I’ve been spending time with Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. I stumbled (like most readers I guess?) over the title before I got into the book. There’s an inbuilt circularity lurking here: doesn’t “explanation” presuppose “consciousness”? Of course this wouldn’t invalidate project: but it might put us on alert. (Can students be trusted to mark their own papers? Perhaps… Can explanation explain itself? Perhaps…)
Most of Dennett’s book is consumed with how consciousness operates. There are intriguing explorations of the relation of thought to time, and the role of multiple mental agents arriving at a makeshift consensus I can attribute to a fictional “me”. Only obliquely does this narrative address the question: “What manner of thing is thought?” But in the early pages, and a few times later, this question appears front and center. Predictably, the reference point—or rather, stooge—is Descartes.
Descartes’ error, for Dennett, is self-evident. He dubs it dualism: positing a realm of “mind-stuff” that exists in parallel with the human body, only connecting to it through the good offices of the pineal gland. On this count, Dennett finds himself in the massive majority, distinguishing himself as more rigorous than most in his rejection of dualism:
“Scientists and philosophers may have achieved a consensus of sorts in favor of materialism, but, as we shall see, getting rid of the old dualistic visions is harder than contemporary materialists have thought.”
I’d like to pause at this minor tributary of Dennett’s thinking, and look at on old question with the possibly naive eye of a non-professional dabbler in philosophy.
It seems natural to consider the question of mind as a problem of its relation to the body, just as Descartes did, and just as Dennett and his contemporaries do. In fact, it’s hard to see why “mind” would be a puzzle at all if there were no “body”.
Today, this discussion quickly lurches into the labyrinthine field of neurobiology, but that can confuse us. Complexity aside, we can note a rather simple structure these arguments usually follow. It goes something like this: “We have matter. How is mind possible?” Or, “We start historically with matter. How did the mind evolve over time?” Or, “We have matter in the form of brains. How do brains create mind?” Or, “We have matter. Is mind anything more than epiphenomena?” Or even, “We have matter. Why do we need the term ‘mind’ at all?”
The trajectory is always from “matter”—the thing we can be sure of—to “mind”—the thing that gives us problems.
This trajectory, of course, allows for only three options. Dualism: there exist both matter and mind-stuff; idealism: the world is the dream of God; or materialism: there is just matter. And as Dennett observes, in contemporary academia, materialism has won handsomely:
“The prevailing wisdom, variously expressed and argued for, is materialism: there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter — the physical stuff of physics, chemistry and physiology — and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon.”
What occurs to me here, perhaps a little oddly, is an observation of Derrida that speech is subordinate to writing. It seems commonsense that speech comes before written text, that the text is merely a derivative of speech. If I understand Derrida correctly, he points out that we only apprehend this through text, that we cannot think “speech” outside our experience of writing, and that actually for us writing is the starting point from which we approach speech. “Nothing outside the text.”
To put it another way, Descartes is not us dumb has he looks (to some). For Descartes, consciousness is the point of origination, not the end of the pursuit. First we know consciousness. From there, we approach “matter”. And then back to the question of mind. It’s easy to miss that first step (such that in the title “Consciousness Explained”, consciousness is already operational before it is questioned.)
What are the possible implications? Here’s a hypothesis: that consciousness is not the problem. Matter is.
Let’s look again at Dennett’s statement, because it is really quite extraordinary:
“There is only one sort of stuff, namely matter — the physical stuff of physics, chemistry and physiology.”
I find something poetically pre-Socratic in this statement, a disarming faith in the underlying simplicity of the universe. “One sort of stuff.”
Really? Let’s consider this term “matter.” For me “matter” has the comforting solidity of cheddar cheese, something you can pick up in your hand and take a bite from. I suspect that whenever people talk about “matter” or the “physical” universe, they are thinking some version of underlying cheddar cheese. The “one sort of stuff” is the solid material you can put in your mouth or throw around the kitchen.
I’m no physicist, but the briefest research informs me that the term “matter” has absolutely no scientific meaning. There is “mass”— indeed there are objects with mass and volume, which produce the reassuring presence of cheddar cheese. But mass and volume are merely characteristics of certain phenomena. They have no special pre-eminence (outside our everyday experience of the macro-world). We have known for about a century that these reassuring objects can be transformed into “energy” —at which point they have neither mass nor volume, and we’re out of cheese. Indeed, the transformation can run both directions. Are mass and energy therefore identical? (Is there no difference between an exploded and unexploded nuclear bomb?) Is mass the cause of energy? Or is energy the cause of mass? And what about time, which we have learned is inherent to space. Does that make time identical with space? Does it make time either the cause or result of space?
I’m not suggesting here a theory of mind in terms of some quantum mechanical equation (though I believe this has been attempted by Roger Penrose). I’m suggesting analogies to open a question. Because when I see claims that “the mind is the brain” or “the brain causes the mind” I wonder how carefully considered are these posited relationships.
One sort of stuff?
I’m no more an ontologist than I am a physicist, but it seems to me that the “being” of time is different from the “being” of energy, which is different again from the “being” of cheddar cheese. They all exist, and they are all necessary to each other. But that does not mean they actually are each other, or that one can be produced as the “cause” of the other. Or even that the word “exist” has the same meaning when applied to cheddar cheese, energy or time.
And what about information? This is perhaps too deep a puzzle: but the question is worth asking. Clearly, huge volumes of information are created and exchanged in the known universe, especially in the biosphere. Information exists, and has observable effects in the natural world. Is information reducible to mass, or energy, or time? Is the “being” of information of the same kind as the “being”of cheddar cheese?
One sort of stuff? What is the scientific or philosophical basis of this ontological monism? Here’s a thought: the problem with dualism is not that it posits more than, but that it posits only two. In other words, we have an option that is neither a materialist reduction to “one sort of stuff” nor a dualistic universe of “matter-stuff” and “mind-stuff”. The third way might be called pluralism, or perhaps (to borrow from Dennett) hetero-ontology. Perhaps there are many sorts of stuff, and contrary to Parmenides and all who followed him, “being” is not One. (Curious that when it comes to the mind, Dennett is a “heterophenomenologist”. But when it comes to the physical universe, on which the whole game is meant to rest, he’s an ontological monist…)
At this point, a different gambit offers itself: “Well OK, there may be many kinds of stuff in the universe, but they are all subject to empirical observation and mathematical quantification.” Here we retreat from basing the unity of science on the ontological unity of nature (unless that unity is now mathematical, another pre-Socratic romance… hello Pythagoras). In this fallback defense of materialism, the unity of science wouldn’t be “matter”—a meaningless term—but method. Only now we would have to define a singular, unified “scientific method” and deal with Feyerabend. And who wants to fall down that rabbit hole?
Having said all that, I have great admiration for Dennett’s book, and particularly his heterogeneous model of the mind. All that’s missing from Consciousness Explained is Volume 1: Matter Explained.