final version: Anthropology
and Philosophy 11, 2014-2015: 77-94
OTHER MINDS AND THE ORIGINS OF
CONSCIOUSNESS[1]
Ted Everett
SUNY Geneseo
Why does
consciousness exist? What is it good
for? Is there anything useful that
consciousness enables us to do which could not be done by an unconscious robot,
sleepwalker, or "zombie"? If
so, what is that function? If not, how
could a useless capacity like this ever have evolved as a trait among creatures
like ourselves? In this paper, I offer a
conception of consciousness as a kind of "higher-order perception"
along lines recently explored by Peter Carruthers, and argue that introspective
consciousness probably co-evolved as a "spandrel" or by-product of
our more useful ability to represent the mental states of other people. The first part of the paper defines and
motivates my conception of consciousness as the representation of representation as representation in response to standard problems about consciousness. The second part explains the basic
socioepistemic function of consciousness and suggests an evolutionary pathway
to this cognitive capacity that begins with predators and prey. The third part discusses the relevance of
these considerations to the traditional problem of other minds.
1. What consciousness is
Consider an
ordinary conscious state like pain. For mainstream functionalists in the philosophy of mind, pain
is to be understood as whatever internal state of an organism has the function
of producing appropriate behavior, such as calling for help, in response to
bodily distress. Thus, pain is
fundamentally a state of alarm, and could in principle take all kinds of
different physical forms. Each
particular instance of pain will still be a physical state, but there need be
no identities between physical and mental states as general types. The problem with this approach applied to
conscious mental states is that it seems to leave out the subjective experience of these states, the qualia
or "raw feels" for the being that has them. Pain is like this; it feels this way to
me. So, it may be easy to identify pain
in humans with something like c-fiber firing in the brain, and to imagine the
nerve impulses running from a burned hand into the brain that set such firings
off, and then back down into the muscles of the arm, pulling the hand off of
the hot stove. But the “paininess” of
pain, its feeling like this, seems to
have no additional role in such an objective account. Nevertheless, the feeling of pain is a real
thing, a fact in the universe, and is surely at least part of what we mean when
we use the word “pain”. So it looks like
functionalism, however much it has to say about mentality in general, gives us
no ready way of understanding conscious experience.
One type of
functionalist response to this problem is higher-order theories of
consciousness, which define it as thinking about our thoughts
(higher-order-thought or HOT), perceiving our perceptions (higher-order
perception or HOP), or something else with a similar, self-referential kind of
structure. The basic idea is that mental
states are unconscious as long as their objects are entirely external to the
mind, but become conscious when they focus inwardly in some way, so that even a
mild itch or pain might be unconsciously experienced (or, rather, not
experienced) until one notices that one is in that state, at which point it
pops into consciousness, and this is because the noticing itself – the thinking
about or the perception of the itchy feeling – is what constitutes its being conscious.
Peter Carruthers has recently (2005) developed an appealing HOP theory
that he calls "dual content" theory.
I want to offer a similar analysis of consciousness in terms that seem
more convenient to me, and that I am inclined to call the
"double-vision" theory.
First, I want
to say a few things about the preliminary concepts of "seeing as" and
mental representation. In ordinary
perception, we don't just see things; we see things as particular things, or things of a certain type. Here is Wittgenstein's famous example of the
duck-rabbit:
We can see this figure initially either as a duck or as a
rabbit, and we can also switch back and forth between seeing the rabbit and
seeing the duck at will, once we have seen it both ways.
In everyday
experience, we see things through familiar categories, and it makes sense that
we should be inclined to do so, rather than always troubling to infer what we are looking at from raw
sense-data. But sometimes we are also
able to perceive things the other way, simply as how they look to us. So, you might
look at the duck/rabbit diagram as neither a duck nor a rabbit, but just as a
squiggly shape and a dot. This is how we
try to look at things when drawing them, and it turns out that this is often
difficult to do well, particularly with things that we find really important,
like faces. Here, for example, on the
left, we see a fairly typical adult's drawing of her own face, while on the
right we see another self-portrait, made after a few lessons in drawing.[2]
Non-artists tend to draw people's heads as flattened on the
top, as on the left above, evidently because our interpretive theory of the face properly includes a
layer of forehead above the eyebrows, topped by a layer of hair, but attributes
no real meaning to the visual proportions involved. In order to draw faces correctly, we need to
stop seeing them in this instinctively interpreted way, and attend only to what
they look like: shapes, shadows, and colors in our visual field. This is a choice we almost always have in
conscious visual perception, that we can see things as whatever we think they
are, or we can just see what they look like to us, independently of what they
are. The same goes for hearing and the
other senses; we can sense things through interpretations, as we usually do
when listening to language we can understand, or we can sense them merely as
sensations, as we might do when listening to someone speaking in an unfamiliar
language.
