Download Ch 1: The reality problem

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Ch 1: The Conceptual Question
I. Three Questions
When God created the physical world was there any thing else he needed to do to
create phenomenal consciousness? This is a rough gloss on Saul Kripke’s formulation
of what is widely regarded, in the consciousness literature, as a rough gloss on the
Metaphysical Question about consciousness. More neutrally put, the question (as
David Chalmers has formulated it) is this. Suppose P is the complete physical truth
about the world. Suppose Q is an arbitrary phenomenal truth, about what it is like to
feel a mouse in one’s hand (Iris Murdoch), say, or to be a bat (Thomas Nagel). The
Metaphysical Question, as it currently understood is: Is P and not C a metaphysical
possibility? The metaphysical import of the question is that if such a conjunction is
metaphysically possible, materialism is false.
What is it about this question that makes it philosophically challenging? In
most accounts of the difficulty, there are two steps. The first step points to a potential
gap or distance between the concepts we use to describe the physical world, on the
one hand, and the concepts we use to capture the phenomenal qualitative aspects of
the mind, on the other. The gap of interest, if it exists, is said to be such that it makes
it hard to make sense of the location of consciousness in the natural world, hard to see
how such a location could be so much as intelligible. Let us call the question of
whether or not there is such a gap the Conceptual Question.
The second step says that this gap, if it exists, is problematic, metaphysically
speaking, if it can be shown to yield a metaphysical gap, that is, if it can be shown to
yield a form of dualism. If it can be shown to do so, the answer to the Metaphysical
Question is: Yes. And, for many, this means we have a metaphysical problem on our
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hands. Call the question of whether or not we can move from conceptual gaps to
metaphysical gaps, or problems, the Metaphysical Implications Question
In these terms, then, if you are a materialist, you might deny there is a
metaphysical problem because you deliver a negative answer to the Conceptual
Question, that is, you deny there is an unbridgeable gap between the concepts (so the
Metaphysical Implications Question doesn’t arise); or, you may agree there is a
conceptual gap, but deliver a negative answer to the Implications Question on grounds
that, roughly, deny the validity of move from conceptual to ontological possibility.
Much of the discussion in recent years of the Metaphysical Question of consciousness
has been concerned with this second response to the Metaphysical Implications
Question, and a great deal of interest has been said about the validity of moving from
conceptual to ontological claims. Indeed, this is one way of describing what much of
the metaphysical debate has been about.
My concern, in these terms, will be almost exclusively with the Conceptual
Question. The general way I will be approaching it, though, differs in several critical
respects from the way it is often approached in recent discussions. As a consequence
the way it links up with the Metaphysical Implications Question and indeed with the
Metaphysical Question itself is somewhat different, though, of course, there are many
points of contact. What I want to do in the next section, for orienting purposes, is give
a quick outline of the central features of what I will take to be the familiar current
consensus about how the Conceptual Question should be formulated. In subsequent
sections I will give a broad outline of the issues that arise when we follow the
alternative approach I will be proposing to the Conceptual Question, and explain
something of the motivation for adopting it, in a way that will serve, at the same time,
as an introduction to the topics the book will be concerned with.
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II. Entailment and Reduction
‘Phenomenal concepts’, on the minimal definition I will be using to begin with, are
the concepts we use to describe our experiences on the basis of introspection.
‘Physical concepts’, on the initial general definition I will be using, are the concepts
we need to deliver the complete truth about the physical world, coupled with the
concepts that appear in entailments from such a description. The Conceptual Question
is a question about the relation between these kinds of concept. In general, it is
possible to distinguish between two kinds of issue that come up here. The first
concerns the question of whether or not there is a potentially problematic
independence of phenomenal and physical concepts. Call this the ‘Conceptual
Independence Issue’. The second issue turns on whether or not locating consciousness
in the natural world, seeing it as part of the natural world, is so much as intelligible,
given the nature of our phenomenal and physical concepts respectively. Call this the
'Intelligibility Issue'.
There is obviously a close relation between these issues. How exactly one
conceives of the relation depends, in part, on how we expand on each one. The
following two renditions of both issues are, I think, widely accepted in current
discussions of the Conceptual Question of consciousness.
