousness; Blackmore took along her recording equipment and conducted interviews with twenty of them. This book is a brilliant collection of conversations based on transcripts from those interviews. Susan Blackmore, ‘There is No Stream of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 9, no. 5/6 (2002): 17–28. A largely accessible paper in which Blackmore presents a detailed case for her view that the stream of consciousness is an illusion. There’s lots of great psychology in here, and it’s all connected to the latest research in philosophy. Beginner Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). This is a brilliant introductory text. It covers most of the central views, but unlike a lot of books on consciousness, it approaches the topic from a largely psychological perspective. With that said, it’s packed with interesting examples from a range of other disciplines.

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Susan Blackmore, Zen and the Art of Consciousness (Oxford: Oneworld, 2011). A beautifully written and sincerely personal guide to consciousness. Far from your dry, academic text, Blackmore reflects on ten of her favourite questions on the nature of consciousness, drawing from personal experiences of Zen meditation.

Chapter Three

The Hard Problem David Chalmers

Introduction Every thought, every feeling, every hope, every desire: our experiences make up the fabric of our inner world. We know what consciousness is, yet it remains one of life’s greatest mysteries . . . how is it, exactly, that 86 billion neurons in our heads are capable of producing a unified conscious mind? How do we explain consciousness? In 1994, David Chalmers labelled this seemingly impenetrable mystery the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. In one breath, he inspired a tidal wave of new scholarship and captured the question that would dominate contemporary philosophy. To say Chalmers is an ‘influential philosopher’ is somewhat misleading. His fame and revolutionary thought – aided by his collection of leather jackets – puts him firmly in the realm of philosophical rock stars. The ‘hard problem’ cannot be overstated. There is a deep, empty void at the heart of our understanding of the natural world – a problem at the core of our being. No matter how detailed our description of the physical brain, says Chalmers, we’ll always be left with the same question: how and why does the brain give rise to experience?

The hard problem When you were a graduate student, very few people were talking about consciousness. Yet today, it seems to be one of the most popular topics in all of science and philosophy. Interestingly, Susan Blackmore said that you were responsible for this recent upsurge of interest. When you coined the phrase the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, suddenly everybody wanted to solve it! 25

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What Susan said is far too kind. The Blindsight patients are problem of consciousness had been visually impaired, however around for a long time before I showed – even if they are clinically up! When I started graduate school, there blind – they are able to were neuropsychologists working on navigate the world as if they blindsight and psychologists thinking can see it. about unconscious memory. In philosophy, consciousness wasn’t the central topic, but there was lively discussion. In the Roger Penrose is a popular mathematical physicist and 1990s, a few things happened. In philosopher of science. In neuroscience, Francis Crick and Christof his book, The Emperor’s New Koch published a very influential article Mind, he argues that the which led neuroscientists to come back to principles of physics show the topic.1 In 1991, Daniel Dennett that consciousness could never be emulated within a published Consciousness Explained, which machine. He went on to caught the interest of many philosophers suggest that consciousness and scientists, and just before that, in 1989, may be a physical Roger Penrose had published his book The phenomenon that exists at Emperor’s New Mind from the perspective the quantum level. of physicists.2 All of this was bubbling away in the early 1990s well before I came on the scene. Then, in 1994, there was the first big conference: ‘Toward a Scientific Basis for Consciousness’ at the University of Arizona. I submitted a talk on the hard problem of consciousness, thinking it might be a poster presentation, but for some reason, the conference organizers put it into the opening session. I gave the talk and it really resonated with people. But the problem itself really wasn’t anything new. I had no idea that people would still be talking about the ‘hard problem’ today! So, what is the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness? In his play, The Hard Problem, Tom Stoppard captures it in just two words: explain consciousness.3 If you want a twoword phrase for the hard problem, that’s about as good as it gets. My official formulation is something like this: why and how do brain processes give rise to subjective experience?

Sir Tom Stoppard’s The Hard Problem is based on the central theme of this book: the mystery of how brain processes give rise to consciousness.

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The problem begins with subjective experience: how it feels from the inside to be a conscious being. We can think of this like an inner movie running through our heads, complete with images, sounds, feelings, tastes, emotions and memories. It’s an amazing, multifaceted movie – a stream of consciousness. The hard problem asks: why does this exist? Why don’t all of our brain processes go on in the dark? If that’s the hard problem, are there ‘easy problems’ of consciousness? Yes, the easy problems involve explaining behaviours and capacities: what we say, what we do and how we respond objectively to stimuli. Why do you pull your finger away when someone burns it? I can study your brain to find which system in the brain makes this happen. That’s an easy problem because we know in principle how to solve the problem. The hard problem is explaining why all of this is accompanied by the experience of pain. For this problem, it looks like the standard method from neuroscience won’t quite work. Study all of the brain mechanisms you like, the same question remains: how and why do they give rise to consciousness? Patricia Churchland has been a strong opponent of this distinction. She thinks we’re wrong to distinguish the hard problem from other difficult neuroscientific problems, such as why we dream or sleep. As she puts it herself: ‘When not much is known about a topic, don’t take terribly seriously someone else’s heartfelt conviction about what problems are scientifically tractable. Learn the science, do the science, and see what happens.’4 Do you think Churchland’s on to something here? We should certainly ‘learn the science, do the science, and see what happens’, and that’s been central to my own approach. I’ve very much wanted to learn from psychology, neuroscience, computer science and physics. However, one thing that becomes really clear, once you know the science, is that it’s not getting us a whole lot further on the hard problem right now. We understand the brain relatively well in certain respects, but none of it helps with explaining why we’re conscious in the first place. What about Churchland’s criticism of the distinction itself? It is right to call the problem of consciousness ‘hard’ and all of the neuroscientific problems ‘easy’? I never thought that the other problems were literally ‘easy’; I said they’re as hard as most problems in science. I could have just called the ‘easy problems’

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the ‘objective problems’ and the ‘hard problem’ the ‘subjective problem’. It’s the contrast between the characters of the problems that matter. The easy problems are about explaining objective things such as behaviour and the hard problem is not. Today’s neuroscience is built for the easy problems, but the hard problem is just a very different kind of problem. It’s going to take something fairly radical and revolutionary to answer the hard problem! Pat thinks that normal science is going to get us there, but I think she’s wrong. Normal science will not be enough.

A science of consciousness You’ve been a very strong advocate of the idea that we need to establish a ‘science of consciousness’. Do you think it’s likely that we can develop a science of consciousness? There’s already been huge progress in the science of consciousness, particularly over the last thirty years or so. There’s now a very lively part of neuroscience called the ‘neuroscience of consciousness’ and in psychology there’s the ‘psychology of consciousness’, and both of these connect to philosophy in really interesting ways. Every year there’s a meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, which I helped to found back in the 1990s.5 The science of consciousness is robust and lively, and lots of this work is making it into journals. But what does the science of consciousness actually look like? If consciousness is this weird, subjective thing, how can we study it through objective science? One of the things which has helped the science of consciousness make progress is the idea that you don’t need to solve the hard problem in order to get on with the science. If we had to wait for a solution to the hard problem, we’d be waiting a long time! Perhaps the centrepiece of the recent science of consciousness has been the search for what people call the ‘neural correlates of consciousness’: what areas of the brain are most active when you have particular conscious experiences? When you’re seeing the colour purple, listening to smooth jazz or experiencing anxiety – what part of the brain is active? In other words, which brain states correlate with which experiences? Susan Blackmore shared a great story from back when you were an upand-coming philosopher at one of the first big consciousness conferences.

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At the start of your presentation, she said, you were running around with a hairdryer (which you’d called a ‘consciousness meter’) measuring whether or not the audience were conscious. So, I’ve got three questions for you: whose hairdryer was it? Did it work? And if not, do you think it might be possible to create such an instrument? This was actually at the second Arizona conference on Toward a Science of Consciousness. At the first one, I gave my talk on the hard problem, and at the second one, I was giving a talk on the search for the neural correlates of consciousness. I started my presentation by saying that finding the neural correlates would be a whole lot easier if we had a consciousness meter: a device that could read off someone’s conscious states. If you had one of these meters, you could start off by plugging somebody into a brain scanner and measuring their brain states. Then, you could simultaneously apply the consciousness meter and figure out which bits of the brain were active when they’re having a particular experience. This would make it a whole lot easier to find the neural correlates of consciousness. After introducing my talk, I said: ‘To date, we’ve never had a consciousness meter. However, over the last few years, the world’s leading scientists have managed to combine neuromorphic engineering, transpersonal psychology, and quantum gravity . . . and I am delighted to reveal today – the first consciousness meter!’ . . . and then I pulled out a hairdryer. I started testing it out. I pointed it at Patricia Churchland, ‘Searching for consciousness, searching for consciousness . . .’ and we got a flickering orange light. Maybe on life support, but it was there. Then I pointed it at Daniel Dennett,‘Searching for consciousness, searching for consciousness, searching for consciousness, searching for consciousness . . . no signal.’ It turned out that Dan’s own zombie hypothesis is correct; he has no consciousness. That was a bit of fun. The more serious point was that we don’t have a consciousness meter: all we have are these indirect guides to other people’s consciousness, such as verbal reports and their behaviour. In the absence of a consciousness meter, that makes the science of consciousness much more difficult. With that said, if we develop a detailed theory of the neural correlates of consciousness, we might be able to use that theory as a kind of consciousness meter. This has begun to happen with brain imaging, in particular with patients who are in comas. We can put these patients into brain scanners, find what’s going on, and determine whether or not there’s enough brain activity to say they’re conscious. That’s a limited kind of consciousness meter which is present now, and as the science of consciousness develops, we may get to have better consciousness meters.

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That’s very interesting, but you tactically avoided one of my questions. Where did you get the hairdryer? I think I pulled it from the hotel bathroom!

Solving the hard problem In your first book on consciousness, The Conscious Mind, lots of people thought your solution to the hard problem was a form of epiphenomenalism.6 Were people wrong to think that this was your view? You’re right, the reviewers of The Conscious Mind thought I was favouring a form of epiphenomenalism. In truth, this was just one of several views I was exploring in the book. Maybe there was a bit more focus on epiphenomenalism, but I wasn’t committed to it. According to epiphenomenalism, consciousness doesn’t play a causal role – it can’t control the body. The epiphenomenalist sees the physical brain like a steam train. If a steam train is functioning properly, then you get smoke. On this view, the smoke is consciousness: consciousness is just this secondary, largely useless, non-causal property. These days I’m much more inclined to reject this view. I think we have compelling reasons for thinking consciousness plays a causal role. A lot of philosophers are firmly committed to a particular view, but you’re notoriously difficult to pin down! I’m extremely easy to pin down! It’s just that I go where the arguments take me and not beyond. If physicalism is false, I’ll tell you physicalism is false. If an argument doesn’t establish that epiphenomenalism is correct, I’ll tell you an argument doesn’t establish that epiphenomenalism is correct! I hope that I’ve been clear and explicit about these matters.

Physicalism (sometimes called ‘materialism’) says that everything in the universe – including consciousness – can be explained in terms of physical properties and laws.

Let me put that slightly differently: you’re not fully committed to a particular view. In 2019, you said, ‘If I’m giving my overall credences, I’m going to give 10% to illusionism, 30% to panpsychism, 30% to dualism, and maybe the other 30% to, I don’t know what else could be

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true, but maybe there’s something else out there.’7 However, there is one position that you do seem to reject entirely. Here’s another quote: ‘No explanation purely in terms of brain processes will be such that we can deduce the existence of consciousness from it . . . someone could know all the physical facts about the world and still not know about consciousness.’8 That’s fairly close to the core of my view. I reject standard forms of physicalism on the grounds that they can’t explain consciousness. However, I’m open to the Illusionism says that there is idea that certain radical forms of no such thing as nonphysicalism may be correct. One radical physical consciousness. Consciousness is just a form of physicalism is illusionism, the physical trick played on us idea that consciousness is just a physical by our physical brains. illusion. I’m inclined to think that’s crazy, but nonetheless, I find it a very interesting idea. After all, who’s to say that I’m not in the grip of some strange illusion here and now? That’s why I gave 10% to that radical form. The boring form of physicalism that just says, ‘here are the neural correlates of consciousness and here’s a conscious experience – they’re just identical’ don’t work. For physicalism to work, it’s got to be radical. In addition to the ‘hard problem’, you’ve introduced another big challenge for philosophers and scientists: the ‘meta-problem’ of consciousness.9 This sounds quite daunting! What is the meta-problem and how is it different to the hard problem? The meta-problem is the problem of explaining why we say the things we do about consciousness, including everything from reports like ‘I am conscious’ and ‘I’m experiencing red’, to things like, ‘Wow, consciousness is very hard to explain!’ That’s the meta-problem: why do we say these things? Could illusionism provide the answer? I think the meta-problem is probably the best argument for illusionism. The illusionist says that if we can explain all of the things we say about consciousness in physical terms, including our judgement that we’re conscious, then we have our solution. We’d no longer have any reason to believe that non-physical consciousness exists. I find that a fascinating argument and that’s why I’ve got some sympathy for illusionism. Ultimately, I don’t think it works for the basic reason that it seems to contradict the

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obvious fact that consciousness exists and is a datum in its own right – but it’s a fascinating view. Galen Strawson has said that illusionism is ‘the silliest view ever held in the history of human thought’ for that precise reason: it denies the existence of consciousness.10 Elsewhere, Strawson puts this quite vividly: the illusionists, he says, will eventually ‘sail off the edge of the world in the great Ship of Fools, crewed by Flat Earthers, under the command of Rear Admiral Daniel Dennett, and we must let them go’.11 This doesn’t sound like the kind of ship we want to be on! I imagine you disagree with Strawson, that illusionism is the silliest view anyone’s ever held? Galen’s got very strong views about this matter, and at this point, I think he’s set in his ways. My approach is quite According to panpsychism, different. The problem of consciousness is consciousness is a hard enough already and we should be fundamental feature of the open to all kinds of radical, crazy sounding universe. This means that all views. Some people think that of the physical stuff in the panpsychism – which Galen favours – is a world is, in some way, fundamentally conscious. radical, crazy sounding view and one of the silliest ideas anybody has ever had. I don’t think calling these theories ‘crazy’ or ‘silly’ will get us very far. There’s a certain subtle elegance to illusionism that Galen dismisses. When illusionism is properly developed by addressing the meta-problem, it’s far more sophisticated than ‘denying the existence of consciousness’. It’s one of the few materialist views that takes consciousness seriously, so I much prefer it to a very flat-footed version of physicalism that simply asserts a reductionist thesis.

The zombie train To help us think about consciousness from an evolutionary point of view, Susan Blackmore asked us to consider two hypothetical beings: conscies (conscious humans) and zombies (non-conscious humans). She said that evolution would have no reason to favour conscies over zombies, and therefore, it’s wrong to think consciousness evolved to fulfil a particular function. What are your thoughts? Do you think we can tell an evolutionary story about consciousness?

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The zombie thought experiment can be used for many different purposes. Zombies are like us physically, behaviourally and functionally. They do all of the things that we do but they’re not conscious at all.12 I’ve argued that we can at least conceive of zombies, and this raises a version of the hard problem: if consciousness is identical with physical processes, why aren’t we all zombies? But here, Susan’s using it for a somewhat different purpose, and I think the reasoning is something like this: a conscie and a zombie would do exactly the same things, and therefore, evolution can’t distinguish between them. Zombies would leave just as many offspring as conscious beings, so evolution can’t explain why we’re conscies and not zombies.13 I think that’s a pretty interesting argument and I agree with Susan up to a point. I don’t think evolution alone can explain consciousness, however, that doesn’t mean In quantum mechanics, a particle’s position is there’s not a function for consciousness. To described in terms of wave understand the role of consciousness, we functions. Scientists have need to bring in something more than discovered that these wave evolution. We could say, for example, that functions exist in multiple consciousness collapses wave functions and states at the same time, that is, until we observe them. thereby leads to sophisticated kinds of Some physicists think that behaviour that we couldn’t get without it.14 I when we observe the think that would be a pretty straightforward physical world, we give it story about how evolution could select order, but when nobody is through consciousness, because there’d be watching, the world is an indetermined mess – think certain kinds of intelligent behaviour which Schrödinger’s cat! The idea only conscious creatures are capable of. If is that consciousness plays a we can tell a story about how consciousness crucial causal role in has a special causal role, then we can ordering wave functions: leverage evolution to help us explain why it consciousness ‘collapses wave functions’. is that we have consciousness. I think Susan’s right though, evolution isn’t going to do all of the work for us. Some philosophers have suggested that our answer to the hard problem will have a profound impact on the way we live our lives. Do you think our understanding of consciousness has any interesting day-to-day implications? I’m inclined to think that without consciousness there would be no ethical value, no aesthetic value and no wellbeing. Connected to that is the idea that what gives a living creature moral status – what puts a being in the circle of

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creatures who we should avoid harming in our moral calculations – is consciousness. If a being isn’t conscious, then it has no moral status – if it is conscious, then it has moral status. Lately, I’ve been thinking about this in the context of a thought experiment that I’m calling ‘the zombie trolley problem’. It goes something like this. Imagine that you’re standing near a railway station, quite far away from the tracks, when you see a runaway trolley hurdling towards a conscious human being who is tied down to one of the tracks. Next to you is a lever, and if you pull the lever it will divert the trolley onto a separate track. Here’s the problem: there’s something else tied to that second track . . . five zombies! What would you do? Should you stand by and let the trolley run over the one human, or pull the lever and kill the five zombies? I’d pull the lever! Exactly! The reason? Because zombies aren’t conscious, they don’t have moral status. Personally, I think this is probably the right action to take. Many people interested in animal rights put forward a similar view. They argue that consciousness is what gives you moral status. However, there’s a more specific version of this position which says that what matters isn’t just consciousness, but the capacity for happiness or suffering. ‘Pain or pleasure’, they say, ‘that’s what gives you moral status!’ This is a view I’m strongly inclined to reject. Why? The view that an action is ‘morally wrong’ if it causes somebody unnecessary pain or suffering is extremely popular. On this account, killing zombies can’t be ‘wrong’ because they can’t experience pain or pleasure. Why do you want to reject this view? Let’s use the same trolley problem, but this time instead of tying five zombies to the track, let’s use five Vulcans. This I’m calling the ‘Vulcan trolley problem’. Like an extreme version of Mr Spock from Star Trek, Vulcans are conscious, but they can never experience happiness, suffering, pleasure or pain. Every state of consciousness for this being is entirely neutral. Now, if you had the choice between killing one being who can experience pain and pleasure, or killing five conscious Vulcans who can’t, what would you do? I’d probably run away, but I’d be pleased that I hadn’t diverted the trolley to kill the five Vulcans.

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Precisely! There would be something monstrous about diverting the trolley to kill five Vulcans! What matters here is not the capacity for happiness or suffering, but something much more basic: the capacity for consciousness of any kind. Consciousness alone, that’s what gives creatures moral status. Now we just need to figure out which beings are conscious!

Afterthoughts The lesson of this chapter is simple but profound. Consciousness appears to us as a non-physical property, something which can’t be reduced to mere physical processes alone, placing it firmly beyond the reach of physical science. However, keep in mind that Chalmers says there’s one physicalist approach worth taking seriously: illusionism. Illusionism says that if we can explain how and why we’re tricked into thinking we’re conscious in purely physical terms (if we can answer the meta-problem), then the hard problem may disappear. As we’ll see, many philosophers are unhappy with this approach: ‘The existence of consciousness’, they say, ‘is fundamental and undeniable.’ If they’re right, then the hard problem demands an answer – one which everyday physicalism isn’t going to give us. To quote a great philosopher of the past, ‘Materialism is the philosophy of the subject that forgets to take account of itself.’15 If you think that consciousness can emerge from physical processes, you haven’t been paying attention. You’d be better off believing that numbers can emerge from biscuits or ethics from rhubarb.16

Questions to consider 1. Is the hard problem of consciousness beyond the reach of physical science?

2. Are there limitations to a science of consciousness? 3. Is it reasonable to think that consciousness cannot interact with the brain?

4. If we can explain why we believe we’re conscious, will the hard problem disappear?

5. Is there a moral difference between killing zombies and killing Vulcans?

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Recommended reading Advanced David Chalmers, ‘Consciousness and its Place in Nature’, in The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, ed. Stephen Stich and Ted Warfield (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 102–42. Chalmers outlines three central arguments against materialism and the six main strategies which seek to solve the problem of consciousness. It’s a challenging read, but its thorough and logical presentation of the leading positions makes it essential for anyone looking to explore the technical literature. David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). This is David’s most developed and exhaustive exploration of the problem of consciousness. Here he makes a compelling case against materialism, before introducing several non-reductive solutions. Intermediate David Chalmers, ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 2, no. 3 (1995): 200–19. Based on his presentation at the 1994 conference ‘Toward a Science of Consciousness’, this is David’s most famous and influential paper. Chalmers explains the distinction between the ‘hard problem’ and the ‘easy problems’ of consciousness, arguing against reductive physicalism in favour of a non-reductive approach. David Chalmers, ‘How Can We Construct a Science of Consciousness’, in The Cognitive Neurosciences III, ed. Michael Gazzaniga, 3rd edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 1111–20. If you’re interested in learning more about the science of consciousness, then this piece gives a clear outline of the various questions, data, projects and limitations we can expect from such a science. Beginner David Chalmers and Andrew Chrucky, ‘Much Ado About Consciousness’, Philosophy Now, 1998, www.philosophynow.org/issues/21/Much_Ado_ About_Consciousness. In this concise yet in-depth interview, Chalmers explains what drew

The Hard Problem him towards the hard problem of consciousness, the problem’s history and why he thinks that current science is misguided. David Papineau, ‘Materialism Must Be Defended’, Institute of Art and Ideas, March 2020, www.iai.tv/articles/we-must-shed-our-metaphysicalassumptions-auid-1367. Not all philosophers think the hard problem gives us reason to abandon non-radical physicalism. In this piece, David Papineau argues that the reason we think there’s a hard problem is because we’re seeing the problem through outdated dualist spectacles. Once we throw them away, we’ll see the hard problem for what it really is: not that hard.

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Chapter Four

A Change of Heart Frank Jackson

Introduction Frank Jackson is one of the world’s greatest living philosophers. Alongside his vivid writing style and the meticulous presentation of his arguments, it’s hard not to find Frank’s personal and sincere approach anything short of captivating. Most notably, in 1982, Jackson published what would soon become one of the most famous thought experiments in the history of philosophy: the story of Mary the neuroscientist.1 It goes a little something like this . . . Mary has spent all of her life inside a black and white room; she’s never seen any other colour. Mary can’t remember how she got there, when she got there or why she’s there. There are no windows, just a single locked door. Every morning, just before she gets out of bed, the door opens, and a dark shadow slides her black and white food into the room. Every morning, Mary tries to muster the courage to escape, but fear has always weighed her down. The rest of the day isn’t so bad. Mary puts on her zebra-print pyjamas, sips her black coffee and sits down to her prized possession: her black and white television set. Unfortunately, the only station Mary can access is Neuroscientist TV. The station plays a constant stream of shows about the neurophysiology of colour vision. After countless years of watching, Mary has seen every single show, hundreds of times, to the point where she’s now acquired all of the physical information there is to know about colour vision. Her physical knowledge is complete – she’s the greatest neuroscientist the world will never see. The day comes: Mary puts on her pyjamas, makes her coffee and turns on the television . . . but this time, to her horror, she’s met with black and white static. Neuroscientist TV has (finally) been taken off the air. Mary decides 39

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there and then: she must escape. She hatches a plan, pours her coffee over the television set and places it directly behind the room’s single door . . . The next morning, Mary wakes up to a bang! The door has struck the television set, and the shadowy figure has stumbled into the room to see what was blocking its path. Mary leaps up out of bed and makes a run for it! Now in the outside world, Mary finds herself in a garden full of roses. She picks one from the ground, holds it out in front of her and stands frozen. She feels a hand on her shoulder . . . ‘What colour is this?’, Mary asks. Turning her back towards the room, the voice replies: ‘Why, it’s red of course . . .’2 This might be the most discussed and controversial fiction in the whole of modern philosophy. Every student has to grapple with it and every philosopher of mind has to have a view on it. But why is it so important? In his original essay, Jackson says that before Mary sees the rose, she won’t know what it’s like to see the colour red. Then, when she’s freed from her prison, she learns a new fact: she learns about the conscious experience of seeing red. This presents us with a problem. If Mary’s prior knowledge – knowledge of every physical property – was incomplete, there must be more to the world than physical facts alone. This, Jackson said, is ‘qualia’: the what it’s like-ness of experience. To put it simply: no matter how much Mary learns about the physical processes that give rise to colour, she’ll never understand the non-physical aspect – she’ll never know what it’s like to see red until she experiences it. What I’ve described above is known as the ‘knowledge argument’. If the To be an anti-physicalist is argument wasn’t famous enough already, to think that consciousness since its original formulation, Jackson can’t be explained through physical science alone. has changed his mind. He no longer thinks the knowledge argument works, abandoning his anti-physicalist approach. In this original and colourful essay, Frank explains exactly why the knowledge argument seems so appealing, and how – once we understand where the initial appeal comes from – we can resist the argument and hold on to physicalism.

Leaving the room The knowledge argument against physicalism was always about properties. The intuition that drives the argument home is that when Mary leaves the

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black and white room, she learns about properties that are different in kind from those she knew about while she was in the room. She doesn’t learn about consciousness, as she herself is conscious before she escapes, but she learns about certain properties associated with having things look one or another colour. In some presentations, the focus is on the idea that she learns about new properties of experiences. In others, the focus is on the idea that she learns about new properties of what she experiences – the surface of a ripe tomato or the colour of a rose – and sometimes it’s a bit of both. I was once a strong supporter of using the According to Greek knowledge argument to make a case against mythology – and early physicalism. I am now a physicalist. I know Greek philosophers – sirens my change of heart has disappointed some. were dangerous creatures I became convinced that it had to go wrong who lured sailors towards somewhere, but for reasons that were silent the rocks in the hope of crashing their ships. Think on where it went wrong. With a lot of help evil mermaids! To resist the from others, I later acquired a view on siren’s call is to fight the where it went wrong, but I’ve said more attraction of something for 3 than enough about that in other places. your own benefit. Here, I’ll concentrate on explaining why the knowledge argument has so much initial appeal. I will, however, allow myself a short remark at the end about one way to resist the siren’s call.

The appeal One way of getting information is from the words that come from the mouths of others. A caddy tells a golfer how far it is to the flag. A radio announcer tells me there’s a bush fire approaching. A friend tells me which movies to avoid. A feature of this way of getting information is that it depends on one’s understanding of the words that come from those mouths. For example, words in Chinese are useless as far as I’m concerned; I need words in English. Something similar is true for information that comes from readings on instruments. We need to know how to understand what the readings are telling us. A petrol gauge isn’t much use to someone who doesn’t know what the position of the pointer means. Perceptual experiences also give us information. Caddies are useful, but a golfer can tell how far away the flag is by looking. In the dark, you can feel where the light switch is. The quality of a sound can tell you how close an explosion is and whether it’s in front of or behind you. The sensation when a

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fly lands on an exposed part of your body tells you where it has landed: on your hand, neck, wherever. And we can see things as moving or not moving, and that gives us information about whether or not they are moving. But this information – fallible and sometimes ‘false’ information, of course – that comes from having perceptual experiences is importantly different from the information that comes from words and instruments. Crucially, we need lessons to read English and understand petrol gauges, but we don’t need lessons in how to read or understand perceptual experiences. The information provided to us in our everyday perceptual experiences is transparent or selfinterpreting. What an experience ‘says’ about how things are in the world is part and parcel of the nature of the experience.

Jackson’s argument in this chapter is all about experiences being ‘transparent’: the property an experience has of giving information about ‘how things are’ by virtue of the kind of experience it is. For example, your experience of something’s looking triangular tells you about its triangular shape.

Okay, so what kind of information do we get from having these transparent, perceptual experiences? Often, it’s information about the kinds of properties Mary knows about while in the black and white room: location, distance away, motion, shape, etc. But what about colour experiences? That’s our concern here. What properties do they tell us about? If experiences deliver information transparently, then the nature of an experience will tell the subject what the properties are. So, when Mary leaves the black and white room and has quite new kinds of experiences – and that she will have quite new kinds of experiences is one of the very few points of common ground in the debate over the knowledge argument – she will know which properties she’s experiencing . . . The big question is whether or not these properties are among those which she knew about while she was in the black and white room. The answer to this question would seem to be a resounding no. Among the properties that she knew about while in the black and white room that are especially relevant to having colour experiences are the wavelengths of light and the impact of those wavelengths on certain processes in our eyes. But no one thinks that the nature of our colour experiences tells us about those properties by virtue of the kinds of experiences that they are. We needed to do a whole range of experiments to find out about those properties. The experience of something’s looking or feeling, say, ‘round’ can, in and of itself,

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tell us about roundness. But something’s looking yellow cannot tell us, in and of itself, about wavelengths and those processes in our eyes. That is why the knowledge argument is so appealing. Mary enters into a kind of state that delivers information about properties transparently – that’s what perceptual experiences do – but none of the properties she knows about while in the black and white room pass the transparency test, or so it very much seems. The diagnosis I am offering of the knowledge argument’s appeal can be summarized as follows. Perceptual experiences are informational states with a special property, the one we called ‘transparency’. The properties Mary knows about in the black and white room include many that our perceptual experiences tell us about in this transparent way – motion and distance away are examples – but the properties Mary knows about in the black and white room do not include the properties colour experiences tell us about in this transparent way, as she realizes when she leaves the room. The upshot is that we need to believe in more than just physical properties; we need to abandon physicalism, or so it seems . . .

