1.0 Chalmers draws a distinction between the "hard" and
the "easy" problems of consciousness. The hard problem is why
consciousness exists at all. For the physical sciences
are, if anything, almost too successful in their job.
Everything that happens in the world seems wholly
explicable in terms of mathematically well-described
microphysical interactions. Our brains are made of the
same stuff, and are described by the same fundamental
regularities, as everything else. Consciousness, given
fundamental physics, seems causally irrelevant to making
things happen. Unless we're hopelessly confused in the
way we conceive of the constituents of the physical world, then
the very existence of a first-person phenomenology
anywhere at all ought to be impossible. Given what we
think we know about the nature of physical phenomena,
then there isn't any room for subjectivity. Worse still, if the
presumptive closed causal sufficiency of physics is
granted, then consciousness shouldn't have the capacity
to provoke us into asking questions about its own
existence.
1.1 Yet herein lies a paradox. For The Conscious Mind,
under a purely physical description, is also exactly the
book a sophisticated philosophical zombie would write -
given complete solutions to the relativistic quantum
field equations we know and love. [Philosophical zombies,
as Chalmers usefully reminds us elsewhere, shouldn't be
confused with their clod-hopping Hollywood cousins; they
instead enjoy a notional existence as insentient functional isomorphs to their conscious counterparts, "real people" such as you and me]. So in principle, the
existence of Chalmers' book is only to be expected. It can be just "read off" the
fundamental quantum mechanical equations describing our
world. The solutions fall out of the equations without
any need to invoke spooky stuff at all. Logically,
the formalism could equally well describe, as far as we
can tell, a wholly insentient universe. It's presently a
mystery why it doesn't. Thus physical interactions, on
the face of it, are sufficient to generate books
purportedly addressing their own causal insufficiency.
Bizarre.
1.2 Now I'm sceptical that Chalmers is really a zombie. My
faith - dependent admittedly on a tenuous and still
unnaturalised semantic realism - is instead
that he's a person whose powerful self-awareness has
inspired him to write a book that's literally "about"
consciousness. So how could consciousness be explanatorily irrelevant? Yet my faith that he's a truly sentient
being can't derive primarily from behavioural or
neurophysiological data. For one's notional zombie
counterpart, under some physical-cum-functional
description or other, is himself in the habit of using his functional
analogue of introspective analogy-spinning to draw
functionally analogous conclusions about zombie-Chalmers.
Likewise again, my faith in real D.C. sentience can't ultimately hinge on
anything Chalmers' body has said or written either -
although the published text is admirably consistent with
such a hypothesis. Instead, a radically different sort of evidential base is needed to justify the claim. I'm going to argue that the
intrinsic, self-intimating texture ["what it feels
like"] of introspection [and not just its
'extrinsic' functional role in the informational economy of the organism] is pivotal in understanding
both the existence and properties of the phenomenology of
mind in the world. Fortunately - I like living
dangerously - I am a practising introspectionist [Heedless sensation-seeking and painstaking experimentalism as practised in a future empirical science of mind are quite different; as indeed are soap-powders, one is told]. I admit to this defining characteristic of my working sense of self-identity
even though - among scientists - introspection enjoys all
the methodological kudos of auto-eroticism while inducing
substantially greater guilt. If I weren't a hard-core introspectionist, and if I were a materialist to
boot, I think I'd have to say that Chalmers was a
zombie. He's a system which behaves, after all, in just
the way a philosophically well-wrought zombie ought to
behave, given the one big QM wave function posited by our best
physical theory of the world.
1.3 As it is, one rather conveniently tends - when
speculating about what if anything physics has omitted
from its vision of Ultimate Reality - selectively to
ignore the canons of formally sound inference. That way
lies madness; or at least intellectual sterility.
Instead, one recklessly generalises on the basis of a solitary known
instance that there aren't any zombies dwelling
outside the philosophical imagination. Yet whether
zombies are non-existent or actually rule the earth, the
single accessible counter-instance to the hypothesis of
ubiquitous insentience should suffice by itself to refute
materialism. Unless something akin to an all-pervasive
cosmic mind-dust is inherently firing up the equations,
then physics has left out an irreducible feature of the
world from its otherwise omnipotent and omniscient formalism.
