McGinn: We Don't Have the Brains for Mind-Body Problem Articles)

What Mind–Body Problem? Understanding consciousness may be easier than we thought

Alex Byrne

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Here is a remarkable fact. When atoms and molecules are organized in a suitably complicated way, the result issomething that perceives, knows, believes, desires, fears, feels pain, and so on—in other words, an organism with apsychology. Besides ourselves, who else is in the club? Descartes notoriously claimed that other animals weremerely unthinking bits of clockwork, but that is an extreme position. Probably cockroaches don’t have much of amental life, if they have one at all, but few would harbor doubts about monkeys, apes, cats, and dogs. Indeed, thereis a flourishing discipline at the intersection of biology and psychology—cognitive ethology—devoted to the study of the mental and social lives of nonhuman animals. Somehow, minds emerge from matter. And so, of course, doesthe weather, digestion, photosynthesis, and glaciation. But although some everyday nonmental phenomena remainpoorly understood—apparently the jury is still out on the explanation of why ice is slippery—the connection betweenminds and matter is supposed to be especially mystifying. Why so?In the famous 1974 article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel fingered consciousness asthe culprit. “Without consciousness,” he wrote, “the mind–body problem would be much less interesting. Withconsciousness it seems hopeless.” And consciousness has had philosophers hot and bothered ever since. DanielDennett published a book called, rather optimistically,

Consciousness Explained

in 1990, and his fellowphilosophers could hardly get into print fast enough to proclaim that Dennett had not explained consciousness at all.But before we get to the conundrum of consciousness, let’s start with an apparently easier part of the mind–bodyproblem.Many mental states—in particular thoughts and beliefs—are about, or represent, other things. In contemporary jargon, passed down to us by the 19th-century German psychologist and philosopher Franz Brentano, thoughts andbeliefs have “intentionality.” For example, when you think that it is now raining in Boston, your thought is about, or represents, Boston. Moreover, your thought does not simply represent Boston; it represents a putative state of affairs: that Boston is in a certain meteorological condition. If Boston is

not

in that condition—that is, if it is notraining in Boston—then your thought represents Boston incorrectly (and so is false). If it is raining in Boston, thenyour thought represents Boston correctly (and so is true). An obvious but noteworthy fact: one does not have to bein Boston to think about it. Although someone thousands of miles away in Mumbai can’t see Boston or walk itsstreets and may have never visited the city, she may well be able think your very thought: that it is raining in Boston.What’s more, one can think about things that do not presently exist, as when one thinks that Socrates died of hemlock poisoning. Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, one can think about things that

never

existed, such ascentaurs and the Easter Bunny.While the slipperiness of ice may be perplexing, no one thinks that this shows that ice is not wholly physical.Intentionality, on the other hand, presents a stiffer challenge to a physical world view. If there is a physicalexplanation of why you are thinking about Boston and representing Boston in a rainy condition, presumably it lies inrecherché facts about your brain. How, though, could a bunch of neurons, no matter how intricately organized,conspire to make you think about Boston? Why do some arrangements of matter amount to thoughts about things,while others do not?Although this is a very hard question, an air of mild optimism prevails. Many philosophers hold that intentionality canbe explained in broadly physical terms, despite the fact that the details presently elude us. To see why optimismmay be warranted, consider the rings of a tree. They represent the age of a tree: if a tree has 50 rings, then thisrepresents that the tree is 50 years old. This sort of natural representation is straightforward: for each year it ages,the tree leaves a trace in the form of a ring. Some philosophers think that this is a suggestive—albeit primitive—model of how representation might emerge from an underlying physical substrate. In recent years varioussophisticated philosophical theories of intentionality have been based on this guiding idea.Without intentionality, the mind–body problem would seem much less interesting. With intentionality, at least itdoesn’t seem hopeless. Why does consciousness gum up the works?* * *“Consciousness is what makes the mind–body problem really intractable,” Nagel gloomily announces at thebeginning of “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The relevant notion of consciousness (a.k.a. “conscious experience” or,simply, “experience”) is perhaps best introduced by examples. If a normal person, awake and alert, stubs her toe,