1. Independence: Two concepts are conceptually independent if there are no a priori
entailments from truths expressed one to those using another. (On some accounts
there will only be such entailments if we can provide an explicit complete analysis of
one concept in terms of the other but this is much debated, and for our purposes need
not be accepted). On this account of independence, then, to say that phenomenal
concepts are independent of physical concepts is to say that there are no a priori
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entailments from truths expressed in physical terms to truths expressed in phenomenal
terms. (For purposes of exposition I assume that linguistic terms express concepts and
so move between language and thought in my formulations of the issues).
2.Intelligibility: whether or not the location of consciousness in the natural world is
intelligible depends exclusively on the possibility of reductions of phenomenally
expressed truths to truth expressed using physical concepts only. The central issue is
the replacability of phenomenal by physical terms. The model here is reductive
accounts of natural macro-phenomena in microphysical terms. The question of
whether such reductions are possible is often, following Levine, described as the
questions of whether or not there is an ‘explanatory gap’ between consciousness and
physical descriptions of the world.
One debate, then, is about whether or not phenomenal concepts are
independent in the above sense from physical concepts. There are, very roughly, two
ways of trying to establish such independence. The first relies on direct, general
strategies for establishing the conceivability of the referents of one kind of concept
being instantiated without the referents of the other kind of concept being instantiated.
A much-discussed example of this kind of strategy is the appeal zombies. Zombies
are defined as creatures which are either physically identical to humans but which
lack phenomenal consciousness. If a world populated by zombies is conceivable, it is
claimed, this shows there are no a priori entailments from the complete physical truth
to phenomenal truths.
The other strategy rests on accounts of the specific nature of our phenomenal
and physical concepts respectively. The most common version of this type of
approach takes its point of departure from an intuition many people share, that
grasping and/or acquiring and properly using phenomenal concepts requires the
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capacity to have the experiences with the phenomena properties the concepts refer to.
This experience-dependence results in phenomenal concepts having a perspectival or
context dependent nature (there are several distinct proposals on how exactly this
perspectival nature should be explained). The idea then is that it is this perspectival
character of phenomenal concepts that blocks a priori entailments; it yields a kind of
epistemic opacity to the entailments.
If you deny such independence you are likely to insist on the possibility of
either functional or physical analyses (loosely understood) of phenomenal concepts.
Certainly this is the kind of grounds for denying independence that are usually
considered (though, I soon return to a different kind of reason for such a denial). I
think it is right to say that the majority of philosophers engaged in this debate deny
the possibility of such analyses, and much of the action in recent years has turned on
the problem of how the appeal to reduction, under the intelligibility heading, should
be understood.
The reduction debate turns on the following question. Suppose you hold that
there are no a priori entailments from physical to phenomenal truths. On one view,
this means there can be no reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness. On
the opposing view, successful reductions do not depend on such entailments, but,
ultimately, on brute identities such as Water=H20, which are not, on that view,
justified by entailments. The metaphysical stakes of this particular debate here are
immediate and high. Many philosophers have found attractive a position Chalmers
labels ‘Type B Materialism’, which allows a significant conceptual gap between
phenomenal and physical concepts, a gap sufficient to block a priori entailments, but
hold this is no bar to the location of consciousness in the natural world, the former
being a conceptual issue, the latter a purely ontological one. If reductions do require a
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priori entailments such a position is untenable, and some form of dualism is strongly
on the cards.
III. Claims to be pursued
This will have to do as a quick introductory survey of the way the Conceptual
Question is approached in recent debates about the intelligibility of locating
consciousness in the natural world. I will come back to specific issues raised in the
course of the book. But we already have sufficient materials for introducing the
problems I will be concerned with, and the claims I will be trying to make good.
My point of departure will be two separate accounts that have been offered of
the specific nature of our phenomenal and physical concepts respectively, accounts
that are meant to result in a kind of independence of the phenomenal from the
physical that would block a priori entailments. The first says the independence of
phenomenal and physical concepts stems from the fact that phenomenal concepts are
essentially perspectival and physical concepts are essentially non perspectival. Call
this the ‘Perspectival Independence Claim’. The second says that such it stems from
the fact that phenomenal concepts essentially do not refer to spatial and physical
properties and physical concepts, obviously, do. Call this the ‘Spatial Independence
Claim’.
