Bachelorarbeit I
Toward a Theory of Consciousness
Juni 2009 Institut für Bildungswissenschaft und Philosophie
Eingereicht von:
Mario Spassov
Matrikelnummer:
a0309830
Studienkennzahl:
A 296
Betreuer:
Dr. Wolfgang Fasching
Seminar:
SE 180186 Das Problem des Bewusstseins - David Chalmers
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Table of Contents Introduction..........................................................................................................................................3 I. The Hard Problem of Consciousness................................................................................................4 I. We know consciousness, and yet we know almost nothing about it............................................4 II. Consciousness has a qualitative feel to it....................................................................................5 III. The hard problem of consciousness...........................................................................................6 IV. Why would we care about consciousness?................................................................................8 II. The Irreducibility of Consciousness..............................................................................................10 I. The basic argument against the reducibility of consciousness...................................................10 II. Logical and natural supervenience on the physical...................................................................11 III. The zombie-argument..............................................................................................................12 IV. There is no objection in physicalist terms against the conceivability of zombies...................14 V. Other arguments against the reducibility of consciousness to the physical. ............................15 VI. Summary..................................................................................................................................16 III. Taking Consciousness as Fundamental: Naturalistic Dualism.....................................................19 I. Consciousness is naturally supervenient on the physical...........................................................19 II. Taking consciousness as fundamental.......................................................................................20 III. Naturalistic dualism.................................................................................................................21 IV. Basic Laws of Consciousness.......................................................................................................23 I. The principle of structural coherence.........................................................................................23 II. The principle of organizational invariance................................................................................24 III. The double-aspect theory of information.................................................................................26 IV. Pan-psychism as logical consequence of principle II and III...................................................26 V. A Critique of Functionalism...........................................................................................................29 I. Where Searle and Chalmers would agree...................................................................................29 II. Consciousness to Searle necessarily has causal functions........................................................29 III. The Chinese-room-argument: syntax is not sufficient for semantics......................................31 IV. The Chinese-room-argument: syntax is not intrinsic to matter................................................32 V. Searle's naturalistic conception of consciousness.....................................................................35 VI. Summary and conclusion.........................................................................................................37 VI. A first-personal approach to the development of consciousness..................................................39 I. A basic outline of Wilber’s early conception of development of consciousness.......................39 II. Development of consciousness as process of differentiation and integration...........................40 III. Development of matter as a process of differentiation and integration...................................42 IV. Pan-interiorism.........................................................................................................................45 Conclusion..........................................................................................................................................49 Bibliography.......................................................................................................................................52
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Introduction The following paper attempts to draw a general outline of a scientific framework that investigates consciousness. Herefore we will in large part follow up David Chalmers' attempts to formulate a scientific and yet non-reductive approach to consciousness. In chapter I we will present the hard problem of consciousness, i.e. why a scientific approach to consciousness – conceived of in terms of qualitative feel - is so particularly difficult to formulate. In chapter II we will further agree with Chalmers that consciousness is irreducible to matter. Chapter III will beyond that suggest that as consciousness does not seem to logically follow from the physical, we might treat it as fundamental entity, inexplicable in terms of something else. Yet again following Chalmers will will argue that although consciousness itself is basic, there might be psychophysical laws, according to which consciousness is correlated with matter. These we will present in chapter IV and hereby conclude our outline of how Chalmers conceives of a theory of consciousness as a search for basic psychophysical laws. In chapter V we will draw from Searle to indicate a first criticism of this overall approach. With Searle we will argue that from postulating the irreducibility of consciousness (chapter II and III) to postulating his basic laws of how consciousness arises from matter (chapter IV), Chalmers makes use of a functional conception of ontology that carries certain difficulties with it. With Searle on the other hand will argue that purely functional approaches to reality are counter-intuitive as they cannot distinguish intrinsic from extrinsic facts. And yet Searle gives no more differentiated ontological account but rather assumes a physicalist counter-position. In following Ken Wilber we will in chapter VI make even more explicit, that both, Searle and Chalmers, avoid systematic discussions of how they conceive of ontology before starting with their attempts to formulate a theory of consciousness. Starting from different unquestioned assumptions about ontology they almost necessarily have to come to different conclusions about the nature of consciousness. Furthermore they also avoid a second important question which is about the first-personal developmental structure of consciousness. Not only do Searle and Chalmers avoid clarifying their ontologies, they also avoid clarifying their first-personal conceptions of consciousness. Following Wilber we will attempt to show that giving a more systematic account on these two questions is possible and might be necessary condition for developing an overall theory of consciousness. As we will show, remaining silent about these two questions results in many impasses between Chalmers and Searle, where their actual theories of consciousness are concerned.
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I. The Hard Problem of Consciousness I. We know consciousness, and yet we know almost nothing about it In his article Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness Chalmers makes a stunning observation: “There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.”1 As - following Chalmers - we will show, there is nothing as “near” to us as our experience of consciousness. And yet consciousness seems at the same time to be the most incomprehensive phenomenon we are aware of, as we cannot fit it into the natural order of things. Even today, after centuries of scientific progress in explaining nature, consciousness still remains as perplexing as ever. Not because our theories of how consciousness arises from matter are not differentiated enough, but simply because we don’t even know how to conceive of the phenomenon as something yet to be explained in physicalist terms. As Chalmers puts it, when it comes to questions about consciousness such as: “Why does it exist? What does it do? How could it possibly arise from lumpy gray matter?”2 or questions such as “‘How could a physical system such as a brain also be an experiencer? Why should there be something it is like to be such a system?’ [...]” he answers: “We do not just lack a detailed theory; we are entirely in the dark about how consciousness fits into the natural order.”3 And yet, we cannot make the move of simply denying the existence of consciousness. We know consciousness is real, although we cannot point to some empirical fact, which would inadvertently prove its existence.4 But in case of consciousness we don’t need proof, as it rather seems to be something that comes before all attempts to prove something: “We know about consciousness more | directly than we know about anything else, so ‘proof’ is inappropriate.”5 Proof is appropriate only in cases in which conceptions of the phenomenon to be proven could be wrong. But in a very specific sense, as we will show, our knowledge of consciousness is infallible. Chalmers summarizes the stunning epistemic asymmetry of knowing consciousness, and yet knowing almost nothing about it, as follows: “We know consciousness far more intimately than we know the rest of the world, but we understand the rest of the world far better than we understand 1 Chalmers 2 Chalmers 3 Chalmers 4 Chalmers 5 Chalmers
1995, 1996, 1996, 1996, 1996,
1 3 xi xii xii-xiii
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consciousness.”6
II. Consciousness has a qualitative feel to it Chalmers shows himself deeply fascinated by the fact that consciousness comes in qualitative feel, i.e. is experienced and “information processing” in the brain is accompanied by some qualitative feel and does not go on in the dark: “There is also an internal aspect; there is something it feels like [ital. M.S.] to be a cognitive agent. This internal aspect is conscious experience. Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experiences of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one’s tongue; from mundane sounds and smells to the encompassing grandeur of musical experience; from the triviality of a nagging itch to the weight of a deep existential angst; from the specificity of the taste of peppermint to the generality of one’s experience of selfhood. All these have a distinct experienced quality. All are prominent parts of the inner life of the mind.”7 The existence of experience, of a qualitative feel, or, as Thomas Nagel puts it, of “what it is like to be conscious or that conscious being,”8 seems baffling, as it is not something we would have predicted from other features, such as memory, language, learning or from anything we know about matter.9 In case of living organisms we usually immediately intuit that there is more to being that organism, than it merely being a pile of functionally organized parts. Being a bat we usually conceive not only of as being a flying mechanism, using sonar for orientation, but we assume there is something it is like to be a bat. I.e. we assume that being a bat is accompanied by some specific experience, that is unique and different from that of, say, being human. To machines on the other hand we usually don’t ascribe such forms of experience. We don’t assume there is something it is like to be, say, a computer, a calculator or a piston. With Searle we could further add, that even conscious experience of objects, i.e. conceptual or intentional consciousness, as found in humans, has a qualitative feel to it. As Searle points out: “When you see a car, it is not simply a matter of an object being registered by your perceptual apparatus; rather, you actually have a conscious experience of the object from a certain point of view and with certain features. You see the car as having a certain shape, as having a certain color, 6 Chalmers 1996, 3 7 Chalmers 1996, 4 8 Nagel 1974 9 Chalmers 1996, 4
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etc.”10 Because of the “aspectual shape” of consciousness we can conceive of the same object in different conceptions. Thus the object Venus can at the same time be conceived of as in the aspectual shape of The Morning Star or in the aspectual shape of the Evening Star. While Searle is using the concept of “aspectual shape” primarily in relation to the notion of intentionality,11 it enriches our discussion at this point, insofar as we can hereby point out that not only sensory modalities such as sight, touch, smell asf. and emotional states, but even concepts are suffused with a qualitative feel. Conceiving of the Venus as Morning Star comes in an aspectual shape that has a qualitative feel to it: there is something it is like to conceive of the Morning Star. This can be taken as first indication that even thought cannot be thought of as something “purified” from experience or subjective feel. Not only is there something it is like to be a bat, there is something it is like to conceive of something, i.e. to think. Chalmers does not insist on this point, and yet it seems fully compatible with his overall definition of consciousness.
III. The hard problem of consciousness While there is a series of “easy” problems of consciousness, Chalmers argues that there is only one hard problem of consciousness. It is the problem of explaining why experience necessarily had to come into existence, once the basic laws of physics were in place.12 Explaining consciousness would amount to explaining the qualitative feel of – to put it in Searlian language aspectual shapes, why e.g. you experience drinking water under an aspectual shape that differs qualitatively from that of drinking soda. This hard problem of consciousness is traditionally regarded as the hard part of the mind-body problem.13 “When I open my eyes and look around my office, why do I have this sort of complex experience? At a more basic level, why is seeing red like this, rather than like that? It seems conceivable that when looking at red things, such as roses, one might have had the sort of color experiences that one in fact has when looking at blue things. Why is the experience one way rather than the other? Why, for that matter, do we experience the reddish sensation that we do, rather than some entirely different kind of sensation, like the sound of a trumpet?”14 Why should the chain of events in my ear, triggered by air vibrations, be accompanied by conscious experiences? Does it follow from the mere physical facts that, say, an octave sounds 10 Searle 1992, 157 11 Searle 1992, 131 12 Chalmers 1996, 5 13 Chalmers 1996, 4 14 Chalmers 1996, 5 6
harmonic, while, say, a tritonus does not? Chalmers distinguishes between a phenomenal concept of mind and a psychological concept of mind. While for the first the qualitative feel of mental states is definitive,15 in case of the latter it is its functional role. Many mental concepts have a psychological and phenomenological meaning at the same time. Pain is such a mental concept: “The term is often used to name a particular sort of unpleasant phenomenal quality, in which case a phenomenal notion is central. But there is also a psychological notion associated with the term: roughly, the concept of the sort of state that tends to be produced by damage to the organism, tends to lead to aversion reactions, and so on. Both of these aspects are central to the commonsense notion of pain.”16 According to Chalmers the psychological notion of consciousness makes up the easy problems of consciousness and concerns cognitive functions and abilities such as:
• the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli; • the integration of information by a cognitive system; • the reportability of mental states; • the ability of a system to access its own internal states; • the focus of attention; • the deliberate control of behavior; • the difference between wakefulness and sleep.17
All these phenomena are straightforwardly vulnerable to scientific explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms, Chalmers would argue.18 But the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness resists these explanations.19 “The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect.”20 While we usually would tend to assume that consciousness 15 Chalmers 16 Chalmers 17 Chalmers 18 Chalmers 19 Chalmers 20 Chalmers
1996, 1996, 1995, 1995, 1996, 1995,
12 17 2 2 29 3
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arises from physics, we don’t have an explanation for how and why it arises.21 “Even after we have explained the physical and computational functioning of a conscious system, we still need to explain why the system has conscious experiences.”22 While we need not agree with Chalmers’ distinction between psychological and phenomenal consciousness - in all the above given examples of psychological consciousness it is very difficult to conceive of it without already having a notion of phenomenological consciousness -, yet we can agree that there is a hard problem of deriving experience from physical facts. From our first approximation to the problem, consciousness - as qualitative feel - does not seem to be explicable in more basic or simple physicalist terms and Chalmers’ conclusion seems plausible: “Trying to define conscious experience in terms of more primitive notions is fruitless. One might as well try to define matter or space in terms of something more fundamental.”23 Before turning to argue this in more detail, we will make a brief remark on why subjectivity would be an important phenomenon of scientific investigation at all. In the end, even though subjectivity might turn out to be irreducible to physics, why would we want to explain something that - according to what has been said so far - is merely subjective and private anyway?
