First event at the SACP was a panel involving Edward (Ted) Slingerland, discussing Confucius’s thought. Slingerland was arguing, against the somewhat behaviourist interpretation promoted by Herbert Fingarette, that Confucius has a conception of “interiority,” or subjectivity – that we are not just the sum of our roles and actions, but there’s a consciousness inside.
The objections to Slingerland were of two kinds. First, people misinterpreted him and objected to the idea of interiority (or consciousness), thinking that he was arguing for interiority himself, even though he repeatedly insisted he was only interpreting Confucius and didn’t believe in it himself. (I’m surprised how many people did that.) Second, people objected (roughly) that Confucius couldn’t possibly have believed in interiority, typically on the grounds that he was a lot smarter than that.
The big surprise, to me, was that nobody (least of all Slingerland) seemed to step up to the plate and defend interiority – to say that yes, there’s actually something going on inside our minds. That’s not exactly an unpopular view, after all – it’s common sense, as Slingerland himself was the first to acknowledge.
Now, of course, common sense is not always sensible – one of philosophy’s most important results is to push us past our everyday views and prejudices. Slingerland argued exactly this when I talked to him more at dinner: of course we think there’s something conscious going on inside our minds, but we’re wrong. We perceive consciousness, but we also perceive the earth as flat and the sun as surrounding it. And evidence from cognitive science, he claims, shows belief in consciousness or interiority to be as much an error as belief in a flat earth.
I replied that I don’t think this is possible. It’s not that empirical evidence shows us that consciousness exists. Rather, it’s the other way round. We need to assume consciousness – or at least something like consciousness, interiority, subjectivity – in order for there to be empirical evidence in the first place. Any sort of scientific experiment must necessarily rely on the evidence of experience and/or perception, and experience and perception presume consciousness. We might not require a single, unified self as a perceiver – Buddhists readily argue for consciousness without a self – but the perception itself has to exist, or it makes no sense to speak of anything being observed, in a scientific experiment or anywhere else. (Descartes’ cogito ergo sum doesn’t necessarily prove that Descartes exists, but it does prove that what we call Descartes’ thought exists.)
A scientific experiment cannot prove that the experiment being conducted doesn’t exist; if it does, it has contradicted itself and gone wrong. But the whole idea of an experiment is that the results are observed and perceived, which in turn requires (I think) that there is consciousness of the experiment. If the experiment claims to disprove the existence of consciousness, it becomes completely incoherent, and has therefore effectively proved – and disproved – nothing.
Stephen C. Walker said:
I’m most interested in the nature of the consensus you observed. How much more detailed did the discussion get? Keywords like “interiority” and “consciousness”, without further specification, are frustratingly blunt-edged.
Amod said:
You’re right; that’s one of the reasons I wanted to say “something like” consciousness. And there were alternative terms bandied about (subjectivity, interiority, consciousness)… but another thing that surprised me was that they seemed to be used more or less interchangeably. Slingerland specified that the “interiority” he attributed to Confucius was a “container view” – that there are states of some sort contained inside of human beings. I would have expected to see more people haggling over terms and their specification (e.g. we can defend consciousness but not interiority, or the like) but I was surprised that that didn’t seem to happen. Nobody seemed to want to defend the existence of consciousness even in relatively weak senses.
Ryan Overbey said:
Surely people arguing against consciousness don’t argue that there is “nothing” going on inside the mind. Perhaps they are simply arguing that the material workings of the human brain and nervous system are complex and interesting enough as they are, without resorting to spooky supernatural things?
You say “experience and perception” presume consciousness. In that case, consciousness for you seems to be defined as any system of taking in sensory data, storing information about that data, and processing that information. Am I reading that correctly? We have computer programs that can do these things. Would they fit your criteria for consciousness. If so, cool! If not, why not?
I always have an uncomfortable feeling that “consciousness studies” is filled with a deep discomfort with materialist accounts of the human organism, motivated by religious sentimentality or romanticism or whatever. I would love to be wrong about that, though.
Ben said:
Many cognitive scientists will argue not that “nothing” is going on, but nothing *special*. Clearly there is something we perceive as consciousness; rather, the cogsci claim would be that this apparent “consciousness” does not reflect what our mind or brain are actually doing. You might call it an illusion, a misperception.
Note, also, that this is not a cut-and-dried closed debate in cognitive science. It is certainly the case that action control and conscious awareness are parallel, substantially separate systems: I could tell neat stories all day long about the evidence of the distinction between distinct “vision for action” and “vision for perception” systems… but both streams still exist!
The perceptions that enter our conscious awareness are distinct from those that we use to guide our actions, yes. But the things that lead to conscious awareness/output have some role also; in the sensorimotor domain, that information probably gets used when planning movements based on memory or maybe anticipated future events.
This is all a bit lower-level than the real “is there anything going on internally?” consciousness question, reflecting my recent expertise; there’s a big gap between visual awareness and internal narrative. I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, without a lot more (offline?) thought and discussion; it can lead towards very divergent conclusions. Does this line of reasoning suggest that consciousness is a necessary element, or that there are valid ways to “observe” without consciousness?
Amod said:
Thanks very much, you two. These are great comments and I think they deserve their own post in response. I will try and do that soon, once I’ve written up a bit more from the conference.
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