Resisting the siren’s call This diagnosis points to a way to resist the knowledge argument: among the properties Mary knows about while in the black and white room, we need to find plausible candidates to be the properties that colour experiences tell us The idea here is that ‘colour’ about. In other words, what can Mary is nothing more than a physical reflectance profile. learn from her television about the A reflectance profile is just a properties of colour vision? What I will fancy way of saying ‘colour do now is sketch a possible candidate is a matter of how light suggested by a popular view among waves reflect on surfaces’. optical scientists about what makes So, a red rose has a certain type of surface, which, when surfaces look a particular colour. My light bounces off it, gives suggestion is that Mary will know about the appearance of ‘red’. these properties while she’s in the black and white room, and therefore, she learns nothing new (about properties) when she’s released into the outside world. The popular view amongst optical scientists is that what makes a surface look the colour it does is its reflectance profile: the percentage of light reflected from the surface at various wavelengths. A nice feature of this view is the way

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it explains colour constancy. Surfaces look much the same colour in a wide range of lighting conditions (not all, obviously), despite big differences in these Colours seem to stay the conditions. The explanation is that the same no matter what lighting conditions we put reflectance profile remains the same them in: this is known as across the different lighting conditions. ‘colour constancy’. For However, given our emphasis on example, a red rose in the transparency, we cannot accept this sunlight appears to have the suggestion. The nature of our colour same colour as when that same rose is illuminated by experiences doesn’t tell us about candlelight. reflectance profiles; serious science was needed for that. But maybe the nature of our colour experiences tells us about relationships between reflectance profiles. The ‘colour solid’ is a This suggestion respects transparency. Think of it like this. We see red surfaces as being different from green surfaces. We see pink surfaces as having a property that falls between red and white. Most of us are familiar with the colour solid, which classifies colours as similar and different along three axes: hue, saturation and lightness. So, perhaps the property information delivered transparently by colour experiences is the location of certain surface properties – properties which are in fact reflectance profiles, though that’s not given to us by the nature of our colour experiences – in the similarity and difference network captured by the colour solid.

three-dimensional representation, which is thought to capture all of the world’s different colours. The model says that colours consist of hue (its basic colour – red, green, etc.), saturation (how intense the colour is – full or faded) and lightness (how light or dark the colour is). Think of it like a three-dimensional colour palette. Here, Jackson is saying that an experience of colour is transparent because it tells us what colour it is, and therefore, where it is on the ‘colour solid’ spectrum.

This fits with what biologists say about the evolution of colour vision; they argue that colour vision evolved because it makes survival-enhancing discriminations possible. Creatures with colour vision can easily tell ripe berries from surrounding foliage and poisonous fungi from safe fungi. This gives a survival-enhancing extra dimension which enables us to see the similarities and differences between things, and that’s why it evolved. These days we exploit this extra dimension for everything from warning lights to weather maps.

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Now we can see, broadly speaking, how Mary could find the properties colour experiences tell us about among the properties she knows about in the black and white room. In the room, she’ll learn about all of the different reflectance profiles from her television, and how they are alike and differ, one from another. Of course, while in the black and white room, there is a sense in which she won’t know what it’s like to see something as red. What she can know, however, is that having this experience delivers transparently information about relationships between surfaces, but she won’t be able to recognize being in the state herself until she finds herself experiencing it. But that’s a point about recognitional capacities, not a point about the ignorance of non-physical properties . . . She knows about all of the properties of colour vision before she leaves her room. When she’s freed, all she learns (if anything) is how to recognize them. She doesn’t learn about something non-physical. Now we can see that when Mary is in her black and white room, she knows all of the properties there are to know. I’m sorry to disappoint, but Mary doesn’t learn about a new type of non-physical property when she escapes into the outside world. When we explain colour in terms of reflectance profiles, we see that the original thought experiment shouldn’t tempt us into rejecting physicalism. No matter how much we want to hold on to our heartfelt convictions, we must always be prepared to let them go. Maybe it’s time we let the knowledge argument go.

Afterthoughts I have mixed feelings about Jackson’s change of heart. On the one hand, Frank’s abandonment of his original argument is worthy of great admiration, particularly in the light of its fame. The strong antiphysicalist intuition that the Mary thought experiment drives home is almost overwhelming; it seems devastatingly obvious that Mary won’t know what it’s like to see the colour red from her black and white room! Frank’s resistance to this intuition, and his subsequent abandonment of his anti-physicalist views in favour of – what many would consider – a more scientific approach, is something very few philosophers are capable of. As Galen Strawson remarks in our tenth chapter, ‘almost nobody engaged in the debate has ever changed sides’. At the same time, the knowledge argument remains extremely popular amongst anti-physicalists. Even if colour is just a matter of reflectance profiles, they say, there’s still a big problem here. When Mary sees

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reflectance profiles for the first time, she learns something new: what it’s like to experience the colour red. To illustrate this point, let’s end with a different example. For most religious believers, God knows every physical fact there is to know. But does God know what it’s like to fall off a bicycle? Does he know what it’s like to surf a gnarly wave or get stung by an angry jellyfish? Can God deduce from his infinite physical knowledge the qualitative nature of experience? Unless he comes down to Earth and tries it for himself, I don’t think he can.

Questions to consider 1. What does Mary learn when she sees the colour red for the first time?

2. Is this thought experiment too unrealistic to be taken seriously? 3. Do you think the appeal of the knowledge argument comes down to what (at first) seems like the non-transparency of colour vision?

4. Is our experience of colour just a physical process? 5. Do you think that Jackson was right to change his mind?

Recommended reading Advanced There’s Something About Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument, ed. Peter Ludlow, Yujin Nagasawa and Daniel Stoljar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). The first – and one of the best – books on Jackson’s knowledge argument. It’s a collection of twenty academic articles analysing the argument. Jackson’s articles on why (‘Postscript of Qualia’) and where (‘Mind and Illusion’) the argument goes wrong are worth checking out, as well as those by Chalmers and Dennett. The Knowledge Argument, ed. Sam Coleman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Here’s another collection of academic papers which focus on the knowledge argument. It’s a great place to go after There’s Something About Mary; this book documents some of the latest developments in the field.

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Intermediate Martine Nida-Rümelin and Donchadh O Conaill, ‘Qualia: The Knowledge Argument’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2019, https://plato.stanford. edu/entries/qualia-knowledge. If you’re new to the knowledge argument and you’ve got a good background in philosophy, this is a detailed overview of the knowledge argument and its main objections. Ari Schulman, ‘What Is It Like to Know?’, The New Atlantis, 2017, www. thenewatlantis.com/publications/what-is-it-like-to-know. A well-written and engaging piece on the knowledge argument’s appeal and how materialists and dualists have responded to Jackson’s original thought experiment; it discusses lots of ideas not covered in the other sources. Beginner Marina Gerner, ‘What Did Mary Know?’, Philosophy Now, 2013, www.philosophynow.org/issues/99/What_Did_Mary_Know. Here’s an accessible description of Jackson’s original knowledge argument. The article does a decent job of placing this classic thought experiment in the context of modern philosophy, whilst covering some popular physicalist responses. Frank Jackson and James Garvey, ‘Latter Day Physicalist’, The Philosophers’ Magazine, 2011, www.philosophersmag.com/interviews/22-frank-jacksonlatter-day-physicalist. In this brilliant, informal interview, Frank discusses how he came to write and reject the knowledge argument. He goes on to explain how we might account for what appear to be non-physical experiences through physical representation and drops a hint that he’s sympathetic towards illusionism.

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Chapter Five

The Given Michelle Montague

Introduction When Mary escaped from her black and white prison and saw a red rose for the first time, there was something it was like for her to undergo the experience. We all agree that she feels as though she’s experienced the colour red . . . and that she should call the police. That much is uncontroversial. After all, we don’t need to be locked away in a colour-void dungeon to understand the point. Reflect on your own experience for a moment: take another sip of coffee, smell the book’s pages, look around to make sure that nobody saw you sniff the book. These sensory experiences make up your conscious mind, but are they all there is to it? Can we have other types of experiences beyond the sensory? What else (if anything) is given to us in experience? Our interviewee for this chapter is Michelle Montague. Michelle’s fascinating, unorthodox and persuasive work has secured her reputation as one of the world’s leading phenomenologists. Her academic writing is precise, Phenomenologists study the thorough and deeply profound, but if nature of conscious experience. In short, their you’re new to philosophy of mind, work centres around the Montague’s technical vocabulary can question: how do we make for difficult reading. In this experience the world? interview, Michelle explains her very complex ideas in very simple ways. Most philosophers think that the only conscious experiences we can have are sensory: either we undergo a sensory experience in the present (think about what you can see in front of you) or we use our memory to replay sensory experiences from the past (recall your first kiss). In short,

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Michelle thinks that this view is wrong and that we can have other kinds of experiences. For example, there is something it is like to feel sad about a friend’s death (evaluative experiences) or to think that ‘1 + 1 = 2’ (cognitive experiences), and these go beyond the sensory. At the risk of sounding like a cheap magician, this interview will change the way you think about your conscious experiences. I encourage you to reflect on your own thoughts throughout. Ask yourself: ‘Does Michelle’s view resonate with my own experiences?’

Consciousness and phenomenology Before we explore the nature of conscious experience, I wonder what you think about philosophy’s wider purpose. Would you agree with Daniel Dennett, for example, who believes that the role of philosophy is to clarify concepts and questions, before passing them on to the scientists to make progress with them? I don’t share Dennett’s view that science will provide the answers. Science won’t answer questions like ‘Does God exist?’, ‘Are values objective?’ and ‘What Metaphysics is the study of ultimate reality. Broadly is the correct political philosophy?’ In speaking, it centres around terms of my own research, I think that two questions: what exists, metaphysics is a real possibility for and how do these things philosophy. When we do metaphysics, (that exist) relate to each we’re studying the ultimate nature of other? reality. Another job for philosophers is to develop an understanding of the nature of consciousness. This is another area where science won’t provide all of the answers. In your search for answers to these questions, are there any significant philosophical positions that you held earlier on in your life which you later went on to abandon? When I was a graduate student, I had the unusual experience of having lots of professors who were dualists about consciousness. That was a very unpopular position in the 1990s. I was strongly inclined to be a realist about consciousness, and I thought that dualism was the only view which maintained that position. At that point, it seemed like you had to make a choice between dualism and

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eliminativism. Today, I’m much more open to panpsychism. I think that if I were pressed, I would say that I’m a dualist or a panpsychist. Throughout your career, you’ve spent a significant amount of time thinking about consciousness, trying to figure out what it is. Does your latest book The Given focus on this same problem?1 Fundamentally, my project in The Given is to accurately and adequately describe Eliminativism is a type of physicalism, which denies consciousness as we experience it. I think the existence of mental we need to introduce a number of concepts states and any notion of a to describe what it is. Generally speaking, non-physical consciousness. consciousness is the what it’s like-ness of For the eliminativist, all an experience: it’s what it’s like to taste mental states can be explained in terms of chocolate, what it’s like to smell a rose or physical states. what it’s like to be kicked in the knee. But in my view, consciousness is far richer than these sensory experiences. We have many types of conscious thoughts: we can have thoughts about the nature of the universe, about what we’re going to wear tomorrow, and intense feelings about people and events that take place in our lives. So, we need concepts that allow us to adequately describe this rich stream of our experience. Is there an implication here that other philosophers haven’t explained conscious experience adequately? I think philosophers of consciousness in the mid-twentieth century to the end of the twentieth century focused on ‘sensory consciousness’. Sensory consciousness is the kind of experience that we get from our sensory modalities. We have vision and there’s something it’s like to see the colour red, we have hearing and there’s something it’s like to hear a car beep its horn, and this is true for all five of our sensory modalities. Part of my project is to widen that scope, to look at the full range of conscious experience. Sensory consciousness on its own cannot capture the rich variety of experience that we have. Are there any big philosophers today who think that consciousness is just sensory?

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I hesitate to name names, but one of my esteemed colleagues Michael Tye defends the view that there’s only sensory consciousness.2 Your project is to recognize the range of experiences that we have and give a rich and full description of what they feel like. Whereas Michael Tye, for instance, says that we should only focus on a bit of that – sensory experience. There’s this term which you use in your work: ‘phenomenology’. Could you tell us what phenomenology is? Funnily enough, we’ve already been discussing phenomenology up to this point. Phenomenology is the conscious experience: the ‘something it is like-ness’. When you bite into an apple, you feel the crunch and you taste its sweetness – these are examples of sensory phenomenology. In the present day, this is how philosophers of mind understand the term. However, it’s not the way that philosophers have used it historically. For philosophers such as Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre, phenomenology referred to a particular method of doing philosophy, which is to describe experience from the first-person viewpoint. In the way they used it, phenomenology wasn’t a property of mental states (the what it’s likeness of experience), which is how we understand it today. My work attempts to describe the way in which we have experiences. If we do not have a good description of what we’re trying to study, we’re going to be misled about the nature of the topic.

Michael Tye’s view is very different from Montague’s. Tye believes that all of our experiences are made up of properties which we have perceived through our senses. For example, when you have a pleasant dream about Paul Rudd, the content of your conscious experiences are only the properties you’ve previously experienced in his brilliant movies.

Franz Brentano (1838–1917) was a hugely influential philosopher and psychologist. Considered the ‘grandfather of phenomenology’, Brentano sought to establish a science of inner experience.

Edmund Husserl (1859– 1938) is often credited as the ‘father of phenomenology’. According to Husserl, phenomenology (the way the world appears to us) should lay the foundations and set the limits of all possible knowledge.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) is one of the most famous philosophers to have lived. Sartre attempted to develop a unified theory of the world from the first-person perspective.

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Lots of philosophers are trying to solve what David Chalmers has labelled the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, but you’re trying to answer a different question. You’re asking: what is the correct description of consciousness, and what’s the content of our experiences? Right. My project is more in the first instance descriptive: can we give an adequate description of consciousness before we try to give a metaphysical account of it?

Awareness of awareness Let’s explore this idea further. You mentioned Brentano earlier – I understand you’re quite a big fan of his work! Could you tell us about his view and why you’re a fan of it? I’m a great fan of Brentano! According to Brentano, consciousness is a ‘selfintimating phenomenon’, that is, when you have a conscious experience, you’re always aware that you’re having the experience.3 Maybe an example will help us get our heads around this. I see the lamp on the table behind you. Now, some philosophers might say that my conscious experience is just ‘seeing the lamp’, but Brentano’s view is: ‘In addition to being aware of the lamp, I’m aware of seeing the lamp.’ Is that the right way to put it? Yes! There’s an awareness of having that experience! All conscious experience is partly constituted by being aware of having that very experience. So, when I’m looking at you sat across from me at the table, not only am I aware of you, but I’m aware that I’m having the experience, and it’s in virtue of this awareness that the experience is conscious. This slightly complicates the structure of conscious experience. It’s not just a flat sort of structure, it has this awareness of awareness built into it; a thicker structure than you might first think. This is what I call the ‘awareness of awareness’ thesis. One sort of catchphrase that you might want to use to capture Brentano’s view is that ‘conscious experiences are ones that you are aware of having’. One of the main reasons you think we should accept the awareness of awareness thesis is what you call ‘the datum’.4 What is the datum and why do you think this supports Brentano’s view?

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This is what I call the datum: in having a perception, we can easily distinguish P. F. Strawson (1919–2006) was one of the twentiethbetween the object and the perception. century’s greatest thinkers. I take the idea of the datum from His work spans an enormous P. F. Strawson, who thought that it was ‘as array of topics, including certain as anything’ that we can distinguish metaphysics, philosophy of between the object of perception and the language, personal identity and free will. perception itself.5 Taking our example from earlier, in seeing the lamp we can differentiate between ‘the lamp itself ’ and ‘the experience of seeing the lamp’. Other theories of consciousness fail to account for the datum. On some accounts (as we shall see), we’re only aware of the properties of objects. Such views attempt to account for the datum only in terms of ‘being aware of an object’s properties’, but if you’re not aware of the experience in any sense, you’re not in a position to account for the datum. On the other hand, if you have Brentano’s awareness of awareness view, you can distinguish between the object of the experience and the experience itself. Another idea in the field is the ‘transparency view’ of conscious experience. This is the claim that we literally see through our experiences. For example, when I look at a Toblerone, it appears to me as a string of delicious brown prisms, Toblerone’s© unique taste but I can never become aware of the and shape make it the perfect gift for any occasion. properties of my own experience!6 I think your colleague Michael Tye holds this view. Why should we reject this idea? Brentano’s awareness of awareness thesis is inconsistent with the transparency thesis. The transparency view says that you cannot become aware of the properties of your experience, but Brentano’s view says that you can. We should reject the transparency view because we have good reason to favour Brentano’s view: in having a visual experience, not only are you aware of the object and some of its external properties, but you’re aware of having the experience itself. And in fact, it is in virtue of being aware of the phenomenological properties of your experience that you can become aware of properties of the object. I wonder if some pathological cases might give us reason to be sceptical of your view. For example, people with depersonalization, schizophrenia and Cotard’s syndrome say things like, ‘These aren’t my experiences’,

The Given ‘These thoughts aren’t mine’ and ‘I feel like I’m dead’. Critics say that this is meant to cast aspersions on the idea that there is awareness of awareness. The pathological cases are good to look at because they allow us to deconstruct our experiences and notice things that we don’t ordinarily find. I think describing exactly what is going on in cases like these has something to do with ownership. The argument seems to be that subjects have experiences in which they don’t feel like they’re the owner of the thoughts, as if somebody had placed them inside of their heads. Now, that’s not a threat to the awareness of awareness thesis. Remember, all the awareness of awareness thesis says is that in having an experience you’re always aware of having the experience. This is true even if you feel like your thoughts didn’t originate with you. So, the awareness of awareness isn’t an experience of ownership?

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Depersonalization is a serious and distressing disorder in which subjects feel detached from their minds or bodies. Many people suffering with the disorder report that their experiences don’t belong to them; they feel as if they were watching a film, rather than living out their own conscious experiences.

Schizophrenia is a longterm mental health condition with a range of distressing symptoms. Subjects with certain types of schizophrenia often report experiencing their own thoughts as if they were somebody else’s.

The term ‘Cotard’s syndrome’ comes from the neurologist, Jules Cotard (1840–1889). Subjects report that they feel like they’re missing bodily organs, that they are dying or that they are dead.

No, I think that the experience of ownership is a much more conceptually laden phenomenon than awareness of awareness. The awareness of awareness is a very minimal aspect of experience. You don’t need to possess concepts to have it. Whereas to feel like you have ownership of a thought, you have to have some further thoughts like, ‘I originated this thought’, or ‘this thought is voluntary to me’. That’s a much richer conceptual phenomenon.

Types of phenomenology At the start of the interview, you said that sensory phenomenology alone cannot account for the whole of conscious experience. Let’s

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introduce the other types of phenomenology you think there could be. What’s ‘cognitive phenomenology’ and why do you think it’s needed in addition to sensory phenomenology? Cognitive phenomenology is an irreducible and unique kind of phenomenology that is paradigmatically associated with conscious thought, but also with conscious emotion and conscious perception. So just as philosophers say there is something that it’s like to taste your favourite chocolate, This example is problematic. there’s also something that it’s like to think Nobody thinks that logic is a fun exercise. that temperance is a virtue or there’s something that it’s like to think that logic is a fun exercise, and those thoughts are distinguished from one another partly because of cognitive phenomenology. In short, there’s something that it’s like to think thoughts! Take the example of the duck–rabbit: I see something that looks like a duck and then I show the picture to somebody else and they say, ‘No, that’s a rabbit!’7 This example demonstrates that there’s more to phenomenology than sensory experience. There must be something extra going on in the background! That’s precisely right, in perceptual cases like the duck–rabbit, the sensory information that you’re getting is exactly the same picture. All of the sensory Philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein information is the same, nonetheless, (1889–1951) famously used your experience when you see it as a duck the example of the duck– versus when you see it as a rabbit is rabbit in his book, phenomenologically different. You can Philosophical Investigations. think of it in the following way: thoughts are composed of concepts, so in order for me to believe that snow is white, I need to have the concept of ‘snow’ and the concept of ‘whiteness’. In seeing the image as a duck, I’m deploying the concept ‘duck’, and there is a certain type of cognitive phenomenology that’s associated with the concept that is manifested in deploying that concept.

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Do you think there’s also something it’s like to experience anger or love? There is something distinctive going on when you experience an emotion like anger or love, and I think part of what’s going on is that you’re attributing certain evaluative properties to an object or state of affairs. Take, for example, a friend’s death: one evaluates that state of affairs as bad. There’s something it feels like to take something to be bad and this is completely different from seeing a colour or hearing a sound. I describe emotions as involving a distinctive kind of phenomenology that I call ‘evaluative phenomenology’. What about the emotion of fear? Sensory phenomenology might very well be part of fear, but there is much more to it. I think that an experience of fear also involves evaluative phenomenology, which in this case is the experience of taking something to be bad. Take an example: I’m afraid of flying. Maybe it’s not very rational, but I’m afraid that something bad might happen, like a crash, or being seated next to a snoring passenger. So we could say, ‘I am experiencing the world in such a way that I’m expecting something bad to happen.’ I think this kind of phenomenology is distinct from cognitive phenomenology and sensory phenomenology. Cognitive phenomenology is associated with concepts and the deployment of concepts, but evaluative phenomenology is associated with value and disvalue. When we experience the emotion of fear in the context of thoughts of a plane crash, I think that cognitive and evaluative phenomenology will both be involved. For lots of philosophers, cognitive and evaluative phenomenology are still quite unorthodox, but readers might reflect on what you’ve said and go, ‘well it seems to me like there’s something it’s like to think thoughts’, or ‘it feels like there’s something it’s like to be worried about an aeroplane crashing’. Why are philosophers so opposed to these different types of phenomenology? One kind of explanation for philosophers restricting their attention to sensory phenomenology is that these have been the standard examples used across the philosophical literature: what it’s like to taste chocolate or see a red rose. I think part of the reason is that sensory experiences are quite vivid. In turn, philosophers have mistakenly thought that they’re capturing all conscious experiences when they appeal to the sensory ones. There’s also a second reason for this. You mentioned the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness earlier, which has tended to focus on sensory experiences. I think philosophers have been reluctant to widen the scope of phenomenology because they think they’re going to make the hard problem even harder!

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But do they have to accept that there’s more to consciousness than sensory experience? I think so. Take a conscious thought like ‘2 + 2 = 4’. How are we going to account for what that conscious thought consists in? If you think there is only sensory phenomenology, then you’re going to have to give an account of that thought purely in terms of sensory phenomenology; maybe you imagine the numeral two, the plus sign and the equals sign, or perhaps you say to yourself in inner speech ‘2 + 2 = 4’. This kind of phenomenology will never be enough! Why? If you take inner visualization or speech, the sentence ‘2 + 2 = 4’ in itself doesn’t have any meaning to it: it’s intrinsically non-meaningful. The only way to get meaning inserted into this sentence is to appeal to concepts or meanings, and once you’ve done that, by my lights you’re appealing to way more than sensory phenomenology.

Sticking to our senses One response might be: there is only sensory experience and memory, and when we think thoughts, we just replay the memories of previous sensory experiences in our heads. For example, David Hume thought that the concept ‘rabbit’ was just a little picture of a rabbit in our mind’s eye! Would your response to Hume be: why then, is the concept meaningful? Precisely, I think that’s exactly right! Jesse Prinz’s view of the duck–rabbit example is very similar to what you described as Hume’s view. But when we have an image of a duck, we take it to be a duck: it’s already saturated with conceptual information. It’s not just sensory, it’s a concept!

David Hume (1711–1776) was one of the principal figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume made huge contributions in almost every area of philosophy and sought to uncover the limitations of human reason through scepticism.

Like David Hume, contemporary philosopher Jesse Prinz has also made contributions to a huge range of philosophical topics and is a strong advocate of empiricism – the view that information comes from sensory experience.

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The duck-ness was already there? The duck-ness has to be there for me to have an image of a duck as a duck. I am arguing that if you take images to be images of something, such as a duck, it’s more than just an outline. A dog could see an outline of a duck and maybe have an image of a duck in its mind, but in that case, they’re not taking it as a duck, there’s no conceptual information or meaningful information contained in their image. That’s a great example. Perhaps another one might drive the point home. Take the sentence: ‘Toblerones are made with honey and almonds.’ If you present this sentence to a small child that hasn’t learnt how to read, they’ll just see a bunch of symbols. That example (not Toblerone specific) is one of the central examples used in the debate to argue for the existence of cognitive phenomenology. Consider two people, one of whom understands what the sentence says and another who doesn’t. There’s an experiential difference here, and it seems like it’s a conceptual, cognitive one. I think that this can only be accounted for in terms of cognitive phenomenology. I’m trying to figure out what’s so controversial about your view. Readers will be thinking, ‘I can think “2 + 2 = 4” and I know that Toblerones are made with honey and almonds. I can imagine the concepts in my heads, and yes they’re meaningful.’ So, what’s the problem? Is it a simplicity thing? That’s such a good question. When you put it to first-year undergraduates, they think it’s pretty obvious that there’s such a thing as cognitive phenomenology. I do think that simplicity is one consideration. Philosophers love reduction, so they want to give the simplest theory they can in order to account for the data. If you can give an adequate account of conscious thought or conscious emotion through purely sensory phenomenology, you have no reason to postulate cognitive phenomenology, and that’s part of the argumentation that you’ll see in the debate.

A ‘simplicity thing’ refers to Ockham’s razor, a popular tool amongst philosophers for determining the likelihood of a hypothesis. The name of this problem-solving principle comes from William of Ockham (1287–1347). Ockham said that if we have multiple competing theories with the same explanatory power, we should accept the one which makes the fewest assumptions.

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If your opponent was determined to reject cognitive phenomenology, do they have an alternative? You either accept cognitive phenomenology or deny the existence of conscious thought. Oddly enough, some philosophers seem willing to deny the existence of conscious thought. What are the dangers of focusing solely on sensory experience? The obvious danger is that we won’t be talking about consciousness in its full nature. If you restrict your attention to sensory consciousness you won’t be able to give an adequate account of conscious thought, nor will you be able to give an adequate account of conscious emotion. Let’s say that you’re a philosopher who only believes in sensory consciousness: this means that you have to reduce all thought to sensory experience. But if you do that, my claim is that you are no longer talking about conscious thought. To give an adequate account of conscious thought, you must appeal to more than sensory phenomenology! Your view is really compelling, and it’s got me thinking whether or not it might be appealing to physicalists. What do you think someone like Daniel Dennett would think of your views? I think that he would hate them!

Afterthoughts Unlike other areas of philosophy, most work in phenomenology hasn’t made its way into the public square.8 The literature is very technical and challenging, and there is little in the way of accessible and engaging content. I hope this interview with Michelle Montague is an exception to that rule. Michelle’s view seems convincing. There is an experiential difference between my sensory experiences and those which are more conceptual. The duck–rabbit example is a good way of thinking about this. The experience seems to change when I see it as a duck, rather than a rabbit. This is hard to deny, and it would point us towards a type of phenomenology beyond the sensory. We should note, however, that Montague’s account remains the minority view. Many prominent philosophers think that the

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duck–rabbit can be explained through sensory phenomenology and that Toblerones aren’t the perfect gift for any occasion (crazy!).

Questions to consider 1. When you have a conscious experience, are you always aware that you’re having the experience?

2. Is it possible to have unconscious experiences? 3. Can you distinguish between the object of your experience and the experience itself?

4. Is it possible to have experiences that aren’t based on things we’ve perceived through our senses?

5. Imagine walking your dog in the park and coming across a duck. You and the dog both see the duck, but do your experiences differ?

Recommended reading Advanced Ray Jackendoff, Consciousness and the Computational Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). A challenging academic text in which Jackendoff unpacks his theory of mental representation. Jackendoff ’s view conflicts with Montague’s as he rejects evaluative and cognitive phenomenology. Michelle Montague, The Given: Experience and its Content (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). This is the main text that we discussed in the interview. Montague explores the content of conscious thought and makes her case for three distinct, irreducible types of phenomenology: sensory, cognitive and evaluative. Intermediate Jesse Prinz, ‘The Sensory Basis of Cognitive Phenomenology’, in Cognitive Phenomenology, ed. Tim Bayne and Michelle Montague (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 174–96. After speaking to Montague, we’re left thinking that cognitive phenomenology and sensory phenomenology must be separate. Prinz challenges this view and argues that all cognitive phenomenology can be reduced to sensory phenomenology.

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Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). In this book, Montague’s colleague and arch-nemesis Michael Tye argues that all phenomenal experience should be understood in terms of mental representation. It’s a longer read, but Tye’s style is more accessible than some of the other books on the topic. Beginner Peter Carruthers, ‘There is No Such Thing as Conscious Thought’, Scientific American, December 2018, www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-nosuch-thing-as-conscious-thought. This is a short interview with Peter Carruthers, in which he gives an overview of his view that conscious thought is an illusion; Carruthers believes that some thoughts (such as judgements and decisions) are always unconscious. David Smith, ‘Phenomenology’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology. This article gives a detailed overview of the history, varieties and relevance of phenomenology. If you’re a high-ability student who is new to the field, this is the perfect place to start.