IV. Why would we care about consciousness? It could be objected that consciousness is not that much of an important thing. So far we have merely argued that the very fact that water “tastes” different from soda, the very fact that water has an aspectual shape and an experienced taste at all,
baffles us, because it does not seem to
necessarily follow from anything we know about water or soda as physical objects. “Who cares,” the objection might go, “why experience has the aspectual shape to it? It is merely subjective anyway. Why would we care about consciousness at all? Does it not seem a relatively minor problem?” Although I have never encountered this objection so far, it seems the logical consequence of defining consciousness as qualitative feel. But, as Searle points out, consciousness is the very essence of our meaningful existence. “One of the weird features of recent intellectual life was the idea that consciousness - in the literal sense of qualitative, subjective states and processes - was not important, that somehow it did not matter. One reason this is so preposterous is that consciousness is itself the condition of anything having 21 Chalmers 1995, 3 22 Chalmers 1996, 29 23 Chalmers 1996, 4 8
importance. Only to a conscious being can there be any such thing as importance.”24 Consciousness is not only the most intimate “thing” we know, it is the most “important” thing we know, or, rather, the only “thing” of intrinsic25 importance at all, as everything else derives its importance from its relation to consciousness: “[...] consciousness is not just an important feature of reality. There is a sense in which it is the most important feature of reality because all other things have value, importance, merit, or worth only in relation to consciousness. If we value life, justice, beauty, survival, reproduction, it is only as conscious beings that we value them. In public discussions, I am frequently challenged to say why I think consciousness is important; any answer one can give is always pathetically inadequate because everything that is important is important in relation to consciousness.”26
24 Searle 2004a, 110 25 For a definition of intrinsic vs. extrinsic facts see e.g. Searle 1992, xiii 26 Searle 1998, 83 9
II. The Irreducibility of Consciousness I. The basic argument against the reducibility of consciousness So far we assumed that consciousness as qualitative feel or subjective experience does somehow “arise” from the physical. The notion of “arising” implies some kind of priority of matter over consciousness, of matter existing first and then consciousness being added to it. However, it is also conceivable that consciousness is not an own phenomenon and consequence of physical processes, but rather an immediate inherent “aspect” of matter. In order not to eradicate this possibility, we will instead of “arise” merely claim, that we can observe a correlation between consciousness and matter. However we conceive of consciousness, as phenomenon standing on its own or as an aspect, we have argued that there seems to be no immediate way of getting from matter to the structure of consciousness. We have not been able to give any coherent answer to the question why performance of psychological functions – if they are conceivable without experience at all - is accompanied by experience.27 One could argue, that experience might have functions that we are not aware of yet, thus neurological processes could be envisaged as needing consciousness and being impossible without it.28 Yet we cannot even imagine what such a function would look like. What kind of function could ever explain the necessity of consciousness? As we will see, our inability to even imagine a function to necessitate consciousness will be the basic argument against the reducibility of consciousness to physics. Chalmers summarizes the argument as follows: “For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? Given any such process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises. The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory.”29 Contrary to, say, the question of why air expands under heat, we could not even conceive of any physical process necessitating the existence of consciousness, while on the other hand we can easily conceive of physical facts to be conceptually coherent without experience. The mere possiblity to logically conceive of matter as causally coherent without consciousness, is the basic 27 Chalmers 1995, 5 28 Chalmers 1995, 6 29 Chalmers 1995, 12 10
argument against the reducibility of consciousness we are yet to develop in more detail.
II. Logical and natural supervenience on the physical Chalmers uses the notion of supervenience to conceive of causality and explanation. Supervenience to Chalmers is a relation between two sets of properties: B-properties - intuitively, the high-level properties - and A-properties, which are the more basic low-level properties.30 In case of supervenience, there are no two worlds identical in respect to their A-, but differing in their Bproperties.31 “When we fix all the physical facts about the world - including the facts about the distribution of every last particle across space and time - we will in effect also fix the macroscopic shape of all the objects in the world, the way they move and function, the way they physically interact. If there is a living kangaroo in this world, then any world that is physically identical to this world will contain a physically identical kangaroo, and that kangaroo will automatically be alive.”32 According to Chalmers, we further need to distinguish logical from natural supervenience. “B-properties supervene logically on A-properties if no two logically possible situations are identical with respect to their A-properties but distinct with respect to their B-properties.”33 What Chalmers means by logical supervenience seems to be conceptual inclusion. In many cases the definition of concepts is performed by reference to other concepts. It therefore becomes logically incoherent to ascribe different features to the same concept. Given we know the features of hydrogen and oxygen, it is logically impossible that these features change - i.e. the features of the components - as soon as H and O form a H2O molecule. In such cases we assume logical supervenience between hydrogen and oxygen and H2O. Given everything we know about hydrogen and oxygen, we cannot even conceive of H2O behaving in contradiction to what we know about its low-level properties. As we will attempt to argue, consciousness is not logically supervenient on matter. But if consciousness is not logically supervenient, it cannot be reductively explained, i.e. it cannot be explained in terms of something else, something more fundamental.34 It has been argued that not only consciousness but tablehood, life, and economic prosperity,35 or, as Searle puts it, split-level 30 Chalmers 31 Chalmers 32 Chalmers 33 Chalmers 34 Chalmers 35 Chalmers
1996, 1996, 1996, 1996, 1996, 1996,
33 34 35 35 50 71
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ranch houses, cocktail parties, interest rates and football games have no logical relationship to facts about atoms.36 But Chalmers does not agree. All these phenomena he believes to be one day explicable in terms of what we know about their low-level physical properties. Only in case of consciousness he argues the relationship between consciousness and physical facts not to be that between high- and low-level facts.37 It might indeed be questioned however, whether such phenomena as economy can be explained in physical terms, as one could argue that social facts are in part constituted by subjective attitudes.38 Facts such as economy or cocktail parties seem intrinsically connected to consciousness: it is difficult to conceive of something called “economy” or “cocktail party,” if no conscious agents were involved in it. If in other words, we were not allowed to use subjectivistic terms such as “motives” for accumulation of goods or “motives” to visit a cocktail party asf. If we take such motives to be constitutive of economy and cocktail parties, it is questionable how they could be reductively explained in terms of physics. Yet even if consciousness is not logically supervenient on matter, according to Chalmers it seems likely - and yet fallible - that consciousness is natuarlly supervenient on the physical. Our task however, in order to show that consciousness is not explicable in terms of physics, will be to show that consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical. Chalmers himself believes that “[...] almost all facts supervene logically on the physical facts [...], with possible exceptions for conscious experience, indexicality, and negative existential facts.”39 In the next sections we will show why he believes so. We ought to keep in mind however, that the following “arguments” are merely examples illustrating the conceivability of the physical realm being causally closed without consciousness making any difference to it, they are nothing but variations on the argument from conceivability.
III. The zombie-argument Chalmers asks us to conceive of physically identical beings to us. They are not only to behave exactly the way we do, but also to be physiologically identical to us, being a molecule-to-molecule replica of us. The only difference we ought to imagine between such beings and us is that they lack experience or what we have so far called “consciousness.”40 Neither do our replica experience any 36 Searle 1992, 62 37 Chalmers 1996, 71 38 Searle 1998, 113 39 Chalmers 1996, 87 40 Chalmers 1996, 94 12
qualitative aspects of pain, i.e. they don’t know the experience of “burning” against “itchy” or “stinging” pain, nor do they “know what it is like” to experience a dissonant chord being resolved into an harmonic. They don’t know what it is like to experience hunger or lust, nor do they know what it is like to think. I.e. they know no such thing as craving to know, shame when they fail, pride when they succeed in understanding. Such beings we could call “zombies.” They, Chalmers insists, would be functionally identical to us, but have no experience: “It is just that none of this functioning will be accompanied by any real conscious experience. There will be no phenomenal feel. There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.”41 In addition to physiological identity we would have to assume historical identity, i.e. these beings having had the same past as us and further being surrounded by the same environment.42 The crucial question for our discussion is whether such beings are logically conceivable. If they are, from conceivability it would follow, that consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical. And Chalmers argues they are conceivable. We agree. Can we coherently imagine such a being? At first sight it seems implausible, as it would be difficult to imagine what might cause such beings to make music, if not the conscious qualitative experience. And it would seem as mysterious, why such beings would stand up and strive for knowledge, if we were no more allowed to postulate “curiosity” as possible reason. Or why would such beings react to failure as if they were ashamed, as if they consciously cared whether they had succeeded in something or simply failed? Or why would such beings attempt to console their zombie-children, if not for the reason that they assumed the kids were in annoying conscious states? Or why would such beings insist to be right about something, why would they act as if they cared about being right? And why would such beings keep their promises, if not for the conscious experience of duty, of being responsible for someone’s well-being and interests? Or why would such beings laugh about something, if not for the conscious experience of something being funny?
