Part Four: Controversies and Speculations

11. Pluralism and the Mind

The previous three chapters have been concerned with physicalism and its limits. We have examined claims that minds and consciousness can be understood in terms of ‘information-processing’, ‘virtual machines’, dynamical systems, neural structures, and functions. These sorts of approaches are widely considered to be the only viable ones, and rest upon basically physicalist presumptions. We have seen, however, that each of these approaches has limits and none seem to be able to handle the basic problem of subjective experiences, or qualia. In my view, this inability strongly suggests that we need to look at some alternatives.

The primary problem is that physicalism, per se, constitutes a theory of objects or the ‘objective’, whereas a theory of consciousness needs to be a theory of subjects. Even an expanded, holistic, biology of the kind I advocate in chapter seven still exists within the realm of ‘flatland holism’, as Ken Wilber put it[1]—which means that subjective elements get left out.[2]

We have also seen that Western theories of consciousness tend to be representational ones, or assume ‘that there is a pre-given world of which our cognitions are representations’.[3] This representational view follows, Rao says, from a sharp split between subject and object and the assumption that the physical world out there is separate from and ‘realer’ than the ‘inner’ world, which ‘is’ a ‘representation’. So the choice one faces, if working within the game-rules and prevailing biases of Western thought, is either the elimination of consciousness or a clearly flawed representational view of conscious/mental experiences.

There are three primary aims of this chapter: (1) to defend the subjective aspect of human beings (i.e. raw experience) as primary, (2) to advocate relational views of consciousness that accommodate the observation that we exist as both subject and object in the world (from the perspective of a science of objects, this move may entail some form of property pluralism, anti-materialism, or at least holism). Finally, (3) I utilize a relational view from Buddhism to expose the limits of Western theories and cast doubt on all of our concepts of a world that we can only know via our own, primary experiences.

The Mystery of Subjective Experiences

Despite claims to the contrary, there seems to be little or no deep understanding of private, first-person conscious experiences (qualia) within the scientific domain.[4] We have seen that most current neuroscientific approaches to consciousness tend to reduce conscious experience to simple awareness, as in Damasio’s definition of consciousness as ‘an organism’s awareness of its own self and surroundings’.[5] Nagel’s question, ‘what is it like to be something?’, does capture something of the quality of experience,[6] but the Buddhist descriptions of consciousness as ‘that which is clear and knowing’[7] or ‘that which thinks of its object’[8] seem in some ways preferable.

Consciousness can be considered primary in the sense that experience comes first, before language and before abstract knowledge. This means that anything we posit about the world—including knowledge about the brain, information-processing, evolution, cosmology, etc.—forms part of the matrix of that experience. As William James observed, this means that such knowledge will always be secondary to said experience where it is not merely interpreted but re-created within this matrix.

This point can be clarified by the words of William James, who wrote that

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done. Compared with this world of individualized feelings, the world of generalized objects which the intellect contemplates is without solidity or life …[9]

James was emphasizing the centrality of the individual mind in the creation and re-shaping of not just intellectual ideas but emotional responses towards the world. James found the impersonality suggested by fashionable intellectual or scientific views shallow because ‘… so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term’.[10]

The primacy of experience is, for me, the strongest reason for doubting the arguments of those who would eliminate or completely identify said experience with brain function. This is not, of course, to suggest that neurological knowledge reflects nothing, but that we all begin with a flow of conscious experiences and that any explanation we develop for how these experiences relate to the world, including intricate neurological or physiological studies, is secondary to that flow.

One problem with the explosion of neurological and cognitive studies is that the flood of new knowledge has obscured this basic point. When reading about consciousness today, one is typically bombarded with a thousand and one fMRI or other studies that demonstrate this or that piece of functional detail. This new knowledge has had a price, which is a downgrading or devaluing of the primary experience in favour of the functional data; the person, and with it subjectivity, tends to vanish in a welter of technical detail. Subjectivity, in this picture, is naturally reduced to precisely measurable data only, and along the way, much of the richness of experience tends to be lost or discarded as irrelevant. In such a situation, it seems very easy to conclude that subjective or private experiences do not exist at all.

Subjective Experiences—Yes or No?

Feyerabend’s Eliminativism

As mentioned in chapter five, Paul Feyerabend claimed that it was possible to eliminate the philosophical mind/body problem by formulating a world-view in which the dilemmas posed by a dualistic point of view do not exist.[11] Dualistic conceptions of the mind/body, Feyerabend thought, constitute a possible ideology or ‘way of life’ that separates and polarizes mental attributes from physical, and that since such a polarization was a construct, it would be possible to constitute an alternative ideology or conceptual structure where such polarization is not a feature. He also claimed that concepts of the mental were incommensurable with the concepts Western science has developed for describing and understanding physical objects.

