|
You can't get there from
here.
|
Colin McGinn is probably
the most prominent of the New Mysterians - people who basically
offer
a counsel of despair about consciousness. Look, he says, we've been at
this long enough - isn't it time to confess that we're
never going to solve the problem? Not
that there's anything magic or insoluble about it really: it's just
that our minds aren't up to it. Everything has its limitations, and
not being able to understand consciousness just happens to be one of
ours. Once we realise this, however, the philosophical worry
basically goes away.
McGinn doesn't exactly mean
that human beings are just too stupid; nor is he offering the popular
but mistaken argument that the human brain cannot understand
itself because containers cannot contain themselves (so that we can never
absorb enough data to grasp our own workings). No: instead he
introduces the idea of cognitive closure. This means that the
operations the human mind can carry out are incapable in principle
of taking us to a proper appreciation of what consciousness is and
how it works. It's as if, on a chess board, you were limited to
diagonal moves: you could go all over the board but never link the
black and white squares. That wouldn't mean that one colour was
magic, or immaterial. Equally, from God's point of view, there's
probably no mystery about consciousness at all - it may well be a
pretty simple affair when you understand it - but we can no more
take the God's-eye point of view than a dog could adopt a human
understanding of physics. |
|
Isn't
all this a bit impatient? Philosophers
have been chewing
over problems like this quite happily for thousands of years. Suddenly,
McGinn's got to have the answer right now, or he's giving
up?
Anyway, it's the worst possible time
to wave the white flag. The real reason these problems haven't
been solved before is not because the philosophy's difficult -
it's because the science hasn't been done. Brain science is
difficult: you're not allowed to do many kinds of experiment on human
brains (and until fairly recently the tools to do anything
interesting weren't available anyway). But now things are changing rapidly,
and we're learning more and more about how the brain actually
works every year. McGinn might well find he's thrown the towel in
just before the big breakthrough comes. A much better strategy would
be to wait and see how the science develops. Once the scientists
have described how the thing actually works, the philosophers can
make some progress with their issues (if it
matters). |
|
There's more than just
impatience behind this. McGinn points out that there are really only
two ways of getting at consciousness: by directly considering one's
own consciousness through introspection, or through investigating
the brain as a physical object. On either side we can
construct new ideas along the same kind of lines, but what we need
are ideas that bridge the two realms: about the best we can do in
practice is some crude correlations of time and space.
McGinn acknowledges a debt to Nagel
, and you can see how these ideas might
have developed out of Nagel's views about the ineffability of bat
experience. According to Nagel, we can never really grasp what it's
like to be a bat; some aspects of bathood are, as McGinn might put
it, perceptually closed to us. Now if all our ideas stemmed directly
from our perceptions (as is the case for a 'Humean' mind), this
would mean that we suffered cognitive closure in respect of some
ideas ('batty' ones, we could say). Of course, we're not in fact
limited to ideas that stem directly from perceptions; we can infer
the existence of entities we can't directly perceive. But McGinn
says this doesn't help. In explaining physical events, you never
need to infer non-physical entities, and in analysing phenomenal
experience you never need anything except phenomenal entities. So we're stuck. |
|
It seems to me that if
there were things we couldn't perceive or infer, we wouldn't be
worried about them in the first place - what difference would they
make to us? If the answers on consciousness are completely beyond
us, surely the questions ought to be beyond us too. Dogs can't
understand Pythagoras, but that's because they can't grasp that
there's anything there to understand in the first place.
Any entity which makes a difference to
the world must have some observable effects, and unless the Universe
turns out to be deeply inexplicable in some way, these effects must
follow some lawlike pattern. Once we've abserved the effects and
identified the pattern, we understand the entities as far as they
can be understood. If philosophers want to speculate about things
that make no difference to the world, I can't stop them - but
it's a waste of time. |
|
I'm afraid it's
perfectly possible that we might be capable of understanding
questions to which we cannot understand the answers. Think of the
chess board again (my analogy, I should say, not McGinn's). A bishop
only understands diagonal moves. He can see knights moving all over
the board and at every step they move from the white realm to the
black realm or vice versa. He can see spatial and chronological
correlations (a bit fuzzy, but at least he knows knights never move
from one side of the board to the other), and both the white and
black realms are quite comprehensible to him in themselves. He can
see definite causal relations operating between black and
white squares (though he can't predict very reliably which
squares are available to any given knight). He just can't grasp how
the knights move from one to the other. It looks to him as if they
pop out of nowhere, or rather, as if they have some strange faculty
of Free Wheel. |
|
Yeah, yeah. It could be like that. But
it isn't. As a matter of fact, we can infer mental states from physical data
- we do it all the time, whenever we work out someone's attitude or
intentions from what they're doing or the way they look. McGinn
should know this better than most, given his background in
psychology. Or did he and his fellow psychologists rely entirely on
people's own reports of their direct phenomenal experience?
It still seems like defeatism
to me, anyway. It's one thing to admit we don't understand
something yet, but there is really no need to jump to the conclusion
that we never will. Even if I thought McGinn were right, I think I
should still prefer the stance of continuing the
struggle
to understand.
|
|
The point you're not grasping
is that in a way, showing that the answer is unattainable is itself
also an answer. There's nothing shameful about acknowledging our
limitations - on the contrary. It is deplorably anthropocentric to
insist that reality be constrained by what the human mind can
conceive!
|
|
Read: |
"The Problem of
Consciousness"
The main statement of Mc Ginn's position
in respect of consciousness. Th crucial paper 'Can we
solve the Mind-Body Problem' appears in collections such
as 'The nature of Consciousness' (ed Block, Flanagan and
Güzeldere), but can also be read on-line -see
below. |
"Problems in Philosophy: the limits of
enquiry"
A
broader, more comprehensive view of human intelligence and its
limitations. |
"The
Mysterious
Flame" A
more 'popular' treatment. |
Some
Links:
|
Homepage: - Essentially a list
of publications .
|
The Problem of
Philosophy:
An on-line paper on
Chomsky and human understanding. |
Consciousness and Space The non-spatial character of the
mind and the problems which arise. A slightly different (and
less convincing?) angle. |
Times interview
- Not a great deal of philosophical light shed
here...
|
|
|