by Katalin Balog
Not so long ago, people had a very different concept of the mind and human nature. Our European heritage is a vision of the body as our mortal coil which we feel and command with our soul. The soul was thought to be immortal and exempt from the laws of nature so that our actions are not determined by anything outside of the boundaries of the soul. Souls of all sorts, of angels and spirits in addition to humans, permeated the universe. The universe was an ordered cosmos with human beings at the center of it with a very special role to play in it. It was commonly held that only the soul can truly exhibit creativity and intelligence which no mere mechanism could replicate. Dreams and visions were considered important messengers. All this is quite intuitive; and its remnants are probably deeply ingrained in the everyday manner in which we still think about ourselves. Descartes – who was also one of the founders of modern science – gave voice to many of these views in his philosophy and his influence on the field remains to this day.
During the last three hundred years, and especially in the 20th century, science has ushered in monumental changes in how we think about ourselves. It has become common knowledge that the mind and the brain are tied together in a systematic way. But what proved most consequential is the tremendous progress of physics, and in particular the idea, generally endorsed by scientists and philosophers, that every physical event can be fully explained in terms of prior physical causes. Since physical events include the movements of our bodies through space, it follows that our actions have purely physical causes. Since this leaves no room for the independent causal agency of the soul, belief in an immaterial, immortal soul not determined by physical reality has steadily declined. Materialism – or, as it has recently been dubbed, physicalism – the view that everything in the universe, including minds, is fundamentally physical, is ascendent. According to physicalism, mental processes – like feeling hungry or believing that most kangaroos are left-handed – happen in virtue of complicated physical processes in the brain. The recent rise of artificial intelligence is calling into question the uniqueness of human creativity, the very idea of distinctly human activities such as storytelling, poetry, art, music. Some predict that artificial intelligence, even perhaps soon, will be able to replicate every aspect of our humanity, except, arguably though controversially, conscious experience. There is not much about the premodern conception that has survived these changes, except the view that we are conscious beings, i.e., that there is, in Thomas Nagel’s expression, something it is like to be us. There is something it is like to hear the waves lapping against the shore or seeing water shimmering in a glass. Being a human being who perceives the world, and who thinks and feels, comes with a phenomenology of which we can be directly aware.
As far as I know, no one has questioned the existence of consciousness before the 20th century, at least in the Western tradition (see this not entirely convincing article arguing that at least one school of Indian Buddhist philosophy was already skeptical about consciousness thousands of years ago). Descartes’s Cogito is based on the very idea that when we reflect on our own thinking (by which Descartes means any conscious state), its reality is the one thing we cannot be deluded about, even if we are deluded about everything else, even if there is no world at all outside of our minds. Reflection on what is involved in awareness of our own minds – in introspection, that is – reveals why this is so. For example, when I reflect on my feeling angry, I know for sure that I do have feelings (that I am not, as philosophers like to put it, a “zombie”) and that I am feeling angry (and not, e.g., languid). I don’t need any other evidence for it beyond having the experience itself, and no further empirical evidence – e.g., evidence coming from the neuro-sciences – could dislodge it. It is an example of what Descartes calls “clear and distinct” understanding.
But in the early 20th century, philosophical behaviorists like Gilbert Ryle have broached the possibility of error in our introspection. He eschewed the first-person perspective so prominent in Cartesianism and made the third person the cornerstone of all knowledge and meaning. According to him, there is nothing more to consciousness than certain dispositions for discrimination, for verbal response, etc. Here is a prominent late 20th century detractor of consciousness, Daniel Dennett:
It is your ability to describe ‘the red stripe,’ your judgment, your willingness to make the assertions you just made, and your emotional reactions (if any) to ‘the red stripe’ that is the source of your conviction that there is a subjective red stripe. (Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, 2018)
Conviction in the existence of consciousness is stubborn, due to its glaring obviousness. But in recent years, illusionists – as its prominent proponent, Keith Frankish has started to call the view – have been on the attack. The view is spreading from the halls of academia to popular media. Illusionists are ready with an explanation of why we cling to our belief in consciousness: the mind doesn’t know itself in introspection; it rather misrepresents itself as being conscious when in fact nothing of the sort is the case. They would have us believe that consciousness is a giant hoax, something like the hoax of Descartes’ Evil Demon conjuring up the illusion of a world, only worse. Our knowledge of our own mind seems safe from tempering by the Demon but it isn’t; it is not only potentially but in fact nothing but illusions. If this view is right, no one has ever felt the pangs of jealousy or the thrill of first love, not at least in the sense that there would be something it is like to undergo such experiences. This view is an attack on the last vestiges of the premodern concept of the mind. We got from a concept of mind that assigned humans a very special and central place in the universe to illusionism: an understanding of the mind stripped of just about every feature that once assured us of our unique importance and purpose, one that denies the reality of even the most intimately known, and central feature of the mind, consciousness.
