All Things Are Full of Gods, page 11
HERMES: Well, now, if you consider the matter, if one isn’t thinking in terms of gravity wells, and if one is aware of the infinity of space, then in a sense every point is the still center of the universe, and the sun does in fact orbit the earth, in a Tychonian fashion of course, with the other planets still circling the sun . . .1
HEPHAISTOS: Oh, please, have pity on my throbbing head. Pedantic equivocations aren’t serious arguments.
PSYCHE: Now, now, my dears, let’s not quarrel. In fact, you both make interesting points—though yours, Phaesty, is interesting chiefly by virtue of its errancy.
HEPHAISTOS: Ah, well, we live to serve.
PSYCHE: Hermes is referring to a matter of perspective, and that’s significant because, indeed, what seems to be the case is often only a matter of the perspective from which one views things. Thus, in terms of gravitation as an object of mathematical description, the heliocentric cosmos is a fact. In terms, however, merely of geometrical relations of center and circumference, the universe is . . . well, “pancentric.” It’s no truer in those terms to say the earth orbits the sun than that the sun—indeed, the entire universe—orbits the earth. As always, Nicholas of Cusa was right.2 The issue is, again, what question you’re asking. But—and here’s where you come in, Phaesty—there’s no way in which our commonsense understanding of the mind can be analogous to geocentrism, because that commonsense understanding isn’t a matter of one or another perspective upon some imponderable quiddity outside ourselves, but is rather a matter of perspective as such. It’s not a question of how mental experience “seems.” The mind can’t merely seem to be what mind seems to be, because the very reality of “seeming” as such is the reality of mental experience, which is what the mechanistic philosophy can’t accommodate. This first-person awareness is a primary datum, the ground of all knowledge, and it simply defies physicalist logic.
HEPHAISTOS: Or so it seems, dear Psyche. We’ve been over this already. What I require are arguments. Explain to me, carefully, precisely what aspects of mental existence you believe can be neither reduced to physical causes nor reconciled to a physicalist philosophy.
PSYCHE: Very well, I shall.
HEPHAISTOS: But please start with the most obvious. Until I’ve fully recovered from last night, I’d rather not leap into the metaphysical deep end.
PSYCHE: I’ll be gentle, I promise. Anyway, we’ve already touched on the most obvious problem of all, or at least the one most conspicuous in the literature: qualitative experience. The problem of all problems here is, of course, first-person subjectivity as such; and, for some reason, in Anglophone philosophy of mind at least, this is usually construed as simply the issue of qualia—sheer phenomenal impressions, the “feel” or the “what it’s like” of being the subject of experience. It’s even come to be called the “hard problem” of philosophy of mind, though in fact it’s really only one hard problem among many.3 And, as a rule, qualia are understood chiefly in terms of sensuous experience: color, taste, sound, palpation, fragrance, a shock of pain, a quiver of pleasure, and so forth. I find that somewhat inadequate, but the important point here is that every individual quale as such appears to be irreducible to anything but itself. It’s entirely “interior,” as it were, entirely the possession of one subject, utterly and inalienably private, and in every discernible or conceivable aspect radically different from any third-person event—even those events with which it seems to be correlated, such as electrical impulses in the cerebrum. Qualia are what are often called “intrinsic properties.” But this world of inner sensibility needn’t be confined merely to the sensuous. There are also subjective qualities attached to an emotional state, to an apprehension, to a memory, to a frame of mind, to a sudden realization, even to the experience of thinking about something. An incalculable range of purely private experience inflects and illumines every feature of our subjective world, and gives us the world not just as a collection of objective properties “out there,” but also as an immediate presence within our very awareness of ourselves. This is crucial, really. Apart from these qualia, it’s likely we’d have no personal identities at all, no sense of self, no sense of others, let alone any awareness of the world.