Consciousness, Chalmers argues, is a property of the
world which can't be given a reductive explanation. It is
a natural phenomenon. Yet none of its Pandora's box of variants can
be deduced from the world's micro-physical primitives.
Once the disposition of those primitives and their
interactions is specified, consciousness doesn't [and I'm
here ignoring a chapterful of well-marshalled
technicalities on how one set of facts can determine
another set of facts] "logically supervene" on
them. Consciousness does, however, naturally
supervene - Chalmers doesn't give Theism or feel-good New
Agery the time of day. He argues that because
consciousness isn't logically entailed by its physical
supervenience base, then materialism is false. Of course
his zombie analogue might be systematically interpreted as
claiming the same thing; and this zombie-Chalmers - if you're
a meaning-externalist with a soft spot for subjunctive
conditionals - would be wrong.
1.4 That's the hard problem and a lightning sketch of a few
of its ramifications, notably what Chalmers aptly calls
"the paradox of phenomenal judgement". Some of the "easy"
problems might tax the intellects of double Nobel-laureates in their prime. Yet such "easy" neurocomputational challenges do tend to
seem potentially tractable. These are the behavioural,
functional, and broadly mechanistic aspects of
mind whose twentieth century conflation with the hard problem of
consciousness became something of a
philosophical and cognitive-scientific art-form. For if
one first lumps together some aspect of sentience with an
aspect of insentience, proceeds deviously or naïvely to
give them the same label, and then purportedly solves the
mechanism responsible for the latter, then it is easy
to persuade oneself one has explained the former. Even
after one learns how the trick is done, it can still be fun
to watch.
1.5 Chalmers' hard/easy distinction is important. Perhaps something like it is even essential for doing practical neuroscience as it is understood today. It is still, potentially, very misleading.
I'll focus on two reasons why.
First, it tends, though not explicitly, to presuppose
at least a recognisable descendant of a folk-realist
story of perception. Perceptual direct realism assumes
that one can access crude, medium-sized lumps of
insentience, whether it's functionally organised or
otherwise. Such mind-independent classical objects
fancifully include other people's brains. These 'publicly accessible' brains
and bodies serve as the objects of investigation in "easy"
mechanistic neural problem-solving. Unfortunately, direct
realism gives rise to wildly misconceived notions about
cheesy wet neural tissues and the like. These gross and typically
indistinguishable eyesores allegedly generate
consciousness and 'the explanatory gap'. "Brains" as conceived by the perceptual direct
realist, and many sorts of perceptual indirect realist,
inspire the whole misbegotten mind/matter conundrum. By way of
contrast, there is a huge convergence of quantum
mechanical, neurosurgical, philosophical and psychedelic
evidence that only an inferential realism about
the posited mind-independent Multiverse is tenable. The very notion of 'perception' embodies a false epistemology. One can't
literally get out of one's head - on acid or off it.
Instead one has to rely on, and indeed one exemplifies,
dynamical, (partly) environmentally-selected,
connectionist simulations of distal macroscopic
patterns in the local natural world. These patterns lie in a personally inaccessible mind-independent reality. That reality stretches way beyond the boundaries of the system one
instantiates. The false assumption of direct waking access to a classical
macroscopic world of insentient objects is an immensely
adaptive piece of neuromythology bequeathed to us by evolution;
and it dies hard. The idea that phenomenal tables, chairs
and classical objects in general - including, crucially, the soggy grey
brains of scientific mythology - are autobiographical constructs takes some
getting used to, even as a hypothesis. So do some of its
consequences; for example, that both people's dreaming- and
waking- virtual worlds are described by the covertly
indexical concepts of innumerable individual idiolects
masquerading as public language i.e. "public" speech is really mentalese. Common-sense is nothing
of the kind; or not around here, at any rate. I'm going to argue that the alleged asymmetry of epistemic access to private and notionally public arenas is a delusive but fitness-enhancing adaptation of Darwinian minds. For many purposes, of course, one cares - or wants to
care - about whatever in the mind-independent world our
dynamical simulations causally co-vary with (etc) - rather than the
intrinsic properties of the medium of simulation itself. This approach won't work when investigating the nature of consciousness. In the Mythology of Neural Porridge below, I argue that if Schopenhauer's notorious World-Knot is to be unravelled, then both the unique
classical macroscopic world of the direct realist and the
matter-myth it spawns will have to be recognised as just
ill-reified chunks of folk-psychology.
