Three Questions About Consciousness
Review of Consciousness And Experience by William G. Lycan
Frank Jackson
Australian National University
Philosophy Program
ACT 0200
AUSTRALIA
frank.jackson@anu.edu.au
Copyright (c) by Frank Jackson 1997
PSYCHE, 3(5), October 1997
Previously held: http://psyche.cs.monashe.edu.au/v3/psyche-3-05-jackson.html
KEYWORDS: consciousness, qualia, functionalism, experience.
REVIEW OF: William G. Lycan (1996) Consciousness and Experience.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hbk US$35. xviii+210pp.
ISBN: 0-262-12197-2.
Much of the contemporary literature on conscious experience revolves
around three questions. Does the nature of conscious experience pose
special problems for physicalism? Is the nature of conscious experience
exhausted by functional role? Is the nature of conscious experience
exhausted by the intentional contents or representational nature of the
relevant kinds of mental states? Bill Lycan has made important
contributions to these questions, and to the philosophy of mind and
consciousness in general, in a number of publications, and especially in
Lycan (1987). The book under review is a 'further thoughts and replies
to objections' book. He states his earlier views, makes some
modifications, and considers in some detail various objections put to
him and some of the writings on consciousness that have appeared since
the 1987 book. The general line of argument sometimes gets a bit lost in
the to-ing and fro-ing, but consciousness specialists will certainly
want to buy this book.
Lycan answers the three questions as follows: no, yes, and yes, maybe. I
will comment briefly on his treatment of each question.
Lycan argues that there is no special problem for physicalism raised by
conscious experience. He rightly distinguishes two questions here. Does
consciousness per se raise a problem? And: Do qualia pose a special
problem? His answer to the first question is to defend an inner sense
account of consciousness; he holds that "consciousness is the
functioning of internal attention mechanisms directed at lower-order
psychological states and events" (p. 14). This view goes back to, e.g.,
Locke and Kant, and is perhaps best known today through David
Armstrong's defence of it. Lycan's contribution is to show how it can
meet various objections recently brought against it.
His treatment of the second question about qualia is, it seems to me,
less satisfactory. The issue of qualia is the issue raised by states
like pain, feeling hungry, and seeing red; states for which there is
something it is like to be in them (though Lycan does not approve of
this phrase and its brethren); states with, as it is often put, a
phenomenal nature. This issue is separate from the question of
consciousness. One can see red and be in pain without being conscious of
doing so, as may happen when your attention is elsewhere; and many are
conscious of believing that two is the smallest prime without it being
the case that there is anything it is like to be so conscious (attending
to what one believes is not at all like feeling hungry). The most
forceful way of raising the problem posed by qualia for physicalism is
in terms of the knowledge argument, and I think that Lycan's way with
this argument is far too quick (I say this as someone who no longer
accepts the argument).
The key claim in the knowledge argument is that someone can know all the
physical facts without knowing all the facts, in particular without
knowing what it is like to see red or feel pain. Ergo, there is more to
know than all the physical facts, and physicalism is false. Lycan's
reply is that the argument simply overlooks the fact that a "person can
know the fact that p without knowing the fact that q even when the fact
that p and the fact that q are one and the same (lightning and
electrical discharge, water and H2O)" p. 49. This is too quick. If you
know enough about H2O, you know that it is water. When we discovered
that water is H2O, we simply discovered enough about H2O -- that it
filled the oceans, was clear and potable, was the stuff we baptised
'water', etc. We did not need to discover anything more. Indeed, all the
cases that illustrate the famous opacity of knowledge are cases
involving ignorance: it is those ignorant of the fact that the first
'star' seen in the evening is the last to disappear at night who know
facts about Hesperus without knowing facts about Phosphorus, and who
fail to know that 'they' are one and the same; it is those ignorant of
ancient history who know that Cicero denounced Catiline without knowing
that Tully did; and so on. But the key claim of the knowledge argument
is that if physicalism is true, one who knows all the physical facts
does not suffer from ignorance. I grant (obviously) that there is much
more to say about the knowledge argument, but any reply to it needs to
do a lot more than appeal to the opacity of epistemic contexts.