HEPHAISTOS: Very well. But need we make a mystery of what seems like a simple feature of organic functions. Surely there are sensations for the very simple reason that they’re part of a system of stimulus and response, which evolved as the most efficient means for negotiating physical reality. Surely it’s enough to say that qualia have a role in the integrated physiology of organisms, preventing them from, oh, trying to take a nap in a camp fire or venturing to kiss a crocodile, and encouraging them to eat and procreate. So qualia aren’t really just private or intrinsic properties, are they? They’re parts of a system of interaction between an organism and its environment, and part of an elaborately calibrated operation of converting so-called inputs into so-called outputs.
PSYCHE: Perhaps, but that hardly addresses the problem. We’re talking about the subjective awareness of sensations, not simply sensations themselves; we’re talking about that incommunicable “what it’s like” of any sensation for the one experiencing it. Suppose your capacity for sensations is nothing but a mode of stimulus and response; suppose also that even those more elusive and rarefied qualia I spoke of—say, the ineffable feeling of wistfulness induced by accidentally hearing an old familiar tune, or an inner sense of having a conviction about something, and so on—have some kind of function, even one that confers evolutionary benefit. Quid sequitur? What follows from that? Proposing a utilitarian explanation for something does nothing to demonstrate that the phenomenon in question is possible in purely physical or mechanistic terms; and experiences of qualia would seem to be anything but. And, if they’re not explicable in the sort of mechanistic causal terms you’d accept, it scarcely matters whether they have some ostensible functional usefulness.
Anyway, who’s to say that qualia, specifically as qualia, contribute any functional value at all? Surely stimulus and response can be programmed, so to speak, into a neurological network without the need for personal affectivity. Function alone isn’t explanatory here. If the system is predisposed to react to certain stimuli in certain ways, the additional element of a private, non-objective sense of “what it’s like” to be aware of that stimulus adds nothing indispensably causal to the function. It doesn’t even add to the information those stimuli convey, since qualia are in a sense an experiential tautology: as they’re supposedly properties entirely of subjective consciousness, present not in things but only in our affective inner worlds, prior to subjective consciousness they wouldn’t exist to begin with, and wouldn’t need to be registered as part of the environment. They’d convey no real information about the world. So those phenomenal impressions—those forms of feeling—aren’t real aspects of any physical stimulant in the environment; they’re wholly superfluous to the process. Moreover, as this is so, subjective awareness wouldn’t be a feature of our organic architecture that would be visible, so to speak, to natural selection. It seems clear that qualitative consciousness is something ontologically distinct from—even redundant to—the mechanical system of functional relations that you’re talking about, and stands outside anything evolution would be able to select for survival. It might even be an impediment to the optimal operation of such a system. After all, a capacity for the feeling of fear may seem like an aid to evolutionary success, but the actual feeling of fear as often paralyzes the will as galvanizes it. How much more economical a system that eliminated the affective dimension of stimulation altogether.
Then, too, what about all those qualia that seem to have no functional purpose? How did they evolve, and why? Am I supposed to believe that the ineffable sense of buoyant melancholy I feel on listening to Schubert’s Winterreise or my sense of satisfaction at having imagined a clever quip—or my frustration at having imagined it belatedly, as a bit of l’esprit d’escalier—has some kind of meaningful function in a purely practical sense? How vast a range of actual experience must be ignored in order to make a purely functionalist account of subjective sensibility sound reasonable? Even then, the deepest problem with this approach to the question is that it doesn’t actually address the real enigma of consciousness as such.
HEPHAISTOS: Your dismissal of functionalism is altogether too cavalier. I have something to say on the matter.
PSYCHE: I’m sure you have, and I’m sure you’ll say it. But let’s complete our initial inventory of problems.
HEPHAISTOS: We’ve deferred so many questions already that soon we’ll have to begin deferring our deferrals. [Turning about and sitting upright on his bench:] Very well, how is it that consciousness in itself defies such explanations?
