INTRODUCTION

The Many Faces of Consciousness: A Field Guide

Guven Gfizeldere

There is perhaps no other phenomenon besidesconsciousness that is so familiar to each of us andyet has been so elusive to any systematic study,philosophical or scientific. In thinking about con-sciousness, the puzzlement one often finds oneselfin is rather like St. Augustine's riddle in his con-templations about the nature of time: When noone asked him, he knew what it was; being asked,however, he no longer did. (Augustine of Hippo1961: Book 11.)

What is at the heart of this puzzlement? Is therea genuine difficulty that underlies it? What are thespecific issues that comprise the problem of con-sciousness? (Is there really a "the problem ofconsciousness"?) And are we facing a phenom-enon the understanding of which lies forever be-yond our intellectual capacities? These are thequestions that I will pursue below.

The overarching goal of this introduction is toprovide a field guide (with a particular perspec-tive) for anyone interested in the history andpresent status of philosophical issues in the studyof consciousness. Part One is a preliminary over-view of the current philosophical positions in theliterature, as well as a discussion of the uniquedifficulties inherent in the concept and natureof consciousness. Part Two is an account of thestudy of consciousness in the history of modernpsychology. Finally, Part Three is an expositionof the mosaic of philosophical puzzles of con-sciousness, as well as an exploration of their in-terrelations.1

PART ONECONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS

The feeling of helplessness was terrifying. I tried to let thestaff know I was conscious but I couldn't move even afinger or eyelid It was like being held in a vice and grad-ually I realized that I was in a situation from which therewas no way out. I began to feel that breathing was im-possible, and I just resigned myself to dying.—Patient: Male, aged fifty-four, bronchoscopy, 1978.

This testimonial was one of the many unsettlingpersonal accounts of "becoming conscious" undergeneral anesthesia, gathered in response to thefollowing advertisement, which appeared in fournational newspapers in Great Britain in 1984:

SURGERY: Have you ever been conscious dur-ing a surgical operation when you were supposedto be anaesthesized? A medical research teamwould like an account of your experiences.Write in confidence.

The goal of this advertisement was to gatherfirsthand accounts of gaining consciousness undergeneral anesthesia, in order to investigate thetruth of a number of patients' discomforting post-surgery reports and to provide legal guidance forthe accumulating court cases.2

Whatever philosophical problems may be as-sociated with the term consciousness, it might bethought that it would be a straightforward matterto specify an operational definition of being con-scious for anesthesiologists to work with. Canconsciousness simply not be detected on the basisof the patient's being alert and responsive? Whatis in question, after all, is neither the notoriouslyelusive problem of phenomenal experience northe concept of the evanescent Humean self.

A brief look at the anesthesiology literature,brimming with terms like real awareness and in-cipient consciousness, quickly proves otherwise.(Cf. Rosen and Lunn 1987.) If anything, the con-sensus is that "with the spectral edge of the EEG[electroencephalogram] or median frequency,or any other processed EEG signal, there doesnot seem to be a clear cut-off, without overlap,between consciousness and unconsciousness"(Vickers 1987, p. 182). The phenomenon of con-sciousness does not have clear-cut boundaries,and its complex structure does not admit anyeasy formulations. (See, for instance, the RocheHandbook of Differential Diagnosis on "Coma"[1979] and on "Transient Loss of Consciousness"[1989].) Even if it is in principle possible to invent

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a "consciousness monitor," a device that woulddetect the physical signs of the presence of con-sciousness in a patient, no such technology isanywhere in sight, because it is not even knownwhat exactly is to be measured.

The root of the problem lies deeper than theinadequacy of the technology or the lack of suffi-cient data, however. What seems to be criticallylacking is a solid theoretical framework to groundand facilitate the experimental research. For ex-ample, there is no established consensus, even inthe medical field, as to what should count as thecriteria of consciousness, so AS to demarcate thedomain of the conscious from that of the uncon-scious or the nonconscious. The problem withbuilding a consciousness monitor is not confinedto a lack of sufficiently fine-grained measuringinstruments; it ultimately has to do with notknowing where to begin measuring and where toend up with the measured quantities.3

Worse, it is not clear whether everyonemeans the same thing by the term consciousness,even within the bounds of a single discipline.There is considerable variation in people's pre-theoretic intuitions, for instance, regarding thekinds of creatures to which consciousness can beattributed.4

And in the absence of well-grounded theories,the lack of robust pretheoretical intuitions be-comes even more importunate. Consider againthe case of anesthesia. A person who is totallyunresponsive to stimuli can, in one very impor-tant sense, be said to have lost consciousness.Nonetheless, can she still be said to be consciousin another sense—in the sense of passively expe-riencing the sensations caused by the stimuli, forinstance? Similarly, are we to grant consciousnessto a patient in a vegetative state, even when shelacks a well-functioning brain stem? Or whatwould justify granting consciousness to thepatient if she did have a functioning brain stemthat maintained the autonomic functions of herbody?5 How many senses of consciousness arethere anyway, and how are we to taxonomizethem?

I The Puzzle of Consciousness

These questions do not have any easy, obviousanswers. Nor is there at present anything thatcould be regarded as a received view on problemsof consciousness in the scientific and philosoph-ical community. Furthermore, it is common tofind serious doubts expressed in the literatureabout whether there can ever be a complete un-derstanding of the phenomenon of consciousness.The gloomy opening lines of Thomas Nagel'sfamous essay, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"have become formative for many in thinkingabout consciousness: "Consciousness is whatmakes the mind-body problem really intract-able Without consciousness the mind-body

problem would be much less interesting. Withconsciousness, it seems hopeless" (Nagel 1974,pp. 165-166).

The puzzle of consciousness can be regardedin various ways, all the way from a supernaturalmystery that will forever elude naturalist expla-nations, to a natural but extremely complicatedphenomenon about which we know very little.And some of the time, the blue line that lies inbetween becomes very thin. There are also thosewho express skepticism about the existence ofconsciousness as a real phenomenon or about thecoherence of its conceptual grounding, as well asothers with a much more positive outlook, busilyconstructing their own accounts of consciousnessto solve the puzzle. A brief look at some of therepresentatives of these different positions is inorder.

The Mystery of Consciousness and theExplanatory Gap

In the opening pages of Consciousness Explained,Daniel Dennett (1991) remarks:

Human consciousness is just about the last survivingmystery— There have been other great mysteries: themystery of the origin of the universe, the mystery of lifeand reproduction, the mystery of the design to be found

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in nature, the mysteries of time, space, and gravity—We do not yet have the final answers to any of thequestions of cosmology and particle physics, moleculargenetics, and evolutionary theory, but we do know howto think about them. The mysteries haven't vanished,but they have been tamed With consciousness,however, we are still in a terrible muddle. Consciousnessstands alone today as a topic that often leaves even themost sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused,(pp. 21-22)

Dennett should not be taken as promoting thesense of mystery, however. After all, his book isentitled Consciousness Explained. Of course, it ishard to say that everyone (or even many) agreeswith Dennett's conviction. In fact, the generalsentiment among those who work on conscious-ness (including philosophers, psychologists, andneuroscientists) seems to be on the "puzzled" side.

Moreover, in the wake of a recent rise in inter-est in the study of consciousness, almost each ap-pearance of consciousness as a subject matter inthe popular press has been tagged with some ele-ment of mystery. For instance, Francis Crick andChristof Koch called consciousness the "mostmysterious aspect of the mind-body problem" intheir article that appeared in a special issue ofScientific American titled Mind and Brain (Sep-tember 1992). Discover magazine enlisted con-sciousness as one of the "ten great unansweredquestions of science" (November 1992), andOmni published a special issue on consciousnessbut titled it "Science and the Soul" (October1993). (Perhaps the rather unusual tide FrancisCrick chose for his book that appeared shortlyafterward was a response to Omni's inquiry: TheScientific Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for theSoul.) Finally, Time magazine, in an issue thatfeatured consciousness research, put the words"that evanescent thing called consciousness" onits cover (July 17,1995).

Now, no one refers to other biological or psy-chological phenomena in such terms. There isnever a special magazine issue that pronouncesthe problem of cell mutation with the question of

the soul in the same breath, nor does anyone referto language as "that evanescent thing." So itseems obvious that consciousness is perceivedas special, possibly unique, and not readily ame-nable to ordinary scientific or philosophical ex-planation.

Some take this sense of mystery even further,and this attitude is not at all restricted to thepopular press. It is in fact possible to find thesame sentiments expressed in philosophical andscientific circles, by those whom Owen Flanagan(1991) calls the "New Mysterians." For instance,Colin McGinn (1989) finds it humanly impossibleever to understand "how technicolor phenomen-ology can arise from grey soggy matter," and ap-provingly quotes the English biologist Huxleywho famously stated: "How it is that anything soremarkable as a state of consciousness comesabout as a result of irritating nervous tissue is justas unaccountable as the appearance of Djin whenAladdin rubbed bis lamp" (p. 349).6

The expression of this sort of puzzlement ishardly new. Similar perplexity has been expressedby a number of people over the years, especiallysince the mid-nineteenth century, with the ad-vancement of neurology and neuropsychologyand the consequently well-grounded convictionthat facts about consciousness must have someexplanatory basis in the facts about the brain. Forinstance, in 1874, physicist John Tyndall madethe following remark: "We can trace the devel-opment of a nervous system, and correlate with itthe parallel phenomena of sensation and thought.We see with undoubting certainty that they gohand in hand. But we try to soar in a vacuum themoment we seek to comprehend the connectionbetween them. An Archimedean fulcrum is hererequired which the human mind cannot com-mand; and the effort to solve the problem .. . islike that of a man trying to lift himself by his ownwaistband" (p. 195).7 In contemporary literature,Karl Popper, in a similar vein, finds "the emer-gence of full consciousness ... which seems to belinked to the human brain ... one of the greatest

Giiven Guzeldere Approaching Consciousness

miracles" (Popper and Eccles 1993, p. 129). Andmost recently, McGinn (1989) delivers what heconsiders to be the final verdict on the mind-bodyproblem: "We have been trying for a long time tosolve the mind-body problem. It has stubbornlyresisted our best efforts. The mystery persists. Ithink the time has come to admit candidly that wecannot solve the mystery" (p. 349).

There is, however, more than one way to readassertions about the mystery of consciousness.Accordingly, it is important not to lump togethereveryone who expresses puzzlement about con-sciousness into the same category. In particular, itis important to pay attention to the following twoquestions: Is the mystery essentially a result of acommitment to a materialist framework? Is themystery essentially inherent in our (lack of) cog-nitive capacities?

As such, these questions constitute an onto-logical and an epistemic axis, respectively, thatcross-cut each other. Not every combination inthe matrix receives equal philosophical attention.A negative answer to both questions essentiallyleaves one out of the circle of those who findsomething mysterious in consciousness, and notmany defend a view that find consciousness mys-terious in both aspects. Rather, the focus is onviews based on an exclusively positive answer toone or the other question.

Those who think that consciousness will re-main a mystery in a materialist ontology suggestthat the proper place to pursue investigation isinstead an immaterial realm—such as the realmof the res cogitans for Descartes, or World 2 ofmental entities for Karl Popper. This move bringswith it a problem perhaps larger than that it waspresumed to solve: how to account for the linkbetween consciousness in the immaterial realmand brains (and bodies) in the material realm.Descartes's notorious solution was to postulatethe pineal gland as the gatekeeper of interac-tion between the two essentially different kindsof substances. Alternatively, Leibniz chose torely on divine intervention to secure a "pre-

established harmony" between the events of thetwo realms.

More than three centuries after Descartes,John Eccles (1991, pp. 190-191) makes a repeatattempt, although in neurologically sophisticateddress, by postulating psychons (mental units) ascounterparts of dendrites in brains, to connectPopper's mental World 2 to physical World 1.Another contemporary expression of the viewthat defends an antimaterialist framework forconsciousness is given by Robert Adams (1987),who finds theism theoretically advantageous tomaterialism in explaining the relation of con-sciousness to bodily physical states.8

On the other hand are those who do not cut thebill of the mystery of consciousness to the pre-sumed immaterial ontology of consciousness butrather to our lack of cognitive capacities thatwould enable us to understand the nature ofthe "psychophysical link" between brains andminds. Tyndall seems to be in this group, andso is McGinn, who states that although "weknow that brains are the de facto causal basis ofconsciousness," we have no idea about how "thewater of the physical brain is turned into the wineof consciousness" (McGinn 1989, p. 349). Thisis an epistemic rather than ontological problem.For McGinn, "there is, in reality, nothing mys-terious about how the brain generates con-sciousness," but we human beings are forever"cognitively closed" to understanding the natureof this process, much the same way the under-standing of quantum mechanics lies beyond thecognitive capacities of monkeys.9

The general difficulty involving consciousnessforms a basis for what Joseph Levine (1983,1993)called the "problem of the explanatory gap." Al-most everyone agrees that there is indeed someexplanatory gap in this area; what is controversialis, as I will note later, whether there is just anepistemic or also an ontological lesson that needsto be drawn from it.

In any case, these positions constitute only afraction of the whole dialectical space. There are

also the skeptics and the naturalists, and to them Inow turn.

Skepticism About Consciousness

The skeptics among philosophers fundamentallydoubt the coherence of the very concept of con-sciousness, and the merits of consciousness itselfas a phenomenon fit for scientific or philosophicalinvestigation. Patricia Churchland, in one ofher early papers, compares the concept of con-sciousness (under a certain reading that she ex-plicates) to such now-defunct concepts as ether,phlogiston, and demonic possession—conceptsthat "under the suasion of a variety of empirical-cum-theoretical forces... lose their integrity andfall apart" (Churchland 1983, p. 80).

In a similar vein, Kathleen Wilkes claims notonly that "science can dispense with the conceptof consciousness and lose thereby none of itscomprehensiveness and explanatory power," but"so too could ordinary language." She then sug-gests that "perhaps 'conscious' is best seen as asort of dummy-term like 'thing', useful [only] forthe flexibility that is assured by its lack of specificcontent" (Wilkes 1984, pp. 241-242). Along thesame lines Georges Rey goes a step further andsuggests that there are "reasons for doubting thatoneself is conscious and... thinking that nothingis conscious." Consciousness, Rey suggests, "maybe no more real than the simple soul exorcised byHume" (Rey 1988, p. 6).

Notice that this sort of skepticism about con-sciousness is a very different attitude from anyform of "mysterianism." In particular, those whothink that consciousness is mysterious are com-mitted to the existence of some significant phe-nomenon, however elusive it may be in relation toscientific investigation or philosophical analysis.Consciousness skepticism, on the other hand,embraces an eliminativist stance: the concept ofconsciousness is defunct, and the phenomenon it-self may actually be inexistent, at least so far as itis construed in the literature that the skeptics areattacking.

The Consciousness Naturalists

Finally, there are those who believe that con-sciousness is a real and perfectly natural phenom-enon and that there will remain no mysteriousunexplained residue about consciousness in acompletely naturalist, but surely more advancedand mature, theoretical framework. Among thenaturalists, however, there is a wide spectrum ofpositions representing different levels of con-fidence in the success of a naturalist program. Forinstance, one can straightforwardly distinguishbetween full-blown naturalists and naturalists-at-heart.10

Into the first group fall a number of philos-ophers who have explicitly defended a naturalistframework to explain consciousness, withouttheoretical reservations. However, some of thefull naturalists, most significant among them PaulChurchland (1988) and Daniel Dennett (1991),have been charged with trying to do away withconsciousness for the sake of explaining it. Someothers have been more careful not to fall underthis decree. For instance Owen Flanagan (1992),who proposes what he calls the natural method—a triangulated approach for studying conscious-ness that combines phenomenology, psychology,and neuroscience—states: "Consciousness exists,and it would be a mistake to eliminate talk of itbecause it names such a multiplicity of things.The right attitude is to deliver the concept fromits ghostly past and provide it with a crediblenaturalistic analysis It will be our proudestachievement if we can demystify consciousness"(Flanagan 1995, p. 20).

Among the naturalists who give accounts ofconsciousness in terms of causal and functionalroles (broadly construed) are Armstrong (1980b,1993), Lewis (1966, 1972, 1980, 1995), Shoe-maker (1975, 1991, 1994), Lycan (1987, 1997b),Van Gulick (1988, 1989, 1993), and Rosenthal(1986,1997).

Most recently, Fred Dretske (1995) and Mi-chael Tye (1995) came up with naturalist ac-counts that explain consciousness in entirely

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representational terms. Finally, one can add JohnSearle to this group, who dubs his view "bio-logical naturalism":

The "mystery" of consciousness today is in roughly thesame shape that the mystery of life was before the de-velopment of molecular biology or the mystery of elec-tromagnetism was before Clerk-Maxwell equations. Itseems mysterious because we do not know how the sys-tem of neurophysiology/consciousness works, and anadequate knowledge of how it works would remove themystery [TJhere has been no question of "natural-izing consciousness"; it is already completely natural.(Searle 1992, p. 102,93, respectively)

Despite Searle's fully naturalist convictions, hisviews have, as I will point out later, significantdisagreements with those of the above on manyother (relevant) points. Nonetheless, his positionalso differs from a position that I call naturalism-at-heart.

Naturalists-at-heart are those who openly feelthe pull of naturalism, while not quite being ableto find a satisfactory place for consciousnessin a naturalist framework. For example, Levine(1983, 1993), who thinks that the problem of ex-planatory gap poses ultimately no ontologicalproblems for materialism, nonetheless expressesthe following troubled sentiments: "The absentand inverted qualia hypotheses are thought ex-periments which give concrete expression to whatI will call, following the Churchlands, the 'pro-qualia' intuition. This is the intuition that there issomething special about conscious mental lifethat makes it inexplicable within the theoreticalframework of functionalism, and, more generally,materialism" (Levine 1988, p. 272). Short of dis-believing materialism, Levine finds it difficult toplace consciousness in a naturalist framework.

Perhaps the most eloquent proponent of thisposition is Thomas Nagel, possibly more so in hisearlier writings than his later work. In one of hisearlier works, Nagel examines and rejects "thereasons for believing that physicalism cannotpossibly be true" and concludes: "My attitudetoward physicalism [is that it] repels me although

I am persuaded of its truth" (Nagel 1965, p. 110).Later he moves to a position he calls "dual aspecttheory"—a position that lies between assertingfalsity of physicalism but remaining short of pos-tulating nonphysical substances for accountingfor the ontology of the mind—while admittingthat "to talk about a dual aspect theory is largelyhand waving" (Nagel 1986, pp. 29-30). So per-haps the early Nagel was a naturalist-at-heart,and now it is more accurate to characterize him asa half-hearted-naturalist. In either case, Nagel'sposition seems, at least fundamentally, some-where in the naturalist camp, despite the skepticaland pessimistic undertones that make him some-times look closer to the mysterians or skeptics.

To recapitulate: It is noteworthy that the spec-trum of disagreements ranges over not onlyparticular accounts of consciousness but, morefundamentally, whether any satisfactory natural-istic explanation of consciousness can in principlebe given. Part of this disagreement owes, nodoubt, to the difficulty in the nature of the phe-nomenon of consciousness. But there is also a partthat stems from a conceptual disarray surroundingthe notion of consciousness. It is thus instructiveto examine these two dimensions that contributeto the puzzle of consciousness separately.

H Approaching Consciousness: A Multitude ofDifficulties

What we are when we are awake, as contrasted withwhat we are when we sink into a profound and perfectlydreamless sleep or receive an overpowering blow uponthe head—that it is to be conscious. What we are Jessand less, as we sink gradually down into dreamlesssleep, or as we swoon slowly away: and what we aremore and more, as the noise of the crowd outside tardilyarouses us from our after-dinner nap, or as we come outof the midnight darkness of the typhoid fever crisis—that it is to become conscious.

This is how George Trumbull Ladd (1909),noted American psychologist (whose definition ofpsychology as the "description and explanation

Approaching Consciousness

of states of consciousness as such" was adoptedand promoted by William James), characterizedthe phenomenon of consciousness (p. 30). Thischaracterization seems straightforward, common-sensical, and familiar to everyone. So familiarthat perhaps, as George Stout (1899), anotherpsychologist of the same era, declares in theopening pages of his Manual of Psychology, noprecise definition is necessary, or even possible:"What is consciousness? Properly speaking,definition is impossible. Everybody knows whatconsciousness is because everybody is conscious"(p. 7). Similarly, William James never attemptsto give a definition of consciousness anywhere inhis two-volume work, Principles of Psychology(1950a, 1950b). This is not because James had nointerest in, or nothing to say on, consciousness;on the contrary, many of the chapters in his twovolumes are about consciousness—its under-pinnings in the nervous system, its function inevolution, its streamlike phenomenology, and soon. Rather, according to James, consciousnesswas a phenomenon too familiar to be given a def-inition. James (1950a) was convinced that every-one took themselves to be possessors of consciousstates that were accessible by introspection, andhe regarded this belief as "the most fundamentalof all the postulates of Psychology." In his refusalto discuss this postulate any further, James addsthat he would "discard all curious inquiries aboutits certainty as too metaphysical" for the scope ofhis book (p. 185).

This somewhat peculiar "all-too-familiar aphenomenon" attitude toward consciousness hasindeed been quite common among many otherprominent investigators of consciousness. Sig-mund Freud (1964), for instance, supports Stout'sand James's convictions in his introductory lec-tures on psychoanalysis: "What is meant by con-sciousness we need not discuss; it is beyond alldoubt" (p. 70). Closer to our times, neuroscientistFrancis Crick and Christof Koch (1990) endorsethe same line in the opening paragraphs of theirarticle, "Towards a Neurobiological Theory ofConsciousness," even though they are attempting

to lay out the foundations of a new theory ofconsciousness: they need not provide a precisedefinition of consciousness since "everyone hasa rough idea of what is meant by consciousness"(p. 263).

On the other hand, it is not uncommon to comeacross statements about consciousness that con-vey a conviction opposite to those mentionedabove: that not only is there no clear and gen-erally accepted definition, but we are not evenin possession of a stable pretheoretical conceptionof consciousness. And this view, too, has beenaround for quite a while, as expressed by EdwardTitchener (1915) who cites two British psycholo-gists, Alexander Bain and James Ward, of the latenineteenth century: "'Consciousness,' says Pro-fessor Ward, 'is the vaguest, most protean, andmost treacherous of psychological terms'; andBain, writing in 1880; distinguished no less thanthirteen meanings of the word; he could find moretoday" (pp. 323-324).

Unfortunately, there is no hope of receivinghelp from antonyms, either. Here is the entry for"unconscious" in a psychology dictionary: "It issaid that there are no less than 39 distinct mean-ings of 'unconscious'; it is certain that no authorlimits himself consistently to one. And nearly allmeanings are closely linked to debatable theories.Any user of the term therefore risks suggestingagreement with theories he may deplore" (En-glish and English 1958). Finally, Julian Jaynes(1976) rhetorically asks: "This consciousness thatis myself of selves, that is everything, and yetnothing at all—what is it?" (p. 1).

Moreover, not only is there no consensus onwhat the term consciousness denotes, but neitheris it immediately clear if there actually is a single,well-defined "the problem of consciousness"within disciplinary (let alone across disciplinary)boundaries. Perhaps the trouble lies not so muchin the ill definition of the question, but in the factthat what passes under the term consciousness asan all too familiar, single, unified notion may be atangled amalgam of several different concepts,each inflicted with its own separate problems.

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What exactly, for example, is the problem ofconsciousness in philosophy, in psychology, andin the neurosciences? Are philosophers concernedwith the same problem, or set of problems,as psychologists and neuroscientists who workon consciousness? Whereas Thomas Natsoulas(1992), a psychologist, questions: "Is conscious-ness what psychologists actually examine?"(p. 363), Kathleen Wilkes (1988), a philosopher,gives the following advice: "Just as psychologistsdo not study 'mind' per se, so they need notbother with consciousness [because] in all thecontexts in which it tends to be deployed, the term'conscious' and its cognates are, for scientificpurposes, both "unhelpful and unnecessary" (pp.38-9).

An even more pessimistic view is enunciated byStuart Sutherland (1995) under the entry "con-sciousness" in his International Dictionary ofPsychology:

CONSCIOUSNESS: The having of perceptions, thoughts,and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to defineexcept in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp ofwhat consciousness means Consciousness is a fasci-nating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible tospecify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved.Nothing worth reading has been written about it. (p. 95)

Why are there such glaring polarities? Why isconsciousness characterized both as a phenom-enon too familiar to require further explanation,as well as a source of obscurity that remains typi-cally recalcitrant to systematic investigation bythose who work largely within the same para-digm? There is something uniquely peculiar here.Is it the phenomenon of consciousness that ismore puzzling, one sometimes wonders, or themagnitude of the puzzlement itself and the theo-retical dissonance surrounding consciousness?Could it perhaps be as R. J. Joynt (1981) pre-dicted: "Consciousness is like the Trinity; if it isexplained so that you understand it, it hasn't beenexplained correctly" (p. 108)?

George Miller (1962), faced with these dif-ficulties, tentatively entertains the interesting

proposition that "maybe we should ban the wordfor a decade or two until we can develop moreprecise terms for the several uses which 'con-sciousness' now obscures." Nonetheless, he ulti-mately decides against it: "Despite all its faults,however, the term would be sorely missed; itrefers to something immediately obvious andfamiliar to anyone capable of understanding aban against it" (p. 25)."

In the end, I find myself in agreement withMiller's positive conclusion. It is historically ac-curate to note that consciousness as a phenom-enon in need of not only explanation, but alsodefinition, has persistently kept resurfacing. Italso seems reasonable to think that furtherattempts to provide carefully constructed con-ceptual tools could only help the situation, pro-viding a common platform of interaction amongall who choose consciousness as their object ofstudy. This is not to say that it is not crucial toproceed cautiously to steer clear of conceptualdead ends, as well as to make sure that one doesnot fall into the trap of reinventing the wheel ofconsciousness over and over. After all, if we hopethat anything toward a better understanding ofconsciousness will come out of the joint efforts ofdifferent disciplines, it is of utmost importance tominimize crosstalk and make sure that commonterms actually point to the same referents. As aresult, it seems even more imperative to look forand try to delineate the specific conceptions andaspects of consciousness under which the differentproblems arise. The next section is a brief attemptto address conceptual issues along these lines,before turning to the epistemological and onto-logical difficulties that arise from the nature ofconsciousness.

Difficulties with the Concept of Consciousness

Because consciousness is a word whose semanticshas shifted over time, a brief lexical and etymo-logical exposition may be of some service asa preliminary step. Let us start with presentdefinitions. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED:

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unabridged second edition), for example, giveseight definitions of "consciousness," and twelvedefinitions of "conscious." For the purposes ofthis chapter, the eight OED entries for "con-sciousness" can be divided roughly into twogroups. On the one hand, there is a largely socialaspect of the term consciousness: joint or mutualknowledge shared by a community of people.This was indeed the earliest sense of conscious-ness, derived from the Latin term conscius. *2 It isthis sense of consciousness that is used in talkingabout "class consciousness" in Marxist thought,or that appears in titles like Gerda Lerner's recentbook, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness(1993).

On the other hand, consciousness has a largelypsychological (mental) sense which relates to in-dividuals, rather than groups, with no particu-larly ethical or political overtones.13 This sense ofconsciousness, too, can be subdivided into twomeanings—it means either "the state or faculty ofbeing conscious, as a condition and concomitantof all thought, feeling, and volition" or "the stateof being conscious, regarded as the normal con-dition of healthy waking life" (OED). The formersense is in accord with Descartes's usage of"consciousness," but it is more closely associatedwith, if it does not originate from, Locke's AnEssay Concerning Human Understanding. It isalso this sense of consciousness that bears an in-tentional component, inherent in the intentionalstates it subserves, leading to the transitive usage:"consciousness of." The latter is the intransitiveusage of "consciousness," something more basicthan, or perhaps a necessary constituent of theformer, unless one wants to insist that all con-sciousness is consciousness of. The distinctionbetween the transitive and the intransitive sensesof the psychological concept of consciousness isalluded to numerous times in contemporary phi-losophy and psychology, and I will accept it hereas such.14

Among the contemporary analytic philos-ophers, David Rosen thai (1997) has writtensubstantially about the distinction between the

transitive and intransitive senses of con-sciousness. He calls these two senses "creatureconsciousness" and "state consciousness," re-spectively. In taking consciousness as a propertyof organisms one can talk about a person's beingconscious in the sense of being awake and alert, asopposed to being in a transient state of no con-sciousness, in a deep coma, or in non-REM sleep.In another vein, one can ask of a bat, or a spider,or a stickleback, or perhaps a robot if it isconscious. All of this has to do with creatureconsciousness. In addition, it makes sense to talkabout whether a particular mental state is con-scious. This is not quite the same as someone'sbeing conscious. The creature sense of conscious-ness denotes an overall state one is in; the otherclassifies one's (mental) states as of one type oranother. Further, a state that is not conscious canbe among those that in principle cannot becomeconscious (e.g., certain computational statespostulated by cognitive psychology), or those thatcan be made conscious only by such specificmethods as Freudian psychoanalysis. In any case,this sense of consciousness which functions as atype-identifier for mental states is what I have inmind by state consciousness.15 (Another impor-tant distinction is that of characterizing creatureor state consciousness in causal versus phenom-enal terms. This distinction will be introduced inthe next section, and used recurrently throughoutthe chapter.)

