Crick’s Deepity

Monday

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James Watson and Francis Crick

The least interesting views on almost any philosophical question will inevitably (inevitably, at least, in our age of industrial-technological civilization driven by scientific innovation) be those of some eminent scientist who delivers himself of a philosophical position without bothering to inform himself on the current state of research on the philosophical question in question, and usually, at the same time, decrying the aridity of philosophical discussion. (While this is not true of all scientific opinion on matters philosophical, it is mostly true.) So as not to make such a sweeping charge without naming names, I will here name Francis Crick as a perfect embodiment of this, and to this end I will attempt to describe what I will call “Crick’s Deepity.”

“Crick’s Deepity” sounds like the name of some unusual topographical feature that would be pointed out on local maps for the amusement of travelers, so I will have to explain what I mean by this. What is “Crick’s deepity”?

The “Crick” of the title is none other than Francis Crick, famous for sharing the credit for discovering the structure of DNA with Watson. It will take a little longer to explain what a “deepity” is. I’ve gotten the term from Daniel Dennett, who has introduced the idea in several talks (available on Youtube), and since having learned about it from watching a video of a Dennett talk I found the term on the Urban Dictionary, so it has a certain currency. A deepity is a misleading statement which seems to be profound but is not; construed in one sense, it is simply false; construed in another sense, it is true, but trivially true.

The most commonly adduced deepities are those that depend upon the ambiguity of quotation marks, so they work much better when delivered as part of a lecture rather than when written down. Dennett uses this example — Love is just a word. If we are careful with our quotation marks, this becomes either “‘love’ is just a word” (trivially true) or “love is just a word” (false).

Twentieth century analytical philosophy expended much effort on clarifying the use of quotation marks, which are surprisingly important in mathematical logic and philosophical logic (Quine even formulated quasi-quotes in order to try to dispel the confusion surrounding the use-mention distinction). The use-mention distinction also became important once Tarski formulated his disquotational theory of truth, which employes the famous example, “‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white.” The interested reader can pursue on his own the relationship between deepities and disquotationalism; perhaps there is a paper or a dissertation here.

In one of his lectures that mention deepities Dennett elaborates: “A deepity is a proposition that seems to be profound because it is actually logically ill-formed.” Dennett follows his deepity, “Love is just a word,” with the assertion that, in its non-trivial sense, “whatever love is, it isn’t a word.” The logical structure of this assertion is, “Whatever x is, it isn’t an F” (or, better, “There is a x, and x is not F”). What Dennett is saying here is that it is a category mistake to assert, in this case, that “x is an F” (that “love is a word”).

Whether or not a category mistake is a logical error is perhaps open to question, while use-mention errors seem to be clearly logical errors. There is, however, a long history of treating theories of categories as part of philosophical logic, so that a category error (like conflating mind with matter, or with material processes) is a logical error. Clearly, however, Dennett is treating his examples of deepities as logically ill-formed as a result of being category errors. “Whatever love is, it isn’t a word,” he says, and he says that because it would be a category error to ascribe the property of “being a word” to love, except when love is invoked as a word. (If we liked, we could limit deepities to use/mention confusions only, and in fact the entry for “deepity” in the Urban Dictionary implies as much, but while Dennett himself used a use/mention confusion to illustrate the idea of a deepity, I don’t think that it was his intention to limit deepities to use/mention confusions only, as in his expositions of the idea he defines a deepity in terms of its being logically ill-formed.)

Now, that being said, and, I trust, being understood, we pass along to further deepities. Once we pass beyond obvious and easily identifiable confusions, fallacies, and paradoxes, the identification of deepities becomes controversial rather than merely an amusing exercise. It would be easy to identify theological deepities that Dennett’s audience would likely reject — religion is a soft target, and easy to ridicule — but it is more interesting to go after hard targets. I want to introduce the particular deepity that one find’s in Crick’s book The Amazing Hypothesis:

“The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carrol’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You are nothing but a pack of neurons.’ This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most of people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing.”

Francis Crick, The Amazing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, New York: Touchstone, 1994, p. 3

No one should be astonished by this hypothesis; reductionism is as old as human thought. The key passage here is “no more than,” although in similar passages by other authors one finds the expression, “nothing but,” as in, “x is nothing but y.” This is the paradigmatic form of reductionism.

Some of my readers might be a bit slack-jawed (perhaps even, might I say, astonished) to see me call this paradigmatic instance of scientific reductionism a “deepity.” In taking up Dennett’s term “deepity” and applying it to the sort of scientistic approach to which Dennet would likely be sympathetic is clearly a case of my employing the term in a manner unintended by Dennett, perhaps even constituting a use that Dennett himself would deny was valid, if he knew of it. Indeed, Dennett is quite clear about his own reductionist view of mind, and of the similarity of his own views to those of Crick.

Dennett, however, is pretty honest as a philosopher, and he freely acknowledges the possibility that he might be wrong (a position that C. S. Pierce called “fallibilism”). For example, Dennet wrote, “What about my own reductios of the views of others? Have they been any fairer? Here are a few to consider. You decide.” In the following paragraph of the same book, Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking, Dennett described what he considers to be the over-simplification of Crick’s views on consciousness:

“You would think that Sir John Eccles, the Catholic dualist, and Francis Crick, the atheist materialist, would have very little in common, aside from their Nobel prizes. But at least for a while their respective view of consciousness shared a dubious oversimplification. many nonscientists don’t appreciate how wonderful oversimplifications can be in science; the cut through the hideous complexity with a working model that is almost right, postponing the messy details until later. Arguably the best us of ‘over’-simplification is the history of science was the end run by Crick and James Watson to find the structure of DNA while Linus Pauling and others were trudging along trying to make sense of the details. Crick was all for the trying the bold stroke just in case it solved the problem in one fell swoop, but of course that doesn’t always work.”

