Phenomenal Consciousness,
Defined and Defended as Innocently as I Can Manage
Commentary on Keith Frankish, “Illusionism as a Theory of
Consciousness”
Eric Schwitzgebel
Department of Philosophy
University of California at Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521-0201
USA
Abstract:
Phenomenal consciousness can be
conceptualized innocently enough that its existence should be accepted even by
philosophers who wish to avoid dubious epistemic and metaphysical commitments
such as dualism, infallibilism, privacy,
inexplicability, or intrinsic simplicity.
Definition by example allows us this innocence. Positive examples include sensory
experiences, imagery experiences, vivid emotions, and dreams. Negative examples include growth hormone release, dispositional knowledge, standing intentions, and
sensory reactivity to masked visual displays.
Phenomenal consciousness is the most folk psychologically obvious thing
or feature that the positive examples possess and that the negative examples
lack, and which preserves our ability to wonder, at least temporarily, about
antecedently unclear issues such as consciousness without attention and
consciousness in simpler animals. As long as this concept is not empty, or broken, or a hodgepodge,
we can be phenomenal realists without committing to dubious philosophical
positions.
1. Introduction.
Keith Frankish
argues that phenomenal consciousness does not really exist. I, along with most other Anglophone
philosophers who have written on the issue, think that phenomenal consciousness
does exist.
Frankish can be
interpreted as posing a dilemma for defenders of the real existence of
phenomenal consciousness – phenomenal
realists, as I will call them. On
Horn 1 we find inflated views about what phenomenal consciousness involves:
infallibility, or metaphysical dualism, or some other dubious philosophical
commitments. If phenomenal consciousness
requires any of those features, it
probably doesn’t exist. On Horn 2 we
find views so deflationary as to be tantamount to the
non-existence of the originally intended phenomenon. Frankish argues that we must choose between
thinking of phenomenal consciousness in so inflated a way that there fails to
be any such thing or so deflationary a way that it has effectively vanished
into something else (e.g., dispositions to make certain sorts of judgments).
The best way to
meet Frankish’s challenge is to provide something
that the field of consciousness studies in any case needs: a clear definition
of phenomenal consciousness, a definition that targets a phenomenon that is
both substantively interesting in the
way that phenomenal consciousness is widely thought to be interesting but also innocent of problematic metaphysical and
epistemological assumptions. In
Section 2, I will attempt to do this.
One necessary
condition on being substantively interesting in the relevant sense is that
phenomenal consciousness should retain at least a superficial air of mystery
and epistemic difficulty, rather than collapsing immediately into something as
straightforwardly deflationary as dispositions to verbal report, or functional
“access consciousness” in Block’s (1995/2007) sense, or an “easy problem” in
Chalmers’ (1995) sense. If the reduction
of phenomenal consciousness to something physical or functional or “easy” is
possible, it should take some work. It
should not be obviously so, just on
the surface of the definition. We should
be able to wonder how consciousness could possibly arise from cognitive
mechanisms and matter in motion. Call
this the wonderfulness condition.
2. Defining Consciousness by Example.
Unfortunately, the
three most obvious, and seemingly respectable, approaches to definition all
fail. Phenomenal consciousness cannot be
defined analytically, in terms of
component concepts (as “rectangle” might be defined as a right-angled planar
quadrilateral). It is a foundationally
simple concept, not divisible into component concepts. Phenomenal consciousness also cannot be
defined functionally,
in terms of the causal role it normally plays (as “heart” might be defined as
the organ that normally plays the causal role of pumping blood). What causal role, if any, phenomenal
consciousness normally plays is a matter of debate. For present purposes, phenomenal
consciousness also cannot be adequately defined by synonyms, since Frankish’s inflation-or-deflation
dilemma applies equally to all of the nearby terms and phrases like “qualia”, “what-it’s-like-ness”,
or “stream of experience”.
