(TTC) Consciousness and Its Implications.pdf

Consciousness and Its Implications

Professor Daniel N. Robinson

T HE T EACHING C OMPANY ®

Daniel N. Robinson, Ph.D.

Philosophy Faculty, Oxford University

Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, Georgetown University

Daniel N. Robinson is a member of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University, where he has lectured annually

since 1991. He is also Distinguished Professor,

Emeritus at Georgetown University, on whose faculty he served for 30 years. He was formerly Adjunct Professor of

Psychology at Columbia University.

Professor Robinson earned his Ph.D. in neuropsychology from City University of New York. Prior to taking his

position at Georgetown, he held positions at Amherst College, Princeton University, and Columbia University.

Professor Robinson is past president of two divisions of the American Psychological Association: the Division of

History of Psychology and the Division of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology.

Professor Robinson’s publications cover an unusually wide range of disciplines, including law, philosophy of mind,

brain sciences, psychology, moral philosophy, American history, and ancient history. He is former editor of the

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology . He is also the author or editor of more than 40 books,

including Praise and Blame: Moral Realism and Its Application , Wild Beasts & Idle Humours: The Insanity

Defense from Antiquity to the Present , An Intellectual History of Psychology , The Mind: An Oxford Reader , and

Aristotle’s Psychology .

In 2001, Professor Robinson received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Division of History of Psychology

of the American Psychological Association and the Distinguished Contribution Award from the Division of

Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology of the American Psychological Association.

Table of Contents

Consciousness and Its Implications

Professor Biography ............................................................................................i

Course Scope .......................................................................................................1

Lecture One Zombies .....................................................................2

Lecture Two Self-Consciousness ....................................................5

Lecture Three The “Problem” of Consciousness ..............................8

Lecture Four The Explanatory Gap...............................................11

Lecture Five Mental Causation .....................................................13

Lecture Six Other Minds.............................................................16

Lecture Seven Physicalism Refined ................................................19

Lecture Eight Consciousness and Physics......................................22

Lecture Nine Qualia and the “Mary” Problem ..............................25

Lecture Ten Do Computers Play Chess? .....................................28

Lecture Eleven Autism, Obsession, and Compulsion .......................30

Lecture Twelve Consciousness and the End of Mental Life .............32

Glossary .............................................................................................................34

Biographical Notes ............................................................................................38

Bibliography ......................................................................................................40

Consciousness and Its Implications

Scope:

The subject of consciousness is among the most vexing in both philosophy and science, and no less tractable in

psychology, where the conceptual problems are often neglected. As a “state,” consciousness seems resistant to

translation into physical terms and measurements, though its dependence on a healthy nervous system appears to be

as close to a “cause-effect” relationship as any in the natural sciences.

The aim and scope of these 12 lectures must be modest, for the subject is as vast as that of human and animal

awareness. What I hope to convey may be distilled into four main points: First, that consciousness and mental life

are sui generis ; they are not “like” anything else. They are not like anything that is material or physical and seem to

require for their fuller understanding a science not yet available, if ever available. Second, what distinguishes

consciousness (and the term presupposes consciousness of something) from all else is its phenomenology —there is

something it is like to be “conscious” that is different from all other facts of nature. Third, conscious awareness is a

power possessed by the normal percipient, including non-human percipients. This power is such that much that

impinges on the sense organs is filtered out and sometimes only the weakest but the most “meaningful” of

occurrences gains entrance. Fourth, such powers vary over the course of a lifetime, are subject to disease and defect,

and thus, lead to questions of profound ethical consequence.

Here, then, is a topic in which science, philosophy, medicine, and ethics are merged, the result being issues at once

intriguing and unsettling.

Lecture One

Zombies

Scope: In this course, we will attempt to unravel the nature of consciousness, its provenance, and its function. We

begin with an examination of the concept of the zombie, which functions effectively as a physical entity

without consciousness. If a system can solve problems and process information without consciousness, of

what value is consciousness? The question of ethics is raised if we consider that entities without

consciousness cannot be judged for their actions. Could such an entity strive for moral improvement? The

subject of consciousness is vast and varied and, as a philosophical problem, far from an easy solution.

Outline

I. Our core questions in this course on consciousness are: What is it? How does it come about? What is it for?

A. Popular speech is rife with references to consciousness. We talk about being “half conscious” or

“unconscious” of something; the act of “daydreaming” reflects by contrast on a vividly conscious life; the

patient in the emergency room is suffering a “loss of consciousness.”

B. Zombies, the “walking dead,” accomplish what they do without consciousness.

1. Philosophical zombies are different from the Hollywood version.

2. They are created to test certain notions we have about the essence of mental life and the properties that

life must have to qualify as “consciously” lived.

C. Some years ago, Güven Güzeldere summarized various ways of configuring such entities and then

understanding their nature.

1. One might make a device that is indistinguishable from conscious human beings in the way it behaves,

though its internal machinery would be nothing like our own (a behavioral zombie).

2. A better “fit” than the behavioral zombie is the functional zombie, which does and says what we do

and say; its underlying systems function as ours do but do not include anything by way of

consciousness, let alone self-consciousness.

3. The third kind of zombie, the identical zombie, has an anatomy fully identical with that of a human.

D. These three types of zombie capture the various ways philosophers have attempted to dissolve the seeming

mystery of consciousness.

1. One solution to the problem of consciousness is behavioristic: X is properly regarded as “conscious”

to the extent that its behavior is relevantly like that of anything that is regarded as being conscious.

2. Other philosophers might use more stringent criteria: Not only must there be behavioral similarities of

the right sort, but these must come about in the right sort of way.

3. The behavior must express underlying physiological processes of just the sort that underlie our own

actions and speech.

4. To the extent that the device functions the way we do, we are permitted to regard it as conscious in the

relevant sense.

5. But this entity nonetheless has no consciousness as we understand that state; physical foundations are

unable to account for the consciousness itself.

E. If not physical properties, what other properties are there? Consider a system entirely physical but

nonetheless conscious. How does a system entirely and solely physical come to have this defining mental

property?

F. Some philosophers reject the very idea of zombies in any terms that would settle issues in philosophy of

mind.

1. Nigel Thomas, in his essay entitled “Zombie Killer,” argued that the very foundational premise on

which zombie examples are constructed is defective.

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