1.6 Second, there would be desperate difficulties to
the hard/easy dichotomy even if something akin to direct perceptual realism
were true. The "easy" problems of neural processing, behavioural discrimination,
information integration and the like can themselves be
thought about only via a cognitive medium whose
properties exemplify part of the hard problem itself. The
properties of the subtle - and tantalisingly elusive -
phenomenology of cognition infect the hypothetical "propositional content"
of everything we think we know. This includes thought-episodes notionally "about" the supposedly easy
functional mechanisms of brain and behaviour - and the
objective, third-person Scientific Image - which some
of us trust we can more-or-less-in-principle understand.
If we're utterly at sea, and not just faintly
puzzled, about the nature of this medium itself, then we
can't be confident that its linguiform structural
variations can be used as neutral problem-solving tools to tackle 'easy' problems.
So just how badly contaminated is the nominal vehicle of
contentful thought?
1.7 We don't really know. Yet if one is brave or foolhardy
enough to investigate, there is empirically-derived,
experimentally-accessible evidence - and not just late-night Kantian lucubrations or after-hours bar-room chitchat - that the generic "medium" of our thoughts is
radically shaping their intentional content as well.
[Intentionality in philosophy-speak is the
property of 'object-directedness' possessed indifferently
by brains-in-vats and brains-in-skulls; but not IMO by (superficially) isomorphic
non-organic robots]. The relevance if any of the
intrinsic intentional quality possessed by one's thought -
to its [notional(?)(!)] relational extrinsic content is
moot. Yet - to walk with alcoholic insouciance right
through an academic minefield - it is the varying intrinsic
intentional content of one's occurrent thought-episodes - functionally-described or otherwise -
together with their generic texture
that exhausts one's conception of Reality. One's
conception of Reality can't literally stretch to the
personally inaccessible relational content one
trusts some of one's thought-episodes enjoy - and to which
all but solipsists subscribe. Change, not just the individual flavour, but the generic what-it's-likeness of thought, and you've generated a new virtual
reality as well. And change it one can.
1.8 A bit of cautious empiricism (a.k.a. 'drug-abuse': the
value-neutrality of science is a fiction to edify the
children and divert the groundlings] suggests that a
generic aspect of everyday thought is shaping the
background assumptions of one's way of life via means
which mundane awareness simply doesn't and can't suspect.
If you chemically manipulate the nominal medium or
vehicle of your thought, then you,
it, and the intrinsic notional content of your thoughts
take on namelessly alien properties. Aspects of awake
thought which aren't explicitly represented within its
workaday operations can eerily change or disappear too.
These ineffable aspects of thought, one may infer if not feeling too shell-shocked, have been shaping one's implicit
conception of Reality to a much greater degree than the focal and
expressly named compositional variations one would more normally expect
to argue about. "Difference is all the mind's input devices can detect, and difference is in a sense all the mind is there to consider and respond to" (Gregory Bateson). If there are deep, currently unfathomable
presuppositions or background assumptions implicit in all our drug-naïve
thought-episodes, then it's hard to see
how they can be individuated or articulated within that
state-specific medium itself. One can't very easily hop
outside one's current mode of consciousness for a quick reality-check; or not by any obvious orthodox route.
1.9 So one may ask: just how strong is the evidence - if any
- that the key facets and assumptions of our ideas on reality are
explicitly represented within our conceptual scheme? In discounting the existence of what is
normally unexpressed, and is perhaps currently
inexpressible, just how confident can
we be that we're not neglecting the defining
features of our normal mode of existence?
1.10 A further question. Must good philosophy be methodologically self-conscious?
No, I think, but it does help. Practising scientists may find meta-philosophical discussions bring a whiff of meta-verbiage
about verbiage. Philosophy in-the-raw can be bad enough.
