Confessions of a Former Consciousness Denier
How I once fell under, and then escaped, the spell of consciousness denialism
A confession: Incredible though I now find this fact, and incredible though anyone who’s met me in the past decade or so will find it, I was once a consciousness denier. That is, I once denied the reality of consciousness, regarding it as some sort of “illusion” (the ultimate absurdity!).1
Here, I will recount how I fell under the spell of illusionism and how, eventually, I broke free of it.
1. What is consciousness?
Consciousness, as I understand it, is one and the same as subjective experience (i.e., the first-person point-of-view; the phenomenological perspective). The redness of a red rose and the blueness of a summer sky; the mintiness of mint and the garliciness of garlic; the pangs of heartache and the thrills of joy; the way your present thought feels in your mind: These are all, ultimately, manifestations - states - of consciousness. You know what they are like immediately because they are what they are like; consciousness is, precisely, what it seems to be.2
But your knowledge of the subjective feel of the manifestations of your consciousness is, ultimately, private and incommunicable. You can describe your states of consciousness to others, but only you can have them. Others can make inferences about what you’re feeling, but only you can know exactly what it is like to be you at a given moment in time (a thought which manages to be both banal and profound).
2. Why conscious could not possibly be an illusion
I take it that consciousness is the one whose existence is certain (about this much, at least, René Descartes was right). In principle, I cannot be certain that I am not in The Matrix; that I am not a bodiless brain-in-a-vat; that I am not now dreaming or being deceived by Descartes’s Evil Demon. But I can be certain that experience is real - for even in considering the possibility that experience is, somehow, illusory, I have the experience of entertaining that very scenario; of having that thought. All theorizing, philosophical or otherwise, begins with the absolute and undeniable reality of consciousness: Every thought, every conjecture, is itself a form of conscious experience.
3. How I, nevertheless, once fell under the spell of illusionism
Before I even began my undergraduate work, I had become convinced that as someone who fancied himself a hard-nosed, rational, scientifically-informed Very Serious Thinker, I needed to be a naturalist, holding that there exists nothing beyond those entities and properties which feature in our best scientific theories. And I thought that naturalism was incompatible with the existence of consciousness because I saw no way to characterize consciousness in terms of the entities and properties of science.
I was not alone. This general view of things remains fairly widely-held in certain circles (namely, those in which people self-conceive as hard-nosed, rational, and scientifically-informed), and so it may be profitable to explain both why I became committed to them and why I eventually came to reject them.
My rationale for believing I had to affirm naturalism was, I think, a common one. Even if I would not have been able to cash out my somewhat inchoate and underdeveloped thoughts at the time in quite these terms, I took the undeniable successes and triumphs of the natural sciences since the 17th century as very strong evidence for the metaphysical thesis that nothing exists beyond those entities and properties posited by our scientific theories. In essence, this meant that I believed all of reality to consist only of those fundamental elements which figure in contemporary physics (i.e., the subatomic particles - or, perhaps more accurately now, quantum fields). Seeing not the slightest reason to attribute consciousness to those entities — and, moreover, not seeing how first-person experience could somehow arise from merely combining myriad non-experiential physical bits (or fields) — I determined that consciousness needed, somehow, to be eliminated from my ontology.
I was, for a time, a thoroughly convinced reductionist - believing all talk of the experiential to be reducible to talk in terms of the non-experiential (e.g., electrochemical events, or behavioral dispositions) - who occasionally flirted with eliminativism (according to which the very category of the experiential should be eliminated from our ontology, altogether).
I would now regard these views as one and the same (and thus equal in their absurdity): Any attempt to reduce consciousness to something other than what it is will entail its elimination. Smart people - including many people much smarter than I - defend reductionism and eliminativism, but the positions are no more tenable for that. One need not have tenure and an impressive list of publications in order to know that it’s like something to sit on a thumbtack: One need only sit on a thumbtack (this is not a recommendation!).
4. How the spell was broken: Realizing that naturalism does not require the elimination of consciousness
Eventually I realized that naturalists, like everyone, should take consciousness for granted - as, indeed, the fundamental datum of natural reality — for the simple reason that, as elucidated above, consciousness cannot be sensibly denied (a line developed at length here, by my former dissertation supervisor, Galen Strawson). If naturalism is to be a defensible worldview, then it must be consistent with the manifest and indubitable reality of consciousness.
Naturalism is consistent with panpsychism and even a version of dualism. A panpsychist can hold that consciousness is natural insofar as it is the very nature (or, at least, an aspect of the nature) of the fundamental physical elements (e.g., see Strawson’s “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism”). A naturalistic dualist can hold that consciousness is natural insofar as it is the product of (or “supervenes” upon) purely natural stuff (specifically, matter - organized in the form of a brain) that gives rise to consciousness, in accordance with certain psychophysical laws, under the right conditions (David Chalmers articulates such a view in The Conscious Mind.)
5. My turn away from naturalism
I am no longer a naturalist, in part, because I no longer think that the success of science is evidence for naturalism. The success of science is really no less expected on the hypothesis that there exist some “non-natural” entities (e.g., abstract objects, such as numbers, irreducibly normative reasons, or propositions).
Additionally, on one view that I find highly plausible, science is in fact in the business of discovering laws of nature, which are themselves irreducible to the physical entities and properties posited by our scientific theories.
Furthermore, I now think that the success of science is one piece of confirmatory evidence for theism (which, as I understand it, is incompatible with naturalism). The intelligibility of nature is evidence for theism insofar as God would desire an intelligible order that can be characterized formally by way of mathematics; the existence of such an order is surprising on non-theistic hypotheses, especially given what theoretical physics tells us of the other ways natural reality could have been. (For more on this and other arguments for theism, see here.)
Conclusion
I believe that the manner in which we conceptualize consciousness is of practical, and not only of philosophical or scientific, significance. Consciousness is the very stuff of existence. Additionally, it is the most fundamental of all the necessary conditions for anything mattering — for if consciousness were illusory, then the world would be absolutely devoid of value. No one would ever have felt love, joy, grief, sorrow, wonder, and the like - and no one would ever have suffered.3
Of course, those who have denied consciousness have nevertheless lived as if they did not. Consciousness denialism truly is the most literally unlivable of all philosophical follies. However, even to pay lip-service to the view (as I once did) is (in my own experience, at least) to inhabit a dimmed, dulled, and unduly disenchanted world; it is to miss the most stunning and incredible fact of existence: Namely, that it is like something to exist (!) - and that in each conscious being, there is a world; a stream of consciousness utterly inaccessible and mysterious to all but its one, unique, irreplicable, and irreplaceable subject.
An illusion for whom, precisely, you might? I would now say that’s a very good question! An illusion, by its nature, has a subject
This is, of course, not to say that reality is merely what it seems; it is not even to say that the mind is merely what it seems. The contents of consciousness can be misleading, but consciousness itself is - ontologically - one and the same as the phenomenon of seeming.
Although there may be non-conscious forms of suffering, I cannot see how anything which lacked consciousness could properly be said to suffer.
Brilliant!
Consciousness is awareness of sensation. It replicates continuously and is therefore the least illusory thing to us. The resolution and precision of what you think you're experiencing is a separate question that does not apply to consciousness as such.