Consider now the following claim about phenomenal concepts, as they are
used to describe the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences. On this account,
getting right the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences, on the basis of
introspection (a) requires uses of demonstratives to refer objects in fact perceived and
the properties they in fact have; and (b) requires the use of spatial indexicals such as
‘here’ to characterise the perspective from which the experience is had. Call this the
‘phenomenal externalist’ account of both phenomenal character and phenomenal
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concepts. If phenomenal externalism is right then (a) reference to space is integral to
the content of phenomenal concepts: the Spatial Independence Claim is wrong. And,
(b) on the face of it, perspectival concepts enter into our description of the physical
world. To get a clash with the perspectival route to independence, here, we would
need the stronger claim, which I will defend, that perspectival concepts such as ‘this’
and ‘here’ play an essential role in our physical description of the world. If this is
right, the Perspectival Independence Claim is also false.
One issue raised by phenomenal externalism is the substantive one of whether
or not it is right, and what are the substantive considerations that should go into
assessing it. I will be arguing that it is right. Very roughly, chapters 2 and 3 will be
concerned with defending it against the Perspectival Independence Claim, and
spelling out central substantive issues that need to be addressed under this heading.
Chapter 4-7 will devoted to doing the same for phenomenal externalism relative to the
Spatial Independence Claim..
A second issue is this. Suppose for the moment phenomenal externalism is
right. The way we have set things up so far, denial of both kinds of independence
claims, perspectival and spatial, should result in a claim to the effect that (a) we can
give an a priori analysis of phenomenal concepts in purely physical terms; and (b) the
intelligibility of the location of consciousness in the natural world will consist in the
reducibility of truths expressed in phenomenal terms to truth expressed in physical
terms.
Intuitively, though, the claim that getting right the phenomenal character of
experiences requires using physical perspectival concepts is much weaker than the
claim that we can give an exhaustive analysis to the content of phenomenal concepts
in purely physical terms; and, on the face of it, it does nothing to suggest that we have
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here the materials for an a priori reduction of truths expressed in phenomenal terms to
truths expressed in physical terms. One question here is: are there other notions of
conceptual dependence and other notions of intelligibility that we can appeal to in
explaining the links between phenomenal and physical concepts that would have to
hold if theses intuitions about the commitments of phenomenal externalism are to be
made good? A second question here is: are these notions sufficiently strong to deliver
a sense in which we can and do find the location of consciousness in the natural world
intelligible? The reason for asking this is that what I earlier described as the central
issue that is currently debated, namely the question of whether reductions need be a
priori in order for the location of consciousness in the natural world to be intelligible,
simply gets bypassed. So if phenomenal externalism does not yield reductions, we
need an alternative account of intelligible locations which is sufficiently robust and
motivated to justify bypassing this debate in this way.
The rest of this chapter will be devoted to introducing an alternative, non
reductive approach to intelligibility, an approach that is implicit in one famous
argument for there being a radical gap between phenomenal and physical concepts
due to the essential perspectivalness of the former and the essential nonperspectivalness of the latter. These will serve as an introduction to the substantive
consideration of the Perspectival Independence Claim in chapters 2 and 3. Before
that, to help with understanding where the very idea of phenomenal externalism is
coming from, I want to say a few introductory words about the general way I will be
pursuing intelligibility and independence issues that arise when we turn our attention,
in Chapter 4, to the Spatial Independence Claim.
