On the issue of consciousness and free will, John Searle argues, numbered 1-6:
1. there are two irreconcilable, irreducible and irrefutable realities;
2. one being the materialist notion of cause and effect such that whatever we “decide” to do and whatever our thought have sequences of prior sufficient causes going back as far as anyone wishes to go;
3. what we think and what we do could not have been otherwise;
4. the other being the undeniability and irreducibility of our subjective experience, herein choice, decisions, alternatives, options, persuasion, deliberation, rationality, blame, reward, punishment, intention, agency, and the whole cluster of language related to our free will;
5. consciousness is real, however intangible, causing us to have further thoughts and to act as we direct ourselves to; and
6. our consciousness is a natural fact about us, part of our nature, part of the natural world.
For Searle and others, put simply, the “hard problem” of consciousness is explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious.
Some dismiss the hard problem by saying consciousness isn’t a real thing. It’s an illusion.
I have a different view: assuming consciousness isn’t an illusion, why is our consciousness in broad or overarching contour a problem?
Why isn’t consciousness understandable simply, as Searle says, as a fundamental part of the way we are?
Taking that further, do we not see awareness as pan-species? Do we not see higher levels of awareness in different species? Why can’t we see that facet of the natural world as most highly evolved in humans, it in us being what it is?
As we increasingly understand the neural basis of consciousness, how mind arises from the brain, what will that do to our conception of mind itself, of consciousness? Will it fundamentally alter it? Perhaps not.
Maybe we’ll continue to see consciousness as real as it is intangible, as a discrete, non spatial zone, marked by certain axiomatic properties:
it’s one thing not another:
it is what it is;
it’s integrated or unified;
it’s a structure of parts that add up to one unified thing; and
it’s intentional.
Moreover, our own “qualia,” our own internal sense perceptions, are not, as some claim, necessarily impossible for anyone else to experience and hence to understand.
For, by and large, when we experience what others experience, we can extrapolate and generalize, albeit necessarily and profoundly imperfectly, from our own experience what others’ similar experience is like.
That ability is the ground of empathy, pity, sympathy, compassion, to, as is said, “feel another’s pain,” and, as well, the ground of shame, guilt and blame insofar, for these last three, as we can generalize from what we like and dislike about what’s done to us and held back from us.
It is as well the ground of culture and social cohesion.
The incapacity so to extrapolate and generalize is a ground of sociopathy and psychopathy.
The relative incapacity to is a ground of cultural and social division and friction.
I’d say, as does Searle, that consciousness is real, causing us to do things. I’d say by our minds we choose; we freely decide; we rationally deliberate; we weigh pros and cons, costs and benefits; we change our views; we reason; we are persuadable.
I’d say the thought that we couldn’t have thought or done otherwise in any particular instance is to reason backwards (circularly?) from the thought or action to its necessity.
There’s no warrant for concluding “otherwise” was an impossibility. No warrant, that is to say, if we see consciousness as real, with properties and content, with thought leading to thought, with thought leading to action, and not just a mirage, an illusion.
To consider consciousnesses an illusion is to try to deny the undeniable, to try to refute the irrefutable, to try to reduce the irreducible, namely the overwhelming reality of our subjectivity.
Why is our experience of our own agency irreconcilable with materialist cause and effect?
Are we misled by consciousness’ non spatial intangibility?
Why can’t mind be seen as caused by material processes but then its own phenomenon, being, in part, a zone of causation where, as noted, thought leads to thought and to specific action, often after deliberating over alternatives.
This isn’t a compatibilist view, where that requires holding as compatible two opposed views, say mind as seen from the outside in or empirically as against mind as seen by us from the inside out, our subjectivity.
Mine is a holistic view that wants to reject acknowledging an unbridgeable divide.
My view might be seen as reviving mind body dualism. It does in a certain way.
The idea of the soul or the ghost in the machine conceives mind as independent entity disconnected and separate from the body.
As I see it, though, mind, while intangible and discrete, is inextricably connected to the body. It arises bodily to become what it is as manifest in consciousness, conditioned by the brain’s operations.
Digestion is to certain internal organs what mind is to the brain, just as real but with mind as opposed to digestion being conscious, self conscious, intangible and non spatial.
In sum, understanding consciousness as real in itself with distinct properties and causing effects seems to me to resolve the putative hard problem, the putative unbridgeability between our subjectivity and sufficient material causes of effects.
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