Category: pragmatism

Judgment: Quality, Qualities, and Qualia

I have been noodling on about judgment on this blog for quite some time now (years!).  And I have written about judgment in Kant and Hannah Arendt in published work, including a forthcoming essay on Arendt that I will post on this blog sometime in the near future.

Still, judgment is a very capacious term and it is often unclear what various thinkers—or me—actually is using the term to designate.  So this post will be an attempt to list a variety of ways the term judgment gets used (Wittgenstein: a word’s meaning is its use) and to see if the various uses are tied to one another or are separate (and better left separate).  Quality, Qualities, and Qualia as a title is meant to outline the territory to be covered although I am afraid those three terms won’t quite do the whole trick.  Complexities will creep in.  But let’s start.

Quality. 

This is mostly the easy one.  Judgment is very commonly tied to an evaluation of something.  I judge whether something is good or bad.  I am, then, considering what is the “quality” of the item in question.  Aristotle thought such judgments were based on a prior conception of the item’s purpose.  A good knife is one that cuts well since cutting is a knife’s purpose.  Judgments in such cases may be absolute (to cut well is to be a good knife), but in practice tend to be comparative.  This knife is better than that knife because this knife cuts better.  It requires a Platonic ideal of good cutting to make an absolute judgment about a particular knife.  In practice, we usually have something rougher in mind: this knife is “good enough” because it gets the job done.  Whether it is the ne plus ultra of knives doesn’t concern us.  We are dealing with the knives available to us in the here and now, not the whole range of all existing and possible knives.  We make our judgment, we choose, among the alternatives we actually have access to.

Judgments, however, can proceed along different axes.  We can judge the knife aesthetically.  In that case, its qualities (first appearance of my second term in the title) as a cutter are subordinated to other qualities (its shape, its color, its weight).  Aesthetic qualities are ones that please the senses (the root meaning of the word “aesthetic”) and are only tangentially related to function, if at all.  Aristotle’s focus on “purpose” is functionalist, whereas the aesthetic is usually only tangential to function, and can be in overt hostility to function.  An aesthetic judgment, then, considers an item’s quality in relation to a different set of criteria than a functional judgment does.  Notoriously, aesthetic judgments seem squishy as compared to functional ones—and generate much more confusion and controversy over what the criteria for judgment are.  Even where there is some agreement and clarity about the criteria being invoked in an aesthetic judgment, disagreement in actual judgments remains very common.

The lack of such disagreements in functional judgments is connected to the use to which the object is being put.  If I am using the knife to cut something, then the degree to which it aids or hampers that effort provides the ground for judgment. If I am trying to use the knife to punch a hole in leather or paper, the fact that the knife proves a poor tool for that endeavor indicates I am using it for a purpose it cannot do well.  With aesthetic objects, however, their purpose is less clear cut.  Do I value the painting because it is pleasing to the eye, because it fills up an empty space on the wall, because it reflects upon a certain tradition in painting, because it indicates my wealth, status, education, and taste?  All of these are possibilities and none of them necessarily excludes the others.  Aesthetic objects have multiple uses, while seemingly not tied to any specific use.  Hence the fuzziness of aesthetic judgments, which vary according to the objective criteria being applied and according to the subjective taste of the one who judges.

The term “value” snuck into last paragraph.  A judgment is an evaluation.  It makes a determination as to the “quality” of some thing—and such judgments seem inevitably tied to an assessment of that thing’s “value.”  A knife that cuts well is more valuable than one that does not.  I would rather possess (and use) the good knife than the poor one.  (Again, comparative in relation to the possible.)  We value things in relation to whether their qualities are desirable and are conducive to advancing our own purposes. 

To pragmatic (purpose oriented) and aesthetic judgments, we must add moral judgments.  The criteria in moral judgments is not exclusively whether an action furthers achievement of a purpose or if the action is “pleasing” to witness or contemplate.  These two bases for judgement need not be excluded in making a moral judgment, but they are neither necessary nor (crucially) sufficient.  A moral judgment must involve a further consideration: the quality of the action in relation to specifically moral criteria.  Identifying moral criteria has proved just about as tricky and ambiguous as identifying aesthetic criteria.  The ongoing debates between Kantians and utilitarians is just one instance of the inability to designate criteria for moral judgments that convince everyone.  Such debates often end up appealing to “moral intuitions” to make their case (Wittgenstein: here my spade turns; I can say no more).  It’s as if “I know a moral action when I see one” for moral judgments crops up alongside the “I know what I like when I see it” explanation of aesthetic judgments.  Moral judgments seem to be endemic—and necessary!—to human social life.  But disputes over moral judgments are as frequent as (and seem much more consequential than) disputes over aesthetic judgments.

To sum up before moving on to qualities: judgments are evaluations of the “quality” of something (an object, an action, even of a person).  Such judgments, at the crudest level, decide whether something is good or bad.  A good knife, a good painting, a good action, a good person as contrasted to ones that are less good or even positively bad.  And we in most cases value good instances of things over bad instances.  There are notable exceptions to this last statement.  We perverse humans can find all sorts of reasons to make the bad our good (to quote Milton’s Satan).