Chapter Six

A Biologist’s Perspective Massimo Pigliucci

Introduction ‘Philosophy is dead’, proclaimed the great Stephen Hawking. The ‘scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge’.1 This judgement will resonate with a lot of people. Philosophy is often seen as the science of the past, the abstract speculation we engaged in before we knew what we were doing. If you’re privileged enough to study philosophy, that’s great, but don’t be confused: it doesn’t make progress. Our guide for this chapter is the philosopher and scientist Massimo Pigliucci, one of the most prolific, insightful and accessible thinkers of the modern day. According to Pigliucci, philosophy isn’t dead. The art of living, the forging of life’s purpose and the study of good reasoning are just as important as they’ve always been. Moreover, Massimo points out that science itself is rooted in the progress of philosophy. Psychology, chemistry, physics, biology – these disciplines are proof of the progress philosophy can make. However, there is a certain type of philosophy that is dead: armchair metaphysics. In this essay, Pigliucci unleashes a sweeping attack on three of the biggest ideas in philosophy of mind: Mary the neuroscientist, philosophical zombies and panpsychism. Massimo cuts through to the heart of the debate. Speculative philosophy of mind, he says, is never going to solve the problem of consciousness. If we want to solve the mystery, science must lead the way.

How philosophy does (and does not) make progress Many people – especially a number of high-profile scientists – think that philosophy does not make progress.2 The argument goes that we’re still stuck 63

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engaging with long-dead (usually white) men like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant – the list goes on. But, in fact, philosophy does make progress, just not in the way science does.3 As they are two different disciplines with different aims and different methods, to talk about it as if there were only one, universally valid measure of ‘progress’ is not very useful. One important way in which philosophy has made progress over the past couple of millennia is by spinning off a number of fields that we today label as ‘science’. Physics was the first of the modern sciences to take this path, with Galileo and Newton thinking of themselves as natural philosophers, even though – with hindsight – what they did was move the field away from philosophy’s analytical approach and into the empirical realm of science. After that, Boyle contributed to philosophy’s spinning off into chemistry, Darwin to that of biology, Adam Smith to that of economics and William James to that of psychology. If one looks at things that way, philosophy has been by far the most prolific and successful intellectual enterprise ever attempted by humanity. Moreover, as soon as a particular subfield spins off to become a science, it generates its own peculiar conceptual problems, which immediately give rise to a corresponding ‘philosophy of’. Yet another way in which philosophy makes progress. For instance, once science was firmly established, we began to see a new intellectual form of inquiry that goes under the umbrella name of ‘philosophy of science’. Arguably the first philosopher of science was Francis Bacon, who challenged the long-established Aristotelian conception of natural philosophy.

The philosopher and scientist Robert Boyle (1627–1691) is one of several key figures who laid the foundations for modern chemistry. Boyle went against the prevailing method of his time – which aimed to understand the world using abstract, philosophical arguments – by studying the world’s basic elements through experiments.

Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a highly influential political philosopher and one of the first to offer a detailed economical system.

The philosopher and politician Francis Bacon (1561–1626) is widely considered ‘the father of experimental science’. Bacon resisted Aristotle’s (384–322 BCE) speculative metaphysical approach; the best way to learn about the world, according to Bacon, was to gather lots of raw data.

Nowadays, philosophy of science has developed into a series of subfields, including philosophy of biology, philosophy of physics, philosophy of

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chemistry and philosophy of the social sciences. The point of these ‘philosophies of ’ is to study their respective fields of interest from the outside, as scientists cannot do, since they’re busy getting on with the science. We want to know, for instance, about the logic of scientific discovery, the relationship between theory and empirical evidence, the ‘epistemic warrants’ for scientists’ claims and a host of other things.4 Philosophy of science studies the The term ‘epistemic’ refers to knowledge, so ‘epistemic logical mechanisms underpinning the warrants’ means the amount workings of science, just like sociology of of knowledge we need in science studies science’s power structures, order to hold a particular and history of science studies the twists belief. and turns taken by the unmistakably nonlinear ‘progress’ of the sciences. There is, however, a glaring exception to the picture I have just painted: philosophy of mind. You see, philosophers of mind are not in the business of studying the cognitive sciences. They are under the illusion that they can actually discover things just by sitting in their armchairs and, you know, thinking about them! They are doing what Aristotle referred to as ‘first philosophy’ and which everyone after him called ‘metaphysics’. Mind you, there is a long tradition of doing metaphysics that way. It began with the first known philosopher of the western tradition, the pre-Socratic Thales of Miletus, who arrived at the conclusion that the world was made, at its core, of water. He was wrong on the specifics, of course, but his idea was an intellectual breakthrough: he at once both moved away from the notion that understanding the world requires supernatural explanations and proposed that everything is made of a single fundamental type of stuff, an idea that modern physicists still pursue.

‘Pre-Socratic’ philosophers are those who lived before the time of Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE), the ‘founder of western philosophy’.

Thales of Miletus (c. sixth century BCE) believed that there must be an essence to physical matter. He proposed that this inner nature was water, because everything in the world needs water to survive.

However, I would have thought that first philosophy had run its course by the seventeenth century, with René Descartes. He was the guy who performed a thought experiment in radical doubt, arriving at the conclusion that the only

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thing he could be absolutely sure of was that he was a thinking being, cogito ergo sum – ‘I think, therefore I am.’5 From that solid foundation, he tried to reconstruct all of knowledge, and failed abysmally. Almost immediately, he had to invoke the guarantee of a God who wouldn’t deceive us whenever we have ‘clear and distinct’ perceptions about the world. It’s a massive case of begging the question, known in philosophy as the ‘Cartesian circle’.6 Yet, some of my colleagues still act as if none of the above ever happened, persisting in the Cartesian project, with – predictably – no more luck than Descartes himself. Let’s briefly consider three examples of this outdated, first philosophytype approach: Mary the neuroscientist, philosophical zombies and panpsychism.

In his book Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), René Descartes (1596–1650) set out to establish what he knew with absolute certainty. After he’d arrived at the fact that he existed, Descartes tried to prove the existence of the outside world. His argument went like this: God would never deceive us into thinking we have clear and distinct ideas – such as belief in the outside world. We know that God exists because we have a clear and distinct idea of God. The argument is circular because it assumes the very thing it sets out to prove. This famous mistake is known today as the ‘Cartesian circle’.

There’s something about Mary Here is how Frank Jackson, the author of the famous knowledge argument (and who, incidentally, has since changed his mind about its outcome), explains the Mary thought experiment: Mary is a brilliant scientist who . . . René Descartes’s Latinized specialises in the neurophysiology name is Cartesius. So, when of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all you see the word ‘Cartesian’, the physical information there is to it means that the idea is obtain about what goes on when we see related to Descartes. ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on . . . What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room . . . Will she learn anything or not?7

The contention is that Mary will, indeed, learn something new, and that this ‘demonstrates’ that physicalism – the notion that all there is in the world are physical facts – is wrong. After all, as the argument goes, Mary knew all of the physical facts that one can learn about vision, so how could she possibly learn

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something new when she finally experiences colour? It must be because there is something non-physical going on! The problem here hinges on a confusion about what counts as ‘knowing’, as has been pointed out by a number of philosophers. Owen Flanagan, for Owen Flanagan is a instance, distinguished between what leading philosopher and neuroscientist. In his book he called ‘metaphysical’ and ‘linguistic’ Consciousness Reconsidered physicalism.8 Metaphysical physicalism is (1992), he argues that the position Jackson wanted to demolish, mental processes are just but he actually only managed to undermine brain processes, and that linguistic physicalism. As Flanagan puts it: collectively – through neuroscience, psychology, ‘Metaphysical physicalism simply asserts biology and cognitive that what there is, and all there is, is science – we’re well on our physical stuff and its relations. Linguistic way to a theory of physicalism is the thesis that everything consciousness without physical can be expressed or captured in needing any mystical substances! the languages of the basic sciences.’9 As far as I know, nobody actually subscribes to linguistic physicalism, which is obviously false: we know of plenty of things that cannot be captured by the language of the basic sciences, including the phenomenal experience of colours. Jackson’s argument attacks linguistic physicalism, but the physicalism that matters (metaphysical physicalism) comes out unscathed. It may still sound like the example of Mary at the very least pinpoints a severe limitation of science, but that’s also not the case, since science was never designed to be an all-encompassing source of knowledge. This brings me to a related response to Alongside his wife Patricia Jackson, articulated by Paul Churchland Churchland, Paul and based on the distinction he Churchland is one of the draws between ‘knowledge-that’ and world’s best-known 10 ‘knowledge-how’. The first kind of neurophilosophers. Some of knowledge is what science traffics in: Paul and Patricia’s views are very similar. The argument knowledge that can be articulated by way cited by Pigliucci here is a of natural or mathematical language, such great example – compare as our understanding of colour vision. The Patricia’s response to the second kind, knowledge-how, is nonknowledge argument in the verbal, as in the case of the fact that you next chapter! probably know how to ride a bicycle, even though you may not be able to verbally explain it to someone else. Mary has

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knowledge-that, but not knowledge-how. There are other responses (and, predictably, counter-responses) to Jackson’s thought experiment, but it seems pretty clear to me that it fails in its attempt at first philosophy, for the sort of very basic reasons just outlined.

Zombieland Let’s move on to philosophical zombies, shall we? This is yet another thought experiment that allegedly demonstrates that physicalism is wrong. The most Keith Campbell introduced popular version is attributed to David the world to philosophical 11 Chalmers, though the original goes zombies back in 1970. In his back to Keith Campbell.12 The argument book Body and Mind, Campbell didn’t call this aims at establishing the existence of hypothetical being a what Chalmers calls the ‘hard problem’ ‘zombie’ but named him the of consciousness: the notion that ‘imitation man’. consciousness cannot, in principle, be explained through physical science. Essentially, Chalmers says that it is conceivable that there could be a being that is exactly like you and me, both in terms of external appearance and of internal structure, yet this being does not experience phenomenal consciousness: he doesn’t feel pain (but cries in apparent pain if you punch him!), doesn’t see red (though he claims he does) and so forth.

‘An object with mass travelling at the speed of light’ or ‘gold dissolving into water’ are both examples of physical impossibilities. A physical possibility doesn’t contradict the laws of physics.

The flaws with this argument have, again, been pointed out by a number of philosophers, but they boil down to the fact that conceivability doesn’t establish anything at all. Conceivability is A logical possibility is not a rigorously defined criterion, unlike, something that’s consistent say, physical possibility or logical with the rules of logic. possibility. Plenty of things are ‘conceivable’ ‘Square circles’, ‘married – meaning that human beings can think bachelors’ and ‘good Adam about them and articulate such thoughts Sandler movies’ are all examples of logical in a certain manner – and yet they turn impossibilities. out to be either physically or logically impossible. For instance, we can easily

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conceive of travelling faster than the speed Pigliucci and Chalmers of light (as depicted in my favourite sci-fi differ on quite a few show, Star Trek) and yet Einstein’s theory philosophical points. of general relativity says this is impossible. However, they both agree Moreover, Chalmers wants to use that Star Trek is one of the best shows on television. conceivability as a vehicle to establish metaphysical possibility, as distinct from logical and physical possibility. But there is no good reason to think that there is any such distinction: something is either physically or logically possible or impossible, nothing else. Finally, it seems to me that the zombie argument doesn’t go through even on its own merits because it misconstrues the question. The issue at hand is not whether in some alternative universe, regimented by different laws of physics, zombies are possible. They may or may not be. We would have to somehow figure out which sets of physical laws are themselves possible or impossible – and nobody knows how to do that. Rather, the discussion is about whether consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon in the only universe in which we (sort of) understand the laws. In our universe, zombies would contradict the laws of physics (a point on which even Chalmers agrees), so they are impossible. Which means that – in this universe – there is no such thing as the hard problem of consciousness, because physicalism applies. It is entirely pointless to argue what would happen in another universe to which we have no access at all. There is no hard problem distinct from the (really hard) one of arriving at a neurobiological causal explanation of consciousness. Ultimately, Chalmers runs into the same problem as Jackson: he wants to do first philosophy, and first philosophy has firmly been replaced by science, so it’s a non-starter.

Megamind Lastly, consider the mother of all first philosophy attempts: panpsychism. This is an idea that is literally as old as philosophy, the first alleged panpsychist being none other than the above-mentioned Thales of Miletus. Broadly speaking, panpsychism is the view that mentality (or consciousness, or the ability to have experiences) is a basic feature of the universe, instead of a particular biological phenomenon historically evolved in a certain number of animal species on planet Earth. Panpsychists disagree about what exactly (or even approximately) their position means. Thales’ version was that everything is full of gods. Another pre-Socratic,

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Heraclitus, said that the thinking faculty is common to all,13 and Plato tells us that the world is a living being,14 a notion later absorbed into Stoicism.15 Confusingly, Galen Strawson says that panpsychism is a form of physicalism, while David Chalmers and Philip Goff describe it as an alternative to both physicalism and dualism. I think such confusion is the result of the fact that panpsychism is an incoherent notion. There are a number of forceful objections to panpsychism, one of which is known as the combination problem. Keith Frankish summarizes it in this way: ‘Panpsychists hold that consciousness emerges from the combination of billions of subatomic consciousnesses . . . But how do these tiny consciousnesses combine? We understand how particles combine to make atoms, molecules and larger structures, but what parallel story can we tell on the phenomenal side?’16 The answer is: none.

Heraclitus (c. 540–480 BCE) observed that – like fire – everything in the world was constantly changing. This led him to the conclusion that the underlying nature of reality was an ever-living fire. This fire, or ‘life energy’, could also be described as a divine spirit. In his own words: ‘The thinking faculty is common to all.’

In his dialogue the Timaeus (c. 360 BCE), Plato (c. 428–347 BCE) explains that when God brought the universe into existence, he gave the world a global soul. To quote him directly: ‘Divine providence brought our world into being as a truly living thing, endowed with soul and intelligence.’

In my view, the most convincing objection Following the death of Plato, to panpsychism is (by admission of its a new philosophical tradition own followers) that there is no possible emerged in Ancient Greece test which could verify or falsify the called ‘Stoicism’. According to theory. Both Chalmers and Goff readily the Stoics, ‘Logos’ – the admit that there is no possible empirical animating principle of the universe – was consciousness. test for panpsychism, but insist that there are, nevertheless, compelling arguments in its favour. In other words, they are engaging in first philosophy . . . and I’ve already made abundantly clear why I think that’s a non-starter.

Consciousness as an evolved biological phenomenon As a biologist, I would think it’s a no-brainer – so to speak – that consciousness is a biological phenomenon, which evolved in the animal world. If by

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‘consciousness’ we mean the ability to have first-person experience, such as feeling pain, then most animals seem to have it. If we mean self-consciousness, i.e. the ability to perceive oneself having those experiences, then probably only animals with a sufficiently complex nervous system have it, obviously including – but not necessarily limited to – humans. Since consciousness requires a complex nervous system, and since complex nervous systems are metabolically expensive, consciousness probably evolved by natural selection in order to fulfil one or more functions. In other words, it’s what biologists call an ‘adaptation’. For mobile organisms like animals (as opposed to plants, which are literally rooted to their spots, and have accordingly evolved different means to achieve the same results), clearly the ability to rapidly sense environmental changes (such as shadows and colours) as well as changes to the animal’s constitution (such as pain) is advantageous in terms of survival and reproduction. In human beings, additional advantages probably include the ability to deliberately plan our actions, running mental simulations of possible alternative outcomes. It is also possible that consciousness is required for the evolution of language, another obviously advantageous trait of Homo sapiens.17 Biology also makes it clear that the much-used comparison between the human brain and a computer is more superficial than substantial. For example, brains are organized in a massively parallel fashion, not linearly, as our digital computers are. Also, brains are not digital devices: they don’t just use electrical signals, but a variety ‘Substrate’ is the underlying material or form which of complex biomolecules that have to be something is built upon. In made in specific ways. Moreover, the this case, Pigliucci is arguing physical feelings that accompany conscious that ‘consciousness’ requires experiences require certain biochemical a biological substrate: a properties in the nervous system. There is complex brain with neurons and biochemicals. much talk in philosophy of mind that Consciousness can’t ‘run’ on consciousness is just about information, and an artificial substrate like a information is – allegedly – substrate computer – it’s the wrong independent (though have you tried to run kind of hardware! a Mac program on a PC? Turns out, the substrate matters!). That is not the case in the biological world. For instance, we often If we know something a priori, it literally means we hear arguments to the effect that silicon know it prior to experience; could replace carbon in order to develop things we can come to conscious artificial intelligence. Perhaps. know without using our five This is an open empirical question that senses. cannot be settled a priori.

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Matter matters The real ‘hard’ problem of consciousness will come from a combination of evolutionary biology and neuroscience. Not from computer science. And definitely not from philosophy of mind. This brings us full circle to the notion that it’s high time for philosophers to let go of metaphysics conceived as first philosophy. The problems we are trying to address are never about simple conceivability – an empty concept in the first place – nor even about the far better understood logical possibility. They are problems concerning how certain natural phenomena exist in the one universe that we actually inhabit. They are scientific – not philosophical – problems. Does this mean that we should stop doing metaphysics altogether? Of course not. There are other, well-developed models of what it means to do metaphysics. Wilfrid Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) Sellars, for instance, articulated a vision of was a leading metaphysician and philosopher of mind, metaphysics as being in the business of whose work on the method bringing together what he termed the and purpose of philosophy ‘scientific’ and the ‘manifest images’ of the remains hugely influential to 18 world. The first one talks about empirical this day. He is best known for facts and theoretical entities (such as proclaiming that ‘the aim of philosophy . . . is to electrons), while the second one concerns understand how things in the meaning and purpose of life and our the broadest possible sense of values and moral prescriptions (for the term hang together in the 19 example, ‘it is wrong to do this or that’). It’s broadest possible sense of the crucial to human understanding and in term’. navigating the world that we are able to square the two images with each other. There is also the so-called ‘scientific metaphysics’,20 according to which the role of modern metaphysics is to make sense of the full picture emerging from the individual sciences, since no individual science is positioned to do so. The future is bright for both metaphysics and philosophy, so long as philosophers update their approaches and goals to modern times, as their predecessors have done ever since the pre-Socratics.

Afterthoughts This shouldn’t be understated: Pigliucci is telling us that some of the biggest philosophers in the world are nothing short of deluded – they’re

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not going to discover anything new about the cosmos from their armchairs! Once philosophy becomes highly specialized and branches off into a new science, he says, we’ve reached the point where we need to give up on the old ways and put on our lab coats. There’s a balance to this approach that should be commended. His view isn’t ‘scientism’, the idea that science is the only discipline that can take us forwards; Pigliucci points out that philosophy might be the greatest intellectual enterprise we’ve ever embarked on, and it still has a role in making sense of the big picture which emerges from the individual sciences. Pigliucci’s account is compelling, but we should put this into perspective. What he offers is a critique of first philosophy, not a solution to the problem of consciousness – and I think Massimo would agree. His point is that the best approach to solving the problem is to explore testable, scientific theories, but some philosophers will remain sceptical. When we try and ‘map out’ the big picture of reality (as Pigliucci asks us to), one big problem for science remains: no matter how much physical stuff we learn about the brain, it doesn’t seem – to some people – like we’ll have an explanation for consciousness. What reason does biology give us to think otherwise? How will biology solve the problem of consciousness?

Questions to consider 1. Is philosophy humanity’s most successful intellectual enterprise? 2. Should we abandon ‘first philosophy’ approaches to consciousness? 3. How would Susan Blackmore respond to Pigliucci’s claim that consciousness is an evolutionary phenomenon?

4. Is a biological explanation of consciousness possible? 5. Will we ever be able to upload consciousness into machines, surviving beyond the death of our bodies?

Recommended reading Advanced Massimo Pigliucci, ‘Mind Upload: A Philosophical Counter-Analysis’, in Intelligence Unbound: The Future of Uploaded and Machine Minds, ed. Russell Blackford and Damien Broderick (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 119–30.

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Philosophers on Consciousness Pigliucci argues against the view that consciousness – like a digital program – is capable of being uploaded onto other physical systems. Instead, Massimo says that consciousness is a purely biological phenomenon, which, at best, can be cloned.

Massimo Pigliucci, ‘Philosophy as the Evocation of Conceptual Landscapes’, in Philosophy’s Future: The Problem of Philosophical Progress, ed. Russell Blackford and Damien Broderick (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), 75–90. The focus here isn’t philosophy of mind, but the purpose of philosophy more generally. If you’re looking for a more detailed account of how and why Massimo thinks philosophy makes progress, this is the article for you. Intermediate Philip Goff and Massimo Pigliucci, ‘Panpsychism and the Science of Consciousness: An Exchange’, Letter, 2019–2020, www.letter.wiki/ conversation/277. This series of letters between Pigliucci and Philip Goff makes for a fascinating read. Goff attempts to defend panpsychism in the light of Pigliucci’s attack on first philosophy, but Pigliucci stands firm: without empirical data, he says, panpsychism is ‘nothing but sophistry and illusion’. Massimo Pigliucci, ‘Must Science be Testable?’, Aeon, August 2016, www.aeon. co/essays/the-string-theory-wars-show-us-how-science-needs-philosophy. Whether scientists can solve the problem of consciousness without the help of philosophers is a theme which runs deep throughout this book. Here, Massimo makes a case for why they shouldn’t be competing but working together. Beginner Massimo Pigliucci, ‘Consciousness is Real’, Aeon, December 2019, www.aeon.co/ essays/consciousness-is-neither-a-spooky-mystery-nor-an-illusory-belief. A brilliant, wide-ranging article, in which Massimo explains his scepticism of anti-physicalist accounts of consciousness, as well as reasons for rejecting illusionism. Massimo Pigliucci, ‘What Hard Problem?’, Philosophy Now, 2013, www. philosophynow.org/issues/99/What_Hard_Problem. If you want a short, accessible and engaging summary of Pigliucci’s view, this is an excellent place to go. Here, Massimo argues that there isn’t really a difference between the ‘hard problem’ and the ‘easy problems’ of consciousness.

Chapter Seven

The Hornswoggle Problem Patricia Churchland

Introduction What makes the wind blow? If you were born into an ancient civilization, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was the work of the gods. Faced with what seemed like an unanswerable question, it made sense to come up with a mystical answer. In the modern day, however, you don’t have any excuses. The sun heats up the Earth’s surface, warm air rises, cool air rushes to fill the gaps, and there you have it: wind. The once impenetrable mystery became something children learn before their eleventh birthdays. In many ways, this is the history of science: the history of overcoming ignorance. Whether it’s the climate, the origin of the universe or life itself, science has a way of explaining the apparently unexplainable. So, why should we think consciousness is any different? Our interviewee for this chapter is Patricia Churchland. Along with her witty, no-nonsense approach, her hands-on brand of philosophy has made her one of the world’s most influential thinkers. Patricia is far from your cliché armchair philosopher; you won’t find her at home, scratching her chin and smoking a pipe. No, to understand something properly, Churchland thinks you need to get out of the house and do some science. Her method is simple: the best way to understand the mind is to study the brain. After all, mental states are natural phenomena: they are products of the brain. Throughout this interview, try and reflect on our place in the history of science. Ask yourself: do we need an abstract solution to the mystery of consciousness, or should we wait for science to take its course? When the wind blows, should we look to the heavens, or the Earth?

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Neurophilosophy Pat, your research is always looking to close the gap between philosophy and science. One interesting way in which you’ve done this is through your work in ‘neurophilosophy’, a term you coined back in 1986.1 How would you describe ‘neurophilosophy’, and in what way do you think it relates to philosophy? There are these grand old questions that have been asked by philosophers in the East and West for millennia: how do we make decisions? What is it to have self-control? How is it that we can learn things that a dog cannot? Back in the 1960s, I was excited to see that neuroscience – the study of the physical brain – had data that bore upon these big questions. At the same time, I was dumbfounded to find that some philosophers thought – and still think – that they could explain consciousness without knowing anything at all about the brain. They assumed they could make it all up! No science, no psychology and no neuroscience. I thought, ‘If philosophy is just about words and has nothing to do with the science of what the words are about, then it’s a waste of time.’ This led me to neurophilosophy, the In the 1960s, a small number discipline which looks at neuroscience and of people suffering with philosophy together. There are lots of things severe epilepsy had their we know about the brain that can help us corpus callosums cut to stop understand philosophical questions. That’s seizures from spreading not to say that philosophical questions across their brains. After the operation, many of these can always be answered by neuroscientific split-brain patients behaved data, but the data are relevant. In short, as if they were two different neurophilosophy says that philosophy people. It was if their mind should take scientific data seriously because had been split in two! thinking, perceiving, deciding, sleeping – these are natural phenomena that have a nature. Science can inquire into that nature. Are there any examples which show how neuroscience can help us answer philosophical questions? Of course! Early on in my career, one of the things that really interested me was the split-brain cases. In split-brain patients, the corpus callosum that stretches between the two hemispheres of the brain

The corpus callosum is a large bundle of nerve fibres connecting the two halves of the brain.

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is cut. One of the things we learnt from these treatments is that it’s possible for one hemisphere of the brain to know something that the other hemisphere doesn’t. I thought: ‘This is amazing! Whatever dualism had as its logical ballast had the crap kicked out of it!’ If you can separate consciousness by cutting the brain in half, the game is over! No spooky stuff, just the brain. How does this relationship between neuroscience and philosophy work? Would you agree with Daniel Dennett, for example, who thinks that the role of philosophy is to sort out the concepts and questions before passing them onto science? Dan and I have always disagreed about this. The idea that philosophers are especially equipped to do this special thing of clarifying concepts and making them precise independently of science is just job creation for philosophers. I say Aristotle (384–322 BCE) that because we know that concepts was an ancient Greek change as science proceeds. For example, philosopher, widely considered to be one of the we know this about lots of concepts like most influential philosophers atoms, heat and temperature. Atoms were to have lived. For Aristotle, once defined as being indivisible, but it philosophy wasn’t just the turns out they are comprised of many study of abstract topics like subatomic components. That was a consciousness, ethics and God, but it also included the scientific discovery that changed the sciences. meaning of ‘atom’. Concepts are refined, clarified and better defined as science develops. In the domain of the mental, this is true of ‘sleep’, ‘learning’ and ‘memory’, for example, whose meanings have shifted and deepened over the last five decades. Not thanks to conceptual analysis, but thanks to discoveries. Within science itself there is always this kind of to-ing and fro-ing between those who are doing the big thinking and those who are doing the experiments. For me, this suggests that there isn’t really an interesting distinction to be made between science and philosophy, and I think Aristotle would have agreed.

Zombies and neuroscientists Talking of distinctions, David Chalmers has drawn a distinction between what he calls the ‘easy problems’ of consciousness and the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. The easy problems of consciousness, he says, are the problems that science will eventually figure out. On the other hand, we’ve got the big mystery: the hard problem! No matter how detailed our description of the physical brain, we’ll still be left with this same question:

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where does consciousness come from? Is this another distinction we should be sceptical of? I think so. The first thing to say is that it’s incredibly hard to know just how hard a problem is until you start putting the work in. Francis Crick and I used to enjoy talking about this. He said that it’s important to remember that when he and James Watson were working on the structure of DNA, people thought that there was an easy–hard problem distinction there too. Conventional wisdom said that the easy problem was how proteins fold. On the other hand, the copying problem – the question of how information is passed from parents to offspring – was the hard problem. Of course, it turned out to be just the other way around! The point is, you can’t tell just by looking at a problem and scratching your noggin whether or not it’s going to be solved in the next ten or twenty years. If you conjure up a problem in such a way that it’s deeply problematic, weird and mysterious – if you build unsolvability into the very nature of the problem – then it’s A vitalist believes that life cannot be explained by only unsolvable because you’ve defined it material properties alone. that way. When I was in high school my This view says that because biology teacher was a vitalist. He used to the physical world is an regale us by saying, ‘You know, the nature of inanimate mechanism, livingness itself, it’s mysterious! There must be there must be an additional property that makes things a living force, because you can’t get livingness living. One of the earliest itself out of dead molecules . . . yadda, yadda, vitalists was Aristotle, who yadda.’ We don’t think that anymore. suggested that this special Similarly, as the data become increasingly life-property was a kind rich and sophisticated with regard to of soul. conscious experience, it gets a little bit harder to roll out this story that it’s all unsolvable and that nobody’s making any progress. To put it bluntly, the person who’s not making any progress is David Chalmers. David said that what we need is a totally new physics because consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe like mass and charge. So, I asked him recently, ‘Is any physicist actually working on this? Does anybody have even a shred of data?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s still speculative.’ He published all of this stuff on the hard problem over twenty-five years ago. Why isn’t he working on a new physics? One thing Chalmers has been working on is his ‘zombie argument’. It goes something like this: imagine a zombie, a creature that is physically

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identical to any ordinary human but has no inner experience. If you made a physical duplicate of me, says Chalmers, it’d be a zombie. This means that the mind and the brain must be separate things; consciousness must be something over and above the physical stuff! Do you have any thoughts on this thought experiment? It’s just a thought experiment. We don’t know if it’s genuinely, realistically possible that a duplicate of me would be unconscious. If its brain is identical to mine and it has the capacity to say, as I can, ‘Last night I had a dream about the abominable snowman’, or ‘I’m currently doing an experiment on visual perception’, where does Chalmers get off saying that it’s not conscious? There is no evidence whatsoever that a being who is not conscious can play hockey or the piano or can say, ‘I am conscious.’ Everything we know about human patients who are not conscious is that they cannot begin to do any of those things. We should be clear that saying something’s possible doesn’t guarantee that it is a possibility. There are lots of things that we can imagine that aren’t empirically possible. For example, I can imagine a time machine that allows me travel back to Ancient Greece to talk to Socrates, but I can’t literally do it. I can imagine going faster than the speed of light! If I can think it, then it’s possible! Sorry, it ain’t possible. David’s talked himself into this silly idea that your imagination can teach you something about what is empirically possible. That’s just illogical. As you know, Frank Jackson made a huge impact with his infamous ‘knowledge argument’.2 He tells the story of Mary the neuroscientist who learns all of the physical information there is to know about colour vision from a black and white room. One day, she’s freed from the room and she sees a red rose for the first time. When she sees the rose, she learns something new – namely, what it’s like to experience the colour red. The implication being that her prior knowledge (all of the physical information) was incomplete. Is this just as ridiculous as Chalmers’s zombie argument? Yes, it’s just as ridiculous – and I’ll tell you why. There’s no expectation that book learning about colour translates into the perception of colour. Here’s one way to think about it. Suppose that I’m congenitally blind and I learn everything there is to know about the nature of the visual system. If I’m blind because I don’t have eyes, then I don’t have the pathways such that my brain can receive signals from the retina. Let’s put it very crudely: what Mary knows

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is in the front of her brain and what she needs in order to experience the colour red is a pathway from her retina to the back of her brain. That pathway can’t be stimulated by the knowledge that is embedded in neurons in the front of the brain. So, the knowledge argument cannot conclude anything about the non-physical (spooky) nature of experiencing red. Here’s an analogy. I can learn everything there is to know about being pregnant, but it’s not going to make me pregnant! This does not mean pregnancy is non-physical or spooky. There’s a very special thing that has to happen, a different pathway – so to speak – in order for me to get pregnant, and it’s not through the front of the brain!3 It’s great to have a fertile imagination, but if your argument’s a dud you’ve got to let it go. To Frank Jackson’s credit, at least he changed his mind! In your written work, you’ve described these as ‘cannot imagine’ arguments.4 What’s wrong with these kinds of arguments? The problem with arguments based on what you can and can’t imagine is that they don’t tell us about reality. Now, what you can and can’t imagine is an interesting psychological fact about you, but it’s not an interesting metaphysical fact about the nature of the universe. I think a little bit of humility from those who come up with these arguments might be in order.

