NED BLOCK'S
ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY ANNUAL LECTURE
ATTENTION
AND MENTAL PAINT
An Introduction
by Ted Honderich
Ned Block studied at Harvard
University and then taught next door at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, and went on to be professor in the departments of philosophy and
psychology and also in the Centre for Neural Science at New York University. A
further and yet greater distinction is that he has not been at all converted by
his locales to functionalism, the idea that what you are thinking or feeling at
this moment is what is just a certain effect and cause, no matter what else is
true or not true of it,
Block provides and considers a kind
of evidence against two claims or theories about your seeing or otherwise
perceiving something, say a red circle on a piece of paper. One theory is that
you are somehow in a direct connection with the thing. The other is that there
is something else in the story -- something that just represents or stands for
the red circle, in something like the way of a word or name. More particularly,
what Block calls the phenomenal character of your perceiving, maybe better
called your consciousness in the perceiving, is not what it is taken to be by
the claims or theories of direct or naive realism or those of
representationism.
Rather, your phenomenal
consciousness is or is a matter of what another philosopher in a superior way
called mental paint and went on to
deny. To allow this mental paint is to suppose your consciousness is or is a
matter of a private inner thing that somehow resembles the red round thing on the paper, something somewhat like
what used to be called a sense-datum, and at least some of what have more
recently been called qualia. Block does say he is explaining your consciousness
in a mentalistic way, by way of mental
objects or qualities, unlike the way of naive or direct realism or common ideas
of representations.
The evidence against direct realism
and representationism, and for his theory, in plain words open to being
misunderstood or misconstrued, is that if you look steadily at something, go on fixing your eyes there, and but
just think of one part of what you
are seeing, that part now looks different from the others in a new way. Get
just a bit of the evidence for yourself. Try it for a start with Figure 2A.
Keep looking steadily at a square dot but attend
to one of the disks -- engage in thinking of one of the disks. That disk,
if you're like me, now looks different from before. So there's mental paint.
There is more experimental evidence
put together, having to do with other cases of attention and differences in the
way things look. These complications are needed in order to defend the theory
of mental paint further as against those of direct realism or
representationism. If you are or have been a student only of philosophy, you
are likely to be among those who have to work at keeping a hold on things in
the lecture, the psychology. Still, you will not need help in getting a hold on
the whole general line of argument [of the lecture] [so far and from here on].
It is that there are changes in the
look of things, differences in what we can call perceptual consciousness. These
attention-changes, as we can call them, have to have a certain explanation. In
the case of the first lot of evidence, they can't be explained by the disk on
the paper itself, which didn't change, and in particular they can't be
explained by direct connection with it. And they also can't be explained by any
difference in representation of the disk. So they have to be explained by way
of the theory of mental paint. That theory has to replace the other theories.
Block says in an abstract of his
lecture that in virtue of what you have heard he is a mentalist, a
propounder/defender of mentalism.
Evidently this is not to say that he is not a physicalist. It is not to say
that he is among the contemporary defenders of the outlook that brain and mind,
brain and consciousness, are so different that the second must not be physical.
If you are persuaded by the use of the evidence having to do with attention and
its effects, what account are we going to give of the difference?
The second last lecture in this book
is Bernard Williams's about mainstream philosophy as a humanistic discipline.
Philosophy is said to be what tries to make sense of our life, sometimes as an
extension of science, but usually not. This philosophy is not scientism, not
something assimilated to the aims and manners of science, not aspiring to an
absolute, objective or universal view, and is in a way historical. I leave it
to you, reader, to consider the extent to which the present lecture is not
mainstream philosophy as conceived, whether or how much this matters, whether
or not any departure from that philosophy was a good idea, what light this lecture
throws on Williams's lecture.
There is also a simpler question.
The whole tradition of private entities in perceptual consciousness, from
Locke's ideas in the 17th Century to
Ayer's sense data and a lot of people's qualia in the 20th Century, has fallen
into doubt. In a sentence, the tradition makes our seeing rooms and desks like
just seeing them on television. To what extent, if any, does this apply to
mental paint?