IV. Two axes of naturalisation
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Anyone surveying the scene in philosophy of mind in the analytic tradition over the
past thirty years cannot but be struck by what can feel almost like a schism between
two quite different ways of approaching problems in explaining consciousness. The
first way of asking about consciousness is concerned with the place of consciousness
in nature. The questions here are: (a) how must we think of consciousness if we are to
fit into nature? And (b) does consciousness in fact meet these requirements? This is
what we have been calling the Metaphysical and Conceptual Questions. Concurrently
with this debate there is an unofficial consciousness debate. It is not usually labelled
as such, and is fuelled by traditional concerns with the question of whether and how
conscious experience provides us with access to the mind-independent world, the
world as it is in itself. Underpinning familiar arguments for and against the common
sense view that experience does present us with the mind-independent world we find
the materials for a concern with the nature of consciousness captured in the following
two questions. (a) How must we think of conscious experience if it does indeed
provide for such access? And (b) does consciousness in fact meet these requirements?
Call this the Perceptual Consciousness Question.
The immediate relevance to our concerns of the Perceptual Consciousness
Question is that addressing it shows up the difference between two radically different
ways of approaching the Metaphysical Question itself, and, hence the Conceptual
Question. The difference can be put in terms of a distinction Colin McGinn draws
between two axes along which, as he puts it, consciousness abuts the physical world.
The first ‘connects consciousness to the body and brain’. He calls this the axis of
embodiment. The second ‘connects consciousness to the objects and properties
represented by conscious states’. He calls this the axis of intentionality.
McGinn himself holds that any account of the location of consciousness in the
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natural world must give the axis of embodiment explanatory priority. I return to his
arguments (in order to reject them) in Chapter 4. It is certainly the case, his argument
apart, that it is usually assumed that the location of phenomenal consciousness in the
natural world will proceed along the axis of embodiment, via some kind of mapping
of phenomenal properties onto brain properties, either directly through type-type
identity claims, or indirectly through the identification of phenomenal character with
functional role, and via that, to the mapping of roles onto to realizing brain states on
particular occasions of experience.
However, once we have the distinction between the two axes before us, the
possibility arises of addressing the Metaphysical and Conceptual questions by
proffering the kind of account of perceptual consciousness that says that in order to
explain our access to the world through consciousness we must adopt a phenomenal
externalist account of consciousness. By this I mean, to repeat, an account that says
that there is no specifying the phenomenal character of particular conscious
experiences without reference to the objects presented in experience and the physical
components of the perspective from which they are had. The clearest (and I think
correct) account of this kind treats the experience of an object as an instantiation of an
acquaintance-like relation between the object and the subject (and/or subject’s located
perspective). If such an account of experience is right, the, on the face of it, we get a
location of the phenomenal aspects of an experience in the natural world through the
location of the phenomenology-determining relata of the experience, rather than
through a mapping of phenomenal properties onto brain properties. (Though, as we
shall see in Chapter 4, references to the brain might, on some versions of this kind of
account, come in as additional specifications of the kind of relation acquaintance is,
rather than via an account that maps phenomenal properties onto physical properties.).
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This is certainly one way of going about thinking about the location of
consciousness in the natural world. One question is raises, though, is, though: how
does it connect with the formulations of the Metaphysical and Conceptual questions
we set out with? There are three issues here. To adopt phenomenal externalism is to
reject a variety of Spatial Independence claims, claims that rule out reference to the
physical world in describing the phenomenal character of experience, and in
accounting for the content of phenomenal concepts. In chapter 4 I will set out two
major arguments for such independence, one stemming from Colin McGinn’s
argument from ‘cognitive closure’, the other stemming form David Chalmers claim to
the effect that we have two mutually independent concepts of perception.
The second issue is this. Suppose phenomenal externalism is right: what kind
of account should we give of the relation between spatial/physical concepts. In
particular is there a notion of dependence of one concept on another than is distinct
from the appeal to full-scale analyzability of one in terms of the other that we can and
should be appealing to in this context? The basic materials for this alternative
approach to dependence will be spelled out in Chapter 4 and further developed in later
chapters.
