Editor’s introduction
The history of the study of consciousness is an old one, but one which is wrapped up in the history of science and philosophy in the modern era. Two of the founding giants of these areas of intellectual investigation are, respectively, Galileo (1564 – 1642) and Descartes (1596 – 1650). From the former we have adopted the view that the proper language for the description of the physical world is mathematical. From the latter, we have inherited a theory that there are two types of stuff, two kinds of substance, namely, the mental and the material, or mind and matter. Descart es’ position is normally referred to as dualism and his interest as the mind/body problem; Galileo’s view amounts to the establishment of what we recognize as science. Galileo’s approach, one where the focus was measurable matter, over time became domin ant, not least because of the obvious successes of physical sciences and the resultant technological advances. 4 The very possibility of the completeness of physics (to use Papineau’s phrase) also created something like a materialist orthodoxy in philosophy and psychology. 5 And that orthodoxy was further sustained by the remarkable advances in brain-scanning technology. In recent years neuroscientists have investigated neural correlates of mental states, have advanced the idea that the brain is a sort of global workspace or an organ that integrates information (so-called Integrated Information Theory ). They have also tried variously to combine these new and exciting (but incomplete) theories with existing theories of perception (where perception is based on abduction, or inference to the best explanation) and of embodied cognition, as well as with some of the insights of psychoanalysis. 6
But for all the advances of neuroscience, for all the sheer cleverness of the materialist approach, there has remained a doubt, expressed in a variety of ways. For Thomas Nagel, in his famous e ssay ‘What is
2009. For introductions to the important subject (and vast bibliography) of the evolution of culture, and the role played by language in that evolution, see Dunbar 2005, and 2014; Sperber 1996. 4 Lord Kelvin is often quoted in this contex t: ‘ I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind. ’ More pithily: ‘To measure is to know.’ 5 For the completeness of physics, see Papineau 2002: 232-56; and pp. 13-46 for one of the best philosophical cases made for a materialist approach to consciousness. Skinner 1971 is one of his articulations of behaviourism, a materialist psychological theory of human behaviour. There is a famous story concerning Max Planck, the celebrated theoretical physicist, who reports the following in a 1924 lecture: ‘ When I began my physical studies [in Munich in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly . . . he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science . . . Possibly in one or another nook there would perhaps be a dust particle or a small bubble [my italics] to be examined and classified, but the system as a whole stood there fairly secured, and theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection which, for example, geometry has had already for centuries. ’ Such optimism about the future of physics should be rare: not only was it blasted away by the revolutions of relativity and quantum theory; it is also inconsistent with Popper’s falsificationist theory of science. It is surprising, therefore, to find that Stephen Hawking, in his 1992 book, Black Holes and Baby Universes , says: ‘Although we have not found the exact form of all [the physical laws], we already know enough to determine what happens in all but the most extreme situations.’ 6 Seth 2021 is a very good recent survey of advances in neuroscience. It is also Seth who spends a lot of time on abduction, and on our experiences of the world as a sort of controlled hallucination. Antonio Damasio one of the neuroscientists most concerned with showing that Descartes was wrong to separate thought (or consciousness) from a) emotions and b) the body (that is, cognition is embodied); on emotions and consciousness, see Damasio 2006 and 2021, and Solms 2021 (who introduces some psychoanalytic insights as well); on embodied cognition, see Damasio 2010.
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