Tag Archives: illusionism

Dismissing materialism

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Eric Holloway gives a brisk and entertaining dismissal of all materialist theories of consciousness here, boldly claiming that no materialist theory of consciousness is plausible. I’m not sure his coverage is altogether comprehensive, but let’s have a look at his arguments. He starts out by attacking panpsychism…

One proposed solution is that all particles are conscious. But, in that case, why am I a human instead of a particle? The vast majority of conscious beings in the universe would be particles, and so it is most likely I’d be a particle and not any sort of organic life form.

It’s really a bit of a straw man he’s demolishing here. I’m not sure panpsychists are necessarily committed to the view that particles are conscious (I’m not sure panpsychists are necessarily materialists, either), but I’ve certainly never run across anyone who thinks that the consciousness of a particle and the consciousness of a human being would be the same. It would be more typical to say that particles, or whatever the substrate is, have only a faint glow of awareness, or only a very simple, perhaps binary kind of consciousness. Clearly there’s then a need to explain how the simple kind of consciousness relates or builds up into our kind; not an easy task, but that’s the business panpsychists are in, and they can’t be dismissed without at least looking at their proposals.

Another solution is that certain structures become conscious. But a structure is an abstract entity and there is an untold infinite number of abstract entities.

This is perhaps Holloway’s riposte; he considers this another variety of panpsychism, though as stated it seems to me to encompass a lot of non-panpsychist theories, too. I wholeheartedly agree that conscious beings are not abstract entities, an error which is easy to fall into if you are keen on information or computation as the basis of your theory. But it seems to me hard to fight the idea that certain structural (or perhaps I mean functional) properties instantiated in particular physical beings are what amounts to consciousness. On the one hand there’s a vast wealth of evidence that structures in our brains have a very detailed influence on the content of our experiences. On the other, if there are no structural features, broadly described, that all physical instances of conscious entities have in common, it seems to me hard to avoid radical mysterianism. Even dualists don’t usually believe that consciousness can simply be injected randomly into any physical structure whatever (do they?). Of course we can’t yet say authoritatively what those structural features are.

Another option, says Holloway, is illusionism.

But, if we are allowed to “solve” the problem that way, all problems can be solved by denying them. Again, that is an unsatisfying approach that ‘explains’ by explaining away.

Empty dismissal of consciousness would indeed not amount to much, but again that isn’t what illusionists actually say; typically they offer detailed ideas about why consciousness must be an illusion and varied proposals about how the illusion arises. I think many would agree with David Chalmers that explaining why people do believe in consciousness is currently where some of the most interesting action is to be found.

Some say consciousness is an emergent property of a complex structure of matter… …At what point is a structure complex enough to become conscious?

I agree that complexity alone is not enough, though some people have been attracted to the idea, suggesting that the Internet, for example, might achieve consciousness. A vastly more sophisticated form of the same kind of thinking perhaps underlies the Integrated Information theory. But emergence can mean more than that; in particular it might say that when systems have enough structural complexity of the right kind (frantic hand-waving), they acquire interesting properties (meaningful, experiential ones) that can only be addressed on a higher level of interpretation. That, I think, is true; it just doesn’t help all that much.

Holloway wraps up with another pop at those fully-conscious particles that surely no-one believes in anyway. I don’t think he has shown that no materialist theory can be plausible – the great mainstream ideas of functionalism/computationalism are largely untouched – but I salute the chutzpah of anyone who thinks such an issue can be wrapped up in one side of A4 – and is willing to take it on!

Why would you even think that?

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More support for the illusionist perspective in a paper from Daniel Shabasson. He agrees with Keith Frankish that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, and (taking the metaproblematic road) offers a theory as to why so many people – the great majority, I think – find it undeniably real in spite of the problems it raises.

Shabasson’s theory rests on three principles:

  • impenetrability,
  • the infallibility illusion, and
  • the justification illusion.

Impenetrability says that we have no conscious access to the processes that produce our judgements about sensory experience. We know as a matter of optical/neurological science that our perception of colour rests on some very complex processing of the data detected by our eyes. Patches of paint or groups of pixels emitting exactly the same wavelengths of light may be perceived as quite different colours when our brains take account of the visual context, for example, but the resulting colours are just present to consciousness as facts. We have no awareness of the complex adjustments that have been made.

