All Things Are Full of Gods, page 28
HEPHAISTOS: [A note of asperity entering his voice:] Such assurance! Persons are often mistaken about what they themselves are actually doing. You know, Dennett has addressed just this issue of interior certitude many times. For instance, there’s his little parable about a robot named Shakey—a machine with a computer for a brain and a video apparatus used by its software to identify the physical objects in a room, assembling images on a screen from a series of separate functions for picking out the different contours of objects. Now, the screen is for Shakey’s human users; he—it—doesn’t look at the screen and, as far as the robot’s functions are concerned, the screen could be switched off without it affecting the system at all; Shakey just goes on translating pixels from his camera in binary notation, nowhere actually producing what we would think of as a direct visual representation or image. Really, this may be what brains do as well, perhaps: maybe they don’t produce a real visual replica of objects, but they encode information that can, as utility dictates, be perceived or manipulated as images. After all, if Shakey also had diagnostic software installed so that it could report its operations, whether the screen is turned on or not, it might merely provide an inventory of each of its mechanical and digital processes; but it also might, if its software dictated that its report be algorithmically reduced to a usefully concise description, tell everyone that it possesses the images of the objects in its room, and even that to “him” it “seems” as if those objects are what they are. In that latter case, one could interpret the report as evidence that Shakey “believes” he has experienced those images, even though all that’s going on in his computer brain is the coordinated storage of the information that, were the screen turned on, would appear in the form of images to his operators. If we assume the heterophenomenological vantage, we can accept that, from Shakey’s perspective, he does indeed believe he sees images in a privileged mental space; but then our third-person perspective also allows us to relativize the intentional and qualitative stance that tells us how things seem to Shakey and to recognize that what he reports to us as images that he’s perceiving are really, described from another stance, only so many binary notations. Well, so it may be with our brains: what we report to ourselves as real images somehow in our minds might really be just the various flows of information that the global neural system stores in our brain to be used as needed, without there really being some sensuous depiction of qualia—which themselves, after all, would need to go through yet another process of qualitative discriminations in the brain’s central homunculus, and so on and so on. We might all really be computers, in a sense, since computers show us how seemingly intentional systems can consist entirely of unconscious competences—competences without comprehension, that is, but with full “cognitive” and “intentional” functions. Or we might be those affectively empty zombies we discussed before, merely convinced that we have inner conscious experiences.27
HERMES: This is utter gibberish.
HEPHAISTOS: Is it, now? And is that how the rest of you see it?
EROS: Yes.
PSYCHE: Actually, it doesn’t rise to the level of gibberish.
HEPHAISTOS: [Arching his eyebrows:] I’m alarmed. You sound as captious as Hermes now.
PSYCHE: Only because you sound like a lunatic. This really is the most abysmal nonsense: non sequitur upon non sequitur, floating in an ocean of conceptual confusions. I don’t know if anyone, even Descartes, actually believed in something like the Cartesian theatre that Dennett describes. Maybe certain materialist philosophers do, inadvertently, but I don’t care. If so, it just means they, as we already know is the case, have no coherent explanation for subjective mental states. Yet we know that those states exist. Yes, if belief in real consciousness and intentionality and unity of apprehension and so forth really involved a homuncular pleonasm, so to speak—a retreat from one large neural module called the brain to some smaller central module within the brain—then we’d be involved in an infinite regress. But we’ve already said as much. Indeed, it was one of my better arguments against a purely physical basis of consciousness, I thought. Of course, it hadn’t occurred to me that instead it might be used as an argument against the existence of consciousness, but that’s only because the suggestion that consciousness merely seems to exist is ridiculous. As I’ve pointed out, those of us of a classically metaphysical bent in these matters don’t think of consciousness in terms of a Cartesian ghost absorbing representations of a mechanical material order. Instead, we merely believe that mind and subjectivity are founded upon themselves, that the material world is a modality of a deeper mindlike or spiritual constitution of all reality, and that we—as organisms, living mind, animating and forming bodies—participate in and know reality by sharing in the same forms that shape the world about us. Dismiss all of that if you like. All language on these matters is an attempt at description of something very mysterious, I admit, but my view of things isn’t incoherent in the way yours so spectacularly is. Again, if your theory can’t accommodate the phenomenon at issue, eliminate the damned theory, not the phenomenon. And no phenomenon is more ineliminable than phenomenality as such.
HEPHAISTOS: “Damned theory?” Goodness. For you, dear Psyche, that’s practically a tirade. If I’ve done anything to rob you of your composure, I’m sincerely sorry.
PSYCHE: Oh, I’m only beginning.
VII
The Turtle Principle
PSYCHE: I understand perfectly well how exhilarating it can be to indulge in boldly counterintuitive claims. It can make one feel so daring. I also recognize, however, that it’s a temptation that as often as not produces pure nonsense, and this is definitely nonsense. I agree with the philosopher Galen Strawson, who’s hardly a champion of supernaturalism, that the denial of the reality of intrinsic consciousness constitutes the single strangest and silliest aberration of reasoning ever to have occurred in the whole history not merely of philosophy, but of human thought as such, and that by comparison even the most outlandish of religious beliefs is scarcely less sensible than the claim that grass is green.28 If I sound impatient, therefore, it’s because there’s something demeaning in having to argue that nonsense is nonsense; it’s like being asked to reason with a small, angry, obstreperous child as if addressing a calm adult.