IV. There is no objection in physicalist terms against the conceivability of zombies But as implausible as such a picture of a zombie-twin might seem, we claim implausibility for the wrong reasons. All the above given implausibilities are given from our own pre-understanding of consciousness and what it is like to be a conscious agent. Yet none of those reasons derives from logical impossibility. We find zombies to be impossible, because we know we are conscious and in 41 Chalmers 1996, 95 42 Chalmers 1996, 94 13
many cases simply cannot imagine why certain behavioral patterns should occur, if not for reasons of conscious experience. But we have so far given no physicalist objection to why zombies are impossible - and this would be required to show that zombies are logically inconceivable in relation to what we know about the physical universe. In all the above mentioned cases, where to explain certain behavior without reference to experience seems very difficult, it is at least conceivable that one day we are to find merely physicalist explanations, but we have no single physicalist objection against the possibility of zombies, such as we would have in the case of conceiving of flying pigs. According to Chalmers, from everything we know about the low-level features of physical particles, we can logically exclude the possibility of flying pigs.43 But if zombie-twins are logically conceivable, i.e. not contradicting anything we know about the laws of physics, we must conclude that consciousness - if it exists - is not logically supervenient on the physical. We could even imagine functional isomorphs to us, which instead of a brain used silicon chips in a functionally identical way to our neurological structure and lacked all conscious experience.44 The only burden on such a conception is whether one can duplicate the causal powers of neurons or compute them with silicon chips, but this is not a logical incoherence of functional isomorphs. “From these cases [of being able to imagine functional isomorphs, M.S.] it follows that the existence of my conscious experience is not logically entailed [ital. M.S.] by the facts about my functional organization.”45 “But given that it is conceptually coherent that the [...] my silicon isomorph could lack conscious experience, it follows that my zombie twin is an equally coherent possibility. For it is clear that there is no more of a conceptual entailment from biochemistry to consciousness than there is from silicon [...].”46 Although we cannot prove the conceivability and coherence of functionally identical zombies, we can only claim that we know of no physicalist objection against it. And Chalmers argues that the opponent would have to support us with some argument why such a picture is logically inconceivable: “In general, a certain burden of proof lies on those who claim that a given description is logically impossible. If someone truly believes that a mile-high unicycle is logically impossible, she must give us some idea of where a contradiction lies, whether explicit or implicit. If she cannot point out something about the intensions of the concepts ‘mile-high’ and ‘unicycle’ that might lead to a contradiction, then her case will not be convincing.”47 43 Chalmers 44 Chalmers 45 Chalmers 46 Chalmers 47 Chalmers
in Searle 1997, 164 1996, 97 1996, 97 1996, 97 1996, 96
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We should further note that adding layers of complexity to the functional isomorph does not do away with the problem that at no point we can deduce the necessity of consciousness to arise from functional organization.48
V. Other arguments against the reducibility of consciousness to the physical. All arguments against the logical supervenience of consciousness on the physical follow the same structure: from the mere conceivability of a world physically identical to ours in which the facts about conscious experience are merely different from the facts in our world,49 we can deduce that consciousness is not logically entailed in physiology. Thus we could also imagine our spectrum to be inverted, i.e. that we experienced green where so far we experienced red, without there being any logical necessity that the functional organization of our brain would have to change too. The idea is that one’s color experiences could in principle be inverted while one’s functional organization stays constant.50 I.e. there is no physicalist explanation why we experience a specific wavelength as the qualitative feel of “red” and not as the qualitative feel of “blue.” While inverting our spectrum is impossible for practical reasons (because we also associate the qualitative feel of “warmth” to color and inverting our spectrum would result in us experiencing e.g. the qualitative color-experience of “orange” as “cold,” which would evidently contradict the colour experiences of others.) it is not impossible for physicalist reasons. From all that has been said so far we can conclude that our belief in consciousness is derived only from our experience of consciousness and not from anything we know about the physical world. And the impossibility of showing that a functional isomorph would have to be conscious for physical reasons on the other hand means that we cannot deduce facts about consciousness from facts about physics: “Even if we knew every last detail about the physics of the universe - the configuration, causation, and evolution among all the fields and particles in the spatiotemporal manifold - that information would not lead us to postulate the existence of conscious experience.”51 This is what Chalmers calls “epistemic asymmetry;” i.e. we know of consciousness immediately but cannot on the other hand deduce it from facts about physics.52 “The epistemic asymmetry associated 48 Chalmers 49 Chalmers 50 Chalmers 51 Chalmers 52 Chalmers
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98 99 101 101 102
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with consciousness [...] us that no | collection of facts about complex causation in physical systems adds up to a fact about consciousness.”53 To further illustrate the epistemic asymmetry associated with consciousness Chalmers follows Jackson in conceiving of a brain scientist called Mary, who - living in a future of advanced scientific knowledge - has discovered everything there is to know about color-vision. Yet she has never experienced color-vision herself, as she lives in a room emptied of colors altogether. The crucial question in this thought-experiment is whether Mary in the state of knowledge about color experience could have anticipated anything about what it is like to experience color. Chalmers argues that in her state of never having known color from experience, Mary could never deduce the quality of color-experience from propositional knowledge about the brain alone. “It follows that the facts about the subjective experience of color vision are not entailed by the physical facts. [ital. M.S.] If they were, Mary could in principle come to know what it is like to see red on the basis of her knowledge of the physical facts. But she cannot.”54 Indeed the example is less far fetched than it seems at first sight: no amount of knowledge about color vision would ever make a blind person anticipate what it is like to experience or know color, just as no amount of knowledge about animals having modalities foreign to our physiology such as bats, dogs or doves, would tell us anything about what it is like to be such a creature.55
VI. Summary So far we have argued that physical facts do not logically entail facts about experience56 and we therefore have to assume that consciousness is irreducible, “[...] being characterizable only in terms of concepts that themselves involve consciousness.”57 There is an “explanatory gap“ between physical properties and consciousness.58 That consciousness accompanies a given physical process is a further fact not explainable simply by telling the story about the physical facts.59 The form of the basic argument behind this claim was: “‘One can imagine all the physical holding without the facts about consciousness holding, so the physical facts do not exhaust all the facts.’”60 53 Chalmers 54 Chalmers 55 Chalmers 56 Chalmers 57 Chalmers 58 Chalmers 59 Chalmers 60 Chalmers
1996, 1996, 1996, 1996, 1996, 1996, 1996, 1996,
102-103 103 103 104 106 107 107 131
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The argument applies to all forms of consciousness, from sensory experience to conceptual experience. We could continue the game and beyond sensory experience apply it to symbols and further even concepts and judgments, which also can be treated as manifestation of consciousness. What we have been claiming so far is that from mere observation of physiology we cannot immediately deduce whether someone is thinking “correctly,” i.e. whether he is deducing correctly, or whether his thought is meaningful at all. What Chalmers has expressed with his thought-experiments is what we might take for granted intuitively anyway, that there is no immediate way of deducing the character of conscious experience from physiology. We can put it the other way round: we can never observe a logically necessary connection between consciousness and matter, as we on the other hand can observe a logically necessary connection between say mass and the properties of molecules. If so, materialism - the claim that everything and thus consciousness too is logically supervenient on the physical - is false. Chalmers himself summarizes the arguments against the reducibility of consciousness to matter given so far as follows:
1. In our world, there are conscious experiences. 2. There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold. 3. Therefore, facts about consciousness are further facts about our world, over and above the physical facts. 4. So materialism is false.61
Or, as Chalmers puts it, after god made sure the physical facts, he had more work to do and ensure that facts about consciousness held too.62 Chalmers admits he himself once had the hope that consciousness could be explained through reference to something more “basic” and physical. “Unfortunately, there are systematic reasons why these methods must fail. Reductive methods are successful in most domains because what needs explaining in those domains are structures and functions, and these are the kind of thing that a physical account can entail. When it comes to a
61 Chalmers 1996, 123 62 Chalmers 1996, 124 17
problem over and above the explanation of structures and functions, these methods are impotent.”63 This is why the problem of how consciousness fits into the physical universe cannot be compared to such of, say, the problem of life, which was once solved by reference to a vital spirit. “The vital spirit was put forward as an explanatory posit, in order to explain the relevant functions, and could therefore be discarded when those functions were explained without it. Experience is not an explanatory posit but an explanandum in its own right, and so is not a candidate for this sort of elimination.”64
63 Chalmers 1995, 12 64 Chalmers 1995, 13 18
III. Taking Consciousness as Fundamental: Naturalistic Dualism I. Consciousness is naturally supervenient on the physical One way of dealing with the problems raised by consciousness so far would be to simply deny its existence. But to Chalmers this seems an implausible solution, as it seems immediately evident that we experience. It is not a matter of believing that we have consciousness, rather even before a creature is able of complex acts of consciousness such as beliefs, it appears to be immediately immersed in states qualitative experience. A dog might have no beliefs about its consciousness whatsoever, still, it remains a conscious entity. Claiming that the concept of consciousness is merely the result of bad intellectual habits, stemming from, say, a Cartesian tradition, seems to miss the point developed so far, that consciousness is not something you could believe or not believe in, deny or assert, but rather something that accompanies all beliefs and assertions and exists onto- and phylogenetically prior to all conceptual or propositional abilities of human beings. Yet what has been argued so far according to Chalmers does not say that physical facts are irrelevant to consciousness.65 So far we have said nothing about identity of consciousness and matter: “The zombie world only shows that it is conceivable that one might have a physical state without consciousness; it does not show that a physical state and consciousness are not identical.”66 We were only concerned with superveneince and not with identity.67 Avoiding to talk about identity allows Chalmers to claim without contradiction, that from everything we know about consciousness and the physical world, we must conclude that consciousness supervenes on the physical. It simply is no logical but natural supervenience.68 On this view consciousness arises from a physical basis, even though it is not entailed by that basis.69 As consciousness cannot be logically reduced to physics, it cannot be treated as physical phenomenon. Yet it arises from physics in a lawful way.70
65 Chalmers 66 Chalmers 67 Chalmers 68 Chalmers 69 Chalmers 70 Chalmers
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II. Taking consciousness as fundamental Instead of denying consciousness, Chalmers suggests to take it as fundamental, as being irreducible to other, more fundamental. facts: “We can give up on the project of trying to explain the existence of consciousness wholly in terms of something more basic, and instead admit it as fundamental, giving an account of how it relates to everything else in the world.”71 This step is far less mystifying than it might seem at first sight. In physics we have become very accustomed to the idea that there are fundamental facts which are not explicable in terms of others. Whatever these most fundamental, indivisible, i.e. conceptually irreducible facts or “atoms” are conceived to be, we don’t feel awkward in the face of assuming that they are inexplicable. “Although a remarkable number of phenomena have turned out to be explicable wholly in terms of entities simpler than themselves, this is not universal. In physics, it occasionally happens that an entity has to be taken as fundamental.”72 One example might be Maxwell’s move to take electromagnetism as fundamental and describe it in terms of equations, instead of attempting to explain it in terms of more fundamental facts.73 And other such fundamental features of physics are of course mass, charge or space-time.74 “No attempt is made to explain these features in terms of anything simpler.”75 Why after all ought we to insist that consciousness must be reducible to more basic physical entities? With us lacking a coherent picture of how consciousness in principle could logically supervene on the physical, Chalmers sees no reason for the assumption that consciousness supervenes logically on the physical and instead suggests to treat consciousness as fundamental, similarly to the way Maxwell treated magnetism. This approach Chalmers does not believe to be in any sense more mystifying than science in regard to its basic laws. On these grounds an explanation of consciousness is of course being reduced to a proper description of the basic principles of its occurrence. “Of course, by taking experience as fundamental, there is a sense in which this approach does not tell us why [ital. M.S.] there is experience in the first place. But this is the same for any fundamental theory.”76
71 Chalmers 72 Chalmers 73 Chalmers 74 Chalmers 75 Chalmers 76 Chalmers
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213 13 14 126 14 15
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III. Naturalistic dualism The suggestion to postulate consciousness as fundamental fact amounts to some version of dualism. “But it is an innocent version of dualism, entirely compatible with the scientific view of the world,”77 Chalmers explains. He hereby merely expands ontology, as Maxwell did. “Indeed, the overall structure of this position is entirely naturalistic, allowing that ultimately the universe comes down to a network of basic entities obeying simple laws, and allowing that there may ultimately be a theory of consciousness cast in terms of such laws. If the position is to have a name, a good choice might be naturalistic dualism.”78 This version of property dualism ought not to be confused with Cartesian substance-dualism.79 There is nothing unscientific about such a dualism, as it does not claim a dualism of mental and material substances but rather of physical and non-physical properties.80 When it comes to explanation in such a conception of ontology, Chalmers suggests to search for certain psychophysical laws “[...] specifying how phenomenal [...] properties depend on physical properties. These laws will not interfere with physical laws; physical laws already form a closed system. Instead, they will be supervenience laws, telling us how experience arises from physical processes.”81 It is the lawful connection between consciousness and its material basis that forms a new field of investigation. Thus a theory of consciousness becomes conceivable as theory of the laws according to which consciousness arises from the physical. These laws will not explain consciousness through reference to some more fundamental entity, but rather capture the regularity of how consciousness arises from matter.