Daniel C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking, 2. “By Parody of Reasoning”: Using Reductio ad Absurdum

Dennett then described Crick’s reductionist hypothesis (I’m leaving a lot out here; the reader is referred to the full account in Dennett’s book):

“…then [Crick] proposed a strikingly simply hypothesis: the conscious experience of red, for instance, was activity in the relevant red-sensitive neurons of that retinal area.”

Dennett, Op. cit.

Dennett followed this with counter-arguments that he himself offered (suggesting that Dennett is not himself quite the reductionist that he paints himself as being in popular lectures), but said of Crick that, “He later refined his thinking on this score, but still, he and neuroscientist Christof Koch, in their quest for what they called the NCC (the neural correlates of consciousness), never quite abandoned their allegiance to this idea.” Indeed, not only did Crick not abandon the idea, he went on to write an entire book about it.

It would be a mistake to take Crick’s reductionism in regard to consciousness in isolation, because it occupies a privileged place in a privileged scientific narrative. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran placed Crick and Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA in the venerable context of repeated conceptual revolutions since the scientific revolution itself:

The history of ideas in the last few centuries has been punctuated by major upheavals in thought that have turned our worldview upside down and created what Thomas Kuhn called “scientific revolutions.” The first of these was the Copernican revolution, that, far from being the centre of the Universe, the Earth is a mere speck of dust revolving around the Sun. Second came Darwin’s insight that we humans do not represent the pinnacle of creation, we are merely hairless neotonous apes that happen to be slightly cleverer than our cousins. Third, the Freudian revolution, the view that our behaviour is governed largely by a cauldron of unconscious motives and desires. Fourth — Crick and Watson’s elucidation of DNA structure and the genetic code, banishing vitalism forever from science. And now, thanks once again partly to Crick, we are poised for the greatest revolution of all — understanding consciousness — understanding the very mechanism that made those earlier revolutions possible! As Crick often reminded us, it’s a sobering thought that all our motives, emotions, desires, cherished values, and ambitions — even what each of us regards as his very own ‘self’ are merely the activity of a hundred billion tiny wisps of jelly in the brain. He referred to this as the “astonishing hypothesis” the title of his last book (echoed by Jim Watson’s quip “There are only molecules, everything else is sociology”).

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, Perception, 2004, volume 33, pages 1151-1154

The narrative of the materialist reduction of mind to brain or to brain function fits nicely into the overarching scientific narrative of conceptual revolutions that are a rebuke to human pride. That the rebuke to human pride remains such a central theme in the ascetic practice of science merely shows the continuity of science with its medieval scholastic antecedents, in which the punishment of human pride was no less a central doctrine. Indeed, what we might call the Copernican imperative of contemporary science has become the dominant narrative to science to the point that few other narratives are taken seriously. (It is also wrong, or at very least misleading, but that is a topic for another, future, post.) Thus the Copernican imperative is a lot like the (repeatedly disputed) idea of progress in industrial-technological civilization: no matter how hard we try to find another paradigm to organize our understanding, we keep coming back to it. (For example, I have mentioned Kevin Kelly’s explicit arguments for progress in several posts, as in Progress, Stagnation, and Retrogression.)

Placing Crick’s thought in the context of the narrative that furnishes much of its meaning suggests further contexts for Crick’s thought — the ultimate intellectual context that inspired Crick, as well as alternative contexts that place a very different meaning and value on Crick’s reductionism. Surprisingly, as it turns out, the ultimate context of Crick’s views is the most simple-minded theologically-tinged science imaginable, which at once makes Dennett’s above-quoted observation about Crick’s and Eccles’ common ground pregnant with meaning.

Crick’s contempt for philosophical approaches to the problem of consciousness is so thick it practically drips off the page, and furnishes a perfect example of what I have called fashionable anti-philosophy. Despite Crick’s contempt for philosophy, Crick jumps directly into the use of theological language by repeatedly invoking the idea of a human “soul” — indeed, his book is subtitled, “the scientific search for the soul.” This is an important clue. Crick rejects philosophy, but he embraces theology. In other words, Crick’s position is theological, and Crick’s theological frame of mind is at least in part responsible for Crick’s dismissive attitude to philosophy.

Many contemporary philosophers (not to mention contemporary scientists) tie themselves into knots trying to avoid saying that thought and ideas and the mind are distinct from material bodies and physical processes, not because they can’t tell the difference between the two (like G. E. Moore’s famous dream in which he couldn’t distinguish propositions from tables), but because to acknowledge the difference between thoughts and things seems to commit one to a philosophical trajectory that cannot ultimately avoid converging on Cartesian dualism — and if there is any consensus in contemporary philosophy, it is the rejection of Cartesian dualism.

How are thoughts different from things, in so far as we understand “things” in this context to be corporeal bodies? The examples are so numerous and so obvious that it scarcely seems worth the trouble to cite a few of them, but since many people — Crick and Dennett among them — give straight-faced accounts of reductionism, I guess it is necessary. So, think of a joke. Or have someone tell you a joke. If the joke is really funny, you will be amused; maybe you will even laugh. But if you had an exhaustive delineation of brain structure and brain processes that correspond with the joke, nowhere in the brain structure or processes would you find any thing funny or amusing. If you are a brain scientist you might find these brain structures and processes to be fascinating, but unless you’re a bit eccentric you are not likely to find them to be funny.

