Is Consciousness an Illusion?

In the current issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Keith Frankish argues that consciousness is an illusion -- or at least that "phenomenal consciousness" is an illusion. It doesn't exist.

Now I think there are basically two different things that one could mean in saying "consciousness doesn't exist".

(A.) One is something that seems to be patently absurd and decisively refuted by every moment of lived experience: that there is no such thing as lived experience. If it sounds preposterous to deny that anyone ever has conscious experience, then you're probably understanding the claim correctly. It is a radically strange claim. Of course philosophers do sometimes defend radically strange, preposterous-sounding positions. Among them, this would be a doozy.

(B.) Alternatively, you might think that when a philosopher says that consciousness exists (or "phenomenal consciousness" or "lived, subjective experience" or whatever) she's usually not just saying the almost undeniably obvious thing. You might think that she's probably also regarding certain disputable properties as definitionally essential to consciousness. You might hear her as saying not only that there is lived experience in the almost undeniable sense but also that the target phenomenon is irreducible to the merely physical, or is infallibly knowable through introspection, or is constantly accompanied by a self-representational element, or something like that. Someone who hears the claim that "consciousness exists" in this stronger, more commissive sense might then deny that consciousness does exist, if they think that nothing exists that has those disputable properties. This might be an unintuitive claim, if it's intuitively plausible that consciousness does have those properties. But it's not a jaw dropper.

Admittedly, there has been some unclarity in how philosophers define "consciousness". It's not entirely clear on the face of it what Frankish means to deny the existence of in the article linked above. Is he going for the totally absurd sounding claim, or only the more moderate claim? (Or maybe something somehow in between or slightly to the side of either of these?)

In my view, the best and most helpful definitions of "consciousness" are the less commissive ones. The usual approach is to point to some examples of conscious experiences, while also mentioning some synonyms or evocative phrases. Examples include sensory experiences, dreams, vivid surges of emotion, and sentences spoken silently to oneself. Near synonyms or evocative phrases include "subjective quality", "stream of experience", "that in virtue of which it's like something to be a person". While you might quibble about any particular example or phrase, it is in this sense of "consciousness" that it seems to be undeniable or absurd to deny that consciousness exists. It is in this sense that the existence of consciousness is, as David Chalmers says, a "datum" that philosophers and psychologists need to accept.

Still, we might be dissatisfied with evocative phrases and pointing to examples. For one thing, such a definition doesn't seem very rigorous, compared to an analytic definition. For another thing, you can't do very much a priori with such a thin definition, if you want to build an argument from the existence of consciousness to some bold philosophical conclusion (like the incompleteness of physical science or the existence of an immaterial soul). So philosophers are understandably tempted to add more to the definition -- whatever further claims about consciousness seem plausible to them. But then, of course, they risk adding too much and losing the undeniability of the claim that consciousness exists.

When I read Frankish's article in preprint, I wasn't sure how radical a claim he meant to defend, in denying the existence of phenomenal consciousness. Was he going for the seemingly absurd claim? Or only for the possibly-unintuitive-but-much-less-radical claim?

So I wrote a commentary in which I tried to define "phenomenal consciousness" as innocently as possible, simply by appealing to what I hoped would be uncontroversial examples of it, while explicitly disavowing any definitional commitment to immateriality, introspective infallibility, irreducibility, etc. (final MS version). Did Frankish mean to deny the existence of phenomenal consciousness in that sense?

In one important respect, I should say, definition by example is necessarily substantive or commissive: Definition by example cannot succeed if the examples are a mere hodgepodge without any important commonalities. Even if there isn't a single unifying essence among the examples, there must at least be some sort of "family resemblance" that ordinary people can latch on to, more or less.

For instance, the following would fail as an attempted definition: By "blickets" I mean things like: this cup on my desk, my right shoe, the Eiffel tower, Mickey Mouse, and other things like those; but not this stapler on my desk, my left shoe, the Taj Mahal, Donald Duck, or other things like those. What property could the first group possibly possess, that the second group lacks, which ordinary people could latch onto by means of contemplating these examples? None, presumably (even if a clever philosopher or AI could find some such property). Defining "consciousness" by example requires there to be some shared property or family resemblance among the examples, which is not present in things we normally regard as "nonconscious" (early visual processing, memories stored but not presently considered, and growth hormone release). The putative examples cannot be a mere hodge-podge.

