Holist: Yet after you analyze all those parts, you will still be obliged to explain how they all unite to produce the streams of consciousness that emerge from them. So, then you still will need some words to describe that entire phenomenon.
Why did our language come to include such terms as ‘awareness,’ ‘perception,’ ‘consciousness,’ every one of which condenses many different processes?
Psychologist: Such self-words are useful in everyday social life because they help us to communicate—both with our friends and with ourselves. For, because we all share the same kinds of jumbled ideas, we can pack them into vague suitcase-terms that seem easy for us to understand.
Ethicist: We need them also to support our principle of responsibility and discipline. Our legal and ethical principles are largely based on the idea that we ought to punish or reward only actions that are ‘intentional’—that is, are based on having been planned in advance, with predictions about their consequences.
Psychiatrist: Perhaps we use those suitcase terms to keep ourselves from asking too much about how our minds control themselves, and what underlies the decisions we make. Perhaps we use words like “consciousness” to help us suppress all those questions all at once—by suggesting that all of them are just a single big Mystery.
Student: If “consciousness” is just a suitcase word, what makes it seem so clear to us that we actually possess such a thing? If such terms keep shifting their meanings, why doesn’t this become evident whenever we start to think about them?
That could be because no part of a mind can ‘see’ much of what the rest of that mind does. A typical resource inside a brain accomplishes its jobs internally, in ways that other resources cannot perceive. Also, when any resource probes into another, that very act may change the other’s state—and thus scramble the very evidence it would need to recognize what’s happening. These could partly account for Hume’s complaint that our minds lack good ways to inspect themselves.
David Hume: “The motion of our body follows upon the command of our will. Of this we are every moment conscious. But the means, by which this is effected; the energy, by which the will performs so extraordinary an operation; of this we are so far from being immediately conscious, that it must for ever escape our most diligent enquiry.”[54]
Hume assumes that we could never develop more powerful ways to inspect ourselves—but today we have new image-machines that show more of what happens inside our brains. For example, now we can detect activities that start before our limbs begin to move.
Dualist philosopher: Still, those instruments will eventually fail, because you can measure a brain but not an idea. Some creatures are conscious, while others are not—and consciousness is a subjective thing that can’t be explained in physical terms.
Functionalist Philosopher: What evidence could support your faith that consciousness could never be explained? We can see it simply as our name for what happens when certain processes run in our brains.
I would agree with that second opinion, except that we also need to say more about what those ‘certain processes’ do—and why we distinguish them as a group. (The next section will offer a theory of this.) Still, many thinkers still maintain that brains must be based on something beyond the reach of our present-day machines.
Emergentist: Perhaps consciousness is just one of those ‘wholes’ that emerge when systems get complex enough. Perhaps that’s just what we should expect from the network of billions of cells in a brain.
When we increase a system’s size, then it will usually work less well, unless we also improve its design, and that always involves some compromise; if a system is built with too many connections, this will lead to traffic jams—while if the connections between its parts are too sparse, it is unlikely to anything useful at all.
Besides, if mere complexity were all it needs, then almost everything would have consciousness. We don’t want to conclude that water-waves think—yet the manner in which a wave breaks on a beach is more complex (at least in some ways) than the processes that go on in our brains.
So, there’s no point to asking what consciousness ‘is’—because we’ve seen that this is a suitcase word, which we each fill up with far more stuff than could possibly have just one common cause. It makes no sense to try to discuss so many different things at once—except when trying to explain why we tend to treat all those things as the same. Let’s listen to Aaron Sloman again:
Aaron Sloman: “I for one, do not think defining consciousness is important at all, and I believe that it diverts attention from important and difficult problems. The whole idea is based on a fundamental misconception that just because there is a noun “consciousness” there is some ‘thing’ like magnetism or electricity or pressure or temperature, and that it’s worth looking for correlates of that thing. Or on the misconception that it is worth trying to prove that certain mechanisms can or cannot produce ‘it’, or trying to find out how ‘it’ evolved, or trying to find out which animals have ‘it’, or trying to decide at which moment ‘it’ starts when a fetus develops, or at which moment ‘it’ stops when brain death occurs, etc. There will not be one thing to be correlated but a very large collection of very different things.”[55]
I completely agree with Sloman’s view. To understand how our thinking works, we must study those “very different things” and then ask what kinds of machinery could accomplish some or all of them. In other words, we must try to design—as opposed to define—machines that can do what our minds can do.
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