In the rest of this discussion, I will largely putaside the social conception of consciousness andproceed with the psychological conception. Thismove approximately halves the size of the liter-ature to be examined; yet there is still plenty thatneeds teasing apart and sorting out.16

Difficulties with the Nature of Consciousness

It is often remarked that conscious experiencesare "immediately familiar" to any subject of suchexperiences. It is also argued that they are "soimmediately close" that it is at times difficult, ifnot impossible, to separate their appearance from

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their reality. This ambiguity between the appear-ance versus the reality of consciousness is also re-garded as unexampled; presumably nothing elsein the world suffers from it. As such, it tends touniquely blur the line between the epistemologyand ontology of consciousness: if all there is to(the reality of) conscious states is their appearingin a certain way to subjects, and if they have noexistential status independent of their so appear-ing, the ontology of consciousness seems to col-lapse into its epistemology.17

Ironically, on the other hand, the problem ap-pears to be just the opposite from a differentangle: the appearance of consciousness seemsso different from its "physical reality" that acomprehensive theory that bridges this gap isregarded as a near impossibility. In Sellarsianterms, the scientific and manifest images of con-sciousness are considered to embody a theoreticalgap perhaps greater than in any other subjectmatter. (Cf. Sellars 1991.)

The view that consciousness (or, in general, themind) and its physical basis (or, in general, thebody) seem essentially so different from one an-other that they must have distinct existencesis based on a deep-rooted idea in the history ofphilosophy. This idea and its variants were' con-stitutive of arguments for the metaphysical in-dependence of mind and body throughout earlymodern philosophy of the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries, perhaps most notably exempli-fied in the work of Descartes. The essential andcomplete nature of mind, generally speaking,seems to consist solely in thinking, and, as such, itmust be unextended, simple (with no parts), andessentially different from the body, and thereforeimmaterial. This was Descartes's argument in anutshell, ultimately drawing a strong ontologicalconclusion (regarding the distinctness of mindand body) from a starting point constituted byepistemic considerations (regarding the distinct-ness of their appearances). As Ben Mijuskovic(1974) observes, in this type of argumentation,"the sword that severs the Gordian knot is theprinciple that what is conceptually distinct is on-

tologically separable and therefore independent"(p. 123).

Mijuskovic, in locating this form of reasoningin its historical context, also notes the presence ofthe converse of its inference: "If one begins withthe notion, explicit or implicit, that thoughts orminds are simple, unextended, indivisible, then itseems to be an inevitable step before thinkersconnect the principle of an unextended, immate-rial soul with the impossibility of any knowledgeof an extended, material, external world" andconsequently, of the nature of the relation be-tween them (p. 121). That is, this time an epis-temological conclusion (regarding an epistemicgap between mind and body) is reached froma starting point constituted by ontological con-siderations (regarding the distinctness of theirnatures).

The difficulties inherent in the nature of con-sciousness constitute many of the philosophicalproblems that will be discussed in depth in the restof this chapter. In particular, the nature andvalidity of inferences between matters epistemo-logical and matters ontological, especially thosethat go from the former to the latter, will con-tinually appear as a leitmotif. Of course, some ofthese difficulties may be overcome quite rapidlyas the study of consciousness advances; othersmay prove more obstinate. But it may also turnout that certain problems that seemed unsolvablehad appeared that way because of the specificways in which they were formulated, or the im-plicit assumptions they rested on. This possibility,too, will emerge as a relevant concern later in thediscussion.

The best way to gain insight into this sort of adifficulty may very well be through locating theanalysis in a broad historical perspective. Thelong history of consciousness research no doubtcontains hints that can be parlayed not only todraw methodological lessons for further study,but also to reveal the constituent fibers of the pastparadigms which couched persistent core prob-lems under different guises over and over. It is infact the most striking feature of the consciousness

Approaching Consciousness 11

literature, as I try to exemplify numerous times inthis exposition, that the very same problems,analyses, and suggested solutions repeatedly ap-pear, and the very same theoretical moves re-peatedly get introduced at different times in thehistory of philosophy and psychology with little(if any) acknowledgement of past attempts andfailures. In this regard, a historical approach thatexposes the misleading implicit assumptionscommon to the past failures should prove usefulin illustrating, at minimum, which steps not totake in approaching consciousness at present.

IE Looking Ahead: The Two Faces ofConsciousness

Before proceeding further, I will offer a brief firstpass at a diagnosis that will be made at the end ofthis chapter: a principal reason underlying theconfusion and seeming mystery surrounding theconcept and phenomenon of consciousness lies inthe presence of two influential, equally attractive,pretheoretic characterizations. These two charac-terizations not only shape the methods withwhich consciousness is studied, but more fun-damentally, shape the way the problems to bestudied are defined and delineated. They canbe summarized in the following mottos: "Con-sciousness is as consciousness does" versus"Consciousness is as consciousness seems." Theformer is the causal characterization: it takes thecausal role consciousness plays in the generaleconomy of our mental lives as basic. The latter,in contrast, is the phenomenal characterization: ittakes as fundamental the way our mental livesseem (or "feel," for lack of a better term) to us—that is, the phenomenal qualities that we typicallyassociate with our perceptions, pains, tickles, andother mental states.

Most of the time, these two characterizationsare taken to be mutually exclusive for explana-tory purposes, to the extent that accounts of con-sciousness built around one characterization aretypically accused of failing to capture the other. Ibelieve that this undesirable consequence, which

often seems to deadlock debates on conscious-ness, stems from a fundamental and ultimatelymisleading intuition that I will call the segrega-tionist intuition: if the characterization of con-sciousness is causal, then it has to be essentiallynonphenomenal, and if it is phenomenal, then itis essentially noncausal. (I call this formulationan "intuition" rather than a "thesis" due to itswidely diffused, often implicit and unarticulated,but highly influential nature.)

In contrast with the segregationist intuition iswhat I call the integrationist intuition: what con-sciousness does, qua consciousness, cannot becharacterized in the absence of how consciousnessseems, but more importantly, that how con-sciousness seems cannot be conceptualized in theabsence of what consciousness does. This counterintuition underwrites the project of trying todissolve the stalemate between accounts ofconsciousness respectively based on the causaland the phenomenal characterizations, and marrythem into a single unified account.

This introduction is not an attempt towardsaccomplishing such a project. Nevertheless, whilepresenting a conceptual mapping of the territoryand locating in it contemporary problems anddebates that center around consciousness, I hopeto provide support for the integrationist intuitionthat motivates it. In doing so, I also aim to sub-stantiate an antiskeptical position with respect toconsciousness: there is a a deep-rooted and con-tinuous theoretical thread connecting a set of re-current problems in the history of philosophy andpsychology typically associated with conscious-ness, indicating the presence of a persistent, sig-nificant, and challenging object of study.

PART TWOA BRIEF HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS:PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY

There is possibly no other subject matter in thehistory of philosophy and science with as fasci-nating a historical record as consciousness. Even

Giiven Guzeldere 12

within the past one hundred years, consciousnesshas more than once been crowned as the mostsignificant aspect of human mentality, to be fol-lowed by periods of scapegoat treatment for thefailures of philosophy and science (in particular,psychology) to give a satisfactory account of themind. In either case, consciousness was hardlyever ignored. Explicitly or implicitly, it was anever-present concern for everyone thinking aboutthe human mind.

Following is a brief journey through the his-torical path that consciousness research has trav-ersed in approximately the last hundred years, inparticular via the schools of introspectionism,behaviorism, and cognitivism in psychology, withearly modern philosophy taken as a startingpoint.

IV Consciousness in Early Modern Philosophy

In accord with the fact that the origins of theword consciousness go back to early modern phi-losophy, it is generally agreed that Descartes gavethe mind-body problem its modern formulation.Descartes's own account respectively charac-terized mind and body as thinking versus ex-tended substances, and postulated that the natureof their relation was that of interaction betweenthe res cogitans and the res extensa. But how didhis notion of consciousness compare with his no-tion of mind? And to what extent does his notionof consciousness capture the notion that presentlyfigures in contemporary debates?18

Descartes claimed that consciousness was anessential component of everything that was men-tal, and by "consciousness" he meant somethingakin to one's awareness of one's own mentalstates: "As to the fact that there can be nothing inthe mind, in so far as it is a thinking thing, ofwhich it is not aware, this seems to me to be self-evident. For there is nothing that we can under-stand to be in the mind, regarded in this way, thatis not a thought or dependent on a thought"(Descartes 1993b, p. 171, fourth set of replies to

Arnauld). By "thought" Descartes must have hadin mind something very similar to one of thecontemporary usages of "consciousness," or"awareness," especially given his definition in thePrinciples of Philosophy: "By the term 'thought' Iunderstand everything which we are aware of ashappening within us, in so far as we have aware-ness of it" (Descartes 1992, p. 174).

Locke, coming after Descartes's rationalismfrom a distinctively empiricist tradition, wasnonetheless largely in agreement with his prede-cessor with respect to the nature of the relationbetween what was mental and what was con-scious: they were conceptually tied. In Locke'swords, "thinking consists in being conscious thatone thinks," and "the idea of thinking in the ab-sence of consciousness is as unintelligible as theidea of a body which is extended without havingparts" (Locke 1959, bk. 2, chap. 1, p. 138).

There is also another sense in which Descartesand Locke seem to be in agreement: the ideaof construing consciousness in roughly some-thing like higher-order awareness. For Descartes,proper sensations in adults exist only insofar asthey are accompanied by a second-order reflectiveawareness: "When an adult feels something, andsimultaneously perceives that he has not felt itbefore, I call this second perception reflection,and attribute it to the intellect alone, in spite of itsbeing so linked to sensation that the two occurtogether and appear to be indistinguishable fromeach other" (Descartes 1991, p. 357: letter to Ar-nauld, 29 July 1648, AT V, 221). Along this the-oretical line, Descartes concludes, for instance,that "pain exists only in the understanding"(Descartes 1991, p. 148: letter to Mersenne, 11June 1640, AT III, 85).

In a somewhat similar vein, Locke famouslystated that "consciousness is the perception ofwhat passes in a man's own mind" (Locke 1959,bk. 2, chap. 1, §19, p. 138). However, it may beunfair to read too much into the "higher-orderawareness" construal and make Descartes's andLocke's views seem more similar than they ac-tually are. For instance, it is not altogether ob-

Approaching Consciousness 13

vious that Locke's second-order "perception" isas cognitively loaded as Descartes's "reflectiveperception," although they seem to serve thesame purpose in being responsible for conscious-ness of "first-order" mental goings on.19 Thereare also contemporaries of Descartes and Locke,who located the epistemic locus of mind in qual-itative conscious states rather than thoughtsor reflective perceptions. Most notably, Male-branche holds this view.20

This brief characterization of the early modernphilosophical thought on consciousness no doubtfails to do justice to the subtleties involved. Butfor the sake of finding a starting point commonto both philosophy and "scientific psychology" inthe study of consciousness, and tracing the issuesin double-track to the contemporary debates, Iwill leap ahead to the late nineteenth century and,skipping over the problem of unity of conscious-ness and Kant's treatment of "unity of appercep-tion," continue with the work of William James.

V The Last Hundred Yean: William James'sPuzzle

William James may be the philosopher and psy-chologist who thought and wrote more aboutconsciousness than anyone else in history. Inter-estingly enough, the record of his stance(s) to-ward consciousness is also the most curious one.James allots a great deal of space to discussing theneural underpinnings, the evolutionary function,and the phenomenal nature of consciousness inhis monumental work, Principles of Psychology.According to James of this book, consciousness isthe starting place of all psychology, the most cru-cial aspect of human mentality. In a chapter onthe methodology of psychology, he states: "In-trospective Observation is what we have to relyon first and foremost and always. The word in-trospection need hardly be defined—it means, ofcourse, the looking into our own minds and re-porting what we there discover. Every one agreesthat we there discover states of consciousness"

(James 1950a, p. 185; originally published in 1890).But only fourteen years later, James would bit-terly denounce consciousness in an article titled,"Does Consciousness Exist?" with the followingverdict:

For twenty years past I have mistrusted "conscious-ness" as an entity; for seven or eight years past I have

-suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried togive them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experi-ence. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to beopenly and universally discarded

[Consciousness] is the name of a non-entity, and has noright place among first principles. Those who still cling toit are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behindby the disappearing "soul," upon the air of philosophy.(James 1971, p. 4; originally published in 1904)

The reasons for this remarkable change ofmind may partly lie deep in James's personal his-tory, but they also have to do with the uniqueplace of consciousness as a subject matter in phi-losophy and psychology.21 A somewhat similar,almost neurotic shift of attitude, though in amuch larger scale, spanning the whole disciplineof psychology and, to some extent, philosophy,occurred in a relatively short period of transition,early in this century. This transition involvedthe collapse of the then very established schoolof introspectionism and the subsequent rise ofbehaviorism.22

VI Inrrospectionism

Introspectionism can be regarded as the first off-spring of the effort of pulling psychology apartfrom philosophy and establishing it as an in-dependent, "scientific" discipline on its own.Ironically, behaviorism would later denounce in-trospectionism as having tangled with meta-physics and present itself as the true, alternativescientific school of psychology. In actuality, intheir struggle for identity, both schools borroweda great deal from the scientific methodology oftheir times, and neither one's approach was in-trinsically more "scientific" than the other.

Giiven Giizeldere 14

Introspectionism's fundamental assumptionwas that psychology was the study of the "phe-nomenology" of the human mind; it attempted togive a full description of the mental landscape asit appeared to the subject. The data points con-sisted of discriminations in subjects' sensationsof colors, sounds, smells, and the like. In doingso, introspectionism largely modeled its method-ology after the modern chemistry of the day,which was enjoying a high reputation due to itssuccesses in having put together the atomic table.The fundamental belief underlying most of in-trospectionist research was that a full under-standing of the mind was possible only aftercompleting an exhaustive inventory of its "atomicunits," most elemental sensory impressions onecan discriminate. Introspectionism, in otherwords, was in the business of constructing anatomic table of the human mind.23 (Cf. Kulpe1901; Titchener 1915.)

Giving a full inventory of anything is no easyfeat, and attempting this for the totality of thehuman "sensory space" was a daunting task, evenin the hands of scrupulous researchers and metic-ulously trained subjects.24 However, the fall ofintrospectionism did not result from depletedpatience or the lack of a sufficient number ofexperiments. The failure had deeper reasons, bothexternal and internal.

The external reason for failure was the overallchanging intellectual climate in Europe and theUnited States, especially the rising influence ofpositivism in all sectors of science, as well asthe humanities. The general positivist attitudeconstituted a significant motivation for psycho-logists, who had been trying hard to sever theirprofessional ties with philosophers and to moveaway from anything "mental" in an attempt torelocate psychology among natural sciences.Consciousness was the subject matter of nonatural science, so it could not be the subjectmatter of psychology either.25

The positivist atmosphere further provided acontext in which it was easier for behaviorists to

make introspectionism appear as a scientificallybaseless enterprise, further burdened with themetaphysically dubious cargo of consciousness—so much so that John Watson, in the openingpages of his book that served as the behavior-ist manifesto, belittled introspectionists' concernwith consciousness by likening it to witchcraft:"Behaviorism claims that consciousness is neithera definite nor a usable concept. The behaviorist,who has been trained always as an experimenta-list, holds, further, that belief in the existence ofconsciousness goes back to the ancient days ofsuperstition and magic" (Watson 1970, p. 2).

In reality, introspectionism was as much an at-tempt to bring psychology up to par with naturalsciences—to make it a "science of the mental,"with ideas and methods inspired largely by chem-istry. Although the founding adherents of be-haviorism wholeheartedly denied any intellectualdebt to their predecessors and did a good job ofmaking themselves appear completely detachedfrom their past, they were very similar to the in-trospectionists in aspiration and professionalpolicy with regard to methodology.26

In any case, it would not be fair to place onsolely external causes all responsibility for in-trospectionism's formidable downfall, whichbrought with it the downfall and disgrace of bothconsciousness (as a subject matter for research)and introspection (as a method for studying themind) for several decades. There were seriousreasons internal to the paradigm as well. Mostimportant was the apparently irreconcilableconflict between results coming out of differentlaboratories. The most significant polarity wasconstituted by two main streams of research pur-sued in two different continents: the Wurzburgschool, represented by Kulpe and his students inLeipzig, versus the Cornell school, lead by Titch-ener and his associates in Ithaca, New York. Forinstance, Titchener's laboratory reported thatthey discovered a total of "more than 44,435"discriminably different sensations, largely con-sisting of visual and auditory elements. In con-

Approaching Consciousness 15

trast, Kiilpe's published results pointed to a totalof fewer than 12,000 (Boring 1942, p. 10). Whowas telling the truth?

Conflicting results are no surprise in any ex-perimental discipline. What led introspectionismto a dead end was an additional methodologicalshortcoming: the lack of a generally agreed-uponmethod of falsifying any of the results. The natureof introspective reports constituting the core ofthe data in the introspectionist paradigm wascolored by the subjects' previous training. Titch-enerian introspectionists were very careful notto work with "naive subjects," enforcing strictprocedures to avoid "stimulus errors," but thispolicy worked against them in the end. Althougha rigorous and careful training program andmeticulous repetition of the experiments providedan acceptable degree of statistical consistencywithin individual laboratories, the results acrossdifferent laboratories were sometimes highlycontradictory. Unfortunately, when individual"seemings" (of colors, sounds, tactile sensations)were what counted as the sole data, each "phe-nomenal" report had to be taken at face value.And within such a framework, the degree andnature of previous training, which apparently wasnot standardized, made all the difference.

Edwin Boring recounts an anecdote in whichTitchener and Edwin Holt debated, in front of anaudience of other psychologists, whether greenwas an "atomic color" or a combination of blueand yellow. Each side insisted on his own judg-ment, and there was no means to settle the issue.One of the most serious conflicts, somewhat sim-ilar to this but larger in scope, involved a staunchdisagreement between the followers of Titchenerand those of Kulpe on the existence of "imagelessthought." Titchener was convinced that all con-scious thought involved some form of imagery, atleast some sensory elements. However, subjectsfrom Kulpe's laboratory came up with reports ofhaving experienced thoughts with no associatedimagery whatsoever. The debate came to a stale-mate of, "You cannot experience X," of Titch-enerians versus "Yes, we can!" of Kulpeians, and

remained the theoretical knot that it was untilintrospectionism, as a whole, eventually disap-peared against the rising tide of behaviorism.27

In sum, the fact that introspectionism ulti-mately located the locus of authority with regardto the data in the word of the subject, whiletraining procedures for subjects were not stand-ardized across laboratories to immunize against"stimulus-error," brought the death sentenceto the movement. When the subjects' reportsshowed statistical inconsistencies, the whole in-trospectionist community found itself up againsta theoretical wall. This impasse, which surfacedas a result of several years of careful laboratorywork, brought with it a sad ending to a researchparadigm of hundreds of experiments and thou-sands of subjects.28

VH Behaviorism

In contrast to introspectionism, behaviorism ar-rived with an extremely straightforward method-ology (that would ultimately cut, rather than tryto untangle, the knot of consciousness), and itappeared as a fresh alternative in the troublingtimes of introspectionism. There was one andonly one element in its research agenda: publiclyobservable behavior. In the natural sciences, be-haviorists argued, all phenomena under scrutinywere open to third-party observation. Behaviorwas a perfect candidate as a subject matter of thissort. Moreover, behaviorism was able to avoidintrospectionism's fatal problem of irreconcilablyconflicting subjective reports by, in Boring'swords, shifting "the locus of scientific responsi-bility from an observing subject to the experi-menter who becomes the observer of the subject"(Boring 1953, p. 184).

Watson championed this shift of locus and thechange in the subject matter of the new psychol-ogy from "facts of the internal" to "facts of theexternal" in a rather rallying manner in the fol-lowing advice to his colleagues:

Guven Giizeldere 16 Approaching Consciousness 17

\

Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely ob-jective experimental branch of natural science. Its theo-retical goal is the prediction and control of behavior.Introspection forms no essential part of its method noris the scientific value of its data dependent upon thereadiness with which they lend themselves to inter-pretation in terms of consciousness. (Watson 1913,p. 158)

You, as a psychologist, if you are to remain scientific,must describe the behavior of man in no other termsthan those you would use in describing the behavior ofthe ox you slaughter. (Watson 1970, p. ix)

The term consciousness had never figured in thevocabulary of any natural science, and it had toleave the vocabulary of the scientific psychologyas well. Watson was confident that behaviorismmarked the beginning of an era that was also thepoint of no return for consciousness:

The time seems to have come when psychology mustdiscard all reference to consciousness; when it need nolonger delude itself into thinking that it is making men-tal states the object of observation This suggestedelimination of states of consciousness as proper objectsof investigation in themselves will remove the barrierfrom psychology which exists between it and the othersciences. (Watson 1913, p. 163,177)

Behaviorism remained a very influential para-digm for psychology for over half a century andmanaged to have the words consciousness and in-trospection disappear from the face of the Anglo-American world.29 There were obvious reasonsfor the enthusiastic acceptance of behaviorismby psychologists, motivated by its promising,"trouble-free" methodology. However, behav-iorism became influential as a doctrine not only ofmethodology but also one of ontology. Thebehaviorist line turned into a fundamental beliefnot only that whatever psychology—the disci-pline—could study could be studied by observ-ing behavior, but also that all there was topsychology—the phenomenon—was observablebehavior.

This was what made (ontological) behaviorismboth very strong and very weak: strong as a doc-

trine in its metaphysical claims and weak ingrounding the strong claims it was making onwhat it took the world's constituents to be. Theultimate expression of the extreme view behav-iorism came to hold about the ontology of con-sciousness is reflected in the formula Karl Lashleyused to characterize "strict Behaviorism": "Con-sciousness is the particular laryngeal gesture wehave come to use to stand for the rest" (Lashley1923, p. 240). However, the metaphysical foun-dations of behaviorism, what it so passionatelytried to detach itself from, turned out to beits own Achilles' heel, the cracked brick in theedifice. Even during the heyday of behaviorism,when all talk about consciousness was strictlytaboo, consciousness was always present as ahidden variable in the minds and research agen-das of psychologists. Boring was cognizant of thisfact as early as the 1930s, when he declared:"Behaviorism owes its ism to consciousness. Andwhat would it be without its isrri! Well, it wouldbe physiology" (Boring 1963, p. 275). Muchlater, Julian Jaynes would retrospectively notethat "off the printed page, behaviorism was onlya refusal to talk about consciousness" (Jaynes1976, p. 15).

This make-believe attitude about the absenceof anything, let alone consciousness, occurringsomewhere between the input impinging on thesubject and the subject's subsequent behavior wasalso precisely what provided cognitive psychol-ogy the fulcrum it needed to topple behaviorism.In Neisser's words, "the basic reason for studyingcognitive processes has become clear as the rea-son for studying anything else: because they arethere. Our knowledge of the world must be some-how developed from the stimulus input" (Neisser1967, p. 5).30

Cognitivfem (and Beyond)

Ulric Neisser's Cognitive Psychology became amark of a new era in psychology and proclaimedthe name of the new game in its title. Neisser, in

the introduction to his book, mentions the changein the intellectual atmosphere among psycholo-gists in a wry tone: "A generation ago, a book likethis one would have needed at least a chapter ofself-defense against the behaviorist position. To-day, happily, the climate of opinion has changed,and little or no defense is necessary. Indeed,stimulus-response theorists themselves are in-venting hypothetical mechanisms with vigor andenthusiasm and only faint twinges of conscience"(Neisser 1967, p. 5).

For consciousness research, the era of cognitivepsychology was marked with a few timid over-tures. With the advent of cognitive psychology,whose fundamental ideas were largely inspired bycomputational models, consciousness found anew niche, though in terms completely foreign toits past: it became a kind of component or aspectof information-processing models. Although onlya small percentage of the models developed at thetime secured a role for consciousness, cognitivismbrought about the first signs of the dissolution ofa taboo. Nonetheless, even these cautious begin-nings were not easy; consciousness would have towait until the current ongoing ascent of neuro-psychology research to come back under thespotlight. In cognitivism, cognition needed de-fense over behavior no more, but consciousnessover cognition still did.

In this context, George Mandler's manifesto"Consciousness: Respectable, Useful, and Prob-ably Necessary," even though it was not the firstarticle that came out of the cognitivist literatureon consciousness, and despite being written ina somewhat gingerly manner, stands out as acornerstone.31 Mandler opens his article withthe following historical remarks: "I welcome thisopportunity to act as amicus curiae on behalf ofone of the central concepts of cognitive theory—consciousness. Another statement, however im-perfect, may be useful to undo the harm thatconsciousness suffered during fifty years (ap-proximately 1910 to 1960) in the oubliettes of be-haviorism. It is additionally needed because somany of us have a history of collaboration with

the keepers of the jail and to speak freely of theneed for a concept of consciousness still ties thetongues of not a few cognitive psychologists"(Mandler 1975, p. 229). Of course, Mandler wasnot alone in pointing to the importance of con-sciousness in cognitive psychology. Tim Shallice,for instance, had observed a few years earlier that"theoretical developments in cognitive psychol-ogy and the increasing use of introspective reportsrequire a rationale, and that this should involveconsideration of consciousness" (Shallice 1972,p. 383).

Interestingly, it was the success, not the failure,of information-processing models in explain-ing learning, memory, problem solving, and thelike—actually almost everything except con-sciousness—that brought some attention toconsciousness itself. The fact that consciousnessseemed to be the last remaining unexplained phe-nomenon in an otherwise successful new researchparadigm helped highlight old questions aboutconsciousness buried during the behaviorist era.Furthermore, similar developments were takingplace in philosophy. Functionalist accounts,largely inspired by computational ideas, werebeing met with noticeable success in explainingprepositional attitudes, whereas consciousness (inthe sense of the subjective character of experience,or qualia) was largely being regarded as the onlyaspect of mind escaping the net of functionalistexplanation. (See, for instance, Ned Block's in-fluential article, "Troubles with Functionalism"1978, as well as Block and Fodor 1980.)

Shallice was one of the first to point out thespecial place consciousness occupied in the prob-lem space of cognitive psychology: "The problemof consciousness occupies an analogous positionfor cognitive psychology as the problem of lan-guage behavior does for behaviorism, namely, anunsolved anomaly within the domain of the ap-proach" (Shallice 1972, p. 383). Attempts to findsome role for consciousness in a cognitive econ-omy turned up results that at times exceededexpectations. Mandler, for instance, pointed tothe possibility that consciousness might be the

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missing central element in a cognitivist frame-work, able to tie together several separate lines ofcognitive research: "I hope to show that con-sciousness is . . . probably necessary because itserves to tie together many disparate but ob-viously related mental concepts, including atten-tion, perceptual elaboration, and limited capacitynotions" (Mandler 1975, p. 229).32

Of course, there were others on whose workMandler was basing bis claim. Most notably,Norman (1968) and Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968)had used consciousness as a property demarcat-ing processes of different kinds (conscious versusunconscious processes) in their respective unistoreand multistore models of memory. Treisman(1969) and Posner and Boies (1971), amongothers, talked about consciousness as a limitedcapacity processing mechanism. Shallice's ideawas to equate consciousness as selector input inhis cognitive model of the dominant action sys-tem. Johnson-Laird characterized the "contentsof consciousness" as the "current values of pa-rameters governing the high-level computationsof the operating system" (1983a, p. 465; 1983b).All in all, the common presupposition drivingthe cognitivist research on consciousness wasthat "the basic phenomenological concept—con-sciousness—can be mapped onto an information-processing concept" (Shallice 1972, p. 383).33

Most of these models came complete with theirflowcharts, with each functionally denned ele-ment confined to its own black box and arrowsindicating the direction of information flowamong them. Consciousness, then, became a boxamong boxes—a module connected to variousother modules of processing in which input wasregistered, intermediate results were transmitted,and output was delivered. This approach to con-sciousness has, according to Neisser, a specialstrategical advantage: "It represents a theoreticalcoup: not only are the facts of attention appar-ently explained, but psychology's most elusivetarget is finally nailed down to a box in a flowchart" (Neisser 1976, p. 103).

A prominent account of consciousness in re-cent cognitive psychology, Bernard Baars's(1988) A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, issimilarly given in information-theoretic termswith substantial use of functional diagrams. Thistrend of diagramming in cognitive psychology,inspired largely by flowcharts of computationalmodels in computer science, also got importedinto philosophy of mind by empirically mindedphilosophers. A primary example is Daniel Den-nett's model in his "Toward a Cognitive Theoryof Consciousness" (1986). Similar functionalflowchart models are also being used in some ofthe present day neuropsychological accounts. (Cf.Schacter 1988 and Shallice 1988, especially chap.16.)

IX The Study of the Unconscious

One important line of thought in the study ofconsciousness that has not yet been addressed inthis chapter is the foundation of the crucial dis-tinction between the conscious and unconsciousaspects of mentality. According to Johnson-Laird, "The division between conscious and un-conscious processes is the best available clue tothe structure of the mind" (Johnson-Laird 1983a,p. 466). Freud would probably agree. None-theless, conceptions of the unconscious havechanged from their Freudian origins to their cog-nitivist incarnations. Following is a brief histor-ical account of the unconscious.

The Freudian Unconscious

Until the time of Freud, there was no proper the-oretical framework in which to reject the Carte-sian idea of equating the mind with whatever laywithin the scope of one's consciousness. In otherwords, consciousness was generally taken to be"the point of division between miftd and notmind" (Baldwin 1901, p. 216)—the mark of themental.