To some, this means that conscious mental events, subjective experiences, etc. should be jettisoned, rather as the concept of phlogiston was jettisoned to account for combustion.[12] Feyerabend’s own writing therefore follows a similar philosophical vein to Wittgenstein, Ryle and Rorty in that he thought that ‘minds’ and ‘selves’ were not concrete entities but abstractions or particular conceptions that were local to a particular set of ideologies.

He retained such views late into his career, criticizing, for example, the idea that creativity is akin to a special, inner ability possessed by an individual self. He compared this view against the Homeric conception of persons, where

there is no spiritual centre, no ‘soul’ that might initiate or ‘create’ special causal chains … the modern conception separates the human being from the world in a manner that turns interaction into an unsolvable problem (such as the mind-body problem), a Homeric warrior or poet is no stranger in the world but shares many elements in it.[13]

Feyerabend was asserting, correctly in my view, that many of the terms that we use to denote human abilities, or alleged abilities, like creativity and free will, are not inherently ‘real’ but local to our culture. The local nature of our concepts for describing subjective attributes or abilities needs to be conceded, and becomes obvious when we consider how other cultures define, delineate, and divide human beings.[14]

However, this view must also be seen in the context of Feyerabend’s epistemological relativism. Just because it is possible to formulate a worldview where folk psychology is irrelevant does not mean that those pushing such a world-view have the right to drive out other ideologies. Secondly, just because conceptions like individual creativity, free will, etc. are local and culturally conditioned does not mean that they are without pragmatic value. Notions like love, hate, compassion, creativity, etc. may arguably be useless within, say, neuroscience, but they can be of immense use in everyday life. Feyerabend was also strongly against the idea of formulating one ideology, approach, tradition to rule over all others; so, for example, the argument that we should replace ‘folk psychology’ with neuroscientific language can be seen as a form of ideological imperialism.

Finally, Feyerabend also advanced arguments for the primacy of everyday experience over scientific concepts, and held that it was possible to dissent from a scientific view if one felt that it diverged significantly from one’s own personal experiences of the world. This may be necessary, for example, if one finds the ‘objective’ world promulgated in the name of science dehumanizing. And as we shall see below, at times he seemed to support a Protagorean viewpoint, which held that the subjective worlds which individuals and cultures inhabit may be seen to be a primary reality that changes as concepts and experiences change. In sum, I think that these later responses at least dilute his earlier eliminativism.

Private Experiences as Linguistic/Conceptual Phantoms

Bennett and Hacker are dismissive of private experiences on the grounds that the metaphors often used to describe them (‘inner’, ‘outer’, ‘public’, ‘private’) seem incoherent. In doing so, whilst making some valid points, they throw the baby out with the bathwater. They deconstruct what they see as four ‘misconceptions’:

Misconception 1: that of privacy or the private ownership of experience.

Their critique: they assert that it is possible for different people to have the ‘same’ pain, belief, or experience. The ‘inner’, they claim, is metaphorical and a misnomer. For example, in toothache, it is the tooth that hurts, and not the mind. There is no such thing as mental toothache.[15]

Response: Of course ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ are metaphorical and as such may be unhelpful or misleading if taken too literally. But it is also problematic to conflate the observation of an experience with the experience itself, and to deny that any aspect of such an experience can be attended to or participated in by the observer. For example, they claim that ‘… if a person groans in pain, says what he sees or expresses his opinions, then he has revealed what in our metaphor of “inner” or “outer”, is the inner’.[16] This ignores the fact that many aspects of an experience such as toothache will be only roughly communicable and sometimes incommunicable, whether we use the inner/outer metaphors or not. Finally, toothache need not be ‘mental’ to be part of subjective, conscious experience.

Misconception 2: introspection as a form of inner perception.

Their critique: introspection is not a form of inner vision or internal sense because it involves no perceptual organ or observational skills. There is no mind’s eye except metaphorically; and we speak of seeing in and not with it.[17] Introspection is better understood as a form of reflexive thought, a route to self-knowledge and self-understanding. But to attend to one’s feelings is not to perceive one’s feelings.

Response: this is a stronger critique, especially for those who claim that the ‘mind’s eye’ is a literal space within the brain.[18] However, what Bennett and Hacker have done is to substitute spatial metaphors for attentional ones. It is that we can attend upon a habit or thought or behaviour and use this to affect changes that is the problem.

Misconception 3: that someone can have privileged access to their thoughts, feelings and experiences.

Their critique: the subject does not have access to anything ‘inner’ at all. Feeling a headache is the same as having one. One cannot feel a pain in the same way one feels a penny; one is a form of perception, the other is not.