The major premises so far have been: 1. Conscious experience exists. 2. Conscious experience is not logically supervenient on the physical. 3. If there are phenomena that are not logically supervenient on the physical facts, then materialism is false.
77 Chalmers 78 Chalmers 79 Chalmers 80 Chalmers 81 Chalmers
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15 15 125 126 127
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4. The physical domain is causally closed.82
Premise four, together with Chalmers insisting that consciousness arises from matter or supervenes naturally on matter, suggests that Chalmers will have to embrace some form of epiphenomenalism. If the physical domain is causally closed, on which Chalmers insists, physics forms a closed and consistent theory even without experience.83 I.e. whatever appears in the domain of consciousness is always pre-determined and necessarily follows on whatever happens on the material domain. Chalmers indeed embraces epiphenomenalism as potential option, that cannot be ruled out a priori. Interactionist dualism on the other hand, the view assuming that consciousness is non-physical, but at the same opening up the possibility of consciousness interacting with physical facts, by assuming that the physical is not causally closed, seems untenable to him.84 This view would not only have to deny that the physical is causally closed but further show how some form of interaction between consciousness and matter could take place. This comes very near to Cartesian substance-dualism, a view Chalmers already rejected for its difficulty to conceive of a causal interaction between different substances. Now we will turn to the – as he admits - most speculative part of Chalmers’ approach to consciousness, an attempt do formulate first basic psychophysical “laws,” describing how consciousness arises from matter.
82 Chalmers 1996, 161 83 Chalmers 1996, 128 84 Chalmers 1996, 162 22
IV. Basic Laws of Consciousness I. The principle of structural coherence As already said, Chalmers distinguishes two aspects of mind: the experientially conscious part, which he names “phenomenal consciousness” and opposed to it what he calls “awareness,” the part performing different cognitive functions. However, according to his first psychophysical law, there is structural coherence between phenomenal consciousness and awareness.85 As Chalmers explains: “Awareness is a purely functional notion, but it is nevertheless intimately linked to conscious experience. In familiar cases, wherever we find consciousness, we find awareness. Wherever there is conscious experience, there is some corresponding information in the cognitive system that is available in the control of behavior, and available for verbal report. Conversely, it seems that whenever information is available for report and for global control, there is a corresponding conscious experience. Thus, there is a direct correspondence between consciousness and awareness.”86 An example for structural coherence between phenomenal consciousness and awareness might be color experience. “For every distinction between color experiences, there is a corresponding distinction in [functional, M.S.] processing.”87 Further: “My visual experience of a red book upon my table is accompanied by a functional perception of the book.”88 Chalmers generalizes this claim to say that wherever there is conscious experience or phenomenal consciousness, it is necessarily cognitively represented.89 The structural coherence between consciousness and awareness is not a logical necessity, as one could imagine consciousness to exist without embodiment and vice versa, however it is an empirical fact.90 “This principle reflects the central fact that even though cognitive processes do not conceptually entail facts about conscious experience, consciousness and cognition do not float free of one another but cohere in an intimate way.”91
85 Chalmers 86 Chalmers 87 Chalmers 88 Chalmers 89 Chalmers 90 Chalmers 91 Chalmers
1995, 1995, 1995, 1996, 1995, 1995, 1995,
17 18 18 220 19; 1996, 220 19 19
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II. The principle of organizational invariance Once he has established a structural coherence between consciousness and awareness, Chalmers can make the next move of claiming the crucial link between both to the functional organization of the physical. I.e. structural coherence between experience and awareness is due to the functional organization of the brain and not due to it being a specific and unique kind of substance. Consciousness arises in virtue of the functional organization of the brain and is even determined by it.92 “On this view, the chemical and indeed the quantum substrate of the brain is irrelevant to the production of consciousness. What counts is the brain’s abstract causal organization, an organization that might be realized in many different physical substrates.”93 To me it remains unclear from what kind of reasoning Chalmers draws this conclusion from. However, let us further follow up this idea. It is crucial that to Chalmers functional organization can be realized in various physical systems.94 One just needs to specify the number of abstract components, their possible different states and the relations between these states. Whether these components are neurons or transistors does in fact not matter.95 “According to this principle, consciousness is an organizational invariant: a property that remains constant over all functional isomorphs of a given system. Whether the organization is realized in silicon chips, in the population of China, or in beer cans and ping-pong balls does not matter. As long as the functional organization is right, conscious experience will be determined.”96 I.e. functionally identical systems have the same consciousness, independently of what they are made of.97 On this view consciousness could at least in principle be embodied in silicon chips. There is no logical argument against the possibility of reproducing the functional organization of neurons by using chips. However, there is an empirical possibility for this to fail. It could in fact turn out that neurons can in principle not be computed by using silicon chips. This view, endorsing structural coherence between consciousness and awareness, Chalmers calls “nonreductive functionalism.” It is a combination of functionalism and property dualism.98 Many have argued that for something to be conscious, it must be made of the right biological 92 Chalmers 93 Chalmers 94 Chalmers 95 Chalmers 96 Chalmers 97 Chalmers 98 Chalmers
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243 247 248 247 249 249 249
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makeup. One usually argues that it is implausible to assume that if the population of China was to duplicate the functional organization of brains via telephone, consciousness would arise.99 But Chalmers holds against this “Chinese-nation” argument: “[T]here is only an intuitive force. This certainly falls far short of a knockdown argument. Many have pointed out that while it may be intuitively implausible that such a system [i.e. the Chinese-nation duplicating the functional organization of the brain, M.S.] should give rise to experience, it is equally intuitively implausible that a brain should give rise to experience! Whoever would have thought that this hunk of gray matter would be the sort of thing that could produce vivid subjective experiences? And yet it does. Of course this does not show that a nation’s population could produce a mind, but it is a strong counter to the intuitive argument that it would not.”100 Size and speed matter in regard to functional organization. Thus “[i]f we take our image of the population, speed it up by a factor of a million or so, and shrink it into an are the size of a head, we are left with something that looks a lot like a brain, except that it has homunculi - tiny people where a brain would have neurons. On the face of it, there is not much reason to suppose that neurons should do any better a job than homunculi in supporting experience.”101 If silicon chips could duplicate the functional organization of neurons and if single neurons were replaced by silicon chips, for Chalmers the most plausible hypothesis is that the replacement would preserve the conscious experience of the specific functional system.102
III. The double-aspect theory of information. His functionalist approach leads Chalmers to conceive of ontology in terms of “information.” “An information space is an abstract space consisting of a number of states, which I will call information states, and a basic structure of difference relations between those states. The simplest nontrivial information space is the space consisting of two states with a primitive difference between them. We can think of these states as the two ‘bits,’ 0 and 1. The fact that these two states are different from each other exhausts their nature. That is, this information space is fully characterized by its difference structure.”103 Information states can be realized in substances. Thus a light switch can be conceived of as realizing a two-state information space “[...] with its states ‘up’ 99 Chalmers 1996, 250 100 Chalmers 1996, 251 101 Chalmers 1996, 252 102 Chalmers 1996, 270 103 Chalmers 1996, 278 25
and ‘down’ realizing the two states. Or we can see a compact disk as realizing a combinatorial information state, consisting in a complex structure of bits. One can see information realized in a thermostat, a book, or a telephone line in similar ways.”104 If we conceive of information in terms of difference, we need to further differentiate in which regard we are to treat difference. Chalmers follows Bateson in defining information as a difference that makes a difference.105 In case of a light switch there can be many positions between what we call “up” and “down.” But merely one of these differences makes a difference to the light that is then either switched on or off. “The difference between these two states is the only difference that makes a difference to the light. So we can see the switch as realizing a two-state information space, with some physical states of the switch corresponding to one information state and with some corresponding to the other.”106 In the notion of information space Chalmers sees the link between the physical and phenomenal: “[...] whenever we find an information space realized phenomenally, we find the same information space realized physically. And when an experience realizes an information state, the same information state is realized in the experience’s physical substrate.”107
IV. Pan-psychism as logical consequence of principle II and III But as practically everything realizes information, are we then to conclude that everything is conscious, even very simple systems, insofar as they represent information-spaces? “This idea is often regarded as outrageous, or even crazy. But I think it deserves a close examination. It is not obvious to me that the idea is misguided, and in some ways it has a certain appeal.”108 If we go down the phylogenetic chain we see consciousness not to disappear suddenly but rather to diminish in grades. Thus for Chalmers it is evident that “[m]ice may not have much of a sense of self, and may not be given to introspection, but it seems entirely plausible that there is something it is like to be a mouse. Mice perceive their environment via patterns of information flow not unlike those in our own brains, though considerably less complex.”109 And if we move down the scale down to fish and slugs there is still no reason to suggest that phenomenology disappears all of a sudden, and we 104 Chalmers 105 Chalmers 106 Chalmers 107 Chalmers 108 Chalmers 109 Chalmers
1996, 1996, 1996, 1996, 1996, 1996,
281 281 281 284 293 294
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are left with organisms, or, rather, information states, purely deprived of all experience. “There does not seem to be much reason to suppose that phenomenology should wink out while a reasonably complex perceptual psychology persists. If it does, then either there is a radical discontinuity from complex experiences to none at all, or somewhere along the line phenomenology begins to fall out of synchrony with perception, so that for a while, there is a relatively rich perceptual manifold accompanied by a much more impoverished phenomenal manifold.”110 Following this chain of reasoning, Chalmers speculates, that the most simple phenomenology should cohere with the most primitive system of perceptual psychology, such as a thermostat.111 “If there is experience associated with thermostats, there is probably experience everywhere: wherever there is a causal interaction, there is information, and wherever there is information, there is experience. One can find information states in a rock - when it expands and contracts, for example or even in the different states of an electron. So if the unrestricted double aspect principle is correct, there will be experience associated with a rock or an electron.”112 While this view might at first sight seem counter-intuitive, it makes consciousness fit into the natural world in a more integrated way. “If the view is correct, consciousness does not come in sudden jagged spikes, with isolated complex systems arbitrarily producing rich conscious experiences. Rather, it is a more uniform property of the universe, with very simple systems having very simple phenomenology, and complex systems having complex phenomenology. This makes consciousness less ‘special’ in some ways, and so more reasonable.”113 However, Chalmers is reluctant to call this view pan-psychism, as he does not intend to imply that self-consciousness goes all the way down to snakes, nor that simple systems have complex phenomenology such as animals.114 Further it might be the case that not all informational states are conscious. A thermostat contrarily to neurons is not active. So maybe further refinements as to what kind of information state could count as conscious are to be made, and one would have to rather say that rocks contain conscious systems, instead of being conscious themselves.115 One further problem remaining unsolved for this view is how microphysics adds up to high-level phenomenology. Why is not that every single neuron in the brain is conscious but rather that there is one unified complex phenomenology?116 110 Chalmers 111 Chalmers 112 Chalmers 113 Chalmers 114 Chalmers 115 Chalmers 116 Chalmers
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294 295 297 298 298-299 297-298 307
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But with these problems unsolved we still gain a more comprehensive picture of how consciousness could be causally relevant. We closed the last section with noting that in insisting that the physical realm is causally closed Chalmers is forced to defend a version of epiphenomenalism or to specify his version of materialism. However, if information intrinsically has a phenomenal aspect to it, we might thus get a better understanding of how consciousness as a necessary internal aspect accompanying information could have causal relevance.117 In the next section we will - in following Searle - point out some difficulties with Chalmers’ functionalist approach to consciousness. Searle however, as we will show, himself has no suggestions on how to overcome the difficulties he himself diagnoses in Chalmers’ theory of consciousness.
