Abstract
This paper aims to uncover where the disagreement between illusionism and anti-illusionism about phenomenal consciousness lies fundamentally. While illusionists claim that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, many philosophers of mind regard illusionism as ridiculous, stating that the existence of phenomenal consciousness cannot be reasonably doubted. The question is, why does such a radical disagreement occur? To address this question, I list various characterisations of the term “phenomenal consciousness”: (1) the what-it-is-like locution, (2) inner ostension, (3) thought experiments such as philosophical zombies, inverted qualia and Mary’s room, (4) scientific knowledge about secondary properties, (5) theoretical properties such as being ineffable and being intrinsic, and (6) appearance/reality collapse. Then I examine whether each characterization provides (i) a dubitable sense of phenomenal consciousness in which the existence of phenomenal consciousness can be reasonably doubted, (ii) an indubitable sense in which its existence cannot be reasonably doubted, or (iii) a gray sense in which it is controversial whether its existence can be reasonably doubted. By doing so, I show that there is no single sense of phenomenal consciousness in which illusionists and anti-illusionists disagree whether the existence of phenomenal consciousness can be reasonably doubted. I conclude that the disagreement between illusionists and anti-illusionists is fundamentally terminological: while illusionists adopt a dubitable sense of phenomenal consciousness, anti-illusionists adopt an indubitable sense of phenomenal consciousness. Because of the extreme vagueness and ambiguity of the term “phenomenal consciousness”, illusionists and anti-illusionists fail to see that they talk about different senses of phenomenal consciousness.
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Notes
I prefer “anti-illusionist” to “realist about phenomenal consciousness”, because there is a few exceptional realist philosophers who take illusionism as attractive and not ridiculous at all (see, e.g., Chalmers 2018).
For a similar response, see Strawson (1994, 101).
It is interesting to compare this reaction with the reactions to illusionism of free will. Even philosophers who argue for the existence of free will do not seem to take illusionism of free will as so ridiculous and crazy that we should take a diagnostic or charitable attitude to it (for a detailed debate over illusionism of free will, see Caruso 2013). This difference in attitude may reflect some significant conceptual difference between phenomenal consciousness and free will.
I will cash out the notion of “can reasonably doubt” in Sect. 3.
I do not claim that there is no other example of this sort of debate. One possible example is the one over dialetheism (Priest et al. 2018).
Note that I do not rule out the possibility that some philosophers dispute about whether there exists phenomenal consciousness in a specific sense on the common ground that it can be reasonably doubted. Perhaps, some philosophers agree that phenomenal consciousness is (in part) defined as being such that the functional duplicate of us can lack phenomenal consciousness, and thereon debate whether there exists phenomenal consciousness as such (for this definition of consciousness, see Sect. 4.3). In this case, however, the philosophical debate would look like more straightforward and fruitful; that is, each camp takes the other camp’s claim seriously, understands it to some extent and tries to provide an argument against it. What I am interested in is not something like that but something more confusing and difficult to follow, namely the debate in which each camp seems to argue on different planes.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the general standard to determine whether a reason is good. For this issue, see Thagard (2004, sect. 4).
For an persuasive objection to the interpretation of the “what it is like” notion as being technical, see Farrell (2016).
Mandik (2016) emphasises the emptiness of what-it-is-like definition of phenomenal consciousness in the technical sense.
The reason why he qualifies the scope of the semantic analysis to stereotypical contexts is that there are some untypical usages of the phrase “there is something it is like to x for y to ψ” which do not concern our experiences. One example he uses comes from Snowdon (2010): What will it be like for the British economy to finally enter the Euro-zone? This (ironical) example obviously does not concern psychological effects but the economical effects of the British economy entering the Euro-zone on the British economy itself.
The reason why Stoljar adds “constitutively” in this definition is to rule out some exceptional cases in which S’s feeling is accidentally caused by being in an unconscious state. For instance, one may feel nausea by having an unconscious desire to do something morally bad. Since the unconscious desire does not always co-occur with a feeling such as the feeling of nausea, it does not satisfy the constitutive condition.
It may be controversial whether inner ostension can work for experiential terms as outer ostension works for non-experiential terms such as animal names. One might argue that inner ostension must be private and that private inner ostension does not work as it is intended to do (Wittgenstein 1973). In response, Goldstein (1996) persuasively argues that inner ostension does not need to be private. Agreeing with him, this paper assumes that inner ostension is available to define experiential terms. However, even if it turns out that inner ostension is not available to define experiential terms, it does not mean that phenomenal consciousness does not exist. It only means that the characterisation of the term “phenomenal consciousness” in terms of inner ostension should be discarded. The what-it-is-like definition of phenomenal consciousness remains intact.