Response: this critique turns on the conflation of different people’s pain. For example, they claim that if two people ‘have a throbbing pain in the left temple, then [they] do have the same pain’.[19] Firstly, even in observational terms, this is an oversimplification, because it is unlikely that the two pains are precisely identical. Secondly, it is very unlikely that two people will experience such pain in an identical way. It is the unique character of experience, and the incommunicability of every aspect of that experience, that denotes privacy.

Misconception 4: that psychological predicates stand for ‘inner entities’.

Their critique: psychological terms do not denote inner entities, but attributes of the whole person.

Response: I agree that psychological attributes should be seen as attributes of the whole person or subject, but differ in my interpretation of this because I think this conclusion leads to property pluralism and not Hacker’s preferred psychophysical unitarianism (see below).[20]

Bennett and Hacker’s critiques are important because they force us to become far more careful about using terms which, taken too literally, may cause us to attribute, say, brain-parts abilities or dispositions which only make sense for the whole person. This is what they mean by the mereological fallacy, which is the attribution of whole-person or system capacities to that of a part (e.g. in neuroscience we constantly find researchers attributing intentional states to parts of the brain). However, their critique of private experience seems to me unconvincing overall.

Reductionist Objections to Subjective Experiences

Reductionist materialists believe that conscious, first-person experiences either do not exist, or can be unproblematically reduced to neural patterns. Their arguments are made on several grounds, but there is a common conviction that everything can and should be reduced to physical processes only, or that the underlying physical processes have a privileged status over high-level descriptions. Often, as in the example that follows, arguments against private experiences are conflated with arguments against any kind of dualism.

Churchland begins by labelling the ‘argument from introspection’ (i.e. the existence of subjective states or qualia) ‘deeply suspect’.[21] He writes that the argument

assumes that our faculty of inner observation … reveals things as they really are in their innermost nature. This assumption is suspect because we already know that our other forms of observation—sight, hearing, touch and so on—do no such thing. The sound of a flute does not sound like a sinusoidal compression wave train in the atmosphere, but that is what it is. The warmth of the summer air does not feel like the mean kinetic energy of millions of tiny molecules, but that is what it is. If one’s pain and hopes and beliefs do not introspectively seem like electrochemical states in a neural network, that may be because our faculty of introspection … is not sufficiently penetrating to reveal such hidden details.[22]

This argument seems itself deeply suspect. The first questionable point is Churchland’s assumption that introspection (or any other kind of observation) must ‘reveal things as they really are in their innermost nature’. This implies that the things we observe, whether inside or outside our minds, have an ‘innermost nature’ that they ‘really are’. As we have seen, physics long ago abandoned this position.[23]

Similarly, the claim that the sound of a flute ‘is’ a sinusoidal pressure wave, or the warmth of a summer breeze ‘is’ the ‘mean kinetic energy of millions of tiny molecules’ seems problematic. Both sorts of description appear secondary to primary phenomenological experience, and there seems little reason to privilege one over the other. Why should the description of the ‘warmth of a summer breeze’ be less apt than a description of the ‘mean kinetic energy of millions of tiny molecules’? One is a sensory description, the other is an abstract physical description; one is not less ‘true’ than another, and both are derivations from different kinds of phenomenological observation. The only reason we have for privileging the technical description over the tactile is the metaphysical assumption of strict reductionism, which assumes that lower-level descriptions are inherently more ‘real’ or valid than higher-level descriptions.

Churchland’s position becomes even more problematic when we move away from raw sensory perceptions. It seems very unclear whether pain, or joy, or compassion, or humour can be fully described as ‘electrochemical states in a neural network’ because the experiences are so much more than that. It is rather like saying that a play at a theatre is ‘nothing but’ actors in makeup reading lines in front of painted sets, which is in some sense true but seems an excessively narrow way of looking at things.[24] Asserting that a neural-level explanation of subjective experience is complete and correct also runs afoul of the mereological fallacy; neural patterns alone do not have feelings, any more than feet alone have sensations.

Churchland’s position, although extreme, reflects a deep suspicion of subjective experiences commonly found in cognitive science.[25] In another example, philosopher Ned Block criticizes the idea that reports of conscious experiences should be the ‘gold standard’ in neuroscience. He points out that (1) observed electrons can provide evidence about electrons that cannot be observed, (2) it is not true that our theory of consciousness should be determined by subjective reports, because no piece of data can be privileged and we should use parsimony to distinguish the best theories, and (3) any neuroscientific approach that bases everything on reports about a subject’s own experience will only find the neural basis of higher-order (conscious) thought which might leave out cases where subjects have experiences without such thought. ‘Higher-order thought’ is defined by him as the ‘thought to the effect that I myself have an experience’.[26]