The third issue is this. Suppose there is a coherent, and correct account that
can be given of how and why we should adopt phenomenal externalism, when our
interest is in The Perceptual Question, the question of how we should account for the
phenomenal character of experience when we are interested in how and whether
consciousness gives us access to the mind independent world. Is there any reason to
adopt it from a purely metaphysical perspective, and hence, is there any reason to
adopt it if we are interested in the Conceptual Question we set out with? Very
roughly, the reason for adopting phenomenal externalism, that I will be proposing
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thought chapters 5-7 is that we need it if we are to explain our grasp of the particular
spatial and physical concepts we use to make sense of the idea of a mind independent,
physical world in the first place. That is, the intelligibility, for us, of there being a
world out there to begin with, an intelligibility manifested in the way we deploy our
spatial and physical concepts, depends on an account of phenomenal perceptual
consciousness that serves to locate such consciousness in the spatial and physical
world, along the lines suggested by phenomenal externalism. Or so I will be arguing,
in chapters 5-7.
The final issue is this. Suppose all of the above responses to the Conceptual
Question are right. How does this affect the answer we should give to the
Metaphysical Question we set out with? Very briefly, I will be arguing in Chapter 5,
that if we suppose that God created the whole physical world at once, such that all
physical truths were in place from the word go, then the answer to Kripke’s version of
the Metaphysical Question is: no, at least with respect to perceptual consciousness.
Once he created all of the physical world, His work was done. Or, to put in Chalmers’
terms: if we suppose that P is the complete physical description of the actual world,
then given any arbitrary Q about perceptual phenomenal consciousness, P and not Q
is not a metaphysical possibility.
But all of this is to jump far ahead. I now want to slow down, come back to
the Perspectival Independence claim, and spend the rest of this chapter introducing it,
and introducing the kind of approach to intelligibility that can be extracted from
Thomas Nagel’s defence of it.
V. Radical Disparateness
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Nagel’s ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ arguably launched the current debate about the
possibility of making sense of the location of consciousness in the natural world,
though some of his concerns, as we shall see, have not figured large in recent
discussions. There are two major aspects of the way he sets up the problem of
consciousness there, and in more detail in the View from Nowhere that I will be
drawing on and developing in the way I approach the Conceptual Question. The first
concerns his explicit account of the sense in which phenomenal and physical concepts
are independent of each other. The second concerns an implicit characterisation of
what is required for giving an intelligibility-conferring explanation of the place of
consciousness in nature, a requirement he holds phenomenal and physical concepts
cannot meet. They can both be introduced as follows.
Suppose you have a visual experience, as of a bluebell in front of you, and are
aware of this experience and think of it as an experience, with such and such
phenomenal properties. The predicates you employ when introspecting these
properties are what we are calling 'phenomenal' predicates; and the modes of
presentation or concepts they express phenomenal modes of presentation (or
concepts). Suppose at the same time someone is probing your brain and watching
various neurones firing away. And let us suppose the person watching your neurones
is armed with predicates used in what has come to be called the Brain Sciences, which
are, in turn a kind of physical predicate.
Nagel is assuming, along with many others, that, ultimately, intelligible
location of consciousness in the natural world will rest on identification of
phenomenally and physically identified properties (perhaps via functionalist
explications of phenomenal predicates). So the basic question we should be asking, on
this assumption is: can the concepts you use when introspecting and concepts used by
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the brain scientist be homing in on the same realm of reference? The problem here is
introduced as follows.
"Usually, when we are told that X is Y we know how it is supposed to be true, but
that depends on a conceptual or theoretical background and is not conveyed by the 'is'
alone. We know how both 'X' and 'Y' refer, and the kinds of things to which they
refer, and we have a rough idea how the referential paths might converge on a single
thing, be it an object, a person, a process an event or whatever. But when the two
terms of identification are very disparate it may not be so clear how it could be true.
We may not have even a rough idea of how the referential paths converge or what
kinds of things they might converge on, and a theoretical framework may have to be
supplied to enable us to understand this. Without the framework, an air of mystery
surrounds the identification."
Nagel then goes on to raise the suspicion that in the case of consciousness and the
physical world we have precisely this kind of mystery on our hands. I return to that
point shortly. Let us first look at his account of what would make and phenomenal
physical identification intelligible.
The first thought in setting out the problem is that if any pair of phenomenal
and physical predicates does refer to the same property they will be doing so in
different ways, expressing different modes of presentation of the property, for any
such identity claim is informative.