This is, of course, a shockingly implausible idea. But absurd as it appears on its face, it is gaining momentum. Illusionism is based on an imperialistic view of science’s domain – we might call it scientism – founded in two dogmas. One is that science has already satisfactorily demonstrated that our universe is purely physical: no God, no soul, no “spooky”, non-physical qualities to our experience. The other is that, consequently, the physical sciences play a special (authoritative) role in all inquiry. It is not just that science cannot be overruled by any other kind of inquiry – which sounds kind of reasonable – but that whatever cannot be demonstrated or understood from the objective perspective of science – and consciousness is notoriously beyond the grasp of third person scientific methods and concepts – doesn’t really exist.
Granted, science and philosophy can and have gone against deeply held common sense views. Obvious examples concern the nature of physical objects (containing mostly empty space), the nature of causation (not an inner, unobservable force), or, more controversially, the nature of the self (not a mental substance) and free will (not incompatible with determinism). But the case of experience is not like that. There are no scientific discoveries incompatible with the existence of conscious experience; and there are no decisive philosophical arguments against it, much less a demonstrable incoherence in our concept of it. Though this is a complicated and much debated philosophical question (see here), it is tenable to claim that the existence of consciousness is compatible with a purely physical universe. But even if it turned out, as David Chalmers argues, that subjective experience cannot exist in a purely physical universe, it would be more reasonable to give up belief in the universe being purely physical than give up the belief in consciousness. So, it is not some overwhelming theoretical reason, accepted on balance and reluctantly in the face of the objections of common sense, that draws its adherents to illusionism. What is it, then?
Illusionists pride themselves on doing away with the last remnants of our inflated, premodern view of ourselves. Just as it turned out to be a baseless phantasy that we are immaterial souls capable of influencing matter independently, so it goes that consciousness is a fiction as well. The attraction of illusionism is exactly that it is counterintuitive. Its adherents take themselves to be hardnosed thinkers following reason wherever it leads. Scientifically minded philosophers find illusionism exciting in the way, e.g., Darwinism was exciting in the 19th century, precisely because it was unseating our cherished views about ourselves. The difference is that illusionists lack real scientific reasons for denying consciousness. Nevertheless, they persist in the view that illusionism is allied to science while those who insist on common sense about consciousness and introspection are mere reactionaries.
One might think illusionists are engaged in a merely academic dispute, but I think this is a mistake. The effects of illusionism bubble over into other areas. What makes illusionism particularly worrisome is its consequences for humanistic concerns. By dismissing consciousness, illusionism indirectly dismisses the most fundamental way in which we understand ourselves and each other: through reflection on our conscious experience. Furthermore, if consciousness doesn’t exist, then humanistic studies appealing to experience in explaining history, politics, art, or morality can’t be of much value. Better to stick to cognitive neuroscience, or other quantitative methods when studying behavior. This seems to be the view of some illusionists. Keith Frankish, for example, suggests that cognitive science should eliminate talk about conscious experience and replace it with talk about “quasi-phenomenal” properties. In this way, illusionism fits into an already existing trend of hostility toward the humanities, in favor of fields of knowledge that yield quantifiable material benefits. But in truth, the cognitive and neurosciences have only made modest inroads in explaining what makes us tick. The things that matter, our emotional lives, our values, our aspirations, loves and passions can be best studied and appreciated the old-fashioned way, by reflection and contemplation. There has been little contribution on the part of the sciences to a serious self-understanding. And even if the sciences in the future will have greatly enhanced our understanding of human psychology in a general way, the task of understanding ourselves, of appreciating our feelings and dilemmas could not be accomplished without directly introspecting and reflecting on our conscious mental life. As Kierkegaard said: …
this is the wonder of life, that each man who is mindful of himself knows what no science knows, since he knows who himself is.