To the first point, we might respond that the electron analogy is of limited use because, even if hidden, we suppose unobservable electrons to be of more-or-less the same character as electrons we can observe (although strictly speaking one cannot observe, i.e. see, electrons). Comparing subjective reports with neurological data seems like a different kind of problem, more like comparing two different kinds of ‘maps’.[27] To the second point, I should acknowledge that no piece of data should be privileged, but would also emphasize that this also includes ‘objective’ neuroscientific data. I would add also that without subjective reports, or experiences, there wouldn’t be a phenomenon to explain! The third point also has some validity, but I would question, again, the expectation that neuroscience can provide exhaustive accounts of experience. Without subjective reports, it is hard to see how the existence of a good number of ‘lowerorder’ phenomena could be suspected, if they are not indirectly deducible from psychophysical data.

Dennett’s Arguments Against Qualia

Dennett has argued repeatedly that ‘there simply are no qualia at all’,[28] and attempts to prove this via a number of ingenious thought experiments. He claims that the only way qualia would make sense was if there was a Cartesian theatre (or mirror!), but that since there isn’t,

there is no way to isolate the properties presented in consciousness from the brain’s multiple reactions to discriminations, because there is no such additional presentation process.[29]

Dennett also tries to demonstrate the inadequacy of qualia via a thought experiment involving beer drinkers. He points out that beer is often an acquired taste, and that one often takes time to learn to like it. So a beer drinker might claim that, for an individual who grows to like beer, the taste gradually changes as they continue to imbibe. But other beer drinkers would claim that the beer always tasted as it did when they first started, only they now like the same taste. Of these two different interpretations, Dennett states ‘in the first sort of beer drinker the “training” has changed the “shape” of the quality space for tasting, while in the second sort the quality space remains roughly the same, but the “evaluation function” over that space has been revised’.[30] Or it could be, Dennett thinks, that both sets of drinkers are fooling themselves, and we have to go to the ‘actual happenings’ in the beer drinker’s heads to ‘see whether there is a truth-preserving [if “strained”] interpretation of the beer drinkers claims’ which will only be a ‘complex of reactive dispositions …’ Dennett concludes that in the latter case, we have to ‘”destroy” qualia in order to save them’.[31]

This objection seems to amount to a ‘demolition’ of a type-token interpretation of subjective experiences. Dennett’s experiment seems most convincing if we assume that said subjective experiences are meant to consist of groupings of discrete, identifiable tokens (e.g. qualities, in Dennett’s account, can only be said to exist if they have a discernible ‘shape’). But this is not necessarily so, and brings us back to disputes over whether words actually stand for discrete categorical objects or heterogeneous families. I do not think that private experiences, or portions thereof, need to be defined in this way to be valid. (Note also the privileging of the ‘actual’ [i.e. neural ] events in the speaker’s head over his experiences.)

Dennett’s argument seems to me to be the converse of Stephen Braude’s arguments about the impossibility of reducing mental states to a neural ‘token’. The only difference is that, in Braude’s case, he argues against the likelihood of an underlying, specific or Platonic ‘token’ linking a given mental state and neural substrate, whereas Dennett argues that one cannot reduce a ‘quale’ to a Platonic token. The interesting thing is that both writers draw radically different conclusions from similar arguments; Braude argues that this supports a level-of-explanation dualism, and for Dennett it implies brain-function only.

My own view is that the totality of conscious experiences probably cannot be reduced fully to verbal or logical constructions, and that the problems with defining or nailing qualia may reflect this limitation. This makes sense when we remember that conscious experience precedes language which precedes science. We should remember that what is being demanded in a theory of consciousness is some way to squeeze the totality of experience into a small abstracted portion of itself. There may be some fundamental limitation to our ability to do this, as Gödel’s incompleteness theorem puts limits to mathematical reasoning.[32]

Funnily enough, mystics have intuited this for millennia; for example, the Middle Way teachings of Tibetan Buddhism (see below) claim that experiential reality can never be accurately described because words can only point to partial aspects of experience.[33] This, too, recalls Korzybski’s principle of non-identity, that whatever we say something is, it isn’t. My own view is that qualia or private experience remains elusive for precisely this reason; that words at best can point the way or form rough descriptions, they cannot be experience itself. All this might sound defeatist, but I believe it perfectly legitimate to posit limitations to language, reasoning and logic, especially with regards to the totality of experience. And if we accept the arguments against philosophical systems being ‘mirrors’ of nature, then why do we expect to be able to reduce everything to said systems?

Relational Views of Consciousness

My assertion that subjective experience can be considered a primary reality could be interpreted in a number of ways. One can interpret this assertion in idealistic terms and conclude, as some quantum physicists have done, that everything ‘is’ mind.[34] However, this seems too extreme a move, despite the various shortcomings of physicalism. A better strategy, in my view, is to try and understand ourselves better as subjects, but in doing so we need to find a way of looking that accommodates our immediate experience and does not try to shoehorn it into a preconceived, one-dimensional explanatory frame.

