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1 April 2006 |
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Ted
Honderich’s new theory of consciousness – that me being conscious of a
room is in some sense just there being a room – was mentioned in these
pages a while ago. On that occasion it was noted that, in spite of his
philosophical eminence as a former Grote professor, his paper had been
rejected by the Journal of Consciousness Studies (not normally a
narrow-minded periodical - happy to publish pieces on parapsychology, say
or Rupert Sheldrake), and it was suggested that the reason might be that
no-one could work out what he was on about. But we liked the rallying-cry
with which he ended, calling for further progress.
That call has not gone
unanswered. Last August in
The least we can do, then, is to have a further look at what these Radical Externalists are saying, and Manzotti’s paper seems a good place to start. |
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The
distinctive feature of Manzotti’s theory is that he takes a process-based
view. Things don’t exist, in his eyes, they take place. Like many others,
he thinks we are to some extent captives of the philosophical outlook
adopted four or five hundred years ago, but instead of Descartes getting
all the blame, as is usual in these cases, he attributes the main guilt to
Galileo (though of course Descartes does not escape unreproved
altogether). Galileo, he says, adopted a methodology which separated the
observer from an observed world of autonomous objects susceptible to
measurement and mathematics. Some features of these objects, such as mass,
were really out there in the world; others, notably colour, were really
only in the observer’s head. This, clearly, was a productive approach: but
what Galileo had no business to do was to add an ontological commitment.
The fact that considering the observer and the observed separately allowed
him to do some interesting sums did not mean that the observer and the
observed were really separate.
This mistake, according to Manzotti, led to our disastrously dualistic outlook, the view that perception happens in the head, and all our difficulties with connecting the inner subjective world with the physical reality outside. Manzotti is surely right to want to remove unnecessary intermediaries from our account of perception – what he refers to as the ‘television’ view. In fact,
he says, the mind is identical with everything the subject is conscious
of. Instead of talking about the perceived and the perceiver, we should
talk about the unifying process of perception, the ‘onphene’ . Our mental life is
composed of these onphenes, reaching out far beyond our skulls. Once we
adopt this conception of ‘the enlarged mind’, all the difficult problems
of consciousness fall away. We don’t have to reconcile qualia with
objective reality because they are objective reality; we need no longer
puzzle over intentionality, the link between things which mean and things
which are meant: the onphene is
intentionality.
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According to Manzotti, perception in some sense constitutes
objects. A favourite example is the rainbow. There is, in fact, no vast
coloured arch in the sky: it’s only in the act of observation that the
rainbow is brought about. As with Honderich, it would be possible to
misconstrue this as a radical kind of relativism – your own perceptions
are the only reality – but Manzotti’s outlook is much more commonsensical
than that. Rainbows, after
all, still have some underlying physical support in the form of raindrops and sunlight. I fear
this is more commonsensical than it really has any right to be. If there’s
still an objective physical world underlying and giving rise to the
onphenes, I think some of the old problems of the relationship between
mental and physical are merely going to be relocated. If Manzotti wants to embrace his
radicalism fully, I think he is bound to adopt an ontology in which there
really is nothing but collections of onphenes. He would then be faced with
difficult problems of accounting for why the onphenes exist, and how they
come to have certain consistencies and commonalities – the kind of
regularities which real objects at one end, and observing people at the
other, are generally thought to explain.
One of the challenges he faces,
of course is how to account for erroneous perceptions. If all my
perceptions just are the things perceived, how could I ever suffer from
illusions or mistakes? Manzotti offers an account of dreams and memories
in which he seeks to preserve the idea that they are, somehow, realities.
Memories are just delayed effects of the onphene still doing its stuff –
but hang on there: if my mind is identical with the things it is conscious
of, how come my mind is here now and the thing remembered is back then?
Dreams, on the other hand, recombine elements drawn ultimately from
reality. It is a key point for Manzotti that the contents of the mind can
only come from the real world – you cannot imagine anything entirely new,
such as a new colour. If I dream of my mother wearing Napoleon’s hat, it
is my real mother and (by a more obscure process, since I have never seen
it) Napoleon’s real hat that are involved. But surely my-mother-in-the-hat
is a legitimate single object of perception, not irreducibly dual. What if
I dream of a purple cow? It may be, at some remove, a real cow: but where
does the purple come from? A particular purple object?
Purpleness?
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Manzotti goes so far as to
claim that the coloured spots created by pressing your eyes (or banging
your head – don’t try this at home) derive from real colours we have seen.
A person who was blind from birth whose eyes were pressed in this way, he
thinks, could not experience colour, but would perceive the spots through
the sensation of touch (why not smell?). But the weakest of his defences,
I think, is the one presented for the case of optical illusions such as
the Kanisza triangle (formed by three ‘pac-men’ providing the apparent
corners) or illusions of movement. Manzotti introduces the idea of a
‘perceived triangle’ and ‘perceived motion’ as the objects of perception
in these cases. Wasn’t this just the sort of thing he was against? And
where is the perceived triangle? Not, surely… in the head of the
perceiver?
In short, I think
there are unresolved problems in Manzotti’s theory. He might well seek to
resolve them by becoming less radical about his externalism – but perhaps
it would be more interesting to go the other way: cast off from the shores
of mere common sense and set up a truly radical onphene metaphysics.
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