Similar considerations hold for tragedy: watch or read a great tragedy, and then see if you can find anything tragic in the brain structures and processes that correspond with viewing or reading a tragedy. If you are honest, you will find nothing tragic about brain structures and processes. Again, take two ideas, one of which is logically entailed by the other — of, if you like, take a syllogism and make it easy on yourself: Socrates is a man, All men are mortal, Therefore Socrates is mortal. Find the brain structures and processes that correspond to these three propositions, and see if there is any relationship of logical entailment between the brain structures and processes. But how in the world could a brain structure or process be logically entailed by another brain structure or process? This is simply not the kind of property that brain processes and structures possess.

Being funny or being tragic or being logically entailed by another proposition are properties that ideas might have but they are not the kind of properties that physical structures or processes possess. Physical structures have properties like length, breadth, and depth, while physical processes might have properties like temporal duration, chemical composition, or electrical charge (brain processes might have all three properties). It would be senseless, on the other hand, to speak of the length, breadth, depth, chemical composition or electrical charge of an idea. It is nonsense to say that, “The concept ‘horse’ is three inches wide.” Not true or false — just meaningless. It is equally nonsense to say that, “The pelvis is tragic.”

To conflate thoughts and things is a category mistake, and in so far as category mistakes are violations of philosophical logic, expressions that formulate category mistakes are logically ill-formed. When logically-ill formed propositions seem profound — the sort of thing which, if true, would be earth-shattering — but in fact are merely false, then you have what Dennett calls a “deepity.” Thus Crick’s deepity is his identification of “your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will” with “the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” If this were true, it would be earth-shattered, but in fact it is a logically ill-formed expression that is a deepity. Whatever your joys, sorrows, and memories are, they certainly are not the behavior of nerve cells. That much should be uncontroversial, so let us call a spade a space, and a deepity a deepity.

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Kantian Critters

Tuesday

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The Transcendental Aesthetic and the Finding of

Other Minds in Other Species

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An extrapolation of the “problem of other minds” to other species

What philosophers call “the problem of other minds” is closely related to what philosophers call the “mind-body problem” (both fall within philosophy of mind), and both are paradigmatic metaphysical questions that have been with philosophy from the beginning. Lately I’ve written a good deal about the mind-body problem on my other blog (e.g., in Naturalism and the Mind, Of Distinctions Weak and Strong, Of Distinctions, Principled and Otherwise, Cartesian Formalism, etc.), and this has got me to thinking about the problem of other minds.

I have never found the idea of other minds in other species to be in the least problematic. When you look into the eyes of another living being, whether human being or other being, you are well aware of the moment of mutual recognition, and you are equally well aware at that moment of mutual recognition that you are sharing that moment with another consciousness (that is to say, you experience a social temporality).

In The Eye of the Other I wrote:

It is when we look into the eye of the other that we recognize the consciousness of the other. Even if we feel that the reality of other minds is beyond philosophical demonstration, even if we are skeptics of other minds, it would be extraordinarily difficult to look into the eyes of another and not experience that immediate reaction of recognition of another mind. When we look not only into the eyes of another being but also into the eyes of another species, there is simultaneously the recognition of the awareness of the other and of the alien nature of that awareness.

Some people feel obliged to deny this inter-species recognition of common consciousness on ideological grounds, although few ever think of speciesism as a ideology. As I have recently observed in relationship to geopolitics, which I characterized as an ideology that does not know itself to be an ideology, so too with speciesism: for many it is simply an unexamined presupposition and is never formalized as an explicit article of belief.

While I myself don’t find anything in the least problematic about consciousness in other species, and I think that anyone that takes a naturalistic point of view would be hard-pressed to deny it, I cannot deny that there are some persons who feel a real sense of moral horror in recognizing the consciousness of other species. I am fully aware of this moral horror, and I am utterly unsympathetic to it. To paraphrase Freud on the “oceanic” feeling, I am unable to discover this moral horror in myself.

Some of those who are uncomfortable with the ascription of consciousness to other species simply don’t like animals, and some of those similarly disposed are just completely uninterested in animals and find it peculiar that some human beings seem to be closer to their dogs and cats than they are to other human beings. Such persons sometimes become visibly discomfited at any mention of Johnson’s Hodge or Greyfriars Bobby or Hachikō, all memorialized by statues. I have personally heard individuals of this particular temperament indignantly lecture others (myself included) on the dangers of anthropomorphizing our companion animals. If I were to be so lectured today, I would lecture right back on anthropic bias in the philosophy of mind, which is utterly out of place and unbecoming of a philosopher (which in this instance includes anyone who makes, or who implies, philosophical assertions about mind, specifically, denying mind to certain classes of existents).

Such persons often live in an exclusively human world, and to them the animal world seems inexplicably alien. This in itself is an implicit recognition of an animal world, that is to say, a world constituted by animal consciousness. But, of course, not all who deny consciousness to other species can be so pigeon-holed. Some who have completely succumbed to anthropic bias in the philosophy of mind are in no sense living in an exclusively human world, and certainly when the dogma of human exceptionalism in consciousness gained currency, long before our industrial-technological civilization freed us from animal muscle power as the motive force of civilization, almost everyone lived intimately with animals.

In this latter context, prior to industrialization, there was always a theological overlay to the denial of consciousness to other species. Indeed, it is very likely that, if the terms of the philosophical problem of other minds were carefully explained, those with a theological world view might well without hesitation grant consciousness of other species, and simply deny they other species possess a “soul,” which is simply a theologically-legitimized devalorization. In practice, it comes to much the same as the denial of consciousness to other species and a sedulous distinction between the human and the animal realms.