Some variety of phenomenalism seems to me to be a necessary first step in accommodating subjective experience. Phenomenology was developed by philosopher Husserl in the early twentieth century, and uses various techniques to investigate and describe subjective experience without theoretical commitment. An updated version, which relates phenomenology to neuroscience, was proposed by Francisco Varela.[35] However, this updated version, known as neurophenomenology, ultimately rests upon similar assumptions to other physicalistic theories: it posits that subjective consciousness must be fit into schemes consisting of functional, physical objects and processes. Feyerabend was critical of such holistic views because they retained many of the deeper problems of more reductive approaches. He complained that ‘[t]his is the old objectivism all over again, only wrapped in revolutionary and pseudo-humanitarian language’.[36] He thought that the conceptual edifices advocated by more holistic thinkers like Varela were as irrelevant to the problems of everyday experience as older, reductionist views.

Feyerabend’s suggested alternative was that we should abandon the search for grand schemes, even holistic ones, and seek a more humanitarian approach that can somehow do justice to the full variety of human experience. Something close to such an approach had been suggested by the Ancient Greek Protagoras. Protagoras (c.490–420 BC) can be seen as an early phenomenalist who rejected the Platonic notion that a hidden, theoretical reality was more real than that of our everyday experience.[37] His most famous statement, that ‘man is the measure of all things’, is ambiguous, but probably refers to the notion that many of the things we project onto the world—properties, feelings, ideas, and judgments, etc.—have no inherent existence apart from our minds. Plato saw Protagoras as a relativist who opposed his (Plato’s) vision of an objective reality, and in his Theaetetus explains but tries to discredit Protagoras’s stance (in fact, the Theaetetus is still worth reading for its presentation of Platonic versus Protagorean ideas of what constitutes the ‘real’).

Protagoras asserted that perception and opinion were infallible and that the ‘worlds projected by different individuals, groups, nations as they perceive them are all equally real’.[38] This assertion might sound horrific, especially to those cognitive psychologists who have spent a career researching just how fallible common perceptions and judgments can be. But however fallible, our perceptions, concepts and dispositions still form the only direct reality we can know. The properties, conceptual schemes and imaginative worlds that help explain our existence further are necessarily secondary and derivative, no matter how plausible they might seem.[39]

So ‘reality’ can only be really judged on individual, direct terms by people and groups living particular kinds of life. And these lives are necessarily idiosyncratic, fluid, and adapted to local conditions. Different people and different cultures live in different subjective worlds, some of which might allow personal growth and development, others of which might not. And as our concepts, ideas, experiences and viewpoints change and develop, so do our personal realities.

Consciousness as Mapping Problem: Mary Midgley

The problem remains, however, how we could relate abstract—and specifically neurological—knowledge to our subjective experiences. The philosopher, Mary Midgley, tries to accommodate the subjective and the physical by favouring something like a dual-aspect approach, and asserting that we have to come to terms with the fact that we are both subjects and objects in ‘the’ world. Consciousness, she asserts, cannot or should not be reduced to a ‘stuff’, or something magical or ‘extra’. Instead, it can be thought of as our condition of being a subject, ‘someone for whom all … objects are objects. The questions [consciousness] raises are therefore primarily about the nature of a person as a whole, a person who is both subject or object’.[40] As a result, the problems associated with consciousness are not how to reduce the ‘mental’ to the ‘physical’. Rather, they are how to relate subjective maps—which include everyday ways of talking about thinking, feeling, and human behaviour—to the maps we have constructed about ‘objects’. The dilemma relates to our dual nature as both subject and object.

Midgley also sees consciousness as having a primary causal role. Indeed, following Hume, she suggests that our models of causation may well be derived from our observations of our own, personal actions. For this reason, she categorically rejects epiphenomenalism—observing that science itself requires conscious, active agents to work. Midgley claims that we need to reposition ourselves as active, subjective agents and redefine consciousness adverbally ‘as a mere matter of our acting consciously’[41] rather than as a noun or a passive quality floating separate from the ‘doing’ portions of the organism.

Midgley is also keen to reposition consciousness in the context of evolution. She believes that the separation of consciousness as a magical property ‘is what stops it being accepted as a normal aspect of mental activity, an emergent capacity acquired naturally by social creatures during the regular course of evolution’.[42]

Midgley’s approach can be seen as a compromise between physicalism and idealism, or mentalism, and has significant merit. However, I would suggest that our current concepts of emergent properties still end up ‘converting’ subjective consciousness into quasi-‘objective’ (physical) processes, which seems wrong to me. I think that any theory of consciousness needs to begin by acknowledging how alien subjects are within the conceptual worlds of current science.

