Abstract
In this paper I scrutinise, out of the many contributions that Ted Honderich has made to current philosophy, some of the arguments and claims he develops as part of his Actualist analysis of consciousness. It is argued that his conviction that physicalism is wrong is not solidly supported, although interesting issues are raised by his arguments. It is also argued that his account of perceptual consciousness seems inconsistent and is also not strongly supported. The points proposed here are intended to fit with the general idea that the nature of consciousness is not something that philosophy can properly determine.
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Notes
- 1.
I discussed an earlier version of Professor Honderich’s views on consciousness in Snowdon P. F. (2006). The main change since then is that he no longer wants to treat the actual objective things around as the external components of perceptual experience, but to postulate as components in perceptual experience things which are external in a different sense.
- 2.
I shall not focus on this tripartite division in the body of the paper, but doubts can be raised. One doubt is that the list is not comprehensive—it seems to leave out such experiences as pains, itches, dreams, and after images. Another doubt is what the third affective category is supposed to cover. It would not be true to say that wanting in general is an experience, and so it seems not to belong to what we mean by consciousness, although it might be something of which we are conscious (in one sense of that word).
- 3.
By the “two great fairy tales” Honderich means the views that are standardly called “physicalism” and “dualism.”
- 4.
I hope that this rather compressed list makes sense to readers. If it does not, it does not matter for the critical point I wish to make.
- 5.
The suggestion is not that having an experience is equivalent to being conscious, but that to be conscious it is necessary to be having an experience, and the phenomenon that strikes philosophers as puzzling is the more general one of experience, rather than the more limited one of consciousness.
- 6.
There is some resemblance here with what might be called a big mistake that Descartes made in his arguments. Descartes could not believe that anything consisting solely of matter could think. The question this conviction raises is how Descartes could know what things made of matter could do. He has some reason to wonder how things made of matter as he knew it could do this, but he had no reason to believe that he knew much about the real nature of matter. Rather than concluding that material things cannot think, he could have concluded, provisionally at least, that there was matter of a kind he did not know about.
- 7.
The list occurs on pages 102 to 103 of Honderich (2017).
- 8.
I have re-written the passage slightly by eliminating some paragraph divisions in the original.
- 9.
Again, the quotation ignores the presence of some paragraph indentations.
- 10.
Thinking about the spatiality of the subjective room also raises the question as to whether it has three dimensions. It must have if I can walk around in it—but then what are its dimensions? Where does it start?
- 11.
Again I have jumped between paragraphs. It might be said that I have failed to note some of the features that are on the promised list and which ground the description as “physical,” and so have failed to realise the full weight in favour of describing them as physical. One element I have not placed any weight on is that subjective worlds are, as Honderich suggests, available for investigation by science. I concede that this is not properly investigated here. I would say though that it is one thing to simply affirm they are available for investigation by science, quite another to indicate and explain what sorts of investigations by science are possible of subjective worlds as they are envisaged.
- 12.
I argue for this in a general way in Snowdon (2015).
- 13.
I am very grateful for Professor Honderich’s response to the earlier version of this paper that I read at the conference in London, and also to others involved in that conference, including Paul Coates, Tim Crane, and Barry Smith.
References
Honderich, Ted. 2017. MIND: Your being conscious is what and where? Chicago: Chicago University Press. Cited page numbers are to the penultimate draft and not the published version.
Snowdon, Paul F. 2006. Radical externalisms. Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (7–8): 187–198.
———. 2015. Philosophy and the mind/body problem. In Mind, self and person, ed. A. O’Hear, 21–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Snowdon, P. (2018). Honderich on Consciousness. In: Caruso, G. (eds) Ted Honderich on Consciousness, Determinism, and Humanity. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66754-6_3
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