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David J.
Chalmers's
The
Conscious
Mind |
This is the 13th in my "Quickening to Qualia" series of posts, the most recent of which was
Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans (Q2Q XII). One main topic has been the ideas of the philosopher of mind David J. Chalmers in
The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Chalmers's topic is consciousness, a.k.a. sentience or subjective experience.
An idea of what he means by consciousness comes from the question, "What is it like to see the color red?" The fact that it is "like" something to see red, says Chalmers, is odd enough to deserve explanation
in and of itself, above and beyond any explanations that can be given of merely physical/functional brain activities.
Chalmers gives a lengthy philosophical argument as to why we ought to accord consciousness an unusual sort of existence: purely mental, in that the explanation of consciousness cannot be reduced to the level of workings of the merely physical or material constituents of the brain, i.e., the neurons.
He also argues to the conclusion that there is nothing
logically necessary about consciousness's "supervenience" on physical facts: an imaginable "zombie world" just like ours except that our doppelgangers have no inner, subjective experience would be, he says, entirely possible. If we met these doppelgangers, their lack of sentience would by no means be apparent to us.
Ergo, Chalmers says, there must be a natural law associating conscious experience with the cognitive processing of information in such a way that it makes no difference to how we actually function in the world ... for if consciousness did make a difference, then we'd surely be able to tell our zombie doppelgangers weren't exactly like us.
I'd like to raise a possible objection to his arguments, but before I do so I'd like to mention my ulterior motive in doing it. It's a subtle one, and at the moment I'm not even quite sure whether my objection actually is going to serve its interests.
In my previous posts on the subject, I mentioned that Chalmers believes there is a special law of nature linking consciousness to cognition. That helps bolster the case for the God hypothesis, I felt. Chalmers himself, though not biased in favor of religion, speaks
figuratively of God having to do "extra work" to introduce such a law into his creation. I simply removed the word "figuratively" from that thought and credited God with having made such a law so he could (eventually, once evolution had done its work) commune with creatures as sentient as he.
Since laying out my own arguments along those lines, I've been nagged by doubts. The notion of God doing "extra work" to establish a cognition-consciousness link makes him into a sort of artisan who, when he finds he needs an extra tool, proceeds to make one on the spot. In this case, the tool is an additional law of nature and not a tangible object in the material domain. Yet the picture is one of an ad hoc, tool-fashioning artisan.
Artisans manipulate and exploit things: objects, not subjects; in Martin Buber's lingo, they live off the domain of
It, not in the domain of
Thou.
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Martin
Buber's
I and Thou |
In his book
I and Thou, Buber shows that God as "eternal
Thou" looks for us to stand in
I–Thou relationship with him. We, on the other hand, are apt to apply the "primary word"
I–It to that and every other relationship we have. The first pronoun
I in each of these primary words is not the same as the
I in the other. The
I of
I–Thou is what God wants of us, not the
I of
I–It.
So, at least intuitively, it seems decidedly odd that God would start things off, creation-wise, by assuming an artisan-like
I–It posture toward his creation. Such a posture, per Buber, does not rise to the level of true relation – as in, "In the beginning is relation" (see p. 18, Ronald Gregor Smith translation). For Buber, "relation" implies encounter and dialogue. But only one-way understanding and artisan-style exploitation are possible, when
Thou collapses into
It.
The way Chalmers speaks of consciousness makes an
It of it, so to speak. By that I mean that in Chalmers's view sentience is but a glorified thing: a
mental thing, true, but still a thing. It exists by virtue of a natural law or laws, just as material things come into being by virtue of the operation of natural laws. In the latter case, the laws are those of physics; in the former, they are putatively laws of mind. Still, the mechanism of conferring existence is the same. A law or laws exploits existing facts to create further facts. Nothing gets created
ex nihilo. What already exists is merely refashioned and given new qualities.
To Buber, only
I–Thou, or standing in mutual relation, is truly creative.