Non-Physical Emergent Properties?

This point becomes apparent when we consider the problems of emergentism. Wallace, for example, criticizes it on the grounds that consciousness seems so radically different from other examples of emergent properties. Emergent properties, he claims, are just functions of complex configurations of inorganic chemical processes, emerging from the action or complex configurations of atoms and elementary particles. Consciousness, by contrast, seems utterly unlike all other known emergent properties so cannot, in Wallace’s view, be classified as emergent. Searle makes similar observations, but unlike Wallace is convinced that somehow consciousness can be naturalized (i.e. conceptually converted into an object, function, or complex physical feature).[43]

My own view is that we need to accept that our models of the physical form part of a conceptual matrix within which consciousness and subjectivity are currently incommensurable, as Feyerabend suggested. But these physical models are very partial. On the other hand, our ‘folk conceptions’ of psychology, which accommodate consciousness, represent a different ‘take’ on the world where subjectivity fits quite happily, but are not really theoretical or scientific.[44] If one insists upon trying to fit consciousness inside the object-worlds developed by science, then something like property dualism or pluralism seems to me the best bet, where it is admitted that humans and probably animals have non-physical[45] properties (i.e. consciousness, intentional states) apart from physical ones.[46] But the fit will probably seem a little awkward, because this sort of conception is in effect a marrying of two incommensurable kinds of world-picture.

The generalized complementarity suggested by Bohr and Elsasser may be of some help here. In the extended version of complimentarity, the more we know about the lower-level physical and chemical processes, the less we can know about the higher-level organizational processes, and vice versa, so the whole properties of organisms might only really be understood at the expense of a loss of knowledge of their more mechanical, lower-level parts. This sort of approach may be applicable to accommodating qualitative consciousness and subjective states, but at the cost of compromising physicalism. This is because we can no longer really assert that these holistic states ‘supervene’ upon lower-level physical states, just as we cannot assert that the particle model of light can be ‘reduced’ to the wave model, or vice versa.[47] What we are left with are local models that describe either qualitative, non-physical or holistic states, or more quantitative, reductionist sub-systems, but one can no longer ‘sum’ the latter to arrive at the former.

This conclusion again forces us to question the insistence upon the metaphysical stance of monistic physicalism in our accounts of consciousness. Are there any good reasons, apart from historical habit, cultural inertia, and/or religious phobia for insisting upon such a position? In this context, it is worth looking at how a non-Western, relational view of consciousness that is not burdened by the sharp, Cartesian split between subject and objects deals with raw experience.

Relational Approaches in Buddhist Traditions

Buddhism is of interest because it contains a relational view of consciousness. The early teachings of Buddhism do not have a favoured ontology or metaphysic,[48] because the Buddha thought that such speculations detracted from his primary goal, which was the relief of suffering (duhkha) and the attainment of mental balance and enlightenment.[49] His approach must therefore be seen as primarily ethical, pragmatic, and empirical in the introspective sense.

The only permanence in Buddhist thought is change, and this extends to the stream of experience possessed by each individual. Like Hume, the Buddha discerned no permanent or discrete self, but only a flow of ever-changing experiences. These could be decomposed into skandhas, which are aggregations or groupings of bodily or mental states. The five kinds of skandhas are: (1) rupa, (2) vendana, (3) sanna, (4) sankhara, (5) vinanna.[50] Rupa corresponds roughly to what we would term ‘matter’ and ‘sensory data’ (but Rao reminds us that Buddhism does not make a sharp distinction between physical and mental; or, I would argue, that the categories ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ are not fully commensurable with Buddhist thought). Vendana corresponds with feeling, sanna with perception and sensation, sankhara volition, and vinanna with consciousness.

Consciousness in Buddhism can be defined as a relation between subject and object. As Rao observes, both subject and object need to be understood as relative and mutually dependent. What does not occur is the sharp division between the ‘objective’ (or ‘physical’) world and the ‘mental’, ‘inner’ world. The phenomenological world, in Buddhism, is seen and divided differently.

The Madhyamika School

The Madhyamika philosophy is particularly relevant to the discussion of consciousness, and the concepts used to explain it.[51] This ‘Middle Way’ is a radical approach that suggests the only reality we can really know is the present. Perceptions tend to be momentary, and are constantly changing. The ‘efficacy’, or mental impact of perceived objects ensures their reality. This is the only measure of reality we have. Some harmony or lawful consistency does exist between a momentary reality and the apparent permanence of an object but, as in Hume’s writing, this does not mean that we can assume a causal link between moments.