Heaven help us when philosophy itself starts getting
self-conscious. [Who knows, perhaps future mental-health
professionals will diagnose some forms of philosophising as a mood-congruent hyper-cholinergic personality-disorder.
Unusually, Chalmers himself seems a cheerily good-natured
soul. QM again, I suppose.]
1.11 Sometimes admittedly it's hard to stifle a yawn at what
one darkly suspects is mere authorial throat-clearing. Yet the methodological chasm separating the study of mind
from all other scientific fields runs far deeper than it
needs to. We carry enough cognitive handicaps as it is.
The disastrous intellectual consequences of academia's
self-denying ordinance on an experimentalist philosophy
of mind don't just permeate all our belief-episodes
and their notional content. The consequences also infect the dime-a-dozen macroscopic virtual worlds which naive realists and
pre-Everett quantum mechanics misconstrue as mind-independent realities too. For folk-physics and folk-perception manage safely to palm off many of mind's properties onto what are only some of its specialised modules; though the thoroughness
of the evacuation-process admittedly varies. On such a diagnosis,
then consciousness is not some discrete puzzle which can
be semantically or evidentially quarantined from the rest
of our professed knowledge. Barring our quasi-magical
unmediated access to the rest of the world, then simply
varying - let alone explaining - its generic
properties is likely to change our conception of
everything else too.
1.12 Now in spite of its well-flagged pledge to treat
consciousness seriously, The Conscious Mind itself
belongs to the often rarefied scholarly genre known, mouth-wateringly enough, as analytic philosophy. Hence its
author neither preaches nor practises the study of
consciousness as an experimental discipline. Whether
through prudence or principle, Chalmers' method of investigation doesn't include emulating
Nature's intrepid chemical psychonauts - or at any rate
not in any very high amplitude part of the Universal Wave
Function.
1.13 Physicists, on the one hand, spend taxpayers' billions
pushing their theories to the limit so as to learn from
where they break down. Neuroscientists, likewise, find
they discover most from abnormal, mutilated or
systematically manipulated brains. By contrast,
professional philosophers of mind don't explore what we
might - using enemy idiom - describe as abnormal,
mutilated or systematically manipulated consciousness
much further than a bit of genteel pipe-puffing. In fact
practitioners of the Oxonian branch traditionally
haven't investigated its altered states much beyond the tipsiness
induced by after-dinner port. The methodological
shortcomings of the a priori approach to their
subject-matter are at least as grave as those of its
experimentalist rival. Yet this is a field where a
conspicuous absence of first-hand experience is
frequently taken as a badge of intellectual authority.
1.14 There is an irony to the gaping deficit in both the
analytic and the - optimistically self-christened - cognitive-scientific literature. [I could of course be missing some
real gems. I'm not one of the cloistered mandarinate
myself. But with a few props on a dark night I could
probably pass myself off as an analytic philosopher; and
Chalmers' sure-footed on-line bibliography confirms one's
suspicion that apriorism runs rampant in the discipline
as a whole]. The irony is that the empirical method -
though scarcely naive empiricism - is presently accorded
a somewhat awe-struck deference by most of the big
beasts of today's philosophical jungle. It's almost as if
physics-envy has sapped the manhood of an otherwise
worldly, truculent, and testosterone-driven bunch of
Anglo-American alpha-male philosophers; and left in its place a bunch of chastened and neutered flag-wavers for the ideology
of scientific materialism. For when it comes to
empirically manipulating the lone accessible instance of
consciousness which anyone has to go on, namely one's own, then one
searches the received texts in vain for some glimmering
of cognitive dissonance at the neglect of experiment. At
the very least - if one's not going to take one's
theories for an empirical test-drive - then one really
needs to offer some compelling, albeit again presumably
a priori, justification of the unique epistemic
legitimacy of apriorism in one's professional area of
expertise.