OK. Right now, we are in the land of endless and irresolvable disputes over aesthetic and moral judgments.  One common response to that problem has been to say the fact of disagreement can be wildly exaggerated. Do we really disagree over whether the sexual abuse of a child is good or bad?  Is there anyone out there insisting that Love Story is a better novel than Middlemarch?  Of course there are difficult cases for making moral and aesthetic judgments, but there are many more cases where there is widespread, close to universal, agreement.  It’s only philosophers who agonize over the hard cases.  For the rest of us, we have “good enough” consensus and learn to live with the instances where consensus cannot be reached.  Yes, some disputes lead to serious conflict since human beings are an argumentative and aggressive lot.  But humans have also instituted procedures for conflict resolution—and when we are persistent and lucky such institutions do their job and bloodshed is avoided.

Qualities

The informal, non-institutionalized, form of conflict resolution is talking things over and through.  And this is where “qualities” enter the picture.  We disagree over the quality of a painting.  To talk through that disagreement, the best strategy (it seems to me) is to step back from the judgment and to instead focus on describing the painting to one another.  Are the colors vibrant or muted?  Do they harmonize or clash? How is the space of the canvas allotted? Are the figures representational or abstract (or some blend of the two)?  Et cetera.  Judgment relies upon, is based on, a discernment of qualities.  Various writers, Hannah Arendt among them, wrap this discernment function into the very notion of judgment. 

Arguably, Kant does as well.  A Kantian determinate judgment is an act of apprehension.  For Kant, we apprehend the qualities of a thing—and then judge what kind of thing it is.  We very rarely disagree as to whether something is a knife, not a spoon, fork, or kettle.  So the most basic judgment is what kind of thing a thing is.  And the “kind” is supplied to us by culture, by our language.  We don’t invent a new category, or word, or kind, to identify this knife as “a knife.”  We use the term our language has already given to us.  In this way, we occupy a common world. 

Judgment understood this way is non-individual.  It is the way that individuals participate in a shared universe.  Individuals re-affirm their deep connection to others as they make these mundane (automatic, rarely reflective) judgments constantly.  Solipsism is a boogy-man.  It is impossible to be a solipsist so long as you use the common language.  I read Wittgenstein’s claim that a private language is impossible as saying that the individual cannot construct a world to occupy on his or her own.  The world only achieves solidity through its being “worded” by an ensemble of selves.  Kant’s determinate judgments refer to specific instances where we encounter some thing and need to identify it.  But there is no individual ability to make determinate judgments based on a completely individual set of “categories” or “kinds” or “concepts” (to go back to my earlier posts on percept/concept).

It is, I am suggesting, just a further refinement on judgment as discernment to dive down into the “qualities” of things.  There is the crude first determination: that is a knife.  But now we can appeal to other culturally provided descriptors to be more detailed.  The knife has a certain shape, a certain weight, a certain size.  Again, agreement about these features should not be hard to achieve.  Evaluation of these features is likely to be more various.  I might prefer a knife of a certain heft, while you find it too heavy.  I might find a certain shape of its handle comfortable and thus a way to make it better for me to use—while that may not be the case for you.  But we have narrowed down, specified more concretely, why your evaluative judgment of the knife differs from mine.

We can take the same approach to aesthetic disputes.  If we can agree that the work’s colors are vibrant and non-harmonious, we can then understand if we disagree about whether such an effect is pleasing or not. Aesthetic objects, however, are complex.  What we value in certain critics is their ability to draw our attention to features of the aesthetic object that we had not noticed.  Here we recognize that some people, in relation to some kinds of objects, have greater powers of discernment. These people apprehend more—and have a talent for articulating what they apprehend.  When we read a superb critic of a literary work (for example), we see things in the work that we missed.  Judgment as discernment highlights “qualities” and appeals to others to acknowledge the presence of those qualities.  It enriches the experience of encountering a thing.  Taking a hike with a naturalist is analogous.  I am alerted to features of the forest that I miss when hiking by myself.

It is still an open question how to evaluate those features.  I may find them boring and wish the naturalist wouldn’t bang on about this or that.  But I am not inclined to disagree about whether the features actually are present in the forest.  Again, when it comes to aesthetic objects, matters can be more complicated.  Since a certain form of literary criticism highly values “unity,” we find critics who work very hard to “prove” that Moby Dick or Ulysses are unified works, whereas I find those two books wildly incoherent, manic in their throwing together of disparate materials and thought. But, then again, I don’t rate “unity” as such a valuable criteria for aesthetic judgment as many others do. A conversation about such matters can make at least some progress by clarifying what features (qualities) I think a work has and what criteria I employ to judge its quality. My interlocutor and I can at least see where we agree, where disagree.

Another way to say this is that our stake in making evaluations generates our powers of discernment.  That is why judgment comes to encompass both evaluation and discernment.  I have increased powers of discernment where something is of value, of particular interest, to me.  If I don’t care much about the differences between oaks and spruces or between different varieties of ferns, then I am much more likely not to notice those differences.  Where I am engaged, I can discern more.  And that’s why we turn to “experts,” to people who have a command of the relevant terms and features that allow more discerning and detailed descriptions of particular things.  Those are the people whose judgment about a thing’s “qualities” we have come to trust.  I think this is what we mean when we talk of an “informed judgment.”  Someone able to apprehend the “qualities” of something in rich detail is more informed about that thing and, thus, has more information on which to base a judgment of its quality.

