| | A Queer Sort of Phenomenon | Recent years have seen a tremendous growth of interest in the topic of consciousness. Once considered taboo, it is now discussed even by neuroscientists. The genuineness of the problem is becoming increasingly recognised, along with its seriousness. … Let us begin by reminding ourselves of the general nature of the material world, as it is now conceived. It consists of causally interacting objects disposed in space, each made up of material parts. These objects are subject to a number of physical forces, such as gravity and the electromagnetic force, and they behave in ways prescribed by physical laws. Before the dawn of consciousness, some time in late evolutionary history, this was all there was in the universe—inanimate, insensate matter, blindly colliding, shrinking and expanding. Basically, it was a world of whirling lumps. But now consider conscious experience: this appears to be a phenomenon of another order entirely. Subjective awareness is no part of the physical world of material clumps in space. When consciousness is added to the world we get something genuinely novel, not just a rearrangement of what we already have. Consciousness is something extra, not just the old particles in a new configuration. The theory that serves to explain the world without experience seems radically inadequate to explain the world that contains it. And there is a pressing problem about relating experience to the physical world: how do experiences of red, say, relate to what happens in my brain, which looks just like a particularly fancy rearrangement of matter? When we reflect on consciousness in this way, noticing its discontinuity with the physical world, we are apt to be struck by the thought that it is a very peculiar thing. It cannot be seen or touched, or studied under a microscope; yet it is for each of us the most obvious reality in the world. No matter how delicately you probe the brain you will not encounter it in the crevices and corners of that greyish dumpling. Where is it? It seems a queer sort of phenomenon, an anomaly—a miracle even. It refuses to slot into our general scientific picture of the universe. How could such a unique phenomenon have arisen from matter, and what kind of entity is the brain such that it can generate it? In response to these questions an array of answers suggest themselves. An extreme response, which has been and still is quite common, is simply to deny that consciousness exists. This doctrine is called eliminativism: it says that there literally are no thoughts and sensations and emotions. All this is prescientific nonsense, analogous to ghosts and witches and ectoplasm. There is just the material brain, with its neurons and chemicals and electrical transactions... A second response, quite opposite in tendency, is to embrace the miracle, declaring that our current world-view is indeed grievously limited. On this view, we need to acknowledge the pervasive presence of the supernatural. Consciousness is taken to be the direct expression of God's will, or at least a sign that there is more to reality than natural forces… A third response rejects both of the first two and declares that consciousness is a primitive existent, but is not in any way miraculous. Just as space and time are primitive dimensions in physics, so conscious experience is a primitive feature of the universe. It is correlated with events in the brain, but nothing can be said to explain how this could be: it just is. This is a radical irreducibility thesis… A fourth response attempts to explain consciousness in more familiar terms, claiming that it is not as queer as it at first appears. Into this category fall the various reductive proposals… [such as] materialism, behaviourism, functionalism and so on. This response sets out to domesticate the phenomenon, to provide a deflationary account of its nature. Consciousness is not as remarkable as it might at first seem; it is really something relatively mundane in disguise. I call these four types of response the DIME shape: D for deflation, I for irreducibility, M for magic, E for elimination. … [M]y own thoughts on the subject have changed quite fundamentally. The approach I now favour runs as follows. The nature of consciousness is a mystery in the sense that it is beyond human powers of theory construction, yet there is no sense in which it is inherently miraculous. This position depends upon a sharp separation between epistemological and ontological questions. Epistemologically, consciousness outruns what we can comprehend, given the ways our cognitive systems are structured—in rather the way that theoretical physics is beyond the intellectual capacities of the chimp. Ontologically, however, nothing can be inferred from this about the naturalness or otherwise of the object of our ignorance: what cannot be known about is not thereby supernatural in itself. So this position accepts the full reality of consciousness (unlike E), denies that it is miraculous (unlike M), insists that it has an explanation (unlike I), but disputes our ability to find this explanation (unlike D). Consciousness has an epistemologically transcendent natural essence. The picture is that an omniscient being could grasp the full naturalistic explanation of consciousness, but we are not thus omniscient. There exists some lawlike process by which matter generates experience, but the nature of this process is cognitively closed to us… | — Colin McGinn, The Character of Mind - An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, 2nd ed., Chapter 3 – Consciousness | Indexes/24 |
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