(Why Kitchen Sink)Great interview with one of the biggest names in philosophy, going over his past and present views on the subject of consciousness:
On the problem of consciousness and the nature of philosophy
The easy problems of consciousness are those about explaining the relevant objective functions associated with consciousness, such as perceptual discrimination, control of behavior, verbal report, and so on, whereas the hard problem is that of subjective experience. In the book, I went on to describe my preferred theoretical approach to the hard problem. I always thought of the distinction between the easy problems and the hard problem as just five minutes in the background of saying the obvious. Everybody knew all along what the hard problem was, but at least the terminology seemed to catch on quite fast, especially for scientists. It has proved to be quite a useful heuristic device for isolating the problem of what philosophers call “phenomenal consciousness”, and drawing it to the attention of scientists and so on as a distinctive problem.
I have also been exploring interactionism – which I was quite opposed to in the book – which is the idea that consciousness might be non-physical but still play a causal role in physics, and I have become interested in the idea that consciousness might play a role in quantum mechanics and in collapsing wave functions, which in fact is what I’m going to talk about in the talk tomorrow.8 In the book I actually argued against that. I said, “I don’t think this can work and here’s why”, whereas I’m now inclined to think that that was much too hasty. So I’m at least interested in exploring that idea. I don’t know that it’s correct, but it might be. Another direction in which my views have developed is that I have become much more inclined to see deep connections between consciousness and intentionality than I was at the time of writing the book.
I said that intentionality has functional aspects and phenomenal aspects, and maybe I put more emphasis on the functional aspects, whereas now I would be inclined to put more of the emphasis on the phenomenal aspects. Maybe the core of intentionality is the kind of intentionality you find in consciousness.
I think panpsychism has many attractions. It offers a very integrated picture of the place of consciousness in the natural order, in a monistic, simple picture. It provides a potential causal role of consciousness in the natural order. I think of it as having many of the advantages of materialism and the advantages of dualism without having the disadvantages associated with the respective positions: too much reductionism for materialism and problems of physics for dualism. The big problem for panpsychism for me is not the counter-intuitiveness; I don’t find it particularly crazy or outlandish. It’s maybe a little counter-intuitive, but I don’t know that our intuitions about consciousness and where it is present count for all that much. After all, it’s not something you can observe. These intuitions are very culturally relative and some cultures have found it very plausible.
I consider the main problem with panpsychism to be the combination problem. How do the little bits of consciousness add up to the kind of consciousness we have?
What I’m skeptical of are certain reductionist approaches to the problem of consciousness, about developing a theory of consciousness in wholly physical terms. I think that’s probably not going to work out. But I’m very much open to scientific non-reductive approaches to consciousness, which take consciousness to be something fundamental and primitive and develop theoretical principles about it. I think there’s a lot of that happening right now. The talk I’m doing tomorrow can be viewed as a contribution to that project – consciousness collapsing wave functions.14 The work of someone like Tononi is also interesting.15 He very much sees his work as a non-reductive approach. So what we have got out of the science of consciousness in recent years, as I see it, is basically a non-reductive science. It doesn’t try to reduce consciousness to the brain.