I observed in The Origins of Physicalism that Cartesianism was the original “mechanical philosophy,” and while Cartesianism in the time of Descartes and immediately afterward incorporated human exceptionalism into the philosophy (i.e., it institutionalized anthropic bias in the philosophy of mind), the logical extrapolation of the theory was evident, and what the Cartesians practised upon other species later philosophers in the mechanistic tradition came to practise also upon human beings: the denial of consciousness.

Today we have a school of thought that is not exactly the denial of consciousness but rather the revaluation, or, better, the devaluation of consciousness, which latter is called a “user illusion” — at least, in techno-philosophy the denial of consciousness is called the “user illusion.” In traditional philosophy, the denial of the existence of consciousness is called “eliminativism,” since instead of seeking to reduce consciousness to something else that is not consciousness (and thereby exemplifying reductivism), eliminativism cuts the Gordian Knot and simply denies that there is any such thing as consciousness — meaning that there is nothing to be “explained away.” I am sure that I am not the only one who finds this to be a thoroughly unsatisfying “solution” to a perennial philosophical problem.

How then are we to understand the minds of other species, i.e., the problem of other minds as generalized to include non-human species? What philosophical framework exists that can provide a conceptual infrastructure for such an understanding? There are many possibilities, but today I would like to consider a Kantian approach.

If we take as the lesson of Kant’s transcendental aesthetic that the mind is being continually bombarded by a riot of sensations from all the various bodily sensory organs, and that the mind then constitutes a kind of conceptual sieve that shapes, channels and directs the mass of sensory experience into something coherent upon which an organism can act, we can recognize that much the same process occurs in other species. All mammals have more or less similar bodies and similar sensory endowments, so that all living mammals are constantly being bombarded by a riot of sensations which each creature must sort into coherent experience. The fact that we can play fetch with a dog, and both successfully interact in one and the same world, simultaneously recognizing the stick at the center of the game as an object that passes between two or more organism involved in a game of fetch, suggests that we and the dog constitute and cognize the world in a remarkably similar fashion.

The dog, like us, is receiving sensory signals from his eyes, ears, nose, and so forth, as well as experiencing kinesthetic sensations from the movement of his body as he exerts himself in lunging after the stick. From all of this sensation the dog successfully distills a world, and that world is remarkably similar to our world.

A few years ago I had an interesting experience that bears directly on games of fetch and shared experience, when I had an opportunity to feel what it was like to be a dog among dogs. I was at a vacation house on a river, and had brought my wetsuit along so I could swim. The river is fed by snow melt from Mt. Hood and it is one of the coldest rivers in which I have ever been swimming. I put on my wetsuit and got into the water just as others were beginning to play fetch with a large black lab that they had brought along. They threw a stick into the frigid waters of the river, and the lab plunged into to fetch the stick. The next time the stick was thrown I started swimming toward it the same time that the lab started swimming toward it. The lab looked at me and instantly saw me as a competitor for the stick. He swam all the harder and made it to the stick before me with an obvious sense of triumphalism.

Of course, most people have had experiences like this in life, and some people will dismiss such experiences as readily as Descartes dismissed his correspondent’s stories attempting to prove that animals are not mere mechanisms. However we interpret such experiences, we share and interact in a common world. Although this is utterly contrary to the spirit of Kant, I have to observe that any animal that could not distill coherent experience of the world out of its mass of sensation would never survive. Evolution selects for those organisms that can best hunt or avoid being prey in the common world in which predator and prey interact. This is a naturalistic point of view, whereas Kant’s point of view was decidedly that of idealism.

Even if one rejects Kant’s idealism, as I do, there seems to me to be some residual value in the idea of the mind being involved in the constitution of experience. I think that Kant was right that we have certain a priori intuitions that order our experience, but I think that this was much more fluid and pluralistic than Kant’s exposition of the transcendental aesthetic allows. While I wrote above that mammals all have a relatively similarly experience of the world, a function of a similar sensory and cognitive endowments, I would allow that there is some important variation. Sight plays a very large role in how human beings cognize the world; smell plays a disproportionate role in how dogs cognize the world; sound plays a disproportionate role in how dolphins cognize the world.

All terrestrial critters of a given level of cognitive complexity have to distill coherent experience of one and the same world out of a mass of sensation, but that mass of sensation differs among different species. I suspect that this sensory difference means that different species also have different a priori conceptions that help them to organize their experience into a coherent whole, and that, just sensory experience differs from species to species, but admits of degrees of greater or less, so too the a priori ideas of distinct species different from species to species but also admit of greater or less similarity. That is to say, smell may shape the world of a dog far more than it shapes our world, but we probably share far more in terms of sensory experience and organizing ideas with a dog than with a marine mammal, and probably we share much more with a marine mammal than with an octopus or other cephalopod. This is a function and an illustration of a point I recently tried to make about the relationship between mind and embodiment.

I tried to make this point in my above referenced post, The Eye of the Other, since when I unexpectedly looked into the eyes of a sealion, a marine mammal, we immediately recognized each other, and in the same moment of recognition also recognized the profound differences between the two of us. Common mammalian minds, differently embodied and living in profoundly different environments, will involve different sensory stimulation, different kinesthetic sensations, and different a priori concepts for organizing experience. But not too different. A shark, with a mind very different from a mammalian mind, can predate marine mammals, so that both sharks and marine mammals interact in the same marine environment just as human beings and tigers interact in the same terrestrial environment.

