Actual Consciousness: An
Oversight, The Tyranny of the Present, Grandiosity
Ted
Honderich
My
book Actual Consciousness, for good
or ill, has
in it just about every
contemporary and recent philosopher of mind many of us are likely to
think of
-- Block, Burge, Chalmers, Churchlands, Clark, Crane, Davidson,
Dennett,
Dretske, Fodor, Heil, Jackson, Kim, Lycan, Martin, McGinn, Nagel, Noe,
Papineau, Peacocke, Putnam, Robinson, Rosenthal, Searle, Snowdon, Tye.
It also has in it quite a few other philosophers of mind with a claim
to attention,
some a lot, but who have not seized it.
The
book (Oxford University Press) arrives by way of a database at an adequate initial clarification of
consciousness, of course figurative, as something's being actual. Then Actualism, the
eventually resulting literal theory or analysis of this consciousness, in its
perceptual, cognitive and affective parts, has as a principal uniqueness that
what it is for you to be conscious in perception now is for a room to exist. It is
for a part, piece, stage, phase of a subjective physical world to exist, one related to you as perceiver. It is
for something to exist that takes up space outside you, is in time, has in it
causal and other lawful connections, stands in lawful connections with other
things, is within the inventory and method of science, is more than bound up
with perception, and so on, these being characteristics of its physicality.
The
myriad subjective physical worlds, each related to a perceiver, each as
entitled to being regarded
as real as transient entities in science, together with with the very
different
subjective physicality of cognitive and affective consciousness, a
matter of representations, make up
subjective physicality. It, together with objective physicality,
which has related but somewhat different characteristics,
comprises
the physical world in general.
My
concern here and now is only the account of consciousness in perception, of course not
all of the subject of perception, which thing includes mentality other than
that of actual consciousness.
In
the book, an amount of attention is given to alternatives to and denials of the
Actualism theory in much contemporary philosophy and science of consciousness,
in particular alternatives to the proposition that your perceptual
consciousness very likely now consists in a subjectively physical room,
dependent on the objective physical world and on you neurally. These contemporary
alternatives and denials are to the effect that your consciousness consists in or
includes internal items spoken of as internal content, internal objects,
representations, stuff of phenomenality, qualia, images, mental paint and so on
-- maybe as well as items not presently so relevant, including a kind of self, aboutness
or intentionality, maybe what it is like to be something, maybe consciousness as
vehicle or medium, and so on.
Yesterday
I found myself in a conversation, for the purposes of a radio programme, about A.
J. Ayer, best remembered as the English exponent of Logical Positivism,
essentially the principle that statements,
utterances or the like with truth-values, include only those utterances that in brief
are either empirical or a matter of logical necessity. Logical Positivism was
of course quite mistakenly spoken of by its proponents and others as having to
do with all meaning, with all meaningful utterances, as distinct from just statements.
The
conversation also included something else. That was phenomenalism, as
Freddie
and others called it, different from but related to the stuff
above of contemporary philosophy and science of consciousness.
Phenomenalism too was to the effect that perceptual consciousness is
a matter of internal items -- such as those called ideas, impressions,
sense-data,
sensa, percepts, and whatever Freddie in a late stage of his
philosophical
progress proposed to construct the world out of.
But
this phenomenalism, as all philosophers a little in touch with history know, is
in fact the main history or fundamental to the great history of Locke,
Berkeley, Hume, and Mill. Not to mention Moore, Russell, Broad, Lewis, Goodman
-- and Ayer. But Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Mill are themselves no less than British
Empiricism, the historic alternative to Continental Rationalism, above all to Kant.
So
Actualism is against a lot. It purports to be a refutation of a great,
long
pile of philosophy. The great history of Empiricism. I more or less
passed that by in the book. It is mentioned on pp. 19, 41, 205-6, 360
and maybe one more, but it is never contemplated and given attention.
Is grandiosity
then a fate of the working philosopher, at least some working philosophers? This
one? At least grandiosity now if not earlier?
My
own first response to the charge is that Actualism has the safety of
first
getting clear what it is on about, what its subject is, what question
it is
answering. That subject is consciousness in the primary ordinary sense,
the
core sense as established by any decent dictionary. Further, it
initially clarifies that consciousness by gathering a database from
leading contemporary philosophers and
indeed just about all reflective thinking and speaking. This
consciousness is what you can call actual consciousness.
Phenomenalism
or empiricism did not distinguish this subject and question. No
doubt all or
many of those great fellows were on about more than that.
So
I am a little abashed this morning in my theory of Actualism, but
not more than that, not bruised. A little abashed and also
thinking about the
tyranny of the present.
I
still pretty confidently propose Actualism to you. If you accept the reasonable premises you're stuck with the conclusion, aren't you? Read
the stuff
without deference to present or past. Forget about democracy about
truth, certainly bloody hierarchic democracy about truth. Forget
about the consensus that science talks piously of but throughout its
history dismisses.
Keep to the imperative of philosophy. Concentrate on ordinary logic. Go
on. You
can do it.