The best approach
is definition by example. Definition by example can sometimes work
well, if one provides diverse positive and negative examples and if the target
concept is natural enough that the target audience can be trusted to latch onto
that concept once sufficient positive and negative examples are provided. I might say “by furniture I mean tables, chairs, desks, lamps, ottomans, and that
sort of thing; and not pictures, doors, sinks, toys, or vacuum cleaners”. Hopefully, you will latch on to approximately
the relevant concept (e.g., not being tempted to think of a ballpoint pen as
furniture but being inclined to think that a dresser probably is). I might even define rectangle by example, by sketching out for you a variety of
instances and nearby counterinstances (triangles, parallelograms,
trapezoids, open-sided near-rectangles).
Hopefully, you get the idea.
Definition by
example is a common approach among recent phenomenal realists. I interpret Searle (1992, p. 83), Block
(1995/2007, p. 166-168), and Chalmers (1996, p. 4) as aiming to define
phenomenal consciousness by a mix of synonymy and appeal to example, plus maybe
some version of the wonderfulness condition.
All three attempts are, in my view, reasonably successful. However, all three attempts also have three
shortcomings, which I aim to repair here.
First, they are not sufficiently clear that they are definitions by example, and consequently they don’t sufficiently
invite the reader to reflect on the conditions necessary for definition by
example to succeed. Second, perhaps
partly as a result of the first shortcoming, they don’t provide enough of the negative
examples that are normally part of a good definition by example. Third, they are either vague about the
positive examples or include needlessly contentious cases. Siewert (1998, ch.
3) is somewhat clearer on these points, but still limited in his range of negative
examples and in his exploration of the conditions of failure of definition by
example.
I want to
highlight one crucial background condition that is necessary for definition by
example to succeed. There must be an obvious or natural category or concept that the audience will latch onto once
sufficiently many positive and negative examples have been provided. In defining rectangle by example for my eight-year-old daughter, I might draw
all of the examples with a blue pen, placing the positive examples on the left
and the negative examples on the right.
In principle, she might leap to the idea that “rectangle” refers to retangularly-shaped-things-on-the-right, or she might be
confused about whether red figures can also be rectangles, or she might think I
am referring to spots on the envelope rather than to the drawn figures. But that’s not how the typical enculturated eight-year-old human mind works. The definition succeeds because I know she’ll
latch onto the intended concept, rather than some less obvious concept that
fits the cases.
Defining phenomenal consciousness by example requires
that there be only one obvious or readily
adopted concept or category that fits with the offered examples. I do think that there is probably only one
obvious or readily adopted category in the vicinity, at least once we do some
explicit narrowing of possible candidates.
In Section 3, I will discuss concerns about this assumption.
Let’s begin with
positive examples. The word “experience”
is sometimes used non-phenomenally (e.g., “I have twenty years of teaching
experience”). However, in normal English
it often refers to phenomenal consciousness.
Similarly for the adjective “conscious”. I will use those terms in that way now,
hoping that when you read them they will help you latch onto relevant examples
of phenomenal consciousness. However, I
will not always rely on those terms.
They are intended as aids to point you toward the examples rather than
as (possibly circular or synonymous) components of the definition.
Sensory and somatic experiences. If you aren’t blind and you think about your
visual experience, you will probably find that you are having some visual
experience right now. Maybe you are
visually experiencing black text on a white page. Maybe you are visually experiencing a
computer screen. If you press the heels
of your palms firmly against your closed eyes for several seconds, you will
probably notice a swarm of bright colors and figures, called phosphenes. All of
these visual goings-on are examples of phenomenal consciousness. Similarly, you probably have auditory
experiences if you aren’t deaf – at least when you stop to think about it. Maybe you hear the hum of your computer
fan. Maybe you hear someone talking down
the hall. In a sufficiently quiet
environment, you might even hear the rush of blood in your ears. If you cup one hand silently over one ear,
you will probably notice the change in ambient sound. If you stroke your chin with a finger, you
will probably have tactile experience.