I suspect that, at least in some senses, the tiger’s mind and the human mind share concepts derived from their common terrestrial environment, while the shark and the marine mammal share concepts derived from the common marine environment, so that a tiger’s mind is more like a human mind than a sea lion’s mind is like a human mind, and, vice versa, a sea lion’s mind is more like a shark’s mind than it is like a human mind. Nevertheless, the human mind and the sea lion mind will share some concepts due to their common mammalian constitution. To employ a Wittgensteinian turn of phrase, the different sensations, concepts, and minds of distinct species overlap and intersect.

The recognition of consciousness in other species is no marginal and recondite inquiry; if, in the fullness of time, we encounter other intelligent species in the universe of extraterrestrial origin, we will need a philosophical framework in which we can integrate the idea of consciousness among other organic species, and if research into artificial intelligence and machine consciousness ever issues in a self-aware mechanism, fashioned by human hands in the same way that we might build a car or a house, we will again require a philosophical framework in which we can integrate the idea of consciousness even more generally, comprehending both naturally-emergent consciousness from organic substrates and artificially emergent consciousness of non-organic substrates.

We need a robust philosophy of mind that does not stagnate in questions of whether there is mind or whether minds can be reduced to other phenomena or eliminated altogether. Such doctrines are — would be — utterly unhelpful in coming to understand what Husserl called the “structures of consciousness.” It is likely that the structures of consciousness vary incrementally among individuals of the same species, vary a little more across distinct species, and will vary even more among minds derived from different sources — different ecosystems and biospheres in the case of organically-originating extraterrestrial minds, and different mechanisms of implementation in the case of inorganically-originating minds of machine consciousness.

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Colonia del Sacramento and the Knowledge Argument

Saturday

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There were a number of old cars in the town, so I took this one street scene with three cars from the 1930s. There are also a couple of contemporary cars, as well as a few other clues that this is not an old photograph, but if I had been a bit more careful I see that it would have been possible to take a picture that looks like a vintage post card.

The Historic Quarter of the City of Colonia del Sacramento is on the UNESCO World Heritage list, which is always a good indication that a particular place will be worth a stop and a look. I’ve been to several UNESCO sites on the World Heritage List, and I always enjoy them, but it almost always is the case that they are different from what I expected. Colonia was not exactly what I expected, but that was great. That is why one travels: in order to have one’s concepts corrected by one’s percepts, just as one thinks in order to have one’s percepts corrected by one’s concepts. Thought and experience are an indissoluble unity; it is when we divide them and compartmentalize them that we get into trouble.

Why travel? What is to be gained from travel? Travel is all about challenging assumptions. One could simply stay at home, read books, look at travel brochures, and watch travel videos, convincing oneself that one had learned all there is to know about a place, and never bother to go there oneself. But we all know that you do need to eventually go to the place — whatever the place happens to be — if you want to understand it on its own terms, rather than attempting to understand a place one has never visited on the basis of one’s preconceived idea of the place.

To say that thorough knowledge of a place is not adequate to saying that one really knows a place made me realize that this suggests a generalization of a thought experiment in the philosophy of mind known as “Mary’s Room.” In the Mary’s Room thought experiment, Mary is a scientist locked in a black and white room, who studies everything that there is to know about color vision. After perfecting her knowledge of color, she leaves her black and white room, and suddenly experiences what it is like to actually see color. The question, from a philosopher’s point of view, is this: when Mary leaves her room, does she learn anything? This thought experiment is also known as the “knowledge argument,” in so far as it points to knowledge that can be attained only through conscious experience.

Putting Mary’s room and the knowledge argument in the context of travel suggests a generalization of the knowledge argument: suppose, in isolation of the object of knowledge studied, one learns all that there is to learn about a given object of knowledge. Say that one learns all that there is to learn about Colonia del Sacramento. After learning about Colonia del Sacramento, does one learn anything by traveling there? Even the most experienced of travelers know that you learn something by visiting a place that you cannot learn by all the research you might possibly conduct. Another way to put this would be to say that there is something that it is like to be in a place — a formulation parallel to Nagel’s famous formulation about there being something that it is like to be a bat.

The conscious experience of a place is a source of knowledge not attainable through study. As I write this I realize that this argument entails that such knowledge is ineffable, otherwise, someone who visited a place and realized what was lacking in its description could simply write it down after having visited, and every subsequent visitor would thereafter visit the place with no surprise at all, and no new knowledge would be attained by such a visit. And yet we know it isn’t like that.

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A Note on Soulless Zombies

Thursday

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Recently in The Limitations of Human Consciousness I reviewed a typology of “philosophical zombies,” which latter are employed as thought experiments to investigate the possibility of human (or quasi-human) existence without consciousness. One species of philosophical zombie is referred to as a “soulless zombie,” and I want to take a few minutes to think about what exactly a soulless zombie would be.

What is a soulless zombie? The Neuronarrative blog defines a soulless zombie in passing as that which, “which looks like a human, has a brain, but lacks, wait for it, a soul (as defined by said inquirer).” The Wikipedia article on philosophical zombies is similarly terse, simply saying that the soulless zombie, “lacks a ‘soul’.” Well, we knew that much from the etymology of the term. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Zombies doesn’t even mention “soulless zombies.” Given that the “soul” is a concept that many philosophers have likely consigned to the category of folk psychology, the idea of a soulless zombie may well be more discussed outside philosophy than in, but it represents a kind of moral intuition, and for that reason alone commands our attention.

