Category: Consciousness

Consciousness and Life

I have now read about 15 books on consciousness. The most recent was Phillip Goff’s Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (Oxford UP, 2023 paperback; originally published in 2017). A very bad book, easily the worst of all the ones I have read on this topic. But, as often happens with bad books, it spurred my thinking wonderfully, since it clarified what I am willing to believe about consciousness and what speculations I find incredible (in the literal meaning of that word, i.e. something I cannot judge worthy of belief).

Goff is a panpsychist—and goes through a torturous path of posited axioms and piled up distinctions (cutting the bologna thinner and thinner, as a colleague of mine used to put it) to make his case. Monotheism has much to answer for. Basically, Goff is striving to be a monist because monism is more “elegant,” more parsimonious, as a theory than any account that multiplies basic entities.

His book just confirmed me in my pluralist views. And pushed me further toward materialism (or what in consciousness studies often gets called “physicalism.) I am, no doubt, ill informed about the basic science here. But I will venture to guess that one of Goff’s major problems is that he takes physics as the fundamental science relevant to his metaphysical project—a project defined by the attempt to identify the “deep nature” of “fundamental reality.” Goff is a believer in substance—and he ends up in a recognizably Spinoza-like place (although he only mentions Spinoza once in his book.) There is only one substance, but it manifests itself in different aspects (Spinoza’s modes) for Goff. And since one of Goff’s axioms is that consciousness self-evidently exists, then the single substance must have some rudimentary consciousness (although he does affirm that consciousness comes in more or less elaborated forms). In his most recent book, Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 2023), Goff substitutes “the cosmos” for God, with what only seems to me a sliver of difference between the two even as he denies belief in God. (I base this on a podcast interview with Goff; I have not read the new book.) You can access the podcast interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHFzS8MIhK0

Enough of Goff. What do I now believe? I buy Goff’s insistence that the existence of consciousness is self-evident. Consciousness is not an illusion; the phenomenon of experiencing consciousness needs to be accepted as evidence of its reality—and thus any metaphysical account of “what is” must include consciousness.

From there, accounting for the existence of consciousness leads into the question of whether it is something very different from the things that do not appear to possess consciousness. Just about everyone out there right now hates dualism; they don’t want a metaphysical account that ends up with two radically different fundamental things: consciousness and non-consciousness. So the alternatives seem to become: 1) reduction of consciousness to matter and its processes (physicalism) or 2) panpsychism (baking consciousness into matter from the very start).

On the face of it, neither alternative is very attractive. For the physicalist, the problem is that the actual physical processes by which you get from bio-chemical interactions to consciousness continue to elude us (despite assurances that date back to the 17^th century that the connection will someday be uncovered). For the panpsychist, the problem is that basic matter—stones, not to mention atoms and electrons, do not demonstrate any of the features of consciousness. So on what basis do you claim that consciousness is somehow present in such instances of matter?

Let me start from what may be a huge misunderstanding on my part. Still: as I understand it, when we go to the periodic table of elements, we get a plurality of instances of matter that we could say are structured the same (i.e. however you characterize atomic structure) but which are different. A gold atom is not a hydrogen atom. And a gold atom will interact differently with an oxygen atom than a hydrogen atom will. So that seems to me to argue against the notion of a fundamental sameness, a monism, at the bottom of the manifested world. Instead, we begin from a variety of things that then interact in ways that produce further variety. Scientific laws may delineate the forms that interactions typically take—but the actual outcomes of interactions depend on which elements are interacting. Furthermore, modern science (again as I understand it—and I could well be wrong) usually works with probabilities, not certainties. Interactions do not always produce the same results. There is a considerable dose of leeway, even if science can fairly accurately (over a range of cases) predict the probability of one outcome over other possible ones. All of this, to my mind, suggests neither monism, not dualism, but pluralism.

But let’s leave physics behind. I think it’s a big mistake on Goff’s part to take physics as the place to land in any attempt to account for consciousness or for fundamental reality. As I see it, biology over the past fifty years has replaced physics as the science most likely to get us to the root of things. What is most striking to me about Goff’s book is the failure to link consciousness to life. I much prefer the various thinkers—Daniel Dennett (Freedom Evolves, Penguin,2004), Nicholas Humphrey [Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness, MIT Press, 2023), Kevin Mitchell (Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, Princeton UP, 2023)—who approach consciousness through an evolutionary lens.

What does that mean? A lot of things. So let me list them here—and then try to discuss each of these items in turn. 1) Consciousness should be considered in relation to the ways it furthers an organism’s ability to survive and to produce descendants. 2) Consciousness should be considered within an evolutionary timeframe. It is not static, but something that changes over time. There is no reason to expect that it always existed (just as human beings did not always exist) and there is no reason to think it is not always in process. Adaptation, mutation, and change never stop. 3) The crucial category for thinking about the fundamental nature of things is “life,” not atomic or sub-atomic structure or some version of quantum mechanics. In short, biology leads us from a “substantialist” way of approaching metaphysical questions to a dynamic, process-focused way of addressing such questions. There is not some fundamental “stuff,” but a dynamic unfolding as “stuff” interacts and is transformed over time.

OK. Let me tackle each of these issues in turn. First, an evolutionary perspective on consciousness. I am mostly following Kevin Mitchell here. Basically, consciousness is a tool for evaluation. A living organism must evaluate its circumstances (what are threats, what are opportunities, what are the affordances) and must evaluate possible courses of action in response to those circumstances (which actions are most likely to be effective, require more of less expenditure of energy, have the least harmful side effects etc.) Self-consciousness is a way of evaluating what we can term the “internal environment.” How am I feeling, what do I want? Since circumstances change in a non-static world, the advantage of having the flexibility consciousness provides is a very valuable evolutionary advantage. Automatic stimulus/response mechanisms cannot adapt to different situations with the subtlety that consciousness affords.