The second thought is that normally, when we say that two modes of
presentation have the same referent, we have some story about 'how the referential
paths converge'. Thus we have a theory about why 2+2 and 4 refer to the same
number; a story about why The Morning Star and The Evening Star are different
modes of presentation of the same planet, and so forth.
The third thought, which is not explicit here but which I shall take as
constitutive of the alternative approach I will be pursuing, is this. Grasp of any
concept involves grasp of what Donald Davidson calls ‘a little theory’ and I shall call
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a ‘primitive theory’. Thus, a child acquiring the concept of ‘tree’ will need to acquire
a primitive theory of growing things, which involves grasp of the concept of soil,
water, roots and so forth. Grasping the concept ‘table’ will require grasping a
primitive functional theory. So, grasping one concept requires grasping a bundle of
other concepts, where grasping the latter also involves grasping primitive theories for
each such concept, so that, as Wittgenstein puts it ‘light dawns gradually on the
whole’.
The fourth thought, and here we come back to Nagel, is that these interlocking
primitive theories built into our concepts at the same time provide a background,
expandable primitive theory of the world as a whole, including theories about how we
find out about the nature things (perception, scientific investigation and the like), all
of which, in turn, can provide us with the materials for making sense of referential
paths converging.
Nagel ends the above passage saying that when there is no such background
theory, and the concepts are in this sense disparate, an air of mystery surrounds the
identity. But we need to distinguish between two kinds of disparateness (and
mystery). The first is a consequence of ignorance, or at best partial understanding of
concepts. ‘For example: people are now told at an early age that matter is really
energy. But despite the fact that they know what “is” means, most of them never form
a conception of what makes this claim true, because they lack the theoretical
background.’ (223)
Let us call this kind of case ‘ignorance-based disparateness’. Nagel does go on
to toy with the idea that our current lack of understanding of the place of
consciousness in the natural world is of this kind, but, critically, from our perspective,
achieving understanding would involve changing our current concepts. However most
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of the paper, and much of The View from Nowhere, is devoted to explaining why the
nature of our actual phenomenal and physical concepts respectively is such that
intelligible identities are ruled out in advance. This is the kind of claim that will
concern us throughout, and I will call this the ‘radical disparateness claim’. When we
have such disparateness, identities using terms that are disparate in this way just
aren’t intelligible.
Before turning to his reason for holding our phenomenal and physical
concepts are radically disparate, let us pause to compare this account of intelligibility
with the one set out at the beginning of the chapter. The main point to note is that
demonstrating the intelligibility of, in our case, the location of phenomenal
consciousness in the natural world, is a matter of showing that phenomenal and
physical concepts fit together in primitive theories about the nature of things. This is
an intra- theory criterion of intelligibility in contrast to a reductive account of
intelligibility, which is, roughly, inter-theory. Naturally the question arises as to what
exactly such intra-theory connectability, in contrast to inter-theoretic reducibility
comes to. And it has to be said that there is not much to be gleaned on this score from
Nagel himself, largely because he thinks that he has an argument to show that
phenomenal and physical concepts are not thus connectable. However, his argument
for radical disparateness does, implicitly, contain some resources we can draw on in
giving a positive account of the kind of theoretical connectedness we should be
looking for. So let us now pick up the thread of his argument.
As a first pass, the reason Nagel thinks we have radical disparateness on our
hands is that our physical and phenomenal concepts have distinct and opposing
allegiances, in the following sense. Getting it right, physically speaking, is a matter
of aiming for greater and greater objectivity, which for Nagel, requires abandoning
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our local perspectives, until we get, ideally, to a wholly non perspectival
representation of the universe. Physical concepts that appear in wholly objective
representations are essentially non perspectival (in a sense to be made precise in
Chapter 2). But, he argues, getting it right phenomenally speaking pulls in the
opposite direction: the further we get from the subject’s perspective, from describing
how things are from the subject’s perspective, the further we get from getting right
what it is like for the subject, and, hence, from getting right what the phenomenal
properties of the experience are. Phenomenal concepts, designed as they are for
getting it right from the subject’s perspective, are essentially perspectival (in a sense
to be made precise in Chapter 2).
