The Portland Oregonian sometimes has the New York Times Book Review section in its Sunday online edition. Looking it over last weekend, I noted an ad for a book containing 133 essays from the Times' award-winning philosophy series.
I gave "Question Everything" to myself as a belated Christmas present. It arrived recently, and I read one of the essays by Galen Strawson this morning: Consciousness Isn't a Mystery. It's Matter.
Wow. Really interesting and thought-provoking.
Strawson presented a fresh view of consciousness that I'd never come across before. This is the power of philosophy, which to me simply means clear thinking -- not the academic version of modern-day philosophy that in large part is devoted to linguistic games, in my decidedly personal opinion.
Here's excerpts from the essay that capture Strawson's main points.
Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don't know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery.
...I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is -- where by "consciousness" I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It's the most familiar thing there is, whether it's experience of emotion, hearing, touching, tasting, or feeling.
It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.
The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour... Or rather, more carefully: The nature of physical stuff is mysterious except insofar as consciousness is itself a form of physical stuff.
This point, which is at first extremely startling, was well put by Bertrand Russell in the 1950s in his essay "Mind and Matter": "We know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events," he wrote," except when these are mental events that we directly experience."
In having conscious experience, he claims, we learn something about the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, for conscious experience is itself a form of physical stuff. I think Russell is right: Human conscious experience is wholly a matter of physical goings-on in the body and particularly the brain.
...We know what conscious experience is because the having is the knowing: Having conscious experience is knowing what it is. You don't have to think about it (it's really much better not to). You just have to have it.
It's true that people can make all kinds of mistakes about what is going on when they have experience, but none of them threaten the fundamental sense in which we know exactly what experience is just in having it.
...So we all know what consciousness is. Once we're clear on this we can try to go further, for consciousness does of course raise a hard problem. The problem arises from the fact that we accept that consciousness is wholly a matter of physical goings-on, but can't see how this can be so.
We examine the brain in ever greater detail, using incredibly powerful techniques like fMRI, and we observe extraordinarily complex neuroelectrochemical goings-on, but we can't even begin to understand how these goings-on can be (or give rise to) conscious experience.
...Many make the same mistake [as Leibniz] today -- the Very Large Mistake (as Winnie-the-Pooh might put it) of thinking that we know enough about the nature of physical stuff to know that conscious experience can't be physical.
We don't. We don't know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff except -- Russell again -- insofar as we know it simply through having a conscious experience.
We find this idea extremely difficult because we're so very deeply committed to the belief that we know more about the physical than we do, and (in particular) know enough to know that consciousness can't be physical.
We don't see that the hard problem is not what consciousness is, it's what matter is -- what the physical is... Physics is silent -- perfectly and forever silent -- on this question.
This point was a commonplace one a hundred years ago, but it has gotten lost in the recent discussion of consciousness. Stephen Hawking makes it dramatically in his book A Brief History of Time. Physics, he says, is "just a set of rules and equations." The question is what "breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?"
What is the fundamental stuff of physical reality, the stuff that is structured in the way physics reveals? The answer, again, is that we don't know -- except insofar as this stuff takes the form of conscious experience.
We can say that it is energy that breathes fire into the equations, using the word "energy" as Heisenberg does when he says, for example, that "all particles are made of the same substance: energy," but the fundamental question arises again -- "What is the intrinsic nature of this energy, this energy-stuff?"
And the answer, again, is that we don't know, and that physics can't tell us; that's just not its business. This point about the limits on what physics can tell us is rock-solid, and it arises before we begin to consider any of the deep problems of understanding that arise within physics -- problems with "dark matter" or "dark energy," for example -- or with reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity theory.
...So the hard problem is the problem of matter (physical stuff in general). If physics made any claim that couldn't be squared with the fact that our conscious experience is brain activity, then I believe that claim would be false.
But physics doesn't do any such thing. It's not the physics picture of matter that's the problem; it's the ordinary everyday picture of matter.
It's ironic that the people who are most likely to doubt or deny the existence of consciousness (on the grounds that everything is physical, and that consciousness can't possibly be physical) are also those who are most insistent on the primacy of science, because it is precisely science that makes the key point shine most brightly: the point that there is a fundamental respect in which the ultimate intrinsic nature of the stuff of the universe is unknown to us -- except insofar as it is consciousness.
Strawson's comments re consciousness arising from the brain sounds pretty reasonable. I'm also of the opinion that there is no mystery about consciousness being as it is an observable, common property of everyone. I see no reason to relegate consciousness to some mysterious external entity or for it to be a property of the universe – any advanced organism has the necessary neurological structure to be conscious.
Strawson makes the point regarding science that: “. . . because it is precisely science that makes the key point shine most brightly: the point that there is a fundamental respect in which the ultimate intrinsic nature of the stuff of the universe is unknown to us - except insofar as it is consciousness.” Maybe reading that one might assume he means that the universe is conscious instead of that physical matter is (ultimately) capable of being conscious.
Although, agreeing with Strawson on consciousness, he does have a belief that we have a self. It is not much of a leap to imagine that his idea of a self could be a conscious self. Jay Garfield takes him to task on this point in (Garfield's) his book 'Loosing Ourselves'. “Strawson defends the reflexivity of awareness in order to argue that this reflexivity is grounded in the reality of a self that is self-aware.” Garfield demolishes this idea.
Reflexivity is the process of self-consciousness where an individual subject or group becomes the object of its own scrutiny. For Strawson then, awareness is a property of a subject of awareness. He introduces a subject that has awareness (very akin to consciousness). So although Strawson states that; “Human conscious experience is wholly a matter of physical goings-on in the body and particularly the brain”, he is dangerously close to introducing a conscious self.
He seems to be leaving the door ajar for allowing a self that is aware, to morph into a self that is conscious. It pays perhaps to be suspicious of philosophers and test their theories against repeatable science and (heaven forbid) one's own honest common sense!
Posted by: Ron E. | January 05, 2023 at 06:14 AM