Don’t misunderstand me. I can see how Dennett must have arrived at his idiosyncratic understanding of these things, and can even sympathize up to a point. It’s almost certainly all the result of an especially circuitous version of the Narcissean fallacy, one induced by an exaggerated credulity with regard to the Turing test, or to its underlying assumptions. Imagine, that is to say, a computational system whose algorithms have become so exquisitely refined that, when that system is “addressed” from the outside, its responses are genuinely indistinguishable from those one would expect from an actually conscious agent. Your interactions with that system would be, for all intents and purposes, the same as your interactions with a person. And, as you imagine this, surely you’ll find yourself wondering whether a system of such intricacy would have to command so formidable an array of internal information states and finely calibrated operations that perhaps this indistinguishability extends all the way into a kind of interiority in the machine. What’s the real difference? Or so you’ll ask yourself. Inevitably, you’ll wonder whether the machine’s ostensibly cognitive functions—including its internal “report” of the data it has collated and arranged from the world beyond—might be so complex as perfectly to imitate conscious and intentional mental states, and whether it may in fact be meaningless conceptually to separate external behavior and internal awareness. Well, then, having reached this point, all at once it seems plausible to you to reverse the picture and ask the same question of yourself: “How do I know that I’m not merely an ensemble of information states and functions with an algorithmic basis?” It’s not an unreasonable question to entertain, at least for a few moments. But, once those moments have elapsed, it requires only a little further reflection to realize that there are no information states in a computer that constitute information for the computer, and that this is the same as any other version of this galling fallacy: the imposition of a false equivalence on two phenomena that are utterly dissimilar (as we’ve already shown), based on a beguiling simulacrum and on a fervent desire to believe.
That said, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to certain other of Dennett’s concerns too. I also understand the appeal of insisting upon third-person verification in cases where it’s appropriate to do so, such as in the collection and accumulation of scientific data; but one makes a mockery of real science by allowing that insistence to become a mystical fanaticism that denies both the authority and the reality of intrinsic first-person experience. And it’s self-defeating, of course; it undermines the very foundations of objective verification. As I’ve also already noted, there’s no such thing as an actual third-person perspective; that’s the most redoubtable of all of modern science’s useful methodological fictions. What we call the third-person vantage is really just the unanimity—or really, as often as not, the statistical mean—of an indeterminate number of first-person testimonies; the third person—homo tertius—is a phantom “subject” generated out of a milling congress of numerous real subjects; we describe him or her as making an observation in the way we might describe a deliberative legislative body as making a decision. This is all to the good, of course. The more the merrier, I say, and merriest of all when those testimonies are in agreement regarding the evidence of repeatable experiments and scrupulous observations. But there’s no mystical juncture at which all those first-person vantages are transformed into an actual third-person vantage, whatever that might be. Whatever heterophenomenology might or might not entail, it certainly can never be more than a structural extension of the power of “autophenomenology.” To imagine otherwise is yet another instance of the pleonastic fallacy. In the end, it’s the trustworthiness of the unified and intentional subjectivity of private witness that renders all “objective” knowledge credible. If somehow subjective consciousness isn’t even really subjective consciousness, but only a functional “interface” and narrative fiction constructed as a convenience from multiple brain-states—who can say how or by what faculty?—then the mind certainly can’t be a vehicle for establishing scientific truths.
Not that anyone really needs to rely on such an argument to answer Dennett. He’s well within his rights to lavish contempt, as he so often does, on those who believe in realities beyond the physical; but it somewhat weakens his position if this obliges him to deny the reality of things that unquestionably do exist. One really isn’t obliged to pretend that there’s anything intellectually respectable going on here. This is all just a fantastic exercise in attempting to make an irrational fundamentalist adherence to an absurd picture of reality sound somehow rigorously rational. But the belief that there aren’t really such things as beliefs, the conviction that there are no intrinsic convictions, the denial of qualia on the utterly irrelevant grounds that they seem to have no fixed function, the bizarre notion that consciousness can’t both comprise a number of uncomprehending competences and also have intrinsic existence—all of it’s absurd. All those leaps of logic, and all those circular arguments, and all the further little epicycles of reasoning within each of them . . . What, for instance, is the point of speaking of subjective, intentional consciousness as a user-interface or computer icon or anything of the sort when these very metaphors refer to implements employed by subjective, intentional consciousness? Implements that exist for no other purpose than serving the ends of an intrinsic intentionality? Logical circles aren’t explanations.