Approaching Consciousness 19

The received conception of the transparency ofthe mind to one's consciousness, found in Des-cartes and Locke, was not without exceptions,however.34 Most notably, Leibniz, in his vision-ary reply to Locke in New Essays, can be said tohave anticipated some very important develop-ments to come in psychology two centuries aheadof their time, especially those with regard to thenature and role of the unconscious: "There are athousand indications which lead us to think thatthere are at every moment numberless perceptionsin us, but without apperception and without re-flection In a word, insensible [unconscious]perceptions are of as great use in psychology asinsensible corpuscles are in physics, and it isequally as unreasonable to reject the one as theother under the pretext that they are beyondthe reach of our senses" (Leibniz 1951, pp. 374-378).

Nonetheless, taking consciousness as markingthe boundaries of mind by and large remained aninfluential maxim until the time of Freud. Forinstance, the entry for "consciousness" in the1901 edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophyand Psychology reads as follows: "[Conscious-ness] is the distinctive character of whatever maybe called mental life" (Baldwin 1901, p. 216).Within this context, the introspectionist convic-tion of the time—that psychology is the "scienceof the mental"—provided an especially strongbasis for rejecting the unconscious as part of themental, and hence as a subject matter for psy-chology. Titchener, for example, was resistant tothe idea of the unconscious, to the extent of de-claring it a theoretically dangerous construct forpsychology: "The subconscious may be defined asan extension of the conscious beyond the limits ofobservation.... [T]he subconscious is not a part ofthe subject-matter of psychology In the firstplace, the construction of a subconscious is un-necessary Secondly, the introduction of a sub-conscious is dangerous" (Titchener 1915, pp. 326-327, emphases in the original text).35

None of this should be taken as claiming thatthe concept of the unconscious as a part or aspect

of the mental was completely unheard of or un-acknowledged, however. In other words, Freudwas not really the inventor (or discoverer) of theconcept of the unconscious in any way. On thecontrary, the general intellectual atmosphere ofthe times preceding Freud's appearance allowedtalk about mental activity of various sorts thatoccurred without the subject's awareness, at leastin any direct way. For instance, the well-knownmetaphor of the mind as an iceberg, consisting ofconsciousness as the tip above the surface and ofa subsurface unconscious component, constitutedby hidden currents but nonetheless effective onone's conscious mental life, was generally recog-nized and used.

In particular, toward the end of the nineteenthcentury, the idea of the unconscious mind hadbecome operative among many scientists, philos-ophers, and literary scholars, in a lineage trace-able back from Rousseau to Goethe, to Fichte,and to Nietzsche (Whyte 1960). Freud apparentlyacknowledged this, as reported by Ernest Jones,one of the most prominent Freud scholars, in thefollowing statement he made at his seventeenthbirthday celebrations: "The poets and philos-ophers before me discovered the unconscious.What I discovered was the scientific method bywhich the unconscious can be studied" (quoted inMaclntyre 1958, p. 6). There were also attemptsto study the unconscious empirically. For in-stance, Henri Ellenberger credits Gustav Fechner,a pioneer of psychophysics research, as the firstperson who tried to reveal the nature of the un-conscious by experimental methods, though hiswork did not prove fruitful (Ellenberger 1970,chap. 5).

However, none of these ideas about mentalprocesses going on in one's mind without beingconscious were well formulated: there was no co-herent account to explain the structure, func-tional role, or operation of the unconscious, orthe modality of its relation to consciousness inthe general scheme of an individual's mental life.There was consensus regarding neither the natureof the unconscious, nor its place in regard to

Guven Giizeldere 20

consciousness, in the intellectual community. Tothis situation Freud brought a steadily evolvingtheoretical framework in which, for the first time,construction of hypotheses to answer each ofthese questions became possible. This is the sensein which Freud can be said to be the pioneer ofthe unconscious.36

In Freudian theory, the unconscious properconsists of repressed processes, exerting stress onthe conscious component of the subject's mindand shaping his or her daily life in substantialways. This is in contrast to the preconscious,which includes those processes that only con-tingently happen to lie outside awareness. What ispreconscious can easily become conscious with-out special techniques or effort; what is uncon-scious has to be "brought to the surface" throughthe psychoanalytic technique with the help of ananalyst.

The Freudian unconscious, although related, isnot the same sense of unconsciousness employedin the current cognitive psychology research re-garding unconscious processes—the "cognitiveunconscious." Unconscious processes of bothkinds are opaque to introspection, but there isa difference between them. The Freudian uncon-scious exists because of past events, explainableby repression mechanisms and the like, and is notin principle inaccessible. The cognitive uncon-scious, on the other hand, exists due to the wayour perceptual-cognitive system is constitutedand lies in principle outside our access. Themechanisms that subserve depth perception, forinstance, are taken to be hard-wired: they are notthere because of repression, and they can neverbecome conscious through any method, psycho-analytic or otherwise.

The recognition and study of the cognitive un-conscious goes even further back than Freud, atleast to von Helmholtz's work on perceptualconstancy, and spans a substantial period, all theway up to the thesis of "unconscious perceptualinference" by Rock (1983). Despite these differ-ences, however, Freud's approach to the uncon-scious was very modern and in anticipation of the"cognitive revolution."

An encompassing account of the Freudian un-conscious, including its structure and dynamics,is given in Erdelyi (1985). Erdelyi also makes astrong case that Freudian psychology was indeedvery close, in essence, to the cognitive psychologyof our day—especially in terms of its approach tounderstanding mental phenomena, and researchmethodology. He even goes on to reconstructFreudian schemas of the structure of conscious-ness, quite plausibly, in modern flowchart style.Neisser (1976) also refers to Freud's diagramsdepicting the structure of the tripartite divisionof consciousness, preconsciousness, and uncon-sciousness as "flowcharts" (See Freud 1950,p. 394).J7 It is true not only that Freud antici-pated some of the developments in cognitive psy-chology but also that the Freudian unconscious,even if under different names, has played a sig-nificant role as an influential construct in cogni-tive psychology.

The Cognitive Unconscious

There has also been a whole research industry incontemporary cognitive psychology involved ininvestigating the nature of the unconscious: men-tal processes that underlie cognition but are them-selves not conscious.38 Over the past few decades,there has been an enormous wealth of dataaccumulated, operative in current psychologicaltheory, in this area—from rules of Chomskianuniversal grammar, to computational mecha-nisms underlying vision and the 2\D sketch in-spired by the work of the late David Marr (1982),and to Newell and Simon's work on cognitiveconstraints in planning, problem solving, andgame playing (1972). Consequently, the classi-fication of mental processes as conscious versusnonconscious is useful and not unusual (thoughcontroversial) in psychological practice, espe-cially in research on psycholinguistics, attention,and perception.39 Furthermore, as evidencedfrom contemporary psychology literature, re-search on type identifying mental states as con-scious versus nonconscious, and research on thenature of consciousness of the subjects who have

Approaching Consciousness 21

such states is being pursued on independent con-ceptual grounds. In fact, the dichotomy of con-scious versus nonconscious processes is not theonly such ground on which current researchin cognitive psychology rests. There are severalother such distinctions, all overlapping in variousways in their function to distinguish mental pro-cesses that are directly available to the subject("introspectable," importable, etc.) and those thatare opaque and unavailable, as reflected in a re-cent note by cognitive psychologists Holyoak andSpellman:

Theorists of diverse persuasions have been led to pro-pose cognitive dichotomies, which have been given arather bewildering array of labels: unconscious vs. con-scious, procedural vs. declarative, automatic vs. con-trolled, reflexive vs. reflective, and many others.

These distinctions do not always divide cognitionalong the same lines ... [but] there are tantalizing sim-ilarities among the proposed dichotomies. In particular,the first member of each pair is generally viewed as in-volving unconscious mental processes, a topic that hasseen a recent resurgence of interest among experimentalpsychologists. (Holyoak and Spellman 1993, p. 265)

In sum, whether or not Johnson-Laird is rightin his claim about the distinction between theconscious and the unconscious being the mostimportant theoretical tool to study the mind, onecan easily say that the investigation of the un-conscious in cognitive psychology has proved tobe at least as fruitful as the investigation of theconscious.40

X Status Report: From Information ProcessingtoQualia

What is the current status of cognitive psychol-ogy? Information-processing models in psychol-ogy are still popular, but they do not constitutethe sole dominant paradigm any more. This isalso reflected in models of consciousness. Butthere are other reasons, too, for the shift in theresearch paradigm with respect to consciousness.One of them is the recognition that the functionaldiagrammatic depictions of consciousness seem

to leave out something important: the subjective,experiential aspect of consciousness. Perhaps thereis something about consciousness that makes itsidentification with specific modules of isolatedfunctions fundamentally inadequate.

Interestingly, it was Neisser who registeredsuch a concern about the information-processingmodels of consciousness during the heyday ofcognitivism:

The treatment of consciousness as a processing stage isunsatisfactory in a still more fundamental way. It doesjustice neither to the usages of the word "consciousness"in ordinary discourse nor to the subtleties of experience.A better conception of consciousness, which has beensuggested many times in the history of psychology,would recognize it as an aspect of activity rather than asan independently definable mechanism Conscious-ness is an aspect of mental activity, not a switchingcenter on the intrapsychic railway. (Neisser 1976, pp.104-105)

Many people, including philosophers, pro-ceeded with Neisser's intuitions in the past fewdecades. Something essential to (at least ourcommonsense conception of) consciousness; itwas largely believed, was necessarily left out incharacterizing consciousness only by specifyingits functional role in the cognitive economy ofhuman mentation and behavior. This some-thing—the phenomenal face of consciousness—brings us back M l circle to the problem of the twofaces of consciousness.

In the last part of this chapter, I will examinethe dialectic of the opposition between the segre-gationist and the integrationist intuitions, in thecontext of the causal and phenomenal character-izations of consciousness.

PART THREEPROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS: APERSPECTIVE ON CONTEMPORARYISSUES AND CURRENT DEBATES

"Consciousness is a word worn smooth by a mil-lion tongues," George Miller once said. "De-pending upon the figure of speech chosen it is a

Giiven Guzeldere 22

state of being, a substance, a process, a place, anepiphenomenon, an emergent aspect of matter, orthe only true reality" (Miller 1962, p. 25).

The conceptual and historical analyses I havepresented are in agreement with Miller: it isprobably best to regard and treat consciousnessas a cluster concept. There are simply too manyconnotations that go under the term, and it seemsfutile to try to specify a single concept that wouldcover all aspects of consciousness or a single "theproblem of consciousness." Nonetheless, I havetried to illustrate, there is a coherent theoreticalthread constituted by certain problems and notothers, that one can trace from texts in earlymodern (if not ancient Greek) philosophy to theemergence of scientific psychology in the nine-teenth century, to the present.

The most troublesome feature of this thread iswhat has been most difficult to explain, and it isthe topic I arrived at by the end of the historical

-, analysis: the qualitative, or phenomenal aspects\ of consciousness, or qualia. Of course, the notion

of consciousness theoretically outstrips the notionof qualia, and there are many fascinating aspectsto consciousness that do not necessarily have aqualitative component (e.g., its representationalaspect, its attentive and control components, andmechanisms of the unconscious). But it is alsoquestionable whether qualitative and nonqualita-tive aspects of consciousness can really be under-stood or explained independent of one another.These are the questions I will focus on and pursuebelow.

XI Consciousness and hrtentionality: TwoDimensions of Mind

Jerry Fodor once remarked: "There are, I think,three great metaphysical puzzles about the mind.How could anything material have consciousstates? How could anything material have se-mantical properties? How could anything mate-rial be rational?" (Fodor 1991a, reply to Devitt,p. 285). Having enumerated these three questions,

Fodor chooses to stay away from the first, despitehis career-long devotion to the latter two (whichhe takes to be closely related). This attitude is notat all uncommon. It is generally accepted as a re-ceived view that the two fundamental aspects ofmind, consciousness and intentionality, can bestudied in the absence of one another—at leastthat intentionality can be so studied with no ref-erence to consciousness. Here, "consciousness"typically refers to the qualitative aspects ofconsciousness, and "intentionality" is takensufficiently broadly to embrace questions aboutsemantics, as well as rationality. Fodor"s justifi-cation is the following:

It used to be universally taken for granted that theproblem about consciousness and the problem aboutintentionality are intrinsically linked: that thought isipso facto conscious, and that consciousness is ipsofacto consciousness of some or other intentional ob-ject Freud changed all that. He made it seem plau-sible that explaining behavior might require thepostulation of intentional but unconscious states. Overthe last century, and most especially in Chomskianlinguistics and in cognitive psychology, Freud's ideaappears to have been amply vindicated Dividingand conquering—concentrating on intentionality andignoring consciousness—has proved a remarkably suc-cessful research strategy so far. (Fodor 1991b, p. 12)

Not everyone agrees, however. In particular,John Searle recently argued for what he called the"connection principle": the thesis that conscious-ness and intentionality are immanently linked,and, contra Fodor's thesis, any research strategythat tries to explain the latter without recourse tothe former is doomed to failure. Searle states theconnection principle as follows: "Only a beingthat could have conscious intentional states couldhave intentional states at all, and every uncon-scious intentional state is at least potentiallyconscious [TJhere ' s a conceptual connectionbetween consciousness and intentionality thathas the consequence that a complete theory ofintentionality requires an account of conscious-ness" (Searle 1992, p. 132).41 More recently,

Approaching Consciousness 23

Strawson (1994) takes the similar position thatconsciousness is the only distinctive characteristicof the mind.

The beginnings of this line of thought can betraced back to Brentano's discussion of the rela-tion between mental and physical phenomena inPsychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Bren-tano is acknowledged as being first to postulateintentionality as the mark of the mental in mod-ern terms. For instance, he says: "Every mentalphenomenon is characterized by . . . the inten-tional inexistence of an object, and what we mightcall, though not wholly unambiguously, referenceto a content, direction toward an object (which isnot to be understood here as meaning a thing)This intentional inexistence is characteristic ex-clusively of mental phenomena. No physical phe-nomenon exhibits anything like it" (Brentano1874, pp. 88-89). And regarding consciousness,Brentano states, for instance, that "no mentalphenomenon is possible without a correlativeconsciousness" (p. 121). Although the connota-tions of the terms consciousness and intentionalityhave somewhat shiiited from Brentano's time tothe present, I think it is fair to note that there isa great deal of theorizing in his work that laythe foundations of an account of the mental thatattempts to incorporate these two dimensions ofthe mind in a principled way.

Another attempt to characterize (phenomenal)consciousness and intentionality as the two hall-marks of the mind, though for the purposes of acritique, is given by Richard Rorty (1979, p. 24)in terms of the diagram in figure I.I. There are infact various ways to fill in such a diagram, andwhich elements of the mental are to occupy whichcells is a matter of controversy. For instance, noteveryone thinks that beliefs and desires are with-out a phenomenal component (Searle 1992), orthat pains have no representational or intentionalaspects (Dretske 1995, Tye 1995). And the ad-herents of panpsychism would probably maintainthat the cell that holds what Rorty labels "themerely physical" is bound to remain nil.42 None-theless, this way of depicting the-dimensions ofthe mental is useful in terms of illustrating whathas been the most problematic aspect of the studyof consciousness. In this diagram, it is what Rortycalls "raw feels."43

Most of the current debates involving con-sciousness revolve around the (possible) inhabi-tants of this particular cell and their nature. Arethere really such things as nonrepresentationalbut phenomenal properties? If there are, what istheir ontological nature, what kinds of specialepistemological problems do they present, andhow can their semantics be given? Can they everbe captured in naturalistic explanatory scheme,

Intentional,representational

Nonintentional,nonrepresentational

With phenomenalproperties

Without phenomenalproperties

Occurrent thoughts,mental images

Raw feels (e.g.,pains and what babieshave when they seecolored objects)

Beliefs, desires,intentions

"The merely physical"

Figure 1.1Two dimensions of mind

Giiven Giizeldere 24

or are they inherently bound to remain mysteri-ous? These are the questions that constitute theconsciousness debates today.

XII Perspectivity and Epistemic Asymmetry

Naturally, there can be several different entrypoints to the kind of exposition I aim to presenthere. The investigation of consciousness is as fas-cinating as it is difficult, and it presents uniqueepistemological and ontological difficulties. Al-though my overarching goal is to provide anoverview of the contemporary problems of con-sciousness rather than try to present my own sol-utions to them, I will start by presenting a briefprofile of what I take to be the primarily respon-sible component in the consciousness puzzle: theepistemic element of perspectivity. Perspectivity,or the fact that consciousness is a phenomenonthat admits a distinction between "perspectives,"or "points of view" in its explication, lies deep atthe roots of the common understanding of con-sciousness, as well as the attitude of puzzlement.Furthermore, epistemically based theses aboutconsciousness seem much less controversial thanontologically based theses. I start by sketching acommonsense conception of consciousness andtry to reveal just how perspectivity figures in it.Then I will proceed to examine its possible onto-logical ramifications.

Why does consciousness keep appearing as anunsolved puzzle for philosophy, psychology, andneuroscience? There do not seem to be similarpuzzles associated with the study of, say, mem-ory or learning, or biological development andgrowth. What is so special about consciousness?

George Miller thinks that perhaps the uniquedifficulty involved in the understanding of con-sciousness stems from the fact that consciousnessis both the phenomenon we try to investigate andthe very tool we need to use to pursue this inves-tigation. "Turning a tool on itself," he says, "maybe as futile as trying to soar off the ground by atug at one's bootstraps." He continues: "Perhaps

we become confused because whenever we arethinking about consciousness, we are surroundedby it, and can only imagine what consciousness isnot. The fish, someone has said, will be the last todiscover water" (Miller 1962, p. 25).

Miller's observation is intriguing. One cannot,in principle, study the minute details of a micro-scope's outer surface, for instance, by using thevery same microscope. This would be impossiblesimply because of the way the microscope, as atool, is designed and used. Neither can one di-rectly take the picture of a camera by using thecamera itself. But why should these considera-tions apply to the study of consciousness usingconsciousness itself? One can certainly lay thebody of a microscope under another microscopefor examination or take pictures of one camerawith another. It may be that the sort of recursiveimpossibility involved in the self-study of toolsapplies to the phenomenon of self-conscious-ness—for example, one's study of one's ownconsciousness by introspection. But Miller isconcerned with the study of consciousness ingeneral here, not only self-consciousness, and it isnot clear why the analogy should hold.44

Nonetheless, Miller's point is related to what Isee as the source of what makes consciousnesspuzzling. The difficulty lies in the curious dualityinherent in the (epistemic) study of the phenom-enon. This duality does not need to be inherent inthe (ontological) nature of the phenomenon ofconsciousness itself or its properties. In fact, as Ihave mentioned, the ontology of consciousness isan issue open to current debates. But as far as theepistemology of the matter goes, there appearsto be a genuine asymmetry between the mode ofaccess to facts of one's own consciousness and themode of access to facts about others' consciousstates. This asymmetry is what grounds theimportant distinction between systematic ap-proaches to consciousness from the first-personperspective versus the third-person perspective.

On the one hand, nothing is more intimatelyknown by conscious human beings than the waythe world (including themselves) appears to them.

Approaching Consciousness 25

We are all subjects of a variety of perceptual ex-periences, thoughts and ideas, pains and tickles,joys and sorrows. Under normal circumstances,there is nothing more familiar with the way theface of one's spouse looks, the way a favoritedrink tastes, the way the chronic heartburn startsto make itself felt. We all have, it seems, firsthand,immediate, direct knowledge of the rich phenom-enology of colors, sounds, tastes, aromas, andtactile sensations that embellish our experiences—the qualia. All these are constituents of a specificmode of being for every individual; they de-termine, in Thomas Nagel's famous phrase, whatit is like to be that individual (Nagel 1974).

Moreover, we all seem to have a "privileged"way of knowing about our own thoughts, feel-ings, and sensations. Epistemological problemsabout knowledge notwithstanding, and even thequestion of the incorrigibility of the mental putaside, it seems that there is at least a special modein which one's own experiences are present toone, in an immediate, direct way, not availablefor anyone else.45

Further, the common wisdom goes, we cannotgenuinely entertain the possibility that we may belacking consciousness; the very fact that we arequestioning our own consciousness renders thepossibility of our not being the entertainer ofsome occurrent thoughts logically contradictory.If in nothing else, Descartes was perhaps right inthis regard: The mere fact of being the bearer of(these) thoughts is, in the Cartesian sense, un-mistakable evidence, for oneself, that one is con-scious. This is the characteristic of the first-personperspective; from the inside, consciousness seemsall-pervasive, self-evident, and undeniable.

On the other hand, contemporary science tellsus that the world is made up of nothing over andabove "physical" elements, whatever their nature(waves, particles, etc.) may be. Where does thisleave us with respect to the place of consciousnessin an entirely physical world? "How can tech-nicolor phenomenology arise from the soggygrey matter of brains?" as Colin McGinn asks(McGinn 1989, p. 349). Can one accommodate a

respectable account of consciousness that doesjustice to the richness of our conscious experi-ences of sights and sounds within a frameworkbased on a monistic materialist ontology? Con-sciousness just does not seem to be the kind ofphenomenon that is amenable to the sort of sci-entific explanation that works so well with allother biological phenomena, such as digestionor reproduction. The facts that would settle thequestion of whether some organism—an animalor a fellow human being—is digesting do notseem to be available in the same way when itcomes to the question of consciousness in others,especially in the case of organisms phylogeneti-cally distant from ourselves. There seems to be noordinary way to peek into the inner lives of oth-ers—to feel their pains, go through their sensa-tions, or directly observe their consciousness.46

That is, there seems to be an epistemic impossi-bility for anyone to have direct access to thequalia of others—literally share their first-personperspective, in short, to partake in the mode ofwhat it is like to be them. These are the limitationsof the third-person perspective: from the outside,firsthand exploration of the consciousness ofothers just seems to be out of the reach of ordi-nary scientific methods, others' experiences beingneither directly observable nor noninferentiallyverifiable. And therein this asymmetry betweenthe first- and the third-person perspectives lies theepistemic duality in the study consciousness.

But what exactly follows from this asymmetry?What do the limitations of the third-personapproach entail, for example? Are there anyinsurmountable problems for a systematic studyof consciousness—its nature, underlying mecha-nism, evolutionary function, ontological status?After all, the third-person perspective is what isand has successfully been operant in the scientificpractice of the past several centuries, and no onedoubts that it can provide valuable advances inthe understanding of consciousness. But the issueis whether such an approach is always doomed toleave something essential to consciousness outof its explanatory scope. In short, is there an

Guven Giizeldere 26

unbridgeable "explanatory gap" inherent in thethird-person approaches to consciousness, and ifso, can it be remedied by the deployment of acrossbred conceptual scheme that embodies afirst-person approach in the investigation of con-sciousness?

First-Person versus Third-PersonApproaches to Consciousness

The epistemic asymmetry inherent in the study ofconsciousness can be found as manifested underdifferent names, roughly as variations of one an-other and as occupying critical roles in theoreticaljunctions. The notion of the first-person versusthird-person perspectives is one such contrastivepair. Yet another similar distinction is that of thesubjective versus the objective, or the "phenom-enal" versus "physical."

One way of describing a particular experience,say, of tasting a particular vintage of a certainkind of wine, would be to try to state how thewine tastes to me—that is, what it is like for me tohave that particular gustatory experience. Thisis indeed the ordinary, even if not so easy, way.It involves the usage of qualitative terms suchas "fruity," "with a hint of tobacco," or "full-bodied," and the hope of conveying some sense ofwhat the tasting of that wine would be like hadit been experienced by the listener.

The other way would be to proceed by way ofgiving a description of the specific ways in whichmy tastebuds are excited, my olfactory nerves areactivated, my blood chemistry has changed, andso forth. This would not be the most ordinaryway of describing one's gustatory experiences,but perhaps one can overhear two devoted neu-rologists talking this way to one another at aconference reception. In any case, in the rightcontext, it is clear that this alternative methodwould also be informative in conveying somethingabout the nature of one's experience.

There is clearly an important difference be-tween the two methods.47 The first one attempts

to describe an experience by stating its qualitativeaspects as they seem to the experiencer. The fruitycharacter is directly experienced only by the per-son whose gustatory and olfactory nerves are ex-cited by the wine. As such, the experiencer has aprivileged status; she gets to have the experience,whereas the listener only gets to hear the descrip-tion. As far as the second method is concerned,however, the experiencer and the listener areepistemically on a par. The description of theperturbations in the experiencer's nervous systemis open to public observation and verification,and ordinarily, no qualitative terms about theexperience (how it feels) need to be involved. Inother words, whereas the instantiation of thephenomenal properties of an experience is di-rectly accessible only to the experiencer, the in-stantiation of its intrinsic neurophysiologicalproperties can be equally observed by many.48 Inthe latter case, what is at issue are the publiclyobservable aspects of the experience—not how itfeels but what it does.

The important question is to determinewhether these two methods have distinct scopesof explanation and whether they are necessarilycommitted to distinct ontologies. I have outlinedtwo general approaches to consciousness, each ofwhich respectively takes one of the two abovemethods as primary. The first of these approachestakes consciousness "as consciousness seems"and, in accord with the phenomenal character-ization, regards its qualitative aspects as the pri-mary components of any explanatory scheme.The second one takes consciousness "as con-sciousness does," and, in accord with the causalcharacterization, tries to account for conscious-ness in terms of what it does and the role it playsin one's cognitive economy. Put in differentterms, one can call these the "first-person-per-spectival" versus the "third-person-perspectival"approaches to consciousness.49 The dichotomy ofthe "two faces of consciousness" manifests itselfin yet other distinctions and under other names,to which I now turn.

Approaching Consciousness 27

XTV The Two Faces of Consciousness Revisited

The phenomenal and the causal characterizationsare merely expressions of what seems most im-portant, or primary, in the understanding of thenature of consciousness. They are not, in them-selves, in opposition with one another. It is onlyunder the dictum of the segregationist intuitionthat they are considered essentially antipodal andmutually exclusive. The issue of how to locate thephenomenal and the causal characterizationswith regard to each other is central to the dialecticof certain ongoing debates surrounding the"phenomenal" versus "access" senses and the"easy" versus "hard" problems of consciousness.

By "phenomenal characterization of con-sciousness" I mean a characterization givenfundamentally in first-person terms, describingepisodes of inner life in terms of how they feelor seem to the subject who experiences them.William James was interested in both the tempo-ral and the spatial structure of consciousness, andhis chapter "Stream of Thought" (James 1950a,pp. 224-290) provides an excellent example ofsuch a characterization.50 Apart from James andthe continental phenomenologist philosophers,introspectionist psychologists were paradigmati-cally interested in the phenomenal aspects of ex-perience, and they relentlessly pursued the projectof "mapping the boundaries of the inner space ofconsciousness." Along those lines, Titchener de-fined consciousness as the occurrent parts of one'smind, accessible by introspection, at any givenmoment: "My 'consciousness' is the sum of men-tal processes which make up my experience now;it is the mind of any given 'present' time. Wemight, perhaps, consider it as a cross-section ofmind" (Titchener 1902, p. 13).

But there is more to the phenomenal charac-terization in the way "problem of phenomenalconsciousness" is understood today. In particu-lar, the problem has now transformed into theexploration of explanatory laws that would ac-count for how particular phenomenal aspects of

consciousness could arise from their physiologicalunderpinnings.51 Deep down, this problem is amanifestation of the gap that separates our directunderstanding of consciousness in first-personterms, versus the objective, physicalist accountsof consciousness given in third-person terms. Theroots of this problem are indeed unique; no otherphenomenon presents us with two distinct epis-temic perspectives from which it can be inves-tigated. Given this duality, how does the "causalcharacterization" of consciousness fare against itsphenomenal counterpart?

A causal characterization of consciousness canbe given in many dimensions. One can try to ac-count for consciousness in terms of behavioralmanifestations, or of its role and place in thegeneral mental economy. The former approachwas behaviorists' failed solution to account for(or, rather, do away with) consciousness. Theformer became a canonical characterization inbehaviorism's successor, cognitive psychologyand in functionalist schools of philosophy.

Behaviorism, in its explicit form, is no longeraround. But it is worth mentioning again how themost obvious difficulty in relying entirely on ex-ternal criteria gave way to information-proces-sing accounts of consciousness in particular, andof mental phenomena in general. Behaviorism leftno room for the possibility of the presence ofconsciousness in the absence of external behavior.Put differently, the absence of evidence from thethird-person perspective implied the theoreticalrejection of all experience that is generally char-acterized in first-person terms. Given that themost familiar aspects of consciousness have to dowith its phenomenology (think of James' stream),this result stood out as the most difficult one toaccept. Even many behaviorists balked at bitingthe bullet and claiming that a person who issitting perfectly still with no vocal cord activitywhatsoever (behaviorists' characterization of"thinking") would ipso facto be unconscious.52

This claim, it seemed, was readily refutable inone's own everyday phenomenology. Therewas, after all, an epistemic component to the

Guven Giizeldere 28

phenomenon of consciousness that cried for acharacterization in first-person terms. However,behaviorism, in its attempt to associate con-sciousness and behavior conceptually, and therebyfully externalize consciousness, left no room fortalking about consciousness as it is experiencedby the subject. Everyone smiled at the joke aboutone behaviorist's asking another, after havingmade love, "It was great for you; how was itfor me?" but (fortunately) not many took thescenario as a serious possibility.53

A logical next step in trying to account forconsciousness in causal terms was to reverse thebehaviorist direction and, to some extent, re-internalize the causal criteria of consciousness.This provided a groundwork for functionalistphilosophy of mind, and cognitive psychology.Under such a more relaxed framework, con-sciousness was allowed to be individualized bythe role it played, as an integral component of thelarger network of mental states and processes.With the promising application of computationalideas and information-processing models in psy-chology, it was canonically characterized as aprocess accomplishing a specific task, a modulewith a specific function in a cognitive diagram, oran abstract property of the overall system. Here isa paradigmatic characterization in the cognitivistframework:

Consciousness is a process in which information aboutmultiple individual modalities of sensation and percep-tion is combined into a unified multidimensional repre-sentation of the state of the system and its environment,and integrated with information about memories andthe needs of the organism, generating emotional re-actions and programs of behavior to adjust the organ-ism to its environment The content of consciousnessis the momentary constellation of these different typesof information. (Thatcher and John 1977, p. 294)

What is important to note here is that this char-acterization is given largely in a third-person per-spective. Consciousness is identified with what itdoes but not necessarily how it feels to the experi-encing subject.