Pragmatic Judgment

This lead me (before I get to qualia) to another common way to use the term “judgment”—a way not quite consonant with my quality, qualities, qualia rubric.  This meaning of judgment is pragmatic, and connected with the Aristotelean term “phronesis” (often translated as “practical wisdom.”)  The colloquial usage here is to characterize a person as having “good judgment.”  Judgment in this case involves evaluating what is possible and/or desirable to do in this particular set of circumstances.  It requires (so the thinking goes) an excellent discernment of the actual features of the situation plus an ability to discern what the situation affords plus a clear sense of one’s own needs/desires plus a sensible prioritizing among those needs/desires in relation to what is possible here and now.  Phronesis is both very specific (tied to this situation and to my purposes) and very holistic (it sees the situation in its full complexity).  Quality and qualities are intertwined here.  I must discern the features of the situation even as I aim to act in ways that enhance the quality of my position.  Embedded in the world, I have the meliorist (William James) goal of bettering my position at every turn, fending off threats to well-being even as I also try to improve that well-being.  Good judgment leads to success in that endeavor—a fact brought home by witnessing how often human actions are counter-productive, make things worse instead of better.  Good judgment is hard and fairly rare, hence its being awarded the honorific term of “wisdom.”

One version of good judgment is to be a “good judge of character.”  Since one of the most crucial wild cards in judging any situation is how much I can rely on the other people who occupy the world alongside me, it is very important to assess accurately the talents and trustworthiness of others.  I can only expect help from people capable of providing that help (I don’t expect a doctor to fix my clogged pipes) and can only enlist that help from people who will be willing to provide it.  So I must make a judgment before the fact as to whether this or that person will actually do what I need them to do.  Relying on someone who lets me down is a failure of judgment, of phronesis. 

Qualia

OK.  Now let me turn to qualia.  In the literature on consciousness, the term “qualia” names the “sensation” that accompanies any experience.  It feels like something to see a Matisse painting.  There is the perception of the painting—and there is the feeling that the perception produces.  An organism can be conscious of something; it is only when that consciousness of something is accompanied by consciousness of an internal feeling (some state of being for the perceiving consciousness) that we have “sensation” as well as “perception.”  (I am following Nicholas Humphrey here, from his book Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2023), but Humphrey’s usage is fairly standard in the literature.  Only “fairly standard,” of course, because there is disagreement about everything relating to these matters among those who consider them.) “Phenomenal consciousness” is the term deployed to designate the experience of a “feeling,” a sensation (an awareness) of an internal state of being.

Quick aside: the “hard problem” in consciousness studies is how to explain the fact of phenomenal consciousness.  Current science can do a good job of explaining the physiological processes that enable one to see the Matisse painting, but we have no remotely adequate account of the processes that would generate the “feeling” that accompanies that perception.  The holy grail of consciousness studies is to explain phenomenal consciousness.  The “mysterians” say we will never get that explanation; the hard-core materialists say phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, not a real thing that needs to be explained.  But most writers accept that phenomenal consciousness is real—and that we lack a good account of its reality.

Back to qualia.  What has they got to do with judgment? Everything if we adopt the James-Lange theory of emotions.  Basically, that theory says that our bodies react immediately to the environmental circumstances one confronts in any situation.  (And situations keep unfolding, keep popping up, because the world we inhabit is much more one of constant change than one of stasis.)  Living things are reactive—finely tuned to apprehend the environment and to adjust to the circumstances.  For James-Lange, feelings (sensations) follow from that bodily adjustment/attunement.  The sensation is how we come to realize what our body’s reaction is.  Feelings are informational; they inform us of how our body has responded to what the world is throwing at it. 

If this theory is correct, then judgment is instantaneous.  Our body both judges what the circumstances are (picking out especially what is most relevant to its most important concerns) and judges (acts upon) what an appropriate response to those circumstances are.  Qualia (our sensation or feeling) registers for our conscious selves the judgment that has already been made on an unconscious, bodily level. 

There are various ways one can argue that it’s evolutionary useful for organisms to acquire an ability to be consciously aware of these unconscious bodily responses.  If we know what our body is doing, we can monitor and even (possibly) revise its responses.  I return here to the recurrent notion that consciousness introduces a pause into the processes of stimulus/response.  The body (in the James-Lange theory) responds immediately and automatically, without any involvement on the part of consciousness.  The bodily judgment is direct; it does not pass through consciousness.  But the ability to pick up the signal that informs consciousness of what that response is provides the possibility of assessing it and revising it.  I.e. there is now a second moment of judgment superimposed on the first, automatic one.  This seems similar to the “thinking fast and slow” that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky introduced into the social sciences. (Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow [Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011]). And it chimes with the work of Martha Nussbaum and others on the cognitive function of the emotions. (Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions [Cambridge UP, 2003].) We know about things, about our environment, through our emotional responses to things.  But we are not ruled entirely by our emotions if consciousness allows for us to examine them, to consider if they are appropriate responses to the situations that elicited them.

What, then, of the discernment judgement calls forth (as described in my thoughts on “qualities.”) For James, efforts to explain a judgment always come after the fact.  We strive to “rationalize,” to provide reasons for, the judgments our body has already made.  We want to “justify” a decision after the fact.  Deliberation, we might say, comes after, not before, action.  Still, this desire to justify can hone attention, can make us more discerning.  And that training of apprehension can then influence future instances of immediate, bodily judgment.  Organisms learn.  Feedback from one instance gets incorporated (in the literal sense of that word: taken into the body) in ways that manifest themselves in future interactions.