Moreover, Dennett’s arguments against the intrinsic reality of qualia—than which nothing could possibly be more obviously real—defy my best powers of ridicule. Again, the baffling question posed by qualitative subjective experience isn’t what purpose it might conceivably serve, evolutionary or physiological or what have you. That’s interesting but hardly obscure. Yes, it’s very useful to have a mind; so let’s stipulate the truth of that astounding discovery and move along. The question is how it is that such experience is possible at all—how, that is, the alleged aimlessness and mechanistic extrinsicism of matter can produce the directedness, self-presence, and introspective depth of the personal vantage, the pure perspective of the I. Somehow Dennett continually shifts the focus here from phenomenal experience to utterly subordinate and largely irrelevant issues of epistemology and behavior. Those are matters of function, within specific contexts; but function and context neither explain what consciousness is nor explain consciousness away. As Hermes says, the experience remains, and it remains irreducible to its physical concomitants, functions, contexts, or uses. That ineffable, private, intrinsic, directly accessible sense of “what it’s like” whose existence Dennett denies not only really and indubitably does exist; it’s the foundation and medium of everything we know and are. Frankly, it’s an embarrassment, and something of a philosophical burlesque, even to have to debate such things. Especially bizarre are the ways in which Dennett’s failure to address the actual question of consciousness in terms other than the functional or epistemological or behavioral produces such garbled arguments. The one you cite—the one about the coffee-tasters—is a perfect example, because it’s also a perfect loop: it starts from the sheerly dogmatic assertion that all mental states must be merely functional processes; therefore, mental states that aren’t merely functional, like intrinsic qualitative experience, can’t really exist; hence, they don’t; and, as they don’t, then all mental states must merely be functional processes. This is positively mystical in its circularity. And somehow, supposedly, it gets us past the rather significant reality that intrinsic qualitative experience does in fact—inconveniently, it seems—exist. So his proof of functionalism is to assert its reality, and then to deny reality itself because of its failure to confirm his assertion. There’s a nimble feat of dialectic for you.
HEPHAISTOS: Well, I don’t . . .
PSYCHE: And of course qualitative states of consciousness can be altered by changes in the objects of perception or in one’s organs of perception, or for that matter can remain unaltered despite such changes. So what? This entire debate of ours began with a red rose blossom plucked from a tree, and I freely admit that, if I should suddenly find that it appeared to be yellow instead of red, I could not be sure whether it or my optic apparatus had been altered. Conversely, if I continue to see it as red, I can’t really know from that alone whether it truly is still red, or indeed ever really was red to begin with. In fact, simply by perceiving it, I can’t be certain that it really exists and that I’m not hallucinating the entire episode. Yet the one thing of which I can be absolutely certain is the immediate, private, intrinsic, subjective qualitative experience itself. All functional, representational, psychological, and behavioral issues can be set aside here, since they have no bearing whatsoever on the matter that remains inexplicable in purely physicalist terms: first-person consciousness. I’m not even sure what point Dennett imagines he’s making, since his putative proof that qualia aren’t intrinsic subjective states is simply to complain that they don’t correspond to objective causes—which suggests that he’s attempting to disprove the intrinsic reality of qualia by demonstrating their independent reality. If anything, what he’s saying only reinforces the claim that the qualitative dimension of experience doesn’t exhaust itself in any mere function; it’s something quite distinct from whatever objective information it may or may not be associated with, in regard either to the world or to my own neurological structures; rather, it’s thoroughly subjective—subjectivity as such, in fact—ontologically distinct from any of the objective physical processes or behaviors with which it might be associated. A particular quale in the present may not tell me whether it’s my coffee or my aesthetic standards that time has altered, but it certainly attests to itself in a wholly immediate, private, and undeniable way. This is a primordial datum—the primordial datum par excellence—which it’s a degrading nonsense to pretend isn’t real.
We see the same basic irrelevancy in Dennett’s point about the various ways in which pain might be experienced. Here his argument is nothing more than the psychologistic fallacy at its most elementary—a failure, that is, to distinguish between the qualitative experience itself and one’s psychological appropriation of it. Yes, the same thrill of pain might in one context induce aversion and in another erotic pleasure, but the subjectivity of the experience is no less mysterious as a result, and the pain is still a private experience, even when it’s not associated with a behavioral “pain-function.” Frankly, we can subtract psychology altogether from our reflections on qualia, since they’re present in each of us even when there’s no egoistic appropriation of them as psychologically “mine.” At times, they can even be disruptive of one’s preoccupation with oneself. A ballerina may lose herself in her dance, precisely because her qualitative awareness has in a sense liberated her from herself, and allowed her to submerge her consciousness in the pure flow of sensuous and emotional impressions, and to achieve a rare immediacy of encounter with the phenomenal realm. There are moments of transport—artistic, mystical, what have you—that utterly subsume function in experience; but the qualitative privacy of the experience remains constant. Why not draw exactly the opposite conclusion, then? Why not see all of this as proof that awareness and intentionality are independent of any mere function as such, and enjoy a kind of ontological liberty from the mechanistic properties of mere stimulus and response? That, in fact, qualia aren’t merely dispositions toward one behavior or another, but possess an intrinsic nature indifferent to whatever behavioral dispositions might at any given juncture rely upon them? That this is intrinsic to the powers of living souls?
