The philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942-) once stated the following words about his fellow American philosopher John Searle (1932-):
“Searle [] claims that organic brains are required to produce consciousness — at one point he actually said brains secrete consciousness, as if it were some sort of magical goo [].”
I don’t know if John Searle actually did say that. (Searle’s own arguments won’t be covered here.) Nonetheless, Dennett’s words perfectly sum up the gist of this essay.
Dennett is right (despite his rhetoric): some philosophers do state such things as “consciousness is produced by the brain”. (Sometimes they use the words “created” or “caused” instead.)
This is problematic for physicalism.
Firstly, stating that “The brain produces consciousness” is an obvious acknowledgement of a distinction between the brain and consciousness. Now that may not be too problematic … or it may be. Whatever it is, a distinction is being made.
So what does stating “The brain produces [causes/ creates] consciousness” actually mean? Or, more abstractly, stating that “x causes y” isn’t very helpful… as it stands. Thus:
1) How does x produce [create/cause] y?
2) Why does x produce [cause/create] y?
Those two questions (I’m not very comfortable with “why-questions” such as 2) aren’t hinting that such claims of (as it were) production or causation can’t be defended . However, they still need to be cashed out.
Again, whatever the answers are, it’s still being acknowledged that y is not x. After all, the poison in a Death Cap mushroom caused the death of Mr Smooth (among various other necessary conditions). Yet that poison and his death aren’t one and the same thing. And, in this case, Mr Smooth’s death can easily be explained. That is, the whys and hows of Mr Smooth’s death are not problematic (i.e., once it’s clear that he’s consumed two Death Caps).
But what about the brain producing (or causing) consciousness?
The Identity Theory (or Type Physicalism)
There are some anti-physicalist philosophers who conflate all types of physicalism with the Identity Theory. That is, they argue that the brain can’t “give rise to itself” or that physicalists “tacitly accept that the brain and consciousness are distinct”.
Some anti-physicalists also ignore non-reductive physicalism too (at least when in a rhetorical mood). And what about the physicalists who’re committed to the emergence of consciousness (see later)?
Yet there are problems with physicalism. There’s even the problem of whether or not physicalism can be squared with emergence or non-reduction.
Take type physicalism again.
(The distinction between type physicalism and token physicalism doesn’t really matter much in the limited context of this essay. And neither does the reality — or otherwise — of multiple realizability.)
The Type Physicalist’s use of the word “correlation” (i.e., as with “produce”, “cause”, etc.) is also problematic. After all, if you state that
“mental event x can be correlated with physical event y in the brain”
then this too seems to make a distinction between mental events and physical events (in the brain). Of course making a distinction between x and y doesn’t necessarily mean that x and y aren’t, in fact, the same thing. And the original identity theorists spent much time explaining this fact (see later).
In any case, isn’t even the Identity Theory sometimes caricatured by anti-physicalists?
Sure, Identity Theorists set up a literal identity between consciousness and the brain. (Actually, it was usually the mind or mental events they had in… mind.) Yet even they acknowledged various distinctions between the brain and consciousness. That is, they acknowledged “first-person” accounts (or to use John Searle’s words again, “the brain from the inside”), the different “senses” which have the same “reference”, etc. But, to them, that still didn’t stop mental events/states from being identical to brain events/states.
In terms purely of sense and reference (to cite just one example).
For Herbert Feigl (1902 —1988) and J.J.C. Smart (1920–2012), the identity between mental events and brain events was seen as being an identity between the referents of the “senses” or descriptions of two different terms or phrases. (As in “the morning star” and “the evening star” both referring to Venus.)
U.T. Place (1924–2000) gave the example of “lightning” and “electrical discharge”. The former and latter words don’t mean the same thing. Yet the statement “lightning is an electrical discharge” is true. Thus Place and others concluded that the statement “mental event x is identical to brain event y” is true — even though the terms on either side of the “equation” don’t have the same sense.
Sure enough, mountains of papers were written criticising this kind of type physicalism. So these positions are extremely problematic — yet so too is anti-physicalism and all the other theories (or philosophies) of mind.
Reduction, Dependence and Emergence
If physicalism is the position that “all facts [] are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to them”, then we still have the problematic words “dependent” and “reducible” embedded in that definition. That is, a distinction is still be made between x and y — or between the brain and consciousness (or mind). After all, if you argue that “y is reducible to x”, or that “y is dependent on x”, then surely you can’t also be arguing that x and y are identical. That is, you’re aren’t (literally) arguing that “y is reducible to y” or that “y is dependent on y”.
So what about emergence?
Some philosophers are deeply suspicious of — or sceptical about — emergence. Yet they must realise that most scientists accept that it exists — at least at some level and in some shape or form. More accurately, most scientists accept weak emergence. (Not that many — or even any — scientists use the philosophical terms “weak emergence” and “strong emergence”.) Now saying that many scientists accept emergence doesn’t automatically mean that emergence must therefore exist — let alone that consciousness emerges from the brain.
And even if consciousness does emerge from the brain, then it’s still deemed to be something over and above the brain. (The very word “emerges” obviously shows that.)
Now what is this emergence and how can it be explained?
We can easily and happily accept that without the brain, there would be no emergence of consciousness in the first place — at least not in human beings as they are today. Yet that still leaves such emergence to be explained. More specifically and to accommodate both panpsychism and artificial intelligence (i.e., brains may not be required for consciousness), we can accept that without the brain of human subject S, that human subject would simply have no consciousness. (This is a statement of the obvious to me.) Yet we still need to explain the emergence of consciousness from — see, what does “from” mean? — the human brain of subject S.
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