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Ted Honderich, as he promised a while ago, has returned in triumph to the periodical which woundingly rejected him a couple of years ago. Back then, Honderich's paper on 'Consciousness as Existence' failed the peer review for the Journal of Consciousness Studies: now, a whole issue is devoted to a target paper from him and eleven responses. In the interval, Honderich has not been idle, He published "On Consciousness", a more substantial adumbration of the same theory, and others, notably Manzotti and Tonneau as mentioned here, have rallied to the banner of Radical Externalism which he has raised. There's really no such thing as final vindication for a philosopher, but this surely represents a remarkable improvement in the reception accorded to his views, and it must surely be highly gratifying: all the more so because, on the whole, the reception accorded his paper is a fairly friendly, positive one. | |
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It's a good time for Honderich - he's on television
in the Perhaps that's a slightly unfair parody, but I find Honderich's expositions always suffer from a strange kind of fogginess. He seems to be asserting something very bold, but amongst all the meandering prose you get a certain impression of the fist not quite connecting. It was just the same, many years ago, with his well-received book, Punishment: it looked as if he thought all punishment was wrong, but nothing half so bold as that was ever quite asserted. And now, consciousness: he seems to be saying, in fact he surely does say, that my consciousness of something just amounts to the thing existing, which is certainly bold: bold to the point of barminess - but it turns out that it actually amounts to the thing 'in a way' existing: three little words which actually stand for a hefty additional apparatus. Tim Crane, in his response, accuses Honderich of equivocating on this, and I find it hard not to agree: in some places Honderich seems to lay stress on the simplicity of the thesis that consciousness is existence, just existence: in others, he explains that what he has in mind is a new and puzzling mode of existence in a second or possibly a third metaphysical world with complicated relations of dependency on other worlds to sustain it. | |
I find Honderich’s style rather engaging in a way: it
has a kind of gently self-deprecating humour. You’re a bit unfair, aren’t
you? On the one hand you accuse him of being “foggy”, and then you
complain that his brief statement of the main point is too terse: doesn’t
include all the details, and therefore conflicts or equivocates with what
he says elsewhere. As Honderich fairly says, anyway, this particular
piece isn’t a detailed, definitive exposition, just a presentation of the
theory: namely, that for you to be conscious of something is just for that
thing to exist, not in the underlying physical world, nor in the form of
firing neurons, but in another, perceptual world, dependent both on the
physics and the neurons but separate from them. In other words, for you to
see something, the actual atoms and molecules of it have to be there in
the physical world, and your neurons have to be firing in whatever way
they do when you notice something: but your consciousness does not consist
in wither of those things: it consists in the object’s being there in your perceptual world – not inside
your skull. | |
Honderich concedes that it isn’t clear how these
triangles fit into his conceptual framework, but he reckons it is a minor
issue of the kind a friendly graduate student could sort out for him.
Surely it’s worse than that? After all, one of the things Honderich particularly wants his theory to do is to banish sense-data style theories from the landscape. Many people have thought that we do not perceive the world directly, but through internal representations of some kind, and it seems to follow that all we ever really perceive is those representations. The main argument put forward for such views is the argument from error or illusion: if we perceived things directly, how could we ever be wrong about them? The error must creep in through our internal representation being different from reality. Honderich is very keen to deny this: indeed I think it is a major part of his motivation here. He asserts that perception is not perception of some representation or sense-data inside our head, it is the external existence of the thing perceived. But if you want to refute a theory whose main argument is based on problems over errors, your theory surely has to have a robust way of dealing with such errors? | |
I agree there’s more to be done in clearing up issues like this, but Honderich has a number of options open to him. He denies that conscious awareness is the perception of internal representations, but that doesn’t commit him to denying that there is any such thing as internal representations. It might well be perfectly reasonable to deny that the objects of perception are in the head while affirming that the objects of dreams and illusions are. This might imply that dreams and illusions are not perceptions, but what’s wrong with that – I’d say they’d better not be! In responding to Paul Snowdon Honderich exploits a distinction between affective and perceptual consciousness, which seems a viable enough path to take. | |
OK. I suppose it’s true that you can lash together a
solution to any difficulty if you don’t care about the additional overhead
in complexity and ontological commitments that you incur. As a matter of
fact, the basic ontological housekeeping of Radical Externalism is its
weakest point if you ask me. I mean, you’ve got this object of perception – let’s
be unimaginative and say it’s a chair. It’s not in the world of physics,
it’s not in my neurons, it’s in this other place, this world of
perception. Is that my world of perception, or
the world of perception? Let’s assume to begin with that there’s only one
world of perception: is the chair I perceive there the same as the one you
perceive? Strange if so, because it doesn’t look quite the same to you as
it does to me. These differences are not really errors, just differences
in point of view and the like: so Honderich can’t deploy whatever he may
eventually come up with as a solution for errors (and if he could I think
he’d find that his treatment of errors gradually eroded the rest of his
theory away altogether). I think we’re forced to conclude that the objects
of our perception are different. This looks worryingly as if the chair
itself might split into two, but Honderich can retain the identity of the
single chair intact in the world of physics and just allow it to have, as
it were, different avatars in the world of perception. | |
I think the point is not about perceptions being
specific to individuals, but about their being distinct from my personal
neuronal activity. If we can agree that they’re outside the skull, I think
Honderich might not care all that much about your wanting to call them
internal in some other vague sense. And your version of internality does
strike me as pretty loose: my shoes are particular to me, but that doesn’t
make them internal. | |
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