Metaphysics is the study of ultimate reality. So, when philosophers say something’s a ‘metaphysical fact’, they mean that it’s a fact about the fundamental nature of the universe.

Humdinger solutions From zombies to abducted neuroscientists, arguments like these continue to be taken very seriously in philosophy of mind. What effect do you think they’re having on the field? Not a positive effect. One problem is that they provoke us into thinking that only a real humdinger of a solution will answer the hard problem, and they deepen many people’s conviction that the problem is unsolvable. The result is that people get hornswoggled into thinking that to explain consciousness we need a deeply radical solution. ‘Not so fast!’, I say. Let’s do the science and see what happens. Incidentally, I am not claiming with certainty that science will

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explain the nature of consciousness. I am claiming only that a scientific approach has a better shot at it than armchair philosophy. What’s a hornswoggle? ‘Hornswoggle’ is just an old word that means to be fooled by something because you’ve been insufficiently sceptical. To be hornswoggled is to be sold a bill of goods, that once you’ve bought, turn out to be worthless. People who buy into a Ponzi scheme that promises to make them rich quickly have been hornswoggled, and they will lose all their money. This might be quite naïve, but isn’t the history of science a history of humdingers? Scientists like Darwin and Einstein, didn’t they turn science on its head to solve the big mysteries? Of course, that’s somewhat true. There certainly have been scientific revolutions, but also tremendous progress that is not exactly revolutionary. The structure of DNA is a case in point. The discovery had a massive impact, but it was the outcome of ordinary science. The real question is whether or not we need a revolution in physics in order to understand a particular brain operation. I don’t have any objections to scientific revolutions, but the claim that a new physics is explanatorily essential for understanding consciousness is unconvincing. The case has never been made. One up-and-coming humdinger solution is panpsychism. Its advocates – including people like Galen Strawson and Philip Goff – say the case has been made. They don’t think that physical science is up to the task of answering the hard problem. Instead, they propose, we should think of consciousness as a fundamental feature of the universe. For the panpsychist, consciousness is everywhere; it can be found in every physical particle! Is this another example of our imaginations gone wild? If panpsychism entails that a pile of manure outside my barn is conscious or that electrons are conscious, then I’m inclined to think that scepticism is appropriate. If people want to be panpsychists then – God bless them – they should go ahead. However, they should ask themselves whether they’re really looking at the data or just taking a bad philosophical argument and running with it. My impression is that Strawson and Goff have no interest in scientific data at all. It is questionable whether they know enough science to claim that science cannot explain – ever – the nature of consciousness.

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At the same time, if ‘panpsychism’ means merely that mammals and birds are conscious, then sure, we have lots of reasons to think they’re conscious. We can say this because they’re so close to us in regard to their behaviour, their capacities and their brain organization. It’s difficult to ascribe consciousness to fruit flies because although their brains are very beautiful, they’re very different from ours. Having said that, I don’t think the claim that mammals and birds are conscious is unique to panpsychism. The current version of panpsychism says that electrons have conscious experience. Does their experience involve use of energy? Is the claim testable? Most panpsychists agree that it is not testable in principle. It’s about as plausible as pan-crap-ism, which is just as untestable. Another interesting humdinger solution that’s gaining traction is illusionism. This view – championed by people like Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett – says that consciousness is nothing more than a physical trick of the brain. Non-physical consciousness isn’t real, it’s an illusion! Is this more in-line with your own thinking? ‘Trick’ of the brain? Why put it that way? Consciousness of fear, for example, is a brain process. Yes, we have illusions in our day-to-day lives. After all, we can hallucinate whilst we’re awake and dream about things that aren’t real whilst we’re asleep; but is consciousness an illusion? It’s not an illusion for me when I wake up at six in the morning from a deep sleep – suddenly I’m conscious! It’s not an illusion for me when I go in for a colonoscopy, and A colonoscopy is . . . you when the anaesthetic wears off – suddenly know what, you might have to look this one up yourself. I’m conscious! That’s not an illusion. In his book Consciousness Explained, Dennett said that the perceptual phenomenon ‘Filling-in’ refers to the of filling-in is not real but an illusion.5 I brain’s ability to form a co-authored a paper listing the many complete experience despite experiments in both psychology and gaps in our perception. neuroscience that were published before Dennett wrote his book, showing that he was factually dead wrong.6 It is a clear case where paying attention to the data would have been useful.

The right pathway Are there any philosophical hypotheses that do appeal to you?

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Yes, the Tononi approach is somewhat appealing. Even though it may turn out to be a bust in the end, at least he does insist the approach be testable if it is to Giulio Tononi is a leading neuroscientist, best known be taken seriously. Giulio Tononi tells as the founder of ‘integrated us that physical complexity plays a really information theory’. Today, important role in conscious experience lots of philosophers and because integrated information is the crux neuroscientists are working of consciousness. I think that might be a on this theory, including Christof Koch and Hedda valuable insight, though it is not clear Hassel Mørch. The view exactly what it means. Christof Koch states that conscious interprets the theory as implying experience arises when a panpsychism, but he concedes that the system – such as a brain – is conscious experience of an electron is a lot deeply interconnected. different from my conscious experience. Maybe so different, any reasonable person would say the electron isn’t conscious. Now, time will tell whether or not they can flesh this story out. Can they use this theory to predict when something is conscious, and when not? Can they determine what experience the subject is having? I do not see how, but perhaps someone will come up with meaningful tests. I should add that there has been quite a lot of scientific criticism of the Tononi–Koch approach. One problem is that when I am in deep sleep my brain is still busy consolidating information and is still super-complex, but I am not conscious. My spinal cord is informationally very integrated and busy and complex but . . . not conscious. The panpsychist will insist that I am conscious in deep sleep; it is just a very different form of consciousness from my waking state. That seems to me like saying, ‘Everyone is obese, it’s just that those who are down to skin and bones from starvation are obese in a different way from the fat lady in the circus.’ This descent into silliness is what motivates some critics to declare panpsychism to be fundamentally meaningless. In the hope of bringing consciousness studies down to earth, some philosophers are exploring the relationship between consciousness and evolution. Interestingly, Susan Blackmore says that we’ve got no good reason to think that evolution would favour conscies (ordinary humans) over zombies (unconscious humans) because natural selection can’t distinguish between them. Would you agree with this view? She says there’s no reason to believe that evolution would favour conscies over zombies? I see every reason to think so. There are many things that aren’t

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behaviourally possible if you’re not conscious. If I’m not conscious I can’t talk, and there are lots of things I can’t learn. I’ve seen patients in the neurology clinic without consciousness. They were in vegetative states or comas, and it should not surprise you to know that they do not show any behaviour. If their eyes are open, they can’t follow the movement of my finger . . . they can’t focus on it and can’t track it. If zombies are physically identical to conscies they have a reticular activating system, a raphe nucleus, a locus coeruleus and a central thalamus. These are all structures known to play an important role in attention and awareness. If Susan can show me a person who has all of these structures functioning properly and can talk, dance, play music and paint a picture but isn’t conscious, I’d be very surprised! Merely imagining such a thing tells us nothing about reality. From what you’ve said, I get the impression that it’s not the philosophers who are making progress, but the neuroscientists. In which case, do you think it would be helpful if all of the philosophers put away their pipes and retrained in the sciences?

The reticular activating system is a big collection of nuclei (lots of neurons) and fibres at the back of the brain. One of its main functions is to regulate sleep.

Your raphe nucleus can be found in the brainstem. This is where most of your serotonin is produced. Serotonin is the chemical that makes you feel good! See Paul Rudd’s movies.

The locus coeruleus is another part of the brainstem. One of its main responsibilities is to help your body respond to stress and panic!

The central thalamus is a small region in the centre of the brain. Its principal role is to pass on information from the rest of the body to various areas in the brain.

What is odd is that some philosophers confidently claim that there has been no biological progress on the problem of consciousness, but they have not bothered to find out whether there is progress. There have been significant neurobiological developments concerning, for example, attention, deep sleep, coma, rehearsal of recently learned things, and feelings such as anxiety or fear. New tools, such as machine learning, yield powerful new results concerning not just neurons, but networks of neurons. The revolution in learning and retrieval mechanisms discredit the claims of no progress. I am not claiming complete explanations; I am claiming progress.

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Nevertheless, some philosophers do care about the data. For example, there is a large network of European philosophers who see the importance of collaborating with scientists. In fact, they’ve formed a group called the ‘Philosophers in Biology and Medicine’. They publish realistic, intelligent papers on such matters as why science needs philosophy and how philosophers can contribute.7 Obviously it’s important to have people thinking about large-scale brain functions, such as the nature of decisionmaking, consciousness, planning and self-control; many neuroscientists engage in theorising about large-scale brain functions. Importantly, there is a significant difference between ignorant speculation and data-based theorising – between untestable hypotheses and testable hypotheses. Notice, too, that there are differences between theories that cannot currently be tested but can be tested as more data and methods emerge, and theories – such as panpsychism – that cannot be tested now or ever. What I think is vaguely disappointing is that there are prominent philosophers who want to address the nature of these mental functions, but they don’t want to learn any science. They just want to make it up. They call it ‘metaphysics’ and expect us to give it the credibility of physics. This will not surprise you, but I find myself somewhat impatient with commenting on someone’s unconstrained-by-facts speculations. It’s just a waste of my time. But hey, if they want to spend their time that way, that’s just dandy. It’s a lot easier than doing science.

Afterthoughts I think Pat’s view captures what lots of people will have in mind when they come across abstract philosophical views: philosophers are just making it all up! As we’ve seen, her main criticism seems to be that lots of prominent philosophers think they can approach the mystery of consciousness without doing any science. I think that’s true for a lot of them and at face-value, this seems like an important criticism. However, there’s an integral question to be asked here: why do philosophers need to engage with science? So long as philosophers take on board the main discoveries of science, isn’t that enough? Can’t they get on with their theorising whilst they wait for neuroscientists to have a crack at it? If it turns out that science can’t explain consciousness, maybe all of this abstract philosophising won’t be a waste of time. It might turn out that this is one for the philosophers!

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How can Patricia know that they won’t find an answer in ten or twenty years’ time? Churchland wouldn’t have much time for this view. For her, abstract philosophy without data is as good as useless; if it can’t be tested, it’s just pie in the sky! This brings us to an important place. As with a lot of philosophers in this book, her response is deeply connected with what she sees as the appropriate methodology and purpose of philosophy. Back in 2020, I asked Pat if she’d like to write a short essay explaining her thoughts on some of the leading theories in philosophy of mind. She agreed and returned her entry to me in record time . . . I must admit, it was a little shorter than I’d expected. In fact, it was just one sentence! ‘Here is my one-line paper: without data, you are just another person with an opinion.’8 If I had half the guts Patricia has, perhaps I’d have published this one-line paper as a standalone chapter. With that said, I’m delighted that she took part in this interview in its place. Why? Her message is an important one. Within this book’s pages, there are lots of philosophers who claim their theory is the right one. Churchland warns them against overconfidence. ‘Don’t get carried away’, she says. ‘Maybe a bit of humility is in order.’

Questions to consider 1. Is it reasonable to think that neuroscience might explain consciousness? 2. If you could create a physical duplicate of yourself, would it be a zombie? 3. Do you think Churchland’s response to the knowledge argument is successful?

4. How much science do philosophers need to learn? 5. If a theory can’t be tied to concrete data, is it a waste of time?

Recommended reading Advanced Patricia Churchland, Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

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Churchland explores some of philosophy’s biggest questions – the self, free will, religion, consciousness – in the context of the latest neuroscientific research. There’s a large section on consciousness, in which Patricia responds to nine arguments from the neurophilosophynaysayers. Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the MindBrain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). In this modern classic, Patricia introduces the world to neurophilosophy. If you’re looking for a detailed introduction to neuroscience and how it’s relevant to philosophy, this is a great place to start. Intermediate Patricia Churchland, Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain (London: W.W. Norton, 2013). This beautifully written and accessible book is aimed at a general audience. Churchland investigates a number of questions in philosophy of mind, with the second and ninth chapters focusing on consciousness. Patricia Churchland, ‘Can Neurobiology Teach Us Anything about Consciousness?’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 67, no. 4 (1994): 23–40. One of Patricia’s most popular essays, in which she warns her fellow philosophers not to see consciousness as an impenetrable mystery. Churchland also gives several concise replies to common arguments against neurophilosophy. Beginner Patricia Churchland, ‘Brains Wide Shut?’, New Scientist, April 2005, www. newscientist.com/article/mg18624976-600-essay-brains-wide-shut. In this great little article Churchland offers her thoughts on Daniel Dennett’s theory of consciousness. She argues that Dennett’s account is inadequate and also suggests that his falsely labelled ‘scientific’ view might be doing more harm than good. Patricia Churchland, ‘The Hornswoggle Problem’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 3, no. 5/6 (1996): 402–8. If you enjoyed this chapter, this is an absolute must-read. Packed with exciting no-nonsense rhetoric and colourful examples, Churchland explains why we shouldn’t believe the armchair philosophers when they tell us consciousness is beyond the reach of science.

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Chapter Eight

Illusionism Keith Frankish

Introduction In the previous two chapters, we saw how some philosophers want to deflate the problem of consciousness: ‘Let’s not let our imaginations get the better of us. If we adopt a down to earth approach, eventually we’ll be able to understand consciousness through physical science.’ To put it simply, they say consciousness isn’t as big of a problem as we first thought. To be clear: that’s not an explanation of consciousness. Think about it like this. Imagine that out of nowhere, you suddenly feel an unbearable shooting pain in your chest! You collapse to the ground, roll around in pain and drag yourself into the next room. Your friend looks at you with mild curiosity. ‘Are you okay?’, they ask. ‘No, I’ve got a huge problem!’ Your friend smiles, ‘I’m sure it’s not that bad! We might figure it out eventually.’ That’s not going to be much help. No matter how big of a problem you think it is, we still need to solve the problem; we still need to explain consciousness. In this chapter, Keith Frankish introduces us to a new and exciting solution to the problem of consciousness known as ‘illusionism’. According to Frankish, consciousness – as philosophers typically think of it – is just that: an illusion. There is no ‘inner observer’, no ‘mental qualities’ and no ‘non-physical mind’. As we’ll see, Keith’s ideas have rightfully earned him a place amongst the most influential philosophers in the world. His status is not only owed to his progressive ideas, but his colourful and captivating writing style. Make no mistake, though. Behind his vivid language and profound insights is something quite drastic. What philosophers call ‘consciousness’, says Frankish, just doesn’t exist.

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The old woman and the beetle You’re in a busy city in a country you’ve never visited before. An old woman in a colourful dress emerges from the crowd, smiling and holding something out to you. She tells you to take it and examine it. Intrigued, you do so. It’s a small wooden box with a hinged lid, a clasp and a peephole in the top. It’s completely empty. The woman tells you to close the lid, fasten the clasp and hold the box tight. She waves her hands around, utters a spell and invites you to look through the peephole. You are surprised to see a huge, colourful beetle inside. The woman repeats her performance and tells you to open the box. As before, it’s empty. She takes back the box, smiles and waits patiently for a tip. It seems that the woman did something miraculous, remotely transporting a beetle into and out of a sealed box. What would you think had happened? Broadly speaking, you’d have three options. First, you might think that the episode was miraculous, and that the woman did, in fact, have paranormal powers. Second, you might assume that there must be a scientific explanation of what happened; perhaps there was some hidden mechanism that allowed the beetle to sneak in and out of the box. And third, you might suspect that it was all an illusion. Maybe there never was a beetle in the box; perhaps the woman just made it seem as if there was. Wouldn’t the last option be the most likely one, even if you couldn’t imagine how the illusion had been created? At any rate, wouldn’t it be worth exploring the hypothesis that the beetle was illusory? Illusionism about consciousness is the view that we should adopt a similar attitude towards the apparent miracle of consciousness.1

The hard problem Think about what happens when you have Marmite© is a sticky, brown a conscious experience – when you’re food paste. The taste of biting into a Marmite sandwich, watching Marmite is widely considered a seagull fly towards you, and kicking a to be the most delightful lamppost in anger because the seagull has conscious experience a flown away with your lunch.2 When you person can have. undergo these experiences, lots of things happen in your nervous system. Receptor cells in your sense organs react to physical stimuli (chemicals, light and tissue damage) and send electrochemical

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signals to your brain. There, sensory regions process these signals, extracting information about the world and the state of your body. This information is then sent around the brain to various systems, and these systems generate physiological and behavioural responses and a vast array of (mostly unconscious) psychological reactions. All of this is immensely complex, but none of it seems miraculous in the light of modern science. However, consciousness seems to involve something else, too. Each experience appears to have a subjective quality or ‘feel’ to it. When you reminisce about your sandwich, what you miss is the mental quality – the taste itself, as you were appreciating it in your mind. It’s as if the sensory processes in your brain don’t just extract information about things and produce reactions to them, but also generate accompanying mental qualities – the qualities of taste, smell, colour and so on – which are sent to an internal arena, where they are appreciated by an internal observer: the inner you, your conscious self. Now, this does seem miraculous. How does the brain produce these qualities, this inner show of colours, sounds, smells, tastes and bodily sensations? How does the brilliant beetle of consciousness appear in the wooden box of the brain? This is the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, and it looks really hard. The problem is made even harder because these mental qualities seem to belong to a private world that is completely inaccessible to anyone else. Scientists might map out your brain processes in fine detail, but they’d never capture the qualitative essence of your experience. The show in the internal theatre is for the ‘inner you’ alone, poised somewhere between the incoming information and the outgoing reactions.

Three options What should we think about this apparent miracle? As with the beetle box, we have three options. First, we might accept that consciousness cannot be explained scientifically. This view proposes that our brains have a distinct non-physical aspect – like a soul or mental essence – in addition to the physical features described by science. This route has its problems; the chief one is explaining how this non-physical aspect interacts with the physical brain. Suppose for a moment that consciousness did involve a non-physical mind or mental essence – that when you look at a ripe tomato, your brain generated a sort of non-physical ‘mental redness’. How would that mental redness get to affect you? If it was to affect what you think, feel, say or do, it’d

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have to have an impact on the systems that control those things. But brain systems are triggered by patterns of neuron firing, not by qualities! It looks like this path quickly leads to a dead end. Secondly, we might be convinced that there must be a scientific explanation: ‘If we can explain all of the brain’s mechanisms and how they represent the world, then maybe, just maybe, we might understand how the brain produces mental qualities!’ The main problem with this view is that we can imagine physical mechanisms operating without any subjective ‘feel’ attached to them. Science could explain all of the physical mechanisms, but it would still be missing the feeling of the mechanisms. As my good friend Philip Goff likes to put it, ‘How could an equation ever explain to someone what it’s like to . . . taste paprika?’3 So, another dead end. Thirdly, we might say that the non-physical aspect of experience is illusory. It seems to be there, but it isn’t really. This view has come to be known as ‘illusionism’. Illusionism completely avoids the hard problem. It says that we don’t have to explain how our experiences have a private qualitative aspect, since they don’t really have one. All we need to explain is why we think they have one, which – I believe – can very likely be explained in terms of brain processes. As with the beetle box, illusionism seems like the most obvious response to the problem. However, despite its promise, it remains a minority view, and it’s often written off as ‘denying consciousness’. In fact, Galen Strawson has said that illusionism is ‘the silliest view ever held in the history of human thought’.4

Does illusionism deny consciousness? Illusionists don’t deny the existence of consciousness in the everyday sense. We don’t deny that creatures have conscious experiences of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling. We really do taste Marmite! What illusionists deny is that experiences involve awareness of non-physical, private mental qualities, presented like a show to some kind of inner observer. In other words, we deny that the Marmite taste is a private inner quality. There’s definitely a box, but there isn’t really a beetle in it! On the illusionist’s view, conscious experience is essentially an informational process. Think of it like a news report rather than a theatrical show.5 Of

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course, this report isn’t in a human language – it’s in the brain’s internal language of neural signalling – and it’s not for the benefit of an ‘inner you’. Sensory systems pass their reports directly to the brain’s control systems, which generate the physiological, psychological and behavioural responses mentioned earlier. You – the person – are the sum of all this activity. If this isn’t clear, think about what happens when you are having a conversation. When your partner asks you, ‘Why are you so hungry? Did a seagull fly off with your lunch again?’, you don’t rehearse the words before you open your mouth. You just say, ‘Of course not, you’ve told me a hundred times not to eat my sandwiches by the harbour.’ The words come to your lips spontaneously thanks to underlying processes in your brain. They are your words, but you didn’t consciously choose them, and you have absolutely no idea how they were produced. Most of our behaviour is of this spontaneous kind, and thank goodness it is. Otherwise, we’d never get anything done! So, illusionists reject the idea of an inner show, decked out with non-physical qualities, presented to an inner observer. According to idealists, That’s the kind of consciousness we do reality is entirely nondeny. However, some people think this is physical; the world is wrong; they say that these qualities are the consciousness. We’ll be very essence of consciousness! In fact, exploring this view in the idealists go so far as to say that there is final chapter. nothing else to the world: everything exists in the mind! According to this view, it’s the physical world which is illusory. Idealists deny the existence of consciousness as we illusionists conceive of it – they deny the existence of a physical brain! So, each of us could be accused of ‘denying consciousness’, but I don’t think it is a very profitable way of moving the debate forward. Let’s just say illusionists and their opponents disagree about what consciousness is and get on with working out who is right.

Putting the ‘illusion’ in illusionism As we’ve seen, illusionists deny that consciousness is an inner show. Instead, we say that having conscious experiences involves processing information about the world. But that’s not the whole story. After all, we can do more than just experience the world around us; we can think about our experiences too. We can recognize our experience (‘it tastes like Marmite’), say whether we

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like it (‘absolutely’) and describe the experience to other people (‘you’ll probably hate it’). You might also think that this presents illusionism with a problem. Why? Because it feels like these internal experiences are made up of distinctively mental properties. Think about it this way. Science tells us that the things we experience aren’t what they seem to be; colours are actually light-reflecting properties of surfaces, sounds are pressure waves in the air and tastes are molecules in our food. But they appear to us as non-physical qualities – ‘redness’, ‘meow’, ‘coffee-taste’. Where are these qualities if they’re not in our minds? The first thing to say is that illusionists don’t deny that we can be aware of our own experiences. Of course we can look inwards and introspect! However, we do hold that introspection misleads us about the nature of our A ‘sub-personal’ mechanism is an underlying process experiences. As illusionists see it, which you’re not aware of. introspection – like sense perception – For example, you’re not depends on sub-personal mechanisms of aware of the information reporting and reacting. It doesn’t involve an that’s currently zooming up inner self which is experiencing nonand down your brainstem. If you were, that would be physical qualities. Introspection is just very distracting! another layer of information processing, this time directed onto other brain processes. Introspective mechanisms monitor the complex informational and reactive processes that make up our experiences and send information about them to the brain’s control systems. These control systems report on the brain’s activities, as well as on the world outside, and these reports are crafted and edited to suit the needs of the systems that receive them. Control systems then use these reports to generate reactions to the experience in the form of beliefs, utterances and emotional responses, and all of this happens at a subpersonal level. The result is that you – the person – are sensitive to the nature of your own experiences. Introspection is also our channel of self-knowledge. Ask yourself now, ‘What am I experiencing in the lower part of my left leg?’, and the beliefs you form will be the product of information in your brain’s reports. Since that information is in the brain’s internal language (neural signalling), you won’t have any access to the details. You’ll just immediately know that you’re having an experience and that it’s of a distinctive kind, which you can only describe as a simple ‘feel’ or ‘quality’. The experience isn’t really a simple quality, of

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course. It’s a highly complex state of your brain. You think of it as a simple quality only because your brain tells you so little about what it really is! What’s more, you’ll tend to judge that you’re aware of this quality directly and with absolute certainty. When we ask ourselves, ‘What am I experiencing?’, we immediately find ourselves with strong beliefs on the matter. But here’s the point: we have no awareness of the introspective mechanisms responsible for generating these beliefs. We just know that we’re feeling a sharp pain in the shin, or the cramp of a Marmite-less stomach. Perception is similar. When we look around us, we immediately form beliefs about what’s there without any awareness of the brain processes that produce them. There’s an important dissimilarity, though. With perception, we know that there are mechanisms involved; we know that we need eyes to see, ears to hear and a nose to smell. With introspection, it’s different: we don’t even know that the mechanisms exist! Consequently, since we know nothing of the mechanisms that produce our introspective experiences, we assume that there aren’t any! This leads us to accept the illusion that the qualities of our experiences are presented to us directly, as if by magic. There’s another difference which further reinforces this illusion. We all know that our senses can mislead us about the world, and we have ways of checking the accuracy of the beliefs they produce. For example, if you suspect that your eyes are playing tricks on you, an optician can take a look and find out what’s going wrong. With introspection, it’s quite different. We have no idea whether or not our introspective mechanisms can mislead us, and we have no way of checking their reliability. It’s not like you can get a friend to introspect on your brain processes for you – although this might change with future technology! That’s where the illusion comes from: since you have no way of questioning the beliefs introspection produces, you assume they’re unquestionable. The result is that introspection systematically misleads us. Its impressionistic sub-personal reports on complex brain processes lead us to think that we have direct and infallible awareness of private mental qualities, but we don’t. This is the ‘illusion’ in illusionism.

Is illusionism self-defeating? The most common complaint is that illusionism is self-defeating. Many people think that it doesn’t make sense to say that experience itself could be

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an illusion. Consciousness is the thing we access the world through! I only know a seagull flew away with my lunch because I had a conscious experience. All we know for certain is that we’re having experiences. Everything else is secondary. Illusionism seems to shoot itself in the foot! This objection gets it the wrong way round. Consciousness doesn’t come first, it comes second. Think about it in the context of evolution. The first living creatures wouldn’t possess complex introspective systems like the ones I’ve described. Not at all. The first things they’d be able to do would be (relatively) simple tasks like finding food or avoiding danger, which are essential for survival. They would need to be aware of opportunities and threats out there in the world, not of events in their own minds. Only later on in the evolutionary process did creatures develop the capacity to monitor and respond to their own mental processes. This shows us that it’s not ‘my awareness of my experience of the seagull’ that comes first, but my awareness of the seagull itself.

‘They’re real, dammit!’ I have tried to give a sense of what illusionism is and why it’s worth taking seriously. Still, you may feel, it just can’t be right. The feel of things – the taste of Marmite, the pain of hunger, the guilt of lying to your partner – these can’t be just a matter of information. They’re too concrete, too vivid, too present! ‘They’re real, dammit!’ That’s a natural reaction – and one that is predicted by the illusionist theory itself. As we have seen, our judgements about our experiences will be compelling in just this way, since they are produced by mechanisms of which we have no awareness. I have given only a simplified sketch of the processes involved here, couched in metaphorical terms of reporting and such like. In reality, the full picture will be immensely complex, and it will take many years of scientific work to complete it. As we slowly fill in the picture – mapping the vast, intricate, multi-layered web of informational and reactive processes – the gap between the illusionist’s theory and our personal impression of what is happening will diminish. We just need to put the work in and be very patient.

Walking away The next day, you are walking in the town when you the spot the old woman again. She looks younger than she did yesterday, and you notice with a shock

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that her colourful dress is covered with images of beetles. Determined to solve the mystery, you approach the woman and beg her to tell you how she made the beetle appear. She smiles. ‘Oh, I didn’t make anything appear’, she says. ‘You see, I’m a hypnotist. I simply hypnotized you into believing you’d seen a beetle.’

