Alexius Meinong (1853-1920) was an Austrian psychologist and systematic philosopher working in Graz around the turn of the 20th century. Part of his work was to put forward a sophisticated analysis of the content of thought. A notable aspect of this was as follows. If you are thinking of the Taj Mahal, you are thinking of something, and that something exists.
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The traditional view puts forward the idea that the vast majority of what there is in the universe is mindless. Panpsychism however claims that mental features are ubiquitous in the cosmos.
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If you asked many people today, they would say that one of the limitations of analytic philosophy is its narrowness. Whereas in previous centuries philosophers took on projects of broad scope, today’s philosophers typically deal with smaller issues.
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You go to the museum. Stand in line for half an hour. Pay 20 bucks. And then, you’re there, looking at the exhibited artworks, but you get nothing out of it. You try hard. You read the little annoying labels next to the artworks. Even get the audio-guide. Still nothing. What do you do? Maybe you’re just not into this specific artist. Or maybe you’re not that into paintings in general. Or art.
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Understanding the relationship between the mind and the body remains one of the most vexed problems in philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience. Physicalism has not reigned unchallenged, however. A number of arguments have been raised which promote dualism in its place -- the view that fundamentally, the mind and body are separate.
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There are various more or less familiar acts by which to communicate something with the reasonable expectation of being believed. We can do so by stating, reporting, contending, or claiming that such-and-such is the case; by telling others things, informing an audience of this-or-that, or vouching for something; by affirming or attesting to something’s being the case, or avowing that this-or-that is true.
What do these acts have in common? Each is an instance of the kind of speech act known as an assertion.
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A few really disastrous mistakes have dominated Western philosophy for the past several centuries. The worst mistake of all is the idea that the universe divides into two kinds of entities, the mental and the physical (mind and body, soul and matter). A related mistake, almost as bad, is in our philosophy of perception. All of the great philosophers of the present era, beginning with Descartes, made the same mistake, and it colored their account of knowledge and indeed their account of pretty much everything. By ‘great philosophers’, I mean Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Kant. I am prepared to throw in Hegel and Mill if people think they are great philosophers too. I called this mistake the “Bad Argument”. Here it is: We never directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world. All we ever perceive are the perceptual contents of our own mind. These are variously called ‘ideas’ by Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley, ‘impressions’ by Hume, ‘representations’ by Kant, and ‘sense data’ by twentieth century theorists. Most contemporary philosophers think they have avoided the mistake, but I do not think they have. It is just repeated in different versions, especially by a currently fashionable view called ‘Disjunctivism’.
But that leaves us with a more interesting problem: What is the correct account of the relation of perceptual experience and the real world? The key to understanding this relation is to understand the intentionality of perception. ‘Intentionality’ is an ugly word, but we can pretty much make clear what it means; a mental state is intentional if it represents, or is about, objects and states of affairs in the world. So beliefs, hopes, fears, desires are all intentional in this sense. ‘Intending’ in the ordinary sense just names one kind of intentionality, along with beliefs, desires, etc. Such intentional states are representations of how things are in the world or how we would like them to be, etc., and we might say therefore that they have “conditions of satisfaction” — truth conditions in the case of belief, fulfillment conditions in the case of intentions, etc.
The biologically most basic and gutsiest forms of intentionality are those where we don’t have mere representations but direct presentations of objects and states of affairs in the world, and part of intentionality is that these must be causally related to the conditions in the world that they present. Perception and intentional action are direct presentations of their conditions of satisfaction. In the case of perception, the conditions of satisfaction have to cause the perceptual experience. In the case of action, the intention in action has to cause the bodily movement. So the key to understanding perception is to see the special features of the causal presentational intentionality of perception. The tough philosophical question is to state how exactly the character of the visual experience, its phenomenology, determines the conditions of satisfaction.