Maybe you are feeling the pain of a headache. If you sip a drink right now, you will
probably experience the taste and feel of the drink in your mouth. If you close your eyes and think about where
your limbs are positioned, you might have proprioceptive
experience of your bodily posture, which you might notice becoming vaguer if
you remain motionless for an extended period.
Conscious imagery. Maybe there’s unconscious imagery, but if
there is, it’s doubtful that you will be able to reflect upon an instance of it
at will. Try to conjure a visual image –
of the Eiffel Tower, say. Try to conjure
an auditory image – of the tune of “Happy Birthday”, for example. Imagine it sung in your head. Try to conjure a motor image. Imagine how it would feel to stretch your
arms back and wiggle your fingers. You
might not succeed in all of these imagery tasks, but hopefully you succeeded in
at least one, which you can now think of as another example of phenomenal
consciousness.
Emotional experience. Presumably, you have had an experience of sudden
fear on the road, during or after a near-accident. Presumably, you have felt joy, surprise,
anger, disappointment, in various forms.
Maybe there is no unified core feeling of “fear” or “joy” that is the
same from instance to instance. No
matter. Maybe all there is to emotional
experience is various sorts of somatic, sensory, and imagery experiences. That doesn’t matter either. Think of some occasions on which you have
vividly felt what you would call an emotion.
Add those to your list of examples of phenomenal consciousness.
Thinking and desiring. Probably you’ve thought to yourself something
like “what a jerk!” when someone has behaved rudely to you. Probably you’ve found yourself craving a
dessert. Probably you’ve stopped to try
to plan out, deliberately in advance, the best route to the far side of town. Probably you’ve found yourself wishing that
Wonderful Person X would notice and admire you.
Presumably not all of our thinking and desiring is phenomenally
conscious in the intended sense, but presumably any instances you can now
vividly remember or create are or were phenomenally conscious in the intended
sense. Add these to your stock of
positive examples. Again, it doesn’t
matter if these experiences aren’t clearly differentiated from other types of
experience that we’ve already discussed.
Dream experiences. Although
in one sense of “conscious” we are not conscious when we dream, according to
both mainstream scientific psychology and the folk understanding of dreams,
dreams are phenomenally conscious – involving sensory or quasi-sensory
experience, or maybe instead only imagery, and often some emotional or
quasi-emotional component, like dread of the monster who is chasing you.
Other people. Bracketing radical skepticism
about other minds, we normally assume that other people also have sensory
experiences, imagery, emotional experiences, conscious thoughts and desires,
and dreams. Count these, too, among the
positive examples.
Negative examples. Not everything going on inside of your body
is part of your phenomenal consciousness.
You do not, presumably, have phenomenally conscious experience of the
growth of your fingernails, or of the absorption of lipids in your intestines, or of the release of growth hormones in your
brain – nor do other people experience such things in themselves. Nor is everything that we normally classify
as mental part of phenomenal consciousness.
Before reading this sentence, you probably had no phenomenal
consciousness of your disposition to answer “twenty-four” when asked “six times
four”. You probably had no phenomenal
consciousness of your standing intention to stop for lunch at 11:45. You presumably have no phenomenal
consciousness of the structures of very early auditory processing. If a visual display is presented for several
milliseconds and then quickly masked, you do not have visual experience of that
display (even if it later influences your behavior). Nor do you have sensory experience of every
aspect of what you know to be your immediate environment: no visual experience
of the world behind your head, no tactile experience of the smooth surface of
your desk that you can see but aren’t presently touching. Nor do you have pain experience, presumably,
in regions outside your body, nor do you literally experience other people’s
thoughts and images. We normally think
that dreamless sleep involves a complete absence of phenomenal consciousness.