Afterthoughts As well as a strong a desire to eat a Marmite sandwich, you’re probably thinking that illusionism is a promising solution to the problem of consciousness. Illusionism side-steps the ‘hard problem’ completely and tells us that consciousness (in the non-physical sense) just doesn’t exist. It’s a mistake in our thinking: a trick of the brain! In the modern day, this view seems very appealing. It’s a simple, hard-nosed, scientific approach, which aims to purge our minds of mystical properties. If you’re starting to like the sound of illusionism, you’re in good company. Susan Blackmore believes that ‘the illusionist research project . . . may be the only research programme worth pursuing’6 and Daniel Dennett has said that illusionism is the ‘obvious default theory of consciousness’.7 So, what’s not to like? The most common and persuasive objection is that illusionism denies the existence of consciousness. Frankish doesn’t think this is a helpful way to frame the debate, but let’s follow the thought. If your starting point is what we can know for certain, then you might think that consciousness is all we can know. After all, the outside world could be a figment of your imagination. You might still be in bed; reading this book could just be a dream . . . but you can’t deny the fact you’re undergoing a conscious experience.8 For a long time, this has been considered the most irrefutable fact in all of philosophy. There’s a reason everyone’s heard the famous dictum, ‘I think, therefore I am.’9 Frankish tells us that this isn’t true. For Frankish, it’s more like, ‘You are, therefore you think.’ The private world of conscious experience is an illusion generated by the physical brain. For some philosophers, that might be too hard of a pill to swallow.

Questions to consider 1. If a street performer made a beetle appear in a box, how would you think it got there?

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2. Is illusionism’s ‘denial’ of consciousness a reason to reject the view? 3. Could illusionism give us a complete account of why people think mental qualities exist?

4. Is it possible to create machines that have the illusion of consciousness? 5. Is illusionism the simplest solution to the problem of consciousness?

Recommended reading Advanced Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness, ed. Keith Frankish (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2017). If you’re looking for a detailed exploration of illusionism, this is the place to go. The book begins with Frankish’s account of illusionism and is followed by a series of commentaries from leading philosophers, including Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett. At the end of this collection, Frankish replies to the commentators and explains why his belief in illusionism remains unshaken. Keith Frankish, ‘The Meta-Problem is The Problem of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 26, no. 9/10 (2019), 83–94. In our third chapter, David Chalmers suggested that the most compelling reason for adopting illusionism is the ‘meta-problem’ of consciousness. In this technical paper, Frankish argues that if we can answer the meta-problem, then the hard problem will disappear. In other words, if we can understand why we think we’re conscious, there will be nothing left to explain. Intermediate Keith Frankish, ‘The Consciousness Illusion’, Aeon, September 2019, www.aeon.co/essays/what-if-your-consciousness-is-an-illusion-created-byyour-brain. Here, Frankish gives another clear and engaging overview of illusionism. As always, it’s packed with interesting ideas and colourful metaphors. One of my favourites: ‘We should no more expect to find phenomenal properties in our brains than to find waste baskets in our laptops.’ Keith Frankish, ‘The Demystification of Consciousness’, Institute of Art and Ideas, March 2020, www.iai.tv/articles/the-demystification-of-consciousnessauid-1381.

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If you’re looking for a detailed response to the objection that ‘illusionists deny the existence of consciousness’, this one’s for you. In this article, Frankish explains that he denies the existence of a private show of mental qualities, not the existence of consciousness. Beginner Keith Frankish, ‘The Lure of the Cartesian Sideshow’, The Philosophers’ Magazine, December 2020, www.philosophersmag.com/essays/222-the-lure-of-thecartesian-sideshow. In this engaging and accessible piece, Keith deconstructs the allure of the Cartesian Theatre: the belief that we have an inner show of nonphysical mental qualities. He goes on to explain why we should reject this view, suggesting that the alternative would not only be more reasonable, but less lonely. Keith Frankish, ‘What is it Like to Be a Bot?’, Philosophy Now, 2018, www. philosophynow.org/issues/126/What_Is_It_Like_To_Be_A_Bot. A brilliant short story which really packs a philosophical punch. Frankish asks us to imagine a race of robots who doubt that human beings are conscious! After reading this, seek out Frankish’s explanation of the story on his website.10

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Closing the Theatre Daniel Dennett

Introduction The sound of rain against your window, the sweet taste of honey on toast, the adrenaline rush of stealing the hairdryer from a hotel bathroom. These experiences are for us; they play out to our inner selves in the sanctum of our minds, on our own private theatre screens. For many philosophers, it’s obvious that we know what it is to have these experiences . . . but not to Daniel Dennett. Since 1971, Dennett has carried out his research at Tufts University, where he is currently Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. Dennett might be the world’s most distinguished philosopher. His research has long been at the forefront of cognitive science and philosophy of mind, but he’s far from your ivory tower academic. Without compromising the complexity of his ideas, Dennett always writes accessibly, which has secured his status as a global thought leader.1 There have already been plenty of references to Dennett’s work throughout this book, which should give you some indication of his enormous impact on the field. Dennett believes that science will be able to explain consciousness. Like Frankish, he thinks consciousness is an illusion – nothing more than a trick of the brain. He also shares Churchland and Pigliucci’s scepticism of unrealistic thought experiments and overly speculative metaphysics. In short, his empirically minded philosophy doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

Out of the armchair Before we discuss the nature of consciousness, I wonder what you think about the purpose of philosophy more generally. In your view, what is ‘philosophy’? 101

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Philosophy is what you’re doing when you don’t know what the right questions are. Once you get the right questions and you’re answering them, that is not typically philosophy. In that case, do you think that philosophy makes progress? Actually, it does. The whole history of science is the history of the progress that philosophy has made. If you go back to Aristotle, it was all philosophy. Aristotle figured out some pretty good questions in mathematics, astronomy and physics. One of the last sciences to be carved off from philosophy is psychology, and some would say it’s had a rather premature birth. There’s still lots of confusion in psychology about what the right questions are. So, philosophy’s role is to sort out the questions before passing them on to the scientists? Is that how philosophy makes progress? That’s right. Being a philosopher means experiencing that uneasy feeling that comes with having no landmarks, nothing to hang on to and no pigeonholes to put things in. If that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, then don’t be a philosopher. Philosophy of mind often gives me an uneasy feeling! What is it that drew you towards the subject? I took an introductory course in philosophy as a freshman in college. Amongst many other classic texts, I read Descartes’s Meditations – I quite vividly René Descartes is often referred to as ‘the father of remember thinking, ‘Well, this is modern philosophy’. fascinating, but wrong! I think I’ll spend Meditations on First an afternoon or two and see if I can set Philosophy is traditionally this straight.’ I’ve been drawn to philosophy one of the first texts that of mind ever since reading Descartes. It students will come across. struck me at the time that dualism – Descartes’s idea that there’s an immaterial mind that interacts with the material body – was such a non-starter. It just couldn’t be right! Not that I knew any science back then, it was just an intuition that I had. Eventually, I took a course in epistemology and realized, ‘Oh, I can see where this is going wrong’, and it just grew out of that! Do you have any thoughts on the best way we can approach philosophy? What advice would you give to somebody who’s looking to tackle ‘the big questions’?

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Don’t restrict your diet to philosophy. All the great work in philosophy is enriched, guided and provoked by work in other fields. You really need to know more than what you learn from the armchair. If you don’t have a background in other areas (such as science, mathematics and history), you may be very clever, but you’re in an atmosphere that’s too thin to do any flying.

Third-person phenomenology One way we might learn things from the armchair is through the phenomenological method. Simply put, this approach says that if we introspect on our experiences and describe them in enough detail, we’ll be able to reach metaphysical conclusions. I believe you label this approach ‘autophenomenology’. In contrast, you’ve suggested that there is a better way of studying consciousness, which you’ve given the rather ominous title – as you claim yourself – ‘heterophenomenology’.2 What is heterophenomenology and why should we prefer it over autophenomenology? Autophenomenology is phenomenology from the first-person point of view; you just sit there and introspect. Heterophenomenology is when you ask other people to introspect and get them to participate in experiments; ask them lots of questions, get them to express themselves by pressing buttons, record their behaviour – measure all kinds of things! What you glean from this is their account of what it’s like to be them. Unlike heterophenomenology, I don’t think you can do autophenomenology scientifically. After all, science has to involve data that can be objectively verified. That doesn’t mean heterophenomenology rules out data about consciousness, it just means that you have to use third parties to gather and interpret the data. Let’s take a simple example. We ask a person, ‘What are you doing?’ and they say, ‘I’m rotating the image on the left to see if it lines up with the image on the right.’ Okay, so that’s what the person thinks they’re doing. Their belief that they are rotating an image might be true or false. We don’t know until we do some experiments to see whether or not it’s plausible that they’re doing what they think they’re doing! However, even if they

Rotating the image

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are wrong about what’s going on in their brain, there is something they are right about: what it’s like to be them. Heterophenomenology is the way of taking consciousness seriously. So, we need to check whether or not somebody’s first-person account is true. In your example, it’s true that they feel as if they’re rotating the shape, but they might not actually be rotating the shape. You put this nicely in your book, Consciousness Explained, when you say: ‘You are not authoritative about what is happening in you, but only about what seems to be happening in you.’3 Could you elaborate on a point you just made? Is heterophenomenology preferable to autophenomenology because it allows us to remove first-person error? When I describe heterophenomenology, I’m simply describing the method that’s been used for one hundred years in experimental psychology, psychophysics and cognitive psychology. We have a wealth of information on what it’s like to be people, and one of the things we know is that they’re often wrong. They just aren’t the authorities they think they are about what’s going on inside their own heads! Heterophenomenology allows us to calibrate the first-person. I compare it with the exercise of going into a native village and learning the language. Yes, probe the villagers and ask them thousands of questions about their beliefs, but don’t argue with them! Take their beliefs as their beliefs. Establish the world according to these people and try not to contaminate your account of their beliefs with your own views. That’s doable, with limitations. It’s the best science can do at extracting an unbiased description of how that person or group sees the world.

The philosopher Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) is often referred to as the ‘father of psychology’. Wundt began to study the mind scientifically, rather than through philosophical speculation. This marked the birth of experimental psychology: the study of the mind through experiments.

Psychophysics explores the relationship between matter and mind. It asks: what are the connections between physical stimuli in the brain and the mental experiences they produce?

Cognitive psychology is a specialized area of experimental psychology. It investigates the internal processes of the brain by observing the behaviour of participants performing cognitive tasks.

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If we wrote down everything a participant had to say about their experience, what should we do with the data? With regard to each item in that set of data, there are two possibilities: either they’re right about their experience or they’re wrong. If they’re right, we need to verify their belief by explaining how it seems to them and why they are right. To use our example from earlier, we need to show that they are indeed turning the shape. To do that, we would have to explain how the brain does that particular thing. If they’re wrong, then we need to explain why. We have to say: ‘We have no reason for thinking that the brain can turn the shape, but this is where the illusion comes from.’ This approach leaves nothing out that I think we should take seriously. Heterophenomenology maximally extracts the value from the first-person point of view!

The Cartesian Theatre One of the things that you’ve tried to convince many people of is the unhelpfulness and failure of what you’ve called the ‘Cartesian Theatre’. What is the Cartesian Theatre? The Cartesian Theatre is the idea that there is a place in the brain where ‘it all comes together’. For Descartes, this was the pineal gland. It’s not just dualists, though. Many philosophers, scientists and laypeople who denounce dualism get trapped in Cartesian ways of thinking. The Cartesian Theatre is a metaphorical picture of how our experiences come about and appear to us. It’s the widespread intuition that there’s a place where ‘consciousness happens’, a place where things ‘enter our conscious mind’. A thought has crossed the finish line and now it’s conscious! All of a sudden, you’re aware of it – it’s in the Cartesian Theatre!

Cartesian Theatre

Descartes thought that the pineal gland was the place where the soul and body interact. In fact, the pineal gland is a very small pinecone shaped organ in the centre of your brain. Its main function is to produce melatonin: the hormone which regulates sleep.

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Now let’s be clear: there is no Cartesian Theatre. There is no ‘inner observer’, no ‘inner you’, no ‘headquarters’ within the brain. We have to cleanse our thinking of this idea. If the Cartesian Theatre isn’t fit for purpose, how should we understand consciousness? I just said that there isn’t a headquarters in the brain. That’s true; there isn’t an inner sanctum or a place where ‘it all comes together’. However, we can think of the whole brain as the headquarters. This leads me to the multiple drafts theory. This is the view that the task of analysing content, of discriminating the world, of interpreting our senses – all of the things that we generally suppose happen in consciousness – all of that work is distributed in space and time across the brain. An essential feature of the multiple drafts theory is the following: we only need to make discriminations once. In other words, once the brain has detected a certain thing, it doesn’t need to be sent somewhere else: it doesn’t have to ‘make its way’ into the Cartesian Theatre. Take an example. When I have a visual experience of a banana, the brain recognizes its various features – location (in the fruit bowl), colour (bright yellow), shape (bendy) – and so, as more discriminations are made, our engagement with the banana spreads to other parts of the brain. When I’m probed (say by you asking, ‘What are you looking at?’), a draft consisting of these discriminations becomes available to me. There’s no Theatre, it’s just one part of the brain having more influence than another.4

The knowledge argument Many proponents of dualism and panpsychism evoke Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument in their case against materialism. Jackson asks us to imagine Mary, a neuroscientist who learns every physical fact there is to know about colour vision from a black and white room. One day, she’s freed, and she sees a red rose for the first time. When Mary sees the rose, she learns something new – what it’s like to see red – so her prior knowledge (all of the physical information) was incomplete. The conclusion? Materialism must be false.5 How would you go about responding to Jackson’s argument?

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Oceans of ink have been spilt over Mary the colour-challenged scientist! I’ve had a lot to say about Jackson’s argument and it’s important to recognize that he’s recanted his view. To start, the premises are just preposterous. Take, for example, the idea of knowing ‘every physical thing there is to know about colour’. The very idea of anybody knowing everything there is to know about anything is absurd. Does Mary know everything there is to know about this teacup? No. That’s already taking us into fantasy land! If we ignored the utter unusability of that premise, it might seem that there could be an argument for qualia of some sort. But let’s entertain a different version of the tale. It starts the same way, but when the door opens, we try to trick her . . . instead of showing Mary a red rose, we show her a bright blue banana! She says, ‘Hey! That’s a blue banana! You’re trying to trick me!’ Now, my opponents would protest, ‘She couldn’t say that!’, but prove to me that she couldn’t. If she knows everything physical about colour, then she knows enough to anticipate her reactions to seeing particular wavelengths reflected in her eyes. If it seems to you that she couldn’t have known that, that’s not obvious to me. It might seem obvious to you, but that’s just a hunch you have; it’s a philosophical hunch and it’s ill-founded. So, Mary will know that a banana is yellow? Of course, she knows everything about colour! Another example should drive the point home. Let’s suppose that instead of being deprived of colour, Mary’s never ever allowed to feel two pencils being pushed against her skin. She’s never had that experience in her whole life, but she’s read all about it. Now, the day comes when somebody comes up behind her and sticks two pencils into her shoulder, and she says, ‘You’ve stuck two pencils in my shoulder!’ That’s not going to be hard for her to say. She hasn’t experienced it before, but she knows what it is.6 You said a moment ago that ‘oceans of ink’ have been spilt over this argument. Do you think we’ll still be talking about qualia in the distant future? I don’t think so. In time, our everyday talk will change, and we’ll stop talking about qualia. We’ll still talk about the smell of the coffee, the glorious colours of a sunset and all of the things that we love to talk about, but we’ll just know better about what’s happening when we do that. We’ve done this before. We still talk about sunsets, but we don’t think, ‘Where does the sun go after it falls into the sea?’ – we know better than to ask those questions.

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Panpsychism Over the past few years, panpsychism has seen a revival of interest, with prominent philosophers such as David Chalmers, Galen Strawson and Philip Goff leading the charge.7 I wonder, are you at all sympathetic to the motivations for adopting panpsychism? No. I’ve spoken to Philip and I’ve read his work at some length, but I find panpsychism an ill-motivated view. Moreover, I think it’s an ill-conceived view, particularly because it’s unclear what would follow from it. I’ve asked David Chalmers and Philip Goff to compare panpsychism with a view that I’m inventing right now which I call ‘pan-nifty-ism’. Everything is nifty! Every electron, every photon, every grain of sand, every tree, every bush: everything is nifty. What follows from pan-nifty-ism? Nothing. What follows from panpsychism? Nothing. Panpsychism doesn’t succeed in explaining how 86 billion clueless neurons can contrive to make a human mind that can appreciate the Mona Lisa, and saying, ‘Well, each one of those neurons and each one of their little parts has a little bit of psyche in them!’ – that goes nowhere. Panpsychism’s an empty view. Just say that everything’s nifty! Does this mean that panpsychism’s not answering what you call ‘the hard question’?8 Could you say what that is? Exactly. The hard question is this: once something ‘enters consciousness’, what does this cause, enable or modify? What does this type of consciousness do? Dualism and panpsychism are absolutely not addressing the hard question. They just say, ‘A mystery happens!’ The whole point is to postulate a substance that is apparently beyond the reach of science. Well, that’s just giving up. Can the materialist answer the hard question? The materialist sees the hard question as a problem to be solved, rather than an Made up of nerve cells, neural tissues are the nervous impregnable mystery. We have all the system’s central components. cards because we’ve got a lot of theory Simply put, their role is to about mechanisms and how they work. send information around the We know about neural tissues and the body. operations of those tissues, and we’re beginning to understand how these enable human beings to perform complex

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tasks like making subtle discriminations. There’s a wealth of data on this, which goes some way in answering the hard question. I wonder how much of the debate between the non-materialists and materialists comes down to a disagreement about how much we can learn from the first-person experience. For example, Philip Goff says, ‘When I experience pain, I fully grasp what it is to feel pain!’9 and you say . . . ‘No, you don’t!’ I say, ‘I’m sorry, your confidence on that score is ill-founded.’ There are some people – predominantly Philip Goff, David Chalmers and Galen Strawson – who are just convinced to their shoes that they know from the inside what having consciousness is. They won’t consider the likelihood that they might be wrong. This is the only topic that anyone would say that about. No one would say, ‘Look, simply by having a metabolism, I know things about my metabolism, and that’s proof against any science!’ Lots of anti-materialists say that they do understand their conscious experiences. Folks like Chalmers, Montague, Strawson and Goff say, ‘Yes, we know what it’s like to feel pain. There’s this qualitative experience which can’t be explained by physical science, so we’ve got to rethink our understanding of the universe.’ Yes, to some extent I agree. They know what it’s like to feel pain and so do I. However, none of us knows everything about feeling pain. Most importantly, they don’t know that their conscious experience is immaterial. They can’t know that.

The silliest claim ever made Galen Strawson wrote in the New York Review of Books that your view constitutes the ‘silliest claim ever made’.10 He writes: ‘One of the strangest things the Deniers say is ‘The Deniers’ is the label that although it seems that there is Galen Strawson gives to conscious experience, there isn’t really advocates of illusionism, any conscious experience: the seeming namely, Keith Frankish and is, in fact, an illusion. The trouble with Daniel Dennett. this is that any such illusion is already

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and necessarily an actual instance of the thing said to be an illusion . . . It’s not possible here to open up a gap between appearance and reality.’11 I’m so grateful to Galen for this passionate and vivid expression of views, that are indeed, very opposed to mine. The reason I’m grateful to him is that I wouldn’t have dared to put those words in the mouth of Otto, my fictional critic in Consciousness Explained, because people would say that I was creating a strawman; and a living, breathing, table-thumping Strawson is better than a strawman any day!

A ‘strawman’ is a falsely presented version of a position that makes it appear weaker than it actually is. Strawmen are often used to create the illusion that a position has been defeated.

The thing is, he really says these things; I mean, he really says them. You just have to stop and think about the state of mind he’s in to award me the honour of defending the ‘silliest idea anybody has ever had’. Now, the prospect that he may have been misinterpreting me seems fairly likely. Indeed, in the very quotation that you just mentioned he misinterprets me. As I have said any number of times: I am not denying that consciousness exists, I’m just saying that you’re wrong about its nature! When we introspect, yes, consciousness seems to be linked with qualia, but this is an illusion. I say: ‘You’re wrong about some of the main features of consciousness.’ There’s nothing self-contradictory about that. If Galen has some sort of papal infallibility about the nature of consciousness (and sometimes it looks like that is what he’s saying), then there would be grounds for thinking that the illusion that I claim would be an instance of qualia. But no, it’s not. It’s not an instance of his phenomenon because he’s got a bad theory of consciousness. Consciousness is not the way he thinks it is, and so there’s no inconsistency at all. I’m so glad he wrote that, because if ever I thought I’m beating a dead horse . . . no, no, no . . . there are some people out there – in fact, some very clever and articulate people – who just don’t get it, and don’t want to get it. Galen’s afraid that I’ll talk people into what he thinks is a morally pernicious position because he thinks it’s going to be a dire consequence. Well, it’s only going to be a dire consequence if you think that the value of human life depends on having the kind of mind that Strawson thinks we have. I’m sorry, he’s just wrong about what consciousness is.

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Afterthoughts With all of its exciting rhetoric and philosophical insight, there’s a lot to explore in this interview, but I’d like to focus on the final section – whether or not Dennett’s view is ‘the silliest claim ever made’. Strawson’s argument is that Dennett’s view is self-contradictory. He essentially says, ‘Dennett thinks that consciousness is an illusion, but his very thought that consciousness is an illusion, is itself an instance of consciousness!’ It’s as if Dennett’s saying he doesn’t believe in tomatoes, whilst he’s biting into a tomato! In his reply, Dennett explains that he’s not denying the existence of consciousness, it’s just ‘not what you think it is’. A helpful way of understanding this was given by Keith Frankish in the previous chapter. Suppose you came across a street magician who makes a beetle disappear before your eyes. In your ignorance, you think that it’s magic. But when you ask her, ‘How did you do that?’, she tells you it was a trick. There wasn’t a beetle there in the first place! It still seems as if the beetle was there (in one sense it’s real – like consciousness), but now you know more about how it got there. Whether or not Strawson and Dennett are talking about the same concept is another matter. We’ll explore this further in the next chapter, where Strawson gives his response to Dennett’s rebuttal.

Questions to consider 1. Will we always be trapped in Cartesian ways of thinking? 2. How might Michelle Montague respond to Dennett’s criticism of autophenomenology?

3. If we released Mary from her black and white room and presented her with a blue banana, would she know that we were trying to trick her?

4. When we feel pain, do we grasp the nature of the experience? 5. Is panpsychism just as empty and trivial as pan-nifty-ism?

Recommended reading Advanced Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Little, Brown, 1991).

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Philosophers on Consciousness Consciousness Explained is one of the best introductory texts in philosophy of mind. Here you’ll find Dennett’s most influential ideas wrapped up in a big picture theory of consciousness.

Daniel Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (London: Penguin Books, 2018). One of Dennett’s best contributions: witty, a little tricky and deeply profound. Starting with bacteria and ending at modern civilization, he explains how the conscious mind developed from the unconscious processes of natural selection. Intermediate Daniel Dennett, ‘Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness’, in Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness, ed. Keith Frankish (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2017), 80–89. In this article, Dennett endorses Keith Frankish’s research project. He explains his main reasons for favouring illusionism and sets out some of the main questions the theory will have to answer. Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (London: Penguin Books, 1997). First published in 1978, this is Dennett’s second book. It’s a collection of seventeen short essays focusing on the nature of consciousness. They don’t need to be read chronologically, just go for one that grabs your interest. The final essay – ‘Where Am I?’ – comes highly recommended. Beginner Daniel Dennett and David Papineau, ‘Papineau vs Dennett: a philosophical dispute’, The Times Literary Supplement, August 2017, www.the-tls.co.uk/ articles/dennett-papineau-debate. This is a short correspondence between Dennett and another famous physicalist, David Papineau. The focus is animal consciousness and qualia. It provides a good insight into the tensions between Dennett’s view and other brands of physicalism. Daniel Dennett and Galen Strawson, ‘Magic, Illusions, and Zombies: An Exchange’, The New York Review of Books, April 2018, www.nybooks.com/ daily/2018/04/03/magic-illusions-and-zombies-an-exchange. Shortly after Dennett took part in our interview, his response to Strawson was published in the New York Review. This article includes Dennett’s reply, along with a rebuttal from Strawson. If you’re interested in their clash, this is definitely worth reading.

Chapter Ten

The Denial Galen Strawson

Introduction Having read the previous two chapters, you might be left wondering what’s left to explain. The illusionists have told us that consciousness is a philosopher’s fiction. Yes, consciousness exists, but it’s not what we think it is; consciousness is a function of the brain, not an instance of qualia. At face value, this seems convincing. If consciousness is just a trick, then we don’t need to believe in non-physical properties. So, is it time we joined the illusionist’s rallying cry? ‘Down with Descartes and power to physics!’ I encourage you to read on before you take to the streets . . . In this chapter, we’ll be speaking to Galen Strawson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. Galen’s work is aimed at the general public as much as it is the academic community, which has secured his status as one of the world’s brightest and best-known philosophers. His philosophy spans across a range of topics, but he is most widely renowned for three things: his opposition to a fixed ‘self’, his objections to the idea that we’re ultimately responsible for what we do and – our focus for this chapter – his rejection of the idea that consciousness is or could be some sort of illusion. According to Strawson, Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett frame the discussion in a way that avoids the real issue: the issue of explaining what everybody else calls consciousness. Despite the illusionists’ claim to the contrary, Strawson argues that they are, in fact, denying the existence of consciousness, calling this ‘the silliest claim ever made’.1 In place of illusionism, Strawson starts with an undoubtable truth, something that we know with one hundred per cent certainty: we cannot doubt the existence of consciousness. And since it’s obviously a wholly natural phenomenon, it must be a wholly physical phenomenon, if 113

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materialism is true, as Strawson believes. So, consciousness must be a form of matter. That may seem strange, but there are many stranger things in physics. Nobody said that matter had to be non-conscious, and that’s where (says Strawson) the illusionists go wrong. Strawson calls on us to take consciousness seriously and to reconsider whether or not there really is a ‘problem of consciousness’. We know that consciousness exists, so what’s the problem?

The silliest claim What’s the silliest claim ever made? I have said that it’s the claim that consciousness doesn’t exist. However, you could argue that there is a sillier claim, which is that nothing exists. That was going to be my next question! Do you really think that the denial of consciousness is the silliest claim ever made? I think that it’s the silliest claim that’s ever been seriously put forward. Uriah Kriegel recently suggested that there was a sillier claim, once made by the sophist Gorgias: ‘nothing exists’.2 This is immediately selfrefuting because the very utterance of ‘nothing exists’ is a something that exists. I don’t know whether the claim that nothing exists has ever been seriously maintained by an accredited theorist who wasn’t stoned . . . Another potential counterexample comes to mind: take the proposition ‘everything is subjective’. This is extremely silly! The statement itself would either have to be subjective or objective. However, if it’s objective, then the statement is false, but if it’s subjective, then it can’t rule out other objective claims, such as the objective claim that the statement is false!3

When he’s not searching for the silliest claim ever made, Uriah Kriegel is another prominent philosopher exploring the nature and value of consciousness.

Gorgias (483–373 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher who belonged to an unofficial philosophical school known as ‘sophism’. Sophists taught their students to win debates with fancy-sounding arguments, rather than to pursue truth for its own sake. Gorgias made the claim that ‘nothing exists’ in his text, On Nature or the NonExistent. Ironically, this work was lost; it no longer exists!

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Nevertheless, lots of people run around saying, ‘Everything is subjective!’ Is this sillier than the denial of consciousness? Yes, this is impressively silly; but not as silly as the denial of consciousness. You call those who deny the existence of consciousness the ‘Deniers’, and this label includes philosophers such as Frankish and Dennett. Why do you think this is such a silly view to hold? The Deniers tell us that there isn’t really such a thing as conscious experience. Conscious experience, they say, is actually an illusion. The problem is obvious: the very thing whose existence they admit – the illusion, the occurrence of the illusion of there being such a thing as conscious experience – is already an instance of what they’re pretending doesn’t exist. Here’s an example. Imagine that I sit you down and dangle an antique pocket watch in front of your eyes. I proceed to hypnotize you into believing that you’re in great pain, and you writhe in agony. Somebody may claim that you’re not really in pain, but this would be missing the point: to seem to feel great pain is to be in great pain. The same applies to conscious experience: to seem to be conscious is to be conscious. The seeming of an experience can’t exist unless there really is an experience. In other words, the illusion itself is already an instance of consciousness. I put your objection to the ‘leading prophet of the Danial’, Daniel Dennett.4 In short, he claimed that you’re misrepresenting his view. To quote him directly, he said: ‘I am not denying that consciousness exists, I’m just saying that you’re wrong about its nature!’ Is there any chance you might be misrepresenting him? There is a way of using the word ‘consciousness’ in which it just means a cognitive function, and has nothing essentially to do with ‘qualia’, i.e. nothing to do with the subjective or ‘qualial’ what it’s like-ness of feeling pain, tasting mint, smelling lavender and so on. But it’s not the standard present-day use. This use has to do with qualia, experiential what it’s like-ness. And whatever Dennett is or is not saying, it’s clear that he is denying the existence of qualia. He’s very clear about what he means by ‘consciousness’. He has these two nice phrases: consciousness is ‘fame in the brain’ or ‘cerebral celebrity’.5 By this he means that a mental state qualifies as a conscious state just so long as it’s

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highly likely to influence other mental states. It doesn’t have to have any qualial aspect or felt what it’s like-ness. And it definitely doesn’t, according to Dennett. He flatly denies the existence of qualia, i.e. the existence of what everybody else means by ‘consciousness’. So I say again, ‘No, consciousness is the fundamental what it’s like-ness of seeing red.’ I don’t care how we use the word, so long as we admit the reality of things like this. Perhaps we should do more work on getting nice examples . . . philosophers are always mentioning colours, pains, tastes and orgasms. What about the feel of waking up, of drinking when extremely thirsty, of diving into cold water, of feeling amused? It’s that – that experiential what it’s like-ness. That’s all I’m talking about – I can’t think of a better way to put it. Anybody who has ever seen, smelt or heard anything knows what it is. I’m talking about everyday experience. Let’s be really clear. What makes you think Dennett is denying the existence of consciousness? Dennett’s almost always a pleasure to read, so let’s consider some of his most famous remarks. As you know, philosophers use the word ‘zombie’ as a technical term for something that looks and behaves like a human being but isn’t conscious. That is, it doesn’t have qualia; it can’t have the experiences of pain and red that we can have. Dennett introduces the term into his book Consciousness Explained and there, using the word ‘conscious’ in the way most other people do, he defines a zombie as a creature that ‘is behaviourally indistinguishable from a normal human being, but is not conscious’.6 So, in Dennett’s own words, ‘there is nothing it is like to be a zombie’.7 Then he asks, ‘Are zombies possible?’ and he answers, ‘They’re not just possible they’re actual. We’re all zombies.’8 That is, we’re not conscious at all in the ordinary sense of the word. He adds, ‘It would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of context!’ All well and good: this discussion supplies all the context we need. Here’s another helpful quotation: ‘When I squint just right’, Dennett says, ‘it does sort of seem that consciousness must be something in addition to all the things it does for us and to us, some special private glow, or here-I-am-ness that would be absent in any robot. But I’ve learned not to credit the hunch. I think it is a flat-out mistake, a failure of imagination.’9 According to Dennett, we’re essentially just like robots; nobody really experiences anything. That’s the denial of consciousness.

