I love the philosophy of consciousness. Is there any other field of
philosophy that proceeds with so few objective reference points, where
people spend so much time fighting over pure first principles? Yes,
probably, but they aren’t as interesting to me as consciousness. Some
(like a certain eliminativist I was arguing with earlier tonight)
argue for its nonexistence; others (Descartes, anyone?) argue that
it’s all that there definitely is. And throughout, language is
thoroughly inadequate of providing referentiality to any of it. Late
Wittgenstein isn’t the only one who would agree with that; early
Wittgenstein would agree too.

Quick crash course for those who are not quite as obsessed with
these things: consciousness = internal, subjective experience. It
means that when I poke you, you don’t only react with behavior
indicating pain (yelping, yelling, etc.), but you also have some
internal, private sense of actual pain. These two things, as one can
read over and over in later Wittgenstein, have no apparent necessary
connection to one another. But at least for me, it’s a rather
significant assumption I make that other people have rather similar
private subjective experience to mine that matches up with their
behavior in similar ways.

See also Thomas Disch’s href=http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/head.html>Fun With Your New
Head. “Taste, see, smell, and ‘pain’ with a HEAD. Every minute is
different from the next minute in incredible thought-chaos of a HEAD.”

Steven Shaviro reviewed
a new s-f novel called Blindsight by Peter Watts. It sounds
a little pulpy, and it’s unlikely that I’ll get around to it any time
soon, at least not until I finish Thomas Metzinger’s marvelous href=http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/metzinger.html>Being No
One. But Shaviro has conveniently described some of the
consciousness aspects that come into play:

What really distinguishes the aliens is that they are zombies: not in
the George Romero, living dead sense, but in the sense that the term
has been used by cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. A
zombie is a being who acts just as you or I do, who shows clear signs
of language, intelligence, and so on; but who is inwardly devoid of
sentience or consciousness. It’s the old Cartesian/solipsist dilemma:
I know that I have consciousness, interiority, and a sense of self;
but how do I know that you have all these things? For all I
know–since all I really know (according to Descartes) comes from
introspection, everyone else in the world may well be a machine, or an
automoton, only simulating consciousness.

Now, there’s a caveat here, in that the aliens aren’t actually
philosophical zombies, because these aliens don’t act like you
or I do, or even as conscious aliens would. Watts provides clear
behavioral indicators for what non-conscious intelligent beings would
act like and how they would differ. I’ll get to those in a moment. A
real zombie, in the sense that David Chalmers and all put it, requires
the assumption that there are no behavioral or linguistic (or
even neurological) cues that peg someone as having subjective
experience or not. The Waggish-zombie would claim to be conscious,
just as I do.

Given the possibility of true zombies, consciousness is
epiphenomenal, i.e., it has no bearing whatsoever on physical
events. Epiphenomenal consciousness lacks causal force, and it is
superfluous to any causal chain of events. This leads to some fairly
bizarre scenarios, like this one that Raymond Smullyan describes (he
actually uses it against dualism, but it works against
epiphenomenalism as well):

Then came the discovery of the miracle drug! Its effect on the taker
was to annihilate the soul or mind entirely but to leave the body
functioning exactly as before. Absolutely no observable change came
over the taker; the body continued to act just as if it still had a
soul. Not the closest friend or observer could possibly know that the
taker had taken the drug, unless the taker informed him.

Then a person who wishes to have no more subjective experience (to
escape various pains and traumas), but not to hurt anyone by
committing explicit suicide, takes the pill. And of course, he
promptly says, “Damn, it didn’t work!”

Right then. Epiphenomenalism also leads to boring books! Reading
about the difference between people who do and don’t have
consciousness but act the same either way is not terribly
exciting. (Actually, I can think of one way in which it would be
interesting, but I’m keeping it a secret in case I write about it some
day.) So Watts cooks up a few differences to keep things going:

By the end of the novel, the difference between conscious
beings and zombies seems to be that only conscious beings possess
aesthetics. The aliens in the novel are a bit like logical
positivists: they have no aesthetic sensibility, and find aesthetic
and affective statements to be, strictly speaking, meaningless. They
can carry on complex conversations, despite not
“understanding’’ what the words mean; but they can only
regard non-functional expressions as a sort of spam. In this way,
Watts’ Darwinism ends up confirming Kant: the defining attribute
of the aesthetic is that it is unavoidably
“disinterested,’’ that its purposiveness of structure
serves no actual (empirical or utilitarian) purpose. In other words,
an aesthetic sensibility — which at this point we can pretty
much equate with consciousness tout court — is not an
evolutionary adaptation, but mere nonadaptive byproduct.

Again, though, this is ultimately an arbitrary and suppositional
distinction. There’s no necessary reason why beings without
consciousness and subjective experience couldn’t have an aesthetics,
just as there could well be an aesthetics amongst a group of people
who each saw a different color of the spectrum. Under Wittgenstein,
aesthetics remains a series of rule-application speech acts,
wholly independent from private subjective experience.

Shaviro hypothesizes that it is putatively nonadaptive behavior
like aesthetics that constitutes “human-ness,” but I’m frankly
surprised that a Marxist like him would claim that aesthetics ever
indeed is disinterested. (He may simply be playing this out as
a consequence of Watts’s views.) Yet the moment consciousness becomes
more than purely epiphenomenal, it is completely up for grabs as
adaptive, precisely because it must manifest itself in
particular types of behavior, but without any contingent restrictions
on what those behaviors could be. To imply a particular link between
consciousness and certain types of behavior (such as the href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test>mirror test, which
proves self-awareness but hardly indicates anything about subjective
experience) is wholly speculative. The epiphenomenalists go too far in
the other direction by saying that there cannot be any
necessary connections between behavior and consciousness; the answer
is that we simply don’t know yet.

Now, the book is speculative fiction; my issue is that the
speculation assumes too much. This is no worse a sin than many
consciousness philosophers and neurologists, but as a hypothesis for
behavioral differences, I don’t find the aesthetics argument
particularly compelling at first glance. If there were general
behavioral differences between beings with and without subjective
experience, my intuition suggests that they would be far
greater than mere aesthetics, and I’m all for the next writer who
wants to take a shot at guessing what they would be.