How then does the intentional content fix the conditions of satisfaction? The first step in the answer is to see that perception is hierarchical. In order to see higher level features, such that an object is my car, I have to see such basic features as color and shape. The key to understanding the intentionality of the basic perceptual experience is to see that the feature itself is defined in part by its ability to cause a certain sort of perceptual experience. Being red, for example, consists in part in the ability to cause this sort of experience. Once the intentionality of the basic perceptual features is explained, we can then ask the question of how the presentation of the higher level features, such as seeing that it is my car or my spouse, can be explained in terms of the intentionality of the basic perceptual experiences together with collateral information.
How do we deal with the traditional problems of perception? How do we deal with skepticism? The traditional problem of skepticism arises because exactly the same type of experience can be common to both the hallucinatory and the veridical cases. How are we supposed to know which is which?
Image Credit: Marmalade Skies. Photo by Tom Raven. CC by NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.
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By Ted Honderich
The philosopher Descartes set out to escape doubt and to find certainties. From the premise that he was thinking, even if falsely, he argued to what he took to be the certain conclusion that he existed. Cogito ergo sum. He is as well known for concluding that consciousness is not physical. Your being conscious right now is not an objective physical fact. It has a nature quite unlike that of the chair you are sitting on. Your consciousness is different in kind from objectively physical neural states and events in your head.
This mind-body dualism persists. It is not only a belief or attitude in religion or spirituality. It is concealed in standard cognitive science or computerism. The fundamental attraction of dualism is that we are convinced, since we have a hold on it, that consciousness is different. There really is a difference in kind between you and the chair you are sitting on, not a factitious difference.
But there is an awful difficulty. Consciousness has physical effects. Arms move because of desires, bullets come out of guns because of intentions. How could such indubitably physical events have causes that are not physical at all, for a start not in space?
Some philosophers used to accomodate the fact that movements have physical causes by saying conscious desires and intentions aren’t themselves causal but they go along with brain events. Epiphenomenalism is true. Conscious beliefs themselves do not explain your stepping out of the way of joggers. But epiphenomenalism is now believed only in remote parts of Australia, where the sun is very hot. I know only one epiphenomenalist in London, sometimes seen among the good atheists in Conway Hall.
A decent theory or analysis of consciousness will also have the recommendation of answering a clear question. It will proceed from an adequate initial clarification of a subject. The present great divergence in theories of consciousness is mainly owed to people talking about different things. Some include what others call the unconscious mind.
But there are also the criteria for a good theory. We have two already — a good theory will make consciousness different and it will make consciousness itself effective. In fact consciousness is to us not just different, but mysterious, more than elusive. It is such that philosopher Colin McGinn has said before now that we humans have no more chance of understanding it than a chimp has of doing quantum mechanics.
There’s a lot to the new theory of Actualism, starting with a clarification of ordinary consciousness in the primary or core sense as something called actual consciousness. Think along with me just of one good piece of the theory. Think of one part or side or group of elements of ordinary consciousness. Think of consciousness in ordinary perception — say seeing — as against consciousness in just thinking and wanting. Call it perceptual consciousness. What is it for you to perceptually conscious now, as we say, of the room you’re in? Being aware of it, not thinking about it or something in it? Well, the fact is not some internal thing about you. It’s for a room to exist.
It’s for a piece of a subjective physical world to exist out there in space — yours. That is something dependent both on the objective physical world out there and also on you neurally. A subjective physical world’s being dependent on something in you, of course, doesn’t take it out of space out there or deprive it of other counterparts of the characteristics you can assemble of the objective physical world. What is actual with perceptual consciousness is not a representation of a world — stuff called sense data or qualia or mental paint — whatever is the case with cognitive and affective consciousness.
That’s just a good start on Actualism. It makes consciousness different. It doesn’t reduce consciousness to something that has no effects. It also involves a large fact of subjectivity, indeed of what you can call individuality or personal identity, even living a life. One more criterion of a good theory is naturalism — being true to science. It is also philosophy, which is greater concentration on the logic of ordinary intelligence, thinking about facts rather than getting them. Actualism also helps a little with human standing, that motive of believers in free will as against determinism.
Ted Honderich is Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London. He edited The Oxford Companion to Philosophy and has written about determinism and freedom, social ends and political means, and even himself in Philosopher: A Kind of Life. He recently published Actual Consciousness.
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