Consciousness is not a Phenomenon, Part 2: Other People's Windows
Further considerations on a fundamental confusion in philosophy of mind
Last week, we saw that phenomenal consciousness, which is the “stage” upon which the world reveals itself to us as phenomena, is itself not a phenomenon, which makes any account of it—especially in material(ist) terms—exceedingly difficult. But to see just how serious the issue is, we need to move from a consideration of our own consciousness to how we might learn about the phenomenality of other people.
Red things just appear red to me, of course. But let’s say that we set up a little experiment. We find a hallway with a 90° turn. I sit at the corner itself and look down one leg of the hallway. I put a paint swatch at the other end of the hall, but I don’t tell you what color it is. You sit in the other leg of the hallway and look at me. I stare at the paint swatch, focusing on its color (spoiler warning: it’s green).
But what do you see? You see my head, and you see me staring intently. Within my brain, complex neurological activity is happening, which involves information processing that allows my brain-body complex to recognize the color green (understood as a specific hertz value of the electromagnetic radiation that struck my retina). This involves my eyes, the optic nerves, and probably many different sections of my brain. This is complicated, but not fundamentally mysterious. We can describe the process, beginning with the light bouncing off the swatch and ending with a brain state of “seeing green”, and we can describe it in purely mathematical terms. Meanwhile, also, this same process (somehow) results in my consciousness hosting the appearance of the quality of greenness (among many other things).
But where does the quality of greenness occur? Let’s say we isolate the part of my brain that actually process visual information and does the green-seeing. If we were able to install a little transparent window on the side of my head, would we expect to see that part of my brain glowing green?
Obviously not! No one thinks that the brain glows green when we see something green. But then…where does the quality of greenness happen? If we did look at the brain as it saw greenness, we would see a very complex network of neurons firing—small changes in voltage across synapses, as as well some chemical changes as well. Again, this can all be described mathematically, with precision, and we can even generate testable hypotheses about this behavior. Our knowledge about the brain is only advancing, and it seems secure and accurate (and only more so as time advances).
But, in all that advancing, that knowledge has gotten no closer to figuring out where the quality of greenness itself is actually occurring. This is where the different materialist (and materialist-adjacent) philosophies of mind reveal themselves to be fundamentally mismatched with reality as it presents itself to us. For the moment, let’s set eliminativism and “constitutive” models of consciousness to the side and consider epiphenomenalism, which it seems to me is still the dominant school of materialist philosophy of mind, the one which philosophers still hope might prove true.
Epiphenomenalism argues that qualitative states of consciousness are generated by material states of being (basically, brain states), as “epiphenomena”, things that do happen, but which are reducible to some more fundamental mode of existence. Now, there are a host of problems with this basic picture, but here I just want to state the obvious, again: consciousness is not a phenomenon at all. If consciousness isn’t any kind of phenomenon, then it certainly can’t be an epiphenomenon, since this is indeed a type or category of phenomena more generally.
Another way of putting this is that while the quantitative states of material being are basically public, that is, states that anyone can either check or at least potentially could check for themselves, the qualitative presentations to phenomenal consciousness are essentially private, only available to that particular phenomenal consciousness itself. We can’t even begin to theorize “where” this private qualia could be thought to occur within the public space of quantitative measurement and relation.
This is what we saw above when we explored where the quality of greenness itself happened in the brain. We agreed (I hope!) that the part of the brain that processes or renders the experience of seeing-green does not, itself glow green. So, when a person experience greenness, they have a qualitative experience of seeing-green, but their brain does not seem to have that state at all. Their brain certainly does engage in a series of neuronal “processing” that absolutely contains the information “this person is seeing green” (in the form of a complex quantitative set of information), but what it doesn’t contain is actually experiencing the quality of greenness. This is a huge problem, though it’s one that is easily overlooked, because we are so used to either converting other people’s subjective experiences into purely quantitative terms, or of indeed forgetting that other people’s frame of consciousness is not in any way contained in ours to begin with.
It may be easy enough for us to elide the strange alchemy by which the state of our brain engaging in information processing (which is correlated with our experience of seeing green) is confused for that experience , because, after all, that experience of the quality of greenness is just there for us, undeniably and immediately present. We can just place a kind of ontological “black box” between the brain as a material entity and our own qualitative consciousness, and assume that somehow the purely quantitative generates something utterly different from itself, that is, qualitative experience. I think there are huge problems there, but it’s obvious that we often do this pragmatically, and it can be hard to identify the error(s) involved here, because, again, our own consciousness is an assumed frame of reference from within which all of our thinking about anything occurs. It is literally so familiar to us we don’t notice it as something rather wildly marvelous which needs any kind of explanation.
But it is the case that, not only other peoples’ consciousnesses, their phenomenalities, their immediate qualitative experience, do not appear to us whatsoever, but also that the contents of their consciousnesses do not appear to us. This is what we outlined above in our thought experiment with the paint swatch: my experience of the quality of greenness doesn’t show up in your consciousness at all, even though you can infer it if you have the right information about my brain state. Inferring a qualitative state is not the same as actually having, experiencing, or being that qualitative state (in a similar way to how having a picture of a million dollars is not the same as having a million dollars). When we consider other people, we can assume that their brain states must generate, or at least correlate to, their own qualitative experience, but we can never actually verify this. And this is because other people’s qualitative experiences are not phenomena for us at all. Those experiences don’t appear in our lifeworld whatsoever. The brain states that are (definitely, if vaguely) linked to those qualitative experiences, certainly do (or at least can) appear in our consciousness. We can indeed measure those states, and can arrive at all kinds of useful information about other persons’ mental states from such measurements.