Phenomenal consciousness is the most folk
psychologically obvious thing or feature that the positive examples possess and
that the negative examples lack. I
do think that there is one very obvious feature that ties together sensory
experiences, imagery experiences, emotional experiences, dream experiences, and
conscious thoughts and desires. They’re
all conscious experiences. None of the other stuff is experienced (lipid
absorption, the tactile smoothness of your desk, etc.). I hope it feels to you like I have belabored
an obvious point. Indeed, my argumentative
strategy relies upon this obviousness.
You must not try
to be too clever and creative here! Of
course you could invent a new and
non-obvious concept that fits with the examples. You could invent some quus-like
feature or “Cambridge property” like being
conscious and within 30 miles of Earth’s surface or being referred to in a certain way by Eric Schwitzgebel in this essay. Or you could pick out some scientifically
constructed but folk-psychologically non-obvious feature like accessibility to
the “central workspace” or in-principle-reportability-by-a-certain-type-of-cognitive-mechanism. Or you could pick out a property of the sort
Frankish suggests, like “quasi-phenomenality” or
presence of the disposition to judge
that one is having wonderful conscious experiences. None of those are the feature I mean. I mean the obvious feature, the thing that kind of smacks you in the face when
you think about the cases. That one!
Don’t try to
analyze it yet. Do you have an analysis
of “furniture”? I doubt it. Still, when I talk about “furniture” you know
what I’m talking about and you can sort positive and negative examples pretty
well, with some borderline cases. Do the
same with phenomenal consciousness. Even
you can do this, Keith! Let yourself
fall into it. Save the analysis,
reduction, and metaphysics for later.
3. Contentious Cases and Wonderfulness.
Some consciousness
researchers think that phenomenal consciousness is possible without attention –
for example, that you are constantly phenomenally conscious of the feeling of your
feet in your shoes even though you rarely attend to your feet or shoes. Others think consciousness is limited only to
what is in attention. Some consciousness
researchers think that phenomenal consciousness is exhausted by sensory,
imagery, and emotional experiences, while others think that phenomenal consciousness
comes in a wider range of uniquely irreducible kinds, possibly including
imageless thoughts, an irreducible sense of self, or feelings of agency.
I have avoided
committing on these issues by restricting the examples in Section 2 to what I
think are likely to be uncontentious cases. I did not, for example, list a peripheral
experience of the feeling of your feet in your shoes among the positive
examples, nor did I list a nonconscious knowledge of
the state of your feet among the negative examples. This leaves open the possibility that there
are two or more fairly natural concepts that fit with the positive and negative
examples and differ in whether they include or exclude such contentious cases. For example, if phenomenal consciousness
substantially outruns attention, both the intended concept of phenomenal consciousness and the
narrower concept of phenomenal-consciousness-along-with-attention
adequately match the positive and negative examples.
Similarly,
consciousness might or might not always involve some kind of reflective
self-knowledge, some awareness of oneself as
conscious. I intend the concept as initially
open on this question, prior to careful introspective and other evidence.
You might find it
introspectively compelling that your own stream of phenomenally conscious
experience does, or does not, involve constant experience of your feet in your
shoes, or reflective self-knowledge, or an irreducible sense of agency. Such confidence is, in my view, often
misplaced (Schwitzgebel 2011). But
regardless of whether such confidence is misplaced, the intended concept of phenomenal consciousness does not build
in, as a matter of definition, that
consciousness is limited (or not) to what’s in attention, or that it includes (or
fails to include) phenomena such as an irreducible awareness of oneself as an experiencing
subject. If it seems to you that there
are two equally obvious concepts here, one of which is definitionally
commissive on such contentious matters and another of
which leaves such questions open to introspective and other types of evidence, my
intended concept is the less commissive one. This is in any case probably the more obvious
concept. We can argue about whether consciousness outruns attention; it’s not
normally antecedently stipulated.
