Daniel Dennett's Problem of Consciousness

A recent speech given by Daniel Dennett for TED illustrates the now common infiltration of scientific presuppositions into what often gets identified as the philosophical enterprise, and although this tendency to render the scientific method as metaphysically true can be seen most obviously in the neo-atheist's (among which Dennett counts himself) arguments against religion, in this case Dennett commits the same error of method in regard to cognitive philosophy. I have not read Consciousness Explained and so cannot comment on the rigor of that work, but I think it possible to see in Dennett's presentation for TED the starting point of his philosophical approach to the "problem" of consciousness. He says:

What you are, what I am, is approximately 100 trillion little cellular robots; that's what we're made of, no other ingredients at all, we're just made of cells... Not a single one of those cells are conscious, not a single one knows who you are or cares. Somehow we have to explain how when you put together teams, armies, battalions of hundreds of millions of little robotic unconscious cells, not so different, really, from a bacterium, each one of them, the result is this [Dennet points to an an illustration of the mind], I mean just look at it: the content, there's colors, there's ideas, there's memories, there's history, and somehow all that content of consciousness is accomplished by the busy activity of those hordes of neurons. Many people just think it isn't possible, at all. They think: "No, there can't be any sort of naturalistic explanation of consciousness."

Dennett's description indicates a thoroughly materialistic metaphysic which considers the truly real aspects of the universe to be quarks, atoms, cells, electromagnetic forces, and so on. I have directly argued against this view elsewhere, but there's a rather obvious problem in talking about consciousness in this way which should be immediately evident to anyone with any philosophical acumen whatsoever. Even without any phenomenological training one might see the peculiarity of trying to explain consciousness by referring to things which can only be accessed through that same consciousness; or to put it another way, the problem of explaining consciousness by the objects of consciousness which can never be spoken of outside the domain of consciousness. Quarks and neurons can only be conceived of after one has adjusted their consciousness so as to conceive of the universe through mathematical physics; consciousness rather obviously precedes any of its objects in the act of knowing, whether they are scientific entities or common artifacts. Objecting to the explanation of a phenomena in terms of things which can only be made known by that phenomenon does not mean that one must fall back on the supernatural because no rational alternative can be found, and Dennett's method can only be called natural in the same sense as Locke's theory of perception: Locke attempted to explain the mind as a blank sheet of paper upon which experience writes, but in doing this he commits the "naturalistic fallacy"--he attempts to explain something by something else, though he -- more than Dennett -- understood this method as an analogy. Here we see the real problem: if we wish to explain something and understand it in itself we cannot simply substitute other things which admit to simpler explanation and declare our work done, and this basic error of substitution only gets aggravated when we try to explain something which reveals something else by the thing revealed.

If Dennett begins to study consciousness by the things to which consciousness might be directed such as the bodies cellular activity, he has already run past the phenomena of consciousness. Really, it makes no difference whether he attempts to explain consciousness though cellular activity, by referring to a sheet of paper, or by referring to anything else which he might be conscious of; for Dennett has ignored how we become conscious of these things in the first place.

The difficulty of discussing consciousness lies in the fact that we do not usually become conscious of consciousness, from which follows that philosophical language which talks about the things at which we can direct our conscious will have to be revamped or abandoned if it intends to make the mind thematic. Phenomenology takes up this project, and in Husserl, Heidegger, Merleu-Ponty, and others we see attempts at this. A good bit of conflict can be found, especially between Husserl and Heidegger, but the important thing about phenomenologists is that they realize the problem. Dennett would do well to engage with these philosophers instead of simply repeating the prejudices of cognitive science and christening it "philosophy."

Against Prohibitionism

Without the principle of moderation the possibility of true asceticism gets lost, and strangely enough this unfortunate state of affairs can often be found in those groups who claim to advocate moderation. Moderation does not have anything in common with prohibitionism as many seem to believe--from the point of view which advocates moderation, prohibitionism is an extreme to be avoided just as one ought to avoid excess.