On another level of explanation, the evolutionary view seems to entail accepting a dualist understanding of causation. Harkening back to Aristotle, the mechanistic efficient causation of physics now needs to be supplemented with a teleological causation acting at the level of the whole. Basically, the idea is that efficient causation is from the bottom-up, parts interacting to create something new. (That something new may, at times, be something larger, the product of a merger of the parts. But that is only one possibility; efficient causes can produce any number of effects.) A teleological cause is from the top-down. The whole has purposes that cause certain behavior in the parts. In evolutionary terms, the organism has an overriding purpose (survival and reproduction) that then causes the selection of certain capacities (sight, consciousness) that serve that purpose. In the most basic terms, the organism must work against entropy, must expend energy to keep its complex systems functioning, must defy the 2^nd law of thermodynamics. Mitchell touches to some extent on this insistence that efficient cause does not rule the entire roost, but to get the full blown rewriting of our theories of causation to serve an evolutionary account of consciousness, you need to go to Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (Norton, 2013) and Mark Solms, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (Norton, 2021). Their work leads to a cybernetic understanding of consciousness and its function within an information-processing model of living organisms. I do not claim to comprehend this model is all its intricacies, but the basic need to establish the credibility of a non-mechanistic form of causality is clear enough.

My second issue—the non-static, dynamic nature of evolutionary time is less complex. The big point here, for me, is that we hardly need (as the panpsychist insists) to have the psychic baked in from the very start. Things emerge over the long, long time spans of evolution; why should it be impossible that consciousness emerges? Improbable, yes. But impossible, no. If there are evolutionary good reasons for consciousness to emerge, then there are forces to work to make that happen. The real improbability is that life itself emerges. Once life does emerge, the emergence of consciousness is less hard to understand since consciousness delivers such substantial advantages for adaptation, survival, and reproduction. In terms or metaphysics, accepting a dynamic and long time frame moves us away from trying to identify basic entities that are there from start to finish. New interactions of pre-existing elements create new things.

So my third issue: life as the crucial category. I think that here I am going to get pushed into something that looks like, most likely is, dualism. But Goff’s book got me thinking about how intimately connected consciousness and life are—and how this intimate connection has not been explicitly addressed in the various books I have read. Here’s what I mean: consciousness is something only living creatures have. A stone is not conscious. But what is a living creature? A stab at a basic definition: a living creature is one that must take in fuel of some sort that it metabolizes to provide the energy required to keep certain life-sustaining processes going. Digestion, consciousness, blood circulation, fighting off infections are just some of these life-sustaining processes. And, crucially, a living creature can be defined as one that can die. To die is to have those various processes come to an end. No more seeking for and then ingesting fuel, no more feeling hungry, no more devising strategies for allaying hunger.

So the dualism seems to be between something that is alive and something that is not. And it seems as if alive things have consciousness and non-alive things do not. Furthermore, things that were once alive can stop being alive; they die and when they die they lose consciousness. All of which suggests to me that consciousness is produced by bio-chemical processes that require energy to occur and, since these processes can go awry in ways that do not sustain life but cause death instead, that the teleology of “life” must organize the multiple processes embodied in a living organism as it tries to ward off death. Consciousness is just one of those processes—and even if it is more mysterious to us than the digestive system, there seems no reason to believe it is different in kind. Hence my physicalism.

But I am still left with a dualism between the living and the non-living. Another way to express that dualism is to say that the processes of geology are also dynamic and non-static, but they are not processes in which natural selection (as understood by evolutionary theory) plays any role at all. Continental drift has nothing to do with adaptation and, thus (if my thinking hasn’t gotten utterly confused at this point), can be seen as solely an outcome of efficient causes, with no involvement of teleological causes.

I will end here. What I have said here does nothing to address the marvels and mysteries of the phenomenological experience of consciousness. Not surprisingly, as a literary person, the phenomenology is in many ways more interesting to me. How different living creatures think and feel is fascinating. We never cease to be surprised at how differently different creatures evaluate what appears to be the same situation. Except, of course, different creatures actually notice different aspects of that situation; different things are salient for them, attract their attention. And that doesn’t even consider different desires. But I don’t know that I have yet found a good way to even begin to sort out the complexities here. I think we need a book titled The Varieties of Conscious Experience—a deliberate echo of William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Percept/Concept

I tried to write a post on the distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive and got completely tangled up. So, instead, I am taking a step backward and addressing the relation between percept and concept, where I feel on surer ground. I will follow up this post with another on fact/value. And then, with those two pairings sorted out, I may be able to say something coherent about the cognitive/non-cognitive pairing.

So here goes. A percept is what is offered to thought by one of the five senses. I see or smell something. The stimulus for the percept is, in most but not all cases, something external to myself. Let’s stick to perception of external things for the moment. I see a tree, or smell a rose, or hear the wind whistling through the trees. I have what Hume calls “an impression.”

I have always wanted to follow the lead of J. L. Austin in his Sense and Sensibilia. In that little book, Austin takes on the empiricist tradition that has insisted, since Locke, that one forms a “representation” or an “idea” (that is the term Locke uses) of the perceived thing. (In the philosophical tradition, this gets called “the way of ideas.”) In other words, there is an intermediary step. One perceives something, then forms an “idea” of it, and then is able to name, think about, or otherwise manipulate that idea. The powers of thought and reflection depend upon this translation of the impression, of the percept, into an idea (some sort of mental entity.) Austin, to my mind, does a good job of destroying that empiricist account, opting instead for direct perception, dispensing with the intermediary step of forming an idea–and thus appealing to some kind of “mental state” to understand perception.

