Things That Bother Me by Galen Strawson

Author:Galen Strawson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781681372211
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2018-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

The Silliest Claim

If you got to ask, you ain’t never gonna get to know.

—attributed to LOUIS ARMSTRONG

1

WHAT IS THE SILLIEST CLAIM that has ever been made? The competition is fierce, but I think the answer is easy. Some people have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the “what-it-is-like” of experience. Next to this denial—I’ll call it “the Denial”—every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green.

The Denial began in the twentieth century and it continues today, especially among philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, and workers in artificial intelligence and information technology. How did it happen? I think it had two main causes. The first was the rise of the behaviorist approach in psychology. The second was the general triumph of a wholly naturalistic approach to reality. Both were good things in their way, but both spiraled out of control—and gave birth to the Great Silliness. I want to consider them in turn, and then say something rather gloomy about a third, deeper, darker cause.

Before that, I need to say something about the thing that is being denied—consciousness, conscious experience, experience for short.

What is it?

The answer is easy. Anyone who has ever seen or heard or smelt anything knows what it is—anyone who has ever been in pain, or felt hungry or satiated or hot or cold or remorseful, amazed, dismayed, uncertain, or sleepy, or has suddenly remembered a missed appointment. All these things essentially involve what are sometimes uncomfortably known as “qualia”: different forms of conscious experience, feeling. Conscious experience is private subjective experience with a certain qualitative character that is directly known only to the creature (human, canine, feline, etc.) that is having it. It’s the feeling four-year-old Lucy is aware of when she’s just stubbed her toe and is in great pain, or the thing five-year-old Louis directs his attention to when you give him a new kind of candy and, when he’s sucking it, ask him whether he likes the taste. It’s helpful to consider children, because they already have a very clear idea of what is in question. Ask them about the color they see—some shade of red—when they shut their eyes and look at a light, and then cover their eyes and watch the red grow dim. They know the color isn’t out there in the world. They know—to put it simply—that it’s just “in their minds” (see further, pp. 162–163).

One way to express the Denial is to say that it’s the denial that anyone has ever really had any of the experiences just mentioned. So it’s not surprising that most of the Deniers deny that they’re Deniers. “Of course we agree that consciousness or experience exists.” But when the Deniers say this they mean something quite different by “consciousness” or “experience.” They “looking-glass” or “reversify” these words—where to looking-glass or reversify a word is to use it in such a way that, whatever one means by it, it excludes what it actually means.

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