The next
preliminary concept is mental representation.
Minimally, one thing represents another if the first functions as a
proxy for the second in some kinds of situations. In the simplest cases, the representation is
similar in some appropriate way to the thing that's being represented. But it is not enough for representation that
things be similar – the representation must also have the function of standing for the thing it represents. So, in the drawings above, the pictures
represent the artist both by looking like that person (more or less, according
to her skill), and by having the function of showing viewers what the she looks
like. Specifically mental
representations are models (symbolic or pictorial) of objects or features of
the world that are encoded somehow in a mind.
I think that consciousness can be given an intuitive functional analysis
in terms of these familiar notions of "seeing as" and mental
representation – something precise enough to account for the existence of
qualia, but abstract enough to apply potentially to robots or aliens as well as
human beings.
Let me define
five levels of mentality in these terms, by way of building up to
consciousness. The first is sensitivity, by which I mean the mere
capacity for responding to environmental cues in some way:
Thermometers are sensitive in this way, with the mercury
level going up or down depending on the ambient temperature. Ants are clearly sensitive in more complex ways,
responding to all kinds of environmental signals, including pheromones, in
their performance of their integrated social functions. But they still probably lack something that
many other animals have, namely perception:
Perceiving
something is more than just responding to it in a functional way. It means forming a mental representation of
the things being sensed. Perception
produces an idea or percept in the perceiver.
The function of perception, as distinct from mere sensation, is to make
memory and learning possible. Perceptive
creatures are able to store representations that permit them to recognize
features of their environment that they have already encountered, and to
respond to these features according to something like empirical inference,
rather than pure instinct. Thus, rats
learn how to get through mazes by constructing internal maps of ones that they
have already been through, and this is surely more effective in real life than
just having some finite set of instinctive maze-solving algorithms. The same goes for machines like the two
rovers that were recently sent to Mars to drive themselves around and map the
planet. Such machines can sense things
with their cameras, then construct or alter internal models of their
environments according to their programming while they move about. We do not, however, suppose that such
mechanical devices are conscious.
A third
functional step in this ideal construction of consciousness is the capacity for
self-representation, beginning with bodies.
The ability of a mind to represent its body as a part of its environment
can be called external self-perception:
Here is a
person who is able to represent both an outside object and his own body as
elements of his environment. This
capacity will make it easier for him to avoid objects that are in its way, to
measure where he can and cannot go, and many other useful tasks. But something like a Mars rover could easily
represent its own position and orientation relative to its own internal maps,
and we still wouldn’t call it conscious.
We ourselves can walk through crowds without consciously perceiving how
close we are to everybody else, and still not bump into anybody; this can even
be done when we are sleepwalking. So,
external self-perception by itself is also not enough for consciousness.
Some things
are capable of perceiving not just their external environments and their own
bodies, but also some of their own internal states. We can call this internal self-perception:
Here the
person is representing the external object in relation to his own body, and he
is also representing a modest itch that he feels on the back of his wrist. Here, I don't mean the qualitative feeling of
an itch, the conscious feeling of an itch, but just the internal neurological
signals that get us to scratch at minor irritations to our skin. David Armstrong (1980) says that
consciousness is a "self-scanning mechanism of the central nervous
system". But if he means only this
simple sort of internal self-perception, then it should still not be counted as
consciousness. For ordinary laptop
computers have all sorts of internal self-scanning mechanisms, that is, they
represent internally their own internal states, but we don't think of them as
even coming close to consciousness. Most
of our itches and other self-scanned internal states must be represented
unconsciously in our mental models of our bodies, or we would be too distracted
by such things to think clearly about the things that really matter to us.[3] Such internal self-perceptions can be made conscious – that is what it is to
notice them – but they are not necessarily conscious, so this cannot be used as
a definition of consciousness itself.
