Chapter One: What's the Problem

What is the world made of?

• The present juncture
  
• "At the start of the twenty-first century many people use the term 'consciousness' quite unproblematically in everyday language to refer to their own inner experiences or awareness." (p. 7)
• "It is not synonymous with 'mind', which has many other meanings and uses, and seems to have lost some of its mystery." (p. 7)
• "At the same time we are rapidly learning how the brain works."  ... We might expect all this knowledge to have clarified the nature of conscious awareness, but it doesn't seem to have done so."
•  The Explanatory Gap
  
• "In many other areas of science, increasing knowledge has made old philosophical questions obsolete."
• Biology: "no one now agonizes over the question 'What is life?'" or hypothesizes (if that's the right word for such posits) an immaterial "life force" or "vital spirit" to explain the various life-functions.
• Psychology: few we still agonize over the questions "What is cognition?" and "What is perception?" no one hypothesizes an immaterial "thought force" to explain the various mental (n.b.) functions,
• example functions
• cognitive: inference
•  perceptual: object recognition
• presumably there are neurophysiological mechanisms responsible
• widely held that these are some sort of computational mechanism
• Might consciousness go the same way as vital spirit -- could we discover that there really never was such a thing as consciousness?
  
• But what of my seemingly undeniable conscious self-awareness ... there's the rub.
• I know how my experiences can mislead me about the world: what looks longer might not be
  
• But how can I be misled about the experience itself: that it does indeed look this way 
  
• Dualism ("mind"-body)
• "we tend to end up talking about two incompatible kinds of stuff" (p.8)
• objective vs. subjective reality
• material vs. immaterial reality
• body vs. mind
• "These subjective and objective worlds seem to be too different from each other to be related at all."  (p.9)

Philosophical Theories

• Monist Theories
  
• Idealism: There are only "minds" or "experiences": subjective idealism (George Berkeley (1685-1753)): bodies are just bundles of conscious "ideas" or experiences.
• Materialism: There is only matter.  Minds or states of consciousness are material processes and nothing more.
•   Other Evasions
• Epiphenomenalism: T. H. Huxley (1825-95): physical events cause mental events, but mental events have no effect on physical events.
• Panpsychism: "the view that mind is fundamental to the universe, and that all matter has associated mental aspects or properties, however primitive." (p.11)
• Dualism
• Cartesian Substance Dualism (René Descartes 1596-1650)
• Matter: extended unthinking stuff
• Minds: unextended thinking things
• Interaction problem: "The insuperable problem ... is how the mind interacts with the body when the two are made of different substances."
• "Physical events in world and the brain must somehow give rise to experiences ...."
• Conscious experiences must somehow give rise to physical events in the brain and world
  
• Descartes' solution: "the two interacted through the pineal gland at the center of the brain" (p.13): says where ... but how?   That's the question. 
• Recent interactionist dualism (Eccles & Popper)
• "argued that the critical processes in the synapses of the brain are so finely poised that they can be influenced by a non-physical thinking and feeling self." (13-14)
an updated version of Descartes minimization tack: says how much but not how

• Dualism Dismissed
• "Almost all contemporary scientists and philosophers agree on this.". (p.13)
• Ryle dismissed it as the "dogma of the Ghost in the Machine"
  
• "accepting dualism is giving up" (Dennett 1991: 37)

Consciousness in Psychology

• William Jame's classic Principles of Psychology characterization: "Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and their conditions." (p. 14)
• the phenomena  conscious experiences
<>
• their conditions = neurophysiological causes or accompaniments
  
• Unconscious psychological phenomena
• Herman von Helmholz (1821-94) proposed "that perceptions are unconscious inferences"
• Moving James to recognize "unconscious cerebration" as being (perhaps) also among the phenomena of mental life
• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) proposed unconscious processes at the root of many kinds of psychological disturbance and mental illness
• Phenomenology
• Edmund Husserl (1838-1917): proposed descriptive science of consciousness.
• The precursor of (mid-twentieth century) Existentialism
• Stress on intentionality -- the meaning or aboutness --characteristic of certain mental states
  
• Introspectionism
• Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920): "the father of experimental psychology"
  
• Proposed a science of consciousness that was
  
• experimental: introspective observations carried out by trained "Observers" under controlled conditions.
• analytic: aim not just to describe experience but to discover the "chemistry" (so to speak) of experience
  
• basis constituents (e.g., sensations) from which more complex states are built up
• the modes of composition by which more complex states of consciousness are build from these
• Problem of insuperable disagreements between Observers and different experimental laboratories
  
• Behaviorism
• Partly inspired by the work of Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) on conditioned reflexes
• John B. Watson (1913) aimed to establish psychology as "a purely objective branch of natural science" which " recognizes no dividing line between man and brute"
  
• to this end he proposed that psychology
• "did not need the methods of introspection
  
• and indeed could do without the concept of consciousness altogether"
  
• Indeed not only could but should: only thus could psychology truly become an experimental science
• Upshot
  
• notable experimental discoveries and advances in our understanding of learning especially
• approach seemed to have reach its limits by the mid-twentieth century
• Chomsky (1954) raised doubts that such an approach could ever scale up to account for high-level human abilities to acquire and use natural languages in particular.
• :A new cognitivist paradigm emerged "with its emphasis on internal representations and information processing"
  
• Cognitivism or Functionalism
  
• hypothesizes that thoughts are internal computational processes
• one upshot: renewed interest in inward experiences
  

The Mysterious Gap

• Recognition (James 1890, i:146-7)
• "A motion became a feeling!" -- no phrase our lips can frame is so devoid of apprehensible meaning": there is a "'chasm' between the inner and outer worlds" (James)
  
• "The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable" (Tyndall)
• "Suppose it to have become quite clear that a shock in consciousness and a molecular motion are the subjective and objective faces of same thing: we continue utterly incapable of uniting the two, so as to conceive that reality of which they are the opposite faces. (Herbert Spencer)
  
• The hard problem: "how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience" (Chalmers (1995a: 201-203)