Once again, it is essential to ask at this stagewhether these two perspectives are mutually ex-clusive regarding their explanatory roles—thatis, whether an account of causal consciousnessprovides us with no understanding of how con-sciousness seems to the first-person subject, andwhether an account of phenomenal consciousnesshas no elements that figure in the understandingof what consciousness does. As I will suggest be-low, my answer is "not necessarily." A furtherquestion along this line would be what onto-logical consequences the perspectival asymmetryin the epistemology of consciousness entails.There, my answer will be "not very much." Butfirst let me bring into the picture another dis-tinction, proposed by Ned Block, which alignswell with the distinction between the causal andphenomenal conceptions of consciousness.

Access Versos Phenomenal Consciousness

Block (1995) distinguishes between "access con-sciousness" and "phenomenal consciousness" asfollows:

Access (A) consciousness: A state is access-conscious if,in virtue of one's having the state, a representation of itscontent is (1) inferentially promiscuous, that is, poisedfor use as a premise in reasoning, (2) poised for rationalcontrol of action, and (3) poised for rational control ofspeech These three conditions are together suffi-cient, but not all necessary.

Phenomenal (P) consciousness: P-consciousness is ex-perience. P-conscious properties are experiential ones.P-conscious states are experiential, that is, a state is P-conscious if it has experiential properties. The totality ofthe experiential properties of a state are "what it is like"to have it. (pp. 230-231)

Defining A-consciousness is a straightforwardmatter. In the case of human beings, A-con-sciousness is a cognitively interwoven aspect ofmental life, underlain by three crucial capacitiescentered around rationality: rational cogitation,speech, and action. (For the general case, not allthree conditions are necessary for A-conscious-

Approaching Consciousness 29

ness because, Block maintains, animals withoutspeech can have mental states of the A-conscioustype.) Construed as such, A-consciousness fitswell in the domain of propositional attitudes inphilosophy of mind, and it is just the perfect sortof subject matter for cognitive psychology.54

P-consciousness is more problematic. Blockstarts out his analysis of P-consciousness bystating the difficulty particular to it: "Let meacknowledge at the outset that I cannot defineP-consciousness in any remotely noncircularway The best one can do for P-consciousnessis .. . point to the phenomenon" (Block 1995,p. 230). The way Block himself goes about char-acterizing P-consciousness is either "via roughsynonyms" or by examples. P-consciousness, asexpected, is what I have been referring to as thephenomenal aspect of consciousness. Among theP-conscious properties that endow a mental statewith P-consciousness in virtue of its having themare, for instance, the way it feels to "see, hear,smell, taste, and have pains" and more generally,"the experiential properties of sensations, feel-ings, and perceptions". Furthermore, Blockmaintains, P-conscious properties are "distinctfrom any cognitive, intentional, or functionalproperty" (p. 230).

Block thinks that it is not an embarrassmentthat he cannot provide a noncircular definition ofP-consciousness. But why is it difficult to providea straightforward definition of P-consciousness,and why should this not be considered a cause ofdisconcertment? According to Block, that there isno way to give a reductive definition of P-con-sciousness is not embarrassing given the "historyof reductive definitions in philosophy," presum-ably full of failures.

It is still not clear, however, whether the in-ability to define P-consciousness reductively issufficient reason to think that the only other al-ternative must be an ostensive definition. Even ifit is, it may be useful to ask why the definition ofP-consciousness is, unlike other definitions, thusobliged to ostention. In the case of A-conscious-ness, there seems to be no such problem. Block's

definition of A-consciousness is not, strictlyspeaking, reductive, and it serves its purpose wellwith no need for ostension. Could there be some-thing inherent in the pretheoretical construal ofP-consciousness such that it does not allow anonreductive but also nonostensive definition?More importantly, could it be that the particularway Block's distinction carves out phenomenalconsciousness, separating it completely from itscausal and functional aspects in accord with the"segregationist intuition," renders its inves-tigation by means of scientific methods theoret-ically impossible? Put differently, could we bepainting ourselves into a corner by a conceptualcommitment to Block's distinction such that weend up with a number of straightforward prob-lems about A-consciousness and a conjured-up"hard problem" of P-consciousness that in prin-ciple admits no solution?55 This last questionleads directly into a related debate that has itsroots in the "explanatory gap" problem, re-cently dubbed by David Chalmers the "easy andhard problems of consciousness."

The "Easy Problems of Consciousness" and the"Hard Problem"

Chalmers (1995) characterizes the "easy prob-lems" as those concerning the explanation ofvarious cognitive functions: discriminatory abil-ities, reportability of mental states, the focus ofattention, the control of behavior. Of course theseare not trivial problems at all, and labeling them"easy problems" should not be taken as down-playing their complicated nature. Rather, Chal-mers's point is that "there is no real issue aboutwhether these phenomena can be explainedscientifically." They can be. "All of them arestraightforwardly vulnerable to explanation interms of computational or neural mechanisms"(p. 201). What makes "the hard problem" ofconsciousness a different kind of problem is,Chalmers maintains, its resistance to all themethods that explain, or have the potential toexplain, the rest of the problems. Put differently,

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there is a different kind of problem about con-sciousness that may evade the successes of allstandard scientific advances. Such a problemwould be a hard problem indeed. What is it?

According to Chalmers, "The really hardproblem is the problem of experience." Morespecifically, it is the "subjective" aspect of everyexperience that resists explanation. The notion of"subjective aspect" is given, as Block does, inNagelian terms: There is something it is like to bea conscious organism and have experiences. Inother words, "what it is like to be" constitutesthe subjective character of the experiences of theorganism in question. This much is also in linewith Block's characterization of phenomenalconsciousness.

I will give a sorted-out schema of the theoret-ically interwoven notions of "phenomenal as-pect," "subjective character," and "what it is liketo be" in section XVI below. For now, it is usefulto observe that the line that separates Chalmers's"easy" and "hard" problems is the counterpart ofthe line that separates "access" and "phenom-enal" consciousness in Block, which also mirrorsthe distinction between the causal versus phe-nomenal characterizations of consciousness out-lined earlier. Given these distinctions Chalmersstates the "hard problem" as the problem ofbridging the explanatory gap between accounts ofthe causal-functional (physical) kind and the oc-currence of specific phenomenal aspects. He asks:

Even when we have explained the performance of all thecognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity ofexperience—perceptual discrimination, categorization,internal access, verbal report—there may still remain afurther unanswered question: Why is the performance ofthese functions accompanied by experience?... This fur-ther question is the key question in the problem of con-sciousness. Why doesn't all this information-processinggo on "in the dark", free of any inner feel? (Chalmers1995, p. 203).

There are two related questions Chalmersraises, and the roots of both go back at least ahundred years in the history of psychology and

philosophy. The first has to do with how to bridgethe explanatory gap between physical mechanismand phenomenal appearance, or brain and mind,as discussed in the "Mystery of Consciousness"section in section I. The second asks whether allthe activity on the "physical" side could go onas usual in the total absence of any counterpartphenomenology. The former question is based onLevine's (1983, 1993) original formulation of theproblem of the "explanatory gap," which has an-tecedents in considerations raised by Saul Kripke(1980) and Thomas Nagel (1974, 1986) (thoughreaching different conclusions). The latter ques-tion is a version of the so-called absent qualiaproblem.36 Similar considerations also underliewhat William Seager (1991) calls the ultimateproblem of consciousness. He asks: "Why is it sohard to think about consciousness, to formulatereasonable models of the relation of particularmodes of consciousness to their physical bases?"The answer Seager offers, in agreement withNagel, has to do with the uniqueness of conscious-ness as a phenomenon: "There is no model bywhich we can satisfactorily understand the rela-tion between conscious experience and subveningphysical state since this relation is absolutelyunique in nature" (pp. 223-234).

Before discussing the status of the hard prob-lem further, let me first sketch a larger frameworkin which a number of relevant questions can belocated and pursued. This framework will alsobe useful in revealing just how much explanationalong one question-path can be useful in explain-ing issues in neighboring problems.

XV The Four W Questions and the Further-HowQuestion

It is true that the enterprise of approaching con-sciousness within a scientific discipline has tradi-tionally been very problematic, largely due to theinadequacy of the scientific third-person perspec-tive all by itself as a penetrating tool for the studyof the phenomenal character of consciousness.

Approaching Consciousness 31

The most influential assumption about conscious-ness, as evidenced by the diversity of the literature,is that what makes it a tough nut to crack is insome crucial way related to those properties ofconsciousness that have to do with its phenomenalaspect. Problems such as the irreducibility of con-sciousness, its imminent subjectivity, the status ofits relation to its physical underpinnings, and so onall relate to the phenomenal side of consciousness.

In order to get into some of the inner structureof this difficulty, consider the following five ques-tions, which I will call the four W questions andOtis further-How question of consciousness:

1. What are the media and mechanisms of con-sciousness? Can consciousness occur in any typeof material substance, or does it have to have aspecific kind of underpinning (e.g., a carbon-based molecular structure)? And what are theunderlying mechanisms that facilitate conscious-ness?

2. Where is, if anywhere, the locus of conscious-ness? Can consciousness be localized in a specificorgan, the brain (or a module in the brain), or is itendemic to the whole of the nervous system?Where is the seat of consciousness?

3. Who can be said to be a conscious being?Using consciousness as a type-identifying pred-icate, one can ask: Is a chimp, a spider, a pro-tozoan, or a robot conscious or nonconscious?(In a slightly different sense of consciousness, onecan also ask of a person in a coma, or in sleep, orin a petit mal seizure whether she is conscious orunconscious.)4. Why is there consciousness at all, and what isthe role it plays in the general scheme of mentallife and behavior of an organism? To put it inevolutionary terms, which function does con-sciousness serve such that it was selected as a traitin the phylogeny of certain classes of livingthings?5. How does consciousness arise in, or emergefrom, its underlying substance, structure, andmechanism, in the way it does?

Notice that the How question seems to be afurther question, the answer to which may not becompletely revealed even if all the previous fourW questions are already adequately answered.The answei to the How question may involve thepostulation of, in Chalmers's terms, an extra in-gredient, which makes the question difficult in aunique way. Even when all the underpinningsof consciousness, including its medium, locus,and mechanism, are revealed, and conscious andnonconscious things are, at least according tosome operational definition, properly categorizedand explained, a further question may remain:Just how is it that one experiences the particularsort of phenomenal quality that one does, ratherthan a different quality, or even none at all?Or, more generally, how does any physicalmechanism give rise to any kind of phenomenalexperience? Because of this extra ingredientseemingly inherent in the How question, I call itHas further-How question.

As must be clear from the formulation of thefurther-How question, the difficulty surroundingthe extra ingredient, the gap that remains notbridged, owes its difficulty to the phenomenal as-pect of consciousness. The further-How questionis generally considered to be categorically moredifficult compared to the other four—hence thedubbing: "the hard problem of consciousness"versus the rest, the "easy problems."

It is important to notice that the term extraingredient can carry greatly different theoreticalweights. For instance, the missing extra in-gredient may be merely explanatory, due to anundeveloped concept, or some other theoreticaltool. That would raise only an epistemologicalproblem. But it may also mean a missing in-gredient in the part and parcel of the world, in itsontology. It has been suggested that the missingingredient is indeed ontologjcal, and conscious-ness should be added to the list of fundamentalphysical elements of the universe. For instance,Chalmers (1995) claims that "a theory of con-sciousness requires the addition of somethingfundamental to our ontology" and suggests we

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take experience as fundamental "along-side mass,charge, and space-time" (p. 210; see also Chalm-ers 1996). Nagel and Searle have respectivelymade the same point in terms of the subjectiveproperties of consciousness, in, for instance, thefollowing passages:

The subjectivity of consciousness is an irreducible fea-ture of reality—without which we couldn't do physicsor anything else—and it must occupy as fundamental aplace in any credible world view as matter, energy,space, time, and numbers. (Nagel 1986, pp. 7-8)

Conscious mental states and processes have a specialfeature not possessed by other natural phenomena,namely subjectivity. It is this feature of consciousnessthat makes its study so recalcitrant to the conventionalmethods of biological and psychological research, andmost puzzling to philosophical analysis The world. . . contains subjectivity as a rock-bottom elementIn the sense in which I am here using the tern, "sub-jective" refers to an ontological category, not to anepistemic mode. (Searle 1992, pp. 93,95)"

The same idea has also been favored amongthose who try to find fundamental theoreticalconnections between consciousness and quantumphysics, as well as those who popularize on thistheme. For instance, an interview with NickHerbert, the author of Elemental Mind: HumanConsciousness and the New Physics, outlineshis position as arguing that "consciousness itselfmust be considered a 'fundamental force' of theuniverse, 'elemental', on a par with such irredu-cible phenomena as gravity, light, mass, andelectrical charge" (quoted in "The ConsciousnessWars," Omni, October 1993, p. 56; see also Her-bert 1993). In a somewhat similar spirit, theoret-ical physicist Henry Stapp claims that "ananalysis of the measurement problem of quantumtheory points to the need to introduce conscious-ness, per se, to physics," stressing as well that acomplete account of consciousness can be givennot in an "ontologically and dynamically mon-istic conceptualization of the world provided byclassical-mechanics" but only "within a dualistic

quantum-mechanical conceptualization of na-ture" (Stapp 1996, p. i).

The study of consciousness can take any oneof the above five questions as its entry point toinvestigation. Indeed, various people have madeattempts to approach the phenomenon of con-sciousness by respectively addressing each ofthese issues. But the further-How question hastypically generated less success than others. As amatter of fact, it led to grim diagnoses about the"explanatory gap," thought by some, such asColin McGinn (1989), to lie possibly forever be-yond the grasp of human understanding.

The seeming uniqueness of the further-Howquestion, given the lack of apparent promisingdirections to pursue it in any existing method-ology, led McGinn (1989) to take its conclusionsperhaps too seriously. The very same consid-erations, on the other hand, can lead one to thinkthat there is perhaps something fishy about thewhole setup. The way the problem is presentedrelies obviously on a set of presumptions aboutthe metaphysics of phenomenal consciousness, aswell as the nature of scientific explanation. Couldit be that the reason we seem to have no clueabout how to explain the further-How question isthat there is really nothing there to explain?58

This brings up a metalevel issue: whether a com-plete explanation of the four W questions will infact leave some further aspect of consciousnessunexplained, such that the further-How questionwill remain untouched, unscathed, and in need ofexplanation as ever? To take up a favorite exam-ple of the Churchlands from the history of scienti-fic explanation, what can assure us that the further-How question will not evaporate in time just asdid questions about elan vital and phlogiston?

Note that this sort of skepticism against thefurther-How question need not entail a defla-tionary attitude toward consciousness in general.One can remain convinced that consciousnesspresents fascinating and real problems for philos-ophy and science and that this is already justifiedin the history of its study, while not believing that

Approaching Consciousness 33

there is a further-How question in the way it isformulated, isolable from the four W questionssuch that no degree of understanding there willshed any light on it.

I do not know if there is a decisive way to settlethe metaissue at this stage of our understandingof consciousness, and thereby decide the fate ofthe further-How question. I do not know if it isuseful, or even yet possible, to settle it at present.It seems that the opposing attitudes towardconsciousness stem largely from pretheoretical,though (or perhaps, hence) deep-rooted and verystrongly held, intuitions. Of course, it is crucialto try to systematically examine and uncover theoften implicit presumptions that these intuitionsembody, but doing that also requires under-standing what is currently known and acceptedabout consciousness at the present theoreticallevel—that is, understanding what is knownabout the four W questions. Each of theseW questions is interesting in its own way, andeach has generated some fruitful thinking in-dependently in different fields. Thus, I now turnto a brief exposition of their current status, pri-marily the What and the Where questions.

The What Question

With regard to functionally characterized vari-eties of access consciousness, there is hardly anysuspicion that consciousness is medium indepen-dent. But regarding phenomenal consciousness,this question is open to speculation. The func-tionalist intuitions suggest that if the existence ofall mental phenomena, including P-conscious-ness, is a matter of the functional organization ofthe elements in the nervous system, then the pos-sibility that consciousness is a trait that is not re-stricted to carbon-based animal brains of thisplanet should be allowed. Denying this possibilitywould be "neural chauvinism."

Perhaps Searle comes closest to claiming thatconsciousness, and actually the mind in general,can occur only in human and animal brains,

or their causal (but not necessarily functional)equivalents, because of the "special powers of thebrain," which cannot be matched by, for exam-ple, digital computers.59 Notice that the questionhere is different from those in the various absentqualia arguments. The possibility being ques-tioned is not one of non-emergence (i.e., absence)of consciousness in functional equivalents of hu-man brains or in human brains themselves.Rather, somewhat symmetrically, it is the possi-bility of the emergence of consciousness in /ton-brains.

What about mechanism? Regarding the un-derlying mechanism of a very important compo-nent of consciousness, the binding of the varioussensory features into a coherent whole in experi-ence, the most promising recent results comefrom the work of Christof Koch and FrancisCrick. In "Towards a Neurobiological Theoryof Consciousness" (1990), they hypothesize thatwhat underlies the phenomenon of binding isthe pattern of synchronous oscillations in thebrain within the 40 to 70 Hz range during visualexperience.60 (See also Llinas and Ribary 1994, insupport of the 40 Hz hypothesis in the contextof dream experiences. Metzdnger 1995a exploreshow the binding problem relates to the integra-tion of phenomenal content.)

Now, let's examine this hypothesis in light ofthe distinctions introduced so far. Does it, forinstance, explain the access or the phenomenalsenses of consciousness (or both)? Since Crick andKoch do not have such a distinction, it is hard toknow what they think. According to Block, thehypothesis is designed to explain P-consciousness;failing that, it can explain, if anything, only A-consciousness. A true explanation of P-con-sciousness, Block maintains, has to explain fur-ther questions about why, for instance, it is the 40to 70 Hz range and not some other. The discoveryof an empirical correlation does not suffice tobridge the explanatory gap between the phenom-enon as it appears to the subject and what its un-derlying mechanism does.

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This formulation is just another expression ofthe "hard problem" and, as such, falls in the pur-view of the further-How question. Thus, while theCrick-Koch hypothesis (so far as it is correct)can be considered to explain successfully the Whatquestion of consciousness for some, it remains es-sentially incomplete for the defenders of a Block-ean conception of phenomenal consciousness.

The Where Question

Is there a seat of consciousness? This question inits various incarnations has been discussed fromthe time of the ancient Greeks. What was once thequestion of the organ of reason in humans (e.g.,die brain versus the heart) has now transformedinto the question of the whole brain or a modulein it, and if the latter, which?

As early as the late nineteenth century, Jameshad discussed the question of the seat of con-sciousness and declared that the cortex, and notthe rest of the brain, is what is responsible forconsciousness:

For practical purposes, nevertheless, and limiting themeaning of the word consciousness to the personal selfof the individual, we can pretty confidently answer thequestion prefixed to this paragraph by saying that thecortex is the sole organ of consciousness in man. If therebe any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, itis a consciousness of which the self knows nothing.(James 1950, pp. 66-67)

James's view was based on the experimentalresults of his day, which showed a significantcorrelation between cerebral processes and sub-jective reports of conscious experience. Note thatJames does not attempt to give an explanation ofhow the brain can possibly subserve consciousexperience any further than outlining the relevantmechanism. In other words, James does not seemto be after anything beyond the ordinary Wquestions. Clearly this sort of explanation doesnot satisfy those who are after the further-Howquestion.

But regardless of whether the further-Howquestion is a well-formed formulation of inquiry,there is a lot of work to be done in explainingthe mechanism of how and where consciousnessemerges in a given organism. James was perhapsone of the first "consciousness modularists" byproposing that it was only a certain componentof the brain that subserved consciousness.61 Al-though it has always been in the scientific agenda,the belief in modularity in brain function hasgained particular popularity over the last decade,especially due to the results coming from neuro-psychology. Recent discoveries involving certaintypes of brain damage, such that the subjects be-come deprived of only very specific, encapsulatedperceptual or cognitive abilities (e.g., prosopag-nosia—the deficit of recognizing faces whilealmost all other visual capabilities remain intact),have provided support for theses of modulararchitecture.62

Extending this idea, one can transform thequestion of the modularity of mental function ingeneral into the question of whether phenomenalconsciousness in particular may be subserved by amodule of some sort. Tim Shallice (1988) putsforth such a view, and a modularity hypothesisseems to lie behind Daniel Schacter's DICEmodel, where consciousness is depicted as a sepa-rate, functionally individuated box in the wiringdiagram sketch (roughly speaking) of a nervoussystem (Schacter 1988). Block is also sympatheticto these models and calls the view "that treatsconsciousness as something that could be accom-plished by a distinct system in the brain" Carte-sian modularism, in contrast to Dennett andKinsbourne's Cartesian materialism.

Cartesian materialism is the name Daniel Den-nett and Marcel Kinsbourne (1992) give to thegeneral belief that there is literally a place in thebrain "where it all comes together"—somethinglike a spatial or at least a temporal finish line thatdetermines the outcome of various brain pro-cesses as a coherent, unitary, single experience.Dennett (1991) calls this the "Cartesian Theater"

Approaching Consciousness 35

model of consciousness.63 The idea of such alogical line in the brain makes it possible to askquestions about the temporality of certain eventsthat take place inside the brain against the mile-post of the phenomenology of experience. Deny-ing that such a line exists makes it logicallyimpossible to impose a fine-grained order on brainprocesses as having occurred prior to or followinga particular experience. Dennett and Kinsbournepresent a forceful argument against Cartesianmaterialism; for them it is the whole brain, if any-thing, that is in some sense the seat of conscious-ness. Today, the Where question, just like theWhat question, remains a hotly debated issue.64

The Who and the Why/Which Questions

The question of who can be classified as a con-scious being is largely subordinate to the questionof what the underlying medium and mechanismof consciousness are, at least in a materialistframework. Roughly speaking, those beingswhose physical constitution (medium) allows theinstantiation of those properties that indicatethe working mechanism of consciousness can besafely allowed into the "charmed circle" ofconsciousness (barring difficulties inherent in. theWhat question itself). It is also common practicein medicine to have a more or less circumscribedset of behavioral and psychological criteria todetermine the occurrent presence or absenceof consciousness in patients (e.g., see the RocheHandbook of Differential Diagnosis on "TransientLoss of Consciousness," 1989).

Of course, the issue is not so straightforward,especially when it comes to phenomenal con-sciousness. Is there anything it is like to be a batcatching prey with its sonar system, or a dogfishdetecting electromagnetic fields in the ocean, ora robot clumsily walking about in an artificialintelligence laboratory? The answers and, moreimportant, the advice on how to obtain theseanswers greatly vary. This question also leadsto the discussion on "zombies"—whether there

could be, in nomological or just logical possi-bility, human replicas who nonetheless lack phe-nomenal consciousness. I come back to this issuein the discussion of epiphenomenalism.

Regarding the Why/Which question, the liter-ature is somewhat barren. Perhaps this is partlyas a result of the fact that it is nearly impossibleto find any evolutionary role for phenomenal con-sciousness to play under the decree of the segre-gationist intuition, whereas the evolutionarycontribution of consciousness, when it is taken ascausally efficacious in accord with the causalcharacterization, is just too obvious. In otherwords, so long as consciousness is characterizedas essentially noncausal and nonfunctional, ren-dered an epiphenomenon that makes no differencein the world, it drops out of the pool of factorsthat have survival value, and thus becomes ex-planatorily irrelevant to evolutionary theory.This is the conclusion Frank Jackson (1982) de-fends (using the term "qualia" for phenomenalconsciousness): "[Qualia] are an excressence.They do nothing, they explain nothing, they servemerely to soothe the intuitions of dualists, and itis left a total mystery how they fit into the world

view of science Epiphenomenal qualia aretotally irrelevant to survival" (p. 135)65 On theother hand, if consciousness is taken as a genusfor different modalities of perceptual awarenessunder a causal-representational characterization,pace Dretske (forthcoming), there remains nophilosophically puzzling question about its evo-lutionary role. It would clearly be somewhat dif-ficult for any creature to survive without sight,hearing, touch, smell, and so forth. (See alsoDretske 1996 for a discussion of what kind ofdifferences qualia make vis-a-vis judgments andbeliefs.) Similarly, Armstrong (1980) attributes tointrospective consciousness the biological func-tion of making us aware of current mental statesand activities of our own mind, such that it be-comes "much easier to achieve integration of thestates and activities, to get them working togetherin the complex and sophisticated ways necessary

Guven Guzeldere 36

to achieve complex and sophisticated ends"(p. 65). See also Van Gulick (1988, 1989) for at-tempts to locate a functional role for phenomenalconsciousness, and Dennett (1991), Flanagan(1992), Dretske (1995), and Flanagan and Polger(1995) for further evolutionary considerations.66

Finally, Jaynes (1976) and Crook (1980) take en-tirely different approaches to the idea of the evo-lution of consciousness (characterized in termscloser to what I called the social sense of con-sciousness). Searle (1992) tries to strike a balancebetween defending a version of the essentialistintuition while assigning an evolutionary role toconsciousness. Finally, a number of neuropsy-chological accounts identify consciousness with aspecific information-processing module, in termsof a specific function it serves in the whole system.Although the concern is almost never evolu-tionary in such accounts, they can be mentionedhere for their effort to find a specific function forconsciousness (see, for example, Schacter 1988and Shallice 1988). But on the whole, there ismuch about the Why/Which question that re-mains to be written than what is already there.

Having considered the various characteriza-tions of consciousness and the various questionsone can ask about them, I now turn to theexamination of questions about phenomenalconsciousness in the landscape of current philo-sophical debates.

XVI A Road Map for PhenomenalConsciousness and the Unbearable Lightness ofWhatitisttketobe

As we have seen, the concept of consciousness is ahybrid that lends itself to several different char-acterizations. Part of my goal in this chapter wasto tease them apart and treat them separately.Having done so, however, one sees that the prob-lem of consciousness is like a Chinese box puzzle;for every distinction made, one discovers thatfurther embedded distinctions are required.

In any case, given that the philosophical prob-lems all revolve around the phenomenal charac-terization of consciousness, it is reasonable tofocus discussion there. Doing so actually revealsthat what is commonly referred to as "phenom-enal consciousness" is also itself a hybrid. Con-sequently, it becomes imperative to bring theanalytical microscope over there and to dissectthe different elements in the tangle of phenomenalconsciousness. Here I present a conceptual roadmap for locating various different philosophicalproblems, each associated with phenomenal con-sciousness in one way or another.

The term phenomenal consciousness is oftenused interchangeably with a variety of others,such as qualitative character, qualia, phenomenalproperties, subjective awareness, experience, andwhat it is like to be a certain organism. (See, forinstance, Block 1994, pp. 210-211.) This is abunch. And to make matters worse, each of theseconcepts is known for its notorious elusiveness.Traditionally, the properties that go under thevarious names of "raw feels," "qualia," "qual-itative character of experience," "phenomenalaspect of consciousness," and so on have allproved to be recalcitrant to systematic explana-tions. Dennett points out that attempts to give astraightforward account of phenomenal proper-ties have typically been frustrating; "no soonerdoes [the concept of qualia] retreat in the face ofone argument that 'it' reappears, apparently in-nocent of all charges, in a new guise" (Dennett1988, p. 42).67

This elusiveness actually goes to the heart ofthe particular and long-standing problem of phe-nomenal consciousness, which is often labeleda mystery. Elusiveness by itself is not whatmakes the problem persistent, however. Other-wise, eliminativism could appear as a moreappealing option. Rather, it is our unique epis-temic relation to consciousness: phenomenalconsciousness is perhaps the most difficult aspectof the mind to give up. An eliminativist stancetoward the phenomenal aspect of mental life

Approaching Consciousness 37

seems the most counter-intuitive of all eliminati-vist attitudes. That is why the question of phe-nomenal consciousness does not just disappearout of the philosophical and, in other guises, psy-chological and scientific landscapes. I thus find itimportant to lay out properly each conceptualcomponent that contributes to the puzzle.