But Kevin Mitchell in Free Agents (Princeton UP, 2023) makes a fairly compelling case for raw percepts being transformed into “representations.” First, there are the differences in perceptual capabilities from one species to another, not to mention differences among members of the same species. If I am more far-sighted than you, I will see something different from you. True, that doesn’t necessarily entail indirection as contrasted to direct perception. But it does mean that the “thing itself” (the external stimuli) does not present itself in exactly the same guise to every perceiving being. What is perceived is a co-production, created out of the interaction between perceiver and perceived. There is no “pure” perception. Perception is always an act that is influenced by the sensory equipment possessed by the perceiver along with the qualities of the thing being perceived. Descriptions of how human sight works makes it clear how much “work” is done upon the raw materials of perception before the “thing” is actually seen. And, of course, we know that there are colors that the color-blind cannot perceive and noises that are in most cases beyond human perceptual notice.

Second, the experiences of both memory and language speak to the existence of “representations.” We are able to think about a perceived thing even in its absence. To say the word “elephant” is to bring an elephant into the room even when that elephant is not physically present. Similarly, memory represents to us things that are absent. Thus, even if we deny that the perception of present things has an intermediary step of transforming the percept into a “representation,” it seems indubitable that we then “store” the immediate impressions in the form of representations that can be called to mind after the moment of direct impression.

Finally, the existence of representations, of mental analogues to what has been experienced in perception, opens the door for imagination and reflection. I can play around with what perception has offered once I have a mental representation of it. I can, in short, think about it. The sheer weight of facticity is sidestepped once I am inside my head instead of in direct contact with the world. A space, a distance, is opened up between perceiver and perceived that offers the opportunity to explore options, to consider possible actions upon, manipulations of, what the world offers. Representation provides an ability to step back from the sensory manifold and take stock.

So it would seem that Austin’s appealing attempt to dispense with the elaborate machinery of empiricist psychology won’t fly. As accounts of how human vision works show, too much is going on to make a “direct” account of perception true to how perception actually works. Stimuli sensed by the senses are “processed” before being registered, not directly apprehended.

So the next issue is what “registering” or “apprehending” consist of. But first a short digression. We typically think of perception as the encounter with external things through one of the five senses. But we can also perceive internal states, like a headache or sore muscle. In those cases, however, perception does not seem to be tied to one of the five senses, but to some sort of ability to monitor one’s internal states. Pain and pleasure are the crudest terms for the signals that trigger an awareness of internal states. More broadly, I think it fair to say that the emotions in their full complex panoply are the markers of internal well-being (or its opposite or the many way stations between absolute euphoria and abject despair). Emotions are both produced by the body (sometimes in relation to external stimuli, sometimes in relation to internal stimuli) and serve as the signal for self-conscious registering of one’s current states. It’s as if a tree was not just a tree, but also a signal of “tree-ness.” Anger is both the fact of anger and a signal to the self of its state of mind in response to some stimuli. Certain things in the world or some internal state triggers an emotion—and then the emotion offers a path to self-awareness. So there appears to be an “internal sense capacity,” ways of monitoring internal states and “apprehending” them that is parallel to the ways the five traditional senses provide for apprehending the external world.

What, then, does it mean to “apprehend” something once the senses have provided the raw materials of an encounter with that thing? Following Kant, apprehension requires a “determinate judgment.” The percept is registered by the self when the percept is conceptualized. Percept must become concept in order to be fully received. To be concrete: I see the various visual stimuli that the tree offers, but I don’t apprehend the tree until I subsume this particular instance of a tree into the general category/concept “tree.” I “recognize” the tree as a tree when I declare “that’s a tree.” The tree in itself, standing there in the forest, does not know itself as a tree. The concept “tree” is an artifact of human language and human culture. Percepts only become occasions for knowledge when they are married to concepts. Pure, non-conceptualized, percepts are just raw material—and cannot be used by human thought. In other words, back to the representation notion. Until what perception offers is transformed into a representation, it is unavailable for human apprehension, for being taken up by the human subject as part of its knowledge of the world. (Of course, famously in Kant, this yields the distinction between our representations and the “thing in itself.” The cost of “the way of ideas”–the cost that Austin was trying to overcome–is this gap in our knowledge of the world, our inability to see things independently of the limitations of human perceptual and conceptual equipment. Science attempts to overcome these limitations by using non-human instruments of perception (all those machines in our hospitals), but even science must acknowledge that what a machine registers, just like what a human registers, is a representation that is shaped by the nature of the representing apparatus.)

Determinate judgment appears to be instantaneous. At least in the case of the encounter with most external things. I see a tree and, without any discernible time lapse, identify it as a tree. I have no awareness of processing the sensory signals and then coming to a judgment about what category the seen thing belongs to. Percept and concept are cemented together. Of course, there are some cases where I can’t at first make out what it is before me. The lighting is bad, so I see a shape, but not enough more to determine what the thing is. Such cases do indicate there is a distinction between percept and concept. But in the vast majority of cases it is just about impossible to pry them apart.

For many artists from Blake on, the effort to pry the two apart is a central ambition. The basic idea is that we see the world through our conceptual lenses—and thus fail to apprehend it in its full richness, its full sensual plenitude. We filter out the particulars of this tree as we rush to assimilate the singular instance to the general category. Thus painters strive to make us see things anew (cubism) or to offer ambiguous items that can’t be immediately or readily identified (surrealism). They try to drive a wedge between percept and concept. “No ideas but in things,” proclaims William Carlos Williams—and this hostility to ideas, to their preeminence over things (over percepts), is shared by many modern artists.