One may wonder how inner ostension can define/characterise a term as referring to something beyond a token experience to which I actually attend. When I say that I call this kind of experience “phenomenal migraine experience”, how is the scope of “this kind” determined? There are two views, metaphysical and epistemic. The metaphysical view is that there exists a metaphysical structure about experiential kinds and the scope of definition/characterisation of an experiential term based on inner ostension is in part determined by the metaphysical structure of the experience that is attended to. This is analogous to the view on which the scope of the term “hug devil” is in part determined by the biological characteristics of the animal that I actually point to when giving ostensive definition to the term. In contrast, the epistemic view is that the scope of the definition/characterisation of an experiential term based on inner ostension is determined by the subject’s relevant recognitional/epistemic capacities. This is analogous to the view on which the scope of the term “hug devil” is determined by my recognitional/epistemic capacities available to identify which animal is a hug devil. I leave open which view to adopt.
Although there may be more detailed analyses of how different they are, I leave it open and stick with this general characterisation in this paper.
There may be a good reason to doubt the conceivability of the thought experiments presented above. For instance, it may be argued that philosophical zombies are inconceivable (Marcus 2004). If the thought experiments turn out to be inconceivable (despite its opposite appearance), the case for E-TE disappears. Given this possibility, it may be that the existence of X that satisfies E-TE can be reasonably doubted. Accordingly, the sense of “phenomenal consciousness” given by the what-it-is-like definition with E-TE may turn out to be dubitable. Since I do not think that this point is directly related to the dispute between anti-illusionists and illusionists, I ignore this issue in this paper.
Although I doubt that colour science really implies that external objects cannot instantiate experiential colour, I do not discuss this issue in this paper. See Maund (2019) for a comprehensive review on this issue.
Although it has been actually debated whether or not phenomenal experience is intrinsic (Block 2003), there is almost no one who endorses the view that phenomenal consciousness is ineffable and/or radically private.
One might insist that what philosophers typically have in their mind when mentioning the appearance/reality collapse is the stronger conditional claim that if it appears to me that I have a specific kind of experience, then I have the specific kind of experience. This may be correct, but there is a dialectical reason to focus on the weaker conditional claim. The aim of this paper is to uncover the fundamental disagreement between illusionists and anti-illusionists. And it has recently been widely accepted that the stronger conditional claim can be reasonably doubted (Schwitzgebel 2012; see also Williamson 2000, chap. 4). As I have mentioned in the Introduction, it may even be intuitive that we sometimes make mistakes about the details of our phenomenal experiences. Given this, the stronger conditional claim does not seem to be a point of dispute, since anti-illusionists would not claim that it cannot be reasonably doubted. Rather, it should be at best counted as a theoretical claim, which attributes a distinctive epistemic property to phenomenal consciousness. Thus, I focus on the weaker conditional claim, which (1) illusionists may deny and (2) anti-illusionists would think to be doubtless.
Illusionists may raise another objection to CAR*. The acceptance of CAR* implies that we have a special kind of epistemic access to our feelings, which can be called “acquaintance”. However, it is unclear how acquaintance can be realized in a physicalist framework (Frankish 2016a, sect. 3.1). This objection seems to work only when a feeling is regarded as different from physical and functional properties. In other words, the objection also seems to depend on M-TE. If a feeling is identical to a certain neural state, for example, we can imagine a self-monitoring neural mechanism (1) whose function is to monitor the neural state and (2) which is in part constituted by the neural state itself. The self-monitoring mechanism cannot be activated to produce the appearance that I have a feeling unless I actually have the feeling, since the feeling is a constituent of the mechanism itself. We can think that acquaintance is realized by the self-monitoring neural mechanism; this is compatible with a physicalist framework. On the other hand, if a feeling is different from physical and functional properties, it is certainly unclear how acquaintance can be explained in a physicalist framework.
I have assumed that the what-it-is-like notion is ordinary. But if the notion is technical, the five characterisations (IO, TE, SK, TC and AR) can be used to theoretically characterise the what-it-is-like notion with some formal revisions.
As we have seen in Sect. 4.4, the theoretical claims should not be counted as defining the term “phenomenal consciousness”. This is why I only take M-TE here.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Benedicte Veillet, François Kammerer, Katsunori Miyahara, Koji Ota, Matthieu Koroma and Uriah Kriegel for their detailed comments on this paper. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number: 18K00031).
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Niikawa, T. Illusionism and definitions of phenomenal consciousness. Philos Stud 178, 1–21 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01418-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01418-x