Of dogs and cows
Are dogs
conscious? My guess, you think so: that’s why they’re termed “sentient.” We
assume that dogs see the world much as we do, despite being receptive to
different information; they experience the same conscious data of sense as we
experience. You, nevertheless, might be prepared to concede the ultimate
unfathomability of the question, but if not, consider a related question: when
did consciousness first arise in the course of organic evolution?
The reason
the questions are obscure deserves scrutiny. I think I know you’re conscious because you say you
know what I’m saying when I mention “consciousness” or “experience,” but the
limits of my knowledge of consciousness are telling: I will never find some
physical structure to explain it. This isn’t due to lack of empirical research
or of theoretical ingenuity. To explain an observation, you must describe it,
and the language used for describing conscious experience is the same language
used for describing the object the experience refers to. The most I can do to
describe the experienced “brownness” is achieved by referring to its cause.
When I see a brown cow, I can only describe the raw experience as “brown”: the
color that ordinarily gives rise to the experience. Thus, I necessarily omit from the description exactly what I want to explain: the qualitative
character of the “brown” experience.
Apparent self-evidence
If
qualitative consciousness existed, it would be utterly inexplicable; yet, the
evidence of direct experience seems self-evidently to support its own
existence. This seemingly immediate awareness of our raw mental states seems to
be just what it is like to be ourselves. (Thomas Nagel.) Regardless of the
apparent indubitability of the intuition that we have raw experiential states,
this intuition remains nothing more than belief, and beliefs are subject to
illusions that mislead us systematically.
One reason you
might resist the conclusion that qualitative experience is illusory is that wholesale
distortion of reality regarding objects of seemingly immediate awareness seems
implausible just because of our intimate connection with our own experience, but scientific developments can render seemingly unrelated philosophical positions
plausible. The work of neurologists, such as Oliver Sacks, should
caution against the prejudice that some experiences are so basic they resist
radical distortion and fabrication. An example Sacks describes is a
brain-damaged patient who mistook his wife for a hat. Neuroscientists conclude
that cognitive functions are assemblies of modules, making it less startling
that beliefs can be so radically wrong.
There’s
also a conceptual reason for the reluctance of philosophers and scientists to
reject the intuition of raw sense experience: lack of clarity about how to
characterize the prewired belief responsible for the illusion. The intuition
seems too complex and sophisticated to accommodate innate belief; philosophers
trying to nail down the precise content of the belief that qualia exist have
had recourse to thought experiments remote from actual experience, and nobody
seems to have characterized the essence of qualia. My suggestion: the illusion of qualitative awareness is the belief that when we perceive or imagine objects we have independently real experiences characterizable
only by the terms used to describe the external object itself. Qualia are inherently ineffable contents of
perception or imagination.
The illusion’s
evolution
This
definition suggests an evolutionary explanation for the illusion of
qualitative experience. Thought doesn’t depend on the illusion of
consciousness, as one can easily conceive of an intelligent being without
illusory beliefs about the nature of the thinking process, but the illusion of
consciousness might have encouraged the development of thinking. Perhaps human
ancestors evolved the innate belief that they have experiences with properties
corresponding to those of their referents because this belief encouraged them to make mental models of the world—encouraged them to engage in the
offline thinking unique for our species. Objectified conscious experience could
encourage mental-model making by generalizing the prior insight that you can predict
one external object by manipulating a similar external object. Our ancestors would
then need only substitute internal objects for external ones.
Bypassing “sense data”
in the theory of knowledge
According
to one longstanding theory in epistemology, sense data are our only basis for
knowing the external world. This doctrine, taken to its logical conclusion,
leads to skepticism about the external world’s existence: sense data,
supposedly our window to the world, became an insuperable barrier to cognition,
for if all our knowledge is nothing but construction from sense data, our sense
data are all we know. We can’t get out of our own minds.
The reason
the sense data theory leads to skeptical conclusions goes back to ineffability.
If we know the world by sense data, you can draw conclusions about the world
only through analogy, that is, by forming a relationship between two descriptions.
Ineffable sense data have nothing in common with a world of things, except
their names—such as “brownness.”
Two illusions
This
account of raw experience as an adaptive illusion brings clarity to the
argument that free
will is illusory. The sense of free will, I concluded, is the misperception
that experienced deciding causes behavior. But “experience” doesn’t exist. Compatibilist free will is incoherent because
it assumes the causal efficacy of unreal raw experience.
See also the overlapping 16.1. The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem.
See also the overlapping 16.1. The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem.
