Consciousness and the Ontology of Properties

Mihretu P. Guta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138097865
• eBook ISBN: 9781351598897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book aims to show the centrality of a proper ontology of properties in thinking about consciousness. Philosophers have long grappled with what is now known as the hard problem of consciousness, i.e., how can subjective or qualitative features of our experience—such as how a strawberry tastes—arise from brain states? More recently, philosophers have incorporated what seems like promising empirical research from neuroscience and cognitive psychology in an attempt to bridge the gap between measurable mental states on the one hand, and phenomenal qualities on the other. In Consciousness and the Ontology of Properties, many of the leading philosophers working on this issue, as well as a few emerging scholars, have written 14 new essays on this problem. The essays address topics as diverse as substance dualism, mental causation, the metaphysics of artificial intelligence, the logic of conceivability, constitution, extended minds, the emergence of consciousness, and neuroscience and the unity and neural correlates of consciousness, but are nonetheless unified in a collective objective: the need for a proper ontology of properties to understand the hard problem of consciousness, both on non-empirical and empirical grounds.

Part 1

Ontology, Properties and Consciousness

1 The Mystery of the Mystery of Consciousness

John Heil

It is important to realize that the sciences, developed around external perception and its manipulative meanings, do not pretend to any intuition of the stuff, or being, of things and events. Those not well trained in epistemology are easily confused. Since neural events must have an intrinsic nature, why not accept the fact that this intrinsic nature rises to a feeling-quale, say, in the thalamus and to discriminated data in the visual center. Conceptualization of this situation and the proper syntax need to be worked out. The brain-event is not colored, as we say a surface is colored, but includes a colored sensation as a qualitative dimension, isolated in awareness. ¹

The philosopher is confronted not by one complex many-dimensional picture, the unity of which, such as it is, he must come to appreciate; but by two pictures of essentially the same order of complexity, each of which purports to be a complete picture of man-in-the-world, and which, after separate scrutiny, he must fuse into one vision. Let me refer to these two perspectives, respectively, as the manifest and the scientific images of man-in-the-world.

(W. Sellars 1963: 5)

The mind and the body are one and the same thing, which is conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension.

(Spinoza 3p2s)

Philosophers damage their minds by coming to believe in their own hypotheses.

(J. B. S. Haldane 1927: 261)

1 The Manifest and Scientific Images

In some quarters consciousness is regarded as the last frontier, the sole remaining mystery of the universe around us. The idea is not that we have answered all the questions posed by the physical and social sciences, that we have the final theory, or that there are no remaining unresolved issues in physics, or chemistry, or biology. Rather the thought is that we have some idea how we might go about answering run of the mill scientific questions, but when it comes to consciousness, we hit a wall.

On the one hand, consciousness is a familiar, perhaps (it is often proclaimed) the most familiar and beloved feature of our lives. We are all conscious and, except for periods of oblivion when we are asleep or anesthetized, we all continuously undergo conscious experiences. On the other hand, it is hard to see how these fit into the world as it is revealed by the physical sciences. The more we learn about the brain, the harder it is to see how what goes on inside our heads could give rise to what Colin McGinn calls ‘Technicolor phenomenology’: qualitatively imbued conscious experiences (McGinn 1989).

Precisely because the problem seems hopeless from a scientific perspective, it has all the earmarks of a philosophical puzzle, a problem largely self-inflicted in the sense that it arises from a collection of assumptions that yield a space of possible solutions, none of which is especially satisfying. If that is so, the way out is not to be found by endlessly retracing our steps through this space, but in examining some of the assumptions that give rise to the problem in the first place.

I am not going to pretend to solve the mystery of consciousness here. My aim is more modest. I am going to speak informally about the nature of philosophy, about various sources of the mystery, and leave you with some speculative remarks as to how the fly might escape the fly bottle. This will disappoint philosophers invested in the presuppositions I want to challenge and those looking for detailed arguments. I do not think that we got where we are owing to unassailable arguments, however, and I do not believe that such arguments are what is required to set us on a different course.