There is a formal analogy here with the way Donald Davidson argues for the
impossibility of psychophysical laws. According to Davidson our mental and physical
‘schemes’ have disparate allegiances. Each is committed to a holistic framework
governed by distinct constraints. What sets the mental apart is the fact that it is
governed by rationality constraints, normative constraints that have no echo in our
physical world. For any attempted reduction of the mental to the physical if the price
is that we have to abandon rationality constraints, we should always give up the
reduction instead.
A similar point can be abstracted from Nagel’s account of the problem of
consciousness with respect to the distinct allegiances of the physical and the
phenomenal. Phenomenal and physical concepts are not made for each other, because
of their distinct allegiances. It is this, which makes for the radical disparateness of our
physical and phenomenal schemes. This is what prevents them being interlocked into
a single theory of anything. (And that, in turn, explains the ultimate unintelligibility of
phenomenal and physical identities).
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VI. The Realism Problem.
While this is suggestive, it is still too vague to be of much use. We need to know why,
according to Nagel, perspectival and non-perspectival concepts, with their distinctive
allegiances, cannot be combined in a theory of what things are. And to get there we
need to come back to the Metaphysical Question, and to a central issue that informs
many recent (and not so recent) approaches to it.
In most formulations of the Metaphysical Question, the content of P is said to
be provided by in the deliverances of the complete and ultimate microphysics. It is
possible to distinguish three motivations for this way of describing the contents of P.
a. The ontological motivation. The appeal to the ultimate physics is based on the idea
that it will deliver a full inventory of what there is in the physical world. The
ontological conceptual question is, in effect, the Metaphysical Question we set out
with. Given the way we think of think about the phenomenal character of experience,
does it make sense to think that once God created the physical world there was
nothing else he needed to do to create phenomenal consciousness?
b. The metaphysical realist motivation. We take it that our representations are made
true by a world is ‘there anyway’, independently of our taking it to be there. You
might ask: can this assumption be justified and what are the conditions for justifying
it? One move to make is to insist that if this assumption is not empty there must be
some way of representing the world relative to which all our actual representations
can be assessed. Bernard Williams dubbed this kind of representation the absolute
conception, which is defined as a representation from no point of view. This is one
definition of what it is for a representation to be objective, and delivers one account of
what it is to be a realist about a realm of reference. Truths about it can be exhaustively
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captured in representations from no point of view. Here, microphysics comes in as the
discipline that has the most chance of meeting the absolute requirements. The
Metaphysical Question is whether conscious phenomena are part of the world as
represented from no point of view (and hence the world as represented by
microphysics).
c. The commonsense sense realism motivation. One question you might be interested
in is how our everyday spatial and physical-object concepts provide for the idea of a
mind independent world, a world out there. Call the spatial and physical-object terms
we use to represent the world out there our ‘intuitive physics’. The way we use our
intuitive physics to represent the world out there can also be said to yield an objective
representation of the world. And we can introduce a notion of reality according to
which to be a realist about a realm of reference is to think of it as part of the world
thus conceived. To say of a realm of reference that we conceive of it in this way is to
be what I will call a ‘ commonsense realist’ about that realm. The Metaphysical
Question about consciousness from this perspective is whether consciousness is part
of the world thus, objectively, conceived. Here, microphysics might come in as an
idealisation of our every day intuitive physics: in particular it might come in because
of a claim to the effect that the kind of objectivity we aspire to in our everyday
physical thought is captured by the absolute conception, which microphysics has the
best chance of fulfilling.
Each of these versions of Metaphysical Question, yields a related version of
Conceptual Question. Given this, we may ask, of particular philosophers, which
version they are interested in when they ask the Conceptual Question. I think it is
right to say that most if not all people participating in the consciousness debate
sketched at the outset are interested in the ontological version of the Conceptual
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Question. In other cases it is less clear. For example, I think Nagel can be read as
being motivated by both commonsense and metaphysical realism in formulating his
puzzle about consciousness. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the distinction between
them becomes important when we examine both his formulation of ‘the problem of
consciousness’ and his solution to it, but for the moment this need not trouble us.