One fairly
common metaphor for consciousness is "having the lights on".[4] And what does having the lights on imply,
other than that one can see
something? So, if consciousness is
having the lights on, this presumably means being able to perceive something
that we can't perceive if we're unconscious.
But what sort of thing could that be?
It cannot just be internal states like itches, in the sense of neural
impulses indicating irritations to the skin, because we can perceive those
things unconsciously. What are the
things that can only be perceived consciously?
I think they are not really different objects from those that we
typically perceive unconsciously, but rather a certain special property that
any object of perception has, namely, what they seem like to us. When we learn how to draw, we learn to see
things not just as the things they are (there goes a car, here are my shoes,
and so on), but also as the way they look to us, which is to say, how we are
representing them. We don't just see
through our representations to the things they represent, as we unconsciously
perceive a stop sign. And we don't just
use our representations, as a robot mouse will use its map of a maze to find
its robot cheese. Instead, in conscious
perception we are able to perceive our representations as representations, as
the way things seem to us. And this, in
turn, is to say no more than that in consciousness we represent our representations to ourselves as representations, like
this:
Here, the
conscious person is still representing the external object we began with, and
he's still representing himself as a body, but now he is also representing his
representation of the object, as his representation of the object. I claim that consciousness is this very
capacity. We perceive objects in the
world, and we represent them in our minds.
We also perceive these representations themselves, as secondary
objects. This is the general semantic
category of a conscious state: a representation of a representation. What makes
it a conscious state, though, is the capacity we have to represent it as a representation, as if to say to
ourselves: "this is what it looks like to me". We don't always have to be saying that in
order to be conscious, but we always have to be able to say that. So, consciousness
in general is the capacity for representation of representation as
representation. A conscious state
is then a representation of a representation, representable as a representation.
Think about conscious
perceptions of color in particular. What
is color? We know that it is not a
primary property of physical objects, but rather a function of the reflectivity
of different surfaces together with our sensitivities to certain wavelengths of
light. An alien species might have no
experience of color as qualia at all, any more than we have qualitative
experience of x-rays, though they might still understand color objectively in
terms of light and optics in the same way that we understand the physical
properties of x-rays. So, think about it
this way: When we are looking at the color of something – not at the thing as
such, but just examining its color consciously, we must be perceiving a quality
only of our representation of the thing, because the thing in itself doesn't
even have such a quality. Our mental representations of physical
objects might be said to have the same shape in our visual fields as the
objects really do in space, in the same way that the shapes within a photograph
literally match the shapes of the corresponding objects in the real world:
shapes representing shapes by way of isomorphism. But the
"filling" within these shapes is utterly different as between a
physical object and its mental or photographic representation. In the real world, outlines are filled with matter, but in the phenomenal world
they're filled with color instead. Color
is in our mental models just a very rough proxy for matter, something that
gives us at least some indication of the type of matter that fills up the
boundaries of the object in physical space.
Thus, a tree doesn't really have qualitative brown as its actual
surface – it has bark. The
"browniness" or other color-qualia of our representations of such
things as trees is just the introspective analogue for such things as bark,
existing as an inherent property only of representations. So, when you're looking around like an
artist, paying attention only to colors as such, that is, when you are conscious of the colors, you can only be
directly perceiving (hence, representing) your own representations.
2. How consciousness evolves
Why, then,
does consciousness exist? What good does it do us to represent our
representations to ourselves as our own representations – that is, to perceive
how things seem to us as well as how they are?
Why should we ever have evolved such a capacity? It seems that getting around in the world,
feeding ourselves, and so on, does not depend on being conscious in this way,
just on being sufficiently perceptive of ourselves and our surroundings. Sleep-walkers can go downstairs and make
themselves a sandwich without waking up.
And dead machines increasingly can imitate that sort of
perception-driven activity. So, why
couldn't we all just be "zombies" all the time?
Some
philosophers, including epiphenomenalists like Chalmers (1995) claim that
consciousness has no function at all.