2 The Culture of Philosophy

Philosophy is hard, but not for reasons those introduced to it in academic settings are inclined to think. True, philosophical prose is often dry, technical, and soporific. Philosophers take simple ideas and represent them in a way calculated to shock and amaze, often in a formal idiom that gives them an undeserved air of precision and rigor. Formal techniques are only tools, however. It is all too easy to get caught up with the tools and lose track of the ends the tools were meant to serve. On the one hand, you can be good with the tools, a virtuoso, without ever saying much of philosophical interest, without being a good philosopher. On the other hand, the memorable philosophical theses are rarely the products of knock-down, logically unimpeachable arguments. Indeed, few philosophers are persuaded to accept a big idea on the basis of an argument. (If you want an example, think of apparently irrefutable arguments for skepticism.) Something else is going on.

More people are engaged in publishing papers on philosophical topics today than at any other time in human history. ² We have record numbers of PhDs toiling on the fashionable problems, so it would be natural to expect steady progress plus the occasional break-through discovery. This is not how it works, however. Philosophy resembles art. In the sense that bad art is not art, bad philosophy isn’t philosophy. Inevitably, most philosophers aren’t philosophers. This remark could seem unforgivably condescending were it not for the fact that I include myself among the ranks of philosophers who aren’t. Enough pontificating – for now – there will be more later.

3 The Manifest Image and the Scientific Image

One way to locate the mystery of consciousness is to recognize it as one aspect of a more general problem, the problem of reconciling our everyday experience of the universe – what Wilfrid Sellars called the ‘manifest image’ – with the ‘scientific image’, the picture of the universe we obtain from the sciences, especially fundamental physics. The tension is nicely illustrated in a much-quoted passage from A. S. Eddington, who, some three decades earlier, had set out to write his 1927 Gifford Lectures by, in his words, drawing up ‘my chairs to my two tables’:

Two tables! Yes; there are duplicates of every object about me—two tables, two chairs, two pens.

One of them has been familiar to me from earliest years. It is a commonplace object of that environment which I call the world. How shall I describe it? It has extension; it is comparatively permanent; it is coloured; above all it is substantial.

Table No. 2 is my scientific table. It is a more recent acquaintance and I do not feel so familiar with it. It does not belong to the world previously mentioned—that world which spontaneously appears around me when I open my eyes […]. It is part of a world which in more devious ways has forced itself on my attention. My scientific table is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself.

(Eddington 1928: ix–x)

Eddington’s first table is at home in Sellars’ manifest image, the picture of the universe that guides our everyday interactions with our surroundings – including the interactions of scientists with instruments in their laboratories. The second table belongs to the picture of the universe we obtain from physics. The difficulty, remarked by both Eddington and Sellars, is to understand how these images are related.

Scientists and philosophers have not been shy in suggesting ways the two images might be reconciled. Four examples are worth mentioning here:

1 The manifest image is an illusion promoted by soft-headed philosophers, journalists, and romantics disdainful of science.

2 The manifest image presents reality as it is; the scientific image serves merely to facilitate our endeavors in the universe as we experience it.

3 The manifest image reveals ‘levels of reality’ dependent on but distinct from the fundamental physical level.

4 The manifest image provides a serviceable representation of what the scientific image reveals.

The options can be illustrated by reference to Eddington’s two tables. Option (1) takes only the scientific table to be real, Eddington’s everyday table to be a fiction, an illusion, a mere appearance. Option (2) accepts the everyday table as real and regards the scientific table as another kind of fiction, an expression of abstract mathematical principles we deploy in predicting and manipulating objects and goings-on in the manifest image. Both of these options have been influential in philosophy and in science from the Milesians to the present day.

The third option is a latter-day invention of philosophers calling themselves ‘nonreductive physicalists’. The idea is that physics affords our best guess as to the nature of ‘fundamental’ reality. But there is more to reality than fundamental reality. Reality comprises a hierarchy of levels, each level distinct from, but in some way dependent on, the level beneath it. There is the fundamental physical level, the biological level, the psychological level, the social level, and so on. In general, higher levels are not ‘reducible to’ lower levels; you cannot formulate the truths of meteorology, or geology, or biology, to say nothing of psychology, in terms at home in fundamental physics. This is taken to show that all of these irreducible truths concern distinct domains: the domain of physics, the biological domain, the domain of psychology, etc.