Lycan's confidence that phenomenal nature is exhausted by functional
role derives in part from his non-standard views about the distinction
between functional roles and their occupiers. Many who insist that
phenomenal nature outruns functional role are moved by the idea that the
kind of states that occupy the relevant roles might matter for
phenomenal feel. They find some of the spectrum reversal cases -- the
familiar cases designed to show that subjects' colour experiences might
be radically different while playing essentially the same functional
roles -- convincing, and infer that the nature of a colour experience is
settled by a combination of the functional role occupied and the nature
-- the physiological nature, as it happens -- of the state that does the
occupying. For instance, the physiological states in question will stand
in various similarity and difference relations, and the suggestion is
often that these relations, in addition to the roles occupied by the
states, influence phenomenal nature. Lycan, however, rejects the usual
way of thinking about the distinction between role and occupant. For
him, it is functional roles all the way down:
I deny the existence of any single distinction between the "the
functional" and "the merely physiological", between "the software"
and "the hardware it runs on".... The difference between
physiological, functional and computational talk is just that, a
difference of degree of abstraction and level of functional
organization.... They [living things and computers] are all
hierarchically organised at many levels, each level functional with
respect to those beneath it but structural or concrete as it
realizes those levels above it. (pp. 118-119)
This means that, for Lycan, it is very hard for functional nature to
fail to exhaust phenomenal nature. Almost anything you might cite as
escaping the functional net is, by his lights, functional after all. The
interesting question then becomes which aspects of functional nature
matter for which aspects of psychological nature, and, though he
indicates sympathy for answers that give a central role to selectional
history, he largely sets the question aside (for now).
Perceptions and bodily sensations represent things as being thus and so;
they have intentional natures. The point is painfully obvious in the
case of perceptions, but is also pretty obvious in the case of bodily
sensations. As Lycan and others urge, bodily sensations represent how
things are with parts of one's body. The live debate, therefore, is over
whether there is more to their nature qua psychological states (we know
there is more to their nature qua neurological states) than is given by
their intentional natures. Can we, for example, capture the painfulness
of pain in terms of how it represents things as being, together with the
associated desire that this stop, or something along these general
lines? Lycan's approach is to explain as much as possible of phenomenal
nature in intentional terms while allowing that in some cases it may
(may) be necessary to add a bit of functional role (a bit, that is,
which does not come for free with intentional nature). In an interesting
final chapter, Lycan replies to three cases presented by Christopher
Peacocke in favour of, as Lycan calls them, 'Strange Qualia', or, as
Peacocke calls them, 'non-representational sensational properties'. Here
is one of Peacocke's cases, quoted by Lycan on pp. 143-144:
Suppose you are standing on a road which stretches from you to the
horizon. There are two trees at the roadside, one a hundred yards
from you, the other two hundred. Your experience represents these
objects as being of the same physical height and other dimensions;
that is, taking your experience at face value you would judge that
the trees are roughly the same physical size. Yet there is also some
sense in which the nearer tree occupies more of your visual field
than the more distant tree. This is as much a feature of your
experience itself as is representing the trees as being of the same
height. The experience can possess this feature without your having
any concept of the feature or of the visual field: you simply enjoy
an experience which has the feature. (Peacocke, 1983, p. 12)
It is clear and agreed by all that the nature of your experience is not
exhausted by its representing that the trees are the same height: both
your memory that they are the same height and your hearing someone say
that they are do that, and yet they are very different experiences from
the experience Peacocke describes. However, your perceptual experience
represents a great deal more than that the trees are the same height: it
represents where they are relative to where you are and relative to
other objects; it represents, in a single package, facts about position,
shape, colour, and size (it isn't like a passage of prose with different
sentences devoted to position, shape, colour, and size); it represents
that the objects are impacting on you in a way which delivers the
putative information about position etc., and so on and so forth. The
question of interest is, accordingly, whether we capture in full the
perceptual experience if we include enough of these additional facts
about the representational nature of your experience.
Lycan sees the issue in just this way and has his own suggestion (given
on pp. 151-152) about the representational facts which make up a package
sufficient to capture in full the perceptual experience. This amounts to
what we might call a direct reply to Peacocke; it is an attempt to
identify the package of representational facts that turns the trick. He
might, though, have first offered an indirect reply; an argument that
there must be such a package of representational or intentional facts
that captures in full the perceptual experience. The possibility of this
kind of existence proof derives from the considerable plausibility of
the claim that a difference in perceptual experience implies a
difference in representational content: for any and every change in your
perceptual experience, there is some change or other in how things are
being represented as being to you -- whether correctly or not is, of
course, another matter. But then, contraposing, we get that sameness in
representational content implies sameness in perceptual experience. This
tells us that the nature of perceptual experience supervenes on
representational content, and so that enough by way of representational
content fixes in full the nature of perceptual experience. This kind of
indirect argument does not tell us which package of representational
facts secures any given perceptual experience, but does tell us, it
seems to me, that there must be such a package for any given perceptual
experience, so confirming Lycan's doubts about strange qualia.
References
Lycan, W. G. (1987).
Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Peacocke, C. (1983). Sense and Content. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