But I think that consciousness has a whole cluster of functions that are
essential to our lives, and that a recognizable humanity could never have
evolved without it. Fundamentally, I
think that we have consciousness, this ability to represent the way things seem
to us as such, in order that we can also represent the way things seem to other
people. This is a terribly useful
cognitive device, because our own, individual perceptions are both highly
fallible and severely restricted by our own small spatiotemporal
extension. Being able to represent other
people’s representations alongside our own, and to resolve the differences that
may occur between them, allows us to multiply our own perceptive powers by as many
people as we can effectively communicate with.
Moreover, the same capacity allows us to correct some of our
misperceptions through perceiving that the perceptions of others are different
from ours.
Here is a very
simple example of people looking at the same thing, but its seeming different
to them, and their resolving that difference:
Here, the person on the left thinks
that the object between them is rectangular, and the person on the right sees
it as circular. Next, they communicate
with each other, by saying how things seem to them as individuals:
Now, by having disagreed in a way
that each can perceive, they can become aware of the fact that they
disagree:
Provided that each sees the other as
having a mind, each can now represent the other's mental representation of the
thing itself, based on the other's testimony, alongside their own different
representation of the object. On my
view, this sort of representational situation cannot exist without
consciousness, because in order for such comparisons to take place each person
must represent his or her own representations to him- or herself as
representations:
Both people
now realize that something is wrong; one or both of their representations of
the object has to be faulty, or at least incomplete. So, there’s a puzzle here, for each of them
to solve, before they can be fully confident in their own representations: why
does the object look this way to me, and that way to the other person? In this case, the puzzle has a simple
solution. With the advantage of two
points of view and elementary geometry, each can now easily surmise that the
object is something that really is rectangular from one point of view and
circular from another, namely, a cylinder:
Now they can inform each other of
their new, synthetic representations:
...ultimately realizing realize that
they now see the object the same way:
Now they can go on exploring and figuring things out together
as a team, each able to use the other's eyes at greater distances, given their
ability to represent each other’s representations through communication and the
double-visual imagination that allows them to connect or to compare their own
representations to those of their partner.
This is what I think consciousness
does for us: it allows us to see things from other points of view than our
own. A sleepwalker can make himself a
sandwich while reciting Ozymandias,
but he cannot learn from other people in the way that he can when he is
conscious, because he lacks at the moment the capacity to understand that other
people see things differently, because he cannot while sleeping represent his
own or anyone else’s present representations to himself as
representations. A zombie can perceive things, which is enough to get around
and kill people and eat their flesh, but he cannot perceive how things seem, to himself or anybody else. If he suddenly could, then he would no longer
be a zombie because he would have regained consciousness. Therefore, nothing can be a zombie, in the philosophers' sense of an unconscious thing
that is completely equivalent in function to a conscious person.[5]
What consciousness is, then, is an
essentially social kind of cognitive capacity, one that allows each of us to
learn from others, and so to develop a more comprehensive and reliable mental
model of the world than we could ever construct all by ourselves. Consciousness
seems hard to understand because it doesn’t really have much of a function when
considered only as an individual capacity.
It is hard to imagine solitary, cognitively isolated creatures ever
evolving consciousness, because they wouldn't get anything much out of it. In fact, such creatures would probably be
better off as zombies, since this would save them the energy required to
operate the intricate, two-tiered perceptive and communicative system that
makes consciousness possible.
So, where did
this complex cognitive ability come from?
How did it evolve? I suspect that
beginnings of consciousness emerged out of an evolutionary
"arms-race" between predators and prey. The standard example of an arms race is
cheetahs and gazelles. In their early
forms, cheetahs were built like ordinary cats and gazelles like ordinary ruminants,
the cheetahs chased the gazelles and sometimes caught them, and sometimes the
gazelles got away, and this would seem to have been a relatively stable
pattern. But there's a problem that
propels further evolution on both sides: any cheetah that was a little faster
than his fellows had a better chance of eating, and any gazelle that was a
little faster and springier than his companions had a better chance of getting
away. So, over time, through natural
selection cheetahs became faster and faster and developed the sleek bodies and
huge lungs which are only good for high-speed short-term chasing, and the
gazelles developed corresponding speed and long springy legs that are not much
good for anything except evading cheetahs.