One of the mysteries of the percept/concept pairing is the relative poverty of our linguistic terms to describe percepts. We can in most cases quickly identify the tree as a tree, and we can certainly say that the tree’s leaves are green in the spring and rust-colored in the fall. But more precise linguistic identification of colors eludes us. We can perceive far more variations in colors than we can describe. Hence the color chips at any hardware store, which offer 45 variants of the color we crudely call “blue” and invent fanciful names to distinguish each different shade from the rest. The same, of course, holds for smells and for emotions. We have a few, very crude terms for smell (pungent, sharp) but mostly can only identify smells in terms of the objects that produce such smells. It smells flowery, or like hard boiled egg. The same with taste. Aside from sweet, sour, sharp, we enter the world of simile, so that descriptions of wine notoriously refer to things that are not wine. Notes of black currant, leather, and tobacco. And when it comes to emotions we are entirely at sea—well aware that our crude generalized terms (love, anger, jealousy) get nowhere near to describing the complexities of what one feels. Thus some artists (Updike comes to mind) specialize in elaborating on our descriptive vocabularies for physical and emotional percepts. Thus a whole novel might be devoted to tracing the complexities of being jealous, to strive to get into words the full experience of that emotional state.

In any case, the paucity of our linguistic resources for describing various percepts, even in cases where the distinction between the percepts is obvious to us (as in the case of gradients of color), shows (I believe) that there are ordinary cases where percept and concept are distinct. We don’t immediately leap to judgment in every case. Now, it is true that I conceptualize the various shades of blue as “color” and even as “blue.” But I do not thereby deny that the various shades on the color chip are also different, even though I have no general category to which I can assign those different shades.

Two more puzzles here. The first is Wittgensteinian. I had forgotten, until going through this recently with my granddaughter, how early children master color. By 18 months, she could identify the basic colors of things. Multiple astounding things here. How did she know we were referring to color and not to the thing itself when we call a blue ball “blue”? What were we pointing out to her: the color or the thing? Yet she appeared to have no trouble with that possible confusion. Except. For a while she called the fruit “orange” “apples.” It would seem that she could not wrap her head around the fact that the same word could name both a color and a thing. She knew “orange” as a color, so would not use that word to name a thing. Even more amazing than sorting colors from things, was her accuracy in identifying a thing’s color. Given sky blue and navy blue, she would call both “blue.” A little bit later on (two or three months) she learned to call one “light blue” and the other “dark blue.” But prior to that distinction, she showed no inclination to think the two were two different colors. And she didn’t confuse them with purple or any other adjacent color. So how is it that quite different percepts get tossed into the same category with just about no confusion (in relation to common usage) at all? It would seem more obvious to identify sky blue and dark blue as two different colors.

The second puzzle might be called the ”good enough” conundrum. I walk in the forest and see “trees.” The forester sees a number of specific species—and very likely also singles out specific trees as “sick” or of a certain age. His judgments are very, very different from mine—and do not suffer from the paucity of my categorical terms. Similarly, the vintner may rely on an almost comical similes to describe the taste of the wine, but I do not doubt that his perceptions are more intense and more nuanced than mine. A chicken/egg question here about whether having the concepts then sharpens the percepts—or if sharper percepts then generate a richer vocabulary to describe them. Or the prior question: do we only perceive with the acuity required by our purposes? My walk in the woods is pleasant enough for me without my knowing which specific types of trees and ferns I am seeing. What we “filter out,” in other words, is not just a function of the limitations of our perceptual equipment, or the paucity of our concepts/vocabulary, but also influenced by our purposes. We attend to what we need to notice to achieve something.

Push this last idea just a bit and we get “pragmatism” and its revision of the empiricist account of perception and the “way of ideas.” The pragmatist maxim says that our “conception” of a thing is our understanding of its consequences. That is, we perceive things in relation to the futures that thing makes possible. Concepts are always dynamic, not static. They categorize what perception offers in terms of how one wants to position oneself in the world. Percept/concept is relational—and at issue is the relations I wish to establish (or maintain) between myself and what is “out there” (which includes other people.)

Back to the artists. The repugnance many artists (as well as other people) feel toward pragmatism stems from this narrowing down of attention, of what might be perceived. Focused (in very Darwinian fashion) upon what avails toward the organism’s well-being, the pragmatist self only perceives, only attends to, that which it can turn to account. It thereby misses much of what is in the world out there. The artists want to fling open the “doors of perception” (to quote Blake)—and see pragmatism as a species of utilitarianism, a philosophy that notoriously reduces the range of what “matters” to humans as well as reducing the motives for action to a simple calculus of avoiding pain and maximizing pleasure. To categorize percepts immediately into two bins–these things might benefit me, these things are potentially harmful—is to choose to live in a diminished, perversely impoverished world.

Of course, Dewey especially among the “classic” pragmatists worked hard to resist the identification of pragmatism to a joyless and bare-bones utilitarianism. The key to this attempt is “qualia”—a term that is also central in the current philosophical debates about consciousness. “Qualia” might be defined as the “feel of things.” I don’t just see trees as I walk in the woods. I also experience a particular type of pleasure—one that mixes peacefulness, the stimulus/joy of physical exertion, an apprehension of beauty, a diffuse sense of well-being etc. “Consciousness” (as understood in everyday parlance) registers that pleasure. Consciousness entails that I not only feel the pleasure but can also say to myself that I am feeling this pleasure. Percepts, in other words, are accompanied by specific feelings that are those percept’s “qualia.” And through consciousness we can register the fact of experiencing those feelings.

The relation of concepts to “qualia” is, I think, more complex—and leads directly to the next post on the fact/value dyad. A concept like “fraud” does seem to me to have its own qualia. Moral indignation is a feeling—and one very likely to be triggered by the thought of fraud. Perhaps (I don’t know about this) only a specific instance of fraud, not just the general concept of it, is required to trigger moral indignation. But I don’t think so. The general idea that American financiers often deploy fraudulent practices seems to me enough to make me feel indignant.

On the other hand, the general concept of “tree” does not seem to me to generate any very specific qualia. Perhaps a faint sense of approval. Who doesn’t like trees? But pretty close to neutral. The issues, in short, are whether “neutral” percepts or concepts are possible. Or do all percepts and concepts generate some qualia, some feelings that can be specified? And, secondly, are all qualia related to judgments of value? If we mostly and instantaneously make a judgment about what category a percept belongs to (what concept covers this instance), do we also in most cases and instantaneously judge the “value” of any percept? That’s what my next post on fact/value will try to consider.