To the followers of the Middle Way, reality is appearance. The Really Real cannot be touched or grasped, but only apprehended via momentary sensory perceptions and via our concepts. Conditioned realities, which are what we typically perceive, are perceptions tinged or ‘bundled’ with concepts. So our experience of a table, chair or pot plant will be a combination of momentary perception plus our conception of these objects. The strength of experience or efficacy of sensory impressions is that which suggests existence.

Concepts, by contrast, are inevitably fictions, and this judgment includes generalities and ideas about Platonic, persistent realities (including the physical). The Madhyamika philosophy, by contrast, seems closer to the Aristotelian and Protagorean school by equating efficacy with the particular, or direct experience, which follows from the idea that only percepts that significantly impact can be considered ‘Real’. So the teachings show in part the self-contradiction inherent in any fixed concept of the nature of reality, and anticipate the writings of Wittgenstein and anti-real movements in science.[52] The aim in Middle Way practice is to leave concepts behind and experience sunyata, or ‘emptiness’, which is percept without concept.

This sort of view diverges significantly from physicalism. We have seen that the two choices one has within physicalism concerning the subjective mind are either that it does not exist or that it is some kind of illusion (or secondary representation). From a Middle Way perspective, as Wallace argues, it is a mistake to view the brain as substantially, inherently real and the mind as an illusion, he observes that ‘[a]ccording to [the Middle Way], the ‘hard problem’ [of subjectivity] is really an insoluble problem as long as you view either the brain or the mind as inherently real’.[53] If one regards electrochemical processes as more ‘real’ than subjective experiences, then, suggests Wallace, this privileging creates the apparently unbridgeable gap between them, and forces one to either reduce to illusion or eliminate the subjective.

If one stops privileging the physical side in this way, then it can be re-designated as part of a conceptual system that includes consciousness:

Therefore … the physical brain is not an absolute. It exists as something conceptually designated upon its parts and functions. On the other hand, the mind is not a pure illusion or nothing. Although that which is designated as ‘the mind’ is conventional and therefore dependent upon its attributes (thought, images, feelings and so on), this concept, ‘the mind’, does appear to our consciousness.[54]

So to devotees of the Middle Way, physicalism is insufficiently radical in designating the mind only as illusory, because physicalism reifies and makes concrete one aspect of the flow of experience that, according to Buddhism, has no more inherent reality than the mind. This is because the totality of the flow of experience, including perceived physical objects, is part of the ever-changing world of Samsara, or the circular chain of existence. ‘Mind’, ‘Self’, ‘Matter’ can be said to be illusory because they lack an inherent, independent existence and can only be defined in relational terms.

The Buddhist approach, and in particular the Middle Way, is of interest for several reasons. Firstly, we have noted currents of similarity between this and relational views previously discussed. Some aspects of these differing relational theories overlap. However, there are also significant areas of divergence. A key point of difference is that Buddhist thought arose in a culture that was animistic, whilst Westerners live in a culture whose mainstream has been largely purged of such elements. For example, the interrelatedness of subject and object implies psychic phenomena, and in Tibetan Buddhism the apprehending mind has an active and magical role in the world (such abilities are said to arise in training, but are held to be distractions on the way to enlightenment).[55] There is also a widespread belief in reincarnation.

A common strategy, in Western forms of Buddhism, is to reject said views as ‘superstition’ and accept only those portions that appear to coincide with Western views.[56] For example, the doctrine of no-self has been claimed to be compatible with cognitive science’s view of the person as an aggregation of biological structure and function.[57] There have also been lengthy attempts to relate the various states of meditative consciousness to neuroscience.[58] In this sort of view, Buddhist thought can only be accommodated by cutting it down to fit within current Western models.

But this sort of approach seems quite ethnocentric to me. It seems quite conceited to assume that other cultural ideas and practices like meditation can only be acceptable if they can be shoehorned or otherwise assimilated into our dominant culture. In doing so, the original ideas get stripped out of context and become transformed to a degree that does not seem to be necessarily desirable. The problem with this is that we risk losing many of the insights about the world provided by an alternative take on things. In this case, we risk losing the insight that all of our concepts, including our most venerated scientific theories, can ultimately be seen to be fictions, of a sort.[59] At the very least, it should invite a little humility about promoting some concepts at the expense of other people’s, or other cultures’.

Conclusion

The least unsatisfactory position on phenomenological consciousness is, in my opinion, suggested by relational views such as those outlined above. These views seem to me to hold the seeds from which more satisfactory accounts of subjective consciousness might be developed. Relational views that place subjectivity first at least potentially accommodate the viewpoints of myriad individuals and cultures without trying to assimilate them into one big monocultural system, and help counter the significantly dehumanizing effects of trying to reduce human beings to objects, mechanisms and functions. What they do not do is settle the issue of whether consciousness arises as an emergent property/capacity/quality or whether it can be considered somehow inherent in the universe, and I will examine this issue next.