It is likewise
contentious what sorts of organisms are phenomenally conscious. Do snails, for example, have streams of
phenomenally conscious experience? If I
touch my finger to a snail’s eyestalk, does the snail have visual or tactile
phenomenology? If phenomenal consciousness meant “sensory sensitivity” we would have
to say yes. If phenomenal consciousness meant “processes reportable via a
cognitively sophisticated faculty of introspection”, we would have to say
no. I intend neither of these concepts,
but rather a concept that doesn’t settle the question as a straightforward
matter of definition – and again I think this is probably the more typical
concept to latch onto in any case.
It is this
openness in the concept that enables it to meet the wonderfulness condition I
introduced at the end of Section 1. One
can wonder about the relationship
between phenomenal consciousness and reportability,
wonder about the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and sensory
sensitivity, wonder about the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and
any particular functional or biological process. One can even wonder whether your stream of
phenomenal consciousness could survive your bodily death. Maybe a bit of investigation will definitively
settle these questions. Wonder doesn’t
have to be permanent. Wonder is
compatible even with the demonstrable mathematical impossibility of some of the
epistemically open options: Before doing the calculation, one can wonder if and
where the equation y = x2 – 2x + 2 crosses
the x axis. The “wonderfulness”
condition as I intend it here does not require any kind of insurmountable
“epistemic gap” – only a moment’s epistemic breathing space.
I suggest that there
is one folk psychologically obvious concept, perhaps blurry-edged, that fits
the positive and negative examples, leaves the contentious examples open, and
permits wonder of the intended sort.
That’s the concept of phenomenal consciousness.
4. Problematic Assumptions?
Back
to Frankish’s dilemma. We get poked by Horn 1 if we commit to
anything metaphysically or epistemically dubious in committing to the existence
of phenomenal consciousness. We get
poked by – or rather, warmly invited to – Horn 2 if we end up with so
deflationary a concept of phenomenal consciousness that it ends up just being
some “easy” straightforwardly functional or physical concept.
Frankish offers a
nice list of dubious commitments that I agree it would be good not to be
committed to simply by virtue of accepting phenomenal realism. Let me now disavow all such commitments –
consistently, I hope, with everything I have written so far. Phenomenally conscious experiences need not
be simple, nor ineffable, nor intrinsic, nor private, nor
immediately apprehended. They need not
have non-physical properties, be inaccessible to third-person science, or be
inexplicable in physical terms. My
definition by example did not, I believe, commit me on any such questions. My best guess is that all of those claims are
false, if intended as universal generalizations about phenomenal consciousness.
My definition did
commit me to a fairly strong claim about folk psychology: that there is a
single obvious folk-psychological concept or category that matches the positive
and negative examples. But that’s a
rather different sort of commitment.
I also committed
to realism about that concept or category: The folk category is not empty or
broken but rather picks out a feature that (most of) the positive examples
share and the negative examples presumably lack. If the target examples had nothing important
in common and were only a hodgepodge, this assumption would be violated. This is a substantive commitment, but not a
dubious one I hope. (However, if the
putative negative examples failed to be negative, as in some versions of
panpsychism, we might still be able to salvage the concept, by targeting the
feature that the positive examples have and that the negative examples are falsely assumed to lack.)
The wonderfulness
condition involves a mild epistemic commitment in the neighborhood of non-physicality or non-reducibility. The wonderfulness condition commits to its
being not straightforwardly obvious as a matter of definition what the
relationship is between phenomenal consciousness and cognitive functional or
physical processes. This commitment is
quite compatible with the view that a clever a priori or empirical argument
could someday show, perhaps even has already shown, that phenomenal
consciousness is reducible to or identical to something functional or physical.
Frankish’s quasi-phenomenality,
characterized in terms of our dispositions to make phenomenal judgments, does
not appear to meet the wonderfulness condition.