1.15 These strictures might better be levelled at
materialist philosophers than Chalmers. In some ways, undoubtedly, The Conscious
Mind is all the better for its author's
abstinence from first-person experiment. Casual use of
psychedelics rarely promotes clarity of exposition or
penetrating analysis. Moreover no one who's tempted to try
chemically-catalysed psychedelic paradigm-hopping can
make an informed choice of what they're letting
themselves in for. Afterwards, too, there's no guarantee
that retired experimentalists will be wholly able, or
indeed willing, to revert to a drug-naïve innocence as if
nothing had changed. By the lights of medievals too, I
suppose, the slippery slope symbolically begun with
looking down Galileo's telescope has lead to ever-escalating levels of mind-rotting gibberish as well. The
revolutionary implications of taking the experimental
method really seriously can't be spelled out in
advance - whether conducted in its first- or third- person guise.
The effects of its application may sometimes last
indefinitely - even if unsophisticated early efforts
result in the functional equivalent of blowing up the
school chemistry labs and being put out to grass.
Even so, for better or worse, the state-dependence
of memory is likely to leave most of psychedelia
cognitively inaccessible, once again, even to its one-time initiates. Perhaps their post-experimental musings
deserve to be listened to with the respect usually given to the
philosophical reflections of retired scientists.
1.16 In consequence of traditional neglect, however, the
significance of none of the outlandish and often
incommensurable realms of mental life opened up by, say,
the dissociative anaesthetics -
such deceitfully anodyne labels - is tackled in The
Conscious Mind. Someday, somehow, some sort of
strategic meta-research program to encompass them all must be launched. Otherwise academic philosophy of mind as traditionally practised threatens to become part of a stagnating and degenerate research program. It's a tradition which presently shows no promise of yielding even a decent taxonomy of consciousness, let alone a framework of
explanation. The integration of psychedelia into a some sort of unitary world-picture is vital if our trans-human successors are to have any kind of proper notion of
What Is Reality - minus the embarrassed scare
quotes - unless Reality itself is written off, lazily and
amorally, as just another pipe-dream.
1.17 Systematic
psychedelic research will demand a much higher order of
methodological sophistication then anything found in the
physical sciences today. For the incommensurability of
paradigms, if the phrase hadn't been appropriated for the
purposes of ridicule, is a notion much better fitted to
different psycho-chemical modes of existence than for
intra-modal scientific disputes. This is not least because changing the generic texture of thought (and all the other, notionally uncerebral sorts of experience) induces a global semantic shift of narrow content. There just doesn't seem
to be any Olympian, God's-eye mode from which (one day!) the nature
and peculiar state-specific semantic content of all the others modes can be impartially accessed and appraised. One
can't rule out that such modes exist; but professed arguments that they
do simply beg the question. And the meta-language to describe all the possible individual first-order languages which the state-space of alien modes could sustain is not currently in prospect.
1.18 The news gets worse. An extension of the experimental method is needed
even more urgently in consciousness studies than in
natural science [where top-rank mathematical physicists -
superstringers, loop theorists and the like - have
learned to regard it as a bit dated; especially when
treated to the story-book sloganeering of earthier colleagues]. Even in one's everyday, chemically unenriched waking
slumbers, sentience is unimaginably more diverse -
intuitively, at any rate - than insentience. Some of the
potential boundaries of the concept must be experimentally investigated even to delimit and classify
what will need explaining. Lining up all one's
intellectual targets instead so they can be knocked down
with the same argumentative bowling ball is satisfyingly
economical of time and effort. It may even work when
one's target is refuting materialism - for the
category of insentience apparently lends itself to
easy generalisation across otherwise disparate objects.
Yet for positive theorising rather than scholarly
hatchet-work, a much more adventurous and ambitious strategy
is required. The implicit claim of semantic privilege to
a single mode of ordinary sentience - non-coincidentally
one's own - and the recruitment of one ordinary
"cognitive" mode to think about both " easy" and "hard"
problems, begs answers to a host of questions we haven't empirically examined. Not
even the most brilliant intellect working from within our
parochial psycho-chemical ghetto can hope to apprehend the
properties of alien state spaces of consciousness simply
by hard thought in one narrow DNA-driven mind-set alone.
It isn't psycho-physiologically possible. One might as
well try mentally to hum a symphony to oneself in purple:
the concepts and psycho-physical substrates are
different.