1 Wilber, 2000.

2 Although some aspects of organicism may allow some kind of understanding of the relation between subjective states and physical states to be developed—see my comments on generalized complimentarity, below.

3 Rao, 2002, p. 135.

4 See Baars, 1999.

5 Damasio, 1999.

6 Nagel, 1974.

7 Rinbochay, 1980; consciousness described in these terms on pp. 43–8.

8 Buddhaghosa, 1920, p. 148. Quoted in Rao, 2002, p. 235.

9 James, 1902/1985, pp. 501–2.

10 James, 1902/1985, p. 498, his italics.

11 Feyerabend 1963a; 1963b; 1975.

12 Churchland, 1986.

13 Feyerabend, 1987, p. 138. Although gods and daemons often took the place of an autonomous mind, creativity, etc. in Greek explanations.

14 See Edge, 2002, for an argument against the supposed universality of beliefs in (substance) dualism or essential selves, and Daniels, 2005, chapter seven, for a survey of the myriad ways in which differing cultures divide human personality, self, soul. It becomes apparent, when surveying the historical and transcultural material, just how parochial the blunt mind/body split actually is.

15 Bennett & Hacker, 2003, p. 88.

16 Bennett & Hacker, 2003, p. 89, their italics.

17 Bennett & Hacker, 2003, p. 91.

18 Kosslyn, 1994.

19 Bennett & Hacker, 2003, p. 95.

20 Meixner, 2010, notes that Hacker’s stance is neither monistic nor dualistic. It is not monistic because it does not seek to reduce subjective attributes to the material. It is not dualistic because it denies non-physical entities.

21 Churchland, 1984/1994, p. 15.

22 Churchland, 1984/1994, p. 125.

23 See chapter five.

24 Bennett & Hacker, 2003.

25 Wallace, 2000; Varela & Shear, 1999.

26 Block, 2005, p. 50.

27 Midgley, 2001; see discussion below.

28 Dennett, 1997, p. 620.

29 Dennett, 1991, p. 392.

30 Dennett, 1991, p. 396.

31 Dennett, 1991, p. 396.

32 Rucker, 1997.

33 Madhyamika teachings actually go much further. Trungpa, 1973, p. 191: ‘Words or concepts only point to partial aspects of experience. In fact, it is dubious that one can even speak of “experiencing” reality, since this would imply a separation between experiencer and experience. And finally, it is questionable whether one can even speak of “reality” because this would imply the existence of some objective knower outside and separate from it, as though reality were a nameable thing with set limits and boundaries.’

34 Henry, 2005.

35 Definition from the glossary in Blackmore, 2005. See also Varela & Shear, 1999.

36 Feyerabend, 1987, p. 6.

37 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protagoras accessed on 17/12/10.

38 Feyerabend, 1987, p. 51.

39 Sahtouris, 2008, also makes this observation.

40 Midgley, 2001, p. 114.

41 Midgley, 2001, p. 153.

42 Midgley, 2001, p. 153, her italics.

43 Searle, 1997.

44 Bennett & Hacker, 2003.

45 Or, debatably, ‘holistic’ or at least whole-person properties.

46 BonJour, 2010, argues along these lines.

47 The same goes for attempts to resolve supervenience in terms of whole-part relations (see, e.g. Murphy & Brown, 2007) as I show in chapter fourteen, such holistic physicalist views retain many of the limitations of assuming that ‘higher’ mental states somehow supervene on ‘lower’ physical processes. Viz. they do not really seem to handle subjective states in a significantly different way to older reductionist or ‘information-processing’ accounts.

48 Although many of the subsequent schools did adopt various metaphysical positions and various different ontological interpretations of the earlier teachings.

49 Most of the account of Buddhist thought is taken from Rao, 2002, chapter ten.

50 Rao, 2002, p. 236.

51 Pandeya, 1964.

52 Hope & Van Loon, 1994.

53 Wallace & Hodel, 2008, p. 161.

54 Wallace & Hodel, 2008, pp. 161–2.

55 Roney-Dougal, 2006.

56 This would accord with the opportunistic response to cultural relativism; one picks handy concepts from another culture one encounters (Feyerabend, 1987).

57 Blackmore, 2003.

58 Austin, 1998.

59 The Middle Way can also be quite effective in exposing dogmatism; for example, during a discussion between neuroscientists and the Dalai Lama on the issue of mental causation, it is quite often the neuroscientists rather than the Tibetans who come across as inflexible. For most experts, it seems, it’s physicalism or nothing. See Goleman, 2003, chapter nine.