What matters, for the moment, is that that his account of radical disparateness is
informed by the idea of a link between realism, objectivity and the ultimate
deliverances of science. It is this link that contains the materials for explaining, why,
according to Nagel, perspectival and non-perspectival concepts, with their distinctive
allegiances, cannot be combined in a theory of what things are.
According Nagel, the metaphysical question about any realm of reference is
whether we are/should/can be realists about it. To be a realist is to be committed to
that realm being part of the world as it is anyway, the mind-independent world. And
for something to be part of that world it must be possible to describe it objectively,
from no point of view (an account delivered by the ultimate physics).
Nagel’s puzzle about consciousness is this. We are, he says, realists about
phenomenal consciousness. This should make it possible to produce accounts of the
phenomenal character of experiences that capture their essence in wholly nonperspectival terms. But we seem to lose essential aspects of the experience once we
drop concepts intended specifically to capture how the experience is from the
subject’s point of view. On the face of it this means we need to give up realism about
phenomenal properties. That is the puzzle (to be discussed at length, together with his
own resolution of it, in Chapter 2).
For the moment what matters is that Implicit in Nagel's puzzle we have the
idea that the theories we are interested in if we are realists about a domain of
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reference are theories that deliver the essence of things as they really are by
representing them objectively. Concepts that cannot represent in this way can have no
part in the ultimate theory of what things are. By ‘cannot’ I mean that no analysis of
them will lead to an objective conception of the realm of reference they represent
(including functional analyses and so forth). The reason phenomenal and physical
concepts cannot combine, according to Nagel, is that phenomenal concepts, being
essentially perspectival, cannot have a role in such a theory.
We need to distinguish two ideas here. The first is that a minimal condition
concepts must meet for them to hang together an intra-theoretic way, if we are realists
about what they refer to, is that they be objective (or be analyzable in objective
terms), thereby making manifest the real, in the sense of mind-independent, nature of
things. This is something I will be suggesting we should hang on to and develop.
The second is the idea that they are objective in the requisite sense when they
represent their referents from no point of view. Much of Chapter 2 will be devoted to
pulling these two ideas apart. And this is where the distinction between metaphysical
and common sense realism begins to matter. To anticipate: one claim I will be making
is that while appeal to representations from no point of view may be right, as a matter
of stipulation, from the perspective of metaphysical realism, there are strong reasons
for holding that it is not right from the perspective of commonsense realism. In
particular the suggestion I will be pursuing in detail in Chapter 3 will be that our
intuitive physics provide for the ideas of an objective world in a way that relies
essentially on the use of perspectival concepts. If this is right about the physical
concepts we use in our intuitive physics, then one negative consequence is that from
the perspective of commonsense realism, we do not appear to have the kind of radical
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disparateness Nagel suggests we have, if the distinguishing feature of phenomenal
concepts is that they are essentially perspectival.
Now, my interest throughout the book will be the commonsense realism
version of the Conceptual Question. From this perspective, to show there is no radical
disparateness on the perspectival/non perspectival front, is not yet to show how
physical and phenomenal concepts do in fact fit together in a theory in a way that
makes manifest the location of phenomenal consciousness in an objectively described
world. It is not yet to provide a substantive account of intelligibility. But it does
suggest that if this is the question we are interested we should turn to an explicit
consideration of the way our intuitive physics concepts provide for the idea of a mind
independent world and see whether and how references to phenomenal consciousness
can be integrated into our intuitive physics in a way that does yield such intelligibility.
This is the suggestion I begin to pursue in Chapter 3, where this in turn, will bring us
directly to the Perceptual Question, and to consideration of the Spatial Independence
Claim.
Concluding Comments
I have been sketching, in very broad outline, one way questions about objectivity and
realism can begin to yield a framework for asking about the intelligibility of the
location of consciousness in the natural world which is distinct from the approach that
explains such intelligibility by appeal to the possibility of reducing phenomenal truths
to physical truths. But there is still a long way to go before we have an account of
what this alternative approach to intelligibility looks like in detail, and even longer to
go before we have an argument for endorsing this account. In the next chapter I will
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begin to fill in some of the necessary details by examining the specific formulations
of the premises and conclusions of Nagel’s puzzle about consciousness.