Philosophy and How One Acts

A friend with whom I have been reading various philosophical attempts to come to terms with what consciousness is and does writes to me about “illusionism,” the claim that we do not have selves. We are simply mistaken in thinking the self exists. The basic argument is the classic empiricist case against “substance.” There are various phenomena (let’s call them “mental states” in this case), but no stuff, no thing, no self, to which those mental states adhere, or in which they are collected. Thomas Metzger is one philosopher who holds this position and in an interview tells us that his position has no experiential consequences. It is not clear to me whether Metzger thinks (in a Nietzschean way) that the self is an unavoidable illusion or if Metzger thinks that ll the phenomena we attribute to the self would just continue to be experienced in exactly the same way even if we dispensed with the notion (illusion) of the self. In either case, accepting or denying Metzger’s position changes nothing. Belief or non-belief in the self is not a “difference that makes a difference” to recall William James’s formula in the first chapter of his book, Pragmatism.

The issue, then, seems to be what motivates a certain kind of intellectual restlessness, a desire to describe the world (the terms of existence) in ways that “get it right”–especially if the motive does not seem to be any effect on actual behavior. It’s “pure” theory, abstracted from any consequences in how one goes about the actualities of daily life.

There does exist, for some people, a certain kind of restless questioning. I have had a small number of close friends in my life, and what they share is that kind of restlessness. A desire to come up with coherent accounts of why things are the way they are, especially of why people act the ways they do. People are endlessly surprising and fascinating. Accounting for them leads to speculations that are constantly being revised and restated because each account seems, in one way or another, to fail to “get things right.” There is always the need for another round of words, of efforts to grasp the “why” and “how” of things. Most people, in my experience, don’t feel this need to push at things. I was always trying to get my students to push their thinking on to the next twist—and rarely succeeded in getting them to do so. And for myself this restless, endless inquiry generates a constant stream of words, since each inadequate account means a new effort to try to get it more accurately this time.

Clearly, since I tried to get my students to do this, I think of such relentless questioning as an intellectual virtue. But what is it good for? I take that to be the core issue of your long email to me. And I don’t have an answer. Where id is, ego shall be. But it seems very clear that being able to articulate one’s habitual ways of (for example) relating to one’s lover, to know what triggers anger or sadness or neediness, does little (if anything) to change the established patterns. Understanding (even if there were any way to show that the understanding was actually accurate) doesn’t yield much in the way of behavioral results.

This gets to your comment that if people really believed Darwin was right, as many people do, then they wouldn’t eat animals. William James came to believe that we have our convictions first—and then invent the intellectual accounts/theories that we say justify the convictions. In other words, we mistake the causal sequence. We take the cause (our convictions) as the effect (our theory), when it is really the other way around. Nietzsche was prone to say the very same thing.

One way to say this: we have Darwin, but will use him to justify exactly opposite behaviors. You say if we believed Darwin we wouldn’t eat animals. I assume that the logic is that Darwin reveals animals as our kin, so eating them is a kind of cannibalism. We don’t eat dogs because they feel “too close” to us; that feeling should be extended to all animals, not just fellow humans and domestic pets. (The French eat horse meat although Americans won’t). But many people use Darwin to rationalize just the opposite. We humans have evolved as protein seeking omnivores and we developed domesticating animals we eat just as we developed agriculture to grow plants we eat. Even if we argue that domestication and agriculture were disasters, proponents of so-called “paleo diets” include meat eating in their attempt to get back to something thought basic to our evolved requirements. So even is Darwin is absolutely right about how life—and specifically human life—emerged, people will use the content of his theory to justify completely contradictory behaviors.

This analysis, of course, raises two questions. 1) What is the cause of our convictions if it is not some set of articulable beliefs about how the world is? James only answer is “temperament,” an in-built sensibility, a predilection to see the world in a certain way. (Another book I have just finished reading, Kevin Mitchell’s Free Agents [Princeton UP, 2023], says about 50% of our personality is genetically determined and that less than 10% is derived from family environment. Mitchell has an earlier book, titled Innate [Princeton UP, 2018], where he goes into detail about how such a claim is supported.) Nietzsche, in some places, posits an in-built will to power. All the articulations and intellectualisms are just after the fact rationalizations. In any case, “temperament” is obviously no answer at all. We do what we do because we are who we are—and how we got to be who we are is a black box. Try your damndest, it’s just about impossible to make sure your child ends up heterosexual or with some other set of desires.

2)So why are James and Nietzsche still pursuing an articulated account of “how it really works”? Is there no consequence at all at “getting it right”? Shouldn’t their theories also be understood as just another set of “after the fact” rationalization? In other words, reason is always late to the party—which suggests that consciousness is not essential to behavior, just an after-effect.

That last statement, of course, is the conclusion put forward by the famous Libet tests. The ones that say we move our hand milli-seconds before we consciously order our hand to move. Both Dennett [in Freedom Evolves (Penguin, 2003) and Mitchell (in Free Agents) have to claim the Libet experiment is faulty in order to save any causal power for consciousness. For the two of them, who want to show that humans actually possess free will, consciousness must be given a role in the unfolding of action. There has to be a moment of deliberation, of choosing between options—and that choosing is guided by reason (by an evaluation of the options and a decision made between those options) and beliefs (some picture of how the world really is.) I know, from experience, that I have trouble sleeping if I drink coffee after 2pm. I reason that I should not drink coffee after 2pm if I want to sleep. So I refrain from doing so. A belief about a fact that is connected to a reasoned account of a causal sequence and a desire to have one thing happen rather than another: presto! I choose to do one thing rather than another based on that belief and those reasons. To make that evaluation certainly seems to require consciousness—a consciousness that observes patterns, that remembers singular experiences that can be assembled into those patterns, that can have positive forward-looking desires to have some outcomes rather than others (hence evaluation of various possible bodily and worldly states of affairs), and that can reason about what courses of action are most likely to bring those states of affairs into being. (In short, the classical account of “rationality” and of “reason-based action.”)