117 Chalmers 1995, 24 28
V. A Critique of Functionalism I. Where Searle and Chalmers would agree Searle and Chalmers seem to agree on many basic assumptions about consciousness. Both conceive of consciousness in terms of experience. I.e. to both consciousness is accompanied by “something it is like” to be conscious and insist that if we were to leave out the first-personal aspect of consciousness, the view from within, we would leave out the phenomenon altogether. In case of consciousness we cannot make the distinction between reality and appearance as the appearance in this case is the reality to be explained.118 Subjectivity or appearance in Searle and in Chalmers becomes the actual reality and object of investigation. And both agree that subjectivity does not come into existence in a sudden leap. Searle insists that e.g. dogs are conscious, that there is something it is like to be a dog, although this is not to be equated with self-consciousness.119 Both authors reject attempts to reductively explain consciousness, i.e. attempts to show that consciousness is “in fact” something else. However, here disagreement sets in. How can we think of consciousness being related to matter? Chalmers suggested consciousness to arise from the informational space realized by the brain. Searle on the other hand rejects such forms of functionalism, as to him they reduce ontology to features of the world that are mind-dependent. Let us take a look at why he believes so.
II. Consciousness to Searle necessarily has causal functions Searle too dismisses substance dualism. He rather conceives of consciousness to be a natural feature or higher order function of the brain. Thus to him there are no two separate ontological realms, matter and mind, but rather there is only matter with consciousness being a feature or property of matter. At this point both authors’ views begin to diverge. Searle not only dismisses substance dualism, but even property dualism, as found in Chalmers, for the very reason that it leads to epiphenomenalism and therefore cannot explain how consciousness could ever cause something.120 But to Searle it is an indisputable fact that we can consciously cause events. Without the notion of 118 Searle 1992, 146 119 Searle 1992, 74 120 Searle 2004a, 31 29
free will, collective intentionality - which for Searle is constitutive of social facts121 - cannot be conceived of. I.e. if we could not consciously guide our actions and decide to follow obligations and perform status-functions, society as a system of mutual recognition of rights and duties would be inconceivable, because it assumes that we are able to give reasons to our actions, even reasons, that are not necessarily in our own interests.122 But as society evidently exists, as there evidently are status-functions, as to Searle there evidently is collective intentionality of, say, using the same object as money,123 and thus consciousness necessarily must have causal functions. As Searle explains, we cannot even conceive of ourselves as being not causally responsible for our actions. He argues that we cannot get rid of the conviction of being free. If a waiter waits for us to decide what to eat and we were to say that we can’t tell, because we were waiting for our brains to decide and nothing so far happened, this would be missing the point, as even this statement itself is expression of free will.124 If we were to consciously give up the idea of free will and initiative, it would still be us consciously attempting to deny free will in an act of free will. As Chalmers is not as interested in social reality as Searle is, he seems to have overlooked the necessity to develop a notion of free will, autonomy and mental causation. But as for Searle social reality is a crucial field of investigation, he prefers to avoid epiphenomenalism altogether and this is one reason why he rejects functionalism altogether.
121 Searle 122 Searle 123 Searle 124 Searle
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III. The Chinese-room-argument: syntax is not sufficient for semantics Searle’s second major argument against functionalism can be illustrated in the Chinese-roomargument. In The Consious Mind Chalmers addresses this argument. There are many variations of it, but the basic structure of the argument goes as follows: Searle invites us to imagine a room full of dictionaries and rules of grammar, and a person translating incoming chinese signs by merely following the rules and producing a proper output of English translation. It is crucial to assume that the person does not understand what she is doing. And indeed we could conceive of the person neither understanding Chinese nor English, as the dictionaries and grammar could be written in, say, Spanish. Such a system might produce a perfectly valid translation, but, Searle argues, no understanding would have occurred. Evidently the person would have not understood what she had translated, nor could one argue that in any part of the room there was “understanding” taking place.
The basic structure of the argument is as follows: 1. Programs are entirely syntactical. 2. Minds have a semantics. 3. Syntax is not the same as, nor by itself semantics. Therefore programs are not minds.125
The “room” represents a purely syntactical structure.126 But Searle insists that words further have semantic content which cannot be immediately deduced from syntax. All language has semantics or meaning.127 If programs are by definition merely syntactical, and in the Chinese-room the role of a program is being substituted by the person performing - to her - meaningless tasks, then they necessarily are not able of semantics. The argument appeals to our intuition, that it just makes no sense to assume, that in purely syntactical space semantics could arise. We know what semantics feels like, we know what it is like to understand something, but in such a room there does not seem the appropriate thing of which we could say “it knows what it feels like to understand the meaning of the Chinese symbols.” 125 Searle 1997, 11 126 Searle 2004a, 63 127 Searle 2004a, 70 31
For Chalmers of course this argument is not convincing, as looked from the outside, brains are not that different from what is going on in the Chinese-room. If we were to imagine our brains to be magnified to the size of a room, we would find all kinds of chemical processes, but would we ever find something resembling a conscious thought? No, thus is seems equally implausible that brains could produce consciousness. As Chalmers insists, there is an impasse on the question of whether the room is conscious as whole or not, with no side having anything more than plausibility at hand, because while brains and the Chinese-room are not in principle different systems, we know that brains are conscious.128 Chalmers however simply choses to side with the position that it is not implausible that a system such as the Chinese room gives rise to experience.129 And as to Searle’s argument from semantics: “[...] the main problem is that the argument does not respect the curcial role of implementation. Programs are abstract computational objects and are purely syntactic. Certainly, no mere program is a candidate for possession of a mind. Implementations of programs, on the other hand, are concrete systems with causal dynamics, and are not purely syntactic. An implementation has causal heft in the real world, and it is in virtue of this causal heft that consciousness and intentionality arise. It is the program that is syntactic; it is the implementation that has semantic content.”130
IV. The Chinese-room-argument: syntax is not intrinsic to matter But so far we have gone only through half of the Chinese-room-argument. In his late works Searle changed his argument in part from merely claiming that computers, being purely syntactical, could never implement semantics, to the argument, that further nothing is intrinsically a computer. I.e. syntax itself is not an intrinsic feature of reality, such as mass, but merely ascribed by conscious agents.131 Thus the very question whether computers will one day develop consciousness is misguided from the start, does not come up to the level of falsehood, as being a computer is nothing independent of consciousness but computers exist only when there is a conscious agent using something as a computer. On this view even calculators don’t compute but rather are to be conceived as circuits, which we use to compute with.132 According to Searle even a pen or window as they have at least two states, e.g. a window can be treated as either “open” or “closed” - can 128 Chalmers 1996, 324 129 Chalmers 1996, 325 130 Chalmers 1996, 327 131 Searle 1997, 14 132 Searle 2004a, 64 32
serve as a computer, as it they can represent symbols through the different states they are in.133 However, representation is nothing intrinsic to the states themselves, but merely ascribed. In other words, syntax is not intrinsic to reality but merely ascribed by consciousness and thus observer dependent.134 Chalmers does not address this part of the Chinese-room-argument and yet it seems to be one crucial argument against his functional approach to consciousness. Chalmers avoids the question of whether function and information is something intrinsic to reality or something ascribed to reality. Searle insists it is extrinsic and ascribed. He backs this position by claiming that you could use the same token to represent different functions and therefore function is not intrinsic to matter. If for example, we say the function of the heart was to pump blood, in such a case it is evident that we treat this as function of the heart only because we value life. If we were to be in high regard of death, to us the heart would be dysfunctional.135 In other words, we can regard the same object at the same time to be functional and dysfunctional. Or, as language use demonstrates, just as we can use the same symbol, say “bark,” in different contexts to either mean a tree or the noise made by dogs, physical states are never intrinsically functional states but rather does functionality lie in the eye of the observer. Beyond Searle we could even argue that we could add layers of functionality to the same system ad infinitum. I.e. we could take the same token to be part of different systems. Of course it is not purely up to us to ascribe functional states and this is why we cannot use everything as a computer but instead need to build things that are particularly apt to the ascription of functions and symbols. However, function itself still remains ascribed, and this remains unchanged in a definition of information states as differences that make a difference, as the reference point of the difference itself is ascribed. I.e. in the example given above, with the light-switch making a difference to the light, it is us, because we value light and teleologically construe light-switches to make a difference to the light, who ascribe the reference point to which the position of the light-switch makes a difference. It is only because a light-switch is a man-made tool with inherent teleology, that there seems to be only one intrinsic reference point – namely the light - to which the position of the lightswitch makes a difference. But if we conceive of nature as being free of teleology, we also must admit that there are many different reference points of what we define as difference. The intuitive force of the second part of the Chinese-room-argument does not lie – as the first 133 Searle 1997, 16 134 Searle 2004a, 64 135 Searle 1998, 122 33
part did - in pointing out that systems alone cannot produce meaning and understanding, but that being a system is something that is observer-dependent. On the other hand Searle assumes that there are intrinsic unities in the world, such as brains. Brains can be treated as systems, but still, they are more than that, they are intrinsic biological “things.” The Chinese-room-argument is to point us to our intuition that there in fact is at least one crucial ontological difference between brains and a room full of dictionaries and grammar-instructions: while brains are biological unities - that, when divided, “die” — rooms are no intrinsic unities, as it is up to us to ascribe the limits of where a room begins and where it ends, just as it is up to ascribe the limits of what we call “nation.” We could easily imagine one of the dictionaries to be replaced in the room and this making no difference to the overall functioning of the room. However, it remains an open (empirical) question, whether if parts of the brain were replaced it would not simply lose its structural organization and dissolve into dust. Searle insists that we simply know, that the brain consists of neurons and being a neuron simply is not identical to performing functions one can ascribe to neurons.136 The Chinese-nation -argument according to Searle is directed toward functionalism and makes even more pressing the issue already raised in the Chinese-room-argument. It illustrates that you can reproduce the causal activities of neurons using the Chinese-nation and telephones and hereby shows, that functionalism must assume unity wherever one can assign information.137 Consequently, you cannot distinguish systems that are conscious from those that are not. All inappropriate systems become conscious.138 This Searle argues is because information - just as syntax - lies in the eye of the beholder. It is not a “real thing” like neuron firings, which are not relative to an observer.139 The population of China is not conscious for the reason that there is no intrinsic unity of that phenomenon.140 As functionality is extrinsic, Chalmers cannot argue with complexity to be a crucial characteristic difference between nations and brains: complexity too is extrinsic and one could always ask in what regard the brain is more “complex” than, say, the Milky Way.141 But as already said, Searle believes in intrinsic biological unities that are mirrors of phenomenal unity. Pan-psychism on the other hand, according to Searle, is facing the binding problem and cannot deal with the problem of unity of consciousness.142 He on the other hand holds 136 Searle 137 Searle 138 Searle 139 Searle 140 Searle 141 Searle 142 Searle
1997, 205 2004a, 61 1997, 144 1997, 205 1997, 144 1997, 207 2004a, 104-105
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that “[c]onsciousness is not spread out like jam on a piece of bread, but rather, it comes in discrete units.” and then he asks: “If the thermostat is conscious, how about the parts of the thermostat? Is there a separate consciousness to each screw?”143 The brain, contrarily to a thermostat, to Searle is an intrinsic unity. Searle would agree with Chalmers that the zombie-argument actually shows that consciousness is not eliminatively reducible to matter.144 But this not only disproves materialism (at least eliminative materialism) but functionalism as well.145 Chalmers cannot show that consciousness is functionally supervenient on information for the same reason he cannot show that consciousness is supervenient on matter.