And there are corresponding changes in behavior on both sides. Gazelles stop running in a straight line and
develop random-seeming zigzag patterns of escape, because the harder they are
for cheetahs to anticipate, the more likely they are to get away and live to
reproduce. Over the same time, cheetahs
develop a heightened ability to make quick turns while running in response to
their perceptions of the gazelles. On
top of this, gazelles develop an enhanced ability to notice cheetahs in the
distance, and cheetahs develop an enhanced ability to sneak up on gazelles.
Now, what
should we suppose is going on cognitively inside these creatures as their arms
race develops? We might imagine that, at
an early evolutionary stage, they are all just Cartesian "machines",
perceptive but unaware of their perceptions as the way things seem to
them. We can see them as self-perceptive,
too, at least externally: the cheetah has to know where it is geographically
with respect to a gazelle if it has any hope of sneaking up on it, and
correspondingly for the gazelle's getting away.
Moreover, a successful cheetah or gazelle might well have the cognitive
ability to anticipate more than one behavior from the other, running
alternative unconscious representations of possible tactical responses from
different positions and velocities within its mental picture of the local
environment. Still, we might imagine
that their subsequent behavioral choices are all based on instinct: the gazelle
runs in some kind of programmed but random-seeming pattern, and the cheetah
adjusts continuously until it either catches the gazelle or runs out of steam –
all without conscious experience on either side.
Even at this
point in the cognitive arms race between cheetahs and gazelles, there will
still be intense selective pressure on both sides to be a little better at
their jobs, since every meter's distance could well make the difference between
life and death for each of them. And if
we imagine two cheetahs, one that's perceptive and capable of multiple
alternative representations but unconscious, and a second, mutant cheetah with
the further ability to represent itself from the gazelle's point of view, the
second cheetah is likely to be somewhat more successful. So, while it is sneaking up on a gazelle, the
second cheetah pays particular attention to the gazelle's eyes so that it can
represent to itself what the gazelle is seeing at the moment, and in particular
whether the gazelle can see the cheetah, or could see the cheetah if the
cheetah crept another meter closer. This
sort of calculation can doubtless be done crudely without consciousness; the
first cheetah could just use instinctive responses to its own direct
perceptions of the gazelle, its eyes included.
But the further mutation that allows the second cheetah to imagine the
gazelle's perceptions surely adds some increment of probable success in
stealthy hunting. By the same token, a
mutant gazelle with the ability to imagine what the cheetah sees will surely
have a similar advantage in getting away over gazelles that operate only on
physical perceptions, unconscious anticipations, and instincts.
I want to
emphasize again that what is working here for each creature is its ability to
represent to itself the other
creature's representations. Any ability
to represent its own representations, hence to be fully conscious, is
essentially a byproduct of this immediately useful cognitive capacity. But once it exists, for whatever reason it
first comes into being, it can develop further functions of its own. So, let consciousness emerge initially out of
predation under pressure from natural selection, which is a social function
only the a minimal sense of competition.
But for genuinely social animals like, say, wolves or other canines,
full consciousness will surely confer substantial further benefits by helping
them coordinate their hunting in packs.
If each wolf in a pack that is hunting an elk, say, can see what's going
on from its own point of view, and also imagine accurately the points of view
of other members of its pack as they close in on their quarry so as to gain a
more complete picture of the total situation, on top of imagining the elk's
point of view as it looks for a way to escape, then this is likely to advantage
this pack over packs in which the wolves are running only on instinct and
individual perceptions and anticipations.
This may be
all that consciousness was for our earliest human ancestors: an ability to
multi-perspectivize while hunting and gathering. We certainly still use this ability at the
same basic level in a lot of activities, wherein people using simple shouts and
signs, together with eye-contact and facial expressions, are sometimes able to
act as if they were parts of one body.
For example, squads of soldiers who attack enemy bunkers in a
coordinated way from several angles at once are surely more likely to survive,
just as players in sports like basketball who can connect and reconcile their
teammates' and opponents' physical points of view with their own are more likely to succeed. Even in ordinary life, we all rely on similar
abilities when we sit down together at dinner and pass the dishes, or when we
take turns driving through four-way stops and roundabouts.