PSYCHE: It doesn’t need to defy them. They never touch upon it to begin with. In such schemes, consciousness remains an unmentioned mystery, the unspeakable open secret right at the heart of mental life. Remember my admonitions regarding the cui bono fallacy. Let’s allow the conjecture that subjective qualitative awareness is functional—is utile—even indispensably so. We’re still left with an aetiological abyss between the reputedly mindless, wholly mechanistic, intrinsically third-person material order supposedly underlying all things and the entirely inner, first-person world of mental existence that supposedly emerged from it. Qualia remain qualitatively distinct from the impersonal quanta that allegedly compose the physical order, but physicalist naturalism asks us to suppose that there’s some transitional point—evolutionary in the case of the species, physiological in the case of the individual organism—where a state of pure exteriority, pure quantitative existence, all at once acquires interiority, a subjective qualitative experience of itself and the world around it. And it would definitely have had to be all at once. Consciousness isn’t a composite state; it’s either there or it’s not. True, it may deepen by degrees, gradually, as a species or an individual becomes more complex; but, if consciousness emerged from mechanism, at some point there was nothing but ubiquitous objectivity and then, an instant later, there was local subjectivity, however dim or feeble. Somewhere the threshold was crossed. But how? Because it’s not really a threshold, is it? It’s that aforementioned abyss again. So how did all that mindless quantity suddenly add up to perceiving mind? How, in this instance alone, did the essential aimlessness of matter achieve so intense and intricate a concentration of its many random forces that it was abruptly and fantastically inverted into the very opposite of everything modern orthodoxy tells us matter is? Remember my cautions against the pleonastic fallacy: no matter how many purely objective quantitative steps the supposedly mechanistic material order may have taken in the direction of mind, none of them seems as if it could have constituted that sudden qualitative transition from pure exteriority into an unprecedented inwardness.
Qualia certainly, at least, seem to exist in excess of the physical processes with which they’re associated: as subjective experiences, they don’t inhere in the objects of experience themselves, but only in our act of perceiving those objects, and they seem to differ from one another far more radically than any one neuronal event differs from any other. As we’ve said, they can’t clearly be causally explained in relation to the electrochemical impulses in the brain’s synapses; but neither can they be causally explained in relation to the physical realities they presumably reflect, because those realities as objectively measured lack the purely relative values of qualitative experience—too hot, too cold, just right, as Goldilocks might measure these things—but have only absolute objective measurements of the sort a thermometer registers. Quite apart from the issue of whether the perceptible qualities of things have some real existence in the world of forms—whether the red of the rose blossom that initiated this discussion is more than a purely subjective impression—we’re confronted with the “what it’s like” of experiencing that red as red, which is a deeper, more mysterious, more irreducible reality. Whether red is real “out there,” as an objective phenomenon, or only subjectively “in here”—whether our minds are participating in the same universal “form of red” that the rose also participates in, or whether instead the red is merely how our brains represent something that itself has no color—scarcely matters at this point. In either case, what’s significant is that there’s an “I” to whom that red appears, and upon whom it makes an affective and private impression. Wherever that red exists, it’s neither in the molecules and physical processes composing the rose nor in the synapses and electrochemical activity of the brain. It exists elsewhere, in an altogether separate dimension, an experiential and formal space where world and mind meet in an event of subjective, immediate knowledge of an objective . . . well, essence. Where is that “elsewhere”? A machine equipped to record all the data of a rose’s appearance, calibrated to report its “redness” to us, doesn’t actually in any sense receive the phenomenal impression of red, even if its equipment is so adjusted as to identify what we would see as a red image; there’s no experience, no “what it’s like,” in that computational process, no unified “I” on the inside of that accumulation of data, translating objective quantities into subjective qualities—or, to put it in more ancient metaphysical terms, no “I” experiencing the otherwise hidden qualities that reveal the form indwelling the rose, or that disclose the rose as a rose rather than as just an ensemble of atomic, molecular, and chemical events. . . .
HEPHAISTOS: And, to your mind, that’s the great mystery of qualia?