Theories of soulless zombies will bifurcate based on the distinction between naturalistic and non-naturalistic explications of the soul. One can follow the lead of Aristotle’s On the Soul and give an essentially naturalistic account of the soul, or one can insist upon the irreducibly non-naturalistic character of the soul, which Plato sometimes called the “divine spark.”

The non-naturalistic interpretation is a dead end for science and philosophy and therefore uninteresting. Theologians may have something more to say on this head, but a non-naturalistic soul means that by definition no naturalistic investigation can shed light on the soul (or that part of the soul that is irreducibly non-naturalistic, if any internal complexity or structure of the soul is recognized; often the advocates of a non-naturalistic soul insist upon the simplicity of the soul, in which case the simply non-naturalistic soul is closed to naturalistic investigation). There remains the possibility that, if the surrounding naturalistic context of the non-naturalistic soul can be better elucidated, this may in turn improve the terms of the discussion surrounding the non-naturalistic soul, but I will leave that possibility aside for now.

If, on the other hand, we acknowledge the legitimacy of the naturalistic account of the soul (as in Aristotle), there is no reason to suppose that the methodological naturalism of science cannot converge upon an adequate (by which I mean non-reductive and non-eliminative) account of the soul and the ensouled person. It is only in the case of the irreducible non-naturalism of the soul and personhood (in at least one of the aspects of personhood) that the methods of science and naturalistic philosophy must fail to capture the essential nature of human persons. If it is categorically denied that naturalistic methods as such can fully account for the human person or the human soul, then it is likely that such a denier will also hold the irreducible non-naturalism of the soul (although I can think of an exception to this which I will not attempt to explicate here).

In discussing philosophical zombies, soulless zombies, and scientific philosophy, the reader may well have Daniel Dennett in mind, so I am going to quote Dennett here in order to point out the way in which the inquiry I have suggested differs in essentials from Dennett’s approach, despite the similarly of the terminology I have employed. Here’s the passage from Dennett:

There is a powerful and ubiquitous intuition that computational, mechanistic models of consciousness, of the sort we naturalists favor, must leave something out — something important. Just what must they leave out? The critics have found that it’s hard to say, exactly: qualia, feelings, emotions, the what-it’s-likeness (Nagel) or the ontological subjectivity (Searle) of consciousness. Each of these attempts to characterize the phantom residue has met with serious objections and been abandoned by many who nevertheless want to cling to the intuition, so there has been a gradual process of distillation, leaving just about all the reactionaries, for all their disagreements among themselves, united in the conviction that there is a real difference between a conscious person and a perfect zombie — let’s call that intuition the Zombic Hunch — leading them to the thesis of Zombism: that the fundamental flaw in any mechanistic theory of consciousness is that it cannot account for this important difference. A hundred years from now, I expect this claim will be scarcely credible, but let the record show that in 1999, John Searle, David Chalmers, Colin McGinn, Joseph Levine and many other philosophers of mind don’t just feel the tug of the Zombic Hunch (I can feel the tug as well as anybody), they credit it. They are, however reluctantly, Zombists, who maintain that the zombie challenge is a serious criticism.

Daniel Dennett, The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition?

Dennett here invokes “we naturalists,” but although I definitely count myself among the naturalists, I do not share Dennett’s point of view on this matter. What Dennett calls a “phantom residue” might be compared to what I called the “irreducible non-naturalistic” nature of the soul, but what Dennett is suggesting is far more radical. Dennett not only rejects the soul (much less the theological, non-naturalistic soul), he rejects the very existence of consciousness and subjectivity. Dennett’s is a eliminativist account, which he pursues despite admitting that he feels the tug of the intuition. Thus for Dennett, a naturalistic account is a mechanistic account, and this is a far more circumscribed conception of naturalism than I would accept or advocate.

However, when Dennett makes the distinction between, “a real difference between a conscious person and a perfect zombie,” he does inadvertently hit upon the essential idea of a soulless zombie: it would be distinct from a conscious person. Thus Dennett’s “perfect zombie” would seem to be what I am here calling a “soulless zombie,” though I could go on to add that Dennett denies even the possibility of a perfect zombie without a naturalistic form of consciousness. In this context it would be very easy to conflate naturalistic and non-naturalistic conceptions of consciousness, but the distinction is most vital where it is most likely to be conflated.

I think that once we make the distinction we can up the ante of the soulless zombie problem, or, in Dennett’s terms, the zombie hunch. To do this we can draw upon a naturalistic account of the soul formulated for the explicit purpose of a sociological explication of religion. I am thinking here of Emile Durkheim’s conception of the soul in his seminal work The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.

Durkheim in famous for treating religion as an essentially social phenomenon, even in its apparently most private forms. Here is a typical passage from Durkheim:

“…it may be said that nearly all the great social institutions have been born in religion. Now in order that these principal aspects of the collective life may have commenced by being only varied aspects of the religious life, it is obviously necessary that the religious life be the eminent form and, as it were, the concentrated expression of the whole collective life. If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.”

This differs radically from, for example, Alfred North Whitehead’s conception of religion as being, “what the individual does with his solitude.”