The desire to justify points us toward the communal pressures upon judgment that Kant (and Arendt in her reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment) emphasizes.  Others demand of us an explanation of our judgments and the actions based upon them.  Why do you think Picasso a lesser artist than Matisse?  Why did you do that?  In answering such questions, we are very likely to point toward features of the paintings or features of the situation we faced as explaining why made the choices we made.  Even if these explanations are “rationalizations” in the negative sense of being excuses for judgments or actions actually made unthinkingly, they do heighten consciousness about our own proclivities and about the complexities (the manifold details) of worldly things and situations.  Because we are called upon to give an account of our judgments and actions, we develop our powers of discernment. 

Arendt translates Kant as saying that our attempts at justification “woo the consent of the other.” There are no absolutely compelling justifications; they are always contestable.  But we want to stand in the good graces of others, so we try to get them to see it our way (as Paul McCartney puts it). 

For Nicholas Humphrey, this need to justify ourselves provides an evolutionary reason for the emergence of phenomenal consciousness.  Because we are social animals, humans must find a way to “work it out” (to quote McCartney again).  And we can only do that, Humphrey thinks, if we have some sense of what others think and feel.  How can we know what “reasons” others will find convincing as we strive to get them to accept our excuses, our ex post facto explanations?  The self-consciousness that phenomenal consciousness enables allows us to imagine how our fellow humans take things, what their sensations are in response to different situations.  Judgment moves from being the purely individual response to the environment toward an always already socially-inflected response.  Our need for, dependence on, others means that their responses to our judgments (and the actions those judgments will inspire) influence the judgments from the start.  Another way to say this: the environment humans face always includes other humans and maintaining desirable relations to those humans is a high priority in any assessment of appropriate responses/adaptations to the environment.  Our learning includes a big dose of learning how other humans respond to us when we make this or that judgment, take this or that action.  We “norm” our taste to fit the groups to which we want to remain members in good standing.

The changing musical tastes of college students offer a good illustration of that last point.  Students will abandon old favorites in favor of more ”sophisticated” ones as they learn new codes of distinction.  Is the music they now listen to “better” than the music they abandon?  Hard to say.  Depends on the criteria applied.  But they will almost certainly acquire a richer vocabulary in which to describe and justify their tastes, while also learning what counts as compelling justifications of taste judgments to the people whose consent they are trying to “woo.” And they will learn what musical tastes are deemed outside the pale.

I will end by saying that the entanglement of judgment with “sociality” (to invoke Arendt on Kant again) is where much of my interest lies.  I want to nail down (and feel I have yet to do so to my satisfaction) the way that judgments are not just influenced by, but are only possible within, intersubjective relations.  Relevant factors are the non-private languages in which judgments are articulated/communicated and the pressure to explain/justify our judgments.  But I still feel like something is missing here, some key piece to the puzzle of how what seems individually located (the response of my body to a situation and my subsequent conscious awareness of that response) is not very individual at all. 

Consciousness and Life: Response and Clarification

My friend Daniel has sent me some questions/responses related to my recent post on Consciousness and Life.  (Here’s the link to that post: https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/05/consciousness-and-life/).

Daniel’s thoughts are in standard type and my attempts to address the issues he raises are in italics.  

Some thoughts:
1. It may be true that Goff is a “monist,” but it seems a strange description of his position, since he is very much arguing against physicalism–hardly a dualist position. Physicalism, too, isn’t an account “that multiples basic entities.” There is one entity–physical matter, whether it’s a rock, an animal, or a brain within an animal. So I’m confused by the idea that your “pluralist views” coincide with physicalism. I would think the point of physicalism, within the consciousness debate, is to say that there is only one substance. (I know you like the idea of pluralism, but…) The “hard problem” poses a challenge that asks how it is that something that seemingly is without physical substance (a feeling of pain, for instance, or the feeling of a rough fabric touched by a hand) might be, in fact, a physical artifact with a physical location–that is, no different than any other physical substance.  

As I read Goff, he is deeply committed to monism, which is why he champions “Russellian monism” as his position.  Basically, like almost everyone these days who participates in these conversations, Goff is a fervent anti-dualist because he rejects any “extra” non-materialist entity (spirit, soul, whatever).  Once he has dismissed dualism, he thinks there are two contenders for a monist account: physicalism and panpsychism. (To be clear, panpsychism is a materialist position; it just bakes in the psychic from the beginning.  Matter has a physic component—or, to us Goff’s term, a psychic “aspect.”)  He works hard to eliminate physicalism as worthy of belief—and thus to boost his preferred position of panpsychism on the back of physicalism’s flaws.  But he also admits panpsychism’s shortcoming, which is why he mostly falls back on “elegance” and ”parsimony” as the reason to prefer panpsychism.  And he even comes to accept a tiny bit of “noumenalism” as most likely inevitable, where “noumenalism” means the existence of a “thing in itself” to which human cognition will never have access. (Pages 230-231 in his book, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.)  

What I am groping toward is a physicalist pluralism, i.e. a physicalism that is neither monist nor dualist.  As I say, I may just have the science entirely wrong—and I also have no doubt that most of the experts in these consciousness debates would find my position out of bounds.  More about this is response to point #2.  