1.19 This isn't to discount any essentialist working definition
of consciousness as unviable. Intuitively, as Nagel has
stressed, the single generic property of what-it's-likeness captures its minimal defining feature. Indeed,
the radical panpsychist monism to be canvassed in this
review will be tenable only if all modes of
consciousness are, in a sense, variations on a single
theme. Yet if, speaking loosely and elliptically,
existence and mathematical what-it's-likeness are co-extensive [as I shall argue], then
it's a very big and varied theme. Moreover speculations on potential
common feature of all experience can induce a
dangerous complacency. For what-it's-likeness - construed
field-theoretically by the panpsychist as minimal and
self-intimating rather than person-specific - is a
variable which takes such a huge immensity and diversity
of values that a single here-and-now frame-of-consciousness can't be confident it knows what it's
supposedly generalising about.
1.20 This is because our weirdly familiar and subtle everyday
"cognitive" modes of consciousness aren't innocent
vehicles for conceptual thought. Some notion of the
extent to which even so-called propositional thought is
inseparable from the phenomenology of consciousness can
be derived only by more-or-less systematically varying
the properties of the generic medium in which it more-or-less serially occurs. A (very) motley bunch of Wittgensteinians, Fregeans and their camp-followers will chafe at this idiom. Doesn't it all amount to just so
much psychologistic anecdotage? Who cares what one of my
thoughts feels like - or anyone else's?
1.21 Well, the phenomenal texture of one's thoughts, and the phenomenal texture of the experiential manifold in which they're embedded,
determines what one thinks the world is like. This is so
independently of whatever role that texture may or may
not possess in fixing any inaccessibly extrinsic
'relational' content which one's thought-episodes
sometimes may, or may not, spirit into existence.
Locating real, spatio-temporal episodes of thought within
the causal structure of the world will be essential to
any serious naturalising project. And since natural
selection specialises in masterly con-jobs like teleology
and function, then it's hard to be confident that
simulating an autonomous abstract realm of disembodied
"broad" meanings and logical inference isn't one of them. One just has to assume otherwise. In principle, after all, super-sophisticated
civilisations of computational A-life could be evolved
within our computers in which semantic properties are
merely simulated rather than exemplified. In principle,
perhaps, a truth-functional semantics could be computationally simulated by our future digital lifeforms far more tightly than is feasible with the putative relational content of our own broadly
indeterminate meanings. Often, however, it's essential
to award oneself a capacity for full-blown rather than virtual semantic realism, if only to
avoid paradoxes of self-reference and semantic
solipsism; but then a selective capacity for make-believe has always been a vital component of both mental
health and intellectual progress.
1.22 As it is, my briefly entertaining the thought that, say,
the moon is made of green cheese and my occurrent belief
in the rough accuracy of Newton's inverse square law of
gravity have a lot in common: introspectively, they're
just minor shifts in one kind of state-specific cognitive
tickle, regardless of their different relational status to the mind-independent world. The
generic texture of that tickle shapes one's conception of
reality irrespective of the systematic logico-inferential
properties etc which its variations may or may not possess.
"What's it like to have a thought?", however, is
not a question which echoes through the groves of
contemporary academe.
1.23 The significance of mutating the generic mode in which
thinking is conducted is easily missed by the drug-naïve.
'What's-he-on-about?' it may be asked. For we won't be
able to verbalise the phenomenology of what we find to
someone who doesn't substantially share it. Establishing
the psychoneural correlates of who shares what with whom
involves a host of practical problems and controversial
notions of type-type identities. The more radical and
interesting the generic shift, the harder it is to say
anything sensible about it. For now, at least, then Sapir-Whorf,
anti-private language arguments plus do-it-yourself psychedelia equals
cognitive catastrophe. It simply isn't possible ostensively
to define for non-initiates the plethora of new semantic primitives
for which new generic thought-media will ultimately call.
