Theories of Consciousness: an Introduction and Assessment/William Seager

THEORIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS “This is a fine book, a fascinating set of discussions of an extremely interesting area.” John Leslie, University of Guelph “This is an excellent survey of recent theories of consciousness.” Barry Loewer, Rutgers University The most remarkable fact about the universe is that certain parts of it are conscious. Somehow nature has managed to pull the rabbit of experience out of a hat made of mere matter. Theories of Consciousness explores a number of ways to understand consciousness and its place in the physical world. Spectacularly diverse, the spectrum of theories ranges from those that identify consciousness with particular brain processes to those that seemingly deny that consciousness even exists. The attempt to understand consciousness is only as old as the scientific revolution. As William Seager shows, Descartes can be seen as the pioneer of this project and some aspects of his position still set the stage and the agenda for modern work. His views vividly illustrate the problem of explaining the physical ‘generation’ of consciousness and point to the fundamental importance of – or perhaps reveal the basic error in – an appeal to the notion of mental representation. After addressing Descartes, Seager considers theories that identify certain particular elements of conscious experience (the so-called qualia) with ‘vector codes’ within abstract spaces defined by neural networks. From there, Seager proceeds to HOT theory, which regards consciousness as the product of higher order thoughts about mental states. The influential and provocative views of Daniel Dennett are closely examined. Theories of Consciousness devotes a lot of attention to the new representational theory of consciousness and the special problems created by the phenomena of conscious thought, which lead to the conclusions that representation is indeed essential to consciousness but that an internalist account of representation is required. In his final chapter, Seager explores more speculative terrain: the idea that consciousness might somehow be a fundamental feature of the universe, perhaps ubiquitous and maybe linked to bizarre features of quantum physics. Theories of Consciousness serves both to introduce a wide array of approaches to consciousness as well as advance debate via a detailed critique of them. Philosophy students, researchers with a particular interest in cognitive science and anyone who has wondered how consciousness fits into a scientific view of the world will find this book an illuminating and fascinating read. William Seager is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. He is the author of Metaphysics of Consciousness (Routledge, 1991). PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN SCIENCE Edited by W. H. Newton-Smith Balliol College, Oxford REAL HISTORY Martin Bunzl BRUTE SCIENCE Hugh LaFollette and Niall Shanks LIVING IN A TECHNOLOGICAL CULTURE Mary Tiles and Hans Oberdick THE RATIONAL AND THE SOCIAL James Robert Brown THE NATURE OF THE DISEASE Lawrie Reznek THE PHILOSOPHICAL DEFENCE OF PSYCHIATRY Lawrie Reznek INFERENCE TO THE BEST EXPLANATION Peter Lipton TIME, SPACE AND PHILOSOPHY Christopher Ray MATHEMATICS AND THE IMAGE OF REASON Mary Tiles EVIL OR ILL? Lawrie Reznek THE ETHICS OF SCIENCE An Introduction David B. Resnik PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS An Introduction to a World of Proofs and Pictures James Robert Brown THEORIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS An introduction and assessment William Seager THEORIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS An introduction and assessment William Seager London and New York First published 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1999 William Seager All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Seager, William, 1952– Theories of Consciousness: an introduction and assessment/William Seager. p. cm. – (Philosophical issues in science) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Consciousness 2. Mind and body. I. Title. II. Series B808.9.S4 1999 128–dc21 98–34492 CIP ISBN 0–415–18393–6 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–18394–4 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-05307-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-21654-7 (Glassbook Format) TO MY PARENTS CONTENTS Acknowledgements viii Preface ix 1 Themes From Descartes 1 2 Identity Theories and the Generation Problem 33 3 HOT Theory: The Mentalistic Reduction of Consciousness 60 4 Dennett I: Everything You Thought You Knew About Experience is Wrong 85 5 Dennett II: Consciousness Fictionalized 107 6 Representational Theories of Consciousness, Part I 132 7 Representational Theories of Consciousness, Part II 153 8 Conscious Intentionality and the Anti-Cartesian Catastrophe 178 9 Consciousness, Information and Panpsychism 216 Notes 253 Bibliography 283 Index