Here is a passage from Durkheim specific to the soul, and incorporating his sociological conception of religious ideas:

“Thus the notion of the soul is a particular application of the beliefs relative to sacred beings. This is the explanation of the religious character which this idea has had from the moment when it first appeared in history, and which it still retains to-day. In fact, the soul has always been considered a sacred thing; on this ground, it is opposed to the body which is, in itself, profane. It is not merely distinguished from its material envelope as the inside from the outside; it is not merely represented as made out of a more subtle and fluid matter; but more than this, it inspires those sentiments which are everywhere reserved for that which is divine. If it is not made into a god, it is at least regarded as a spark of the divinity. This essential characteristic would be inexplicable if the idea of the soul were only a pre-scientific solution given to the problem of dreams; for there is nothing in the dream to awaken religious emotions, so the cause by which these are explained could not have such a character. But if the soul is a part of the divine substance, it represents something not ourselves that is within us; if it is made of the same mental matter as the sacred beings, it is natural that it should become the object of the same sentiments.”

EMILE DURKHEIM, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, TRANSLATED BY JOSEPH WARD SWAIN, Chapter VIII, “The Idea of the Soul,” section IV

Durkheim’s naturalistic-socialogical conception of the soul has been formulated in a particularly compelling manner by professor Charles B. Jones:

“The soul is nothing but the image of society introjected into the individual and appropriated by the individual as his or her most essential identity. When a person has been successfully integrated into the religious life of a social group they then take that image of the group and of all the virtues and goals, the mission of the group, the ideals that it adheres to, and brings it on board as part of their own being.”

Charles B. Jones, Ph.D., University of Virginia, The Catholic University of America, Introduction to the Study of Religion, published by The Teaching Company

I think that this nicely captures the sense of necessity that people typically invoke in relation to the soul by contextualizing it as implicated in the individual’s identity and being.

Now, a perfect zombie would presumably be able to be successfully integrated into the religious life of a group (if a zombie failed to do so its behavioral emulation of human beings would be imperfect) and so would able to appropriate the group identity as its own.

Would there be a difference between a religiously socialized zombie, perhaps even a zombie that believed itself to have a soul, and if asked, “Do you have a soul?” would respond in the affirmative, and a human being who was also religiously socialized, also self-identified as having a soul, and also affirmed the possession of a soul when asked?

I think that this sharpens the dilemma a bit, because it is possible for me to imagine a soulless zombie undergoing initiation rites in the religion and mimicking all those aspects of behavior that Durkheim associated with the social manifestation of the concept of the soul, and yet still that soulless or perfect zombie would be without any feeling (i.e., qualia) of what it is like to be a member of that community and to feel the fellowship of the share ritualism of a liturgy that affirms the soul.

As far as a naturalistic conception of the soul can go, then — and I admit that it very well may not go far enough — there still seems to be room for an explanatory gap between a soulless zombie and a human being.

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The Limitations of Human Consciousness

Tuesday

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Beyond Philosophical Zombies:

A Thought Experiment in Absolute Consciousness

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One of the thought experiments in contemporary philosophy of mind that has a certain traction with popular culture is that of “philosophical zombies.” It is a little surprising that this interest in philosophical zombies should coincide with a popular culture zombie craze, but that seems to be the case — unless we posit a zombie conspiracy that seeks to acculturate and familiarize human beings with zombie being so that when the zombies take over we will be easy prey, so to speak (sort of like — but not exactly like — the plot in Aurthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End).

Daniel N. Robinson, Ph.D. (Philosophy Faculty, Oxford University, Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, Georgetown University) begins his Teaching Company lectures on philosophy of mind with an initial lecture on philosophical zombies. Dr. Robinson distinguishes at least three (3) species of philosophical zombie (a tripartite distinction that he credits to Güven Güzeldere):

● behavioral zombies such that the zombie is behaviorally indistinguishable from a human being possessing consciousness

● functional zombies also apparently called a neurological zombie, which is physiologically indistinguishable from a conscious human being, and

● identical zombies such that the zombie is anatomically indistinguishable from a conscious human being; it is not clear to me exactly how a functional or neurological zombie is supposed to differ from an identical zombie unless we go a step further and, invoking theological language, assert that the identical zombie has no soul, while a conscious human being does have a soul (this qualification yields what is called a soulless zombie)

Given the pop-culture resonance of philosophical zombies an enormous amount of ink has been spilled over the idea, and it is not my wish simply to add another discussion to an already burgeoning field of zombie studies. What I would like to do, however, is to use the idea of philosophical zombies in order to broach the possibility of a thought experiment antithetical to that of philosophical zombies.

Philosophical zombies are employed as a thought experiment in order to investigate the possibility of entities that are somehow less than full human beings. What about the possibility of entities that are somehow more than human beings? That is to say, what about superior beings, i.e., being superior to human being?

I would like to propose a thought experiment in what might be called absolute consciousness. If zombies lack all consciousness, the antithetical condition to that of a zombie would be that of greatly enhanced consciousness — i.e., consciousness enhanced or extended beyond ordinary human consciousness.

It's not only zombies that have a pop culture resonance: Megamind represents a popular culture expression of enhanced and expanded human consciousness.

In order to consider the possibility of absolute consciousness, we must attempt to investigate the limitations, weaknesses, and constraints of human consciousness, and to attempt to imagine a consciousness from which these limitations, weaknesses, and constraints have been removed. This is not easy to do. As Dr. Robinson observes in his lectures, human beings experience consciousness in the way that fish experience water — it is so pervasive and so complete that it would be difficult to even identify it. But just as we learned to investigate the air we breathe and which surrounds us our entire life — and which we also took for granted in a pre-scientific stage of civilization — so too we can learn to investigate consciousness. And we have, in fact, done so in some degree of detail.