If this kind of feedback loop actually exists, if I can learn that some actions produce desirable results more dependably than others, then the question becomes (it seems to me): at what level of abstraction does “knowledge” no longer connect to action? Here’s what I am struggling to see. Learned behavior, directed by experiences that provide concrete feedback, seems fairly easy to describe in terms of very concrete instances. But what happens when we get to belief in God—or Darwin? With belief in God, we seem to see that humans can persist in beliefs without getting any positive feedback at all. I believe in a loving god even as my child dies of cancer and all my prayers for divine intervention yield no result. (The classic overdramatized example.) Faced with this fact, many theologians will just say: it’s not reasonable, so your models of reasoned behavior are simply irrelevant at this point. A form of dualism. There’s another belief-to-action loop at play. Another black box.

On Darwin it seems to me a question of intervention. Natural selection exists entirely apart from human action/intention/desire etc. It does its thing whether there are humans in the world or not. That humans can “discover” the fact of natural selection’s existence and give detailed accounts of how it works is neither here nor there to natural selection itself. This is science (in one idealized version of what science is): an accurate description of how nature works. The next step seems to be: is there any way for humans to intervene in natural processes to either 1) change them (as when we try to combat cancer) or 2) harness the energies or processes of nature to serve specific human ends. (This is separate from how human actions inadvertently, unintentionally, alter natural processes–as is the case in global warming. I am currently reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future–and will discuss it in a future post.)

In both cases (i.e intentionally changing a natural process of harnessing the energies of a natural process toward a specifically human-introduced end), what’s driving the human behavior are desires for certain outcomes (health in the case of the cancer patient), or any number of possible desires in the cases of intervention. I don’t think the scientific explanation has any direct relation to those desires. In other words, nothing about the Darwinian account of how the world is dictates how one should desire to stand in relation to that world. Darwin’s theory of evolution, I am saying, has no obvious, necessary, or univocal ethical consequences. It does not tell us how to live—even if certain Darwinian fundamentalists will bloviate about “survival of the fittest” and gender roles in hunter-gatherer societies.

I keep trying to avoid it, but I am a dualist when it comes to ethics. The non-human universe has no values, no meanings, no clues about how humans should live. Hurricanes are facts, just like evolution is a fact. As facts, they inform us about the world we inhabit—and mark out certain limits that it is very, very useful for us to know. But the use we put them to is entirely human generated, just as the uses the mosquito puts his world to are entirely mosquito driven. To ignore the facts, the limits, can be disastrous, but pushing against them, trying to alter them, is also a possibility. And the scientific knowledge can be very useful in indicating which kinds of intervention will prove effective. But it has nothing to say about what kinds of intervention are desirable.

I am deeply uncomfortable in reaching this position. Like most of the philosophers I read, I do not want to be a dualist. I want to be a naturalist—where “naturalism” means that everything that exists is a product of natural forces. Hence all the efforts out there to offer an evolutionary account of “consciousness” (thus avoiding any kind of Cartesian dualism) and the complementary efforts to provide an evolutionary account of morality (for example, Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project [Harvard UP, 2011.) I am down with the idea that morality is an evolutionary product—i.e. that it develops out of the history and “ecology” of humans as social animals. But there still seems to me a discontinuity between the morality that humans have developed and the lack of morality of cancer cells, gravity, hurricanes, photosynthesis, and the laws of thermodynamics. Similarly, there seems to me a gap between the non-consciousness of rocks and the consciousness of living beings. So I can’t get down with panpsychism even if I am open to evolutionary accounts of the emergence of consciousness from more primitive forms to full-blown self-consciousness.

Of course, some Darwinians don’t see a problem. Evolution does provide all living creatures with a purpose—to survive—and a meaning—to pass on one’s genes. Success in life (satisfaction) derives from those two master motives—and morality could be derived from serving those two motives. Human sociality is a product of those motives (driven in particular by the long immaturity, non-self-sustaining condition, of human children)—and morality is just the set of rules that makes sociality tenable. So the theory of evolution gives us morality along with an account of how things are. The fact/value gap overcome. How to square this picture of evolution with its randomness, its not having any end state in view, is unclear. The problem of attributing purposes to natural selection, to personifying it, has bedeviled evolutionary theory from the start.

For Dennett, if I am reading him correctly, the cross-over point is “culture,”—and, more specifically, language. Language provides a storage device, a way of accumulating knowledge of how things work and of successful ways of coping in this world. Culture is a natural product, but once in place it offers a vantage point for reflection upon and intervention in natural processes. Humans are the unnatural animal, the ones who can perversely deviate from the two master motives of evolution (survival and procreation) even as they strive to submit nature to their whims. It’s an old theme: humans appear more free from natural drivers, but even as freedom is a source of their pride and glory, it often is the cause of their downfall. (Hubris anyone?) Humans are not content with the natural order as they find it. They constantly try to change it—with sometimes marvelous, with other times disastrous, results.

But that only returns us to the mystery of where this restless desire to revise the very terms of existence comes from. To go back to James and Nietzsche: it doesn’t seem like our theories, our abstract reasonings and philosophies, are what generate the behavior. Instead, the restlessness comes first—and the philosophizing comes after as a way of explaining the actions. See, the philosophers say, the world is this particular way, so it makes sense for me to behave in this specific way. But, says James, the inclination to behave that way came first—and then the philosophy was tailored to match.