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If we’re all robots, does this mean all of our pains and pleasures are also an illusion? This follows inexorably from his view, as far as I can see. If Dennett’s right, no one has ever really suffered; no one has ever caused anyone (or anything) any pain. Murder, rape, slavery, genocide – there is no suffering here, according to Dennett. In the final section of your article in the New York Review of Books, you warn us about the moral consequences of this idea. You write: ‘We must hope that it doesn’t spread outside the academy, or convince some future information technologist or roboticist who has great power over our lives.’10 The idea being that if pain doesn’t really exist, anything goes! Are you afraid that he’ll talk people into believing him? Not really. I added those final sentences somewhat unwillingly at the request of the editors of the New York Review blog. But Daniel Kahneman is right when he says, ‘people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers’.11 That’s the principal problem with the internet. Look at the American political scene. You’re very well-known for your argument against free will, where free will is understood as something that confers ultimate moral responsibility. Your conclusion is that, ultimately, nobody is responsible for anything that they do!12 It looks as if this conclusion could have some dangerous consequences if it came to be generally believed. But you’re not afraid of that. No, because there is no chance that people in general will come to believe it, as my P. F. Strawson (1919–2006) famously argued that we father P. F. Strawson argued. Interestingly, couldn’t give up our deeply you could run a P. F. Strawson style rooted, everyday belief in argument about consciousness just as he free will, even if we became does for free will. Consider the following: convinced that it was (in Dennett says that consciousness is some some sense) an illusion. sort of illusion which everybody is in the grip of. However, even if Dennett could have been right, this illusion couldn’t ever go away. Just stop and think about how we feel when we experience pain or how deeply sympathetic we are when we see other people suffering. This is way too deep in us. Even if illusionism could have been true, we couldn’t ever

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have broken the spell of the ‘illusion’. So we shouldn’t be worried about the moral implications.

Real naturalism What do you think is motivating the Deniers? Why do they believe that consciousness is an illusion? I think the main problem for people who hold Dennett’s view is that they’re utterly committed to a natural but in fact entirely unjustified view of what physical reality is – physical being in general, physical stuff (I’ll call it ‘matter’ for short, although there is in fact more to physical reality than matter). They not only think that everything is physical, as I do myself, they also think that matter is essentially non-conscious. They think they know this for certain. And now comes a great irony: in spite of mocking Descartes, they agree with him (and me) that you can’t possibly get consciousness out of utterly non-conscious matter. And since, unlike Descartes, they think that matter is all there is, they end up having to deny the existence of consciousness. My point on this is always the same: don’t think that physics gives you any reason to think that matter is essentially something non-conscious; it doesn’t. This is what I call ‘the silence of physics’. Anyone who isn’t clear about this just doesn’t understand what physics is. Physics gives us wonderful equations that allow us to do all sorts of things, but it doesn’t tell us about the ultimate ‘stuff nature’ of matter. This isn’t any sort of criticism of physics; it’s just not what physics was designed for. As Stephen Hawking put it, physics ‘is just a set of rules and equations’, it doesn’t tell us about the intrinsic nature of reality, it doesn’t answer the question: ‘What is it that breathes fire into the equations?’13 This point can take years to sink in. It’s a revelation when it finally does. It spaced me out for a couple of weeks back in the 1990s. The biggest mistake made by the Deniers is the one they start from: the mistake of thinking that they know what matter is. How do we avoid the same mistakes? How should we approach the mystery of consciousness? Lots of people talk about the mystery of consciousness, but there’s a huge false assumption built into that phrase. There is no mystery of consciousness in one

The Denial fundamental sense, for we know exactly what consciousness is. The people who call themselves naturalists today, who I call anti-naturalists (or noturalists), think that consciousness is a mystery because one, they think they know what matter is, two, they think that it’s definitely non-conscious, and three, they think everything is matter. Then they wonder, ‘Where did the consciousness come from?’, and conclude that it’s a mystery. The trouble is that to pose the problem like this begs the question, and begging the question is a big theoretical sin. They beg the question because they simply assume the truth of the very thing that is at issue: whether matter is in fact, in its fundamental being, something nonconscious.

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Naturalism states that everything in existence is entirely natural and physical. According to this view, nothing supernatural or non-natural exists. Strawson says that most naturalists are anti-naturalists because they think ‘being physical’ amounts to ‘being nonconscious’.

In philosophy, we say an argument ‘begs the question’ when it assumes the conclusion which it intends to prove. The assumption is usually a controversial one!

What I call ‘real naturalism’ starts off with a simple fact: we know that consciousness exists. No serious naturalist can deny the existence of experience; it’s beyond all reasonable doubt. Since we know that consciousness exists, the naturalist must take consciousness to be an entirely physical and natural phenomenon. From here, I think we have to move to the conclusion that there may be, probably must be, something consciousness-involving in matter right from the start. I completely agree with the fake naturalists that you can’t get consciousness from utterly non-conscious matter, but that doesn’t lead me to (crazily) deny the existence of consciousness. It leads me to think, with some notable Nobel Prize winners,14 that consciousness in some form is in matter from the beginning.

Knowing consciousness So, unlike the noturalist, the real naturalist says that we need to be realists about consciousness. In other words, we need to accept that consciousness exists as we experience it. However, we’re still missing a piece of the puzzle: why should we be realists about consciousness? I don’t know what more to say. Should you believe that 2 + 2 = 4? I should say you should. It’s the same for consciousness. In general, it’s usually a good idea

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to start from something you know for certain (I’m not saying it’s compulsory). Descartes not only argued that we (each of us individually) know with certainty that we exist; he also pointed out that we know we’re having the experiences we’re having when we’re having them. Look up and consider your vivid visual experience right now. Try your hardest to When laying the foundations of his imagine that it doesn’t really exist at all, but philosophy, René Descartes only seems to. Well, what about this vivid wanted to establish what he seeming? It certainly exists (try to blink knew with absolute it away: it won’t go). But for it to exist certainty. We can doubt is already for you to be having visual almost everything, says Descartes, including the experience. The seeming can’t be mere existence of the outside seeming, because it is itself a case of the world. The only thing we very thing that is meant not to exist. This is cannot doubt is the fact that Descartes’s argument. It’s like the case of we are thinking, i.e. having being hypnotized to feel pain that we talked conscious experience, when we are (Descartes uses about earlier. This is why the existence of ‘think’ to mean any kind of conscious experience is more certain than conscious experience). For any other natural phenomenon; it’s the Descartes, the existence of most certainly known natural fact there is. our conscious experience is Here the Dennettians may say that I’m the only thing we can know for certain. begging the question – assuming the truth of the very thing that is at issue. I’m as happy to do this here as I am to insist that 2 + 2 = 4 when someone argues passionately that 2 + 2 = 5. There’s more. We also know the nature of thousands of different types of experience (colours, sounds, smells, aches), and we can go on from these to form an extremely general notion of consciousness. We can think that Martians (say) may have types of conscious experience that are utterly unlike ours, experiences we can’t even imagine. Even young children can do this, and what this shows is that we have a completely general notion of what consciousness is that isn’t tied to our own human case. Sorry to bring up Dennett again, but he seemed pretty convinced that we can’t understand the nature of consciousness through reflection alone. He used the analogy of ‘having a metabolism’. Nobody would say, ‘Simply by having a metabolism, I know things about my metabolism!’ The analogy is no good – my access to my consciousness is nothing like my access to my metabolism! Plus, I’m not talking about any kind of ‘reflection’.

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I’m talking about what philosophers call immediate acquaintance – what we’re immediately acquainted with right now in having (say) visual experience. There are many, many things that I don’t know about my mind, but I know what consciousness is. If Dan was here, as much as I like him, I’d probably give him a sharp kick in the leg and say, ‘There’s an example for you!’ All I’m claiming to know is the thing you can’t doubt – the subjective, qualitative character of experience – the thing that nobody ever doubts until they take up philosophy. Would you like me to pinch you now? No thank you! Philip Goff has a view very close to your own. He says, ‘When I experience pain, I fully grasp what it is to feel pain!’15 I agree with him completely. On the other hand, Dennett and Frankish seem to deny that you and Goff know what it’s like to feel pain; do you think this is where the debate ultimately lies? Does it all come down to this fundamental disagreement about whether or not you can grasp your experiences from the firstperson point of view? I’m not sure. What is clear is that Dennett says that the ‘what it’s like-ness’ of pain is an illusion, and when he says that it also seems quite clear that he means that there isn’t really a ‘what it’s like’ at all – that it doesn’t exist. We believe it exists, he allows, but we’re just wrong. And at this point, I don’t know what to say to him. The reality of consciousness is undoubtable – what he claims is an illusion is itself an instance of consciousness – and that’s why it’s the silliest claim ever made! With that said, I gave up trying to convince anyone a long time ago: almost nobody engaged in the debate has ever changed sides. I sometimes find this depressing.

Panpsychism According to panpsychism, consciousness – in some perhaps very primitive form – is a fundamental feature of the universe. This seems pretty close to what you were describing earlier when we discussed your brand of naturalism. Would you say that you’re a panpsychist? I think that panpsychism is, in some version, in the present state of our knowledge, the most plausible, parsimonious, elegant, hard-nosed theory of the nature of reality.

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Why do you think panpsychism is the best theory we have? Can it help us solve the problem of consciousness? What problem?! You’re right that many people think there is a seemingly insoluble problem about explaining consciousness, a deep mystery. But this, again, is because they simply assume that the basic stuff of the universe is wholly non-conscious. And it’s precisely this assumption – this great big wholly unjustified assumption – that creates the (seeming) problem. If you reject it, it disappears: the supposedly insoluble mystery disappears. And this is what panpsychism does: it rejects the assumption. Why is it the best theory? Because it makes the supposed mystery disappear, and it does so simply by rejecting a wholly unjustified assumption! Please don’t misunderstand me. We do most certainly need an explanation of the existence of complex, interesting consciousness – consciousness of the sort we find in creatures like humans, cats and dogs. Luckily, we have one: evolution by natural selection. The thing about evolution is that it needs some material to work on. In the case of our bodies, it had extended matter. It worked on that to produce bodily shapes, moulding it into arms, legs, opposable thumbs and so on. So too, when evolution produced the eagle’s vision, or the dog’s sense of smell or human beings’ complicated consciousness, it had to have some already given material By ‘rudimentary to work on. And what it had to work on consciousness’, Strawson is was rudimentary consciousness that was referring to the most basic, already there. Some people think that this elementary, undeveloped raises a new insoluble difficulty called ‘the and non-complex form of combination problem’, but there are many consciousness possible. ways of engaging with that problem. The fundamental thought is simply this: you can’t get consciousness from something that is in itself wholly and utterly non-conscious, as matter is The idea of radical standardly supposed to be. You can’t get emergence is best illustrated by the case in question. If consciousness to spring into existence consciousness somehow simply by rearranging utterly nonarose from the goings-on of conscious matter in complicated ways, e.g. wholly and utterly nonin the way it’s arranged in brains. That conscious stuff, that would would be a case of what we call ‘radical be a paradigm case of radical emergence. emergence’, which is ruled out by any plausible naturalist approach. This is why the theory of evolution provides some of the strongest support for some

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version of panpsychism: we know for certain that complex animal consciousness exists and we’re sure it evolved. But it couldn’t have evolved by radical emergence from something wholly and utterly non-conscious. So the existence of matter must already have involved rudimentary consciousness that evolution worked on and developed into specialized forms. As I’ve said, physics gives us no reason to think that matter is fundamentally nonconscious – while both the undoubtable reality of consciousness and the way in which evolution works give us lots of reasons to think that consciousness is fundamental. If we’re naturalists (and I think we should be), we should think that consciousness is entirely physical. So now you might ask: ‘Where is consciousness?’ Well, it’s everywhere. That’s panpsychism, and it’s the best theory we’ve got. Margaret Cavendish put it rather well in 1664.16

Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) was a prominent philosopher and scientist. Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters (1664) eloquently criticized other leading philosophers of her time in the course of arguing for a version of panpsychism. Like Strawson and her contemporary Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), she was an advocate of ‘real materialism’, in that she thought consciousness was an entirely physical phenomenon.

Afterthoughts There’s a thread that runs throughout this interview: the idea that physics doesn’t tell us what matter is. In my experience, I’ve found that people typically think the opposite. After all, science has been on a bit of a roll lately. The mystery of life, the origin of the universe and the structure of space-time itself – today, some of philosophy’s once greatest mysteries have compelling, scientific answers. I think Strawson, rightly, curbs our enthusiasm. Science doesn’t tell us about the intrinsic nature of matter, and more importantly, it doesn’t tell us that matter is nonconscious. It’s odd that so many of us are inclined to stretch physics beyond its boundaries. There’s still a big elephant in the room, the question of whether or not illusionists deny the existence of consciousness. As we’ve seen, Strawson thinks that illusionism is ‘the silliest claim ever made’, but we should note that not all panpsychists hold this view. In fact, in the next chapter, we’ll see that Philip Goff thinks that illusionism is ‘a beautiful, elegant

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solution to the problem of consciousness’. In terms of the tensions between the Deniers and Strawson, I predict that this one is destined for a stalemate. Strawson’s starting point is the certainty of consciousness, whereas the Deniers aim to fit consciousness into their description of a non-conscious world. For either side, any concession here would require the complete overhaul of their philosophical approaches. It’s a mess that can’t be undone by carefully untying the knots: this one needs scissors.

Questions to consider 1. Is the denial of consciousness the ‘silliest claim ever made’? 2. Should we fear the moral implications of illusionism? 3. Is it really possible to genuinely disbelieve in the existence of conscious experience?

4. Does evolution by natural selection give us reason to favour panpsychism over illusionism?

5. If panpsychism is true, how might it affect our lives?

Recommended reading Advanced Galen Strawson et al., Consciousness and its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?, ed. Anthony Freeman (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2006). A collection of academic papers from leading philosophers of mind responding to Strawson’s popular essay, ‘Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism’. The book concludes with Strawson’s extraordinarily thorough reply to his critics. Galen Strawson, Real Materialism: and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Another collection of academic essays, all of which are authored by Strawson himself. This is the perfect book if you’re looking to explore the theme of real naturalism in more detail. In addition to essays on consciousness and the mind, you’ll also find Strawson’s work on free will and the self. Intermediate Galen Strawson, ‘A Hundred Years of Consciousness: “A Long Training in Absurdity” ’, Estudios de Filosofía, no. 59 (2019): 9–43.

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If you’ve enjoyed the discussion of ‘the Denial’ over the last few chapters, this is an absolute must-read. In this lecture turned essay, Strawson makes a compelling case against illusionism and explains the intellectual history which led to the Denial. If you’ve enjoyed the debate between Strawson and Dennett, you have to read the final pages of this paper, titled ‘Dunking Dennett’. Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2018). This popular book aimed at the public contains a collection of nine short pieces that cover some of Strawson’s most influential ideas. In addition to his views on consciousness, you’ll find his reflections on death, moral responsibility and the self. If you’re new to Strawson, this is the best place to start. Beginner Keith Frankish, ‘Why Panpsychism Fails to Solve the Mystery of Consciousness’, Aeon, September 2016, www.aeon.co/ideas/why-panpsychism-fails-to-solvethe-mystery-of-consciousness. In this short piece, Keith Frankish explains the appeal of panpsychism before introducing two central objections. This would make for an interesting read before you jump into the next chapter. Galen Strawson, ‘Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery. It’s Matter’, The New York Times, May 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-amystery-its-matter.html. A concise and engaging piece by Strawson explaining his frustrations with the popular cliché that ‘consciousness is a great mystery’. The nature of matter: that’s the real mystery.

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Chapter Eleven

Galileo’s Error Philip Goff

Introduction If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? This seems like a silly question at first; it’s the kind of thing your uncle would jokingly ask you at Christmas dinner when he discovers you’re interested in philosophy. Don’t be fooled, though. This one runs deep. I’ve asked hundreds of people this question myself – I’m great fun at parties – and they all say the same thing: ‘Didn’t you pay attention in school? When a tree falls it creates a sound wave. Sound waves are sounds, so yes, of course it does. Now get lost and stop asking me stupid questions!’ I think this answer captures the public’s attitude towards science. Once physics has finished describing the world, there we have it: a complete explanation of the universe. Is this right? Is there more to sounds than sound waves? Our interviewee for this chapter is Philip Goff, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. Goff’s work is essential reading for anyone interested in the field. Like Strawson, his work aims to inspire people to face up to the problem of consciousness and introduce them to his exciting and increasingly popular solution, which is nothing short of a scientific revolution. ‘Sound waves are sounds.’ For Goff, there’s something missing here: a huge gap at the heart of our description of reality. We all know that sound is more than just sound waves; there’s something it’s like for a conscious organism to experience them. Sound has a qualitative aspect, which science has always been silent on. Why? Because science’s founding father told us to ignore these qualities. This, says Goff, was Galileo’s error.

The great astronomer, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) laid the foundations for the scientific revolution. He rejected the prevailing science of his time which described the world in terms of qualities and goals. Instead, Galileo declared that mathematics should be the language of physics.

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The error We’ve all heard of Galileo in one way or another – I’m tempted to sing here – he was one of the most influential scientists to have lived and was widely considered to be ‘the father of modern science’. What was it about his work that was so revolutionary? I’m glad you didn’t sing. As you say, Galileo’s known as ‘the father of modern science’ and this is because he laid the philosophical foundations of the scientific revolution – the same scientific paradigm which we operate in today. It’s important to understand what this revolution involved. A key moment is Galileo’s declaration that the new science was to use the language of mathematics; his new science was to have a purely quantitative vocabulary. This is a much-discussed moment, but what is less discussed is the philosophical work Galileo put in to get to that position. Before Galileo, following Aristotle, people thought that the physical world was full of qualities. According to this view, there were colours on the surfaces of objects, smells floating through the air and tastes actually inside of food. The trouble is you can’t capture these kinds of qualities in a purely quantitative vocabulary like mathematics. You can’t describe the redness of red or the spiciness of paprika in the form of an equation.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) thought that qualities were literally a part of objects themselves. Think about a lime. Not only is a lime a spherical object weighing fifty grams with a diameter of five centimetres, but for Aristotle it also has the property of ‘zestiness’.

So, how did he accommodate these qualities into his mathematical theory? He proposed a radical new theory of reality, which, in essence, left these qualities out. As part of his new theory, Galileo said that qualities aren’t really ‘out there’ in the physical world, rather, they’re in the consciousness of the observer. In other words, the redness isn’t actually on the surface of the tomato, rather, it’s in the consciousness of the person looking at the tomato, and the spiciness isn’t really in the paprika, it’s in the consciousness of the person eating it. Take the age-old philosophical question of whether or not a tree crashing down in a forest makes a sound. For Galileo, the sound isn’t in the forest, it’s in the consciousness of the person listening, so if there’s no one there to listen, there’s no sound.

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Galileo strips the physical world of its qualities and all that remains are the purely quantitative features of matter. This creates a radical division between two domains. On the one hand, we’ve got the mathematical domain of science, which investigates the physical world and its purely quantitative properties: size, shape, location, motion and so forth. On the other hand, we’ve got the qualitative domain of consciousness, with all of its colours, sounds, textures, tastes and smells. Galileo puts this domain beyond the reach of science, and this is what I call ‘Galileo’s error’: he leaves consciousness out, and we need to get it back in! Does this mean that consciousness is beyond the reach of science? I’d say it’s beyond the reach of physical science – science as Galileo conceived it – which might not be the same thing as science per se. There’s broad agreement now that consciousness poses a serious and profound challenge to contemporary science. Despite the great progress neuroscientists have made in understanding the brain, they don’t have even the beginnings of an explanation as to how electrochemical signalling can give rise to an inner world of colours, sounds and smells. Still, some people are determined that physical science will eventually crack it, and they think that all we need is more neuroscience. Aha! But you’re saying, ‘That’s not what Galileo set science up to do! Physical science alone won’t crack it!’ Nevertheless, there are lots of people who remain committed to this view. What do you think motivates their commitment? We’re going through a phase in history where the public is quite understandably blown away by the success of physical science; just stop and think about all of the incredible technology that it’s produced! This faith in science leads people to think that eventually it will find all of the answers, which gives them a feeling of certainty and security. However, this whole attitude is rooted in a misunderstanding of the history of science. Yes, it’s been successful, but it’s only been successful because it was designed to exclude consciousness. Sometimes when I’m lying in bed at night, I imagine what it would be like if Galileo were to time travel to the present day. If a neuroscientist were to ask him, ‘Do you think we’ll be able to explain consciousness in terms of physical science alone?’, he’d take one look at them, hit them on the head with his telescope and say, ‘Of course not. I designed physical science to deal with the quantitative, not the qualitative!’

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False starts From ancient civilizations to the twenty-first century, dualism continues to be the most popular solution to the problem of consciousness. This might seem like a good candidate for completing the unfinished picture that Galileo left behind. What do you make of this view? When I was taught philosophy as an undergraduate, we were told there were just two options: you’re either a materialist or a dualist. I’ve already explained why I don’t think you can account for consciousness in the purely quantitative language of physical science; this is the claim of the materialists, so that rules materialism out. So, what do I make of dualism? I think it’s pretty hopeless too.

Dualism says that humans are made up of two different substances: bodies and minds. For many, this is the default, instinctive view; in other words, it’s quite intuitive. Moreover, its popularity can be traced back to the major world religions, who understand the mind to be a sort of soul.

The worries of dualism are more straightforwardly scientific. The first thing to say is that most dualists think there’s a pretty intimate causal relationship between the mind and the brain. For example, dualists claim that when the light hits the retina of an eye, it causes a visual experience in the immaterial mind or soul. This works both ways. For example, when the soul decides to jump up and down on a trampoline, it moves the body to produce the desired effect. The problem is, you’ve got to think about what things would look like if that were true. If there were an immaterial mind impacting on the brain every second of waking life, this would show up in our neuroscience. There’d be all sorts of things happening in the brain that would have no physical explanation. It would look like a poltergeist were constantly playing with the brain! So, what you’re saying is that if an immaterial mind was always acting upon the brain, neuroscientists would expect it to ‘light up’ in loads of unpredictable ways when they put it under a scanner? Exactly. An analogy might help. Suppose you had a God who was always intervening in the physical world. If this God was constantly performing miracles – let’s say they were always healing diseases – there would be a lot of changes to our bodies that couldn’t be explained. It’d be exactly the same if

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there were immaterial minds: we’d have all of these little miracles happening in people’s brains, all of the time! The other more straightforward issue with dualism is that it sins against Ockham’s razor. This theoretical imperative says that we should believe the simplest theory that’s consistent with the data. Rather than appealing to more physical stuff, dualists postulate non-physical souls or minds. By introducing all these souls, dualism gives us a divided and disunified picture of reality. With that said, I’d rather go for dualism than deny the existence of consciousness. As you know, some prominent philosophers do deny the existence of consciousness – or, better put, they describe consciousness as an ‘illusion’. Although it seems like magicians can cut their assistants in half and pull rabbits out of hats – and we might be tricked into believing that there’s some magical power involved – we’re just misdirected! In your written work, you describe this view as ‘a beautiful, elegant solution to the problem of consciousness’,1 but ultimately, you think it’s self-defeating. Why do you think this is the case? I’ve got more time for illusionism than most of my anti-materialist comrades. Some people get really annoyed with the illusionists, but I’m happy to try out all kinds of views and give credence to all possibilities. I’m good friends with Keith Frankish and it’s fun chatting to him about these things. But yeah – as you say – ultimately, I think illusionism is self-defeating. The illusionists want to say there are scientific grounds for thinking that consciousness doesn’t exist. I’m never quite clear on what those grounds are, and that’s one problem. The second problem is that we have to access empirical reality via consciousness. For example, I only know the results of an experiment because I’m having a conscious experience of them. Thinking that science could give you a reason to doubt consciousness is a bit like thinking that astronomy could give you a reason to doubt the reality of telescopes. You need a telescope to do astronomy and you need consciousness to do science!

The scientific revolution To recap, Galileo’s error was that he took consciousness out of the picture, and now it’s up to us to get it back in. The dualist’s view doesn’t match up with neuroscience and illusionism is self-defeating. Now, to solve the problem, you think we need a scientific revolution!

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That’s a nice way of putting it. The science of Galileo wasn’t designed to deal with consciousness, and therefore, we need to move to a more expansive conception of what science is. Don’t worry! This doesn’t mean that we need to do physical science any differently, it just means that it’s not the full story. We need a conception of science that takes seriously both the quantitative properties of matter and the qualitative reality of consciousness. We need to bring these things together into a single, unified worldview. In your book Galileo’s Error, you say that this single, unified worldview can be found in the work of Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington. As you put it yourself: ‘I am convinced that Russell and Eddington did for the science of consciousness what Darwin did for the science of life.’2 You’re right, it’s very much rooted in the work of Russell and Eddington. It’s a tragedy that their ideas were forgotten about for so long, but fortunately, they’ve been rediscovered, and now they’re causing great excitement in academic philosophy! The starting point of Russell and Eddington is that physical science doesn’t tell us what matter is. That seems like a bizarre claim at first. When you read a physics textbook you seem to be learning all of these incredible things about the nature of time, space and matter, but what Russell and Eddington realized is that physical science is confined to telling us about the behaviour of matter.

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) is one of the most famous and influential philosophers to have lived. Russell thought that physics only tells us about the behaviour of matter – not what matter is. He proposed that the inner nature of matter is, at bottom, neither mental nor physical. However, he did suggest that it was more like the former than the latter.

The scientist Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) is best known for confirming Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Whereas Russell proposed that the inner nature of matter was neither mental nor physical, Eddington embraced the panpsychist view that the world is made up of ‘mind stuff ’.

Think of it like this: physics tells us not what matter is but only what it does. Take electrons, for example. Physics tells us that electrons have mass and negative charge. Okay, so what are mass and negative charge? Mass involves gravitational attraction and resistance to acceleration, whereas negative charge is the disposition to repel other negatively charged things (and attract positively charged things). Here – as with everything else

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in physical science – mass and charge are characterized by their behaviours. Everything is explained in terms of what it does and not what it is. This means that science leaves us completely in the dark on what philosophers like to call the ‘intrinsic nature of matter’: what matter is in and of itself, independently of its behaviour. So, it turns out, there’s this huge hole in our standard, scientific story of reality, and as we’ve already said, we’re also looking for a place to bring consciousness into our worldview. Now here’s the crucial move: the proposal of Russell and Eddington is to put consciousness in that hole! Does this mean that matter is consciousness? Exactly, and the resulting view is a kind of panpsychism. Panpsychism is the ancient view that consciousness is a fundamental and pervasive feature of the physical world; all of the concrete stuff is experiential stuff. However, the kind of panpsychism I’m talking about is stripped of any mystical or spiritual connotations. It’s a beautifully simple and elegant way of integrating consciousness into our picture of the world. As I like to say, in the 1620s, Galileo separated the qualitative and the quantitative, and in the 1920s, Russell and Eddington found a way to bring them back together. According to panpsychism then, ‘all of the concrete stuff is just conscious stuff’, and this means that every physical particle has a little bit of consciousness. As you know, this view faces a serious objection known as ‘the combination problem’. I’ll pose it in the form of a question: how do 86 billion conscious neurons in my head combine to form one, unified conscious mind? There are two ways the panpsychist can approach this question: strong emergence and weak emergence. The strong emergentist thinks to bridge the gap you need a fundamental law of nature. In other words, it might just be a basic law of nature that when you have conscious particles arranged in a certain way – and it’s the job of neuroscience to tell us what that arrangement is – then you get consciousness attached to the whole. The weak emergentist says that you can bridge the gap without appealing to a fundamental law of nature; just having the conscious particles arranged in a certain way automatically gives you consciousness of the whole. It’s early days but I think they’re both promising views. Hedda Hassel Mørch has a fascinating proposal on the strong emergentist version, interpreting the

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integrated information theory as a type of panpsychism, and that’s a wonderful example of how science and philosophy can come together to shape a theory of consciousness. I’ve got a lot of problems with that specific view, but I think it’s the closest we’ve got to a complete theory of consciousness. Daniel Dennett has said that without an answer to this problem, panpsychism’s an ‘empty and trivial’ worldview. To illustrate his point, he compared panpsychism to ‘pan-nifty-ism’, a fictional view which says that everything is nifty. Dennett claims that this is just as ridiculous as panpsychism because neither view can explain how all of the neurons in our heads come together to form a human mind. What do you make of this parody? I think it comes down to a difference in approach. My view is that there’s something we know to be real indeHedda Hassel Mørch is a pendently of observation and experiment, leading proponent of namely, our own feelings and experiences. integrated information If you’re just going off the basis of thirdtheory : the theory that person observation – like Dennett – you’ve conscious experience arises got no reason to believe in consciousness. when a system – such as a brain – has enough You can’t look inside someone’s head and integrated information. On see their feelings and experiences! Once this view, everything has you agree with me that there’s another some degree of integrated source of data, you need to have a theory information, and therefore that brings together what you know from everything has the potential to be conscious. the outside and what you know from the inside. I think the Russell–Eddington view is the most elegant way of doing that.