V. Searle's naturalistic conception of consciousness Although his criticism of functionalism raises important questions, such as what to treat as intrinsic unity, Searle’s own overall theory of consciousness seems much less satisfactory than Chalmers' suggestion of pan-psychism. To Searle consciousness is a natural phenomenon like digestion.146 He conceives of consciousness to be a feature of the real world,147 a property of the brain the way density is of the wheel.148 What at first sight seems to be a form of property dualism Searle insists not to be a dualism at all. Consciousness to Searle is the biological, described at a higher level.149 I.e. one phenomenon can have top- and low-level features, which are top- or lowlevel descriptions. And just as we can describe causal processes going on in combustion engines either on a top-level (in terms of pistons and explosions) or in terms of low-level descriptions (in terms of molecules), we can describe the brain at top-level, in terms of conscious experiences, or at low-levels such as neurons. Yet the top-level description is not epiphenomenal to the low-level description, i.e. the macro level of pistons is not epiphenomenal to that of molecular activities.150 Similarly consciousness to Searle is not epiphenomenal to neuronal activity but rather the top-level description of neurons. Consciousness being a feature of the brain is fully determined by the causal powers of the 143 Searle 144 Searle 145 Searle 146 Searle 147 Searle 148 Searle 149 Searle 150 Searle
2004a, 105 1997, 148 1997, 151 2004a, 79 2004a, 80 2004b, 26 2004a, 159 2002, 27
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brain.151 Yet these causal powers can be described in either low- or high-level terms, i.e. consciousness is not a separate entity or property, it is just the state that the brain is in, described at a certain level.152 According to Searle from the laws of nature consciousness follows as a logical consequence, just as does the existence of any other biological phenomenon, such as growth, digestion, or reproduction.153 Yet consciousness is not exactly like digestion and explosions in car-engines. Searle distinguishes between third-personal features, describable in third-personal terms, such as digestion, and first-personal, such as pains and itches, that are experienced by someone. Consciousness always comes in a first-person point of view, i.e. is describable in I-language154 and thus is not exactly as digestion and reducible to neuron-firings, as first-person ontology cannot be reduced to third-person ontology.155 This move however seems to move his theory of consciousness against his intentions into the position of some form of dualism. Although Searle insists not to be a dualist, neither a substance nor property dualist, it still remains a mystery why there should be two forms of “features” of physics, or types of description of the physical: first- and third-personal. Consciousness and intentionality are according to Searle not observer dependent but intrinsic first-personal features or descriptions of the world.156 But this view, Searle insists, is not a form of property dualism. Rather he thinks there endlessly many properties: atheltic, political, geological, historical asf.,157 i.e. as far as I understand he might be assuming an endless number of possible levels of description. However, these descriptions fall into the above described two categories of either being first- or third-personal. And while one can make causal inferences from one level of description to another, as long as one remains within one category of description, i.e. while Searle insists there to be bottom-up explanations, i.e. from lower-level to top-level descriptions - such as boiling water, that can be explained either in terms of kinetic energy or in terms of water-movement158 - there remains a difficulty to make inferences from third- to first-personal categories of description. On the one hand Searle, as noted above, insists that first-personal descriptions are not entailed in third-personal descriptions, on the other hand he claims that consciousness is predictable from what we know 151 Searle 152 Searle 153 Searle 154 Searle 155 Searle 156 Searle 157 Searle 158 Searle
2004b, 27 2004a, 146 2004a, 90 1992, 72 2004a, 147 1992, xiii 1997, 207 1992, 87
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about the brain, as every textbook on neurology talking about experience of animals asf. is supposed to be proving.159 Searle indeed attempts to avoid substance-dualism but in the end he ends up in a new form of dualism. The one world Searle claims to exist - he rejects such notions as there being two worlds and claims we live in exactly one world that is dividable in as many different ways as we want: in terms of electromagnetism, consciousness and gravitational attraction, in terms of interest rates, points scored in football games asf.160 - is composed of two categories of “descriptions:” such that have first- and such that have third-personal ontology. The weird thing is that while brains have first-personal descriptions, cars according to Searle have not. Why is this so? The old mind-body problem re-appears in Searle, who insists on having avoided it. He cannot explain how it comes, that there are not only third-personal but also first-personal features of the brain. He cannot explain why there is an epistemic dualism between third- and first-personal features.
VI. Summary and conclusion. The major criticism of Chalmers’ theory of consciousness we gained from Searle was to question whether we should treat information as intrinsic or extrinsic. Unfortunately neither Searle nor Chalmers give us a detailed analysis of their notions of causality and ontology. While Chalmers uses “functionality” to replace a notion of causality and “information” to replace a notion of substance, Searle insists that functionality and information are both extrinsic features, i.e. merely ascribed, but matter and causal interaction of material entities are not. I.e. brains for Searle have intrinsic “causal powers” determining their physical structure,161 the Chinese-room on the other hand is no intrinsic unity. But in the end both merely postulate different intrinsic features of the world - causality vs. function - and necessarily have to treat the rival view as “implausible.” Maybe at this level of metaphysical speculation about ontology a greater degree of precision is unattainable and one is simply left with chosing to either side with a functional or a physicalist account of ontology. Following Wilber, in the next section we will however attempt to give a heuristic outline of a basic ontology that is more differentiated than the two given so far and might help us on the question of what to treat as intrinsic unity and what not. Further Searle and Chalmers avoid giving a more detailed phenomenological and genetic 159 Searle 1997, 123 160 Searle 2002, 59 161 Searle 1997, 131 37
account of consciousness. Indeed, why should they? Haven't they, with claiming that consciousness has a first-personal aspect to it, in a sense said everything about consciousness there is to be said? Searle however shows first attempts of describing the basic structures of consciousness in his The Rediscovery of the Mind.162 This indicates, that to him not only the question of relating mind and matter seems of importance, but also the question about the very structure of consciousness. However, it is evident that his list of roughly a dozen basic structural features of consciousness is not only very likely incomplete but altogether lacks a developmental account. While the question of genealogy might at first sight seem indirectly related to their endeavor to formulate a framework of how to study consciousness scientifically, in the next chapter we will - following Wilber - argue that giving a more detailed developmental account of consciousness might help us to (at least heuristically) to decide the questions about correlation between mind and matter, at which Chalmers and Searle arrive at an impasse only. While Chalmers and Searle would certainly want to defend a developmental view of matter, we will attempt to defend a developmental account of consciousness, which might in the end be of crucial help when questions about how mind and matter are related are concerned.
162 Searle 1992, 127ff. 38
VI. A first-personal approach to the development of consciousness I. A basic outline of Wilber’s early conception of development of consciousness Although Chalmers and Searle would both agree that consciousness somehow “decreases” when we go down to lower animals,163 yet they don’t discuss what “less” consciousness actually is supposed to mean, just as they don’t bother about how to conceive of being “more” conscious of something. Contrarily to Searle and Chalmers the first-personal structure and development of consciousness is of central interest to Wilber from his early works on. To answer the question of how consciousness develops from within, he primarily relied on the first-personal accounts of consciousness that had been worked out by philosophical, psychological and contemplative traditions. I.e. in his opinion for studying consciousness from within, we need not open up a wholly new field of investigation but have rather rich sources to start from. His first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, was an attempt to integrate up to that date diverging views on the development of consciousness of western psychology and eastern contemplative practice (as they are philosophically summarized in the philosophia perennis). The theoretical core of the contemplative traditions he relied on could be summarized as a spectrum-theory, conceiving of the cosmos as being arranged in different “degrees” and “planes” of reality and consciousness. “As Hustom Smith, […], Ananda Coomaraswamy, and other scholars of these [contemplative, M.S.] traditions have pointed out, the core of the perennial philosophy is the view that reality is composed of various levels of existence - levels of being and of knowing - ranging from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit. Each senior dimension transcends but includes it[s] juniors, so that this is a conception of wholes within wholes within wholes indefinitely, reaching from dirt to Divinity.”164 This sequence of ever more complex levels of being - called the Great Chain or Great Nest of Being165 - can be third-personally understood as a chain of increasingly more complex organisms, or first-personally, as a chain of increasingly more complex structures of consciousness. In The Spectrum of Consciousness Wilber formulated a unified developmental spectrum of consciousness, according to which “pure awareness” - which he identifies with Spirit or what beyond was called Divinity; an idea he adopts from the philosophia perennis - “breaks“ down or goes through a process of “involution” into a series of dualisms or contractions.166 Evolution of consciousness on 163 Chalmers 1996, 255; Searle 1992, 87 164 Wilber 1999c, 437 165 Lovejoy 1993 166 Wilber 1999a, 223ff. 39
the other hand according to the philosophia perennis is to be understood as a “re-owning” or “remembering” of these dualisms. Wilbers model differs form the philosophia perennis in claiming that western psychology can contribute to “re-owning” specific dualisms that lie outside the reach of contemplative practice. I.e. on this view, psychology can deal with uniting dualisms on “personal” planes and aid contemplative practice by e.g. uniting with disowned aspects of one’s own personality (e.g. the shadow).167 Contemplative practice as found in the philosophia perennis on the other hand on this view is responsible for uniting “trans-personal” dualisms such as mind/body, inside/outside and pleasure/unpleasure.168 “Pure consciousness,” which in involution breaks down into this series of dualisms, can be regained through contemplative practice. Each dualism has an experienced pathology just as resolving each dualism has a specific first-personal qualitative feel to it. Development of consciousness on this view consists in regaining “pure awareness” that is inherently teleologically pre-given to all conscious beings.