If allowed to seep into the way we understand ourselves, illusionism is likely to have a negative effect on our moral outlook as well. Illusionism is unable to fully account for moral value and therefore also have trouble accounting for the moral worth of sentient beings. To illustrate the point, consider the following thought experiment. Suppose there was a super-intelligent organism, let’s call her Zombie-Mary, with a nod to Frank Jackson’s (1982) super-scientist Mary (a video depicting Jackson’s famous Mary argument can be found here). Zombie-Mary is physically like us and behaves like us but lacks any conscious experience; she is a creature of pure thought. When she sees a roadside accident, she has no “gut reaction” to it: in addition to not having a conscious experience of color, sound, etc., she feels no aversion, no horror, no sadness, or, as the case might be, no morbid curiosity. When she is with her loved one, she feels no love or joy from their presence. She could know a tremendous amount about humans in biological, neuronal, and information-processing terms – but she has never experienced the myriad ways in which something can be painful or joyful. According to a widely held view, value is grounded in affectively valanced conscious experience; which means that Zombie-Mary does not only lack an understanding of pain and joy, but also of the badness of pain and the goodness of joy. Consequently, she is incapable of having moral concepts. Illusionists up till now haven’t embraced this consequence of their view, nevertheless, it is hard to escape the conclusion that on an illusionist view, our moral concepts are illusory as well, an astonishingly corrosive and unhealthy way of regarding ourselves.
Of course, I don’t believe illusionists are correct, but a mere belief in illusionism might, by itself, lead to morally detrimental real-life consequences. If we think others lack consciousness, we might be less reluctant to cause harm to them. This connection seems to have some empirical corroboration. For example, in a study on mind perception, the authors have found that people want to avoid harming other creatures to the degree that they attribute to them the capacity for conscious experience. Illusionism completes the zombification of the mind by denying that anything is good or bad in the way we had thought, or that humans have moral worth in the way we thought; that, too, is an illusion. It invites us to think of humans in the same way most of us think about robots: unfeeling, meaningless (meat)-machines.
Illusionism is not a wide-spread view at this point. But it might be the canary in the coal mine. A look at its wider significance might give us a clue why. Are people outside academia ready for a turn toward zombification? The situation is different than it had been prior to the twentieth century. Everyone used to take it for granted that it is through lived experience that we primarily relate to the world and the good or bad in it, and it wasn’t controversial that awareness of experience is a crucial component of self-knowledge, and, through empathy and imagination, of knowledge of other people. Now we can think about ourselves not only as conscious subjects but also as information processors, or a collection of neurons firing away in our skulls. We are all of that – yet the third person story now threatens to take over. Illusionism is of a piece of the view – quite widespread, though also widely challenged – that animals are not conscious. It even has a remote resonance with racialized views of consciousness, which prove that humans are capable of thinking of other humans – even if not of themselves – as unconscious. All of these views were based on prioritizing the third-person perspective over the first-person, and all of them, like illusionism, were helped along by political and cultural forces.
I worry that those forces in our anxious, catastrophizing age are making us more susceptible to illusionism. Advances in neuroscience and the development of AI make it more believable that we, too, are simply machines. It appears that Descartes’ view of animals as mindless robots is inching toward acceptance as a view of humans. From metaphor, robots have become our shadows; our refuge from ourselves. The self-alienation involved in this view is part of a general alienation from the world, embodied in techno phantasies of virtual worlds. When we look at the angel again:
what do we see? The inward gaze of quiet contemplation or a look of blindness to what lies within?
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