This point is particularly evident in the case of colour vision, where the processing done by the brain is elaborate and sometimes counter-intuitive. It’s less clear that we’re missing out on much in the way of subtle interpretive processing when we detect a poke in the eye. Generally though, I think the claim  is pretty uncontroversial, and in fact our limited access to what’s really going on has been an important part of other theories such as Scott Bakker’s Blind Brain.

Infallibilty says that we are prone to assume we cannot be wrong about certain aspects of our experience. Obviously most perceptions could be mistaken, but others, more direct, seem invulnerable to error. I may be mistaken in my belief that there is a piano on my foot, or about the fact that my toe is crushed; but surely I can’t be wrong about the fact that I am feeling pain? Although this idea has been robustly challenged, it has a strong intuitive appeal, perhaps partly out of a feeling that while we can be wrong about external stuff, mental entities are perceived directly, already present in the mind, and therefore immune from the errors that creep in during delivery of external information.

Justification is a little more subtle; the claim is that for any judgement we make, we believe there is some justification. This is not the stronger claim that there is good or adequate justification, just the view that we suppose ourselves to have some reason for thinking whatever we think.

Is that true? What if I fix my thoughts on the fourth nearest star to Earth which has only one planet orbiting it, and judge that the planet in question is smaller than Earth? If I knew more about astronomy I might have reasons for this judgement, but as matters stand, though I feel confident that the planet exists, I have no reasons for any beliefs about its size relative to Earth.

In such a case, I believe Shabasson would either point to probable justifications I have overlooked (perhaps I am making a mistaken but not irrational assumption about a correlation between size and number of planets) or more likely, simply deny that I have truly made the relevant judgement at all. I might assert that I really believe the planet is small, but I’m really only playing some hypothetical game. I think in fact, Shabasson can have what he needs for the sake of argument here pretty much by specification.

Given the three principles, various things follow. When we judge ourselves to be having a ‘reddish’ experience, we must be right, and there must be something in our mind that justifies the judgement. That thing is a quale, which must therefore exist. This follows so directly, without requiring effortful reasoning, it seems to us that we apprehend the quale directly. Furthermore, the quale must seem like something, or to put it more fully, there must be something it seems like: if there were nothing a quale were like, there would be no apparent difference between a red and a green quale; but it is of the essence that there are such differences.

What is it like? We can’t say, because in fact it doesn’t exist. Though there really are justificatory properties for our judgements about perceptions, they are not phenomenal ones; but impenetrability means we remain unaware of them. Hence the apparent ineffability of qualia. Impenetrability also gives rise to an impression that qualia are intrinsic; briefly it means that the reddish experience arrives with no other information, and in particular nothing about its relation to other things; it seems it just is. Completing the trio, qualia seem subjective because given ineffability and intrinsicality, they are only differentiable through introspection, and introspection naturally limits access to a particular single subject.

I don’t think Shabasson has the whole answer (I think, in particular, that the apparent existence of qualia has to do with the particular reality of actual experience, a quality obviously not conveyed by any theoretical account), but I think there are probably several factors that account for our belief in phenomenal experience, and he gives a very clear account of some significant ones. The use of the principle of justification seems especially interesting to me; I wonder if it might help illuminate some other quirks of human psychology.

Illusionism

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frankish-illusionConsciousness – it’s all been a terrible mistake. In a really cracking issue of the JCS (possibly the best I’ve read) Keith Frankish sets out and defends the thesis of illusionism, with a splendid array of responses from supporters and others.

How can consciousness be an illusion? Surely an illusion is itself a conscious state – a deceptive one – so that the reality of consciousness is a precondition of anything being an illusion? Illusionism, of course, is not talking about the practical, content-bearing kind of consciousness, but about phenomenal consciousness, qualia, the subjective side, what it is like to see something. Illusionism denies that our experiences have the phenomenal aspect they seem to have; it is in essence a sceptical case about phenomenal experience. It aims to replace the question of what phenomenal experience is, with the question of why people have the illusion of phenomenal experience.