So, to end this overlong wandering, back where I began. Bertrand Russell (in his A History of Western Philosophy) said that Darwin’s theory is the perfect expression of rapacious capitalism—and thus it is no surprise that it was devised during the heyday of laissez-faire. That analysis troubles me because it offers a plausible suspicion of Darwin’s theory along the William James line. The theory just says the “world is this way” in a manner that justifies the British empire and British capitalism in 1860. But I really do believe Darwin is right, that he has not just transposed a capitalist world view into nature. I am, however, having trouble squaring this circle. That is, how much our philosophizing, our theories, just offer abstract versions of our pre-existing predilections—and how much those theories offer us genuine insights about the world we inhabit, insights that will then effect our behavior on the ground. A very long-winded way of saying I can’t come up with a good answer to the questions your email posed.

Arguing with the Darwinians

In the consciousness literature, Darwin is king. Whatever consciousness is (and there is plenty of disagreement about that), every one in the conversation accepts that consciousness must be a product of a Darwinian process of evolution. There are various competing versions of an evolutionary narrative for the arrival of consciousness on the scene.

In its most extreme versions, panpsychism tries to avoid the sticky problem of identifying the “before” from the “after” moment. The problem for any Darwinian account: once consciousness did not exist, but at a certain point in time it emerged, it arrived. By saying something (just what is unclear) fundamental to consciousness was always already there, the panpsychist tries to sidestep the before/after conundrum; but even the panpsychist has to have a story about how the originating germ of consciousness develops into the full-blown consciousness of humans, higher primates, other mammals, and other creatures. No one is claiming mollusks have a consciousness as fully elaborated as that in chimpanzees. Or that chimpanzees were there at the origins. There still needs to be a story about the elaboration of consciousness from its primitive beginnings into the sophisticated forms displayed in life forms that arrive on the scene at a much later date.

There are two things it would seem any plausible Darwinian account must provide. First, it must provide a plausible bio-chemical account of a) how variants are produced for a process of selection to choose among, and b) the physiological/chemical processes that create consciousness itself. Genetics (most directly random genetic mutations) is assumed to provide most of what is needed to answer the variant question. As for b, a bio-chemical explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness, that such an explanation must exist is generally assumed in the literature, although everyone (with a few exceptions, as always) agrees that we are still a long way away from possessing anything like a complete and satisfactory bio-chemical understanding of consciousness.

I am going to leave these bio-chemical questions aside in this discussion—as do Veit and Humphrey in their books. [Nicholas Humphrey, Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2023) and Walter Veit, A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness (Routledge, 2023).] Instead, I want to focus my attention on the second requirement of any Darwinian account.

Namely, such an account must identify the “advantage(s)” that consciousness would provide to an organism. Only if there are such advantages would consciousness be “selected” for. Since (of course) we don’t get to see the competition between creatures possessing different types and/or degrees of consciousness in real time, we must (as both Veit and Humphrey explicitly state in their books) “reverse engineer” the account of how one possible variant is “selected” over another. Those more skeptical of Darwinian explanations call “reverse engineering” “just-so stories.” Lacking direct evidence, a narrative is produced that assumes the mechanism of natural selection.

Essential to such accounts is functionalism. The writer must identify what consciousness does, what functions it performs, and from that basis argue for those functions as providing advantages in a struggle for existence understood in Darwinian terms. Veit is what might be called a Darwinian fundamentalist. He flatly states “the goal of biological systems is ultimately reproduction” (54); and identifies “the real purpose of the organism, which is to maximize its representation in future populations” (55). Armed with this fundamental and overriding purpose, he can then assess how consciousness would provide a leg up in the effort to “maximize” an organism’s chances for reproductive success. That such an account of “purpose” seems awfully reductive in the face of the wide variety of behavior exhibited by animals and humans does not seem to bother him a bit.

More interesting is Veit’s holistic understanding of the dynamic nature of the organism. He calls his approach “teleonomic”: “organisms are goal-directed systems,” that “evolve to value states and behaviors that increase their own fitness and avoid those that are detrimental to their health” (9). This approach falls in with other recent accounts that rehabilitate an Aristotelean notion of teleological or final causes. The organism is directed toward something—and that something acts as one cause in the action of natural selection. As Veit strongly puts it: “the external factors that matter to the evolutionary trajectory of the organism are themselves causally dependent on the organism” (8). In other words, the organism is not a merely passive recipient of what external environmental and genetic factors produce. The organism’s active pursuit of reproductive advantage guides its own selection process; the organism evaluates what the larger ecological scene makes available and works to exploit the elements in that scene that will serve its purpose(s).

Of course, this approach still must posit an overriding purpose present (innate to) all organisms: the drive for reproductive success. So one complaint I have about such Darwinian theorizing is that natural selection does not get off the ground unless there are randomly produced variants. If we only have clones, then there is no range of actual variants for selection to choose among. Yet the theory allows for no variance in the fundamental purpose of organisms. Everything walks in lock step to the Darwinian command to maximize reproductive success. And that leads to the absurdities of the endless worries about altruism, music, laughter, and play. More and more implausible stories must be told about all of these behaviors to make them serve the overriding Darwinian purpose. Reductionism doesn’t simply haunt Darwinian thought; it appears as absolutely central to such thinking.

Veit cheerfully accepts the hard-core utilitarianism of his approach. “It is thus not unreasonable to treat them [organisms] as economic agents maximizing their utility (i.e. fitness). Each individual within a species is fundamentally faced with a resource allocation problem. . . . This is the economy of nature” (19). Casually swept aside are all the frivolous and downright counter-productive behaviors on view every day in the natural world. The failure of humans and other animals to be reasonable resource maximizers must be ignored or subjected to torturous (and implausible) explanations. Surely the simplest approach here would be to concede that the struggle for life and reproductive success doesn’t consume all of the organism’s time and energy—and the surplus is devoted to activities that don’t further Darwinian goals. But very few of the Darwinian advocates take this easy way out. Of course, it has been a commonplace that it is rich societies (Renaissance Florence, Elizabethan England etc.) that witness a flourishing of the arts. The problem is that, in fact, we don’t know of any societies without music and dance. Variety, activities that are hard to account for by a strict Darwinian logic, appear baked in from the beginning.