Definition by example can be silent about what descriptive features all these conscious experiences share, just as a definition by example of "furniture" or "games" might be silent about what ties those concepts together. Maybe all conscious experiences are in principle introspectively reportable, or nonphysical, or instantiated by 40 hertz neuronal oscillations. Grant first that consciousness exists. Argue about these other things later.

In his reply to my commentary, Frankish accepts the existence of "phenomenal consciousness" as I have defined it -- which is really (I think) more or less how it is already defined and ought to be defined in the recent Anglophone "phenomenal realist" tradition. (The "phenomenal" in "phenomenal consciousness", I think, serves as a usually unnecessary disambiguator, to prevent interpreting "consciousness" as some other less obvious but related thing like explicit self-consciousness or functional accessibility to cognition.) If so, then Frankish is saying something less radical than it might at first seem when he rejects the existence of "phenomenal consciousness".

So is consciousness an illusion? No, not if you define "consciousness" as you ought to.

Maybe my dispute with Frankish is mainly terminological. But it's a pretty important piece of terminology!

[image source, Pinna et al 2002, The Pinna Illusion]

Keith Frankish Replies to Dominic Murphy on Mind and Supermind

... new in the Underblog.

Zombies and anti-zombies (by guest blogger Keith Frankish)

I'm coming to the end of my stint as guest blogger. It's been fun, and I'd like to thank Eric and everyone who has commented. I thought I'd finish with another post about consciousness.

Every schoolboy knows how the zombie argument goes. Zombies -- physical duplicates of us that lack consciousness –- are clearly conceivable. If a scenario is clearly conceivable, then it is metaphysically possible (the conceivability–possibility, or CP, principle). So zombies are metaphysically possible, and therefore physicalism is false. (Physicalism is the view that consciousness supervenes metaphysically on the physical and thus that there is no world where the physical correlates of consciousness are instantiated without consciousness.) I suspect that the first premise here is false -- that zombies are not conceivable, at least in the rigorous way required by the argument. (For a persuasive statement of the case for this view, see Allin Cottrell's paper, 'Sniffing the Camembert'.) But even if that's wrong, I still don't think the argument works. Like many people, I'm suspicious of the CP principle. And one way to highlight the problem is to note that physicalists can also invoke the principle to argue for their position. Here's how it goes.

Consider anti-zombies. These are beings that are physical duplicates of humans, and that have no non-physical properties, but which are nonetheless conscious. They inhabit an anti-zombie world, which is a physical duplicate of ours, but where no non-physical properties are instantiated. (Physicalists think that we are anti-zombies, of course.) Then we can run an anti-zombie argument for physicalism, as follows. Anti-zombies are conceivable and therefore, by the CP principle, metaphysically possible. And if anti-zombies are metaphysically possible, then physicalism is true. The last step may seem a big one, but it should be uncontroversial. In the anti-zombie world consciousness is physical, so the microphysical features of that world are metaphysically sufficient for consciousness, and any world with the same microphysical features will have the same distribution of phenomenal properties. But, by definition, our world has the same microphysical features as the anti-zombie world. Hence the microphysical features of our world are metaphysically sufficient for the existence of consciousness, which is to say that physicalism is true.

The argument has been anticipated by various writers -- notably Peter Marton -- but I've but tried give it a definitive statement in a recent paper (available here for those with a Blackwell Synergy subscription). As I stress in the paper, the only response available to defenders of the zombie argument is to deny the first premise, that anti-zombies are conceivable.

The point can be made independently by considering the unique world that is a physical duplicate of ours and where no further, non-physical properties are instantiated. This should be a zombie world, if any is. But it's also the only candidate for an anti-zombie world. Thus, the possibility of zombies is incompatible with that of anti-zombies. And if conceivability entails possibility, then the conceivability of zombies is incompatible with that of anti-zombies. So defenders of the zombie argument must deny that anti-zombies are conceivable.

Now of course physicalism is the view that we are anti-zombies, so if anti-zombies aren't conceivable then physicalism isn't conceivable either. In short, if you want to endorse the zombie argument, then you have to maintain that physicalism is inconceivable.

That's all from me. So long and thanks for all the fish.