This basic
ability to see things as others see them has another obvious advantage in
helping us take care of families, friends, and other associates, and especially
our children. Successful parents work
hard at imagining how things seem to their children. In doing so, in placing ourselves in their
shoes, we are better able to imaging how they feel about these things, and this
empathy motivates us in turn to help them resolve their intellectual and social
problems far beyond the limits of instinctive sympathy. This kind of cognitive connection with other
people, not just perceptive but emotional, is clearly advantageous for groups
of creatures like ourselves in a competitive and challenging environment,
especially given that our offspring are unable for so many years to look out
for themselves. People who are
especially good at seeing things from other people's points of view tend to
become successful in a variety of situations, while people who can only see
things their own way are liable to be left behind, all other things being
equal. Conceivably, this empathetic use
of consciousness even arose first, before its practical, reciprocal uses in cooperative
activities like hunting. But it strikes
me as most likely that empathy and cognitive cooperation evolved more or less
in concert, both deriving ultimately from perceptive competition between
predators and prey.
This socially
useful, cooperative and empathetic capacity makes possible the introspective
kind of consciousness that has been taken by philosophers since Descartes as
more fundamental. When we ask ourselves
what consciousness is, we naturally think of individual minds, as this is where
qualitative consciousness resides. So,
when we seek to find its function, we are inclined to look within the
individual for this as well. But its
most basic function is not there, within the individual as such – or perhaps it
is better to say that purely
introspective consciousness has no basic function at all. Our ability to examine our ideas for their
own sake, as it were, seems instead to be a "spandrel", a mere
byproduct of our useful capacity for comparing and resolving differences
between our perceptions and those of other people. This more basic, as it were altrospective
consciousness entails a kind of double vision with respect to our own
perceptions: seeing things as things in order to represent the world, and
seeing things as how they appear from our own point of view in order to connect
and reconcile our view of things with those of others.
Still, when
other people stop communicating with us, this does not shut the lights off in
our own heads. We can still perceive our
own thoughts and manipulate and question them, just as if they were the
thoughts of other people. Does this
left-over, introspective form of consciousness serve any function for us? Not in the fundamental way that altrospective
consciousness does – that is, it does not extend our range of perceptions
through access to other minds or quickly resolve different appearances from
multiple points of view. But it seems to
have been "exapted" in ways that surely enhance our intellectual and
social abilities. For one thing, introspection
allows us to consider as many possible alternative points of view as we like,
for as long as we like, whether those other points of view are real or
not. It allows us to analyze and
criticize our own standing perceptions and beliefs, regardless of real or
hypothetical disagreement from others.
It also allows us to perceive at least some aspects of our own feelings,
desires, and intentions more clearly and directly than can anybody else, and
this self-knowledge makes us more empathetic and potentially more helpful with
our fellows than we would be otherwise.
Finally, introspection permits us to live lives of an intellectual
richness and depth far beyond what is needed for survival and practical
cooperation, including my life and yours as philosophers. And even if philosophy is just as useless in
itself as most outsiders (and more than a few insiders) take it to be, no other
field of useful research, including modern science, could prosper without the
broad scope of imagination and internal dialectic that altrospective
consciousness has permitted and that introspective consciousness provides.
3. Our knowledge of
other minds
Language and
consciousness have long been thought to be intrinsically related. Descartes took the absence of language to demonstrate
the absence of conscious thought in non-human animals.[6] More recently, Donald Davidson, C. A. J.
Coady, and Tyler Burge all have argued that language only makes sense as a
means of communication if we presuppose that other people have the same sorts
of linguistic intentions as ourselves, and that most of what we hear from other
people is the truth. And this is
certainly hard to imagine without conceiving of our interlocutors as conscious
beings. As Burge puts it, "The
relation between words and their subject matter and content is not an ordinary,
natural, lawlike causal-explanatory
relation. Crudely speaking, it involves a mind."[7] This accords well with the story I have been
telling of the evolution of the conscious mind as a means for usefully
imagining the mental states of others.
It seems, then, that a genetic predisposition to believe in other minds
would seem to be a prerequisite for consciousness itself. But an evolutionarily accountable disposition
to believe something is no proof that the belief is true. We can still reasonably ask the traditional
question: how can we know that other
people actually do have minds?