I–It is but a cobbler, an artificer. Relation takes precedence over existence. (As for essence or being-qua-being, existent entities – relatants such as you or I and the eternal
Thou – do possess it, it looks like, but it is unfathomable to us in this life; see pp. 86ff.)
My ulterior motive in challenging Chalmers is accordingly to take God out of the artisan business. I would prefer consciousness itself to be, in some sense, relational.
My takeoff point in trying to refute Chalmers comes from a fact about music. To wit, what it is like to experience hearing a note or a chord depends on its tonal context.
Most Western music is tonal. It sets up a key: a certain note, say C or D-flat, is established early on as the tonal center of the piece, the note to which the melody inevitably gravitates. Typically at the end of the piece, or of a section within the piece, the melody returns to the tonic note, leading the listener to experience a feeling of release of tension, resolution, and completion.
In addition to the melody, each piece of music has a harmonic structure, typically expressed as a series of chords accompanying the melody. This set of chord "changes" — also known as the chord "progression" — is as important to the musical experience as is the melody which the progression serves to set off. Each chord is usually based on one of the degrees of the scale defined by the key of the piece.
If the key is C Major, for example, the notes of the ascending melodic scale are C, D, E, F, G, A, and B, before the scale returns to the tonic C an octave higher. A chord
based on the first scale degree, C, is said to be a (Roman numeral) I, or "one," chord. A chord based on the fifth scale degree, A, is a V, or "five," chord. So the chord Amaj ("A Major") is a V chord
when the key is C Major.
A chord like Amaj is
experienced differently when it is a V chord than when it is a I chord. The ear "hears" it as a source of tension and not a source of resolution. Same chord + different context = different experience.
The same is true of a single note. In C Minor, the note A brings tension and suspense, the high point of the melodic roller coaster. In the key of A Major, the very same note, A, signifies the end of the ride.
It is as if the experience of music is
constituted by the associated contextual relationships. If it can be said that "consciousness exists" — which is in fact one of Chalmers's most basic assumptions — then perhaps existence per se is constituted by relation: perhaps the inner nature of reality itself is that it is constituted by dialogue!
Perhaps the information processing centers of the brain, as they encounter a piece of music that is being auditioned, are
in dialogue with one another, and out of this dialogue pops conscious experience!
Or, maybe consciousness
is dialogue. By virtue of it, the notes of the music can be said to be "talking to one another" within the mind somehow, and we
experience that dialogue as "what it is like to hear music."
Consciousness might accordingly be the "shadow" of the relationships that arise among the various physical components of the mind as they go about their separate-but-intertwined information-processing duties. If so, then Chalmers may be wrong: there are no actual "facts" of conscious experience (see p. 161). Conscious experiences would lack facts and properties as well, because they are only the "shadows" of relations.
According to Chalmers, the "properties" of consciousness are its qualia: the qualitative "feels" that are associated with our subjective experiences. If we see something that is red, the quale (sing. of qualia) it invokes accounts for "what it is like to see red." Each quale in the mind might be thought of as a distinct "chunk" of consciousness, waiting to be invoked as a particular experience.
These qualia seemingly exist on a non-causal plane of immaterial existence: they play no role in the "closed causal loop" of the physical world. Still, qualia form what Chalmers might call the "substance" of consciousness. Substance is what makes things
things, rather than empty placeholders. For example, according to him (see p. 153) things that exist in the physical world would be nothing but empty placeholders, were it not for their intrinsic properties: their substance. To him, intrinsic properties equal substance.
And (see p. 125) "conscious experience involves properties," as well — the qualia — even though consciousness is mental, not material. In Chalmers' philosopher-speak, intrinsic properties are
ontological; they confer existence. The very first premise of Chalmers's entire argument (see p. 161) is, in fact, that consciousness
exists. Hence, consciousness must be constituted by some sort of ontological chunks that give it its substance.