It is worth noting, however, that among allnotions that are associated with phenomenalconsciousness, one has particularly capturedphilosophical intuitions more than any other—somuch so that it has become the central notionunderlying almost any discussion about con-sciousness during the two decades since its pub-lication. Unfortunately, it is also the most difficultto pin down or muster theoretical agreementupon. I have in mind Nagel's (1974) notion of"what it is like to be" a certain creature, or sub-ject of experience.68

Nagel's notion of "what it is like to be" hasbeen so influential that it seems to have an omni-presence in several distinct (even if related) prob-lems with regard to consciousness. In particular,it gets pronounced in an intertwined way with theproblem clusters that can be grouped under theheadings of qualia, subjectivity, and the knowl-edge argument.

Nagel himself presents the issue of what it islike to be a certain creature as a theoretical basisfor establishing the claim about that creature'shaving a certain ontologically irreducible point ofview, which furnishes certain facts about thecreature with subjectivity. For others, however,the notion of "what it is like to be" is taken to laythe ground for arguing for the reality of qualia,and for others, for the persuasiveness of theknowledge argument which claims that physi-calism, as an ontological doctrine, is false. But thenature of the relations among each one of theseproblems is hardly ever spelled out in any detail.In fact, it seems that the notion of "what it is liketo be" has become the wild card of consciousnessproblems. I will henceforth refer to it simply asthe notion of whatitisliketobe.

Given this tangle, let me present the followingschema as a conceptual road map to distinguishproblems typically associated with phenomenalconsciousness:

1. Qualia: Experiences have phenomenal andthus noncausal, nonrepresentational, nonfunc-tional, and perhaps nonphysical properties.

2. Subjectivity: Certain facts about experiencesare subjective, that is, they cannot be completelyunderstood except from a single kind of point ofview.

3. Knowledge Argument: Certain facts aboutexperiences are nonphysical.

To this, one can add the "base element" in theformula:

* Whatitisliketobe: There is something it is liketo have experiences for a certain organism (or,simply, something it is like to be that organism).

I call whatitisliketobe a wild card, because itgets alluded to in discussions concerning any ofthe three problems mentioned above. To havecertain qualia, it is generally presumed, is what-itisliketobe an organism undergoing a certainexperience; certain facts about an experience aresubjective because there is somethingitisliketobehaving that experience; and finally, whatitislike-tobe having a certain experience constitutes non-physical facts about that experience. I think,however, that it can be questioned whether thiscommon denominator is not in fact theoreticallyvacuous. Perhaps whatitisliketobe has turned intonothing but a wild card—a convenient way oftalking about any one of the three problems ofphenomenal consciousness, without, due to itsintuitive charm, having to specify anything fur-ther. Then there would be no reason to look for ashared ingredient in need of explanation, aboveand beyond the explanation of these three prob-lems.69

Nagel's original intention in introducing thenotion of whatitisliketobe was, I think, to use itas an "intuition pump" for instating subjectivity

Guven Guzeldere 38

rather than as a tool to talk about qualia. Fur-ther, for Nagel, the scope of applicability of thenotion of subjectivity greatly transcends theproblem of qualia, or consciousness in general; italso underlies problems about free will, personalidentity, and the self, as well as the ontologicaldoctrine of physicalism.70

The knowledge argument, formulated in con-temporary literature by Frank Jackson, is alsomuch closer in nature to issues surrounding sub-jectivity than to the problem of qualia. In fact, itcan be seen as a logical conclusion of the diffi-culties Nagel raises about accommodating sub-jectivity in a physicalist ontology. In a nutshell,the knowledge argument is based on the claimthat certain facts about experiences evade allphysicalist accounts, and no matter how muchone learns about the physical (causal, functional,representational, and so on) aspects of an ex-perience, some facts about how the experiencefeels (to oneself, but more important, to others)will remain in the dark until one actually has thatexperience.

Jackson attempts to establish this claim bymeans of a thought experiment that involves animaginary vision scientist, Mary, who learns"everything physical there is to know" aboutcolor experiences without ever having color ex-periences herself. Jackson's contention is thatupon seeing a colored object for the first time inher life, Mary will learn something new, belyingphysicalism. The pivotal issue here is whetherthe having of an experience constitutes a specialclass of irreducible "first-person facts" or whetherwhat is lacking in Mary has to do with her ex-periential "mode of access" to facts that she isalready acquainted with (in the form of proposi-tional knowledge); on this point of contention theknowledge argument has generated a fair amountof literature.71 The interrelations between theseproblems need to be pursued further, but I willstop and opt for focusing on the most centralplayer of the phenomenal consciousness debate:qualia. (I will henceforth use "phenomenal con-sciousness" and "qualia" interchangeably.)

XVH The QuaHa Battles

The problem of qualia is one that surfaced underdifferent guises in the philosophy literature duringdifferent periods. It is probably fair to state thatqualia was the single most recalcitrant notion thatresisted the rising wave of materialists in theirprogram of giving an account of the mental bymeans of identity theory. For example, J. J. C.Smart mentions in his now-classic "Sensationsand Brain Processes" (1959) that among the eightobjections he considers, he feels the least con-fident in his answer to the one about phenomenalproperties. (This is Objection 3, attributed toMax Black.) Both U. T. Place (1956) and B. A.Farrell (1950), philosophers of the same era, notethat the identification of the so-called raw feelswith the straightforwardly physical properties ofthe nervous system has been the most elusivecomponent of the overall program of identitytheory in "Is Consciousness a Brain Process?"and "Experience," respectively. Herbert Feiglalso wrestles with the same problem in his lengthymanuscript, The "Mental" and the "Physical"(1967).72

A second wave in philosophy of mind cameabout, this time that of functionalism, in the1970s. The problem of qualia was again on stage;the phenomenal feels were considered the"Achilles' heel of functionalism" (Shoemaker1981a)—the only aspect of mentality that es-caped the net of functional explanations.73 It isduring this period that the problems of absentqualia and a reincarnation of Locke's puzzle ofinverted spectrum reached celebrity status. Criticsof functionalism argued that a functionalistframework can provide an account of all compo-nents of mental life but cannot capture its qualia,lacking the theoretical tools to settle decisivelyquestions about whether any two functionallyequivalent systems differ (e.g., can be inverted) intheir phenomenal aspects, or even whether agiven system has any qualia at all. Thomas Nagelgives a concise characterization of the problem of

Approaching Consciousness 39

absent qualia as follows: "The subjective charac-ter of experience... is not captured by any of thefamiliar, recently devised reductive analyses ofthe mental, for all of them are logically compat-ible with its absence. [E.g.,] It is not analyzable interms of any explanatory system of functionalstates, or intentional states, since these could beascribed to robots or automata that behaved likepeople though they experienced nothing" (Nagel1974, pp. 166-167; my emphasis).74

In a footnote to this passage, Nagel also enter-tains the possibility of the impossibility of absentqualia, but rejects it: "Perhaps there could not ac-tually be such robots. Perhaps anything complexenough to behave like a person would have expe-riences. But that, if true, is a fact which cannot bediscovered merely by analyzing the concept of ex-perience" (fn. 2, p. 167; my emphasis). But whatNagel merely asserts as true has no argumentativeforce against certain causal-state identity theo-rists and some functionalists. For they takeexactly the opposite of Nagel's assertion (broadlyconstrued to include not only behavior, but alsocausal, functional, and intentional character-ization) as a fundamental assumption.

For instance, David Lewis (1966) states: "Thedefinitive characteristic of any (sort of) experi-ence as such is [by analytic necessity] its causalrole, its syndrome of most typical causes andeffects" (p. 17). Similarly, the concept of a men-tal state for David Armstrong (1993) is that of a"state of the person apt for bringing about certainsorts of physical behavior," where he regards themind as "an inner arena identified by its causalrelations to outward act" (p. 129). As such, therelation between experiences and causal (and/orfunctional, intentional, etc.) characteristics istaken to be, contra Nagel's assumption, inherentin the concept of experience. This kind of funda-mental disagreement where each side is vulner-able to the charge of question-begging againstthe other is a typical syndrome of the "qualiabattles."

The possibility of absent qualia is closely re-lated to the doctrine of epiphenomenalism (that

phenomenal consciousness has no causal powers)and thus to the possibility of "zombies" (humanreplicas with all mental and behavioral attributespresent save for phenomenal consciousness), asI argue below. The possibility of inverted spec-trum, on the other hand, simply requires an in-version of a particular set of phenomenal qualitiesin some sensory domain, such as the hues in one'scolor space.75

But let us pause and ask the same question al-ready posed about consciousness: When friendsand foes of qualia disagree about whether qualiaexist, are they really talking about the same thing?The ontologically rather ordinary fact that phe-nomenal properties of an experience exist onlyinsofar as they belong to someone's experience(compare: geometric properties of a shadow existonly insofar as they belong to someone's sha-dow), when combined with the epistemologi-cally rather extraordinary fact that experiencescannot epistemically be shared, and hence every-one can have "direct access" to only his or her'qualia, seem to make it uniquely, even surpris-ingly difficult to investigate the ontological natureof qualia. As such, it gives rise to a wide variety ofpositions regarding what qualia are.

In "Quining Qualia," Dennett, one of thestaunchest critics of the notion of qualia, tries toestablish that "conscious experience has no prop-erties that are special in any of the ways qualiahave been supposed to be special." He attemptsto show this by laying out what exactly it is thathe wants to deny in denying the existence ofqualia and sets up his target by identifying qualiawith the "properties of a subject's mental statesthat are: 1. ineffable, 2. intrinsic, 3. private, and 4.directly or immediately apprehensible in con-sciousness" (Dennett 1988, pp. 43,47). The finalverdict Dennett arrives at, after an elaboratechain of "intuition pumps" designed to show thatthe very concept of qualia is inherently confused,is an eliminativist one: "There simply are noqualia at all" (p. 74).

In contrast to Dennett's eliminativist stance,the spectrum of other positions with respect to

Giiven Guzeldere 40

qualia extends from taking qualia to be non-physical properties that require a new ontology toreductively identifying qualia with neurophysio-logical properties. There are also midway, con-ciliatory positions. Paul and Patricia Churchland,for example, agree that when qualia are construedin the way Dennett does, the situation is indeedhopeless: "So long as introspectible qualia werethought to be ineffable, or epiphenomenal... onecan understand the functionalist's reluctance tohave anything to do with them" (Churchland andChurchland 1982, p. 34). While promoting arealist attitude toward qualia, they claim thatqualia will turn out to be properties intrinsic todie nervous system, such as spiking frequencies inthe brain. Construed as such, qualia cease to beelusive, but their investigation also falls into thescope of disciplines other than philosophy orpsychology. In the Churchlands' words: "Thefunctionalist need not, and perhaps should not,attempt to deny the existence of qualia. Rather,

he should be a realist about qualia [But, atthe end], the nature of specific qualia will berevealed by neurophysiology, neurochemistry,and neurophysics" (Churchland and Churchland1982, p. 31).

Owen Flanagan, who believes that an effortof triangulation involving phenomenology, psy-chology, and neuroscience, which he calls the"natural method," can penetrate the mystery ofqualia and help dispel it, follows suit in promot-ing a more positive characterization of qualia:"Those who would quine qualia are bothered bythe fact that they seem mysterious—essentiallyprivate, ineffable, and not subject to third-personevaluation. Qualia are none of these things." Al-though Flanagan does not necessarily share theChurchlands' conviction that qualia will turn outto be properties in the domain of neuroscience, hetoo concludes that "there are no qualia in Den-nett's contentious sense, but there are qualia"(Flanagan 1992, p. 85).

A recent proposal in accounting for qualiacomes from Fred Dretske's representational nat-uralism (Dretske 1995). According to this view,

"all mental facts are representational facts" andhence, a fortiori, all facts about qualia are alsorepresentational. Dretske identifies qualia asproperties that one's experience represents objects(or whatever the experience is about) as having.As such, qualia do not have to be given a func-tional characterization or identified with neuro-physiological properties. Rather, Dretske locatesqualia outside the mind, in accordance with hisexternalist theory of the mind. This view has theadvantage of maintaining a realist stance towardqualia while remaining in a perfectly naturalisticframework.76

Finally, Ned Block brings the qualia issue backto the problem of "explanatory gap" and raisessuspicions about the conceptual machinery ofcognitive psychology to deal with qualia: "On thebasis of the kind of conceptual apparatus nowavailable in psychology, I do not know how psy-chology in anything like its present incarnationcould explain qualia" (Block, 1978, p. 289). Blockis neither as sure as the Churchlands aboutwhether the answer to the nature of qualia willturn out to be in the domain of neuroscience, noris he as optimistic as Flanagan in the promise ofinterdisciplinary methods to deliver a successfulaccount of phenomenal properties. Nor is heconvinced that qualia can be accounted for in aDretskean representational framework. On thecontrary, Block actually wants to raise moregeneral doubts about the explanatory power ofany mechanistic, functionalist, or in general phys-icalistic schemes to account for the presence oremergence of qualia. His worry, in other words, isabout how qualia can be accounted for as partand parcel of any physical system, including (orrather, especially) a brain, even if one thinks thatit must be so accounted. Block states: "No physi-cal mechanism seems very intuitively plausible asa seat of qualia, least of all a brain Since weknow that we are brain-headed systems, and thatwe have qualia, we know that brain-headed sys-tems can have qualia. So even though we have notheory of qualia which explains how this ispossible,we have overwhelming reason to disregard what-

Approaching Consciousness 41

eveiprima facie doubt there is about the qualia ofbrain-headed systems" (Block 1978, p. 281).

As a consequence of this kind of general doubtabout physicalism, the scenario involving beingsphysiologically and behaviorally similar to us,perhaps even identical down to the last molecularstructure and behavioral trait, who nonethelesslack qualia altogether, is considered a genuinetheoretical possibility. This step brings us to thedebate on the notion of zombies and the doctrineof epiphenomenalism.

XVm Epiphenomenalism and the Possibility ofZombies

Consciousness epiphenomenalism is the viewthat (phenomenal) consciousness has no causalpowers and hence exhibits no effects in the world,though it may be the effect of some other causeitself. This doctrine and the possibility of zombiesare closely related. If consciousness is an epi-phenomenon, that is, not essentially linked tocausal processes, or is only a recipient of but not acontributor to effects in a causal network, thenthere exists the possibility that the same organismthat is taken to possess consciousness could begoing through the very same mentations and be-havior even if it had no phenomenal conscious-ness at all. Subtract away the consciousness, andyou still get the same beliefs, desires, motives,preferences, reasoning capacities, and behavior inthe organism. But what you get is a zombie. Itspains, tickles, and itches are all "ersatz." Thezombie does not feel anything, even if it thinksand acts as if it does. Its experiences lack thequalitative feels altogether. There is nothing it islike to be it.11

Put differently, zombiehood becomes a pos-sibility only under a view that accords withepiphenomenalism. If we maintain that con-sciousness has causal powers, then the absence ofconsciousness in my zombie twin, which is iden-tical to me in every other respect, would makesome difference. But by stipulation, there is no

difference whatsoever between persons and theirzombie twins except the fact that the latter lackconsciousness. Hence, denying epiphenomenal-ism would also block the possibility of zombie-hood. That is, if we accept that consciousness hascausal powers, then my zombie twin cannot exist,even as a genuine theoretical creature.

The doctrine of epiphenomenalism has a deep-rooted history. The philosophers and the psy-chologists of the nineteenth century hotly debatedwhether consciousness was part and parcel of thecausal network that was responsible for the deci-sions we make, actions we take, and so forth orwhether it was just an idle spectator, riding alongthe causal processes, perhaps being caused bythem, but without exerting any causal effect onthose processes itself. Perhaps, the idea was, weare all automata, since all of our mental life andbehavior seem to be determined by our nervoussystems, in a purely mechanical framework, withno respectable place in it for consciousness.78

Thomas Huxley was one of the most influentialadvocates of such a thesis, known as the autom-aton theory of consciousness. The thesis was firstformulated to apply to animals, in perfect agree-ment with Cartesian intuitions. Huxley put thematter as follows: "The consciousness of bruteswould appear to be related to the mechanism oftheir body simply as a collateral product of itsworking, and to be as completely without anypower of modifying that working as the steamwhistle which accompanies the work of a loco-motive engine is without influence upon its ma-chinery" (Huxley 1901, p. 240). But, of course,the real target was human beings and the natureof human consciousness. This is where Huxley'sautomaton theory differed with Descartes's in-teractionist dualism. Huxley's account of the"brutes" was just a lead to make the same pointfor humans: "The argumentation which applies

to brutes holds equally good of men It seemsto me that in men, as in brutes, there is no proofthat any state of consciousness is the cause ofchange in the motion of the matter of the organ-ism" (pp. 243-244).79

Guven Guzeldere 42

In Huxley, consciousness plays no contributoryrole in the causal chains that take place in thenervous systems that totally determine the be-havior of an organism; it only gets affected by theneural interactions. In contrast, Descartes's ideaof consciousness was one of an equally causallyefficacious parameter in the formula of mind-body interaction. As much as Descartes isthought to be the founder of interactionism,Huxley can be thought of as having laid outa clear foundation for epiphenomenalism withrespect to the mind. The fundamental ideaabout epiphenomenalism remained intact untilthe present day, but what was then dubbed the"Automaton Theory" has been transformed intothe "Problem of Zombies" in contemporary lit-erature. Of course, it is important to note thateven if we establish that it is the truth of someversion of epiphenomenalism that makes zom-biehood a possibility, there remain important is-sues about what the nature of this possibility is,for example, whether it is empirical, metaphy-sical, or conceptual. These are subtle issues that Icannot do justice to in the limited space here.Hence, rather than pursuing this line further, Iwill step back once again and examine how thebackground conditions for bringing the meta-physical disagreement on the possibility of zom-biehood (just like the disagreement on the statusof phenomenal consciousness) can be brought toa settlement.80

XIX Stalemate: How to Settle the PhenomenalConsciousness Dispute?

There are a variety of positions on the ontologicalstatus of phenomenal consciousness in the liter-ature, all the way from substance dualism toproperty dualism, to reductionism (via someform of identity thesis), to eliminativism (usuallycoupled with some kind of antirealist stance), torepresentationalism (maintaining a naturalizedrealism). However, the literature does not containany knock-down argument that would convince

a "friend of phenomenal consciousness" to areconciliatory middle ground with a "qualiaskeptic." Most often, the disagreement betweenthe two parties comes down, for each side, to thecharge of begging the question against the other.The eliminativists charge the defenders of phe-nomenal consciousness with believing in a fictionand creating a philosophical problem out of it. Inreturn, the eliminativists get charged with holdingthe most preposterous philosophical fancy fordenying their opponents' characterization ofqualia.

As an example, consider Daniel Dennett, whois convinced that the notion of qualia "fostersnothing but confusion, and refers in the end tono properties or features at all" (Dennett 1988,p. 49). Ned Block, as a representative of the otherside of the spectrum, accuses Dennett of beggingthe question against (the existence of) phenom-enal consciousness (Block 1993, 1995). Interest-ingly, the dialectic of the debate seems to be atan impossible impasse: the contention is at thefundamental level of taking for granted versusdenying the existence of a feature of mentalitythat can at best be defined ostensively. Friendsof qualia, as exemplified by Block, claim thatthere is obviously something in their mental lifethat can be theorized about under the name"phenomenal consciousness," while the qualiaskeptics, as exemplified by Dennett, state thatthere is no such thing to point at in their ownexperience.81

This is unfortunately the kind of philosophicaljunction at which most worthy disagreements hitrock bottom. Neither side is willing to concedetheir own point, and moreover neither side seemsto have any way of demonstrating the validity oftheir claim. In another statement on the side ofthe friends of phenomenal consciousness, JohnSearle satirically asks: "How, for example, wouldone go about refuting the view that consciousnessdoes not exist? Should I pinch its adherents to re-mind them that they are conscious? Should Ipinch myself and report the results in the Journalof Philosophy?' (Searle 1992, p. 8). In contrast,

Approaching Consciousness 43

Dennett declares: "I cannot prove that no suchsort of consciousness exists. I also cannot provethat gremlins don't exist. The best I can do is toshow that there is no respectable motivation forbelieving in it" (Dennett 1991, p. 406).

Of course, the situation on the whole (and theparticular state-of-the-art philosophical under-standing of the mind-body problem we havearrived at after twenty-five hundred years ofpondering) is more nuanced than I have justsketched. For instance, the eliminativist positionhas more resourceful ways of undermining beliefin qualia, and the "friends of qualia" have in-tuitively appealing conceptual tools on their side,such as the absent and inverted qualia puzzles andtheknowledgeargumentNonetheless, neither sidecan help finding the other's theoretical maneuversequally unconvincing.

The eliminativist strategy largely depends onthe deconstruction of the concept of phenomenalconsciousness, thus revealing theoretical tensionsinternal to it. In different ways, both DanielDennett and Richard Rorty take this approach(Dennett 1988; Rorty 1979). Dennett does thisby providing a number of "intuition pumps," de-signed to show that our pretheoretical intuitionsabout phenomenal consciousness are far frombeing reliable and sound. On the contrary, asDennett attempts to show, our commonsensegrasp of the facts about phenomenal conscious-ness can result in such conceptual dilemmas thatit might be a better strategy to abandon any talkabout phenomenal properties altogether. Dennettis quite straightforward in this approach; he says:"I want to make it just as uncomfortable foranyone to talk of qualia—or 'raw feels' or 'phe-nomenal properties' or 'subjective and intrinsicproperties' or 'the qualitative character' or expe-rience—with the standard presumption that they,and everyone else, knows what on earth they aretalking about" (Dennett 1988, p. 43).

If there indeed is a conceptual disarray sur-rounding the notion of phenomenal conscious-ness, it seems only fair to demand from those who

take the idea of phenomenal consciousness seri-ously and use it as a fundamental theoretical tenetto come up with a clarified conceptual network ofterms that all go along with the umbrella term ofphenomenal consciousness. On the other hand,there may be good reasons to respect the words ofthe supporters of phenomenal consciousness thatthe only definitional way open to them is by os-tension. Being unable to provide a nonostensivedefinition is not, by itself, sufficient reason topronounce the notion of phenomenal conscious-ness as theoretically illegitimate, and therebypromote its complete abandonment. The meritsor shortcomings of an ostensive definition in re-vealing the essence of a phenomenon have to bejudged on its own ground, in virtue of its successin providing conceptual clarity and theoreticalagreement in the relevant discussions.

It should be acknowledged, however, thatthe strategy of revealing essences by means of"pointing" has not delivered any kind of agree-ment with respect to phenomenal consciousnessthus far.82 The same problem appears even moreacutely in thinking about the possibility of zom-bies. How can you tell a zombie from a non-zombie, someone who has absent qualia fromsomeone whose qualia are intact? If zombiehoodis a possibility, not only could your closest friendturn out to be a zombie, without anyone'sknowledge or awareness, so could you, and notknow it yourself. Zombiehood brings with it notonly the problem of other minds, and thus third-person skepticism, but first-person skepticism aswell. If you, the reader of these lines, suddenlyturned into a zombie, no one would notice anydifference, and in a significant sense of "notic-ing," neither would you. Remember that know-ing, judging, thinking, and being aware of—ina nonphenomenal sense—are all capabilitiesgranted to a zombie, and furthermore, "there isno need to invoke qualia in the explanation ofhow we ascribe mental states to ourselves [be-cause a zombie] after all, ascribes himself thesame qualia; it's just that he's wrong about it"

Guven Giizeldere 44

(Chahners 1993; Chalmers 1996 embraces theconsequences of this result under the title "theparadox of phenomenal judgement").

Thus, to the extent that "seemings" of yourown phenomenal states are constituted by self-ascriptive judgments, beliefs, thoughts, memo-ries, expectations, and so forth about those states(and no doubt there is a significant extent towhich such seemings are so constituted), it wouldbe warranted to say that your inner life wouldcontinue to seem the same to you, despite the factthat you would cease to have any genuine phe-nomenal states once you turned into a zombie.Put differently, according to the zombie hypoth-esis, you could now be "hallucinating" your ownphenomenology. You would, ex hypothesi, beconfidently judging that nothing changed in yourinner life, and be mistaken about it, but youwould never be able to find this out. Indeed, forall you know, your present existence on earthcould be continuing in alternating phases ofhumanhood versus zombiehood, switching everyother minute. Hmm

Coming back to a distinction I introduced atthe beginning of this chapter, it is also importantto note that the segregationist intuition plays intothe hands of epiphenomenalism and the possi-bility of zombiehood. Characterizing conscious-ness in essentially noncausal (nonfunctional,nonrepresentational) terms leaves no epistemichook for making it possible to detect the presenceor absence of phenomenal consciousness, evenfrom a first-person perspective.

But if we are to accept the possibility that anyone of us can be a zombie and not know it, that is,if any one of us can be totally lacking phenomenalconsciousness while not being able to find outabout it, how can we possibly expect a stalemateover the ontology of phenomenon consciousnessto be resolved, while fundamentally relying onostention for its presence?

The stalemate seems unresolvable under theproposed terms. Perhaps, then, there is somethingfundamentally misleading here, and it is time tostart looking for ways of building an alternative

conception of phenomenal consciousness basedon the integrationist intuition—not one that elim-inates phenomenal consciousness but not onethat renders it completely inefficacious, or opaqueeven from the first-person perspective either.Rather, the conception should take the first-per-son characterization of experience seriously andsupport the commonsense understanding of phe-nomenal consciousness.

The bottom line of what seems most unaccep-table here is the fact that under a framework thatallows for the possibility of zombies, phenom-enal consciousness is to be regarded as makingno difference, in an epistemically significantsense, even in the first person. That is, a well-intended effort to promote phenomenal con-sciousness by conceptually separating it from allcausal and representational properties actuallyyields a position with the opposite theoreticalconsequence: the demotion of phenomenal con-sciousness to a ghostly existence. If it is this sortof a property that we talk about when we con-sider phenomenal consciousness, would we reallylose much (anything) by doing away with it?83

And if we are committed to (internal) "pointing"as the only reliable way to verify the existenceof phenomenal consciousness, the knowledgeof the absence or presence of which is hiddeneven from the first-person perspective, that is,to the person who has it, should we perhapsnot reconsider our very concept of phenomenalconsciousness?

XX In Place of a Conclusion

I would like to leave the reader with the twoquestions I just posed above. But let me also givea brief recapitulation and try to tie some of theloose ends.

I started by noting an epistemological asym-metry in the way one has access to (the factsabout) one's own experiences versus those ofothers. This asymmetry leads us to the notion ofperspectivity, something quite unique to (the

Approaching Consciousness 45

study of) consciousness, and to the distinctionbetween first-person and third-person points ofview. This duality between points of view withrespect to accessing facts about experiences alsomanifests itself in a duality in characterizing con-sciousness, in causal versus phenomenal terms.

Taking these characterizations as mutually ex-clusive, based on the presumption that phenom-enal consciousness is essentially phenomenal andessentially noncausal, yields what I called thesegregationist intuition. Opposing it is the in-tegrationist intuition, which maintains that phe-nomenal consciousness can only be characterizedby means of all causal, functional, or repre-sentational elements. Given these two intuitions,I briefly argued that the former plays into thehands of the doctrine of epiphenomenalism,which, when combined with considerations fromthe possibility of absent qualia and zombiehood,leads us into untenable and noncommonsensicalconceptions of phenomenal consciousness. This isgood evidence, on the other hand, to takethe latter seriously and use it as the pretheore-tical basis in reexamining our notion of phenom-enal consciousness.84'

Another domain where the epistemic elementof perspectivity figures in is the problem of theexplanatory gap and the question of the "hardproblem" of consciousness. There seems to bean unbridged gap in the explanation of howphysical embodiment and conscious experienceare linked. The former is in general given a causalcharacterization from a third-person perspective,the latter a phenomenal characterization in first-person terms. It seems that under our existingconceptual scheme, bolstered by the segregation-ist intuition, the "hard problem" just does not,and cannot, lend itself to a solution.

What is important to note here is that the ex-planatory gap, in the way it is set up, stems froman epistemological issue. The further questionthat remains is whether its persistence is goodenough evidence to yield ontological conclusions.Some think yes; introducing an "extra ingredient"into the picture and thus augmenting one's on-

tology to include consciousness as a fundamentalelement could indeed relieve one of the naggingproblem of having to bridge mechanism and ex-perience (by emergence, reduction, elimination,and so forth) or vice versa. Others think that theepistemological nature of the explanatory gapdoes not warrant ontological conclusions. Al-though I cannot go into this debate in any furtherdetail here, I too would like to lend my support tothis latter position. True, in the presence of theexplanatory gap, the link between experience andits physical underpinnings may seem arbitrary,but I think that the decision to introduce a newfundamental element into the ontology, basedon the explanatory gap, seems equally arbitraryas well. At least I fail to see how the moststeadfast belief in a thus-expanded new ontol-ogy would leave one less puzzled about justhow consciousness relates to its physical under-pinnings, hence diminishing the explanatory gapand explaining away the further-How question.What seems the most promising direction inreapproaching consciousness and pursuing itsdeep-rooted problems in the present era involvesrethinking epistemology and conceptual schemes(as opposed to a priori postulation of new ontol-ogy) to yield a cross-fertilization of the first-person and third-person perspectives, whichwould allow theorizing about how causal efficacyfigures in how consciousness feels, and how phe-nomenal quality relates to what consciousnessdoes.