2. In that sense, yes, a rock and a dog are both made up of the same stuff, even if one is living and one is not. (By the way, it seems that rocks, too, evolve, along with those “living things” you speak of.) I don’t mean to belittle the distinction, but opponents of physicalism are the ones who argue that a dog is different than a rock, not because a dog is alive but because it has consciousness, and consciousness defies physical explanation. Or am I missing something here?  

What I am trying to deny is exactly the idea that a dog and a rock are made of the same stuff.  Here’s my basic idea.  BIG BANG: out of that big bang comes a bunch of different stuff.  Basically the periodic table.  There are hydrogen atoms, oxygen atoms, iron atoms, gold atoms etc.  These atoms are different things; they behave differently and interact with other atoms differently.  Since what we get on the ground is a universe composed of many different things—rocks, water, air, plants, animals—it seems odd to assume we started from one thing.    Furthermore, evolution precisely results in a wide range of living creatures as different “niches” are exploited by different creatures.  William James says of pragmatism: “an attitude or orientation is what the pragmatic method means.  The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (29 in Penguin edition of Pragmatism.)  And when we look at what’s on the ground now, as opposed to speculating about origins, James asserts: “The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful, and perplexed.  The world to which your philosopher introduces you is simple, clean and noble” (15).  Philosophers are always trying to clean things up. This is Goff’s “elegance.” 

But why believe the universe is elegant when all of our experience of it screams that it is not?  So I am trying to say 1) why not believe we had many different things from the very beginning and 2) why obsess about origins at all?  I’d rather we focused on trying to explain what we have here in front of us right now instead of positing a just so story that claims we got to current multiplicity from some primal unified and monolithic substance. And then we can think about how things present now interact in ways to produce what comes next.  

So how to get physicalist pluralism?  Precisely through the dynamics of evolution for living things and of physics for non-living things.  Do we believe that water or salt existed from the very beginning? Or are they products that emerge later through the interactions of basic atoms?  Similarly, do we believe life existed from the start?  Or does life emerge from interactions of different elements? You can’t get water from one element; you have to have two.  So if everything at the beginning is the same stuff, then emergence of water is a mystery.  You get an infinite regress here.  Because you are going to have to account for the existence of hydrogen and oxygen (also two different things) if you say we start from one basic stuff. Here is where I admit I may have the science totally wrong. But even if I do, there still has to be some account of how new forms appear on the scene.  Evolutionary theory goes a long way (although not the whole way) to providing that explanation for new species on the living creatures side.  

Furthermore, if I am right that consciousness is a feature of living beings, then what the philosophers need to explain is the presence of life, not the presence of consciousness.  They should be pan-lifeists, not panpsychists.  The emergence of life is much more mysterious than the emergence of consciousness, since once you have life the evolutionists have a pretty compelling account of why consciousness is of benefit to life, to how it would give a living creature an evolutionary advantage.  In other words, once you have living creatures, evolution can kick in and its mechanisms account for the growing complexity of life forms.  But there is no evolutionary explanation for why life itself emerges.

This is not to say that evolution offers a full mechanistic, biochemical explanation of how consciousness emerges. That emergence is lost in the mists of time.  But evolutionary theory makes the emergence of consciousness plausible since consciousness serves the basic evolutionary goals of survival and reproduction.  Those goals presume the existence of living forms.  Evolutionary theory does not help at all in explaining why living forms themselves come into being.   The hard problem is identifying the interactions that produce the phenomenon of consciousness and accounting for why those interactions would generate the particular “feelings” or “sensations” or “states of mind” that they do.  I am not claiming to solve the hard problem.  I am just saying it seems more plausible to me—or, at least, a hypothesis that should be entertained—to say that the physical bases of consciousness are interactions between different elements rather than manifestations of one basic stuff. 

To my mind, the interactional thesis better captures the dynamism that characterizes a universe in which life and consciousness did not always exist—and a universe in which life and consciousness (through evolution) are still in the process of emerging, with old forms dying out and new forms coming on the scene (as well as less holistic changes within specific forms.)  

3. You probably know it, but I think that you’re forced to include plants in what you’re saying, if “consciousness is a tool for evaluation”; they, too, like any other living thing,  “evaluate possible courses of action in response to…circumstances,” no? They certainly seem different, in your sense, from rocks.  

Happy to include plants. The problem here, it seems to me, is one that I have been surprised to find gets little attention in all these books we have read. Namely, the line between instinct (or automatic stimulus/response) and consciousness.  All living creatures, plants very much included, respond to their environment. Therefore, they must have a way of taking in information about the environment and of altering behavior in relation to that information.  Consciousness is, I think, an obvious way of assessing incoming information and evaluating what behavior is best suited to the circumstances. But it seems that instinct does the same work without going through the experience of consciousness.    My sense is that all the current research in animal studies and even plants (the book How Trees Think has been a path-breaker here) has pretty consistently lessened the terrain governed by instinct while expanding the domain of consciousness.  Still, there does seem to be something we can call instinct that is different from consciousness. The newborn “knows” how to suck at the mother’s breast.  That seems instinctual, as does breathing.  In short, I’d love to see a convincing account of (what I suspect is) the continuum from instinct all the way up to full self-consciousness. 

