Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
1 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 2 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. 3 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 4 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 5 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 6 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 7 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 8 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 9 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 10 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.). 11 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 12 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 13 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 14 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 15 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 16 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 17 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). 18 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 19 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 20 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 21 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 22 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 23 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.