II. Development of consciousness as process of differentiation and integration In his later works Wilber never abandons the role of contemplation for our first-personal understanding of consciousness. However, he turns his view upside down and instead of claiming that we are born with pure consciousness and then - in socialization - go through a series of dualisms or loss of consciousness, he rather postulates the opposite: in the very moment of embodiment we always already have lost - if we have ever had it at all - pure consciousness and growth is nothing but a differentiation or development of consciousness striving for pure consciousness. On this view pure consciousness still remains the highest telos towards which all development of consciousness is directed.169 But every new dualism that arises in development is on his new view not a dis-membering of pure consciousness, but rather already a re-membering in an act of differentiation.170 In differentiating self from other the child on this view does not lose its “primordial unity” with the world but rather gains consciousness of differences that are really out there. On this view, therapy has as goal not to make away with dualisms, but rather to strive for integration of real differences.171 Similarly, contemplative practice then - if it is not to be regression into child-like pre-differentiated states - has not to strive for making away with distinctions, but 167 Wilber 168 Wilber 169 Wilber 170 Wilber 171 Wilber
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rather for pure consciousness or a transpersonal witness of differences that are factually there.172 We will not discuss how this view of increasing consciousness through differentiation and integration is to be understood in detail but merely note, that it is an attempt to systematize with phenomenological and structuralist evidence our everyday view, that consciousness somehow becomes “more,” as Chalmers and Searle already indicated. Wilber’s spectrum-model is one attempt to conceptually grasp how this “increase” could be understood as a process of differentiation, in which what was so far the subject of awareness becomes content and object of the present moment of awareness. As Wilber puts it in reference to developmental psychologist Rober Kegan, the subject of one stage of consciousness becomes the object of the next.173 Each act of such differentiation goes hand in hand with new qualitative feel coming into the world. Put differently, there is a different qualitative feel to being aware (as object) of your emotions than to merely having emotions. Similiarly being aware (as object) of what you experience with your senses has a different qualitative feel to it than simply having sensory experience. According to this developmental view, consciousness begins with most rudimentary forms of perception and basic impulse and develops through increasing stages of awareness, which can objectify what so far was the stream of consciousness. On this view consciousness develops through the mere qualitative feel of perception to the qualitative feel of witnessing a constant inner image.174 The witnessed object then can itself become object of awareness in forming a concept. Concepts on the other hand can again be brought into and made an object of awareness in judgments. And judgments again can be made conscious in contemplation. The chain of differentiation and integration comes to an end in pure witnessing in contemplation, according to Wilber, which is aware of all content of consciousness as it arises. Each higher stage of consciousness integrates the previous ones, i.e. builds on them, in the way concepts are empty without intuitions, and on the other hand gains autonomy over previous stages of consciousness. Just as concepts can operate on sensory experience, judgments can operate on concepts and contemplation on judgments. In this developmental scheme each more differentiated form of consciousness is a compound of less differentiated forms of consciousness.175 The scheme in no way explains why concepts necessarily follow ontogenetically once sensory experience is developed. Rather it is a 172 Wilber 173 Wilber 174 Wilber 175 Wilber
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reconstructive observation that concepts arise. Just as Chalmers suggested to take consciousness as fundamental and irreducible to other entities, Wilber suggests to take each “stage” as basic and irreducible to a different stage. I.e. no stage of consciousness can be explained in terms of the lower or as necessarily following the lower stage of consciousness. Wilber summarizes this point by saying that as you cannot reduce the inner (consciousness) to the exterior (matter)176 you cannot reduce the higher (e.g. concepts) to the lower (e.g. sensations).177 This amounts to a form of dualism between mind and matter. It is not a substance dualism though, but rather a form of perspectival dualism. Wilber does not treat matter as immediately given but rather as that which is being construed from sensory experience. Construing structured unity from sensory experience in terms of location, spatiality and movement is what he calls a “thirdpersonal-approach” to reality. First-personal-approaches on the other hand are such as phenomenology, which rests in the very nature of experience itself and treats experience as end - as we did in the developmental scheme beyond. Both approaches according to Wilber unveil a developmental sequence: consciousness evolves from within, which appears as increasing differentiation of content of consciousness just as from without we can observe increasing structural differentiation from lizzards to humans. If what we call “matter” is only a perspective construed from our sense-experiences, just as that which we call “consciousness” is only a perspective construed in terms of immediacy and qualitative feel, then the possibility occurs for both, matter and consciousness to be perspectives of “the same.” Perspectivism allows Wilber not to share the view of the physical universe as being causally closed or composed of self-sufficient atoms. To make the claim that the physical is not causally closed more comprehensive, we will take a short look at his basic conception of ontology or third-personal reality.
III. Development of matter as a process of differentiation and integration While through structuralism and phenomenology Wilber attempted to get behind developmental structures of experience, it is through approaches of dynamic systems theory that he attempts to formulate his ontological conception of physical reality. He comes to the conclusion that external reality must be conceived in terms of structural units called “holons.”178 I.e. where Searle 176 Wilber 2000, 445 177 Wilber 2000, 54 178 Wilber 2000, 40 42
postulated matter and causation and where Chalmers postulated structural organization, Wilber postulates holons as building blocks of third-personal reality. He heuristically gives a list of roughly twenty basic structural features of holons, generally derived from dynamic systems theory,179 and hereby says more about the structure of ontology than either Searle or Chalmers. For our further discussion only four of those tenets will be of central interest:
1. Self-preservation: “All holons display some capacity to preserve their individuality, to preserve their own particular wholeness or autonomy.”180 Holons are wholes that are simultaneously part of larger wholes, just as atoms are parts of molecules. Yet once a higher level of structural organization is attained - as in case of H2O - holons tend towards self-preservation from within. I.e. even without any exterior influence, holons tend to preserve the level of structural organization that has been so far attained. 2. Self-transcendence: “Self-transcendence is simply a system’s capacity to reach be- | yond the given and introduce some measure of novelty, a capacity without which, it is quite certain, evolution would never, and could never, have even gotten started. Self-transcendence, which leaves no corner of the universe untouched (or evolution would have no point of departure), means nothing more - and nothing less - than that the universe has an intrinsic capacity to go beyond what went before.”181 Self-transcendence names the observable tencency that the universe strives towards ever more increasing levels of structural differentiation instead of running into a state of entropy. However, the yet to be developed higher levels of structural organization cannot be deduced from what we know about those which have already developed. This inevitably leads Wilber to postulate – contrary to Searle and Chalmers - that not only is there no way of deducing concepts from intuitions, but there is no way to deduce H2O to be a necessary evolutionary consequence of oxygen and hydrogen. Although we can reconstructively observe, that oxygen and hydrogen tend to form a holon called H2O, there would have been no way of predicting that evolutionary trend from what we know about the behavior of oxygen or hydrogen molecules alone. This is to say that: 3. Holons emerge: “Owing to the self-transcendent capacity of holons, new holons emerge. First subatomic particles, then atoms, then molecules, then polymers, then cells, and so on. The emergent holons are in some sense novel; they posses properties and qualities that cannot be strictly and totally deduced from their components; and therefore they, and their descriptions, cannot be 179 Wilber 2000, 48ff. 180 Wilber 2000, 48 181 Wilber 2000, 51-52 43
reduced without remainder to their component parts.”182 Contrarily to Searle and Chalmers Wilber assumes that although we might be able to reconstruct tendencies of structural organization, there is no way of predicting all structural changes from what we know about the smallest particles. I.e. “[e]mergence also means that indeterminacy (and one of its correlates, degrees of freedom) is sewn into the very fabric of the universe, since unprecedented emergence means undetermined by the past (although pockets of the universe can regularly collapse in a deterministic fashion, as in classical mechanics). Holons, that is, are fundamentally indetermi- | nate in some aspects (precisely because they are fundamentally self-transcending).”183 The fact that many high-level features are not reducible to low-level features is what Wilber calls emergence. What Wilber’s third-personal ontology would challange then, is Chalmers’ claim that the physical universe is causally closed. I.e. Wilber conceives of causality as behavioral tendencies of holons. And the less complex the holon of observation, the more rigid the tendencies of behavior are: “It now seems virtually certain that determinism arises only as a limiting case where a holon’s capacity for self-transcendence approaches zero, or when its own self-transcendence hands the locus of indeterminacy to a higher holon [...]”184 I.e. we can only reconstruct the behavior of holons and formalized such reconstructions of holons with least “depth” or self-transcendence are what we came to know as laws. “That is, we never know, and never can know, exactly what any holon will do tomorrow (we might know broad outlines and probabilities, based on past observations, but selftranscendent emer- | gence always means, to some degree: surprise!). We have to wait and see, and from that, after the fact, we reconstruct a knowledge system.”185 And Wilber further clarifies in a footnote to the above cited passage: ”We can see why a holon acted in a particular way, but not that it would act in only [ital. M.S.] that way.”186 And if we deal with holons of minimal depth, these reconstructions can gain a form of reliable prediction: “[...] [w]hen a holon’s self-transcendence approaches zero (when its creativity is utterly minimal), then the reconstructive sciences collapse into the predictive sciences. Historically, the empirical sciences got their start by studying precisely those holons that show minimal creativity. In fact, they basically studied nothing but a bunch of rocks in motion (mass moving through space over time), and thus they mistook the nature of science to be essentially predictive.”187 In holons such as molecules, a minimum of creativity goes with a
182 Wilber 183 Wilber 184 Wilber 185 Wilber 186 Wilber 187 Wilber
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maximum of predictive power.188 4. Self-dissolution: “Holons that are built up (through vertical self-transformation) can also break down. Not surprisingly, when holons ‘dissolve’ or ‘come unglued,’ they tend to do so along the same vertical sequence in which they were built up (only, of course, in the reverse direction).”189 This is what in case of complex holons such as organisms we call “death.” They don’t just stop working, as a machine does, but dissolve and fall apart into their lowest-level holons. This basic outline of Wilber’s third-personal view on development of ontology will in the next section be brought together with what we said about the development of consciousness.