I think (although here, again, I could be horribly wrong) that consciousness comes in degrees, with pure instinct at one end of the spectrum but with nothing definitive at the other end.  I certainly don’t want to say the form of consciousness that seems typical of humans is “full” (the be all and end all) and therefore marks the other end of the spectrum.  Rather, at that other end, we find (I think) a variety of forms of consciousness, each (in most cases) evolutionary adequate for the creatures who have that form.  Evolution is not flawless, but we can say that it tends to provide for each creature the consciousness it needs to survive and to reproduce.  What sends living creatures to extinction is drastic changes in the environment—new predators/competitors and altered basic conditions—not the failure of current capacities to survive if the environment holds constant (which it never does over the long haul—or even the short haul in some cases).  

4. When you say that “consciousness is not an illusion,” I think you may be referring to Illusionism–I’m thinking of Daniel Dennett and Keith Frankish. In that odd philosophical way, there is a little consequence to illusionism one way or the other; we continue to feel things exactly the same, whether or not our qualia or feels are real or not. So I would think you’d find it a more interesting theory, if only because it (a) gets rid of the hard problem (okay, perhaps too easily), and (b) counters Goff’s anti-physicalist arguments. Frankish is especially bullish on the idea of generating new research projects on the brain; the “illusion” seems to be, from his point of view, simply another name for a process in the brain whereby we fool ourselves (probably for good reason, but certainly in keeping with other ways we respond to, say, optical illusions.) He is thoroughly a physicalist.

Yeah.  The physicalists’ task is pretty straightforward.  They need to get the experimental results that show the physical processes that produce consciousness and connect those physical processes to the “feel,” the phenomenology of consciousness.  I am of the camp that says this is theoretically possible.  I am only saying 1) I think working from the various physical elements involved in these processes is much more likely to produce results than thinking there is some sort of primal stuff that explains things and 2) that the phenomenology will also prove to be a product of those processes, not some illusion.  (In fact, I am confused by the very notion of illusion.  If the processes produce the illusion, then how is the illusion somehow not real? It’s a real product of an actual physical process.  I need to read more about illusionism to overcome this basic misunderstanding of what distinguishes an illusion from something “real”.)  In short, I am betting on bio-chemistry as “the answer,” even as I admit an answer seems very far from being reached right now.

5. I do agree with you that a biological approach is missing in Goff’s view, and I wonder whether this sort of approach amounts to a “functionalist” account of consciousness. (I’m out of my league here.) The point would be, as you suggest, that consciousness is very useful, for any number of reasons, and likely the result of animal evolution. Though I find myself uncomfortable with the idea of evolution having a teleology. There’s a long history of seeing evolution as having some purpose (in its worst version, a divine design, or, just as bad, the goal of humankind as its epitome); I realize that this is not your intent, but I wonder if it’s even necessary to explain the “emergence” of consciousness by some sort of pull of nature. There is a lot of controversy about teleology in respect to both Darwin and subsequent evolutionary theory. (See, for example, John Reiss’s Not By Design, a detailed and historical argument against any teleological understanding of evolution.)

Yes, evolution acts blindly; it does not have any “purpose.”  But, of course, we almost inevitably end up talking about it as having agency.  The very term “natural selection” is agency-laden.  To “select” is an act—and “nature” is proposed as the agent.  Personifying evolution is a bad habit that just about everyone finds difficult (close to impossible) to avoid. That’s because evolution produces things and we (by virtue of grammar Nietzsche would say) connect production to agency.  The product is the noun and the action that produced it is the verb.

And, yes, using the term “teleological” only increases the chances of mistaking evolution for some kind of intention-guided agent.  But the field of evolutionary studies, especially the writers focusing on consciousness, appear to have decided that “teleological” is the term they are going to use when speaking of evolutionary causes.  I assume this choice of terminology comes from relying on Aristotle’s famous—and still canonical—account of causation.

I do think, and here is where we may fundamentally disagree, that the basic point is still valid: an evolutionary cause is not a mechanical, efficient (in Aristotle’s use of that term) cause.  How so?  What is a cause?  A cause is a force that makes something happen in the world.  An efficient cause requires an interaction between the cause and the effect.  Causation, in this case, is direct.  The cause acts upon something and brings about a change (the effect) in the thing acted upon.  The water is spilled and the tablecloth gets wet. 

An evolutionary cause does not act that way.  It is indirect.  The efficient cause in evolution is genetic mutation (another source of pluralism, by the way, even as its randomness drains any “purpose” from its generation of effects).  But the evolutionary cause is the “fitness” of that mutation for an organism living in a specific environment.  So an evolutionary cause has these multiple elements: a living organism embedded in a specific environment, a genetic mutation, a competition for resources required for life and reproduction within that environment, and an environment complex enough to have different “niches” so that multiple species can co-exist. With those elements in place, evolution “selects” for the features of an organism that give it a better chance to survive and reproduce. 

What the theorists I reference (Deacon and Solms) do is take this high-level evolutionary cause and bring it into the organism itself.  Living creatures become increasingly complex as evolutionary history unfolds.  Thus, animals have digestive systems, hearts (blood circulation), lungs (oxygen intake), reproductive systems, and more as well as consciousness. These various systems are regulated (governed) in terms of the needs of the organism as a whole.  They are not free agents, but subordinated to the primary evolutionary goal: survival and reproduction.  Hence the argument for top-down causation attuned to an end result.  The coordination of the various parts of a complex organism cannot be explained solely by efficient causes.  That’s the argument.