If we consider modern psychiatry and psychology since Freud — and I specifically appeal to the Freudian tradition since Freud was a physician who sought to treat specific pathologies — we are presented with a detailed account of all the ways in which a mind can “go wrong,” as it were. So, first of all, absolute consciousness would experience no mental illness. This is a highly problematic claim, since it implies a distinction between mental health and mental pathology that may be relatively clear from the clinical standpoint but which is difficult to justify from a philosophical perspective. Are mental pathologies limitations to human consciousness? They are in so far as the inhibit the activity of consciousness, but I suspect that absolute consciousness (were it possible) would probably appear profoundly alien and, yes, pathological.

One of the most obvious forms of limitation of human consciousness is memory. Human memory is highly imperfect in terms of recall and accuracy. Absolute consciousness would be characterized by perfect recall with perfect accuracy. Borges wrote a short story about this that I discussed in ¡Feliz cumpleaños Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo! The character of Ireneo Funes, whom Borges memorably describes as a “vernacular superman” (in other words, a provincial Nietzschean Übermensch), has a perfect memory with perfectly accurate recall of everything. This story is so singularly beautiful that it is an act of vandalism to quote only an excerpt, but here is the narrator’s description of his encounter with Funes:

“He told me that previous to the rainy afternoon when the blue-tinted horse threw him, he had been — like any Christian — blind, deaf-mute, somnambulistic, memoryless. (I tried to remind him of his precise perception of time, his memory for proper names; he paid no attention to me.) For nineteen years, he said, he had lived like a person in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without hearing, forgot everything — almost everything. On falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories. A little later he realized that he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his perception and his memory were infallible.”

Ireneo Funes, then, possessed the greater part of absolute consciousness — perfect memory and perfect perception. But these things are problematic also, as Borges begins to point out, when he shows Funes to be contemplating an absolute language and an absolute catalogue of memories, which the narrator realizes neither serve the essential function of language or thought. Funes is not overwhelmed by this absolute consciousness, but he is at least staggered by it, and in seeking so way to order the vast stores of memory and perception that he has at his command, descends to a level beneath that of which limited consciousness served by limited language and limited cognitive resources command.

Human calculating power is manifestly deficient. The simplest mechanical or electronic calculator can calculate with greater rapidity or accuracy than almost any human being. Similarly, logic and mathematics, though human creations, are difficult in the extreme. Many of us go our entire lives without mastering them, and those who spend their lives on logic and mathematics master only a portion, and that at the opportunity cost of many other human endeavors. Presumably absolute consciousness would be perfect in calculation. And this, too, is problematic, since anyone who has studied logic or mathematics and passed beyond the rudiments of these subjects knows that they are fascinating disciplines torn by internal controversies precisely because they are imbued with the spirit of philosophy. The further reaches of logic and set theory are, in fact, difficult to differentiate from philosophy proper.

It was traditional to maintain that Adam knew all philosophy; it is not clear whether this knowledge preceded or followed the drawing out of Eve from his side.

And this brings us to philosophy proper, since absolute consciousness would presumably be philosophically perfect as well. At this point we have probably reached the reductio ad absurdum of the very idea of absolute consciousness, since it is almost ludicrous to speak of a philosophically perfect mind. Not that people haven’t entertained this idea. In the early modern period in Europe it was the tradition to maintain that Adam had a perfect knowledge of philosophy, that this knowledge was subsequently lost, and all philosophy since the time of Adam was simply the rediscovery of the philosophy that Adam knew in virtue of his proximity to the fons et origo of all being and knowledge. One might think of this as a Christian re-telling of the Platonic theory of knowledge as recollection.

Plato had Socrates draw an ideal knowledge out of the slave boy Meno; for Plato, knowledge was absolute, and embodied in the Forms; today we are not so likely to acknowledge an ideal and absolute knowledge.

Absolute consciousness may well be impossible for reasons given above, but even if impossible is remains an interesting thought experiment. What I have written here is only a rough first sketch of what might be done with the idea. If certain conventions are observed — the sort of conventions implicit in Plato’s theory of knowledge as recollection, most famously presented in the dialogue Meno — one can arrive at an “absolute” formulation of anything, but if we acknowledge that human thought routinely transcends established conventions, it cannot be so easily maintained that there is any absolute or perfect form that consciousness could take. And what is the investigation of the limits of consciousness but the investigation of the transcendence of such limitations? On the other hand, even if absolute and perfect consciousness is not possible, it doesn’t take much effort to conceive of a consciousness that is markedly superior to that which we now possess.

Angels, traditionally holding a place in the Great Chain of Being between divinity and humanity, can be thought of as examplars of absolute consciousness, which falls between ordinary human consciousness and omniscience in the scale of awareness.

Absolute consciousness, while it would radically outstrip the capabilities and capacities of ordinary human consciousness, still falls far short of the idea of omniscience. Indeed, we could define absolute consciousness as here sketched as personal omniscience, i.e., absolute knowledge of oneself, of one’s experiences, and of the contents of one’s own mind. Omniscience simpliciter, traditionally conceived as a divine attribute, would be absolute knowledge of everything, of all experiences, and of the contents of all minds. Thus while there is a yawning chasm between ordinary human consciousness and absolute consciousness, there is an equally yawning chasm between absolute consciousness and omniscience, and this in itself makes the thought experiment of absolute consciousness interesting, because it posits a degree of being between human being and divine being as traditionally understood. Absolute consciousness is, if you like, the consciousness of angels.

If absolute consciousness is problematic, as we have seen that it indeed is, then a fortiori the idea of omniscience itself is problematic. This is, of course, not a new idea. Radical Ockhamists like Richard Holcot and Adam Wodeham attempted to think through the logic of omniscience and came to some disturbing conclusions, but this is another story for another time.

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