Abstract
The superfunctionality claim is that phenomenal experiences are more than functional (objective, causal) relations. This is one of the most widely used but least attacked claims in the anti-physicalist literature on consciousness. Coupled with one form of structuralism, the view that science only explains functional relations, the superfunctionality claim entails that science will not explain phenomenal experience. The claim is therefore essential to many anti-physicalist arguments. I identify an open question argument for the superfunctionality claim that expresses an intuition deserving of explanation. Using the experience of fear as an example, I show that this intuition cannot distinguish between whether conscious experiences are more than functional relations, or whether instead they are just very complex (including, constituted by very complex functional relations). I give reasons to suspect that the latter is more likely the case. This renders physicalism safe from the superfunctionality claim. This also provides a challenge to the proponents of the superfunctionality claim: they should explain why paradigmatically mysterious phenomenal experiences are correlated with extensive and complex physical correlates.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This way of describing the superfunctionality claim allows that phenomenal experience can have structural features; I am reading the arguments that apply the superfunctionality claim as thus aiming to show that physicalist explanations are incomplete (and not that they will have nothing to say about phenomenal experiences). See Stoljar (2006, 146ff) for a valuable discussion of this distinction.
There is a challenge in that some scientists and philosophers state something that seems quite like structuralism but which may only be an endorsement of objectivity in observations. Thus C. I. Lewis cites Max Born as a structuralist (Lewis 1956, 393ff). But Born’s position seems to be rather one of endorsing a move away from first person reports. Born does write about “invisible… light, inaudible sound” (1962, p. 2) but he goes on to explain that this is a matter of “objectivization, which aims at making observations as independent of the individual observer as possible” (p. 2). His point then seems to be not that science cannot refer to particulars but rather that it must refer to things in the third person.
My concerns include that a priori structuralism may be motivated by a fallacious meta-induction. It is easy to find examples where science refers directly to particulars (e.g., the big bang, the Earth, the particular proton smashed in this collision, Lucy, etc.). If we ask of any of these particulars, what kind of thing is that? The scientific answer will be relational—although other relata may be particulars. And, a similar observation can be made about kinds. But this is a very different thing from saying that science does not refer to or explain things with reference to properties or objects that are not solely relational (such things would presumably be something like a particular or kind that has properties posited as primitives in the science, and so assumed to exist in isolation and even in the absence of measuring relations). Even if it were the case that any particular that currently enters into scientific explanation will itself be explained by some set of relations, this does not entail that all scientific explanations entail no references to non-relational particulars. We could find ourselves in this position (where every particular we can find is ultimately explained away in terms of objective relations, but there are non-relational particulars), for example, if because of the progress of science, every present and past example of a posited particular or non-relational kind was ultimately explained by analysis, because science is revising its understanding of its particulars and kinds. In other words, if some particular or kind is at first taken as a primitive and then ultimately analyzed into some relations, this may be theoretical progress, and not an implicit universal ontological commitment.
Just as there are early examples of structuralists, there are good examples of responses from the last century to this coupling of structuralism with non-reductive positions in the philosophy of mind. Feigl, in his masterwork “The Mental and the Physical,” offers two criticisms of the application of structuralism to the problem of consciousness (1958, pp. 450–451). First, he notes that there is a fallacious move that occurs when these arguments slip from experiences to our knowledge about those experiences; if experiences are non-relational primitives, our knowledge about them is not. It is always our knowledge about phenomenal experience that is playing some role in an argument about conceivability or knowledge or modality. Second, there is no effective objection to calling some of the things identified through “triangulation” of scientific means qualitative and non-relational.
The closely related conceivability arguments try to avoid this problem by assuming that an ideal reasoner can derive all the implications of a theory T—and therefore she can derive all physical facts from the basic physical facts and the final theory of physics (she is also apparently omniscient), but cannot derive phenomenal facts from these. It is beyond the scope of this paper to attack this idea that we somehow commune with ideal and omniscient reasoning, presumably through some kind of miraculous revelation. But fortunately this is not required here. If someone is to claim that the open question is asked by the ideal and omniscient reasoner, then the open question argument collapses into the obviousness justification. That is, to assume that the omniscient ideal reasoner can ask the open question is to assume superfunctionality. I am not answering the obviousness justification, but rather am trying to identify and respond to a non-question-begging argument for superfunctionality.