'What am I?' (by guest blogger Keith Frankish)

Eric's recent post about subjective time set me thinking about how strange and different the mental life of children can be. Here's a little example from my own experience. When I was a young child, around the age of four, I discovered that I could put myself into a rather odd state of mind simply by repeating to myself the question 'What am I?'. This had two effects. First, it generated a strong sense that I was not the boy Keith – the boy whose body I was associated with. The sense wasn't simply of a dissociation between mind and body; rather it was the sense of being a different person from Keith, in mind as well as body. It was as if I were someone who inhabited Keith's body and normally let him speak and act for me, but who was nonetheless quite distinct from Keith and didn’t wholly approve of him. The second effect was to generate a mild form of out-of-body experience. I felt as if I were slightly behind and above Keith's body, almost outside it, but not wholly separate. (Of course, I am describing all this in an adult vocabulary, but I'm trying to capture what it felt like, as far as I can remember it.)

I used to find this experience interesting rather than scary, and I would induce it quite often. I'm not sure how I interpreted the feelings it generated, though I do remember that I was puzzled enough to ask my mother what I was -- what I was -- to which of course I got the true but unsatisfactory response that I was a little boy. As the years passed, the experience become weaker and it became harder and harder for me to induce it, and by adolescence I completely lost the knack.

What was going on? I don't think it was merely a problem with the indexical 'I'. The sense of distinctness was too real to be the product of semantic confusion, and I didn't have similar problems with other indexicals (I wasn't given to asking where was here, for example). Perhaps it was a side-effect of the acquisition of full-blown theory of mind -– which we know happens between three and four. With theory of mind in place, we are able to think, not only about the thoughts of others, but also about our own thoughts, and to a child this might easily generate a sense of puzzlement. 'If I am thinking about someone's mind,' a child might reason, 'then I must be separate from that person, especially if I disapprove of their thoughts and feelings' (as I said, I didn't wholly approve of Keith). In an imaginative child, this puzzlement might also generate some phenomenology of dissociation. One attraction of this account is that it would explain why I eventually lost the ability to induce the dissociative state, since the fallacy in the reasoning behind it would in time have become apparent.

I'd be interested to know if others can recall having similar experiences or if anyone knows of research that has been done on this topic.

Introspection and consciousness (by guest blogger Keith Frankish)

One of the deepest disagreements about consciousness is whether the subjective character of experience is exhausted by its intentional content or whether it also has an intrinsic, non-representational component. The latter view is the traditional one, but it has come under attack in recent years from first-order representational theorists, such as Fred Dretske and Michael Tye.

Now, you would think this dispute would be easy to settle. The putative intrinsic properties of experience are very different from the properties of external objects represented in experience. The reddishness (to use Joseph Levine's term) of an experience of a red apple is a very different property from the redness of the apple itself. And if our experiences have these distinctive non-representational properties, then surely introspection should reveal this to us. (Indeed it's not clear that anything else could reveal it.)

This invites a bit of experimental philosophy, so I ran an informal survey on the philosophy discussion lists at the Open University. I asked people to pay close attention to their perceptual experiences and say whether, when they did so, they were (a) aware only of properties of the objects of the experiences, or (b) aware both of properties of the objects of the experiences and of properties of the experiences themselves. Twenty-two people replied, of whom five said (a), ten said (b), and seven objected to the way the question was posed. (Four respondents said the answer was sometimes (a) and sometimes (b), so I counted them as a half member of each of those camps.) From their comments, it appeared that some people were answering (b) because they were aware of feelings and reactions associated with their perceptual experiences, so I re-ran the survey stressing that participants should ignore such associations and focus on the character of the experiences themselves. In the event, this seemed to make little difference. Fourteen people replied, of whom three said (a), six said (b), and five questioned the question.)

Now, of course, this wasn't a serious piece of research, but the results are interesting all the same – both because of the number of people who rejected the question and because of the disagreement among those who accepted it. Why should people reject the question? Either experiences possess non–representational properties or they don't, and introspection should be the best, if not the only, way to find out. And assuming people don't have radically different inner lives, how could they differ as to the answer to the question? If experiences of red things possess reddishness, then how could even a minimally attentive introspector miss the fact? And if they don’t, then how could introspection lead us to think they do?

Of course, I'm being a bit disingenuous here. I think that introspective reports are heavily theory-laden, so I wasn't surprised by the results. But the results ought to be surprising, I think, on a very common view of consciousness, which takes the nature of the phenomenon to be an unproblematic given. ('If you have to ask, you ain't never gonna know.') What would Jackson's Mary say, I wonder, if she knew that people on the outside had such differing views about what could be learned from introspection?