A world of value If panpsychism is true and consciousness is literally everywhere, how might this affect our relationship with the world? I’m always keen to emphasize that when we’re doing philosophy, we should be thinking about the theory that’s most likely to be true, not the one we’d like to be true. With this qualification in mind, I think panpsychism can bring more happiness and meaning to our lives than rival views. According to the materialist’s understanding of the universe, the world is pretty bleak. Ultimately, we’re just an accident on the edge of a cold, non-conscious,

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meaningless universe. We feel like the world isn’t like us – we’re conscious beings, but the universe is just a physical mechanism. I think this can leave us feeling alienated from the world around us. On the panpsychist’s account, however, the universe is enchanted with this special, valuable property. Suddenly we have something in common with the natural world: consciousness! The universe is like us; we belong to the universe. I think this can make us feel at home in the cosmos, and it has the potential to change our relationship with the environment for the better. How is that different to the materialist’s account? If I’m a materialist, I think there’s just physical stuff ‘out there’ in the world, yet I feel at one with the universe because I’m a physical thing as well! I suppose I don’t think people can really live as materialists. Even committed materialists often admit that they can’t help but feel that consciousness is something more than just a physical process.3 If you’re thinking dualistically – which the materialist will be – then you’re somewhat alienated from the world around you. However, if you’re a panpsychist the world is conscious, just like you! You mentioned a moment ago that panpsychism can change our relationship with the environment for the better. Does this mean that the view has some moral implications? I think there are, particularly for plant life. Take a mango tree, for example. If you think a mango tree is just a mechanism, then its value is indirect. In other words, it only has value in terms of what it can do for us: a mango tree looks pretty, it sustains the environment and we can pick its delicious fruit. However, if you think a tree is a conscious organism, then it’s morally significant in its own right. Chopping down a mango tree becomes an action of immediate and direct moral significance. Think about this in the context of tree huggers, whom people tend to laugh at. If trees are just mechanisms, then sure, hugging them seems ridiculous. You might think hugging a tree is just as silly as hugging a washing machine! On the other hand, if a tree is a conscious organism, then maybe hugging it becomes a little bit more like stroking a cat. They’re obviously very different things, but there’s one important sense in which they’re similar: you’re interacting with a conscious organism, not a non-conscious mechanism. I’m confident that panpsychism can only change our relationship with the world for the better.

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Are there any other interesting ethical implications if plants and trees are conscious? Well, if materialism is true and plants aren’t conscious, then there’s a clear dividing line between plants and animals. We can say: ‘Let’s not eat things that are conscious. So, we can eat plants, but we can’t eat animals.’ However, as a panpsychist, I do think that plants are conscious, and therefore, there isn’t an obvious dividing line between plants and animals. The ethical implication is that this makes it very unclear what it’s okay and not okay to eat. It might turn out that destroying sentient life is essential to our survival, which raises a problem for the vegans and vegetarians amongst us. Maybe there’s a problem here. Somebody might agree with you that plants are conscious, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they can suffer. For example, on the panpsychist worldview, a rock is made up of conscious particles, but the rock itself can’t suffer, and therefore, it’s not ‘morally wrong’ to kick a rock. Likewise, if plants are conscious but they can’t suffer, doesn’t the same thing follow? That’s a really interesting question. I haven’t given too much thought to distinguishing between those two things. However, I’m inclined to think that plants do suffer. It seems that across the whole animal kingdom, the frustration of aims is accompanied by suffering, and I don’t see why that wouldn’t carry over to plants. I’ve got this huge Madagascan dragon tree called Susan back home; I worry that when I’m away and not watering her there’s a kind of suffering there.

Consider a dog whose owner refuses to take them for a walk. Imagine an ant eater that is banned from eating ants. Suppose that we pass a law that forbids Paul Rudd from making any more movies. Each ‘frustration of aims’ seems to be accompanied by suffering. So, why is it any different when we stop a sunflower from facing the sun?

A lot of people might think that panpsychism, and some of its implications, are a little crazy! Do you think the peculiar nature of panpsychism gives us reason to doubt its truth?

Don’t be concerned. Philip’s not underwatering Susan. This once small Madagascan dragon tree has grown so tall it no longer fits in his house.

At the end of the day, we should judge a view not by its cultural associations but by its explanatory power. If you think that physical science can explain everything, then of course panpsychism seems crazy. However, to hold this

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view would be to ignore the reality of consciousness and the limitations of the conception of science bequeathed to us by Galileo. I’ve lost any sense that panpsychism’s crazy, and I think that the public perception is changing too. It’s gone from a position that was laughed at to a position that’s taken very seriously as a respected minority view, and it will continue to grow in popularity. Eventually, I think society will come to realize that consciousness is something that our current scientific model can’t account for. When they realize this, I think it will bring about a profound change in how we see the world and in our conception of what it is to be a human being.

Afterthoughts There’s something exciting about panpsychism; it makes the world seem even more special than we previously thought. If we think trees, trains and hospital waiting rooms are alive with consciousness, maybe this can make us feel less alone in the world when we’re at our lowest. To find out, I encourage you to spend a day or two thinking about the world from this perspective. Even a moment’s reflection seems to bring a sense of – dare I say it – religious awe. Not all of the implications are positive. One interesting takeaway here is that panpsychism might blur the line between plants and animals. On Goff’s view, it appears that a diet that harms no sentient creature is close to impossible. However, not all panpsychists hold this view. Many remain sceptical that plants have the ability to feel pain. After all, it’s not like plants would benefit from this ability; they can’t exactly get up and run away!4 The onus is on Goff to answer an important question: why would a plant develop this capacity? Maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The first thing we need to establish is whether or not panpsychism is true. One question to consider is if it can overcome the ‘combination problem’: the question of how conscious particles come together to form unified minds. Perhaps Philip downplays just how big of an issue this is. A theory of consciousness shouldn’t just tell us where consciousness comes from; we need to know how it comes together in the brains of birds and mammals. In fairness, I think Goff would agree with this analysis. He’d insist that his aim is to

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lay the groundwork for a new science of consciousness, a science which one day might come up with a solution.

Questions to consider 1. How does Massimo Pigliucci’s approach to philosophy differ from Philip Goff ’s?

2. Without a solution to the combination problem, is panpsychism an empty worldview?

3. Can panpsychism make us feel more at home in the cosmos compared to rival views?

4. If panpsychism is true, is it morally wrong to eat plants? 5. Will we come to accept panpsychism as a credible alternative to materialism?

Recommended reading Advanced Philip Goff, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Aimed at an academic audience, Goff outlines a detailed and compelling case against materialism before introducing a form of panpsychism called ‘cosmopsychism’ (the whole universe constitutes a single, unified mind). Philip Goff, William Seager and Sean Allen-Hermanson, ‘Panpsychism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2017, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ panpsychism. This is a brilliant overview of panpsychism. It covers the main types of panpsychism, as well as several arguments for and against the view. Intermediate Philip Goff, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (London: Penguin Books, 2019). This is the book to read if you want to find out more about the ideas from this interview. Written for a general audience, Philip traces the problem of consciousness back to the scientific revolution, before introducing us to his radical solution: his call for a new science of consciousness.

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Philip Goff, ‘Is the Universe a Conscious Mind?’, Aeon, February 2018, www. aeon.co/essays/cosmopsychism-explains-why-the-universe-is-fine-tunedfor-life. Philip argues that the conditions which allow intelligent life to exist are so finely balanced that they point towards a type of cosmic designer. Combining this with arguments for panpsychism, he proposes that the universe is a big, conscious mind that strives to create a world of value. Goff ’s changed his mind since he wrote this; there’s a link to another piece at the end of the article in which he explains why. Beginner Philip Goff, ‘Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe?’, Scientific American, January 2020, www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-consciousnesspervade-the-universe. In essence, this is a very, very short version of the interview you’ve just read. If you wanted to convey the gist of Goff ’s main ideas to a friend, this would be a good link to send their way. Philip Goff, ‘The Case for Panpsychism’, Philosophy Now, 2017, www. philosophynow.org/issues/121/The_Case_For_Panpsychism. Here’s a great, accessible summary of Philip’s brand of panpsychism. He introduces the main reasons for adopting panpsychism and responds to the criticism that panpsychism’s too crazy to be taken seriously.

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Chapter Twelve

The World as Consciousness Miri Albahari & Jack Symes

Introduction So, here we are. The end of our journey. We’ve explored many promising solutions to the mystery, but somehow, consciousness just keeps slipping through our fingers. Each time we come up with a new answer, another problem rears its head, and it doesn’t seem like we’re getting any closer to an explanation. We’ve considered lots of interesting theories, but each of them is plagued with problems, and there’s no clear way of deciding which one’s going to overcome its afflictions. How did we end up here? It feels like we’re more lost now than when we started. Maybe we took a wrong turn . . . maybe, it’s time we turned back. I am delighted to present this final piece alongside one of the most exciting and inventive philosophers of the modern day: Miri Albahari. In Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) is a wellshort, Albahari believes that a vital clue known Hindu sage. At the to the mystery of consciousness can be age of sixteen, he had a found in the content of irreversible life-altering mystical mystical experiences. A famous example experience, in which he of which comes from Ramana perceived the ultimate nature of the world to be Maharshi, who – gripped with the fear pure consciousness. that he was about to die – asked himself, ‘What dies and what lives?’ In his own words: ‘Enquiring within “Who is the seer?” I saw the seer disappear, leaving That alone which exists forever.’1 ‘That alone which exists forever’ is consciousness. This consciousness does not belong to any individual seer’s perspective. It is pure, universal and makes up the fabric of the world. Such experiences have been reported by many mystics over the centuries. Could they offer a map to the deeper reaches of reality? Albahari thinks so. 141

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Let’s turn the car around and start from the beginning. This time, let’s be careful not to take a wrong turn. Aha! The map says we should avoid Descartes’s Drive. Perhaps we should try Berkeley’s Boulevard instead?

Apples and bananas How can you be certain that the outside world exists? When you walk down the street, what’s to say that the squirrels, trees and people who walk by your side aren’t just the outputs of a complex computer simulation? More worryingly, maybe an evil demon is deceiving you into thinking that there’s an outside world of objects and people, but really, you’re just a brain in a jar! That’s the question: how can you know that you’re not being tricked into thinking that there is an outside world? Back in the seventeenth century, René Descartes asked this same question. His answer? We know that God exists, and therefore, we can rest peacefully knowing that a loving God wouldn’t deceive us into thinking that there’s a mind-independent world when there isn’t one.2 In other words, a good God wouldn’t let us live in a world that would constantly deceive us. According to Descartes, this is the only reason we can trust our senses and thank God (quite literally) that we can. After all, we need the external world, he says, to underpin all of our mathematical and scientific discoveries. Seventy years later, Bishop Berkeley George Berkeley tackled this problem for himself, but he (1685–1753) – known came up with a very different answer. For commonly as ‘Bishop Berkeley, God wouldn’t need to create an Berkeley’ – is one of the extravagant external world. All God most well-known and progressive thinkers in the needed to do was fashion the impression history of philosophy. In of a world in our minds.3 Think about it short, Berkeley argued that like this: instead of creating mindwe need to deny the independent apples, why wouldn’t God existence of a mindjust create a bunch of sensory impressions independent world. that appear to us as apples? It’s much simpler. God’s power and goodness could ensure the law-like regularity of these impressions, such that when we reach for the apple-images, they don’t suddenly turn into bananas! Descartes and Berkeley were trying to secure a foundation for our knowledge, but each position carries with it some interesting implications for the mind–

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body problem. They give us two different approaches to the puzzle of how our minds can interact with the world around us. On the one hand, Descartes thought that while our minds are non-material souls, there really was a material world ‘out there’. So, how do they interact? Well, quite clumsily, he said that the mind interacts with the physical world through the pineal gland in the brain. We shouldn’t take this too seriously: picking out a part of the brain doesn’t tell us how a non-material soul can interact with a material body. In contrast, Berkeley advocated a variant of ‘idealism’: the view that only immaterial minds exist. His basic building-blocks were God, finite minds (like ourselves), and the ideas perceived by them. This was everything he thought we needed for a complete explanation of the world. Here’s the important bit: by explaining the appearance of worldly objects in terms of only these mental elements, Berkeley thought he could bypass the troublesome problem of how our minds interact with the material world. Simply put, if there’s only ‘mind stuff ’, there’s no problem with how it interacts with the ‘material stuff ’. The so-called ‘outside world’ is just ‘mind stuff ’ as well! In the past century, Western philosophy hasn’t been Berkeley’s biggest fan. Alongside Descartes, it has opted for a mind-independent, material world. A number of rival theories have emerged, each of them competing to explain how consciousness can fit into our understanding of the material world.

The grand competition There are several popular theories, but each of them has a skeleton in its closet. Dualists follow Descartes in holding that minds aren’t material. They try to develop accounts of how mental phenomena can interact with physical systems such as our bodies and brains. On the other hand, materialists hope to explain minds solely in terms of physical systems, such as our brains. Both ‘Wetware’ refers to the cells and processes which make face vast explanatory gaps between mind up a biological brain. and matter. For the dualist, the main Computers have ‘hardware’ problem is explaining how the material and ‘software’, but humans and non-material interact. For the have ‘wetware’ and materialist: how can the taste of chocolate ‘consciousness’. or the feeling of nostalgia arise from mere electrical firings in neural wetware? Conscious minds and matter seem to be radically different things – it’s very hard to see how a connection between them could work!

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With little success, dualists and materialists have tried to close these gaps by continuously updating their theories. In fact, the materialist position called ‘illusionism’ goes so far as to deny the very existence of consciousness! An increasing number of philosophers – rightly – remain unconvinced by this way forward, opting instead to pursue panpsychism. Materialists and dualists usually agree that matter lacks any conscious qualities. Their disagreement is over how consciousness, if it exists, relates to non-conscious matter. Panpsychists deny their shared assumption by placing consciousness inside of matter. Externally, matter is thought to behave just as physics and physiology describe it. But according to panpsychism, from the inside, there is something that it feels like to be matter. This isn’t just true for our brains and bodies, but its most fundamental constituents as well. Pencils, lamps and stones don’t tend to make the list, but subatomic particles, atoms and neurons may well do. However, we should note that the range of conscious experience enjoyed by an atom would differ vastly to that of a human, although it shares an important, common feature: they both have the same basic nature – there is something it’s like to be that subject of experience. Panpsychists sometimes motivate their position by pointing out that physics only tells us what matter does, but not what matter is. So, we have a gap in our understanding of the world, but thankfully, we have a candidate to fill that gap: something to colour in our empty picture of reality. That candidate is consciousness. As Goff puts it, ‘The most elegant, simple, sensible option is to colour in the rest of the world with the same pen.’4 Igniting basic matter with the spark of consciousness is thought to overcome the problems we’ve mentioned with materialism and dualism. The fact consciousness is fundamental removes the need for it to emerge from the brain or interact with it from another realm.

Two views, two problems: the micropsychists and the cosmopsychists Broadly speaking, there are two different types of panpsychism. Micropsychists take the smallest micro-physical parts of our cosmos to be infused with their own little sparks of consciousness. We get our conscious experiences from all these ‘little bits’ of consciousness that belong to the atoms in our brain. This gives rise to a new puzzle. Conscious subjects like humans, penguins and kangaroos are deeply private entities; their experiences are sealed off from the rest of the world. You might see me wince with pain when I step on a sharp

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piece of glass, but you can’t feel the pain that I feel. Only I can feel that pain from the vantage point of my own unique perspective. Here’s the problem: micropsychists suppose that I get my subjective experience of pain from a combination of experiences belonging to lots of smaller subjects (the atoms which make up my brain), but how do they combine? Do they break their own little seals and spill their pain-pellets into my experience? Do they somehow cause my experience to emerge from theirs? In short, how do lots of little experiences come together to form one, unified experience? There’s an explanatory gap here, known officially as the ‘combination problem’. Cosmopsychists, on the other hand, take the cosmos itself to be fundamentally conscious. On this view, we don’t get our experiences from ‘little bits’ of consciousness – instead, we get them from the entire cosmos having a global experience. But now there arises a different yet similar problem to the one we had before, called the ‘decombination problem’.5 To put it briefly: how can one big conscious mind (the mind of the cosmos) break down into lots of little minds? How can an experience that seemingly belongs to my unique perspective also belong to another subject – ‘the cosmos’? The micropsychists and the cosmopsychists are both missing an essential piece of the puzzle: how minds can come together or break apart to form other minds.6 Thankfully, we have a solution that avoids these problems altogether . . .

Berkeley’s Boulevard The only way to close the mind–body explanatory gap is to avoid opening it up in the first place. To keep the gap closed, we need to do away with all vestiges of mind-independent matter and follow the idealist route! Western philosophy took a wrong turn when it travelled down Descartes’s Drive. It’s time to return to Berkeley’s Boulevard.7 But not to Berkeley’s specific address. Recall that his basic building-blocks were: God, immaterial minds and their ideas. The idealist system being proposed here keeps ‘minds’ and ‘ideas’, but there’s one notable difference: we’re going to replace ‘God’ with consciousness. Let’s break this down. ‘Minds’ and their ‘ideas’ make up the whole range of conscious experiences. So, what are they? Think of the ‘mind’ in the way we normally think about it (a conscious subject) and ‘ideas’ as the qualities that make up all of our experiences of the world (sights, sounds, thoughts, etc.). To use our previous

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example, my ‘mind’ will experience the ‘idea’ of pain when I step on a piece of glass along with an ‘idea’ of glass that is stepped on. It’s that simple. Now we must face our greatest challenge. Without God to hold everything in place, somehow, we need to bring minds, ideas and consciousness together to account for the appearance of the physical world.

Panpsychist idealism The view being proposed can be seen as a development of panpsychism, but with idealist rather than materialist underpinnings. Let’s call it ‘panpsychist idealism’.8 Panpsychist idealism says that there is no mind-independent material universe. It doesn’t exist. Everything physical is, in fact, mental. This goes a step further than the usual ‘panpsychist materialism’. For them, the physical structure of such things as atoms and brains needn’t be experienced by other conscious minds in order to exist. Even if conscious on the inside, their outer physical nature is mind-independent. In panpsychist idealism the things we call ‘physical’ need to be experienced by other minds in order to exist. To put it another way, instead of conscious subjects being trapped inside a mind-independent material universe (as those living in Descartes’s shadow would have us believe), images of a mind-independent material universe are trapped inside conscious subjects! Conscious subjects are centred perspectives to which the imagery of what we call ‘the world’ appears. The world is grounded in consciousness and its qualities. Therefore, panpsychist idealism eliminates the problem of figuring out how conscious subjects can fit into a mind-independent world; the solution is that the world isn’t mindindependent, but mind-dependent. The hard problem of consciousness is to explain where consciousness comes from. This view solves that problem: it says that consciousness is the underlying nature of the world. It also avoids the challenge of explaining how a non-material mind can interact with the world, because the world is nonmaterial too. Now there’s only one problem remaining: how does panpsychist idealism avoid the combination problem?

Grab the cosmic popcorn Suppose you’re at the cinema watching Adam Sandler’s latest movie. Among your many experiences are movie sounds, bad acting and the delightful taste

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of caramel popcorn. ‘Consciousness’ is the unified field of awareness in which these The term ‘cognisensory’ is different experiences unfold. Even if you’re used to refer to all of the not attending to all of them, there’s a cognitive and sensory experiences that can occur registering aspect that knows that they’re in conscious minds. all present at once. ‘Conscious awareness’ registers all this cognisensory imagery – and here’s the important bit – while being simultaneously alive to itself. Consciousness, without all of this cognisensory imagery, still exists – there’s a pure state of consciousness in all of us, which has this sort of inner glow. Think of it like this: just as the sun, while illuminating objects, carries self-shining brightness in its nature, conscious awareness – while illuminating our experiences – has a self-shining presence too. Since consciousness is usually beamed at objects, it’s hard for us to notice at first, but if you reflect on it, you’ll come to see that consciousness has its own presence. Consciousness is, in essence, pure and independent of our experiences. Now, recall that we’re walking the path of the panpsychist idealist. On this view, ‘pure consciousness’ underlies what we take to be the physical cosmos. This conscious background is the source from which conscious subjects like ourselves, with all our experiences of objects, arise. The conscious field doesn’t belong to us. It’s a pure, perspective-less consciousness – the inner glow underlying all of existence. While it’s alive to its own presence, it doesn’t depend upon any objects or parameters. This completely avoids the combination problem faced by the standard panpsychist materialist. On this view, conscious perspectives come from a perspective-less ground of pure consciousness. The problem of how perspectives can come from other perspectives doesn’t arise here. But how do perspectives come from perspective-less consciousness? Simply through the arising, within consciousness, of cognisensory imagery! Just as Berkeley thought, minds and ideas go together. All imagery brings in for free a perspective to which it’s experienced. Whoever heard of a pain that was felt by no one? We’re close to solving the mystery. Nevertheless, some people might say that they find this ‘pure, perspective-less consciousness’ to be inconceivable. They may even object: ‘Can we even make sense of consciousness without a perspective?’

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The cognisensory deprivation tank Imagine that in the same laboratory famed for Miller’s zombie implant,9 a team of mad scientists have created their next great invention: the cognisensory deprivation tank. This machine, the scientists say, disintegrates the structure of your perspective by removing all of the contents within your mind, leaving only the conscious field. They tell you that if you get into the tank, you’ll start out as a subject with a normal range of experiences and end up with pure consciousness: unbounded by space, time and perspective. After passing up on the zombie implant, you’re guilted into doing your bit for science, and you step into the tank. While strapping in, you consider the objects of your experience which make you part of the spatio-temporal world. Visual imagery, such as the sight of lab coats and clipboards, is a major spatial cue. So are sounds, bodily feelings and the sense of recognizing where objects are. ‘Without these’, you think, ‘how could I retain any sense of occupying space?’ Likewise, the flow of memories and imaginations and all cognisensory imagery lend the impression of passing time to your experience. They convey the subtle sense of being an embodied self: a ‘you’ that is the thinker, owner and agent of life’s experiences. The cognisensory deprivation tank is switched on, and it starts to cut out the different groups in your perceptual imagery. First to go is your visual imagery. Then go the sounds, followed by the odours, tastes and bodily feelings. Your cognitive imagery starts to disappear as well: your thoughts, memories and imaginings. And finally, all of the imagery goes . . . all that remains is a conscious field. Suddenly, the switch is reversed, your imagery returns, and with it, a centred perspective on the world re-appears! The scientists thank you for your time, give you a sticker and a lollipop, and send you on your way. Do you think you’ll see the world as you did before? It’s unlikely that you will. Consider the following analogy. Imagine a person who has only ever seen space from the confines of a windowless room. If that’s all they’ve ever seen, they’ll assume that space is limited to the dimensions of that room. Now, the day comes when we release them into the open air, and it dawns on them almost immediately: they were wrong about space! While the room they once occupied continues to look square-shaped upon their return, they’ll no longer perceive space as being limited to this dimension. Similarly, before you

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entered the cognisensory deprivation tank, you had only experienced consciousness through the lens of an object-viewing mind, generating the impression that consciousness is confined to a person’s particular perspective. Experiencing consciousness without a perspectival subject or its objects will shatter any impression of limitation! After the switch is flicked, you won’t forget the true nature of consciousness! So, what’s the moral of the story? When the Tank has taken all of the imagery away, if a conscious field does remain – alive to its own presence – then the thought experiment shows us that we can make sense of ‘limitless consciousness’. This consciousness isn’t bound by space (all spatial cues have gone) or the passing of time (all temporal cues have gone). It’s pure consciousness . . . and this consciousness is the very fabric of the world.

Coming home Out of the cognisensory deprivation tank, we return to the world with our new-found outlook. We walk down the same old streets, but nothing seems as it did. The same squirrels, trees and people pass us by, but we’re haunted by a new question; now we ask, ‘Which of these things has its own perspective?’ If we know the world to be consciousness, which things within it are subjects of experience? That which we call ‘squirrel’ and ‘person’ are obvious candidates. They’ll have the same kinds of objects and ideas in their minds as me! But what about the imagery that we call ‘rock’ or ‘apple’? These don’t have their own perspectives. It’s more likely that they are raw outer presentations of a collection of simpler perspectives that microscopically appear to us as ‘atoms’. But you might think this raises a problem of its own. If rocks and apples only exist when they’re perceived by conscious minds, how do they continue to exist when we stop looking? What stops apples from disappearing when we close our eyes? For Berkeley, a watchful God is supposed to keep apple-images alive when we leave the room, making sure they don’t disappear or turn into bananas! But what happens when we swap God for pure consciousness? Assuming atoms (rather than apples) to be the relevant subjects, when we close our eyes, these subjects continue to exist as experiences for each other. We leave behind a network of micro-subjects that appear to one another in the form of simple imagery. And all this is sustained by pure consciousness.

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The world as consciousness We won’t get anywhere if we continue to pace up and down Descartes’s Drive. The dualists can’t tell us how immaterial minds can interact with a material world, the materialists don’t know how conscious subjects can emerge from a non-conscious universe, and the panpsychist materialists can’t show us how perspectives can combine to form other perspectives. Panpsychist idealism avoids all of these problems. The cognisensory deprivation tank showed us a way to conceive of the conscious field at the heart of reality. It’s a field unbound by perspective, imagery, space and passing time. Conscious minds arise out of this pure consciousness reflecting one another as images of the world: that’s the simplest, most elegant explanation.

Afterthoughts The mystery of consciousness has taken us further than we could ever have imagined. If Albahari is right, we no longer face the problem of explaining how minds can exist in a non-mental, material world. The world, says Miri – following the mystics – unfolds on a great cosmic stage: the stage of pure, perspective-less consciousness. There is no material world. There is no hard problem of consciousness. There is no mind–body problem. Not if we see the world for what it really is. Not if we are aware of the world as consciousness. For many of us, the question is whether or not this answer comes at too high a price. Are we prepared to renounce the mind-independent material world in the name of consciousness? Maybe that’s what it will take. However, in the West, I think most people would rather follow in Descartes’s footsteps than Berkeley’s. They want the external material world and consciousness – they want to have their cake and to eat it too. If there’s a lesson to this book, it’s that – on our present understanding – we just can’t have both. Maybe we need to deny the existence of one. So, which is it going to be?

Questions to consider 1. What would the world look like inside the cognisensory deprivation tank?

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2. Why do you think philosophers have followed René Descartes over Bishop Berkeley in preserving the external material world?

3. Is the denial of external physical brains just as unreasonable as the denial of consciousness?

4. Is panpsychist idealism more plausible than panpsychist materialism? 5. Is panpsychist idealism too outlandish to be true?

Recommended reading Advanced Miri Albahari, ‘Perennial Idealism: A Mystical Solution to the Mind–Body Problem’, Philosophers’ Imprint, vol. 19, no. 44 (2019): 1–37. Albahari unpacks the ideas covered in this chapter in greater detail. This is the best place to go if you’re looking for a technical and thorough account of Miri’s solution to the mind–body problem. The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism, ed. William Seager (London: Routledge, 2019). This collection of academic essays should give you a comprehensive guide to the history of panpsychism and its most recent developments. There’s a great chapter by Albahari on universal consciousness, as well as an essay by Chalmers titled ‘Idealism and the Mind–Body Problem’. Intermediate Miri Albahari, ‘Panpsychism and the Inner-Outer Gap Problem’, The Monist, forthcoming. This paper provides an accessible development of Albahari’s ideas that are covered in this chapter. It advances a novel argument (the ‘InnerOuter Gap Problem’) against panpsychist materialism and in favour of panpsychist idealism. Muruganar, Padamalai: Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi, trans. Dr T.V. Venkatasubramanian, Robert Butler and David Godman, ed. David Godman (Boulder, CO: Avadhuta Foundation, 2004). While expounding Ramana Maharshi’s philosophy, this book includes chapters that go further into the origin and nature of pure consciousness as ultimate metaphysical reality.

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Beginner Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi, ed. David Godman (London: Penguin Books, 1988). An accessible introduction to the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, from which Albahari extrapolates her metaphysical system. Bernardo Kastrup, ‘The Unexpected Origin of Matter’, Institute of Art and Ideas, March 2020, www.iai.tv/articles/matter-is-nothing-more-than-the-extrinsicappearance-of-inner-experience-auid-1372. In this short article, Kastrup makes a similar case to Albahari: the hard problem will never be answered if we try to explain how consciousness fits into a materialist universe. The only credible solution, says Kastrup, is to pursue an idealist solution.