On such a view, both of Eddington’s tables exist, but at different levels. The everyday table occupies a higher level, dependent on but still distinct from the scientific table; the one is not reducible to the other. The scientific image depicts the fundamental physical level, the manifest image includes depictions of successively higher levels. It is this approach to the reconciliation problem, the problem of reconciling the manifest and scientific images, that, as I hope to convince you, is the source of our present-day mystery of consciousness.

I shall postpone discussion of the fourth option, noting only that it regards the scientific image as providing an account of what it is that the manifest image is an image of. Eddington’s everyday table is his scientific table.

4 The Mystery

Although much has been made of the mystery of consciousness, I find it increasingly difficult to convey the mystery to my students and other philosophical innocents with a clear conscience. To appreciate the mysteriousness, to live it, you need to think as philosophers currently tend to think about minds and their place in the universe. (And in this context, you do well to bear in mind that philosophers aren’t the only philosophers.) Part of what I shall suggest is that these ways of thinking are (a) optional, and (b) themselves largely to blame for the mystery. Resolving the mystery of consciousness involves finding our way out of the fly bottle.

A good place to begin is with Descartes, the most celebrated historical source of the mystery. Descartes held that the universe contained two kinds of substance: material substances and mental substances. (Substances, here are not stuff – air or water, for instance – but particular objects – tomatoes, planets, electrons.) Each kind of substance was identified with a particular attribute. Material substances are extended, mental substances are conscious. ³ Properties of a substance are modes of its defining attribute. Thus, properties of material bodies are modes of extension, ways of being extended (which would include objects’ shapes, sizes, and spatial locations), and properties of mental substances are modes of consciousness, ways of being conscious (which would include thoughts, judgments, sensations, images).

The attributes of thought or consciousness and extension are distinct. Because substances are their attributes, no material substance could be conscious, and no conscious substance could be extended. Thus, it is that the mental–material distinction is what Descartes, following his scholastic predecessors, called a real distinction, a distinction in reality, not simply a distinction in point of view or conception.

Recall Phosphorus and Hesperus, the Morning Star and the Evening Star. Once, these were believed to be two stars; once, the distinction between Phosphorus and Hesperus was thought to be a real distinction. Astronomers then discovered that the distinction between, Phosphorus and Hesperus was a distinction of conception only, Phosphorus and Hesperus were in fact, one and the same heavenly body, Venus, differently considered.

Nowadays most philosophers dismiss Descartes’ dualism of substances as hopelessly quaint; there are not two kinds of substance – mind and body or mind and brain. There are just complex bodies endowed with seriously complex nervous systems. Nevertheless dualism – and Descartes’ real distinction – has survived in the guise of a dualism of properties. Mental properties are presumed to be really distinct in kind from physical properties. And now the problem becomes how could something physical, a brain, say, support mental (that is, nonphysical) properties?

Most readers will be well aware of the standard answers to this question. Think first of functionalism. Descartes emphasized the qualitative nature of consciousness, but functionalists characterize states of mind by their ‘causal roles’, their typical causes and effects, relations they bear, or would bear, to sensory inputs, behavioral outputs, and to other mental states. To be in pain, for instance, might be to be in a state caused by tissue damage or excessive heat or pressure – a state that in turn produces aversive thoughts and deeds. There is no special problem in thinking that brains could include such states, so pains – and presumably other conscious states – could be brain states. Problem solved!

Not quite. Pains do indeed seem to be states that ‘play the pain role’, b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1 Ontology, Properties and Consciousness
• PART 2 Ontology, Emergence and Consciousness
• PART 3 Mental Causation and Counterfactuals: A New Argument for the Type-Identity Thesis
• PART 4 Extended Mind, Constitution and Consciousness
• PART 5 Neuroscience and Consciousness
• References
• Index