Online research in philosophy

This is not just another book about consciousness: it takes the subject of consciousness forward, out of the impasse into which it has come.

Consider three answers to the question of what it actually is for you to be aware of the room you are in. (1) It is for the room in a way to exist. (2) It is for there to be only physical activity in your head, however additionally described. (3) It is for there to be non-spatial facts somehow in your head. The first theory, unlike the other two, satisfies five criteria for an adequate account of consciousness itself. The criteria have to do with the seeming nature of this consciousness, and with subjectivity, reality including non-abstractness, mind-body causation, and the differences between perceptual, reflective and affective consciousness. The theory of consciousness as existence is not open to the objection having to do with a deluded brain in a vat. The theory, as any theory of consciousness needs to, explains its own degree of failure in characterizing consciousness. It releases neuroscience and cognitive science from nervousness about consciousness, and leaves all of consciousness a subject for science. The theory is a reconstruction of our conception of consciousness. It may be that we should carry forward several theories of consciousness. But they will have to be compared in terms of truth to the five criteria for an adequate theory.

If you want a philosophically diligent exposition of a theory, something that has got through review by conventional peers, go elsewhere (Honderich, 2004). If you want an understanding made more immediate by brevity and informality, read on. The theory is a Radical Externalism about the nature of consciousness. If it is not a complete departure from the cranialism of most of the philosophy and science of consciousness, it is a fundamental departure.

It is hard not to sympathise with Professor Honderich's starting point. It is easy to feel pessimistic about philosophy's ability to throw light on the nature of consciousness. What, then, to do? One option is to persist with the various current approaches. It is clear that Honderich thinks this would be akin to putting more effort into trying to work out the temporal priority of the chicken and the egg. The thought of the orthodox is that an account of consciousness is going to be either fundamentally materialist or fundamentally dualist. The first of these is untenable as consciousness has other or more than neural properties. The second is untenable for various reasons, Honderich's favoured one being that it renders consciousness as out of space and of a mysterious nature. A second option would be to follow Colin McGinn's lead, and think that the problem is of such a nature that it is necessarily unsolvable (McGinn, 1989). Alternatively, we should be more radical and think creatively, not necessarily respecting our current conceptual boundaries between the mental and the physical, the inside and the outside. The solution, Honderich says, lies in the thought that `my consciousness now consists in the existence of a world' (Honderich, 2004, p. 130). I shall say a little about what I understand by this claim, by raising what I take to be three obvious questions, looking at Honderich's answers them, and inviting some further clarification. Throughout I will address only the question of perceptual consciousness.

I shall here raise and attempt to answer -- given the constraints of space, rather dogmatically -- some fundamental questions as regards the fertile and far-reaching doctrine Ted Honderich has in the past called Consciousness as Existence.

Honderich claims that for a person to be perceptually conscious is for a world to exist. I decide what this means, and whether it could be true, in the opening section Consciousness and Existence. In Honderich's Phenomenology, I show that Honderich's theory is essentially anticipated in the ideas and Ideas of Husserl. In the third section, Radical Interiority, I argue that although phenomenology putatively eschews ontology of mind, and Honderich construes his position as near- physicalism, Honderich's insights are only truths because we are spiritual substances.

Professor Honderich presents his account of consciousness boldly and informally, and his presentation merits a response in similar terms. I conceive of this response as simply the first move in a conversation, in the course of which misunderstandings might be removed and, just possibly, criticisms sharpened, and positions modified. I want to concentrate on two questions that his very interesting paper prompts me to ask. The first question is; what exactly is the thesis about consciousness that Professor Honderich is proposing? The second question is; what are the main reasons he has for his proposal and are they persuasive? Although there are two questions, I shall mix considerations of them together in a way which I hope it is possible to follow.