I don’t think that, in this discussion, much would turn on explaining the notion of theoretical adequacy in play here. But we can use the very strong notion that T is adequate to explain E if T can predict E and all the relevant features of E, given relevant information about the state of the physical situation a short while prior to the occurrence of E. For example, the physicalist theory is adequate can mean, if you tell us about Smith’s brain at time T1, then we can in principle tell you E will occur (and tell you all the relevant features of E) at shortly later time T2.
Descriptive complexity is also known as Kolmogorov complexity. It is a rigorously defined and objective measure, in which the complexity of any description (which can include a theory) is the shortest computer program that can repeatedly generate that description. See Li and Vitanyi (1997) for an overview.
It is, in fact, meant to be taken as not teleofunctional at all. I doubt that this is possible. One needs some criteria to distinguish the kind of relations that are relevant from the very many causal relations that are not relevant, and the only way to do this is to appeal to some sense that some causes play a role in some ongoing system. But nothing in these arguments turns on this observation.
References
Armstrong, D. M. (1968). A materialist theory of mind. London: Routledge.
Blackburn, S. (1990). Filling in space. Analysis, 50, 60–65.
Born, M. (1962 [1924]). Einstein’s theory of relativity. New York: Dover.
Bradley, M., & Lang, P. (2000). Measuring emotion: Behavior, feeling, and physiology. In R. Lane & L. Nadel (Eds.), Cognitive neuroscience of emotion (pp. 242–276). New York: Oxford University Press.
Carnap, R. (1969). The logical structure of the world and psuedoproblems of philosophy. Translated by R. George. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chalmers, D. (2010a). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. In D. Chalmers (Ed.), The character of consciousness (pp. 3–34). New York: Oxford University Press.
Chalmers, D. (2010b). Consciousness and its place in nature. In D. Chalmers (Ed.), The character of consciousness (pp. 103–139). New York: Oxford University Press.
Churchland, P. (1996). The rediscovery of light. The Journal of Philosophy, 93, 211–228.
Churchland, P. (1997). The Horswoggle problem. In J. Shear (Ed.), Explaining consciousness: the hard problem. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
DeLancey, C. (2002). Passionate engines: What emotions reveal about mind and artificial intelligence. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dennett, D. C. (2005). Sweet dreams: Philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Eddington, A. S. (1933). The nature of the physical world. New York: The Macmillan Company.
Feigl, H. (1958). The ‘mental’ and the ‘physical’. In H. Feigl, M. Scriven, & G. Maxwell (Eds.), Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science, volume II: Concepts, theories, and the mind-body problem (pp. 370–497). Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Jackson, F. (1982). Epiphenomenal qualia. The Philosophical Quarterly, 32, 127–136.
Kandel, E. R., Schwartz, J. H., & Jessel, T. M. (Eds.). (2000). Principles of neural science (4th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Kim, J. (1998). Mind in a physical world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kirk, R. (1974a). Zombies v. Materialists. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 48(Suppl), 135–152.
Kirk, R. (1974b). Sentience and behaviour. Mind, 83, 43–60.
Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ladyman, J., Ross, D., Spurrett, D., & Collier, J. (2009). Every thing must go: Metaphysics naturalized. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Levine, J. (1993). On leaving out what it’s like. In M. Davies & G. W. Humphreys (Eds.), Consciousness: Psychological, philosophical essays (pp. 121–136). London: Blackwell.
Levine, J. (2007). Phenomenal concepts and the materialist constraint. In T. Alter & S. Walter (Eds.), Phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, C. I. (1956 [1929]). Mind and the world order: Outline of a theory of knowledge. New York: Dover.
Li, M., & Vitanyi, P. (1997). An introduction to Kolmogorov complexity and its applications. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Mandik, P. (2010). Swamp Mary’s revenge: Deviant phenomenal knowledge and physicalism. Philosophical Studies, 148(2), 231–247.
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450.
Niedenthal, P., & Setterlund, M. (1994). Emotion congruence in perception. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20(4), 401–411.
Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. London: Hutchinson.
Stoljar, D. (2006). Ignorance and Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.
Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20, 158–177.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
DeLancey, C. Consciousness and the superfunctionality claim. Philos Stud 161, 433–451 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9748-8
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9748-8