In any case, at present it just does not seem as ifthere is a way to settle the dispute decisively aboutthe "hard problem" or the consequences of theexplanatory gap. And given the troublesomestalemate over the ontological nature of phe-nomenal consciousness, we seem to be not quitenear a satisfactory understanding of the phenom-enon. If anything, the survey of the contemporaryissues and current debates surrounding con-sciousness points to a need for a careful re-examination of our pretheoretical intuitions andconceptual foundations on which to build betteraccounts of consciousness. It also seems probable

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that an entirely satisfactory understanding of con-sciousness will be possible, if at all, only when theconstitutive elements of a more comprehensiveframework, in which consciousness needs to betheoretically situated, are themselves better un-derstood. And these elements include nothing lessthan causality, representation, indexicality, andpersonhood, and especially the deep-rooted di-chotomies between mental and physical, and sub-jective and objective. As such, it is probablyreasonable to assume, as Jerry Fodor likes toprognosticate regarding a complete account ofrationality, that "no such theory will be availableby this time next week."85

This being said, I conclude on a more positivenote. Presently, there is an impressive rising tideof interest in the study of consciousness, andthanks to recent advances in interdisciplinaryresearch, we are now in a better position topenetrate the mysteries of this great intellectualfrontier. By integrating methodologies and per-spectives from psychology, philosophy, neuro-science, cognitive science, and other disciplinesand by keeping a mindful eye on the successes andfailures of the past, we should be able to reach ahigher vantage point and to see more broadly andmore deeply than has ever before been possible.These are very exciting times for thinking aboutconsciousness.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my coeditors, Ned Blockand Owen Flanagan, for many helpful sugges-tions. Special thanks to Fred Dretske, John Perry,Roger Shepard, Brian C. Smith, and again toOwen Flanagan, for teaching me what I neededto know to write this chapter, and for their sup-port throughout the preparation of this book.

Notes

1. The scope of my work has been limited to the philo-sophical and scientific paradigms rooted in Western in-

tellectual history and, more specifically, in the analytictradition. Obviously, there is a wealth of fascinating is-sues, questions, and approaches concerning conscious-ness that lie outside this limited scope. This chaptershould not be taken as an attempt to give an exhaustivesurvey of all aspects of consciousness even within itsown scope, and certainly not as embodying the granderambition of covering all paradigms of the study ofconsciousness.

2. The results of this effort were discussed as part ofa workshop attended by anesthesiologists, neuro-physiologists, psychologists, and medicolegal experts inCardiff, United Kingdom, in 1986. Rosen and Lunn(1987) is an outcome of this workshop.

3. Michenfelder makes the same point in another way,in concluding, "Thus there are a variety of end pointsone might choose to answer the question 'When isthe brain anesthetized?' and there is no obvious basisfor selecting one over another" (Michenfelder 1988,p. 36). However, cf. Nikolinakos (1994) for an opti-mistic outlook on the role of consciousness in anes-thesia research. See, also, Flohr (1995) for aninformation-theoretic model of anesthesia where the"threshold of consciousness" is determined in terms ofthe brain's representational activity.

4. If we go down the phylogenetic ladder—for instance,from humans all the way to amoebae—where are we tocut the line and determine the bounds of the charmedcircle to which only those who possess consciousnesscan belong? (The metaphor of the "charmed circle" isfrom Dennett 1987, p. 161.) Chimps, dogs, spiders?What about infants, fetuses, or comatose patients? Onthe other hand, if we insist on experience of sensations,itches, and tingles as necessary components of con-sciousness, is there any principled reason for stopingshort of requiring something further, such as a con-ceptual overlay that makes possible one's situatedawareness of one's own place and relations with others(not to talk of the Cartesian res cogitans), as essential tothe nature of consciousness? The answers to these ques-tions are all up for theoretical grabs.

It is also sociologically interesting to look at patternsin the common sense attributions of various mentalabilities to various organisms. In contrast to widelydissenting opinions on the attribution of consciousnessto others, there does not seem to be such a significantvariation in pretheoretic intuitions with regard to attri-butions of intelligence, or perceptual capabilities. Apreliminary survey study conducted on approximately

Approaching Consciousness 47

one hundred Stanford students and faculty, based on atwo-dimensional matrix of mental attributes (e.g., theability to perceive, the ability to learn, intelligence,consciousness) versus kinds of organisms (e.g., proto-zoa, spiders, chimpanzees, humans) seemed to indicatea bias in our attributions toward reserving conscious-ness most exclusively for ourselves, while being moregenerous with the attributions of other mental abilities.(Guzeldere 1993).

5. This is, it turns out, a very tricky question. On theone hand, patients with only cortical brain damagemake a striking contrast with those who further lack afunctional brainstem. For instance, a report on the di-agnosis of death, prepared by the President's Commis-sion, makes the following statement:

The startling contrast between bodies lacking allbrain functions and patients with intact brain stems(despite severe neocortical damage) manifests [atremendous difference with respect to responsive-ness, and hence the attribute of life]. The former liewith fixed pupils, motionless except for the chestmovements produced by their respirators. The lattercan not only breathe, metabolize, maintain temper-ature and blood pressure, and so forth, on their own,but also sigh, yawn, track light with their eyes, andreact to pain or reflex stimulation.

On the other hand, the commission shies away fromreaching any conclusion with respect to the absence orpresence of consciousness in patients of either kind: "Itis not known which portions of the brain are responsiblefor cognition and consciousness; what little is knownpoints to substantial interconnection among the brainstem, subcortical structures, and the neocortex" (Presi-dent's Commission 1981, quoted in Capron 1988, pp.161,160, respectively).

Perhaps it is altogether misleading to think of thepresence of consciousness in a binary fashion. It mightbe necessary to talk about degrees of consciousness,which could allow one to say that normal human beingsare "more conscious" than those with brain damage,the brain-damaged patients more than those without abrainstem, and so forth.

6. Even though McGinn (1989) cites Julian Huxley asthe author of this by now very popular, colorful quote(with no source), the credit belongs to T. H. Huxley(Julian Huxley's grandfather). In full, it reads: "Butwhat consciousness is, we know not; and how it is thatanything so remarkable as a state of consciousness

comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, isjust as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinwhen Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the story, or as anyother ultimate fact of nature" (Huxley 1866, 193). In-terestingly, Huxley seems to have removed the referenceto the Djin (as well as Aladdin's lamp) in the later edi-tions of this book. For instance, in the 1876 edition, thesame passage appears as: "But what consciousness is,we know not; and how it is that anything so remarkableas a state of consciousness comes about as the result ofirritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as anyother ultimate fact of nature" (p. 188). Too bad the Djinis no longer around, for we could perhaps have wishedfrom it to tell us if we would ever be able to solve themind-body problem.

7. There is a longer passage in Tyndall's "ScientificRealism" where he addresses the mind-body problemin length, and concludes, in agreement with McGinn(though in 1868) that it is "as insoluble, in its modernform, as it was in the prescientific ages." Because thepoints Tyndall touches upon are so remarkably close tothe contemporary formulations of the issues debated inthe literature under the labels "explanatory gap" andthe "hard problem" (e.g., the nature of the explanationbetween mind and body as opposed to other physicalphenomena; the prospects for the mind-body problemupon reaching a fully advanced neuroscientific under-standing of the brain; and the status of possible corre-lation-based accounts of consciousness), I quote thispassage here in its entirety. (A more detailed discussionfollows in section XIV.)

The relation of physics to consciousness being thusinvariable, it follows that, given the state of thebrain, the corresponding thought or feeling might beinferred: or, given the thought or feeling, the corre-sponding state of the brain might be inferred. Buthow inferred? It would be at bottom not a case oflogical inference at all, but of empirical association.You may reply, that many of the inferences of sci-ence are of this character—the inference, for exam-ple, that an electric current, of a given direction, willdeflect a magnetic needle in a definite way. But thecases differ in this, that the passage from the currentto the needle, if not demonstrable, is conceivable,and that we entertain no doubt as to the final me-chanical solution of the problem. But the passagefrom the physics of the brain to the correspondingfacts of consciousness is inconceivable as a result ofmechanics.

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Granted that a definite thought, and a definite mo-lecular action in the brain, occur simultaneously; wedo not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparentlyany rudiment of the organ, which would enable usto pass, by a process of reasoning, from the oneto the other. They appear together, but we do notknow why. Were our minds and senses so expanded,strengthened, and illuminated, as to enable us tosee and feel the very molecules of the brain; werewe capable of following all their motions, all theirgroupings, all their electrical discharges, if suchthere be; and were we intimately acquainted withthe corresponding states of thought and feeling, weshould be as far as ever from the solution of theproblem, 'How are these physical processes con-nected with the facts of consciousness?'. The chasmbetween the two classes of phenomena would stillremain intellectually impassable.

Let the consciousness of love, for example, be asso-ciated with a right-handed spiral motion of the mole-cules of the brain, and the consciousness of hate witha left-handed spiral motion. We should then know,when we love, that the motion is in one direction,and, when we hate, that the motion is in the other;but the 'WHY?' would remain as unanswerable asbefore. (Tyndall 1868, pp. 86-87)

It is worth noting that equally dissenting opinionswere also available at the time. For instance, Huxley(1901) states: "I hold, with the Materialist, that thehuman body, like all living bodies, is a machine, all op-erations of which, sooner or later, be explained onphysical principles. I believe that we shall, sooner orlater, arrive at a mechanical equivalent of conscious-ness, just as we have arrived at a mechanical equivalentof heat" (p. 191).

8. For a materialist response to Adams, see Lewis(1995).

9. Antecedents of McGinn's view can be found inNagel's work in several places, although Nagel onlypoints out the possibility of McGinn's position with-out committing himself to it. For instance, he says:

We cannot directly see a necessary connection, ifthere is one, between phenomenological pain and aphysiologically described brain state any more thanwe can directly see the necessary connection betweenincrease in temperature and pressure of a gas at aconstant volume. In the latter case the necessity of

the connection becomes clear only when we descendto the level of molecular description: till then it ap-pears as a contingent correlation. In the psycho-physical case we have no idea whether there is such adeeper level or what it could be; but even if there is,the possibility that pain might be necessarily con-nected with a brain state at this deeper level doesnot permit us to conclude that pain might be di-rectly analyzable in physical or even topic-neutralterms Even if such a deeper level existed, wemight be permanently blocked from a general under-standing of it. (Nagel 1986, pp. 48-49; my em-

The possibility of a permanent cognitive closure inhumans with regard to the understanding of the mind-body relation is an intriguing idea. But when it comesto taking this possibility as a statement of certainty, asMcGinn does, it seems fair to question what warrantsthis conviction, especially in the absence of empiricallygrounded reasons. In particular, there is a curious ten-sion between McGinn's confidence, on one hand, of hisown cognitive ability to assert such a sweeping verdicton behalf of all human beings (at present as well as inthe foreseeable future), and the aim of his argument, onthe other hand, which ultimately strives to attenuateconfidence in the powers of human cognitive abilities tosolve the mind-body problem.

Put differently, McGinn wants his readers to simul-taneously believe, as a result of bis largely a priori rea-soning, both that our cognitive abilities are limited toforever fall short of bringing a solution to the mind-body problem, and that they are nonetheless sufficientlypowerful to foresee the exploratory limits of the humanmind vis-a-vis the very same issue. By the same kind ofreasoning, isn't there equally good reason to think, onewonders, that the opposite claim might rather be true—that it is more likely (or, at least not less likely) that wewill someday come to a satisfactory understanding ofthe nature of the mind-body relation than it is thatwe will ever be able to determine how far the humanunderstanding will extend? (For a thorough critiqueof McGinn's position, see Flanagan (1992), chap. 6.)10. It is actually not a straightforward matter to give aprecise definition of naturalism, and I will not attemptone here. Roughly speaking, I take "naturalism" to de-note the view that everything is composed of fun-damental entities recognized by the natural sciences(ontological dimension), and possibly that the accept-

Approaching Consciousness 49

able methods of theorizing about these entities are thosecommensurable with methods employed in the naturalsciences (methodological dimension). For a compre-hensive overview of naturalistic approaches in epis-temology and philosophy of science in the twentiethcentury, see Kitcher (1992); for a recent analysis of thepresent status of naturalism, see Stroud (1996).

In philosophy mind, naturalism is often regarded as aclose ally of two related but not identical views, materi-alism and physicalism, but there are exceptions. See, forinstance, Post (1987) for a detailed attempt to lay out afully naturalist but nonreductive metaphysics that iscommitted to a monism of entities with a pluralism ofirreducible "emergent" properties. See also Chalmers(1996) for a somewhat similar view he calls "naturalisticdualism." For a thorough examination of the physical-ist program, compare Poland (1994); for contemporaryobjections to physicalism, see Robinson (1993).

11. As it happens. Miller is not the first one to thinkabout placing a ban on "consciousness" in order to helpsort out the tangles in related terminologies. Here is aquote from the turn of the century, by philosopher andWilliam James scholar Ralph Barton Perry (1904):"Were the use of the term 'consciousness' to be for-bidden for a season, contemporary thought would be setfor the wholesome task of discovering more definiteterms with which to replace it, and a very considerableamount of convenient mystery would be dissipated.There is no philosophical term at once so popular andso devoid of standard meaning Consciousness com-prises everything that is, and indefinitely much mote. Itis small wonder that the definition of it is little at-tempted" (p. 282). Hence, according to Perry, it is not(only) the ubiquitous familiarity with consciousness thatrenders attempts to give it a precise characterization ordefinition unnecessary; the reason is rather the difficultyof the analytic task involved in doing so.

12. A related term in Latin was conscientia, whichranliterally be translated as "knowledge with," which aj$^peared in English and in French as "conscience.""Conscience" also had, and still has, a significant eth-ical aspect, which is reflected in another OED entry:"Internal knowledge, especially of one's own innocence,guilt, deficiencies, etc." (Cf. Baldwin 1901). Nonethe-less, consciousness and conscience have been separatewords with quite distinct meanings in English, at leastsince the time of Locke. In contrast, there is only oneword in Romance languages like French {conscience)

and Italian (coscienza) that carries both meanings. Out-side the boundaries of Indo-European languages, theterm corresponding to consciousness in, say, Turkish—an Altaic language—carries a political, but not reallyethical, connotation, in addition to the common psy-chological usage (bilinf or suur, as opposed to vicdan).In any case, this little linguistic excursion gives no evi-dence of a semantic taxonomy that systematically re-lates to one based on language families.13. The following quotation, taken from the circleswhere the concern with consciousness has to do pri-marily with the social rather than the psychologicalsense highlights this distinction quite eloquently:

' When you speak of "consciousness," you do not re-fer to the moral conscious: the very rigor of yourmethods ensures that you do not leave the strictlyscientific domain which belong to you. What youhave in mind exclusively is the faculty of perceivingand of reacting to perception, that is to say, the psy-chological concept which constitutes one of theaccepted meanings of the word "consciousness."(Pope Paul VI, addressing a gathering of scientistsfor the conference Brain and Conscious Experiencein Rome in 1964; quoted in Kanellakos and Lukas1974, p. i)

14. This distinction is not uncontested, however. Some,especially in continental philosophy, think that there isno intransitive sense of consciousness: all conscious-ness is consciousness of. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example,is a typical representative of this view: "We establishthe necessity for consciousness to be consciousness ofsomething. In fact it is by means of that of which it isconscious that consciousness distinguishes itself in itsown eyes and that it can be self-consciousness; a con-sciousness which would not be consciousness (of)something would be consciousness (of) nothing. (Sartre1956, p. 173). The origins of this kind of an essentiallyintentional construal of consciousness goes back to Ed-mund Husserl's work from which Sartre adopted hisview, most likely Ideas (Husserl 1913). (I thank RonBrady for this pointer.)

15. See Guzeldere (1996) for an analysis of how thecreature and state senses of consciousness can be con-nected by means of the "Introspective Link Principle,"yielding various "higher-order monitoring" concep-tions of consciousness. For other recent attempts todistinguish different senses of consciousness and sort

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out some definitional issues, see Lycan (1987, preface;1997b, chap. 1), Goldman (1993), and Natsoulas (1983,1986).

16. My decision to address problems that bear only onthe psychological sense of consciousness should not betaken to imply that the two subcategories are not relatedin interesting ways. In fact, it seems a philosophicallysignificant task to investigate the nature of the relationbetween the social and the psychological senses of con-sciousness—is it something more like a genus-speciesrelation, or one of family resemblance, or somethingcompletely unique? It can also be questioned whetherone can fruitfully give an analysis of one of these halveswhile eschewing the other. Nonetheless, for the pur-poses of this chapter, I opt for focusing solely on thepsychological sense of consciousness. Even if it may beimpossible to fully understand the social sense of con-sciousness without referring to the psychological sense,or vice versa, due to the conceptual disarray surround-ing the term "consciousness" such an analytic strategyseems essential as a first step.

17. For an exploration of the distinction between epis-temological and ontological considerations, as well asthe question of whether a set of criteria to distinguishthe mental in general from the physical can be coher-ently formulated, see among others Rorty (1970a,1970b) and Kim (1972).

18. The status of the mind-body problem in ancientGreek philosophy is also worth a visit. It is generallyargued that there is no single term in ancient Greek thatreflects the counterpart of the Cartesian/Lockean con-ception of consciousness, and that nothing like the con-temporary debates on the mind-body problem or theproblem of consciousness was ever in their horizon. Forinstance, Matson (1966) claims that "the Greeks had nomind-body problem" (p. 101), and Wilkes (1995) arguesthat "[Aristotle] paid absolutely no attention to con-sciousness per se" (p. 122). Similarly, Hamlyn (1968a)states: "There is an almost total neglect of any problemarising from psycho-physical dualism and the facts ofconsciousness. Such problems do not seem to arise forhim. The reason appears to be that concepts like that ofconsciousness do not figure in his conceptual scheme atall; they play no part in his analysis of perception,thought, etc. (Nor do they play any significant role inGreek thought in general.) It is this perhaps that giveshis definition of the soul itself a certain inadequacy forthe modern reader" (p. xiii). See also Kahn (1966),Hamlyn (1968b), and Wilkes (1988) for similar views.

However, this view is not uncontested. For instance,Alastair Hannay (1990) suggests that in Greek philoso-phy one can find, contrary to the skepticism expressedabove, something like a distinction between the socialand psychological senses of consciousness. According toHannay, Greeks distinguished between synekksis (pri-marily ethical individual or shared knowledge) andsynaesthesia (Aristotle's variation of the "unity of ap-perception"), in much the same way as modern philos-ophy proceeded in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies. In alliance, Hardie (1976) argues againstMatson, Kahn, and Hamlyn, and states that "it is . . .paradoxical to suggest that Aristotle was unaware of themind-body problem" (p. 410). According to Hardie,Aristotle was "the first psychologist, and for him psy-chology without the conscious psuche would have beenHamlet without the Prince" (p. 405). Ostenfeld (1987)goes a step further, and claims that both Plato andAristotle were dealing with the mind-body problem inmuch the same sense Descartes did and we are. Thisdebate, so far as I can see, is far from resolved atpresent.

19. The debate about whether consciousness consists inthe higher-order awareness of first order mental states isvery much alive in the contemporary literature. Amongthose who defend this view, some take the higher-orderrepresentation to be some form of perception (for ex-ample, Armstrong 1980, Churchland 1988, Lycan1997), and others as some form of thought (for example,Rosenthal 1986, 1997; Carruthers 1989,1996). For cri-tiques, see Dretske (1993,1995) and Shoemaker (1994).Despite the fact that such higher-order awareness ac-counts of consciousness have many promising aspects,I have to'stop short of giving a proper exposition here.(A more detailed treatment of this approach can befound in Guzeldere 1995b.) I will also leave the dis-cussion of "self-consciousness" (which is sometimesunderwritten by such higher-order accounts) out of thescope of this chapter.

20. For Malebranche, although we can have a "clearidea" of our bodies, we cannot, unlike what Descartesbelieved, have a clear idea of our souls or minds. Putdifferently, we cannot know our minds through a clearidea; rather we know them "only through consciousnessor inner sensation" such as "pain, heat, color, and allother sensible qualities" (Malebranche 1923, Elucida-tion 11: Knowledge of the Soul, pp. 86-87). As such,Malebranche gives qualitative aspects of the mind amuch more central place in his theory, in contrast to the

Approaching Consciousness SI

Cartesian view. See Schmaltz (1996) for a thorough ac-count of Malebranche's philosophy of mind. (I thankTad Schmaltz for the relevant material and helpful dis-cussion on this issue.)

21. Labeling the seemingly opposing views of James of1890 and James of 1904 simply a "change of mind" isprobably too superficial a conclusion in terms of histor-ical scholarship, and not quite fair to James either. It isimportant to note that James's denouncement in thelatter work is of "consciousness as an entity" ratherthan the reality of "conscious states." Regarding con-sciousness as an "entity" has close connotations toCartesian substance dualism. Even though there is nostraightforward advancement of such a metaphysicalposition in the Principles of Psychology, James's posi-tion with respect to the ontology of consciousness is notentirely clear there. Hence it might be better to charac-terize his 1904 article as marking merely the abandon-ment of consciousness as a nonmaterial entity, notconsciousness per se as a subject matter. This inter-pretation is supported by James's own remark that hemeans to "deny that the word [consciousness] stands foran entity, but to insist most emphatically that it doesstand for a function" (James 1971, p. 4).

Even though this much seems quite straightforward,we are by no means faced with an unproblematic ac-count of consciousness. In fact, James never quite worksout the metaphysical presuppositions and consequencesof his view of characterizing consciousness as a func-tion, as opposed to an entity. Moreover, the ontologicalturn he takes toward "radical empiricism" at around thesame period as the publication of his "Does Conscious-ness Exist?" complicates matters. It is probably wellwarranted to remark that William James never helda long-standing metaphysical position with respectto consciousness void of internal tensions. At a cer-tain stage in his life, roughly midway between thepublication of the two above mentioned works, hewent so far as to defend the plausibility of the immor-tality of consciousness in an article titled "HumanImmortality," in the following words: "And whenfinally a brain stops acting altogether, or decays, thatspecial stream of consciousness which it subserved willvanish entirely from the natural world. But the sphere ofbeing that supplied the consciousness would still be in-tact; and in that more real world with which, even whilsthere, it was continuous, the consciousness might, inways unknown to us, continue still" (James 1956, pp. 17-18). Perhaps the historical fact of the matter regarding

James's attitude toward the metaphysics of conscious-ness is reflected most accurately in Gerald Myers's fol-lowing remark, from his extensive study of James's lifeand thought: "James wanted to hold that in one wayconsciousness does not exist, but that in another way itdoes; yet he was never able, even to his own satisfaction,to define the two ways clearly enough to show that theyare consistent rather than contradictory" (Myers 1986,p. 64). For related work, see among others Dewey(1940), Lovejoy (1963), and Reck (1972). (I thank DenisPhillips, Imants Barass, and Eugene Taylor for helpfulpointers and discussion on William James's views onconsciousness.)

22. The claim of introspectionism's being well estab-lished here refers not as much to the soundness of itsmethodology and theoretical grounding as to its perva-siveness and preeminence in the field of psychology as awhole. To see this, one only needs to survey the mono-lithic psychology literature of the few decades roughlybetween the end of nineteenth and the beginning of thetwentieth centuries: all major psychology journals areedited by the protagonists of the introspectionist school,all articles report studies involving introspection as theirprimary method, and so on. Ironically, the same ob-servation holds of the period that immediately follows(roughly from late 1910s to early 1960s), except withbehaviorism substituted for introspectionism.

It would be interesting to pursue the question ofwhether the fluctuation in James's life with respect toconsciousness occurred as a result of, or was influencedby, the general air of dissatisfaction with the internalconflicts of the introspectionist school toward the end ofits tenure, which led to behaviorism's rapid rise andtakeover of the intellectual landscape. Or was the influ-ence in the opposite direction? These are all intriguingquestions, but unfortunately they lie outside the scope ofthis chapter.

23. This is only one (as it happens, also historically themost significant) use of the word introspection. A num-ber of different phenomena have passed under the samename. For instance, toward the end of the last century,Brentano and Comte argued that introspection, as asecond-order mental act that gathers information aboutfirst-order sensations, was misconstrued. Mill andJames agreed and proposed a model of introspection asretrospection: the examination of one's own mentalhappenings retrospectively, through the medium ofmemory of the immediate past. (For details, see Lyons1986, chap 1.) A second, separate phenomenon that

Guven Guzeldere 52

made its way to the cognitive psychology literature inthe 1970s under the name introspection was the phe-nomenon of reasoning about the causes of one's ownbehavior, in terms of one's beliefs, desires, motivations,and so forth. (For a seminal article that piqued most ofthe initial interest in this literature, see Nisbett andWilson 1977.) In any case, my analysis deals with in-trospection only in the former sense.

24. Edwin Boring notes that no subject left WilhelmWundt's laboratory without having provided 10,000data points (Boring 1953, p. 172). William James hu-morously observes that if it had not been for the sus-tained patience and the inability to get bored of theleaders of introspectionism who came from the Ger-manic part of the continental Europe, the enterprise ofintrospectionism could have never endured. "Theymean business," James remarks, "not chivalry" (James1950, pp. 192-193).

25. The nature of the relation and the degree of influ-ence between positivism and behaviorism are not un-controversial. Even though it is generally taken forgranted that the two movements enjoyed a genuine allystatus, the details of this received view have recentlybeen contested by Laurence Smith. Smith claims, "Withtheir common intellectual background and orientation,behaviorism and logical positivism were naturally dis-posed to form some sort of alliance. But only after bothmovements were well under way was there any signif-icant interaction between them" (Smith 1986, p. 5; cf.the rest of his book for further details).

26. In all fairness I should add that behaviorism didmanage to bring in fresh air to psychology of the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries at a time whenan uncomfortable sense of containment within the rigidintrospectionist paradigm was rapidly growing. Therealization that psychology could employ nonhumansubjects and pursue research without being solely de-pendent on the linguistic data to be provided by trainedintrospectionists seemed, rightly, to open up new hori-zons. This should also explain, in part, the rather im-mediate success and popularity of behaviorism and thesymmetrically rapid fall of introspectionism. Unfor-tunately, as I will detail below, behaviorism turned outto constrict psychology into an even more rigid cast incomparison to its predecessor.

27. John Watson would not miss the chance to put anail in introspectionism's coffin by alluding to this con-troversy: "Psychology, as it is generally thought of, hassomething esoteric in its methods. If you fail to re-

produce my findings, it is not due to some fault in yourapparatus or in the control of your stimulus, but it is dueto the fact that your introspection is untrained. The at-tack is made upon the observer and not upon the ex-perimental setting" (Watson 1913, p. 163).

Interestingly, approximately two hundred years ear-lier, a similar debate had taken place between two em-piricist philosophers, Locke and Berkeley, on almostexactly the same issue. The question was whether therewere any "abstract ideas": ideas that are not of partic-ular things but of universal—"types" of particularthings. In the following quotation, notice that Berkeleyrests his challenge of Locke's position on this questionon exactly the same grounds that Titchener challengedKulpe: personal experience based on introspection.

If any man has the faculty of framing in his mindsuch an idea of a triangle as is here described, it is invain to pretend to dispute him out of it, nor would Igo about it. All I desire is that the reader would fullyand certainly inform himself whether he has such anidea or no. And this, methinks, can be no hard taskfor anyone to perform. What more easy than foranyone to look a little into his own thoughts, andthere try whether he has, or can attain to have, anidea that shall correspond with the description thatis here given of the general idea of a triangle, whichis "neither oblique nor rectangle, equilateral, equi-crural or scalenon, but all and none of these atonce"? (Berkeley 1977, pp. 13-14)

28. There is of course a third, unmentioned but impor-tant school of psychology that emerged during the pe-riod of transition from introspectionism to behaviorism:Gestalt psychology. The fact that a separate account ofGestalt psychology is not being provided here is cer-tainly not because it is intellectually unworthy of con-sideration. Quite the opposite, Gestaltists were verykeen about the reasons for introspectionism's failure,and they brought a fresh new perspective on the basis ofwhich a large number of facts in the psychophysics ofperception could be fruitfully reinterpreted. Nonethe-less, Gestalt psychology shared many of the same onto-logical assumptions with respect to consciousness andthe role of phenomenology in studying the mind withintrospectionism. As a result, as far as the history ofconsciousness in psychology research is concerned, itdoes not constitute the sort of sharp contrast that be-haviorism provides. Hence, the brief treatment

Finally, the emerging clinical wing of psychology, thepsychoanalytic school, also had its disagreements with

Approaching Consciousness 53

introspectionism, and it constituted the third distinctangle of attack alongside with behaviorism and Gestaltpsychology. Unfortunately, I cannot go into a detailedanalysis concerning these three movements here. For awell-documented historical account of introspectionismand the debates and movements that surrounded it, cf.the section on "Modern Experimental Psychology" inBoring (1929), as well as chapters 1 and 2 of Lyons(1986).

29. So much so that it is very rare, even today, to comeacross "consciousness" or "introspection" in anypsychology or cognitive science textbook, or even psy-chology dictionaries. See, for example, Corsini (1984)or Stillings et al. (1987), which contain no entries for"consciousness," "awareness," or "introspection."

30. Naturally, there were internal disagreements, andthus different schools, within Behaviorism, and not eachbrand of the doctrine was as hardheaded. Most notably,the analytical (logical) behaviorists (who were mostlyphilosophers, e.g., Hempel 1949) were interested in an-alyzing meanings of mental terms in a purely behavioralvocabulary, whereas the methodological behaviorists(who were mostly psychologists) wanted merely to re-strict their research to the study of publicly observablebehavior without having to attempt any conceptualanalysis or even deny the reality of the publicly un-observable mental phenomena.