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rubs her fingers on a cheese grater, takes a sip of wine, or listens to her iPod, she has a conscious experience of acertain sort. In a phrase that Nagel firmly cemented in the philosophical lexicon, there is “something it is like” for her to stub her toe, sip wine, and so on. Experiences of stubbing one’s toe and of sipping wine are evidently dissimilar:what it is like to stub one’s toe is very different from what it is like to sip wine. Nagel sums this up by saying thatthese experiences have their own distinctive “subjective character.”It is the subjective character of experience that makes the mind–body problem uniquely knotty, according to Nagel.And here, to illustrate the point, swoop down bats (chosen, incidentally, because they were frequent visitors toNagel’s house).Most bats use one or another kind of echolocation—which works on the same principle as sonar—to perceiveinsects and avoid obstacles in flight. Echolocation in bats was demonstrated in a series of famous experiments inthe 1940s (in which bats were given earplugs) by Donald Griffin, one of the founders of cognitive ethology. As ithappens, Griffin and Nagel were briefly colleagues at The Rockefeller University in the 1970s, and Griffin waspersuaded by conversations with Nagel to take animal consciousness seriously. (For more on Griffin and cognitiveethology, see Colin Allen and Marc Bekoff’s

Species of Mind

.)Nagel not unreasonably supposes that bats have conscious experiences. Given their special perceptual apparatus,their experiences are presumably quite unlike ours. So human experiences and bat experiences have a differentsubjective character. What is that batty subjective character? That is, what is it like to be a bat, to enjoy battyexperiences?It will not help, Nagel says, to imagine “that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic” or that one flies around at night eating insects. That exercise might tell you what it would be like for

you

to

behave

likea bat, but not what it is like for the bat. The question, Nagel suggests, is unanswerable: we will never know what it islike to be a bat. This is because we cannot even entertain the correct hypothesis about the subjective character of batty experiences, because the subjective character of our experiences is so different. Consider this contrastingexample: we never will know the exact amount of hemlock that Socrates drank, but whatever it is, we can at leastentertain the hypothesis that Socrates drank a certain amount—we can wonder whether he drank exactly fiveounces. The problem with batty experiences is worse, Nagel thinks: we can’t even wrap our minds around thecorrect hypothesis of what batty experiences are like.The example of the bat is particularly vivid, but in fact Nagel’s point could be illustrated without crossing the speciesbarrier. Nagel gives such an example himself: someone blind from birth cannot know what it is like to see colorsbecause she cannot form the conception of what experiences of colors are like.Suppose Nagel is right that facts about the subjective character of experiences are only accessible to those whohave similar sorts of experiences—who occupy, in Nagel’s phrase, a similar “point of view.” He has not yet reachedany depressing conclusion about the mind–body problem. Admittedly, explaining the subjective character of battyexperience will be beyond us, for the simple reason that we can’t understand the phenomenon to be explained. Butwe might still be able to explain the subjective character of

our

experience in physical terms.This brings us to the second part of Nagel’s argument. The physical-cum-natural sciences, he says, seek an

objective

understanding of phenomena—an understanding that transcends particular points of view. Consider themeteorological phenomenon of lightning. Lightning has distinctive effects on us—it causes us to have visualexperiences with a particular subjective character. It might cause Martians to have experiences with a very differentsubjective character. But the objective nature of lightning—its being a kind of electrical discharge—is equallyaccessible to both human and Martian scientists, precisely because the scientific investigation of lightning leavesout the idiosyncratic experiences enjoyed by humans and those enjoyed by Martians. We describe lightning, Nagelsays, “not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses, but in terms of its more general effects and of properties detectable by means other than the human senses.”You can see where this is going. In the case of lightning, or any other phenomenon studied by the physicalsciences, we can investigate its objective nature while ignoring the subjective character of the experiences that thephenomenon causes. In investigating the nature of lightning we forgo “appearances” (the impressions lightningmakes on our senses), for “reality” (the objective nature of lightning). We can do that because lightning is one thing(a phenomenon of the atmosphere), and experiences of lightning are quite another (phenomena of the mind andbrain). We aren’t ignoring anything important about lightning, the atmospheric phenomenon, if we ignore the kindsof experiences it causes in us.