Notes & Sources Chapter One 1 Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–50. 2 George Orwell, George Orwell: In Front of Your Nose, 1945–1950, vol. 4: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 125. 3 Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 42–45. 4 One may wonder whether some people would take the zombie implant to save another person’s life: maybe their parent’s life, or perhaps the lives of their own children. They may well do, and that would make them a particularly noble person. However, recognizing the level of sacrifice only reinforces the importance of consciousness. If you’re going to be zombified, it better be worth it. 5 Joni Mitchell, ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, Ladies of the Canyon (Warner Records, 1970). 6 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 43. 7 Ibid. 8 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 302–13. 9 Galen Strawson, ‘Cognitive Phenomenology: Real Life’, in Cognitive Phenomenology, ed. Tim Bayne and Michelle Montague (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 299. 10 The point here is similar to that of John Searle’s ‘Chinese room’ thought experiment: without consciousness language isn’t meaningful. See John Searle, ‘Minds, Brains, and Programs’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 3, no. 3 (1980): 417–24.

Chapter Two 1 ‘30 Most Influential Psychologists Working Today’, Best Masters in Psychology, 2013, www.bestmastersinpsychology.com/30-most-influentialpsychologists-working-today. 2 Gianluigi Ricuperati, 100 Global Minds: The Most Daring Cross-Disciplinary Thinkers in the World (Dublin: Roads Publishing, 2015). 3 Susan Blackmore, Conversations on Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 74. 4 Ibid., 129–30.

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5 William James, The Principles of Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1890). 6 Edward Tolman, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1932). 7 Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–50. 8 Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 146. 9 Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (London: Picador, 2011), 25–46. 10 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Little, Brown, 1991). 11 In the actual experiments, real-world photographs are used to simulate the reality of change blindness in day-to-day life. 12 A good example of this is the infamous ‘gorilla experiment’. See Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, ‘Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events’, Perception, vol. 28, no. 9 (1999): 1059–74. 13 Patricia Churchland, ‘The Hornswoggle Problem’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 3, no. 5/6 (1996): 402–8.

Chapter Three 1 Francis Crick and Christof Koch, ‘Toward a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness’, Seminars in the Neurosciences, vol. 2 (1990): 263–75. 2 Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 3 Tom Stoppard, The Hard Problem (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 11. 4 Patricia Churchland, ‘The Hornswoggle Problem’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 3, no. 5/6 (1996): 408. 5 Further information about the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness can be found on their website, www.theassc.org. 6 David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 7 ‘David Chalmers on the Nature and Ethics of Consciousness’, The 80,000 Hours Podcast, 2019, 01:38:13–01:38:30, www.80000hours.org/podcast/ episodes/david-chalmers-nature-ethics-consciousness. 8 Susan Blackmore, Conversations on Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 42. 9 David Chalmers, ‘The Meta-Problem of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 25, no. 9/10 (2018): 6–61. 10 Galen Strawson, ‘A Hundred Years of Consciousness: “A Long Training in Absurdity” ’, Estudios de Filosofía, no. 59 (2019), 32. 11 Galen Strawson, ‘Galileo’s Error by Philip Goff review – a new science of consciousness’, The Guardian, December 2019, www.theguardian.com/ books/2019/dec/27/galileos-error-by-philip-goff-review.

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12 Chalmers popularized ‘philosophical zombies’ through his book The Conscious Mind. 13 Chalmers discusses this same argument in his own work. See The Conscious Mind, 139. 14 For an introduction to this idea, see Kevin McQueen, ‘Does Consciousness Cause Quantum Collapse’, Philosophy Now, 2017, www.philosophynow.org/ issues/121/Does_Consciousness_Cause_Quantum_Collapse. 15 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp, vol. 2, 3rd edition (Boston, MA: Ticknor, 1887), 176. 16 This example is borrowed from Colin McGinn, Consciousness and its Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 145.

Chapter Four 1 Frank Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 127 (1982): 127–36. 2 Frank Jackson’s original is less ominous. 3 For why it had to go wrong, see Frank Jackson, ‘Postscript on Qualia’, in Mind, Method, and Conditionals: Selected Essays (London: Routledge, 1998): 76–79. For where it goes wrong, see Frank Jackson, ‘Mind and Illusion’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, vol. 53 (2003): 251–72.

Chapter Five 1 Michelle Montague, The Given: Experience and its Content (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 2 Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 3 Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, ed. Oskar Kraus and Linda McAlister, trans. Antos Rancurello, Dailey Terrell and Linda McAlister, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 1995), 98. 4 Montague, The Given, 75–84. 5 Peter Strawson, ‘Perception and its Objects’, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Michelle Montague and Galen Strawson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 133. 6 This is not an advertisement. Toblerone© – sigh – have not sponsored this book. 7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, 3rd edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 194. 8 One notable exception comes to mind. See Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails (London: Penguin Books, 2017).

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Chapter Six 1 Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (London: Bantam, 2010), 13. 2 See Philosophy’s Future: The Problem of Philosophical Progress, ed. Russell Blackford and Damien Broderick (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017). 3 Massimo Pigliucci, ‘Philosophy as the Evocation of Conceptual Landscapes’, in Philosophy’s Future, ed. Russell Blackford and Damien Broderick, 75–90. 4 See Alan F. Chalmers, What Is This Thing Called Science?, 3rd edition (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999). 5 René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, ed. Paul J. Olscamp, revised edition (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001), 27–28. 6 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies, ed. John Cottingham, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 7 Frank Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 127 (1982): 130. 8 Owen Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered (London: MIT Press, 1992), 98. 9 Ibid. 10 Paul M. Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 62–63. 11 David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 12 Keith Campbell, Body and Mind (London: Macmillan, 1970), 100–1. 13 Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 32. 14 Plato, Timaeus, trans. Donald J. Zeyl (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000), 30a. 15 Some Stoics identified Logos with God. See Massimo Pigliucci, How to Be a Stoic: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living (London: Penguin Books, 2017), 79–91. 16 Keith Frankish, ‘Why Panpsychism Is Probably Wrong’, The Atlantic, September 2016, www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/ panpsychism-is-wrong/500774. 17 See Wallace Chafe, ‘How consciousness shapes language’, Pragmatics & Cognition, vol. 4, no. 1 (1996): 35–54 and Michael Arbib, ‘Co-evolution of Human Consciousness and Language’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 929 (2001): 195–220. 18 Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’, in Frontiers of Science and Philosophy, ed. Robert Colodny (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), 37. 19 Ibid., 37–78. 20 See James Ladyman and Don Ross, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and Scientific

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Metaphysics, ed. Don Ross, James Ladyman and Harold Kincaid (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Chapter Seven 1 Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). 2 Frank Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 127 (1982): 127–36. 3 Churchland, Neurophilosophy, 330–34. 4 Patricia Churchland, ‘The Hornswoggle Problem’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 3, no. 5/6 (1996): 406–7. 5 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Little, Brown, 1991), 321–68. 6 Patricia Churchland and V.S. Ramachandran, ‘Filling In: Why Dennett Is Wrong’, in Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind, ed. Bo Dahlbom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 28–52. 7 Further information about Philosophers in Biology and Medicine can be found on their website, www.philinbiomed.org. 8 Patricia Churchland, email to the editor, May 2020.

Chapter Eight 1 The beetle box story is inspired by a famous example used by Wittgenstein. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, 3rd edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 100. 2 This is not an advertisement. Marmite© are – sadly – not affiliated with this book. 3 Philip Goff, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (London: Penguin Books, 2019), 26. 4 Galen Strawson, ‘A Hundred Years of Consciousness: “A Long Training in Absurdity” ’, Estudios de Filosofía, no. 59 (2019), 32. 5 More accurately, a vast collection of news reports all being told at the same time, as multiple channels of sensory information and interpretation unfold in the brain. This is known as the ‘multiple drafts theory’. See Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Little, Brown, 1991), 101–38. 6 Susan Blackmore, ‘Delusions of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 23, no. 11–12 (2016), 52. 7 Daniel Dennett, ‘Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness’, in Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness, ed. Keith Frankish (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2017), 80–89.

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8 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies, ed. John Cottingham, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 9 René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, ed. Paul J. Olscamp, revised edition (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001). 10 Keith Frankish, ‘Postscript to ‘What is it like to be a bot?”, 2018, KeithFrankish.com, www.keithfrankish.com/publications-by-date.

Chapter Nine 1 ‘The Global Thought Leaders 2013’, Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, 2013, www. gdi.ch/en/publications/trend-updates/global-thought-leaders-2013. 2 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Little, Brown, 1991), 72. 3 Ibid., 96. 4 For more on the Cartesian Theatre and the multiple drafts theory, see Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 101–38. 5 Frank Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 127 (1982): 127–36. 6 Jackson himself says that the knowledge argument should be transferable to bodily sensations. Here, Dennett uses this idea against him. See Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, 130. 7 Although panpsychism’s an ancient worldview, it made its way into the modern debate primarily through the work of Galen Strawson and David Chalmers – in that order. Strawson discussed panpsychism in his book Mental Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994) and Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), but the real spark was Strawson’s paper ‘Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 13, no. 10/11 (2006): 3–31. 8 Daniel Dennett, ‘Facing Up to the Hard Question of Consciousness’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol. 373, no. 1755 (2018), www.royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.0342. 9 Philip Goff, email to the editor, January 2021. 10 Strawson, ‘The Consciousness Deniers’, The New York Review of Books, March 2018, www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers. 11 Ibid.

Chapter Ten 1 Galen Strawson, ‘The Consciousness Deniers’, The New York Review of Books, March 2018, www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousnessdeniers.

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2 Uriah Kriegel referenced in Strawson, ‘A Hundred Years of Consciousness: “A Long Training in Absurdity” ’, Estudios de Filosofía, no. 59 (2019): 32. 3 This argument is borrowed from Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15. 4 Strawson’s description of Dennett in ‘A Hundred Years of Consciousness’, 34. 5 Daniel Dennett, ‘Are We Explaining Consciousness Yet?’, Cognition, vol. 79, no. 1/2 (2001): 224. 6 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Little, Brown, 1991), 405. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 406. 9 Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (London: Penguin Books, 2013), 285. 10 Strawson, ‘The Consciousness Deniers’. 11 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Penguin Books, 2012), 217. 12 See Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2018), 110–29. 13 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam, 1998), 174. 14 Examples include Erwin Schrödinger, Hendrik Lorentz and Louis de Broglie. 15 Philip Goff, email to the editor, January 2021. 16 A short and fairly accessible excerpt from Cavendish’s works can be found in Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period, ed. Margaret Atherton (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994).

Chapter Eleven 1 Goff, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (London: Penguin Books, 2019), 98. 2 Ibid., 117. 3 See David Papineau, ‘The Problem of Consciousness’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, ed. Uriah Kriegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 33. 4 Thank you to Galen Strawson for suggesting this response.

Chapter Twelve 1 Ramana Maharshi, ‘Arunachala Ashtakam’, in The Five Hymns to Arunachala and Other Poems, trans. K. Swaminathan (Tiruvannamalai: Sri Ramanasramam, 2001), 121.

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2 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies, ed. John Cottingham, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 3 George Berkeley, ‘A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge’, in Berkeley: Philosophical Writings, ed. Desmond Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 4 Philip Goff, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 171. 5 From here, the ‘combination’ and ‘decombination’ problems are referred to collectively as ‘the combination problem’. 6 Most versions of panpsychism hold the cosmos or its smallest parts to take the inner form of minds with perspectives. It is to these versions that the combination problems apply. 7 For other recent developments in idealism, see David Chalmers, ‘Idealism and the Mind–Body Problem’, in The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism, ed. William Seager (London: Routledge, 2019), 353–73. 8 This view is technically called ‘perennial idealism’. Albahari previously said that this wasn’t a panpsychist position – see Miri Albahari, ‘Perennial Idealism: A Mystical Solution to the Mind–Body Problem’, Philosophers’ Imprint, vol. 19, no. 44 (2019): 1–37 – but has since changed her mind. Brentyn Ramm, to whom Albahari conversationally owes the term ‘panpsychist idealism’, is developing another version of the position. 9 Recall Miller’s thought experiment in our opening chapter.

Index Page numbers: Notes are given as [page number] n. a priori knowledge 71 adaptation 71 Albahari, Miri 141, 150, 160n. ‘Panpsychism and the InnerOuter Gap Problem’ 151 Allen-Hermanson, Sean, ‘Panpsychism’ 138 animals behaviourism 14 biology of 70–1 ethics 7 moral status 6, 34 panpsychism and 136–7 radical emergence 123 anti-naturalism 119 anti-physicalism 40 Aristotle 64–5, 77–8, 102, 128 armchair philosophy 63, 65 autophenomenology 103 awareness of awareness thesis 53–5

‘There is No Stream of Consciousness’ 23 Zen and the Art of Consciousness 24 blindsight 26 Boyle, Robert 64 brain hemispheres 77 brain imaging 29, 130–1 brain–mind studies 75, 79, 130 brain processes assumptions 19–20 fear as 82 illusionism 92 subjective experience 26–7 brains computer comparison 71 control systems 93, 94 brainstem 3, 84 Brentano, Franz 52–4 Buddhism 22

Bacon, Francis 64 bat experiment 14–15 Bayne, Tim, ‘Consciousness as a Guide’ 8 beetle box problem 90–2, 97, 111, 157n. ‘begging the question’ 119–20 behaviourism 13–14 Berkeley, George (Bishop Berkeley) 142–3, 145–6, 150 biological approach 4, 17–18, 63–74 Blackmore, Susan 11, 13, 22, 25–6, 28–9, 32, 83–4, 97 Consciousness: Introductions 23 Conversations 23 ‘Delusions of Consciousness’ 23

Campbell, Keith 68 Body and Mind 68 ‘cannot imagine’ arguments 80 Carruthers, Peter, ‘There is No Such Thing as Conscious Thought’ 62 Cartesian circle 66 Cartesian Theatre 99, 105–6 Cavendish, Margaret 123, 159n. Philosophical Letters 123 central thalamus 84 cerebellum 3 cerebrum 3 Chalmers, David 15, 18, 25, 35, 53, 68–70, 77–9, 108–9, 158n. The Conscious Mind 30, 36

161

162

Index

‘Consciousness and its Place in Nature’ 36 ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’ 36 ‘How Can We Construct a Science of Consciousness?’ 36 ‘Much Ado About Consciousness’ 36–7 change blindness experiment 21 chemistry 64 Chinese room experiment 8 Chrucky, Andrew, ‘Much Ado About Consciousness’ 36–7 Churchland, Patricia 12, 21, 27–9, 67, 75, 85–6, 101 Brain-Wise 86–7 ‘Brains Wide Shut?’ 87 ‘Can Neurobiology Teach?’ 87 ‘The Hornswoggle Problem’ 87 Neurophilosophy 87 Touching a Nerve 87 Churchland, Paul 67 classical conditioning 13 cognisensory deprivation tank 148–50 cognisensory imagery 147–8 cognitive disorders 18 cognitive maps 14 cognitive phenomenology 5, 50, 56–7, 59–60 cognitive psychology 104 Coleman, Sam, The Knowledge Argument 46 colour constancy 44 colour experiences 41–5 colour solid 44 colour vision 39–40, 44–5, 79–80, 106–7 combination problem 70, 122, 133, 137, 145, 160n. computer–brain comparison 71 conceivability 68–9, 72 concepts experience and 60 meaning and 58

scientific progress 77 thought and 56 conditioning behaviour 13 ‘conscies’ 17, 32–3, 83–4 conscious awareness 147 conscious experience existence of 120 explaining 51 as illusion 95–7, 115 qualitative properties 14, 93 conscious subjects, imagery 146–9 conscious thought 5, 51, 58, 60 consciousness day-to-day implications 33–4 defining 14–15 denying 92–3, 113–25, 131, 144 essential qualities 93 evolution of 17–18 as experience 2 explaining 25–6 knowledge of 119–21 life as 11 science of 27–30 the world as 141–52 consciousness line 15 consciousness meter 29 continuity, illusion of 18–22 control systems, brain 93–4 corpus callosum 76–7 cosmopsychism 144–5 Cotard’s syndrome 54–5 Crick, Francis 12, 26, 78 Dainton, Barry, ‘Consciousness as a Guide’ 8 Darwin, Charles 81 data-based theories 85, 103, 105 datum 53–4 decombination problem 145, 160n. dementia 19 the Deniers 109, 115, 118, 120, 124 Dennett, Daniel 12, 29, 50, 60, 77, 82, 97, 101, 109–11, 113, 115–16, 120–1, 134 Brainstorms 112

Index Consciousness Explained 19, 26, 82, 104, 110, 111–12, 116 From Bacteria to Bach and Back 112 ‘Illusionism’ 112 ‘Magic, Illusions, and Zombies’ 112 ‘Papineau vs Dennett’ 112 depersonalization 54–5 Descartes, René 65–6, 102, 105, 118, 120, 142–3, 150 Meditations 66, 102 descriptive approach 53 discrimination 106, 109 dualism 16, 50–1, 70, 102, 130–1, 143–4, 150 denouncing 105 ‘hard problem’ and 108 knowledge argument 106 logic defied 77 materialists’ connection 135 duck–rabbit example 56, 58–61 Eastern traditions, illusion 22 ‘easy problems’ of consciousness 16, 27–8, 77–8 economics 64 Eddington, Arthur 132–4 Einstein, Albert 81 Einstein’s theory of general relativity 69, 132 eliminativism 51 emotions, evaluative properties 57 empiricism 58 epiphenomenalism 30 epistemic warrants 65 ethical subject 5–7 ethics 7, 136 evaluative phenomenology 50, 57 evolutionary approach 17–18, 32–3, 70–2, 83–4, 96, 122–3 existence certainty of 66 of conscious experience 120 denial of 114

163

experience of living 4 qualitative nature of 46, 93–4 recognizing/describing 93–4 transparency of 42–5 see also conscious experience experience machine 2–7 experimental psychology 104 experimental science 64 fear 57, 82 feeling 6, 19, 71, 84, 92, 109, 134, 148 ‘filling-in’ 82 first philosophy 70, 73 see also metaphysics first-person experience 52, 71, 103–5, 109 Flanagan, Owen 67 Consciousness Reconsidered 67 Frankish, Keith 70, 82, 89, 97, 101, 109–11, 113, 115, 121, 131 ‘The Consciousness Illusion’ 98 ‘The Demystification’ 98–9 ‘The Lure of the Cartesian Sideshow’ 99 ‘The Meta-Problem’ 98 ‘What is it Like to Be a Bot?’ 99 ‘Why Panpsychism Fails’ 125 free will 117–18 Freud, Sigmund 13 ‘frustration of aims’ 136 Galileo Galilei 64, 127–39 ‘Galileo’s error’ 127–39 Garvey, James, ‘Latter Day Physicalist’ 47 Gerner, Marina, ‘What Did Mary Know?’ 47 God as all-knowing 56 existence of 66, 142 replacing 145, 149 Godfrey-Smith, Peter, Other Minds 8 Goff, Philip 70, 81, 92, 108–9, 121, 123–4, 127, 137, 144

164

Index

‘The Case for Panpsychism’ 139 Consciousness 138 ‘Does Consciousness Pervade?’ 139 Galileo’s error 132, 138 ‘Is the Universe a Conscious Mind?’ 139 ‘Panpsychism’ 74, 138 Gorgias 114 On Nature 114 ‘gorilla experiment’ 154n. Greek culture, siren’s call 41 ‘hard problem’ of consciousness 15–16, 18, 21, 25–37, 53, 57, 68, 72, 77–8, 80, 90–1, 108–9, 146 Hawking, Stephen 63, 118 hedonism 2 Heraclitus 70 heterophenomenology 103–5 Hobbes, Thomas 123 Homo sapiens 71 ‘hornswoggle problem’ 21, 80–1 hue of colour 44 Hume, David 58 Husserl, Edmund 52 idealism 93, 143, 145–7, 150, 160n. ideas and minds 145–7 illusion consciousness as 11–24 of continuity 18–22 experience as 95–7 in illusionism 93–5 illusionism 31–2, 35, 82, 89–99 defence of 109–11 denying consciousness 92–3, 113, 115, 117–18, 121, 123–4, 131, 144 putting illusion in 93–5 as self-defeating 95–6 imagery 146–9 imagination argument 80 immediate acquaintance 121 impression of the world 142

incidental learning 13–14 information, substrate-independence 71 information gathering 41–2 information processing 3, 92–3 integrated information theory 83, 134 introspection 94–6, 110 Jackendoff, Ray, Consciousness 61 Jackson, Frank 39–40, 42, 44–6, 66–9, 79–80, 106–7 ‘Latter Day Physicalist’ 47 James, William 12–13, 64 Principles of Psychology 12–13 Kahneman, Daniel 117 Kastrup, Bernardo, ‘The Unexpected Origin of Matter’ 152 Keim, Brandon, ‘Never Underestimate’ 8–9 ‘knowing’, confusion about 67 knowledge argument 40–7, 66–7, 79–80, 106–7, 158n. ‘knowledge-how’ 67–8 ‘knowledge-that’ 67–8 Koch, Christof 12, 26, 83 Korsakoff syndrome 18 Kriegel, Uriah 114 lightness of colour 44 linguistic physicalism 67 ‘livingness’ 78 Locke, John 5 locus coeruleus 84 logical possibility 68–9 ‘Logos’ 70, 156n. Maharshi, Ramana 141 Be As You Are 152 manifest images 72 ‘Mary the neuroscientist’ 39–47, 49, 63, 66–9, 79–80, 106–7 mass 132 materialism 108–9, 114, 130, 143–4, 150

Index panpsychism and 123, 146–7, 150 plant–animal division 136 view of universe 134–5 see also physicalism mathematical theories 128–9 matter behaviour of 132 consciousness as 114, 118–19, 122–3, 133, 144 intrinsic nature of 133 mind connection 143 quantitative features 129, 132 meaning concepts and 58 source of 5, 6–7 melatonin 105 memory 5, 19, 49, 58 mental essences/qualities 91–2 mental states 52, 75, 115–16 mentality 69 meta-problem of consciousness 31 metaphysical facts 80 metaphysical physicalism 67 metaphysical possibility 69 metaphysics 50, 64, 72, 80, 85 see also first philosophy micropsychism 144–5 Miller, Gregory 1, 5, 7, 8, 11 mind–body problem 16, 142–3, 145 mind–ideas connection 145–7 mindfulness 20, 22 Mitchell, Joni 4 Montague, Michelle 49, 60, 109 The Given 51, 61 moral responsibility 117–18, 135 moral status 6, 33–5 Mørch, Hedda Hassel 133–4 multiple drafts theory 106, 157n. Muruganar, Padamalai 151 mysterians 16 mystical experiences 141 Nagel, Thomas 2, 14 ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ 8, 14–15

165

natural philosophy 64 natural selection 17, 71, 83–4, 122 naturalism 118–19, 121, 123 nature laws of 133 scientific inquiry 76 negative charge 132–3 neural correlates 28–9, 31 neural signalling 93–4 neural tissues 108 neurobiological developments 84 neurophilosophy 76–7 neuroscience 12, 15–16, 18, 27–8, 39–47, 72, 129–31 laws of nature 133 philosophy connection 76–7 progress in 84–5 zombies and 77–80 Newton, Isaac 64 Nida-Rümelin, Martine, ‘Qualia’ 47 Nozick, Robert 2, 4–5 Anarchy, State, and Utopia 2 O Conaill, Donchadh, ‘Qualia’ 47 object and perception 54 objective events 16 objective statements 114–15 Ockham’s razor 59, 131 operant conditioning 13 Orwell, George 2 ownership 55 pain 34, 109, 115, 117, 121, 144–5 pan-nifty-ism 108, 134 panpsychism 51, 81–3, 85, 108–9, 144–5, 158n. biological perspective 63, 69–70 combination problem 160n. defence of 121–3, 132–9 ‘hard problem’ 32 knowledge argument 106 panpsychist idealism 146–7, 150, 160n. panpsychist materialism 146–7, 150 Papineau, David

166 ‘Materialism’ 37 ‘Papineau vs Dennett’ 112 Penrose, Roger 26 The Emperor’s New Mind 26 perception/perceptual experiences 41–3, 54, 95 ‘perennial idealism’ 160n. perspective problem 147–9 phenomenology 49–54, 55–8, 103–5 ‘Philosophers in Biology and Medicine’ 85, 157n. philosophical zombies 17, 63, 68–9, 155n. philosophy progress of 63–6, 102 purpose of 101–2 philosophy of mind 65, 102 philosophy of science 64–5 physical possibility 68–9 physical reality see matter physical science, limitations of 129, 132–3, 136–7 physicalism 30–2, 35, 40–7, 66–7, 69, 108–9 see also eliminativism; materialism physics laws of 69 limitations 123, 144 philosophy relation 64 revolution in 81 ‘silence of ’ 118 Pigliucci, Massimo 63, 67, 69, 72–3, 101 ‘Consciousness is Real’ 74 ‘Mind Upload’ 73–4 ‘Must Science be Testable?’ 74 ‘Panpsychism’ 74 ‘Philosophy’ 74 ‘What Hard Problem?’ 74 pineal gland 16, 105, 143 Pinker, Steven 16 plant life 135–7

Index Plato 70 Timaeus 70 pleasure 34, 117 pleasure machine 2–7 pre-Socratic philosophers 65, 69–70 present experiences 49 Prinz, Jesse 58 ‘The Sensory Basis of Cognitive Phenomenology’ 61–2 psychological approach 11–14, 23–4, 26, 28, 102, 104 psychophysics 104 pure consciousness 147–50 qualia 14, 40, 107, 110, 115–16 qualities in science 127–9, 132–3 quantitative features 128, 129, 132, 133 quantum mechanics 33 radical emergence 122–3 Ramm, Brentyn 160n. raphe nucleus 84 real materialism 123 real naturalism 118–19, 121 reality access via consciousness 131 ‘can’t imagine’ argument 80 intrinsic nature of 118 mystical experiences 141 theories of 121, 128 reflectance profiles 43–5 ‘reflection’ 120–1 reticular activating system 84 robots 116–17 ‘rotating the image’ exercise 103–5 rudimentary consciousness 122 Russell, Bertrand 132–4 Sacks, Oliver 18–19 Sartre, Jean-Paul 52 saturation of colour 44 schizophrenia 54–5 Schulman, Ari, ‘What Is It Like to Know?’ 47

Index science ascendency of 123 concepts changed by 77 ‘hornswoggle problem’ 80–1 illusionism and 94 limitations of 67, 104 natural phenomena and 76 philosophy connections 63–5, 69, 72, 76–7, 85 third-party data 103 science of consciousness 27–30 scientific images 72 scientific metaphysics 72 scientific revolution 127–39 scientism 73 Seager, William, ‘Panpsychism’ 138 Searle, John, ‘Minds, Brains, and Programs’ 8 the self illusion and 20, 22 zombie implant and 4–5 self-consciousness 71 self-intimating phenomena 53 self-knowledge 94 Sellars, Wilfred 72 sensory consciousness 51–2, 60, 91 sensory phenomenology 49–52, 55–9, 61 sensory systems 93, 95 serotonin 84 Simard, Suzanne, ‘Never Underestimate’ 8–9 ‘simplicity thing’ 59 Singer, Peter, ‘Are Insects Conscious?’ 9 siren’s call 41, 43–5 Skinner, B. F. 13 sleep 83–4 Smith, Adam 64 Smith, David, ‘Phenomenology’ 62 Socrates 65 sophism 114 sound waves 128 split-brain patients 76–7 spontaneous behaviour 93 Stoicism 70, 156n.

167

Stoppard, Tom, The Hard Problem 26 ‘strawman’ 110 Strawson, Galen 5, 32, 45, 81, 92, 108–11, 113–14, 119, 122–4, 158n. ‘Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery’ 125 Consciousness and its Place in Nature 124 ‘A Hundred Years of Consciousness’ 124–5 ‘Magic, Illusions, and Zombies 112 Real Materialism 124 Things That Bother Me 125 Strawson, P.F. 54, 117 stream of consciousness 11, 20–1, 22 strong emergence approach 133–4 sub-personal mechanisms 94–5 subjective experience 2, 16, 26–7, 91 subjective statements 114–15 substrate 71 suffering 6, 7, 117, 136 survival-enhancing colour vision 44 Thales of Miletus 65, 69 third-person phenomenology 103–5 thought concepts composing 56 ownership of 55 see also conscious thought Tolman, Edward 14 Purposive Behaviour 14 Tononi, Giulio 83 Tononi–Koch approach 83 ‘Toward a Science of Consciousness’ conference 29 transparency 42–5 transparency view 54 ‘tree falling’ question 127, 128, 135–6 Tye, Michael 52, 54 Ten Problems of Consciousness 62 universe, views of 69–70, 80, 134–5, 146 unsolvability 78

168 value moral status 33 panpsychism and 134–7 phenomenology and 57 source of 5, 7 vitalism 78 voluntary actions 3 ‘Vulcan trolley problem’ 34–5 Watson, James 12, 78 Watson, John B. 13 wave functions, collapsing 33

Index weak emergence approach 133 ‘wetware’ 143 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 157n. Wundt, Wilhelm 104 zombie implant experiment 3–7, 153n. ‘zombie trolley problem’ 34 zombies 3, 17, 32–5, 63, 78–9, 155n. conceivability 68–9 defining 116 natural selection and 83–4 neuroscience and 77–80

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