Another puzzle about belief (by guest blogger Keith Frankish)

9 am: Jack enters his office and flips the light switch. Call this event A. It is plausible to think that there's an intentional explanation for A: Jack wants light and believes that flipping the switch will produce it. But light doesn’t come. The bulb goes pop, and Jack sets off to the store cupboard to get a replacement.

9.05 am: Bulb in hand, Jack re-enters his office, and again flips the switch -- then curses his stupidity. Call the second switch-flipping event B. Now what is the explanation for B? More specifically, is the explanation the same as for A, and it is an intentional one?

There are four options, and each has its problems:

1) The explanation is the same and it is intentional: Jack wants light and believes that flipping the switch will produce it. Problem: In the run-up to event B Jack surely doesn't believe that flipping the switch will produce light. After all, he knows that the bulb is blown and that blown bulbs don’t produce light, and he is minimally rational.

2) The explanation is the same and it is not intentional -- perhaps the movement is a reflex one. Problem: Flipping a light switch is just one of a vast array of routine unreflective behaviours for which we find it perfectly natural to give intentional explanations. If these actions are not intentional, then the realm of folk-psychological explanation will be massively reduced, vindicating at least a partial form of eliminativism.

3) The explanation is different and it not intentional. Problem: It's implausible to think that A and B have different explanations. In a real life version, I'd be willing to bet that the neurological processes involved in two cases were of the same type.

4) The explanation is different and it is intentional. Problem: As for (3), plus it's hard to see what alternative beliefs and desires might have motivated B.

This puzzle about belief seems to me an important one, though it has received relatively little attention -- which is why I thought I’d give it an airing here. (One of the few extended discussions I know of is by Christopher Maloney in a 1990 Mind and Language paper titled 'It's hard to believe'. Eric also discusses cases of this sort in his draft paper 'Acting contrary to our professed beliefs'.)

My own view is that the plausibility of the options corresponds to the order in which I have stated them, with (1) being the most plausible. That is, I would deny that at the time of event B Jack doesn't believe that flipping the switch will produce light. The problem then, of course, is to explain how he can believe that the switch will work while at the same time believing that the bulb is blown and that blown bulbs don’t produce light. The only plausible way of doing this, I think, is to distinguish types, or levels, of belief which are relatively insulated from each other, and to claim that Jack's belief about the effect of flipping the switch is of one type and his belief about the condition of the bulb of the other. (Maloney takes the broadly same line, though he works out the details in a different way from me.) I happen to think that this view is independently plausible, so the puzzle is actually grist to my mill, though distinguishing types of beliefs has its own problems. I'd be interested to know how others react to the puzzle.

Qualia: The real thing (by guest blogger Keith Frankish)

What is the explanandum for a theory of consciousness? The traditional view is that it is the qualia of experience, conceived of as ineffable, intrinsic, and essentially private properties -- classic qualia, we might say. Now classic qualia don't look likely to yield to explanation in physical terms, and physicalists typically propose that we start with a more neutral conception of the explanandum. They say that we shouldn't build ineffability, intrinsicality, and privacy into our conception of qualia, and that what needs explaining is simply the subjective feel of experience -- the 'what-it-is-likeness' -- where this may turn out to be effable (yes, there is such a word), relational, and public. Call this watered-down conception diet qualia. Though rejecting classic qualia, physicalists tend to assume that it's undeniable that diet qualia exist, and go on to offer reductive accounts of them -- suggesting, for example, that experiences come to have diet qualia in virtue of having a certain kind of representational content or of being the object of some kind of higher-order awareness.

Drawing a distinction between classic qualia and diet qualia (though not under those terms) is a common move in the literature, but I'm suspicious of it. I'm just not convinced that there is any distinctive content to the notion of diet qualia. To make the point, let me introduce a third concept, which shall I call zero qualia. Zero qualia are those properties of an experience that lead its possessor to judge that the experience has classic qualia and to make certain judgements about the character of those qualia. Now I assume that diet qualia are supposed to be different from zero qualia: an experience could have properties that dispose one to judge that it has classic qualia without it actually being like anything to undergo it. But what exactly would be missing? Well, a subjective feel. But what is that supposed to be, if not something intrinsic, ineffable, and private? I can see how the properties that dispose us to judge that our experiences have subjective feels might not be intrinsic, ineffable, and private, but I find it much harder to understand how subjective feels themselves might not be.