For example, according to Edwin Holt (1914), "thetrue criterion of consciousness is not introspection, butspecific responsiveness" (p. 206). Since making be-havior the criterion of consciousness is not quite thesame as identifying the two, consciousness thus becomes"externalized" by means of a publicly observable mea-sure, but the metaphysical question of identity is leftopen. As such, the two phenomena could be said to becoexistent, as Holt (1915) acknowledges in a later work:"When one is conscious of a thing, one's movements arereadjusted to it, and to precisely those features of it ofwhich one is conscious. The two domains are cotermi-nous" (p. 172). Edward Tolman's position in his "ABehaviorist's Definition of Consciousness" (1927) isalso similar to Holt's in stopping short of advancing ametaphysical claim: "Whenever an organism at a givenmoment of stimulation shifts and there from beingready to respond in some relatively differentiated wayto being ready to respond in some relatively more dif-ferentiated way, there is consciousness" (p. 435). (Seealso Tolman 1967 and note 43 for his position with re-spect to the study of "raw feels" in psychology.)

In contrast, the ontological behaviorists were in favorof doing away with consciousness, or any aspect of themind, by identifying it with some piece of behavior. Forexample, Lashley (1923) maintained the following the-sis: "The conception of consciousness here advanced is,then, that of a complex integration and succession ofbodily activities which are closely related to or involvethe verbal and gestural mechanisms and hence mostfrequently come to social expression" (p. 341).

Although the assumptions of these three schools are,by and large, logically independent of one another,Watson (1913, 1970), an indoctrinated behaviorist,seems to have believed in all of them, arguing that thetime was ripe for psychology to discard all reference toconsciousness. It is no doubt that a Watsonian universewould make life much easier for philosophers and psy-chologists. It would, for instance, remove the epistemicduality in the study of consciousness by collapsing thedistinction between the first-person and third-personperspectives. Furthermore, by making consciousnessultimately an operationalized parameter in the domainof behavior, it would allow a set of behavioral criteria tosettle questions about who or what possesses creatureconsciousness. But, as is evident from the history ofpsychology, life is never easy in the domain of mind.Questions about consciousness remained a naggingissue during behaviorism's tenure, and they eventuallyled its prominent figures like B. F. Skinner to not onlyacknowledge the existence of the phenomenon, but alsoadopt a conciliatory position in his later works. For ex-ample, Skinner (1974), after stating that the commonconception of behaviorism as a school of thought that"ignored consciousness, feelings, and states of mind"was all wrong, concedes that the "early behavioristswasted a good deal of time, and confused an importantcentral issue, by attacking the introspective study ofmental life" (pp. 3-5).

Undoubtedly, consciousness was not the only factorthat brought the demise of behaviorism. A different lineof attack, for example, came from the quarters of new-born modern linguistics on the issue of explanation ofverbal behavior. In particular, Noam Chomsky's famousreview (1959) of Skinner (1957) is a milestone thatshook behaviorism (in psychology) in its foundations.For an influential critique of logical behaviorism (inphilosophy), see Putnam (1963).31. Of course, there were a few exceptions who spokeup while the reign of behaviorism was still tight andproved to be visionaries. Worth mentioning here is a

Guven Guzeldere 54

lengthy discussion Miller gave on consciousness in hisexcellent survey of psychology as early as 1962. It ispossible to recount even earlier attempts to break thesilence, and directly or indirectly talk about conscious-ness, especially in the fields of attention, learning, andcybernetics. Cf. Hebb (1949), Abramson (1951-55),Hilgard (1956), and Broadbent (1958). See also Hil-gard's remarks on this issue in his lucid survey, "Con-sciousness in Contemporary Psychology" (1980). Foran account of the "cognitive revolution" in psychology,see Baars (1985) and Hilgard (1987), chap. 7.

32. Years later, Alan Baddeley (1993), a prominentpsychologist who has devoted his career to the inves-tigation of memory, validates Mandler's insight in thefollowing words: "I am rather surprised to find myselfwriting about consciousness There are very goodreasons why the study of consciousness has been dis-cretely ignored by cognitive psychology during its earlyyears of development Why, then, have I changed mymind? In my own case, the strongest reason has comefrom the pressure of empirical evidence; I am an ex-perimental psychologist who uses empirical data todrive theory, and it has become increasingly difficult tohave a model of memory that is at all complete, withoutdirectly or indirectly including assumptions about con-sciousness" (pp. 11-13). (Note, by the way, that Bad-deley 1990—in many respects a very thorough book onmemory—contains no references to consciousness.)

33. The information-processing models of conscious-ness, although not the only game in town, are still verymuch alive today, in psychology as well as in philoso-phy. For instance, Dennett's central claim in his mostrecent Consciousness Explained is that "conscioushuman minds are more-or-less serial virtual machinesimplemented—inefficiently—on the parallel hardwarethat evolution has provided for us" (Dennett 1991,p. 218). See also Hofstadfer (1979), Hamad (1982), andSommerhof (1990, 1996) for theorizing about con-sciousness in computational and systems-analysis terms.However, information-processing models of the mind(and, a fortiori, of consciousness in particular) have notalways been everyone's favorite. For example HubertDreyfus, in his well-known critique of the research pro-gram and methodology of artificial intelligence, broughtthe whole information-processing approach under se-vere criticism (Dreyfus 1979, 1992, esp. chap. 4, "ThePsychological Assumption"). Another line of attackwas developed from neighboring quarters by philos-opher John Searle. In an essay that later became known

as the "Chinese room argument," Searle argued that noamount of information processing could alone providea system with original (as opposed to derivative, as-signed, etc.) semantics (Searle 1980). Dreyfus's critiquenever focused on consciousness per se, but Searle, in anewer work, deals exclusively with the problem of con-sciousness in cognitive science, and in general compu-tational paradigms (Searle 1992). In contrast, a rivalaccount of consciousness built entirely on computa-tional ideas can be found in JackendofT's Consciousnessand the Computational Mind (1987). For a predecessorof the information-processing accounts of conscious-ness, see Donald Hebb's The Organization of Behavior(1949), a work that came out of the behaviorist era butanticipated what was ahead with foresight: Hebb arguesto identify consciousness "theoretically with a certaindegree of complexity of phase sequence in which bothcentral and sensory facilitations merge, the central act-ing to reinforce now one class of sensory stimulations,now another" (p. 145).

34. Note, however, that a curious passage in Des-cartes's Principles of Philosophy suggests a theoreticalcommitment to something very much like Freud's un-conscious, which does not sit squarely with his explicitcommitment to the transparency of the mind:

The strange aversions of certain people that makethem unable to bear the smell of roses, the presenceof a cat, or the like, can readily be recognized as re-sulting simply from their having been greatly upsetby some such object in the early years of their lifeAnd the smell of roses may have caused severeheadache in a child when he was still in the cradle, ora cat may have terrified him without anyone notic-ing and without any memory of it remaining after-wards; and yet the idea of an aversion he then felt forthe roses or for the cat will remain imprinted on hisbrain till the end of his life (Descartes 1992), p. 195:Principles of Philosophy, pt. I, §9, AT, 429)

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any fur-ther elaboration of this idea in Descartes's writings,which would surely be relevant in better understandingthe nature of what seems to be an apparent theoreticaltension.

35. The controversy over the status of unconsciousmental states is multifaceted. Another staunch criticof the unconscious, though for reasons different fromTitcheners' (that have to do with his stance againstpanpsychic views of consciousness), was William

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James (1950a). He fretfully remarks: "The distinction. . . between the unconscious and the conscious being ofthe mental state ... is the sovereign means for be-lieving what one likes in psychology, and of turningwhat might become a science into a tumbling-groundfor whimsies" (p. 163). As discussed in section XI, adifferent line of objection is also raised, this time ina Cartesian spirit, by Searle (1992) and Strawson(1994).

Note also that in Titchener, talk about the uncon-scious has switched to talk about the subconscious, butthere is enough reason to think that nothing theoret-ically significant hangs on this implicit substitution. Thisterminological variation stems from the fact that Freudand his contemporary, Pierre Janet, had an initial dis-agreement that left them with two different terms {un-conscious and subconscious), and each one adopted andperpetually owned his own term with a vengeance. Butthis was more a result of personal quarrels between thetwo personalities than a genuine theoretical dissonanceon the nature and structure of that which is not con-scious. And so far as I can tell, there is no evidence thatTitchener's use of Janet's term, subconscious, ratherthan Freud's unconscious is the result of a "consciousdecision" and a theoretical commitment For an illumi-nating account of the relation between Freud and Janet,see Perry and Laurence (1984).

36. For an interesting discussion of the question ofwhether the Freudian unconscious is a "theoreticalconstruct" on a par with scientific theoretical entities,see Dilman (1972).

37. Note that over time, Freud grew dissatisfied withhis tripartite structure and eventually introduced thenew elements of the id, the ego, and the superego intothe picture:

In the further course of psycho-analytic work, how-ever, these distinctions (i.e., conscious, preconscious,and unconscious) have proved to be inadequate, andfor practical purposes, insufficient. This has beenclear in more ways than one; but the decisive in-stance is as follows. We have formed the idea that ineach individual there is a coherent organization ofmental processes; and we call this ego. (Freud 1962,p. 7)

Later Freud (1964) gives a schematic depiction of thestructure of consciousness, with the id, the ego, and thesuperego being "superimposed" on the classical tri-

partite division of the conscious, the preconscious, andthe unconscious.

38. Cf. John Kihlstrom's work for a cognitivist over-view of the various forms of the unconscious (e.g.,Kihlstrom 1984,1987).

39. For a thoughtful discussion of the theoretical issuesinvolved, see Reingold and Merikle (1990).

40. Another paradigm in contemporary psychologythat makes use of the conscious-unconscious distinctionis that of implicit learning and implicit memory, as wellas implicit perception. The focus of interest in thisparadigm is on measuring the amount of learning andmemory possible in the absence of subjects' awarenessof the stimuli presented to them. A certain branch of thiswork became sensationalized in the media under the ti-tle "subliminal perception" in the 1970s. For a thor-ough and sympathetic account of the nature of thisphenomenon, as well as the history of related research,see Dixon's Subliminal Perception: The Nature of aControversy (1971) and his later Preconscious Proces-sing (1981). For possibly the most influential recentwork in this area (especially in masking studies), seeMarcel (1983a, 1983b).

Naturally, there are also skeptics. For instance, Erik-sen stated quite early on, "At present there is noconvincing evidence that the human organism can dis-criminate or differentially respond to external stimulithat are at an intensity level too low to elicit dis-criminated verbal report. In other words, a verbal reportis as sensitive an indicator of perception as any otherresponse that has been studied" (Eriksen 1960, p. 298).

More recently, Holender (1986) presented a negativeand rather controversial statement on subliminal per-ception, which also included a comprehensive surveyof the field. For a collection of contemporary positionpapers in this paradigm, see the special issue of Mindand Language on "Approaches to Consciousness andIntention" (Spring 1990).

41. Searle also has an explanation to offer regarding themotivations underlying the sort of separationist viewthat Fodor promotes with respect to consciousness andintentionality:

There has been in recent decades a fairly systematiceffort to separate consciousness from intentionality.The connection between the two is being graduallylost, not only in cognitive science, but in linguisticsand philosophy as well. I think the underlying—andperhaps unconscious—motivation for this urge to

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separate intentionality from consciousness is that wedo not know how to explain consciousness, and wewould like to get a theory of the mind that will notbe discredited by the fact that it lacks a theory ofconsciousness. (Searle 1992, p. 153)

Perhaps a piece of careful Freudian psychoanalysiswould resolve this issue for good. Lacking such ex-pertise, I choose to leave the question open.

42. Panpsychism is a deep-rooted idea that can prob-ably be traced, in one form or another, back to Thalesand other ancient Greek philosophers. Nagel (1988)presents a contemporary discussion of panpsychism,characterizing it as the view that "the basic physicalconstituents of the universe have mental properties,whether or not they are parts of living organisms"(p. 181). Panpsychism was quite popular as a metaphy-sical doctrine among the psychologists (in particular,the psychophysicists) of the nineteenth century, includ-ing such prominent figures as Gustav Fechner and Her-mann Lotze. William James, in contrast, was neversympathetic to this view; chapter VI of James (1950a)contains a cogent critique of panpsychism (under thetitle "Mind-Stuff Theory"). For recent discussions ofpanpsychism in the context of ongoing consciousnessdebates, see Seager (1995) and Hut and Shepard (1996).

43. The origins of the term raw feels goes back, so faras I can trace, to the work of behaviorist psychologistEdward Tolman. In outlining what falls outside thescope of "scientific psychology," Tolman (1967) char-acterizes raw feels (from his opponents' perspective)as follows: "Sensations, says the orthodox mentalist,are more than discriminanda-expectations, whetherindicated by verbal introspection or by discrimination-box experiments. They are in addition immediatemental givens, 'raw feels'. They are unique subjectivesuffusions in the mind" (Tolman 1967, pp. 250-251).But it is probably Herbert Feigl (1967) who is responsi-ble for the introduction and wide acceptance of raw feelsin the philosophical terminology.

44. In a short passage in the Tractatus, Wittgensteinmakes a similar point regarding the self (or subject-hood):

5.633 Where in the world is a metaphysical subjectto be found?You will say that this is exactly like the case of theeye and the visual field. But really you do not see theeye.

And nothing in the visual field allows you to inferthat it is seen by an eye.5.6331 For the form of the visual field is surely notlike this:

Eye-

(Wittgenstein 1974, p. 57)

Keith Gunderson (1970) also discusses this issue underthe title, "The Investigational Asymmetries Problem"and makes the similar point that "just as the eye doesnot, cannot, see itself in its own visual field, so too, theself will never, in its inventory-taking of the world, finditself in the world in the manner in which it finds otherpeople and things" (p. 127).

Again, the point raised is well taken for consciousnessso far as one's own selfhood is involved in it, but it is notobvious just how it generalizes into a difficulty (muchless an impossibility) with the study of consciousness ingeneral by (other) conscious beings.

45. This observation is intended to be ontologicallyneutral. The emphasis here is on the "mode of access"part and not on the "facts" themselves. In particular, itdoes not entail the existence of a special class of facts,"first-person facts," on the basis of an assumption ofontological difference between facts of one's own con-sciousness and those of others.

46. Of course, technically speaking, it is not possibleto digest food in someone else's stomach either, but"digestive epistemology" just does not seem to be afashionable topic these days.

47. Perhaps the most succinct expression of this dif-ference is given in Sydney Shoemaker's question: "Ifwhat I want when I drink fine wine is information aboutits chemical properties, why don't I just read the label?"(quoted in Dennett 1991, p. 383). There is a ready-made answer to this question: It indeed is informationabout the chemical properties of the wine that a con-noisseur is interested in, but only if that information canbe accessed in a certain sensory modality—gustatorily,not visually. Put in Fregean (1892) terms, reading thelabel and sipping the wine would provide access to the

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same referent via different "modes of presentation."Note, however, that Shoemaker's question remains notfully addressed until this answer is supplemented by asatisfactory account of something akin to modes ofpresentation regarding qualia.

48. Of course, not all publicly observable properties ofan experience are intrinsic. There are often a great manyextrinsic properties that determine what the experienceis about that are equally accessible to the experiencerand the observer. Some think that all important prop-erties of experiences, including those that determine anexperience's phenomenal character, are extrinsic. SeeDretske(1995).

49. There is a spectrum of positions with respect tothese dichotomies that yield deep differences in themetaphysics of consciousness. Let me mention a fewexemplary positions. Nagel (1979, 1986) takes the dis-tinction between subjective and objective points of viewas fundamental to important philosophical problems,such as personal identity, free will, and the mind-bodyproblem. Velmans (1991) posits that first-person andthird-person accounts of consciousness are comple-mentary, but not reducible, to one another. In contrast,Dretske (1995) argues that as a "result of thinking aboutthe mind in naturalistic terms, subjectivity becomespart of the objective order. For materialists, this is as itshould be" (p. 65). This is in accord with an earlierstatement by Lashley (1923), who claims that "the sub-jective and objective descriptions are not descriptionsfrom two essentially different points of view, or de-scriptions of two different aspects, but simply descrip-tions of the same thing with different degrees ofaccuracy and detail" (p. 338). Papineau (1993) arguesthat it is a mistake to think that first-person and third-person thoughts refer to different entities on the basis ofan epistemic difference, and calls it the "antipatheticfallacy." Finally, Perry (1979,1993) examines the statusof the first-person in relation to the role of indexicalityin mind and language. Also, for two alternative ap-proaches, see Hut and Shepard (1996) for a prioritiza-tion of the first-person over the third-person, and Smith(forthcoming) on how to get to the third-person fromthe first-person. For a scrutiny of the metaphysicalfoundations of such dichotomies as objectivity versussubjectivity, see among others Goodman (1978), Rorty(1979), Putnam (1981), and Smith (1996).

50. For a lucid analysis of James's account of thestructure of "fringe consciousness," see Mangan (1993).Regarding works on the structure of phenomenal con-

sciousness, continental Europe was certainly more of acenter than James's Cambridge. See, for instance,Brentano's chapter, "On the Unity of Consciousness," inhis Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (Brentano1874), a work that slightly precedes James's Principlesof Psychology (1890). A more detailed analysis of thissort was later given by Husserl. See, among others, hisIdeas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology(1913) and The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Con-sciousness (1928). A more recent attempt along theselines, which comes from the analytic tradition, can befound in Searle (1992, chap. 6).

51. The idea of finding systematical bridging relationsbetween the "mental" and the "physical" in order toestablish explanatory hooks on consciousness was alsothe driving factor behind the emergence of psychophy-sics as a research program in the nineteenth century.This is exemplified in, for instance, Gustav Fechner'swork where he sought ways of formalizing a logarithmicrelation between the intensity of physical stimuli (mea-sured in "physical units"), and the magnitude of feltsensory experience (measured in "psychological units")as reported by the subject. (Cf. Fechner 1966, see alsoBoring 1942 and Hilgard 1987, chap. 4.) The same ideawas also operative in Gestalt psychology in the hy-pothesizing of a relation of isomorphism between"the structural characteristics of brain processes andof related phenomenal events" (K6hler 1971, p. 81; seealso Kohler 1980 and Boring 1929, chap. 22).

52. John Searle presents a major attack on behavioristtheories of consciousness in his Rediscovery of the Mind,arguing for what he dubs "the principle of the in-dependence of consciousness and behavior." His thesisis that "the capacity of the brain to cause consciousnessis conceptually distinct from its capacity to cause motorbehavior." One consequence he draws from this thesis isthat "a system could have consciousness without be-havior." Under certain qualifications, I find this viewplausible. However, Searle goes further to claim that"ontologically speaking, behavior, functional role, andcausal relations are irrelevant to the existence ofxon-scious mental phenomena" (Searle 1992, p. 69; emphasisin original). This further and more encompassing claimdoes not directly follow from the weaker one. More-over, it opens up a path the logical conclusion of whichmay turn into "epiphenomenalism": the view that con-sciousness plays no causal role itself, though it may bethe causal effect of other phenomena. I find Searle'ssecond thesis untenable and its consequence very

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undesirable. I will come back to this issue in my dis-cussion of epiphenomenalism and the possibility ofzombies.

S3. There are also scientifically documented cases wherethe relation between consciousness and externally ob-servable behavior breaks down. I briefly discussed thephenomenon of "gaining consciousness' while undergeneral anesthesia as one example. There are alsoseveral diseases of the nervous system that fall in thecategory of demyelinating neuropathies (diseases thatresult from loss of conduction of nerve impulses due tothe lack of formation of myelin, a fatty substance es-sential to the insulation of axons in neurons), which re-sult in the patient's gradual loss of reflexes and muscularstrength, and hence behavior, while not resulting insubstantial sensory changes (e.g., the Guillain-Barresyndrome). The ultimate state of such a patient involvesvery little outward behavior with no loss of conscious-ness, defying the behaviorist dogma. (Cf. Reeves 1981.)A moving account of a somewhat related nervous sys-tem disorder, encephalitis lethargica (commonly knownas the sleeping sickness) was given in Oliver Sacks'spopular book, Awakenings. Sacks's description of thevictims of encephalitis lethargica is worth quoting atleast for its literary value:

Patients who suffered but survived an extremelysevere somnolent/insomniac attack of [encephalitislethargica] often failed to recover their originalaliveness. They would be conscious and aware—yetnot fully awake; they would sit motionless andspeechless all day in their chairs, totally lacking en-ergy, impetus, initiative, motive, appetite, affect ordesire; they registered what went on about them withprofound indifference. They neither conveyed norfelt the feeling of life; they were as insubstantial asghosts, and as passive as zombies: von Economocompared them to extinct volcanoes. [However,... ]one thing, and one alone, was (usually) sparedamid the ravages of this otherwise engulfing disease:the "higher faculties"—intelligence, imagination,judgement, and humour. These were exempted—forbetter or worse. Thus these patients, some of whomhad been thrust into the remotest or strangest ex-tremities of human possibility, experienced theirstates with unsparing perspicacity, and retained thepower to remember, to compare, to dissect, and totestify. Their fate, so to speak, was to become uniquewitnesses to a unique catastrophe. (Sacks 1974, pp.9,12)

54. Let me also mention that some philosophers thinkthat the only legitimate sense of consciousness is phe-nomenal consciousness (e.g., Searle 1992, Flanagan1992), while others believe only in access consciousness(e.g., Dennett 1991), and still others believe in phenom-enal consciousness but try to account for it in causal,functional, or representational (i.e. "access-related")terms (e.g., Van Gulick 1988, Tye 1992, Dretske 1995).

55. Some of these ideas are briefly explored in Gu-zeldere and Aydede (forthcoming).

56. I will discuss absent qualia, an offspring of philo-sophical imagination that was conceived as a resultof taking the "hard problem" (perhaps too) seriously,in discussing zombies below. Regarding the explanatorygap, here is a surprisingly contemporary expression ofthe problem from the nineteenth-century philosopher-psychologist Charles Merrier: "The change of con-sciousness never takes place without the change in thebrain; the change in the brain never . . . without thechange in consciousness. But why the two occur to-gether, or what the link is which connects them, we donot know, and most authorities believe that we nevershall and can never know" (Mercier 1888, p. 11).

Note that the point Mercier is raising is very similarto the one expressed by John Tyndall in section I. Asimilar but more recent statement, though in a moredeterminedly pessimist tone, can be found in a ratherunlikely source. Here is Freud on the "hard problem":

We know two things concerning what we call ourpsyche or mental life: firstly, its bodily organ andscene of action, the brain (or nervous system), andsecondly, our acts of consciousness, which are im-mediate data and cannot be more fully explained byany kind of description. Everything that lies betweenthese two terminal points is unknown to us and, sofar as we are aware, there is no direct relation be-tween them. If it existed, it would at the most affordan exact localization of the processes of conscious-ness and would give us no help toward under-standing them. (Freud 1949, pp. 13-14)

In contemporary philosophy of mind, Nagel's for-mulation of this problem has been most influential. Thedifficulties Nagel raises with respect to "bridging theexplanatory gap" between things physiological andthings phenomenal are also reflected in Kripke's attackagainst identity theory. Even though the latter followsa different path, using tools from philosophy of lan-guage, they arrive at very similar conclusions. (Cf.

Approaching Consciousness

Nagel 1974,1979,1986, and Kripke 1980.) The follow-ing quotation eloquently summarizes Nagel's (and pre-sumably, Kripke's) position:

We cannot directly see a necessary connection, ifthere is one, between phenomenological pain and aphysiologically described brain state any more thanwe can directly see the necessary connection betweenincrease in temperature and pressure of a gas at aconstant volume. In the latter case the necessity ofthe connection becomes clear only when we descendto the level of molecular description: till then it ap-pears as a contingent correlation. In the psycho-physical case we have no idea whether there is such adeeper level or what it could be; but even if there is,the possibility that pain might be necessarily con-nected with a brain state at this deeper level does notpermit us to conclude that pain might be directlyanalyzable in physical or even topic-neutral terms.(Nagel 1986, pp. 48-49)

57. Searle's position is not as straightforward asNagel's, however. Although Searle talks about sub-jectivity as an irreducible ontological property unique toconsciousness, he also maintains the following position,in a somewhat puzzling way, in the same book: "Con-sciousness is, thus, a biological feature of certain or-ganisms, in exactly the same sense of 'biological' inwhich photosynthesis, mitosis, digestion, and repro-duction are biological features of organisms One ofthe main aims of this book is to try to remove thatobstacle, to bring consciousness back into the subjectmatter of science as a biological phenomenon like anyother" (Searle 1992, pp. 93,95; emphasis added).

58. As Wittgenstein somewhat sarcastically remarks:

The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between con-sciousness and brain-process: how does it comeabout that this does not come into the consid-erations of our ordinary life? This idea of a differ-ence in kind is accompanied by slight giddinessWhen does this feeling occur in the present case? It iswhen I, for example, turn my attention in a particu-lar way on to my own consciousness, and, aston-ished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be producedby a process in the brain!—as it were clutching myforehead. But what can it mean to speak of "turningmy attention on to my own consciousness"? This issurely the queerest thing there could be! (Wittgen-stein 1958, §412, p. 124e)

59. Searle says: "For any artefact that we might buildwhich had mental states equivalent to human mentalstates, the implementation of a computer programwould not by itself be sufficient. Rather, the artefactwould have to have powers equivalent to the powers ofthe human brain" (Searle 1984, p. 41).

Searle's argument is against functionalist accounts ofconsciousness. Even though he should not be taken tocommit himself to a single specific underlying substance(i.e., neuronal structures), he nonetheless seems to thinkthat consciousness is not medium-independent, at leastso far as the causal powers of the medium go. This viewseems to be based on the implicit assumption that thereare causal powers that cannot be captured by functionalorganization, but it unfortunately leaves the central no-tion of causal power unexplicated.60. Here is a noteworthy historical fact: Over a hundredyears before Crick and Koch presented their findings onthe 40-70 Hz phenomena, in 1879, Payton Spence pub-lished an essay in which he argued, on purely metaphy-sical grounds, that the basic form of consciousnessconsists of a constant alteration of conscious and un-conscious states. But the alteration is so rapid that thesubject never becomes aware of the discrete nature ofher consciousness; she is under the illusion of havinga continuous stream. Spence then speculated thatthere must be an underlying mechanism in the brainthat is responsible for this alteration—something likea very rapid oscillation of neural tissue. In his ownwords:

The simplest form of consciousness, or mental life,must consist in an alteration of a state of conscious-ness with a state of unconsciousness—a regularrhythmical revelation of the Affirmation, con-sciousness, by its Negation, unconsciousness, andvice versa Perhaps it would be safer, for thepresent, to call it a pulsation, or an undulation in thebrain, or a vibration of the molecules of the brain,paralleled in consciousness. This pulsation or vi-bration is, of course, very rapid; otherwise, wewould not have to infer its existence, but wouldknow it by perceiving the alterations of one statewith another. (Spence 1879, p. 345)

The interesting part comes when M. M. Garver, aneurophysiologist of the same era, finds the idea plau-sible and follows up on it on experimental grounds. Inparticular, he investigates the neural basis of voluntaryaction (often associated with or regarded as an aspect of

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consciousness in those times, by psychologists includingWilliam James) and publishes his results in the Ameri-can Journal of Science in 1880. According to Garver,mental activity is subserved by a cerebral oscillatorymechanism with a frequency range of 36-60 Hz. Garverhypothesizes that the change in the frequency of theneural oscillations correlates with minimum and max-imum levels of mentation, which results in voluntaryaction. Garver formulates his hypothesis as follows:"The cerebral portion of the nervous system is con-tinually varying in its activity, waxing and waningbetween certain limits, periods of maTimiim activityfollowing periods of minimum activity at the rate of 36to 60 times per second" (Garver 1880, p. 190).

At the end of his article, Garver claims that thispattern can be extended to accommodate Spence'shypothesis of alternating states of consciousness andsuggests that the lower and upper limits of the oscil-lation frequency can be taken as the correlates of con-sciousness and unconsciousness, respectively.

While Spence and Garver cannot perhaps be said tobe in pursuit of a solution to the binding problem, andthus have anticipated the Crick and Koch hypothesisover a hundred years ahead of its time, I find the sim-ilarity in the basic idea of seeking a neural oscillatorybasis for consciousness fascinating. Except a passingremark by William James in his discussion of the con-tinuity of consciousness (James 19S0, p. 220, footnote),Spence and Garver's work seems to have gone, so far asI could trace, unnoticed to date.

61. The idea of localized functions in the brain precedesJames's work, and goes back at least to the once-too-popular phrenology of Franz Gall in early 1800s (see,foT instance, Ackerknecht and Vallois 1956). Jean Bap-tiste Bouillaud, in 1825, proposed a hemispheric asym-metry in brain function, but it was Carl Wernicke andPaul Broca who made the greatest contribution to theidea of modularity in the brain. Wernicke hypothesizedthat two particular areas in the left hemisphere of thebrain (roughly, the left frontal lobe and the posteriorcortex), which later became known as Broca's andWernicke's areas, were responsible for language pro-duction and language understanding, respectively. Foran elemental neuropsychological account of aphasiasthat result from damage to these areas and other relatedmatters, see Kolb and Whishaw (1990).

62. For a comprehensive survey of similar neuro-psychological disorders, see Farah (1995). I discusssome philosophical issues involved in the phenomenon

of blindsight against the background of Block's accessversus phenomenal consciousness distinction in Gu-zeldere (1995e).