Is this functionalism?  Yes.  Darwinian theory is adamantly functionalist.  And there have been various ways to try to wriggle out from under what might be called “vulgar functionalism” or what some writers have called “Darwinian fundamentalism.”  Basically, vulgar functionalism claims that every instance of animal behavior must be understood as advancing the primary evolutionary imperatives of survival and reproduction.  Hence, baseball must be understood in terms of its helping its players find a mate.

The most common way people (Stephen Gould is a major source here) try to sidestep Darwinian fundamentalism is to say that certain capacities (like the hand/eye coordination that helps someone be a skilled baseball player) evolve in relation to the Darwinian imperatives, but then these capacities are put to uses in ways unconnected to those imperatives.  In short, this is a surplus theory.  It does not take all our energy and time to fulfill our Darwinian needs, so we use our spare energy and time to do things that our evolved capacities make possible.  Needless to say, this solution has not pleased everyone.  Plenty of people want to be able to introduce some other fundamental motives into animal existence than just the two Darwinian ones.

Finally, rocks.  My life/non-life dualism amounts, I think to saying that efficient causes are sufficient to explain the changes time brings to non-living things.  Rocks are not subject to evolutionary causes.  Geology has no need or uses for teleological or Darwinian causes.  Rocks are not selected in relation to criteria of fitness.  Biology is the science that attends to living things, which is why physics and geology are not the right place to go when considering questions about consciousness (if I am right that consciousness is confined to living things).  Yes, rocks change over time, but not as a result of evolution; only as a result of brute, mechanical causes. 

6. Still, I think we can make general observations about the usefulness or function of consciousness: If I reach for the pan on the stove, I will feel the presence of heat and think twice about grabbing it barehanded. The feel of heat is mine, an instance of consciousness. This feel doesn’t seem like a physical thing; and as skeptics of physicalism point out, it’s not as though you’re going to cut into my brain and find that feel (though you might find the neural correlates). For some reason, none of this seems to trouble me (at least not today). I have a sense that the feel is a function of my brain; or it may be function of my brain in coordination with networks associated with other parts of my body; but one way or the other, it’s related to my physical body. Or, again, it may be a less a thing–what I’ve been referring to as a “feel”–than an illusion my brain creates. No difference.

Percept/Concept 2

I wrote a post sometime back that tried to sort out the relation between percepts and concepts.

Here’s the link to that post: https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/03/13/percept-concept/

The issue in that post was the relation of percepts (information taken in via the five senses) to concepts (the categories by which we identify what a percept has given to us).  Mostly (although not entirely) that post assumes that the percept comes first, followed by the judgment (assignment) of the appropriate concept.  The puzzle, in part, was that this kind of temporal sequencing is not experienced in most cases.  The percept and the concept arrive together.  I see a tree.  I don’t see some amorphous set of sense impressions and then decide they form a tree.  The percept comes already conceptualized, categorized.

There are cases where percept and concept are pried apart.  And many artists, especially since the Romantics, strive hard to separate the two, to overcome our habitual associations and expectations.  To break the crust of habit, the received categorizations of culture, is one of their top artistic goals.  Thus, “difficult” poetry strives to slow the reader down, to use words in unfamiliar ways so we have to puzzle out the meaning instead of simply swallowing it at one gulp.  The same for many modern paintings or music.  A moment of confusion, of disorientation, is deliberately created.

However, according to what has become the reigning orthodoxy in current consciousness studies, I was working with the wrong model of perception.  The new orthodoxy says 1) percept and concept cannot be pried apart, but even more consequently, 2) that concept always precedes percept.  Here’s is Andy Clark’s description of the current consensus: “the world we experience is to some degree the world we predict.  Perception itself, far from being a simple window onto the world, is permeated from the get-go by our own predictions and expectations.  It is permeated not simply in the sense that our own ideas and biases impact how we later judge things to be, but in some deeper, more primal, sense.  The perceptual process, the very machinery that keeps us in contact with the world, is itself fueled by a rich seam of prediction and expectation” (The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, Pantheon Books, 2023, p. 17).  “Every time we make sense of our worlds through perceptual encounters, we do so by means of both the incoming sensory signals and a rich invisible stream of knowledge-based predictions” (22).

This vision does seem very close to the classic pragmatism of Peirce and William James.  We move through the world in a kind of semi-somnolent habitual gliding.  Not closely attending, we walk, see trees, eat food, carry on conversations that move along predictable paths. In the ordinary course of events, very little surprises us, brings us up short.  All unfolds almost entirely as expected.  It takes pretty dramatic deviations from the expected to break through, to make us question what we have casually assumed to be the case. Inquiry (in the pragmatist parlance) begins from doubt. We must set about trying to figure out what we have seen, what is happening, when things don’t go as expected.

Andy Clark is sunnily optimistic about all this.  But it is easy to see how it could be given a pessimistic spin, as a writer like Flaubert (with his fierce hatred of received ideas) does.  That we process the world through our expectations explains confirmation bias and our bog-stupid inability to alter our expectations and prejudices (this latter word the exactly precise one for this state of affairs) in light of new evidence, new percepts.  We quite literally do not see what is in front of us; we see what we expect to see.

In Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he reports on an experiment in which the subjects are shown playing cards.  The trick is that the cards have the spades and clubs colored red, and the hearts and diamonds colored black.  Over 80% of the subjects will identify a 6 with black hearts as either a 6 of hearts or a 6 of spades.  Less than 20% will say: that’s a six with black hearts.  And increasing the time subjects were given to view the cards did not substantially change the results.  We look at something quickly, make our judgment of what it is, and move on.  Anomalies are hard for us to see.

Of course, it is hopeful that a certain percentage do recognize that something is awry, that what perception is offering does not match what was expected/predicted.  Clark sees humans as self-correcting animals, adjusting their judgments as we go along.  His model is basically one in which “errors” in prediction are registered—and then serve to alter expectations. 

Clark’s reliance on a virtuous feedback loop becomes clear when he turns to an account of action. (Again, his account chimes with classic pragmatism.)  “[S]uccessful action involves a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.  Predicting the detailed sensory effects of a movement is what causes the movement to unfold.  By making prediction the common root of both perception and action, predictive processing (active inference) reveals a hidden unity in the workings of the mind.  Action and perception form a single whole, jointly orchestrated by the drive to eliminate errors in prediction.  . . . In other words, the idea of a completed action is what brings the actual action about” (70-71).  We are guided by our vision of consequences; we then act to bring the desired consequences about.

The feedback loop comes into play in terms of what Clark calls “precision weightings.”  “Various estimates of precision alter patterns of post-synaptic influence and so determine what (right here, right now) to rely on and what to ignore.  This is also the way brains balance the influence of sensory evidence against predictions.  In other words, precision variations control what bits of what we know and what we sense will be most influential, moment by moment, in bringing about further processing and actions.  Expressed like that, the intimacy of precision and attention is apparent.  Precision variation is what attention (a useful but somewhat nebulous concept) really is.  . . . [A]ttention is the brain adjusting its precision-weightings as we go about our daily tasks, using knowledge and sensing to their best effect.  By attending correctly, I become better able to spot and respond to whatever matters most for the task I am trying to perform.  Precision estimation is thus the heart and soul of flexible, fluid intelligence” (50). 

Although he doesn’t say this, Clark has here added “purposes” to expectations and predictions.  We attend to (notice) the elements of a situation relevant to our current purposes.  And we adjust our understanding of those situational elements (attain more precise readings of the situation) in response to the feedback received as our purposes are attained or thwarted.  So the senses (perceptions) do have their role to play; they do provide information about the situation.  But what information is taken in and how it is processed (evaluated) is guided by the prior purposes/expectations. 

Clark invokes William James briefly at this point—and accepts that this account reverses common-sense notions of the causal sequence: i.e. that we see something first, then act upon it; here, by contrast, we see something by virtue of the fact that we are looking for it in relation to our purposes/expectations.  Attention is influenced more by what we expect to see or are specifically looking for than by what is actually present in the world we encounter.  But the ability to shift attention, to move toward a more precise apprehension of the actual situation is “the heart and soul of flexible, fluid intelligence.”

A corollary of this view is that situations, in almost all cases, contain more elements than any perceiver/agent takes in. Attention is selective; we simply do not see what is neither expected nor relevant to our purposes. William James constantly stressed this “more”: the fact that our knowledge is almost always incomplete. Again, it does seem that many artists are dedicated to bringing more of a situation into view–or, at least, at bringing what has not been seen, what had been neglected by common sense (a loaded term), to our attention.

Clark does not take up the issue of just what is required to break through the crust of expectations. He only briefly considers the problems of entrenched prejudices, of failures to apprehend the real—or even the problem of bad judgments about the actual affordances of a particular situation.  He does talk of “disordered attention” (51) and “aberrant attention” (52) and considers clinical ways of intervening to redirect attention in such cases.  To my mind, however, he is over-optimistic about the ability to shift our incoming biases.

Clark also takes a very individualistic stance on the nature of our preconceptions and expectations.  He sees them as the product of individual experience much more than of socialization (however you want to conceive of the process by which individuals are provided with a set of cultural expectations and beliefs.)  And he doesn’t address the problem of the loss of flexibility as one ages.  At what point are the individual’s expectations hardened to the point where they are very hard to revise, to un-fix. 

So I have posed two questions: 1) how strong does the disconfirmation of expectations have to be to actually break through and garner attention? What kinds of shocks actually move us to doubt and inquiry (as conceived in the pragmatist model)? And 2) at what age are expectations mostly entrenched and thus resistant to revision?  An open mind is a wonderful thing in part because it is so rare.

And just as open minds are rare, so are true idiosyncratic individuals.  There is no reason to deny individual variations, but behavior and beliefs also, to a very large extent, clump.  We are all strongly influenced by our closest fellow humans, adopting their styles, beliefs, values, habits etc. 

William James famously wrote “the trail of the human serpent is over all.”  I will admit that acknowledging the conceptual overlay through which all perceptions are processed depresses me.  I am enough of a Romantic that I want, along with William Blake, to throw open the doors of perception. I don’t deny that the available evidence speaks strongly in favor of the new orthodoxy about how we process the world.  I just want to be among the twenty percent who see red spades.