It may be replied that diet qualia are properties that seem to be intrinsic, ineffable, and private, but may not really be so. But if the suggestion is that they dispose us to judge that they are intrinsic, ineffable, and private, then I do not see how they differ from zero qualia. They are properties which dispose us to judge that the experiences that possess them have classic qualia -- in this case by disposing us to judge they themselves are classic qualia. If, on the other hand, the suggestion is that diet qualia involve some further dimension of seeming beyond this disposition to judge, then I return to my original question: what is this extra dimension, if not the one distinctive of classic qualia?

In short, I understand what classic qualia are, and I understand what zero qualia are, but I don't understand what diet qualia are; I suspect the concept has no distinctive content. If that's right, then the fundamental dispute between physicalists and anti-physicalists should be over the nature of the explanandum -- classic qualia or zero qualia -- not the explanans. The concept of diet qualia confuses the issue by leading us to think that both sides can agree about what needs to be

Footnote: This shows just how easy it is to be confused about qualia, even when it comes to the real thing.

If you want my opinion … (by guest blogger Keith Frankish)

I'd like to thank Eric for inviting me to guest on The Splintered Mind. Blogging gives one a chance to express one opinions, so I thought I’d begin by saying something about opinions.

When we talk of opinions I think we often have in mind states of the kind to which Daniel Dennett applies the term. An opinion in this sense is a reflective personal commitment to the truth of a sentence (see especially ch.16 of Brainstorms). Dennett suggests that we can actively form opinions and that we are often prompted to do so by social pressures. The need to give an opinion frequently forces us to create one – to foreclose on deliberation, find linguistic expression for an inchoate thought, and make a clear-cut doxastic commitment. This, Dennett suggests, is what we call making up our minds.

But what is the point of having opinions? Non-human animals get on well enough without them, and much of our behaviour seems to be guided without the involvement of these reflective, language-involving states. Dennett himself makes a sharp distinction between opinion and belief, and maintains that it is our beliefs and desires that directly predict our nonverbal actions, whereas our opinions manifest themselves only in what we say.

I disagree with Dennett here. I think that opinions can play a central role in conscious reasoning and decision-making. They can do so, I have argued, in virtue of our (usually non-conscious) higher-order attitudes towards them (see here for an early stab at the argument and here for the developed version). However, it’s undeniable that many of our opinions do not have much effect on how we conduct our daily lives. Many simply aren’t relevant. Few of us are deeply enough involved in politics for our political opinions to have a significant impact on our nonverbal behaviour. Moreover, opinions have drawbacks. They are hard to form. It’s not easy to arrive at coherent set of opinions which one is prepared to commit to and defend in argument. They can be dangerously imprecise. People are all too ready to endorse blanket generalizations and sweeping moral prescriptions. And they can be inflexible. We sometimes hang on to our opinions beyond the point where a wiser person would revise or abandon them, and end up falling into dogmatism or self-delusion. (Someone once said of the British politician Enoch Powell that he had the finest mind in Parliament until he made it up.)

The wise course, it seems, would be to keep an open mind as far as possible, and then commit oneself only to qualified views, which one is always ready to reconsider. Why, then, are people so keen to form strong opinions and to broadcast them to others? (a keenness very evident in the blogosphere). The question is one for social psychologists, but I'll speculate a bit. One factor is probably security. It's a complicated world and doubt is unsettling, so it's comforting to have clear, well-entrenched opinions. A unified package of opinions can also serve as a badge of tribal loyalty, identifying one as a member of a particular party or sect and so fostering a sense of comradeship and belonging. Another factor, I suspect, is prestige: a set of clear, firmly held opinions is impressive, suggesting that one is knowledgeable, tough-minded, and decisive.

These benefits aren't negligible, but I doubt they outweigh the risks, and it might be better if we were all more cautious in our opinions. I'm not recommending quietism; it's often important to take a stand. But I think we should resist the pressures to form quick and easy opinions, and, in particular, that we should resist the pressure to choose them from the predefined packages offered to us by professional politicians and 'opinion formers'. Referring to opinion polls, Spike Milligan once said that one day the 'Don't knows' would get in, and then where would we be? Well, perhaps we'd be a bit better off, actually.