IV. Pan-interiorism Building on these basic ontological assumptions Wilber suggests to treat all holons to have intrinsic interiority or consciousness, down to whatever the final observable holonic structures are.190 This claim is as speculative as Chalmers’ speculation on stones having interiority or Searle’s denial of such claims as absurd. And yet it is build on explicated assumptions about the development of consciousness and on explicated assumptions about how to conceive of ontology. Both, Searle and Chalmers, avoid the intricate questions of how to conceive or think of matter exactly and assume physics to be somehow fundamental. Searle simply postulates that the brain causes consciousness.191 Chalmers on the other hand simply postulates that it is the functional organization of the brain from which consciousness arises. Wilber bridges both views by suggesting to assume consciousness only in entities that so far know for sure have consciousness: us and animals. And as we are holons and our conceptual capacities depend on us having lower structures of consciousness, Wilber sees no reason to extend the notion of consciousness onto other holons too. The major difference between pan-interiorism and Chalmers pan-psychism lies in the question of what to treat as intrinsic unity. While Chalmers suggests every difference making a difference already is to be treated as a functional - although not necessarily material - unit, Wilber suggests to treat as unity only these phenomena that show the basic characteristics of holons. It is evident, that the list of characteristics is heuristic at best - often the distinction between holon and heap seems 188 Wilber 189 Wilber 190 Wilber 191 Searle
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very difficult to draw. However, it captures our immediate intuition in the Chinese-room-argument, that we need to differentiate between heaps or what we ascribe to be a unity and holons, which are intrinsic units. This distinction is maybe what Searle was referring to when labeling the possibility of the Chinese-nation to become conscious as single unity as “absurd.” Searle seems to intuit that there are intrinsic units in the world - in his case biological organisms - and extrinsic units or as-if units, such as stones, cars, galaxies asf. that are dependent on a reference point of unification. In a sense, Wilber would at the same time agree and disagree with both. He would agree with Chalmers on the view of pan-interiorism but - in resonance with Searle - disagree that all conceivable systems are conscious. Assuming pan-interiorism to be a plausible view results from the above given picture of development of consciousness in steps of increasing differentiation and integration. Differentiation goes hand in hand with new forms of experience, integration on the other hand means, that all previous forms of experience are included in the new form of conscious experience. On this view, for an organism to be able to have consciousness of a constant inner image, there must first have been an organism being capable of basic sensory experience. Consciousness in other words evolves, it does not simply appear in things. Before there is an organism with conceptual powers, this organism must have had sensory experience. And as evolving entity consciousness can be correlated with third-personal evloving entities or holons. While brains are holons, just as molecules are, stones, states or the galaxy are not. Wilber’s heuristic suggestion is to attempt a correlation between first- and third-personal holons and not between consciousness and matter as such. This account of correlating mind and matter can further adding a plural to the first- and thirdpersonal views already presented. I.e. we could not only correlate consciousness and matter but further correlate these perspectives with a systems-approach on exteriors and a cultural view on ontology, dealing with systems of interiors. The following four quadrant model serves as heuristic map, correlating individual development of consciousness (upper left or UL) with individual physiological development (upper right or UR) with social development (lower left or LL) with development of systems (lower right or LR).192
192 Wilber 1997
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The model is highly heuristic however. There is no way of arguing for say concepts (UL) to necessarily go hand in hand with neocortex (UR). It is merely based on reconstructive observation, that whenever an organism shows signs of conceptual ability, it has a neocortex.193 Just as the various perspectives cannot be deduced from each other, the various stages of organization within the perspectives cannot be deduced from the lowest. The picture does not explain consciousness. It merely points out that a theory of consciousness helping us to better cope with the phenomenon could already consist in merely correlating our first-personal (UL) with our third-personal (UR) conception of development. Before Chalmers and Searle even attempt a theory of consciousness, they might first turn to what we already know about the development of consciousness and what we know about the development of matter. They have taken neither developmental psychology nor evolutionary theory into account in their attempts to develop a theory of consciousness. As a result their views, while agreeing on basic assumptions such as the irreducibility of consciousness and the definition of consciousness in first-personal terms, nevertheless necessarily get stuck in an impasse, as soon as questions such as whether to ascribe consciousness to thermostats and Chinese-rooms are 193 Wilber 2000, 104
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concerned, and whether consciousness arises from functional organization or some intrinsic biological causal mechanism. Wilber’s suggestion is to correlate the developmental structures of consciousness with the developmental structures of matter and avoid attempts to either reduce consciousness to matter (or vice versa) – attempts as rudimentarily found in Searle, when he claims consciousness to be a high-level feature of the brain -, just as to avoid attempts to reduce the higher to the lower (or vice versa) – attempts such as found in Chalmers, when he claims the physical to be causally closed and consequently must defend a Grand Unified Theory not only of physics but of all scientific methodologies on the market, an assumption many non-physicists will find worth a defensio.
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Conclusion The major interest of this paper was to discuss how we could approach consciousness scientifically. In following our basic starting point, David Chalmers, we argued that consciousness cannot be reduced to matter, as there seems to be no logical entailment of facts about experience in facts about physics. To show this we drew from the argument of conceivability, which we illustrated in different variations, from the zombie-argument to Jackson's Mary-argument. The basic intuitive force behind the argument was to point out that if we can coherently imagine the physical to exist without being accompanied by consciousness, it follows that consciousness is not logically entailed in physics. Put differently, we could give no physicalist account of why all the different functions performed by our brains don't go on in the dark but rather are accompanied by a phenomal feel. The major conclusion we drew for our theory of consicousness was to treat consciousness as basic entity, comparable to basic entities in physics such as atoms or laws of gravity asf. But if consciousness is irreducible to more fundamental phenomena, how is a science of consciousness to be conceived in consequence? Here again we agreed with Chalmers that although consciousness itself is fundamental, its relations to matter could be systematically studied in terms of psychophysical laws, that are yet to be discovered. However, the rest of the paper was concerned with showing that Chalmers omitted two steps before attempting to formulate his psychophysical laws: First, in following Wilber and Searle we attempted to show that Chalmers had left out the question about the structure of consciousness. Chalmers seemed to merely assume consciousness as self-evident and transparent phenomenon and make no attempt to give a detailed account of basic structural moments of consciousness, as they appear from mere introspection. Although Searle at least raised the question of structure he never faced it systematically, taking into account what had so far been said about the structure of consciousness in different disciplines, ranging from psychology to contemplative traditions. Thus his short account on the structure of consciousness presented in The Rediscovery of the Mind could serve as a heuristic starting point at best. Further Chalmers and Searle at the same time avoided giving a developmental account of how consciousness develops from children to adults, development which both nevertheless seemed to pre-scientifically assume, as they agreed that consciousness somehow becomes “more” from lizards to mice to dogs to humans. We attempted to indicate that Wilber at least faced the question of how to systematically conceive of development, even though we had no space to discuss his model in
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more detail and critically evaluate it. Second, and here again we used Searle to indicate first difficulties, Chalmers presupposed functionalist ontology in his theory of consciousness which, as Searle pointed out, makes it very difficult to distinguish intrinsic unity from such that is merely ascribed. It is the second part of the Chinese-room-argument that was supposed to help us intuit, that there might be a difference between intrinsic units, such as brains, and merely ascribed units, such as rooms, states asf. Chalmers' functionalist approach has no way of distinguishing what is ascribed from what is intrinsic. Searle however, as with the question of how to conceive of the structure of consciousness, did not go beyond merely postulating that we need to distinguish “real stuff,” such as neuronfirings, from merely ascribed systems such as galaxies, without again giving a systematic account of ontology. Avoiding systematic clarification on these two questions Searle and Chalmers were at many points forced to an impasse, where basic psychophysical laws were concerned. While Chalmers postulated the principle of organizational invariance, Searle argued that as the argument from conceivability showed consciousness not to supervene logically on the physical, it showed consciousness not to supervene logically on functional organization as well. Chalmers, as Searle argued, has no way of showing that functional organization is relevant for consciousness rather than the very stuff consciousness is embodied in. Further, while Chalmers postulated a form of naturalistic dualism, Searle rejected this view and claimed to replace it with a monist account of reality, in which consciousness was conceived of as being a top-level feature of the brain. Hereby Searle attempted to avoid the - for him untenable - view that consciousness – if conceived of in terms of naturalistic dualism – must be epiphenomenal and therefore causally irrelevant. And while Chalmers at least flirted with the idea of pan-psychism, Searle rejected it as implausible and necessary consequence of Chalmers' – untenable - functionalist approach. We intended to show that these impasses might have been avoided, if both had answered the questions about the structure of mind and matter we suggested above. Where Searle and Chalmers postulated consciousness to be more or less self-evident, Wilber gave a dozen developmental structures of consciousness. Where Searle and Chalmers postulated matter and function as selfevident starting-point, Wilber gave twenty tenets (of which we sketched only four) as basic characteristics ontological entities. With this new form of heuristics we attempted to show that the problems of impasse, as they appeared between Searle and Chalmers, might be solved. With Wilber's basic developmental model of consciousness and matter in mind, Searle's 50
question, which systems to treat as conscious and which not, seems at least heuristically answerable: systems that show the basic characteristics of what he calls holons, are to be treated as conscious. Galaxies are no holons, just as rock or thermostats are not. But molecules on the other hand are, and according to his basic ontology, Wilber would predict that they have interiority of some sort. Herein he seems to agree with Chalmers, and yet he would not ascribe consciousness to thermostats and side with Searle that we need to distinguish intrinsic units (holons) from extrinsic. Further Wilber can defend consciousness to be causally relevant, as he conceives of matter as being an ascription. In his model consequently the physical is in no way causally closed, but merely levels of description are. I.e. in his model we cannot deduce facts about biology from facts about physics, just as we cannot deduce facts about consciousness from facts about matter in general. This does not only save the possibility of consciousness being causally relevant but at the same time allows for methodological pluralism, which Chalmers from the beginning seems to believe to be something that one day will be replaced by physics. Further this picture of us not being able to deduce toplevel facts from low-level facts about physics seems compatible with the view that we also cannot deduce top-level facts from low-level facts about consciousness, i.e. we cannot deduce concepts to be a necessary evolutionary consequence of intuitions. Thus to Wilber science becomes generally reconstructive. Independently of however plausible this view might seem at first sight as opposed to Searle's and Chalmers' suggestions, we attempted to show it to be more explicit and differentiated where metaphysical assumptions about the structure of consciousness and the structure of matter were concerned. Chalmers assumes that when it comes to consciousness two things need explanation: “Why does it exist?” and “Why do conscious experiences have their particular nature?”194 However, after what has been said so far we might add a third: “What is the basic (developmental?) structure of consciousness” and a fourth question: “What is the basic (developmental?) structure of matter?” This paper attempted to show that answering the latter two questions might be a necessary condition for giving an answer to the former two, if they can be answered at all.
194 Chalmers 1996, 5 51
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