But the qualitative experiences themselves never appear, and, after all, it’s those experiences that I think really matter to us. When we worry that someone is in pain, we are worried that they are having the qualitative experience of pain. If there were a “philosophical zombie”1 which had a nervous system, and in that nervous system, a given nerve was firing at a high magnitude, indicating tissue damage, but there was no experience of pain, we would probably not find that ethically worrisome.
But it is precisely because we do assume that other people are not philosophical zombies that we would actually worry if we knew that someone’s nervous system was engaged in such a communication of pain. But the actual qualitative experience of that pain never appears to us at all. We have to, essentially, imagine it for ourselves.
This basic, easily-overlooked, but (I think) unassailable fact about the relation between a quantitative description of the world and the actual qualitative presentation of existence has many ramifications and consequences. But I want to end this piece here. I certainly will have more to say on this topic, in this space, in the future.
A “philosophical zombie”, or, more annoying, a “p-zombie”, is a theoretical human being who exhibits all the same bodily properties as a regular human being, but which lacks any phenomenal consciousness. Such a being is often invoked in discussions of consciousness in analytic philosophy of mind, most famously by Chalmers in The Conscious Mind.
Glad to read your posts again! What I remember from the classical Indian theories of consciousness is that there were mainly two models. (That's without going into things like non-dualism.)
The first is the screen or container model. Consciousness is like a neutral container on which mental and sensory phenomena project themselves. Traditional images for that are like a transparent crystal, a blank screen or an empty vessel.
The second model is that the string of patches of conscious phenomenality *is* what we call consciousness itself, without a separate container-like principle to hold it.
Do I understand right that the approach you are presenting is of the first type? If so, does the second type have a Western equivalent or a name?
It seems to me like the second approach would be a better starting point for physicalist attempt at making sense of consciousness.
"But it is the case that, not only other peoples’ consciousnesses, their phenomenalities, their immediate qualitative experience, do not appear to us whatsoever, but also that the contents of their consciousnesses do not appear to us. This is what we outlined above in our thought experiment with the paint swatch: my experience of the quality of greenness doesn’t show up in your consciousness at all, even though you can infer it if you have the right information about my brain state. Inferring a qualitative state is not the same as actually having, experiencing, or being that qualitative state (in a similar way to how having a picture of a million dollars is not the same as having a million dollars). When we consider other people, we can assume that their brain states must generate, or at least correlate to, their own qualitative experience, but we can never actually verify this. And this is because other people’s qualitative experiences are not phenomena for us at all. Those experiences don’t appear in our lifeworld whatsoever. The brain states that are (definitely, if vaguely) linked to those qualitative experiences, certainly do (or at least can) appear in our consciousness. We can indeed measure those states, and can arrive at all kinds of useful information about other persons’ mental states from such measurements."
I believe "we can never actually verify this" is problematic assertion. It smuggles in the assumption that the phenomenal experience of 'seeing green' is limited to some kind of pure sensory experience, but upon closer inspection we find that the experience of 'seeing green' is always interwoven with the *concept* of 'greenness', and it is in fact these concepts which are shared between relative perspectives. For example if I am looking at a green table from one point in space, and you are looking at it from another point in space (obviously, since our physical body cannot share the same point in space), we undoubtedly have unique experiences of the green table from our relative perspectives. Yet we would nevertheless say we are observing the *same* green table. Why? Because we share the same concept of 'green table' that unites the unique perceptual frames of our experience into a coherent whole.
To use another example, let's say I stretch my arm to take the pen on my desk. There's a whole spectrum of conscious phenomena that are correlated in the most complicated, yet consistent ways. Physically, the motion of my arm, the nerve impulses, and the brain activity are all consistent. But these are only part of the spectrum of conscious phenomena. My idea that I need to take the pen for some purpose, which I experience as activating the will, is also fully correlated with all the other perceptions and is no less valid of a conscious experience than the others. In fact, from my perspective, it is the most important one because it is what brings into harmony all the separate frames of perception of my arm movement. It is true that the real-time idea is not a phenomenon like the sensory phenomena, but as soon as it recedes from real-time perspective, it becomes a phenomenon (a "phenomenon" can be considered anything we can potentially think about or remember, including past thoughts and intents).
So if we return to your example, what would allow the other person to experience the 'seeing green' that I experience? Hypothetically, they would need to resonate with my inner life such that they could figure out the preferences, desires, feelings, thoughts, etc. that 'funneled down' the potential palette of colors I could choose from into the particular decision of using the green paint swatch. It is that inner life of intuitive factors, which are shared across many relative perspectives, that renders our experience of 'seeing green' a potentially shared/objective reality, while only our momentary positioning of sensory organs within 'spacetime' renders the experience unique and 'subjective'. Of course, this is not something that any ordinary person would be sufficiently developed to do, but it is still a conceivable possibility. There is no reason to assume that it is impossible to verify the inner experience from the outset.
And upon further investigation, I think we would find that we are *always* resonating with the inner life of other relative perspectives - hence we can empathize, infer, communicate, etc. - but normally that fact is obscured by our myopic/selfish attention and interests, which is what makes us feel like bubbles of consciousness with our own 'private' inner lives of experience.