1.24 For what it's worth, in other psychochemical guises I do have my own limited
in-house set of incommunicably novel semantic
primitives. Yet in the absence of laboratory-controlled
experiments in which other subjects undergo type-similar
psychochemical cascades, then the private meanings and
experiences of alien Daves remain vulnerable to well-rehearsed verificationist and beetle-in-the-box
arguments; just like consciousness itself in fact. This sort of obstacle to progress, at least, is a reflection of the hidebound institutional structures of present-day science and academia; not a law of nature. In a happier post-HI age, co-ordinated and controlled research will begin in earnest. Simply
syntactically combining the new primitives into the
deliverances of a full-blown language, let alone harnessing
its conceptual resources as part of a mature cultural
tradition, may yet take millennia of exploration in modes
of being which can now only fleetingly be glimpsed; and
in some cases not glimpsed at all.
1.25 None of this should be misread as a plea for analytic
philosophers and cognitive scientists to desert the
scholasticism of the Academy for a reckless
binge on psychedelic cocktails. Uninhibited use of
today's psycho-toxic chemical agents is not, I think, a likely
recipe for incisive and penetrating thought. Alexander
Shulgin, not Timothy Leary or Terrence McKenna, serves as
the role model for the cognoscenti - admittedly in a realm
where, to be fair, the whole lot of us
are only floundering stone-age dilettanti.
1.26 Moreover it's worth stressing there are indeed immense mental wastelands as well as intellectual
treasure-troves waiting to be discovered in mental terra
incognita. It's not a case of simple pharmacological shake-and-stir. Many presently-accessible drug-induced states of consciousness
exhibit all the intellectual depth of 'Neighbours' and the
edifying uplift of glue-sniffing. Not everyone, the
uncharitable might claim, has the imagination even to
have a bad trip. Further, some crude psychedelic agents induce
post-synaptic psychochemical cascades which are too
complex and unpredictable in their effects to allow
fellow-trippers even the illusion of a shared mode of
experience. Barring any consistency of behavioural responses
or relative constancy of subjective psychophysical state induced, they are
effectively off-limits to scientific research for the
foreseeable future. Moreover a vast combinatorial explosion sets in. More radically still, whole topologies of
mental weight-space may, I suspect, be completely
and eternally untamable conceptually. Here truly there be
monsters; and, flippancy aside, far worse.
1.27 Indeed, there is another danger here. By slipping into
the sort of racy but comfortable academicisms best
calculated to win a [wincing?] scholarly audience, then this
plea to take naturalising the mind really
seriously may deceive author and website visitor alike. This
is because the states of mind fit for digesting "cognitive
science" and analytic philosophy of mind, whether jazzed
up a bit by a Golden House Sparrow or treated with
due solemnity and traditional gravitas, are foreign and
semantically blind to the raw wild hyper-weirdness of
what I'm on about. There aren't any homely translation
manuals or true multi-lingual, multi-paradigm adepts to hold one's hand
along the way. As with consciousness itself, one is,
ultimately, all on one's own. Surgically granting a blind
man the gift of sight, to reach for the usual tired but
serviceable sort of perceptual analogy, doesn't suddenly
confer visual literacy or articulacy on the recipient. On
the contrary, and even with all the advantages of a mature,
pre-digested conceptual scheme presented him on a plate,
the newly-sighted subject may struggle for years to make
sense of his new universe of experience.
1.28 This sort of
problem applies to the far more revolutionary,
introspectively-intimated cognitive and affective analogues
of sensory modes of consciousness opened up by
psychedelia. Unfortunately, in such modes there is no
mature canon of psychedelic theory to help enculture the
experience. Understandably, the literature is mostly
pretty dreadful. Lapsing again into more accessible sensory
analogies, it's as if, say, one had to talk about sound
in the language of olfaction: if one's audience were
congenitally anosmic, then one's own intellectual and
linguistic resources might be over-stretched too. When the new phenomena created are modes of introspective awareness which confer no new behavioral discriminative capacities, then a drug-naïve audience will probably find what one says even more vacuous.