So I now see that I must dispute Chalmers at his very first reasoning step. I am not at all certain that consciousness exists, in the sense of having ontological substance. I'd say a thing might be real without yet existing, if it is entailed by a relation.
The idea of reality-in-relation, I think Martin Buber is saying, precedes and is different from the idea of reality-in-being. For example, in Christian theology the mutual love between the Father and the Son is at first real-in-relation and only then (as Holy Ghost) real-in-being. The second kind of reality "proceeds from" the first, in the same way that the Nicene Creed says the Holy Ghost "proceeds from the Father and the Son," the first two divine Persons who, it is sometimes said, "abide in" one another.
If reality-in-being proceeds from reality-in-relation, and if consciousness is pure reality-in-relation, then Chalmers starts out on completely the wrong basis. We can take consciousness very, very seriously, indeed, without ascribing to it existence, being, or ontological substance.
Buber provides yet another possible way to look at it, though. It comes amid a lengthy discussion of how his thought compares and contrasts with Buddhism (pp. 83-95, Smith translation). He warns us that some of the interpretations that have been given to the Buddha's teachings in effect violate the primal
I–Thou relation. Yet he also finds the Buddha's life in itself to be anything but contradictory to his thesis. It is as if Buddha was intentionally silent about what he himself knew about
I–Thou in order to present a teaching to men that would take them beyond
I–Thou to the annulment of suffering: "of becoming and passing away" (p. 139, Kaufman translation). This happens by virtue of absorption or immersion into True Being.
Buber disdains such absorption or immersion as a proper goal of life as really lived. Yet Buber can also commend the Buddha:
The Buddha knows saying You to man — that is clear from his greatly superior, but also greatly direct, intercourse with his disciples — but he does not teach it: to this love, which means "boundless inclusion in the heart of all that has become," the simple confrontation of being by being remains alien. In the depths of his silence he certainly knows, too, the You-saying to the primal ground, transcending all the "gods" whom he treats like disciples; it was from a relational process that became substance that his deed came, clearly as an answer to the You; but of this he remains silent. (p. 140, Kaufman, in which the translator uses "You" instead of "Thou").
Whatever the merits of Buber's dispute with Buddhism, it is clear from the above that for Buber, a relational process can in fact become substance. He is saying that the Buddha first engaged in a dialogue with the eternal You. This was a relational process. It was then turned into the (immaterial) substance of the Buddha's actual teaching.
If a relational process in the domain of
I–Thou can become a (possibly immaterial) substance within the
I–It domain, then perhaps this is where the so-called qualia of consciousness come from. Perhaps each time we hear a piece of music which uses, say, the A major chord as a V chord, the relational process between us–as–
I and the music-as-
Thou simply turns the notes of the A major triad into the immaterial substance of "what it is like to hear a V chord," just for the present moment.
This appears to be a valuable formulation of the situation we live in. It allows qualia-as-substance to exist, if only ephemerally. It accounts for why consciousness per se is not part of the closed loop of physical-world causality. That would seem to please Chalmers.
Yet it also allows a Martin Buber to extol "how I [that is, any person] cause my attitude of soul to the world to grow to life, to life that acts upon the world" (p. 94, Smith). The relational process which
becomes substance is, for Buber, the only thing that is truly creative of new reality.
However, it appears that this formulation might not
totally satisfy Chalmers, who insists that consciousness is not absolutely entailed by what goes on in the brain, or transpires between the brain and the sensory world. There could, after all, be a Zombie World in which the denizens possess no conscious experience.
It looks to me as if Buber would say, if confronted with such a claim as Chalmers', that the crucial distinction is, rather, this: an
I–Thou relational process will
always produce, in the
It domain, the (possibly immaterial) substance of a new reality. On the other hand, an
I–It relational process will not yield a new reality, only (at best) the reconfiguration of an existing substance. For Buber, a Zombie World in which no relational process yields consciousness is a world of nothingness; it could never even conceivably exist.