of Names 296 Subject Index 300 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Most of this book was written while on a sabbatical leave from the University of Toronto and my thanks go to my university for continuing to support the notion of a research leave. Some of the book has appeared before. A small part of chapter 3 was published in Analysis as ‘Dretske on Hot Theories of Consciousness’ (Seager 1994). The bulk of chapter 4 originally appeared in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research as ‘The Elimination of Experience’ (Seager 1993a); a version of the minimalist explication of Dennett’s four-fold characterization of qualia also appeared in my previous book, Metaphysics of Consciousness (Seager 1991a). I give it here again for the convenience of the reader. A earlier version of a good part of chapter 5 can be found in Inquiry as ‘Verificationism, Scepticism and Consciousness’ (Seager 1993b). Parts of chapters 6 and 7 were published in a critical notice of Fred Dretske’s Naturalizing the Mind in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy (Seager 1997). An early version of chapter 9 was published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (Seager 1995) and some of my ‘A Note on the Quantum Eraser’ (Seager 1996) from Philosophy of Science has been interpolated into chapter 9 as well. I would like to thank the many people who have discussed this material with me. My students at the University of Toronto have been an invaluable help. The philosophers at Dalhousie University have suffered over the years through almost the whole manuscript, always providing an enthusiastically critical outlook on the work. Early versions of chapter 8 were presented at a conference, Conscience et Intentionalité, held at the Université du Québec à Montréal in 1995, organized by Denis Fissette, to a conference on Consciousness in Humans and Animals, held at the Centre for Process Studies in Claremont in 1994 and organized by David Griffin, and to the meetings of the Canadian Philosophical Association in Calgary also in 1994. A preliminary version of chapter 5 was presented to the Toronto Cognitive Science Society in 1993. My thanks to the organizers and participants of all these events. Finally, I would like most of all to thank Christine, Emma, Tessa and Ned for being there. viii PREFACE Recently there has been a tremendous surge of interest in the problem of consciousness. Though it has always lurked in the vicinity, for years there was little or no mention of consciousness as such in either the philosophical or scientific literature. Now books and articles are flowing in an ever widening stream. This is strange. Hasn’t the mind–body problem always been about consciousness? There is no mind–body problem without the dream of a complete physical science, a dream first clearly entertained by Descartes who then had no choice but to invent the modern mind–body problem. And for Descartes, the mind–body problem is the problem of consciousness for there is, according to his understanding of the mind, nothing else for the mind to be. It is consciousness that sits square across the advancing path of the scientific world view. I doubt that Descartes, were he to admit the possibility of unconscious mentality, would think that it posed any serious challenge to a materialist view of the world. I think it was the growth of psychology as a potential and then actual science that forced upon us the idea that there could be a generalized mind–body problem, of which the problem of consciousness would be but one aspect. Scientific psychology both posited and seemed to require unconscious processes that were in their essential features very like the more familiar conscious mental processes of perception, inference and cognition. And far from retreating, the contemporary science of psychology, along with the upstart sciences of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, has shown ever more reliance upon the hypothesis of non- conscious mental processes. Thus, just as psychology carved out a problem- domain independent of consciousness so the philosophy of mind saw its task redirected on to a mind–body problem whose focus was on the mental processes appropriate to the new problem space (especially the problems of mental representation and the nature of cognition). Is it an unworthy suspicion that the absence of consciousness was not unwelcome? Then it came to seem that perhaps consciousness could be relegated and confined to one esoteric and increasingly baroque scholastic corner of the mind– body problem which has come to be known as the ‘problem of qualia’. What are qualia? They are the particular experienced features of consciousness: the redness of the perceived or imagined poppy, the sound of an orchestra playing in your dreams, the smell of burnt toast (perhaps as evoked by direct neural stimulation as in the famous experiments of Wilder Penfield).

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