1.29 Perhaps it's worth recalling initial scientific scepticism toward synesthesia. Natural synesthetes experience the transposition of sensory modalities more commonly associated with good acid. Synesthetes who report 'oblong tastes', 'coloured vowels', 'green odours', 'salty visions', and (in one case) 'technicolor orgasms' were once derided sooner than an Oxford voice could cry 'category mistake'. Moreover there are some incommensurable modes of altered introspective consciousness about which one can't even talk nonsense. In
consequence of psychedelia's present ineffability, however, and of every
ill-advised and culturally-refracted instance of drug-induced babbling born of hapless attempts to express the
ineffable [such as? ed], there flourishes a robust
but sloppy-minded verificationism among traditional
apriorist philosophers of mind i.e. those that don't take psychedelic drugs. This allows them to
dismiss altered states, insofar as they even get a look-in, with a breezy rhetorical flourish:
Where's the beef? If all that psychedelia can deliver
beyond New Age witterings is superficial generalities and
woolly-minded generalisations, then why take it
seriously? Let's get back to real work.
1.30 This response is far too glib; but then the village-verificationist is always with us. Normally we are
protected from the uncharted dimensions of our ignorance
of most forms of consciousness. So we've no way of knowing what we're missing. The hope that there are relatively 'easy' as well
as hard problems of consciousness, which can be resolved
within the neural and computational paradigms, covertly
depends on our supposed enjoyment of a privileged vehicle
within which the investigation can be conducted. So are
there substantive grounds for claiming such psychic
super-user status?
1.31 I'm still looking. Alas, the everyday waking
consciousness of hunter-gatherer minds doesn't straightforwardly enjoy,
whatever one may question-beggingly presuppose,
Archimedean privileges to which all other generic modes
of being must be subordinated. One can't explain what one can't even cognitively access. Grant, to take a toy example, that in two radically different
generic modes of consciousness, the nominally same
organism (e.g. a DP) can exert a similar capacity both
behaviourally to manipulate its environment and pay lip
service to the nominally type-identical QM physical
formalism describing the world. Given that one occupies systematically
co-varying alien states of consciousness, then what is it that
these mutually more-or-less inaccessible virtual worlds both share? Their respective textures define what one thinks the world is like - both the virtual world simulation and the metaphysical Multiverse they're presumably all stuck in. Yet insofar as these modes are mutually accessible to 'memory' at all, they seem ineffably different. Evolutionary epistemology can't straightforwardly be used to underwrite one generic mode rather than the other; any more than it can be used to underwrite the supposedly mind-independent phenomenal greenness of grass when other types of what-it's-likeness could have done the same functional job.
So which, if either - or any - mode of experience should be privileged? The introspective
and semantic analogues to the problem of spectrum
inversion are, I think, much more profound in their sceptical implications than its usual gaudy sensory
puzzle-cases. They are certainly far harder to express.
1.32 But I can't prove this a priori. Until the state-enforced and Inquisitorial censorship of knowledge peculiar to outlawed states of
consciousness is lifted, then overground academic
researchers will be immersed, often without knowing it,
within the often sterile and sometimes cosily common-sensical confines of one state-specific medium. Occupants
of its impoverished semantic and evidential base need a
dose of drastic - but not too drastic - simulated annealing if consciousness studies is not to run the
danger of congealing into a stagnant if often shark-infested
puddle of debate. Regrettably, an empirically-grounded strategy can be ethically and
responsibly advocated only when the genetically-engineered substrates for happy tripping predicted by HI
become ubiquitous. Only then can wholesale research
begin. To my mind the moral urgency of HI wholly
eclipses its beneficent intellectual spin-offs. Yet when
the momentous phase-change to universal well-being
occurs - whatever the time-scale - the epistemic pay-off
will be awe-inspiring beyond our wildest imagination.
1.33 More immediately, the incongruous attitude to the
empirical method is a vice which bedevils cognitive science
and the armchair traditions of mainstream analytic
philosophy of mind as a whole. Within this effectively pre-Galilean
context - safe-surfing visitors to HedWeb expecting bland textual
exegesis and good old-fashioned peer-reviewed commentary
might do best to leave the site altogether - Chalmers is
in total command of his material. One can only marvel at
his enviable but wholly unobtrusive familiarity with the
literature. Deplorably, one can find oneself relying on
Chalmers rather than chasing up original texts. As far as
I can tell he is, with few exceptions, a disconcertingly
reliable guide.