(See also Frankish 2012’s “zero qualia”.) It does not leave open, even for a moment,
the question of whether phenomenal consciousness might be present even in the
absence of a certain cognitive functional feature: the disposition to make
phenomenal judgments. I do think that
question is open, at least for a moment – and probably for much more than a
moment. I wonder, for example, whether
snails might be conscious despite (presumably) their not being disposed to
reach phenomenal judgments about their experience. I wonder whether we might have fleeting,
unattended conscious experiences even if we are not disposed to reach judgments
about them. I even wonder whether group
entities like the United States might possess phenomenal consciousness at a
group level, despite (presumably) no tendency to judge that they are doing so
(though I doubt many people will join me in wondering about this).
After being
invited to consider the positive and negative examples, someone might say, “I’m
not sure I understand. What exactly do you mean by phenomenal
consciousness?” At this point, it is
tempting to clarify by making some epistemic or metaphysical commitments –
whatever commitments seem plausible to you.
You might say, “those events with which we are
most directly and infallibly acquainted” or “the kinds of properties that can’t
be reduced to physical or functional role”.
Please don’t! Or at least, don’t
build these commitments into the definition.
Such commitments risk introducing doubt or confusion in people who
aren’t sure they accept such commitments.
Maybe it’s okay to say, “that about which it
has often been believed we have
direct, infallible access and believed
to be irreducible to the physical”. But
let the examples do the work.
Here’s a
comparison: You are trying to teach someone the concept “pink”. Maybe her native language doesn’t have a
corresponding term (as we don’t have a widely used term for pale green). You have shown her a wide range of pink
things (a pink pen, a pink light source, a pink shirt, pictures and photos with
various shades of pink in various natural contexts); you’ve verbally referenced
some famously pink things such as cherry blossoms and ham; you’ve shown her
some non-pink things as negative examples (medium reds, pale blues, oranges,
etc.). It would be odd for her to ask, “so do you mean this-shade-and-mentioned-by-you?” or “must
‘pink’ things be less than six miles wide?”
It would be odd for her to insist that you provide an analysis of the
metaphysics of pink before she accepts it as a workable concept. You might be open about the metaphysics of
pink. It might be helpful to point, noncommittally,
to what some people have said (“well, some people think of pink as a
reflectance property of physical objects”).
But lean on the examples. If
she’s not colorblind, and not perverse, there’s something obvious that the
positive instances share, which the negative examples lack, which normal people
will naturally latch onto well enough, if they don’t try too hard to be
creative or insist on an analysis first, and if you don’t confuse things by
introducing dubious theses. This is a
perfectly good way to teach someone the concept pink, well enough that she can confidently affirm that pink things
exist (perhaps feeling baffled how anyone could deny it), sorting future positive
and negative examples in more or less the consensus way, except perhaps in
borderline cases (e.g., near-red) and contentious cases (e.g., someone’s
briefly glimpsed socks). My view is that
the concept of phenomenal consciousness
can be approached in the same manner.
I want, and I
think we can reasonably have, and I think the most natural understanding of
“consciousness” already gives us, room to wonder about certain things. We needn’t commit straightaway to either a
reductionist picture on which everything is physical stuff, entirely mundane,
or to what Frankish calls a “radical realist” picture on which consciousness
somehow transcends the physical. If I
had to bet, I’d bet on the mundane, but I don’t want to build it right into my
conceptualization of consciousness. I
want as innocent a concept as I can manage, which
leaves the possibilities epistemically open.[1]
References:
Block,
N. (1995/2007) On a confusion about a function of consciousness, in N. Block, Consciousness, function, and representation,
Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Chalmers,
D.J. (1995) Facing up to the problem of consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2 (3), 200-219.
Chalmers,
D.J. (1996) The conscious mind, Oxford: Oxford.
Frankish, K. (2012) Quining diet qualia. Consciousness & Cognition, 21
667-676.
Schwitzgebel,
E. (2011) Perplexities of consciousness,
Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Searle, J.R. (1992) The rediscovery of the mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Siewert,
C. (1998). The significance of consciousness. Princeton: Princeton.
[1] For helpful discussion, thanks to Keith Frankish,
Pauline Price, and commenters on my related blog post
at the Splintered Mind.