Incredible though I now find this fact, I once was a consciousness denier: that is, I once denied the reality of consciousness, regarding it as some sort of “illusion”.1 Here, I will simply recount (a) how I came to be a denier, and (b) how I turned from denier to realist (i.e., someone who affirms the manifest reality of consciousness), and (c) why I now believe that when it comes to accounting for consciousness, the only viable positions (or, more accurately, viable families 2 of positions) are dualism (according to which consciousness is ontologically distinct from physical stuff) and panpsychism (according to which the fundamental physical entities are essentially experiential, so that consciousness is a base-level feature of the natural order, rather than an emergent property of brains3).
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 “garlicy-ness” of garlic; the pangs of heartache, and the thrills of joy; the sight of these words on your screen, and the rich tone of a cello; the way your present thought feels in your 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 - it is “what-it’s-likeness”, itself.4 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; only you can know exactly what it is like to be you at any given moment in time (a thought which is perhaps as painfully banal as it is utterly profound).
By my lights, consciousness is the one thing the existence of which 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. Indeed, by my lights, the reality of consciousness is the one and only thing of which I can be completely certain. I am, in this sense, a “consciousness-firster”: I take all theorizing - philosophical or otherwise - to begin with the absolute and undeniable reality of consciousness.
However, as I have said, this was not always so. Before I even began my undergraduate work, I had become convinced that as someone who fancied himself a hard-nosed, rational, scientifically-informed type, I needed to accept the propositions that (a) naturalism is true: there exists nothing beyond those entities and properties that feature in our best scientific theories, and that (b) naturalism is incompatible with the existence of consciousness, understood as suggested above (i.e., as subjective experience). I am now agnostic about (a) but firmly reject (b). However, both propositions remain fairly widely-believed 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 (a) 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 the fundamental elements which figure in contemporary physics (i.e., the subatomic particles - or, perhaps more accurately now, quantum fields). Those, I thought, were the fundamental elements of reality. And, seeing not the slightest reason to attribute consciousness to those entities - and, moreover - not seeing how first-person experience could somehow arise from the combining of myriad non-experiential physical bits (or fields), I determined that consciousness needed, somehow, to be eliminated from my ontology. Therefore, 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). (As my earlier comments indicate, I now regard both positions as complete non-starters. Smart people - including many people much smarter than I - defend them, but the positions are no more tenable for that: one need not have tenure and an impressive list of publications to know that it’s like something to sit on a thumbtack.)
I am now agnostic about whether naturalism is true, in part because I no longer think that the success of science is particularly strong evidence for naturalism: the success of science is, it seems to me, 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). (Indeed, on one [broadly Platonic] view that I find at least plausible, science is in fact in the business of discovering laws of nature, which are themselves not reducible to the physical entities and properties posited by our scientific theories.) So, I would no longer rule out dualism merely on the grounds that (a) this view entails that the mind is something non-natural, and (b) nothing non-natural should be thought to exist.
More importantly, however, I now think that naturalists - like everyone - should take consciousness for granted, for the simple reason that (for the reasons elucidated above) consciousness cannot sensibly be denied (a line developed at length here, by my former dissertation supervisor, Galen Strawson). If naturalism is a defensible worldview (as I believe it to be5), then it must be consistent with the manifest and indubitable reality of consciousness.
As far as I can tell, naturalism is consistent with both of the realist views of consciousness which I identified at the outset: dualism and 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, for example, develops such a view in The Conscious Mind.) And 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”). Panpsychists generally believe that their view is superior to naturalistic dualism insofar as they are not committed to the idea that the experiential somehow “pops” into being out of the wholly non-experiential. (They do not believe that the fundamental physical units have complex minds like ours; only that minds like ours are composed of stuff that is itself experiential.)
I lack any especially strong conviction about which of the two - dualism or panpsychism - is more plausible, let alone about which of the many versions of each view are the best (and I cannot entirely rule out a third view - idealism - according to which reality is at its core mental, so that “the physical” is illusory or, at most, a mere aspect or manifestation of the mental; I do, however, find it incredible6). I am convicted only of the reality of consciousness; it is for this reason that, rather than “a panpsychist” or “a dualist”, I prefer to simply call myself a realist about consciousness (i.e., someone who affirms that consciousness is real).
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; it is, perhaps, the most fundamental of all the necessary conditions for anything’s 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.7 Of course, those who have denied consciousness have nevertheless lived as though they did not; consciousness denialism truly is the most literally unliveable of all the exotic views philosophers have defended. However, even to pay lip-service to the view (as I once did) is (in my own experience, at least) to inhabit a dimmed and unduly unenchanted world; it is to miss the most stunning and incredible facts of existence: namely, that it is like something to exist (!) - and that in each conscious existence, there is a world - a stream of consciousness, utterly inaccessible to all but its one, unique, irreplicable, and irreplaceable subject.
An illusion on…whom, precisely, you might? (I would now say that’s a very good question…)
There are myriad varieties of each, as any contact with the relevant literature will reveal.
This is not to say that minds - at least complex minds - are not emergent properties of brains. Most panpsychists would affirm that minds like ours are products of brains, but will insist that they can be products of brains precisely because the fundamental physical constituents of brains are themselves experiential (if nevertheless incapable of thought).
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.
By which I mean that I think it is possible for a rational and informed person to be a naturalist.
I find idealism less incredible on theism; it seems to me that the idealist needs God to explain the uniformity of experience among persons, in the absence of some shared physical reality - though perhaps this seeming is not well-founded. I have not devoted much though to this issue.
Although there may be non-conscious forms of suffering, I cannot see how anything which lacked consciousness could properly be said to suffer.
What do you think of people who are realists about conscious experience, but somehow Illusionists/eliminativists about the self, the experiencing subject?
To me, this view is as untenable, as "silly", as denial of conscious experience itself. I don't see how one can accept the reality of experience while denying the reality of the experiencer; that which is the bearer of experience. Any thoughts on this?