Consciousness is not a Phenomenon, Part 1: Forgetting Our Window

Exploring a fundamental confusion in philosophy of mind

This guy’s got it all figured out…

The question of what consciousness is has long interested—and perplexed—philosophers. Plato’s dialogue in the Phaedo, for example, is (in part) an effort to work out what consciousness might be. But the quest for an understanding of consciousness intensified in the latter part of the 20th century, at least within English-language philosophy. Contemporary Philosophy of mind developed in order to make sense of consciousness, to explain how consciousness could be fitted into the materialist ontology which had, by that time, become unquestionably dominant within most of academic philosophy.

However, after many decades of earnest work, the effort to arrive at a decisive answer to the question of how consciousness might arise from the brain seems no closer to success today than it did in 1950; indeed, in many ways, the pendulum seems to have shifted. More and more philosophers seem dubious that any materialist explanation of consciousness will be forthcoming.¹

Now, there is much to say about all of this, both in making sense of the materialist strategies in philosophy of mind (eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, and “constitutivism”) as well as in the premises, assumptions, and biases that informed those efforts, and the fact that non-materialist or semi-materialist efforts to develop a philosophy of mind have not necessarily been any more successful (at least, so far). Philosophy of mind is an extremely complex and confusing group of discourses. I intend to write about it plenty in this space, but I will have to make sure I only bite off as much as I can chew each week.

So today I want to offer a general remark about a fundamental confusion that I see in much of philosophy of mind discourse—materialist or otherwise. It’s a confusion that I think helps to explain why so much of the writing on this subject is so often so fruitless and opaque.

First off, though, let’s (briefly!) define this word I keep using,: “consciousness”. It’s a word we use in English to denote a number of related, but distinct, things or ideas. For example, if we ask if someone is conscious, what we often mean is simply “awake”. Likewise, when we speak about consciousness, we sometimes just mean “thinking” in the sense of cognitive processes (drawing in sense impressions and organizing them rationally, etc.).

Now, wakefulness and cognition are two states or activities that we have increasingly better understanding of. Neurology has developed massively over the last century, and we now have a pretty solid understanding of how our sensory organs connect to our brains, and how densely complex networks of neurons in our brains “fire” and interact with each other to allow for information processing (to draw an analogy with computers). We have isolated certain areas of the brain that seem responsible for specific functions, such as visual processing, the regulation of heartbeat and breathing, long-term memories, short-term memories, facial recognition, etc. etc. The brain is an extremely complex entity that engages in a vast suite of cognitive functions. And we can understand all of this activity on basically materialist grounds.²

But none of this is what we mean when, in philosophy of mind, we wonder about “consciousness”. David Chalmers put it well when he separated what he called the “easy” problems of consciousness—basically, what we outlined above—from the “hard” problem of consciousness, which is what gets all the attention in philosophy of mind.³

The hard problem of consciousness seeks to understand not the functioning of the brain, but rather the bare facticity that the world appears to us in (or as) consciousness at all. That is to say, “there is something it is like to be” a human brain (or person, or soul). We might isolate this specific meaning of consciousness by calling it “phenomenal consciousness” or even just “phenomenality”. When we explain the brain’s behavior, we can do so via an irreducibly quantitative description: the brain is a vast system of particles (sometimes waves!), and those particles can be described purely in quantitative (that is to say, mathematical) terms: this atom of oxygen is located at x, y, z location, and it has the properties it has because it has 8 protons, and those protons generate specific behaviors in various contexts due to the fundamental forces, which are mathematically describable as fields.

All well and good! But if we consult our own immediate experience (that is, do some phenomenology!) we find there not quantitative values or magnitudes, but rather qualitative presentations—what analytic philosophers of mind often like to call “qualia”. The experience of redness seems qualitatively different than the experience of purpleness, for example—even though we know that purple is really the same kind of energy as red, only at a higher frequency. Meanwhile, the experience of hearing a sound is just different from seeing any color, even though neurologically both would be reduced to a quantity (with the measurement of the light-quantity, in hertz, being much higher than the sound-quantity). And of course, as we add to this affect (emotional states) and the “feeling” of a concept as we consider it, we have a vast collection of qualitative states, or presentations.

Chalmers’s hard problem is, in essence, to figure out how a quantitative state can somehow generate, render, be transformed into, present as, or otherwise result in a qualitative presentation. This, it turns out, is an unanswerable question (at least so far). But as I said, today, I don’t want to try and dig into the details of philosophers’ titanic struggles to answer this question. I just want to clarify the question itself by pointing out what I think is often missed in these discussions: just how massive the gap between realms of the quantitative and the qualitative truly is.

Our own phenomenal consciousness, it must be first said, does not appear to us as any kind of “state”, as any kind of thing at all. Rather, our own consciousness is more like the field, or window, or “stage” (as Husserl put it) upon which or through which everything else appears. This makes talking about consciousness very difficult, because our language has evolved to help us talk about the things that appear within consciousness, and it assumes consciousness as a frame of reference but without ever referring to the frame itself. Our words describe the kinds of things that appear within consciousness, and help us to figure out how those things can interact with each other, but they have to assume that setting first, before we can use them. If we are asking about the setting itself—why there should be any frame of consciousness to begin with—we find that our words can’t operate very well there, any better than a human can operate above the earth’s atmosphere (without quite a lot of help).

In other words, our language(s) have developed in order to help us talk about phenomena (singular: phenomenon): things like trees, the feeling of anger, mathematical entities, and the concept of causality. Each of these are things that we can sense, feel, or think about. They appear within consciousness. We build our view of the world by systematically relating all the phenomena we have familiarity with.

Phenomenality is, as I said, the stage upon which phenomena arise, present themselves, and interact. But this means something critically important: phenomenality—that is, consciousness—is not a phenomenon. Consciousness itself does not appear as a phenomenon for us, because it is the very “place” where phenomena occur. In one sense, it is always “there”, always available to us, in many ways available as us, but it is also perfectly “transparent”; it is, as I suggested above, like a window through which we see everything else. But the window itself, being perfectly transparent, we don’t notice at all.

Now, this is all true when we consider our own consciousness. But we can see just how serious and deep the problem is by simply asking about other people’s frames of consciousness. And that’s just what we will do when we continue next week.

Consciousness is not a Phenomenon, Part 2: Other People's Windows

1. Undoubtedly, David Chalmers’s The Conscious Mind, published in 1994, was a decisive turn in the discourse, at least in analytic philosophy. Since then, though, there has been not only a revival of dualist philosophy of mind, but also of panpsychism and other non-materialist or semi-materialist approaches.

2. That is to say, methodological materialism, though ultimately, perhaps, not ontological materialism.

3. It can be helpful to use a new technical term for “consciousness” when we mean it in this sense. I sometimes like to use the term phenomenality here, but I will often switch back and forth between this term and others (such as “phenomenal consciousness”), in part because I don’t want jargon to get in the way of comprehension.