In one way I wonder whether it isn’t better to stick with raw scepticism than frame the whole thing in terms of an illusion. There is a danger that the illusion itself becomes a new topic and inadvertently builds the confusion further. One reason the whole issue is so difficult is that it’s hard to see one’s way through the dense thicket of clarifications thrown up by philosophers, all demanding to be addressed and straightened out. There’s something to be said for the bracing elegance of the two-word formulation of scepticism offered by Dennett (who provides a robustly supportive response to illusionism here, as being the default case) – ‘What qualia?’. Perhaps we should just listen to the ‘tales of the qualophiles’ – there is something it is like, Mary knows something new, I could have a zombie twin – and just say a plain ‘no’ to all of them. If we do that, the champions of phenomenal experience have nothing to offer; all they can do is, as Pete Mandik puts it here, gesture towards phenomenal properties. (My imagination whimpers in fear at being asked to construe the space in which one might gesture towards phenomenal qualities, let alone the ineffable limb with which the movement might be performed; it insists that we fall back on Mandik’s other description; that phenomenalists can only invite an act of inner ostension.)

Eric Schwitzgebel relies on something like this gesturing in his espousal of definition by example as a means of getting the innocent conception of phenomenal experience he wants without embracing the dubious aspects. Mandik amusingly and cogently assails the scepticism of the illusionist case from an even more radical scepticism – meta-illusionism. Sceptics argue that phenomenalism can’t be specified meaningfully (we just circle around a small group of phrases and words that provide a set of synonyms with no definition outside the loop) , but if that’s true how do we even start talking about it? Whereof we cannot speak…

Introspection is certainly the name of the game, and Susan Blackmore has a nifty argument here; perhaps it’s the very act of introspecting that creates the phenomenal qualities? Her delusionism tells us we are wrong to think that there is a continuous stream of conscious experience going on in the absence of introspection, but stops short of outright scepticism about the phenomenal. I’m not sure. William James told us that introspection must be retrospection – we can only mentally examine the thought we just had, not the one we are having now – and it seems odd to me to think that a remembered state could be given a phenomenal aspect after the fact. Easier, surely, to consider that the whole business is consistently illusory?

Philip Goff is perhaps the toughest critic of illusionism; if we weren’t in the grip of scientism, he says, we should have no difficulty in seeing that the causal role of brain activity also has a categorical nature which is the inward, phenomenal aspect. If this view is incoherent or untenable in any way, we’re owed a decent argument as to why.

Myself I think Frankish is broadly on the right track. He sets out three ways we might approach phenomenal experience. One is to accept its reality and look for an explanation that significantly modifies our understanding of the world. Second, we look for an explanation that reconciles it with our current understanding, finding explanations within the world of physics of which we already have a general understanding. Third, we dismiss it as an illusion. I think we could add ‘approach zero’: we accept the reality of phenomenal experience and just regard it as inexplicable. This sounds like mysterianism – but mysterians think the world itself makes sense; we just don’t have the brains to see it. Option zero says there is actual irreducible mystery in the real world. This conclusion is surely thoroughly repugnant to most philosophers, who aspire to clear answers even if they don’t achieve them; but I think it is hard to avoid unless we take the sceptical route. Phenomenal experience is on most mainstream accounts something over and above the physical account just by definition. A physical explanation is automatically ruled out; even if good candidates are put forward, we can always retreat and say that they explain some aspects of experience, but not the ineffable one we are after. I submit that in fact this same strategy of retreat means that there cannot be any satisfactory rational account of phenomenal experience, because it can always be asserted that something ineffable is missing.

I say philosophers will find this repugnant, but I can sense some amiable theologians sidling up to me. Those light-weight would-be scientists can’t deal with mystery and the ineffable, they say, but hey, come with us for a bit…

Regular readers may possibly remember that I think that the phenomenal aspect of experience is actually just its reality; that the particularity or haecceity of real experience is puzzling to those who think that theory must accommodate everything. That reality is itself mysterious in some sense, though: not easily accounted for and not susceptible to satisfactory explanation either by induction or deduction. It may be that to understand that in full we have to give up on these more advanced mental tools and fall back on the basic faculty of recognition, the basis of all our thinking in my view and the capacity of which both deduction and induction are specialised forms. That implies that we might have to stop applying logic and science and just contemplate reality; I suppose that might mean in turn that meditation and the mystic tradition of some religions is not exactly a rejection of philosophy as understood in the West, but a legitimate extension of the same enquiry.

Yeah, but no; I may be irredeemably Western and wedded to scientism, but rightly or wrongly, meditation doesn’t scratch my epistemic itch. Illusionism may not offer quite the right answer, but for me it is definitely asking the right questions.