One plausible
answer is that the hypothesis of others having minds offers the best
explanation of our obvious ability to communicate and to perform all the
related cognitive and social functions that communication make possible. So, I have this capacity for double vision
and it facilitates my understanding of the statements of others so as to
enhance my own perceptive reach; they all seem to have the same linguistic and
socio-perceptive abilities that I have, not to mention the same physical
structures in the brain; therefore, it stands to reason that the same sort of
double-visual capacity is what gives them these same abilities. This abductive argument is more compelling
than the standard analogical argument to the effect that others are liable to
have minds simply because they behave the way we do in similar situations. That more basic argument relies only on the
principle that pure coincidences are rare, so it would be odd if I were the
only person who had conscious experience along with everything else that seems
to be shared with other people. This analogy would have the same force even if
we supposed that conscious experience is utterly epiphenomenal. But once we have identified a necessary
function for consciousness itself, or rather for the socioperceptive ability
that makes consciousness appear, we have a much stronger causal argument for
believing in other minds. For now, given
that my fellows seemingly must have a double-visual mental capacity at least
somewhat like my own in order for them to learn from me the same way that I
learn from them, it becomes not just odd but inexplicable for me that they should not also be conscious.
There is, I
think, a further, even stronger argument to be made here for other minds. Consider a high-functioning android like the
character Commander Data on Star Trek:
the Next Generation. Data is treated
as a conscious person, not just a robot, by his shipmates, and we viewers more
or less spontaneously see him that way too.
Why is that? What evidence do we
have that Data is a conscious person, not just a computerized automaton like
most other science-fiction robots? Well,
one reason is what I have just been saying, that this would account for his
ability to function linguistically just as we do in absorbing information from
multiple points of view and sharing it back appropriately. But there is much also in the content of what he has to say that
leads us to perceive him as a conscious being.
For we know that Data is an extremely reliable source of information,
including information about his own inner operations. And many of the things he tells us are
reports of his conscious experience as such.
That is, he represents to us in language how things seem to him, which
is to say, how he is representing things to himself, which he can only do
through the capacity to perceive these representations as his
representations. Reliable sources ought
inductively to be believed if there is no reason to doubt them on a given
topic. This is why we ought to believe
Data (or any other reliable speaker)
when he talks about his inner states.
If we believe him when he says that this or that is how things seem to
him, then we have to believe he has a
conscious mind, because that's all there is to having one.[8]
WORKS CITED
Armstrong, D. 1980. The Nature of Mind and Other Essays. Brisbane: University of Queensland
Press.
Burge, T. 1993. "Content Preservation", Philosophical Review 102: 457-88.
Carruthers, P. 2005. Consciousness:
Essays from a Higher-Order Perspective.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Chalmers, D. 1995. “Facing Up to
the Problem of Consciousness”, Journal
of Consciousness Studies 2.3:
200-19.
Coady, C. 1992. Testimony: A Philosophical Study .Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Cottingham, J., Stoothoff, R., and Murdoch, D. trans. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Descartes, R. 1637. Discourse,
in Cottingham, et al 1985.
Edwards, B. 1979. Drawing
on the Right Side of the Brain. London: Souvenir Press.
Everett, T. 2000.
"Other Voices, Other Minds", Australasian Journal of Philosophy 78.2: 213- 222.
Searle, J. 1980. "Minds,
Brains and Programs", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3.3: 417–457.
NOTES
[1] Thanks to Alan Sidelle and to an audience at SUNY Geneseo for their thoughtful comments on this paper, and to Catherine Everett for the handsome illustrations.
[2] These drawings are taken from Betty
Edwards 1979.
[3] This is why physical pain, which by
its nature typically commands our attention, is such a pain.
[4] For example, David Chalmers 1995
uses the metaphor in a negative way, when he speaks of unconscious zombies
being always "in the dark".
[5] There might still be a kind of zombie that could behave
equivalently to a conscious human being, but not by functioning in the way that we function. It would have to use some kind of "brute
force" mechanism instead, like a chess computer that has no understanding
of chess but can beat a human being, just because it makes so many million
calculations every second - the sort of brute functional equivalence that John
Searle 1980 derides in his Chinese Room example.
[6] pp. 140-141. Carruthers, too, claims (p. 11) that animals
other than ourselves totally "lack phenomenal consciousness", which
makes the evolution of consciousness in humans much harder to explain, I think.
[7] p. 479.
[8] For a general account of this
argument from reliable testimony, see Everett 2000.