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There is an obvious roadblock when we try to apply this model to experience itself, which, Nagel observes, “doesnot seem to fit the pattern.” “The idea of moving from appearance to reality,” he writes, “makes no sense here.”Suppose we try to reduce experience to an objective phenomenon, a certain configuration of neurons firing, in thestyle of reducing lightning to an electrical discharge. The discovery that lightning is nothing but a kind of electricaldischarge is only possible because the subjective character of lightning-produced experiences is not part of thephenomenon to be reduced. That is, the objective methods of the physical sciences require that we

ignore

thedistinctive subjective character of human experiences. So it is very hard to see how an experience could

just

be theoccurrence of a certain neural configuration, the nature of which is thoroughly objective.One might expect Nagel to conclude that since experiences elude objective inquiry they aren’t physical. Interestinglyenough, he doesn’t: to do so, he writes, “would be a mistake.” Rather, the claim that experiences are entirelyphysical “is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might betrue.”* * *The purported lesson of “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” is that we have no idea how to explain consciousness inphysical terms. Eight years after its publication came another landmark, Frank Jackson’s “Epiphenomenal Qualia,”with a blunter take-home message. (“Qualia” is another term for Nagel’s “subjective character”; the significance of “epiphenomenal” will become clear shortly.) Consciousness is

not

a physical phenomenon, Jackson argues.Physicalism, or materialism, the view (to put it very roughly) that everything is entirely physical, is just false.What Jackson calls his “knowledge argument” against physicalism is disarmingly simple. Imagine, he says, thatMary, a terribly clever student, lives in a black-and-white room and never sees any chromatic colors, like red andgreen. In her room, she is extensively tutored on the science of vision via black-and-white television. EventuallyMary’s expertise is complete: she knows

everything

about the physical processes leading from ripe tomatoesthrough the visual pathways in the brain. Suppose that physicalism is true, and that (visual) experiences are entirelyphysical. Then, because Mary knows

everything

physical about experiences, she ought to know everything aboutexperiences. But, Jackson argues, that is plainly false. Imagine that Mary is released from her cell and shown a ripetomato for the first time. She won’t complacently shrug her shoulders and say, “Ho hum.” Instead, she will gasp withamazement. She will come to

know

something about experiences of red that she didn’t and couldn’t know while inher black-and-white room. She will learn, in Nagel’s terminology, that these experiences have a certain subjectivecharacter. So physicalism is false.(Mary is one of philosophy’s more memorable fictional characters, so it is appropriate that she has achieved theliterary cachet of featuring prominently in David Lodge’s 2002 novel

Thinks

. . .)While Nagel’s paper emphasizes the deep puzzle of how consciousness could be nothing but physical activity in thebrain, “Epiphenomenal Qualia” is entirely devoid of such mystery-mongering. The puzzle isn’t so deep, Jacksonthinks: We can’t understand how physicalism might be true because it

isn’t

true. Digestion, glaciation,photosynthesis, and the like are entirely physical phenomena, and one would have hoped that ultimately everyphenomenon would fall under the umbrella of the physical sciences. Alas, that hope is dashed by the knowledgeargument. The argument shows that a purely physical theory of the universe is incomplete: to account for

everything

, we have to recognize nonphysical qualities, namely “qualia,” or the subjective character of experiences.Well, so much the worse for physicalism, you might think. Not so fast, though: to accept the conclusion of theknowledge argument is to occupy an uncomfortable position that is flagged by the eponymous “epiphenomenal.”Epiphenomenalism is the doctrine that nothing mental ever causes anything physical. To borrow an analogy fromWilliam James, the epiphenomenalist thinks that mental phenomena are like shadows—they are produced by andaccompany material objects like sticks and stones, but shadows themselves never play any role in explaining whysticks break and stones fall. Hence the title of Jackson’s paper: he takes the knowledge argument, in establishingthat the subjective character of experience is nonphysical, to also show that it is epiphenomenal.Suppose someone waves her hand. What causes her hand to move? The answer, presumably, is a verycomplicated story involving the firing of neurons in her primary motor cortex, the transmission of these signals to thespinal cord, and the contraction of muscle fibers in her hand. Importantly, this story is entirely physical—nononphysical subjective character is needed to get her hand moving. Now suppose that the subject is told “wave your hand if you have an experience with the distinctive subjective character associated with experiences of red things.”

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