I am hardly conversant with the vast literature about Darwinian evolution. But I do know that whole books get written about the “problem” of altruism. Whereas, as far as I know, no one takes up what seems to me the much more glaring problem of war. After all, from the standpoint of reproductive success, war (which also seems endemic to all human societies of which we have any record) is a real puzzler. Here’s an activity that places in danger precisely the (male) members of society who are in their prime years for passing on their genes. And it would take a lot of ignoring of facts on the ground to claim that wars are primarily about securing resources necessary to life. Despite the intuitive appeal of the Marxist notion that economics drives everything, wars are not only more often driven by issues of pique, status, and out-group hostility than by the scarcity of resources, but there is also the fact that wars destroy resources rather than augment them. Wars are costly—more like potlatches dedicated to the wholesale destruction of goods and lives than a reasonable way to secure resources. (A side note: Engels realized that Marx and Darwin are at one in their appeals to economic reasoning and in identifying the pursuit of “interests” as the primary motive of “life.”) In short, Darwinian reductionism (as well as its Marxist counterpart) offers little in the way of a plausible explanation for this all too frequent form of human behavior.

I want to end by moving on to more technical concerns about evolutionary accounts. I will quote here from Humphrey’s book. “Since we are discussing evolution, we can assume three guiding principles. First, there must have been a continuous sequence of stages with no unaccountable gaps. Second, every stage must have been viable, at the time, on its own terms. Third, the transition from one stage to the next must always have been an upgrade, adding to the chances of biological survival” (101).

I have trouble with both assumptions one and three. This may come down to semantics, to what exactly is meant by a “new stage.” But let me state my worries.

On number one, I don’t see how unexpected and random genetic mutations (which are the engine of change, of movement from one stage to the next) are “continuous.” It’s the discontinuity of mutations that seems much more obvious. As I say, Humphrey might very well reply that I am misunderstanding the sense in which he is using “continuous.” And, of course, various evolutionary theorists (most famously Stephen Jay Gould) talk of “punctuated equilibrium” to describe the sudden transformations that a genetic mutation can generate. Still, Humphrey seems to think there will be an orderly “sequence” from one evolutionary stage to the next. And that assumption will guide his “reverse engineering” account of the emergence of consciousness. I think this confidence in an orderly sequence is misplaced—and thus makes the strategy of reverse engineering much more problematic. It is harder to tell a story that, as Humphrey understands, has “gaps” that are not easily bridged.

The third assumption we might call the “things get better” thesis. Each stage is an improvement over the last in terms of enhancing “chances for biological survival.” But that way of stating things dismisses variants. I had thought one goal of Darwinian theory is to explain diversity. Variants are produced in the course of reproduction—and some of the variants (hardly all of them, but not just only one of them) prove viable (to use Humphrey’s term). They are viable either because they exploit different ecological niches to secure the necessary resources to sustain life or because they are “good enough” to sustain life even as they differ from other variants. Another way to say this: various traits get produced along the evolutionary track that do not undermine the ability to sustain life drastically enough to cause extinction of the organism carrying that trait. A fairly obvious example is myopia. Hardly a great asset in the “struggle” to survive, but apparently not enough of a deficit to have been discarded along the evolutionary pathway that leads to today’s humans. In short, variants get produced all the time that are not “upgrades.” They are simply not strong enough “downgrades” to prove fatal.

By a similar logic, just as not all features of the organism necessarily make fully positive contributions to the effort to survive, not all features of the organism need be devoted to that effort. The issue, once more, is surplus. Just as the arts (in one reading) can seem irrelevant to the effort to sustain life, so various features of complex organisms may not be contributors to that effort. A hard core Darwinian can consider them “free riders”—and that way of addressing the issue is fairly common in the literature. Knowing how to read is not strictly necessary to survival—but humans get that extra ability because it develops from cognitive abilities that are essential to survival. The problem becomes how do we identify (except by some seat of the pants appeals to what is necessary as opposed to what is “extra”) the abilities required by survival and those that free ride upon it. Going back to war: perhaps we would want to argue that just like reading is a beneficial free rider, war is a disadvantageous one. War, in other words, is an offshoot of some fundamentally necessary component of human physiology/psychology and thus can’t be jettisoned as evolution moves us toward “stages” where our chances our survival are enhanced. Even though war itself decreases chances of reproductive success.

I am hardly claiming that Darwinian evolution is a fundamentally mistaken theory. But I am saying that the ham-handed, reductionist accounts of evolution overlook a number of puzzles that should give prevailing mono-causal biases some pause. Furthermore, these puzzles should at least disturb any blithe confidence in “reverse engineering” stories. Introducing a wider array of possible causes into such accounts, along with recognizing the random and disruptive effects of genetic mutations, would certainly complicate matters greatly. But it also might yield more plausible accounts of how an evolutionary history got us the diversity and complexity of the animal and human worlds we can observe in the wide variety of behavior displayed in the present.

Addendum (added January 19, 2024). I have just come across this relevant statement by Daniel Dennett on the error of thinking that evolution always produces enhancements of chances for biological success (quoted from Just Deserts: Debating Free Will, Polity 2021, p. 162):

“It is a fundamental mistake in evolutionary thinking to suppose that whatever ways (ideas, practices, concepts, policies) survived this process must have proven fitness-enhancing for the human species, the lineage, or even the individuals (or groups of individuals) who adopted them. Some, even many, of the established ways (of thinking, of acting) may have been cultural parasites, in effect, exploiting weaknesses in the psychology of their hosts.”