63. The precursors to Dennett's Cartesian Theatermetaphor can be found in the writings of Gilbert Ryleand U. T. Place. Ryle (1949) characterized and criti-cized the Cartesian notion of the mind as "a secondarytheater in which the episodes enacted enjoy the sup-posed status of 'the mental'" (p. 158). Similarly, Place(1956) called it a mistake to suppose that "when thesubject describes his experience, when he describes howthings look, sound, smell, taste, or feel to him, he is de-scribing the literal properties of objects and events on apeculiar sort of internal cinema or television screen,usually referred to in the modern psychological liter-ature as the 'phenomenal field'" (p. 107). (The view thatRyle and Place criticize also constitutes a particularfamily of sense-data theories of perception that werequite popular at the time.)

Interestingly, while the metaphor of mind as an innertheater never occurs explicitly in the writings of Des-cartes (so far as I could tell), it can be found in a vividpassage in Hume (in his discussion of personal identity):."The mind is a kind of theatre, where several percep-tions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass,glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of posturesand situations." But Hume is also careful not to en-dorse, in virtue of using this metaphor, the kind of on-tological conclusion Descartes is criticized as holding:"The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us.They are the successive perceptions only, that constitutethe mind; nor have we the most distant notion of theplace, where these scenes are represented, or of thematerials, of which it is compos'd." (Hume 1955, BookI, IV:V, 85).

64. Another issue related to the Where question has todo with lateralization of brain function in light of the"split-brain" research of the last few decades. The per-formance of commissurotomy on humans (proposedand initiated by surgeon Joseph Bogen in 1960) to con-trol interhemispheric spread of epilepsy produced anumber of patients in whom individual investigationof specialized hemispheric capabilities became possible.The research on such patients (initially pursued by psy-chobiologist Roger Sperry and his collaborators) re-vealed a number of interesting facts about hemisphericspecialization and resulted in a sizeable scientific liter-ature, as well as a huge corpus of popular psychologywriting on the so-called left-brain versus right-brain

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distinction with regard to personality types, social be-havior, and so on. One of the major results that cameout of the commissurotomy research is the hypothesisproposed and defended by (among others) MichaelGazzaniga (1993), that human cognition as well asconsciousness (in the sense of awareness of experience)are subserved by special brain circuitry normally lo-cated in the left hemisphere. For an account of the earlywork on commissurotomy, see Gazzaniga (1970). Galin(1974) explores the implications of hemispheric special-ization for psychiatry. For a comprehensive collectionof current research results in human neuropsychology,including articles on modularity of mental function andhemispheric specialization, see Gazzaniga et al. (1995).65. It is interesting to note that this is a junction atwhich some upholders of the "pro-qualia intuition"meet on common ground with the most indoctrinatedqualia skeptics, such as the behaviorist psychologists forwhom exorcising qualia out of the scope of psychologywas a primary goal. Notice, for instance, the similaritybetween Jackson's (1982) position (who characterizeshimself as a "qualia freak," p. 127), and the positiondefended by Edward Tolman: "[Regarding visual per-ception in others] we never learn whether it 'feels' likeour 'red' or our 'green' or our 'gray', or whether, indeed,its 'feel' is perhaps sui generis and unlike any of our

own Whether your 'raw feels' are or are not likemine, you and I shall never discover. Your color 'feels'may be the exact complementaries of mine, but, ifso, neither of us will ever find it out, provided onlythat your discriminations and my discriminationsagree If there be 'raw feels' correlated with suchdiscriminanda-expectations, these 'raw feels' are by verydefinition 'private' and not capable of scientific treat-ment. And we may leave the question as to whether theyexist, and what to do about them, if they do exist, toother disciplines than psychology—for example, tologic, epistemology, and metaphysics. And whatever theanswers of these other disciplines, we, as mere psychol-ogists, need not be concerned" (Tolman 1967, pp. 252-253).

Whether this surprising "meeting of minds" betweensuch arch-opponents as behaviorist psychologists and acertain brand of qualia defenders on presumably thevery point of contention between them speaks in favorof the former or the latter party (if either), I leave opento the judgment of the reader.66. William James (1950a), who characterizes con-sciousness as a "fighter for ends," makes the following

statement (largely in agreement with Herbert Spencer1891, 1898) in support of the causal construal and theevolutionary relevance of consciousness:

It is a well-known fact that pleasures are generallyassociated with beneficial, pains with detrimental ex-periences. ... These coincidences are due, not to anypre-established harmony, but to the mere action ofnatural selection which would certainly kill off in thelong-run any breed of creatures to whom the funda-mentally noxious experience seemed enjoyable. Ananimal that should take pleasure in a feeling of suf-focation would, if that pleasure were efficaciousenough to make him immerse his head in water, en-joy a longevity of four or five minutes. But if thepleasures and pains have no efficacy, one does notsee why the most noxious acts, such as burning,might not give thrills of delight, and the most neces-sary ones, such as breathing, cause agony Theconclusion that [consciousness] is useful is . . . quitejustifiable. But, if it is useful, it must be so throughits causal efficaciousness.

James's conclusion is that "the study a posteriori ofthe distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactlysuch as we might expect in an organ added for the sakeof steering a nervous system grown too complex to reg-ulate itself" (pp. 141,143-144).

67. See also Kitcher (1979) and Revonsuo (1994) forrelated points.

68. Precursors to Nagel's thinking on this issue canbe found in the writings of B. A. Farrell and TimothySprigge. Even though it was made famous by Nagel, theoriginal formulation of the question "what is it like to bea bat?" goes back to Farrell's somewhat neglected essay,"Experience" (1950). In discussing the issue of experi-ential knowledge, Farrell imagines a Martian visitorabout whose sensory capacities we obtain all the in-formation there is. According to Farrell, "We wouldprobably still want to say: 'I wonder what it would belike to be a Martian.'" He continues: "There is some-thing more to be learned about the Martian, and that iswhat his experience is like." Farrell then extends thequestion to babies and mice, as well as an opiumsmoker, and finally a bat: "I wonder what it would belike to be, and hear like, a bat" (pp. 34-35).

The lessons Farrell draws out of his ruminations arequite the opposite of Nagel's conclusions, however. It israther Sprigge (1971) who makes the connection be-tween the "what it is like" aspect of experience and

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physicalism's difficulty with accommodating it in theparticular way Nagel problematizes the issue: "Whenone imagines another's conscious state, there is no con-clusive way of checking up whether one has done socorrectly or not Presuming that the object (that is, atleast normally, the organism) with which one is con-cerned, is indeed conscious, then being that organismwill have a certain definite complex quality at everywaking moment Physical science makes no refer-ence to qualities of this kind. Thus consciousness is thatwhich one characterises when one tries to answer thequestion what it is or might be like to be a certain objectin a certain situation" (p. 168).

69. Lycan (1997b) also makes a similar point: "Thephrase 'what it's like' is more sinning than sinnedagainst; nothing whatever is clarified or explained byreference to it, and it itself is not only badly in need ofexplanation, in general, but at least three-ways ambig-uous in particular" (p. 176).

70. See Nagel (1974, 1979, 1986) for a full range ofproblems that involve subjectivity. See Lycan (1990),Biro (1991), Akins (1993), and Dretske (1995),among others, for deflationary responses. See alsoNagel (1983) for a discussion of how subjectivity figuresin the problem of self, without ever touching on qualia,and Perry (forthcoming) for a penetrating analysis andcritique of Nagel's account.

71. For Jackson's formulation, see Jackson (1982,1986). For various critiques, see Nemirow (1980),Churchland (1989), Lewis (1990), Dennett (1991, chap.10), Van Gulick (1993), Loar (1990), Harman (1993b),Dretske (1995, chap. 3), and Perry (1995). For a relatedempirical study on the conceptual representation ofcolors in the blind and the color-blind, see Shepard andCooper (1992).

One of the earlier formulations of the knowledgeargument can be found in C. D. Broad's thought ex-periment about the archangel who knows all aboutchemistry but lacks the sense of smell. Broad sets up theproblem as follows:

Would there be any theoretical limit to the de-duction of the properties of chemical elements andcompounds if a mechanistic theory of chemistrywere true? Yes. Take any ordinary statement, suchas we find in chemistry books; e.g., "Nitrogen andHydrogen combine when an electric discharge ispassed through a mixture of the two. The resultingcompound contains three atoms of Hydrogen to one

of Nitrogen; it is a gas readily soluble in water, andpossessed of a pungent and characteristic smell." Ifthe mechanistic theory be true the archangel coulddeduce from his knowledge of the microscopicstructure of atoms all these facts but the last. Hewould know exactly what the microscopic structureof ammonia must be; but he would be totally unableto predict that a substance with this structure mustsmell as ammonia does when it gets into the humannose. The utmost that he could predict on thissubject would be that certain changes would takeplace in the mucous membrane, the olfactory nervesand so on. But he could not possibly know that thesechanges would be accompanied by the appearanceof a smell in general or of the peculiar smell of am-monia in particular, unless someone told him so orhe had smelled it for himself. (Broad 1962, p. 71)

Similarly, an early formulation of the knowledge ar-gument, as well as an antecedent of the Nemirow-Lewiscritique, appears in Feigl's discussion of "cognitive rolesof acquaintance." Feigl asks: "What is it that the blindman cannot know concerning color qualities?" andproposes the following answer

If we assume complete physical predictability of hu-man behavior, i.e., as much predictability as the bestdeveloped physical science of the future could con-ceivably provide, then it is clear that the blind manor the Martian would lack only acquaintance andknowledge by acquaintance in certain areas of therealm of qualia. Lacking acquaintance means nothaving those experiential qualia; and the consequentlack of knowledge by acquaintance simply amountsto being unable to label the qualia with terms usedpreviously by the subject (or by some other subject)when confronted with their occurrence in direct ex-perience. Now, mere having or living through is notknowledge in any sense. "Knowledge by acquaint-ance," however, as we understand it here, is prepo-sitional, it does make truth claims.

Feigl then goes on to suggest, anticipating many ofthe present-day critiques of the knowledge argument,that the blind person (or Jackson's fictional color scien-tist, Mary) does not lack any knowledge per se; all he orshe lacks is a particular mode of knowing the same factsas do normally sighted people: "What one person hasand knows by acquaintance may be identical with whatsomeone else knows by description. The color experi-

Approaching Consciousness 63

ences of the man who can see are known to him byacquaintance, but the blind man can have inferentialknowledge, or knowledge by description about thosesame experiences" (Feigl 1967, p. 68). A related puzzle,based again on a thought-experiment, was posed as a"jocose problem" to John Locke by William Molyneux,an amateur philosopher, in a letter dated 1693: "Sup-pose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by histouch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of thesame metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell,when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, whichthe sphere. Suppose then the cube and sphere placed ona table, and the blind man be made to see: quaere,whether by his sight, before he touched them, he couldnow distinguish and tell which is the globe, which thecube?" (Quoted in Locke (1959), Book U, Chapter DC,pp. 186-187.) As such, Molyneux's question transformsthe inquiry of whether non-experiential facts can yieldknowledge of experiential facts (in the knowledge argu-ment) into a puzzle about intersensory translation—whether tactile facts can yield knowledge of visual facts("facts" taken broadly). Locke's negative answer to thisquestion was in agreement with Molyneux's opinion.But others disagreed, and Molyneux's question becameone of the central topics of contention among such phi-losophers as Berkeley, Leibniz, Reid, Diderot, andVoltaire, in the greater context of the controversies overinnateness and abstract ideas. See Morgan (1977) andSanford (1983) for further exposition and discussion ofthe related issues.

72. For a classical treatment of the identity theory, seeSellars (1964). For recent arguments in its defense, seeEnc (1983) and Hill (1991). A thus far unmentioned butrelated concept that has played a significant role in thephilosophy of mind over the past few decades is super-venience (presumably imported from Rom Hare's workin ethics [1952] by Donald Davidson 1970). The thesisthat the mental supervenes on the physical is put forth asa better materialist solution to the mind-body problemthan the identity thesis. The supervenience thesis isroughly that the mental character of a state or event iswholly determined by its physical profile, such that therecannot be a change in the former without a change inthe latter. Put differently, sameness in the (subvening)physical properties is hypothesized to guarantee same-ness in the (supervening) mental properties.

But the status of the supervenience thesis vis-a-visthe mind-body problem, especially with regard tophenomenal consciousness, remains controversial. Are

supervenient properties ontologically distinct (auton-omously emergent) from physical properties, for in-stance? Or (otherwise) does supervenience boil downto old-fashioned identity? How are we to explain thenature of the supervenience relation itself? Given thewide variety of possible supervenience relations (for ex-ample, weak versus strong, local versus global), there isa vast and technically complicated literature in this area,but there exist no clear-cut received views that are takento unanimously answer all these questions. For a sys-tematic and thorough exploration of the superveniencethesis in all its different characterizations, see JaegwonKim's essays collected in Kim (1993). Two other usefulcollections that contain representatives of contem-porary theorizing on supervenience are Beckermann,Flohr, and Kim (1992), and Savellos and Yalcin (1995).See also McLaughlin (1989) for a discussion that relatessupervenience to the question of epiphenomenalism,and McLaughlin (1992) for a thorough exposition of thethought of British emergentists in which one can findnumerous clues for the present supervenience debates.In addition to philosophy of mind, notions of super-venience, emergence, and different kinds of reductionhave been central to discussions in philosophy of biol-ogy, particularly during the first half of this century. SeeBrandon (1996) for an exposition of these issues thatalso ties them to debates in contemporary biology, andHarris (1993) for an exploration of the relations be-tween the natures and the study of mind and life in phi-losophy, psychology, and biology.

73. It is interesting to note, by the way, that the wordconsciousness was hardly ever present in the philosoph-ical- literature around the time of functionalism, whichwas instead brewing with the term qualia and, to a lesserextent, terms like raw feels and phenomenal aspect ofconsciousness. In the 1990s, in contrast, many of thesame old problems have gained new interest and im-petus (perhaps from slightly but essentially similarperspectives) within a terminology populated with themagic word consciousness and its derivatives. The rea-sons for. this terminological change probably lie partlyoutside philosophy, for example in the wide acceptanceof the term consciousness into other fields with whichphilosophy interacts.

74. There is a sizeable literature regarding the absentqualia argument. Some of the most influential thoughtexperiments that support the possibility of absent qualiaare due to Block (1978, 1980b) and Block and Fodor(1980). See Shepard (1993) for a recent discussion in the

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context of color vision and evolutionary theory. Shoe-maker (197S, 1981a) presents an eloquent defense offunctionalism against the absent qualia arguments. Seealso Dretske (1995) who raises the possibility of absentqualia in an externalist context in relation to DonaldDavidson's (1987) "swampman" argument, and Tye(1995) for a representationalist critique of absent qualia.For further discussion, see Lycan (1981), Levin (1985),Graham and Stephens (1985), White (1986), Fox (1989),Levine (1989), Horgan (1987), and Hardcastle (1996).

One of the most commonly cited absent qualia argu-ments is based on Block's (1978) "Chinese Nation"scenario, designed to "embarrass all versions of func-tionalism" by showing that functionalism is guilty of"classifying systems that lack mentality as having men-tality" (p. 275). Block asks us to imagine the functionalsimulation of a human brain by the Chinese nation byconnecting each of the billion inhabitants of China inappropriate ways through radio links, and having themcommunicate from a distance like neurons in a brainand thereby animate an artificial body for a certain pe-riod of time. According to Block, while this China-bodysystem is "nomologically possible" and "it could befunctionally equivalent to [a human being] for a shorttime," it is doubtful "whether it has any mental states atall—especially whether it has . . . 'qualitative states','raw feels', or 'immediate phenomenological qualities'"(pp. 276-278). Block's point is to establish the short-comings of functional characterizations of qualia, byappealing to intuitions that he takes as common sens-ical, such as the intuition that such "distributed minds"are absurd.

A similar intuition was commonly employed in dis-cussions regarding the unity of mind versus the divisi-bility of matter with the aim of embarrassing all formsof materialism in early modern philosophy. For exam-ple, the eighteenth century English theologian SamuelClarke appeals to the absurdity of the distributed-mindsintuition in a piece of hypothetical reasoning, similar toBlock's, to make a case for the "immateriality and nat-ural immortality of the soul" as follows: "That the soulcannot possibly be material is moreover demonstrablefrom the single consideration even of bare sense andconsciousness itself. For suppose three, or three hun-dred, particles of matter, at a mile, or at any given dis-tance, one from another; is it possible that all thoseseparate parts should in that state be one individualconscious being?" But Clarke then takes his argument astep further to apply it to human beings: "Suppose then

all these particles brought together into one system, soas to touch one another; will they thereby, or by anymotion or composition whatsoever, become any whitless truly distinct Beings, than they were at the greatestdistance? How then can their being disposed in anypossible system, make them one individual consciousbeing?" (Clarke 1707, p. 82)

75. The origins of this problem go back indeed toa puzzle about visual experience, described by JohnLocke a few centuries ago:

Neither would it carry any imputation of falsehoodto our simple ideas, if by the different structure ofour organs it were so ordered, that the same objectshould produce in several men's mauls different ideasat the same time; e.g. if the idea that a violet pro-duced in one man's mind by his eyes were the samethat a marigold produced in another man's, and viceversa. For, since this could never be known, becauseone man's mind could not pass into another man'sbody, to perceive what appearances were producedby those organs: neither the ideas hereby, nor thenames, would be at all confounded, or any falsehoodbe in either. For all things that had the texture of aviolet, producing constantly the idea that he calledblue, and those which had the texture of a marigold,producing constantly the idea which he constantlycalled yellow, whatever those appearances were inhis mind; he would be able as regularly to distin-guish things for his use by those appearances, andunderstand and signify those distinctions marked bythe name blue and yellow, as if the appearances orideas in his mind received from those two flowerswere exactly the same with the ideas in other men'sminds (Locke 1959, bk. n , chap. 32, §15, p. 520).

There are also several positions with respect to theinverted spectrum argument. Here is a simple set: Block(1978) and Block and Fodor (1980) raise the possibilityof inverted spectrum against functionalism, and Block(1990) presents an original twist on the same problem asa reply to Harman (1990), who argues against invertedspectrum on externalist grounds. Shoemaker (1975,1981b, 1991) is more lenient toward accepting the pos-sibility of inverted spectrum compared to his rejectionof the possibility of absent qualia, but he presents anargument on how to accommodate qualia inversionwithin a broadly functionalist framework. However,see also Levine (1988), who argues that absent qualiaand inverted spectrum stand or fall together as logical

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possibilities against functionalism. Dretske (1995) re-gards inverted spectrum as a problem for functionalismbut not for representationalism (and hence, not formaterialism in general). Tye (1995) argues for theconclusion that is somewhat similar to Shoemaker's:spectrum inversion is possible in narrow functionalduplicates, but this does not constitute a problem forwide functionalism (that Tye defends).

76. A similarly externalist theory is put forth by GilbertHarman (1990) where qualia are identified with inten-tional properties, as well as by Michael Tye (1995).David Armstrong had earlier suggested identifyingqualia (what he called "secondary qualities") withproperties of physical objects in his discussion of "Re-alist Reductionism" (Armstrong 1993, chap. 12, 270-290). Clues for these positions can be found in ElizabethAnscombe's discussion of the intentional nature of sen-sations (Anscombe 1965).

77. Perhaps a caveat about the particular brand ofepiphenomenalism and zombiehood I am referringto is in order here. Epiphenomenalism about phenom-enal consciousness is, of course, different from epi-phenomenalism about the mind in general. Discussionsabout epiphenomenalism earlier this century generallyassumed the latter kind (see, for instance, Broad 1962).In the contemporary literature, however, the focus hassomewhat shifted. Probably largely due to the advent offunctionalist and computational-representational theo-ries of mind in a materialist framework, many todaytake intentional states, such as beliefs and judgments, ascontentful internal structures in the brain (see, for ex-ample, Fodor 1987). As such, no one thinks that beliefs,qua such physical structures, lack causal properties. Thecontroversy is rather on whether their content (seman-tics) has a causal role in the explanation of behavior (cf.Dretske 1988).

But the real hot spot of the epiphenomenalism debatehas to do with phenomenal consciousness—whetherqualia play any role in the otherwise causally charac-terizable economy of our mental lives. Note, after all,that while there is a vast literature on the possibility ofabsent qualia, no one seems to be worrying about thepossibility of "absent beliefs" or "absent judgments."There seems to be a crucial difference between beliefsand pains: while it is considered legitimate to attributebeliefs to someone who behaves in ways that can be ex-plained by belief-attributions of the relevant sort, it isconsidered very problematic to so attribute pains, be-

cause the essence of pains, the reasoning goes, is not at-tributable (by a third party) but rather accessible in aprivileged way (through the first-person perspective).There is something it is like to have pains, but there isnothing it is like to believe that there is no greatest primenumber (or even that one is in pain). It is this differencethat warrants epiphenomenalism, in the present liter-ature, as a possibility with respect to pains, but not be-liefs (about prime numbers, one's pains, or anythingelse).

Accordingly, under the stipulation of appropriateenvironmental and historical conditions, it is generallyregarded as a possibility that a physical replica of a hu-man being can lack all qualia, while not lacking beliefsor judgments (or other such intentional states). This isthe possibility of the modem zombie that has centerstage in debates about phenomenal consciousness. NedBlock (1995) calls such replicas phenomenal zombies:"the familiar . . . robots that think but don't feel"(p. 234). Or, as David Chalmers (1996) describes: "Myzombie twin . . . will be psychologically identical to me.He will be perceiving the trees outside, in the functionalsense, and tasting the chocolate, in the psychological

sense [similar to its ordinary twin modulo qualia] Hewill be awake, able to report the contents of his internalstates, able to focus attention in various places, and soon. It is just that none of this functioning will be ac-companied by any real conscious experience. There willbe no phenomenal feel. There is nothing it is like to be azombie" (p. 95).

It is important to notice that zombies, construed assuch, are taken to be in possession of all sorts of beliefs,thoughts, and judgments that their human twins typi-cally have, including the self-ascribed ones. As Chalm-ers (1993) states: "Zombie Dave's beliefs may not becolored by the usual phenomenological tinges, but itseems reasonable to say that they are neverthelessbeliefs. Beliefs, unlike qualia, seem to be characterizedprimarily by the role that they play in the mind's causaleconomy." Accordingly, the zombie twin, too, takesaspirin because he thinks he has a headache, wants an-esthetics at the dentist chair because he believes the rootcanal will hurt, and so on. It is just that all his beliefs andjudgments about bis own qualia are systematically false.Nothing hurts in him, even if he sincerely believes he hasa splitting headache. Accordingly, we should not bemotivated to put him under anaesthesia when his toothis being drilled, despite all his screams, if it is the painquale that matters.

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Put differently, what distinguishes this kind of azombie from its human twin is the stipulated ever-presence of a gap between the "appearance" and "re-ality" of the zombie's qualitative states—what qualiahe judges himself to have versus what qualia he reallyhas—and nothing much else. (Note that something likean "appearance-reality" distinction is required in orderto coherently conceptualize the possibility of a zombie.)As such, there is a psychologically significant and ex-planatorily important sense in which things seem (i.e.,are judged, thought, believed, expected, noticed,... tobe) a certain way to the zombie twin.

Consequently, to the extent that nonqualitative in-tentional states, (including self-ascribed beliefs aboutone's own qualitative states) are constitutive of a first-person perspective (cf. Chisholm 1981), the zombie canbe said to have such a perspective (albeit a systemati-cally misguided one). A zombie's life is not, after all,completely devoid of all mental elements. He only lacksan important component of an otherwise intact epis-temic perspective. After all, it is in virtue of having sucha perspective that receiving anaesthetics at the dentistchair seems to matter to the zombie twin, even if hispreferences are entirely on the basis of false self-ascribedbeliefs (about his own non-existent pain qualia). It is thischaracterization of zombiehood that is typically in-voked in contemporary debates, and I will confine mydiscussion accordingly throughout the rest of thischapter.

78. Notice that this view, as such, does not deny that weare conscious. It comes close, however, in positing thatour being conscious, in itself, makes no difference—hence the path to zombiehood.79. James (1879) is a vigorous response to Huxley. Seealso Capek (1954) for a commentary on this exchange.80. As far as I could trace, the term zombie enters thephilosophical vocabulary with Kirk (1974) in an argu-ment against materialism. For other arguments thatdefend the intuition in favor of the possibility of zom-biehood, see Block (1978), Block and Fodor (1980),Searle (1992), and Chalmers (1996). For counterargu-ments, see Lewis (1972) and Shoemaker (1975), as wellas Kirk (1994). For an expression of philosophical in-tolerance for epiphenomenalism and the possibility ofzombies, see Dennett (1991, chp. 10). Guzeldere (1995d)distinguishes among physiological, functional, andmerely behavioral zombies, and briefly examines theirrespective underlying metaphysical assumptions. (See

Journal of Consciousness Studies (2:4, 1995) for a sym-posium on zombies based on Moody 1994).81. Here is Dennett (1979) on describing the phenom-enology of one's own experience: "We are all, I take it,unshakably sure that we are each in a special position toreport, or to know, or to witness or experience a set ofsomething-or-others we may call, as neutrally as pos-sible, elements of our own conscious experience

Prepositional episodes . . . comprise our streams ofconsciousness by embodying our semantic intentions ofthe moment, by being the standards against which wecorrect, or would correct, any failures of execution werewe to utter anything at the time These are.. . think-ings that p. . . . I call them judgments Such judg-ments exhaust our immediate consciousness, that ourindividual streams of consciousness consist of nothingbut such prepositional episodes. My view, put bluntly,is that there is no phenomenological manifold in anysuch relation to our reports. There are the public reportswe issue, and then there are the episodes of our propo-sitional awareness, our judgments, and then there is—sofar as introspection is concerned—darkness" (pp. 93-95).

This quotation probably represents a position at afar end of the spectrum of views on the nature of innerexperience. There are, of course, many midway viewsbetween the positions that occupy the two endpoints.For instance, one can agree with "friends of qualia" thatthere is something crucial to theorize about under theterm "phenomenal consciousness" distinct from "epi-sodes of propositional awareness and judgments," butmaintain that the way they choose to theorize about it ismisguided.82. The disagreement is not only between those whobelieve in phenomenal consciousness and those whodeny it; it pervades the community of the supporters ofthis very notion. For instance, Block claims that Searle,in an attempt to point to consciousness, confounds toomany senses of the term. As Block says, "It is importantto point properly." But who has the omniscient pointer?

83. Jaegwon Kim (1996) makes a similar point with re-spect to mind in general: "Saving mentality while losingcausality doesn't seem to amount to saving anythingworth saving. For what good is the mind if it has nocausal powers?" (p. 237). Or, to transform a point FredDretske (1988) makes with respect to the explanatoryrole of content into one about phenomenal conscious-ness (with apologies), "if having a mind is having (his

Approaching Consciousness 67

kind of qualia (which don't do anything), one may aswell not have a mind" (p. 80).

However, this position should be distinguished fromeliminativism about consciousness, defended, for in-stance, by Rey (1988). Rey's suggestion is to do awaywith the largely folk-theoretic notion of consciousnessbecause it contains Cartesian elements and plays nouseful causal-explanatory role. I am suggesting (andprobably Kim and Dretske would agree), in contrast,that because we do not want to do away with our com-mon sense notion of consciousness (or, at least, a sig-nificant part of it), we need to seek to secure a genuinerole for it in the causal web of the world.84. Put differently, I am essentially in agreement withDavid Lewis (1980) on a point he makes regarding thestatus of pain that I take as an objection to the segrega-tionist intuition: "Only if you believe on independentgrounds that considerations of causal role and physicalrealization have no bearing on whether a state is painshould you say that they have no bearing on how a statefeels" (p. 222). Along these lines, see Humphrey (1992);see also Hardin (1987, 1988) for an important attemptto deflate the explanatory gap between the causal andphenomenal aspects of consciousness in the case of vis-ual perception and color qualia.

85. The Fodor quote is from Fodor 1987, p. 156. Fodorholds a much more pessimistic opinion regarding theprospects for a theory of consciousness in comparison toa theory of rationality, however. Regarding rationality,he thinks that "certain residual technical difficulties"notwithstanding, "we are (maybe) on the verge of solv-ing a great mystery about the mind: How is rationalitymechanically possible?" (Fodor 1987, pp. 156, 21). Re-garding consciousness, here is what he says: "Nobodyhas the slightest idea how anything material could beconscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like tohave the slightest idea about how anything materialcould be conscious. So much for the philosophy of con-sciousness" (Fodor 1992, p. 5).

Perhaps then, one thinks, Fodor should considerstarting to think about consciousness and give thoseworking in the field a helping hand. But similarlygloomy sentiments are expressed by Block (1994), aprominent figure in the consciousness literature, as well:"The notable fact is that in the case of thought, we ac-tually have more than one substantive research pro-gramme, and their proponents are busy fighting it out,comparing which research program handles which phe-nomena best. But in the case of consciousness, we have

nothing—zilch—worthy of being called a research pro-gram, nor are there any substantive proposals abouthow to go about starting one Researchers arestumped.... No one has yet come up with a theoreticalperspective that uses these data to narrow the explana-tory gap, even a little bit" (p. 211).

My ultimate conclusion, expressed in the last para-graph of this chapter and hopefully substantiated by theexposition presented thus far, differs from both.References to the Introduction appear on pages 807-816.