PSYCHE: Well, surely you’d grant that no credible modern scientific model exists that can tell us how the electrochemistry of the brain, which is mechanically uniform and physical, can generate the endlessly varied and incommunicable experience of a particular person’s inner phenomenal world. Obviously the event is inflected through the apparatus of perception; no one should deny that. The encounter between a certain kind of object and our neurology produces particular kinds of data; the rose’s redness, understood as a chromatic translation of properties of light and matter through optic nerves and brains, has a physical side. But it’s the other side where the mystery lies: entirely in the subjectivity that’s the site of those impressions, giving them their irreducibly subjective character—not just the data received and processed by the brain, but the mental impression here, the experience of the data as mine, as having a quality for me, and as being like this. That private feeling of red—that phenomenal “thusness,” so to speak—is not the physical event of either the rose itself or my sensory physiology; indeed, it seems superfluous to the physical transaction altogether.
HEPHAISTOS: I don’t deny that it’s mysterious. And perhaps you’re right that to attribute a function to this or that quale isn’t yet to explain the mechanism of qualitative awareness in itself, or how it’s possible; but don’t pretend it’s clear that what we call qualia are in themselves simply devoid of function. Perhaps they’re the necessary palette of mental representation, necessary pigments, so to speak, by which our neurology produces a picture of a particular kind of stimulus, as part of the larger system of stimulus and response—input and output, to use those rebarbative terms again. I honestly don’t know what to make of your archaic talk of seeing the form of the rose, or some transcendental formal cause—roseness, redness, what have you—informing both an object in the world and the mind’s perception of that object. As far as I’m concerned, the world that appears to us is the product of a neural translation of diffuse information into a usefully simplified representation; it’s that representation—not the rose itself—to which I have mental access, or which itself is my mental access to reality, and which allows me to navigate what would otherwise be a trackless ocean of contending sense data. The world we experience is a set of symbolic algorithms, a representational distillate of the world beyond us, a kind of user-interface, to use the jargon of computation. Those qualia aren’t intrinsic realities, but simply neural transpositions of objective realities out there—filters through which information enters a practically useful state. We aren’t seeing red in the rose so much as we’re seeing the rose “redly,” as a convenient way of registering it and reacting to it, if necessary.
HERMES: “User-interface”? What a grotesque phrase. What exactly does it mean?
HEPHAISTOS: I’m sorry if the patois of the technical class abrades your patrician sensibilities. It means simply that, when a system is too complex in itself to be mastered all at once by an operator, it’s useful to condense its functions into small, easily manipulated springs or buttons or . . . well, computer icons are the best example. Just as the coding and functions of software are far too arcane and complex for the ordinary user of a computer, and so the operational conventions of a handful of icons—such as, say, the picture of a file-folder to mean “save document”—allow a user to employ a vast system of algorithms that would otherwise be useless to him or her, so too the vast complexity of all the discrete and related activities of the brain is far beyond anyone’s powers of comprehension and control, but evolutionary forces have created cognitive fables, as it were, to make it all manageable for us. Our agency as the organisms we are is full of unconscious systems and sub-systems that far exceed our capacity for direct understanding and operation, but the simple fictions we employ to tell ourselves what we’re doing make it possible for us to function. Evolution has equipped us with a fairytale that cunningly provides us with a script for pulling levers and releasing springs we’re not even aware exist.
HERMES: Ah. How very up-to-date you are for a superannuated god. It’s still a vulgar locution.
HEPHAISTOS: I yield to your more refined capacity for aristocratic daintiness.
PSYCHE: Now, now, my dears, pull in your claws. Phaesty, that’s all well and fine, of course, but it still doesn’t explain how it could happen in the first place that a world of mindless matter could produce that particular . . . “interface.” But let’s set that aside for the nonce. As for reducing qualia to purely representational states, I suspect there are qualitative experiences that have no particular representational content. I mean, if we’re just talking about sensuous perceptions, that tells us nothing about, say, my awareness of being in a good or bad mood, or of feeling contentment on hearing a sparrow chirp. And there are qualia that far exceed any merely informational function. The bliss induced by a particularly great work of art, for instance, or a beautifully turned sentence: that nimbus of affectivity that hangs about many an ordinary experience and that seems inseparable from consciousness as such. You’ll have a hard time convincing me that that’s some sort of simple “user-interface”—which, I agree, is an unpleasant phrase.