I do not mean by "prohibitionism" specifically the historical movement which set out to ban alcohol, nor the continued theological position that one must avoid alcohol (though in these cases one sees in an obvious and concentrated form the attitude at which I take aim), but the disposition that if something should not be used in excess one ought -- in order to be on the safe side -- not to use it at all. In the case of alcohol, this attitude does not manifest in those who declare alcohol to be evil in principle; this is a different, and rather silly, intellectual disorder. To the Christian mind, this absolute prohibition of alcohol appears suspiciously close either to gnosticism (in its distrust of the goodness of creation), or to Islamic teaching. Even setting aside the historical attitude and traditional position of the Church towards alcohol, the Bible simply lauds wine -- and particularly in regard to its psychoactive effects which promote revelry and fraternity -- too loudly and too repeatedly for the intellectually honest fundamentalist to ignore. If one considers the Bible to be in any sense authoritative in the way a Christian ought to live his or her life, one simply cannot regard that which in the Psalms is declared to be made by God for the purpose of "[making] glad the heart of man" as evil without very obviously impugning God in the process. And those few who attempt through absurd etymological strategies to deny that the Hebrew word for "wine" means "wine" make Bishop Spong's Biblical criticism look like the work of a hermeneutical genius.

One finds a better example of the prohibitionist temperament I have in mind in those who accept the obvious historical reality concerning the Judeo-Christian use of wine and who -- while not maintaining an absolute prohibition against alcohol consumption -- hold that it might be better to abstain from alcohol altogether lest one drift into excess. Though this position has the benefit of at least being intellectually honest, it either misapprehends the nature of moderation or does not consider moderation virtuous in itself. Moderation does not simply mean avoiding excess, one must avoid deficiency as well; to paraphrase Aristotle, moderation stands in the mean between two extremes. The motivation of the prohibitionist just mentioned can be considered good, but incomplete: for by avoiding all alcohol (in this example) one does not violate the moral rule against drunkenness, but neither does one fully assert the goodness of the gift of wine. In Aristotelian terminology, one unintentionally falls into the extreme of deficiency while trying to avoid the opposite extreme of excess. Here one can see a fundamental problem that cannot simply be restricted to issues such as alcohol; that is, that creation is a good gift from God and must be received as such.

In asserting that one does best to not only avoid extremes but to avoid moderation as well, one must implicitly claim not only that whatever a person takes in moderation is not a good but that moderation itself is not good. In the case of alcohol the abstainer avoids drunkenness in a way which ends up expressing (quite unintentionally) disdain for God's creativity. The prohibitionist gets so wrapped up in avoiding doing wrong that he fails to do right, or else he conceives of moral law in a fundamentally negative way wherein one stays on the right side of the law simply by not violating it. In either case, we see that without a practiced moderation one cannot live fully, and that the state of one's soul gets inhibited in a way which makes it difficult -- though not entirely impossible -- to affirm the goodness of creation.

Moderation must not be interpreted in solely a legal way; though it is a mean it is not a mathematical mean. To eat moderately does not really entail eating a precise amount of food; moderation cannot be placed on a coordinate system. For this reason Aristotle asserts that while moderation requires a mean between extremes, moderation is itself an extreme; in other words, in order to be moderate one must avoid excess and deficiency, but this alone does not constitute moderation--it merely makes it possible. Once a person frees himself from extremes he creates the calm space in which he can enact virtue. In the case of food, moderation becomes possible when one neither eats too much or too little, but moderation is achieved when one relates to food as one ought to. It is quite possible that one avoids excesses but still is not moderate. Similarly, in the case of alcohol one cannot be called moderate simply by avoiding drunkenness or excessive sobriety; one is moderate when, neither given to drunkenness nor sobriety, one relates to alcohol as a good to which one is not enslaved but which one may enjoy as one should. Moderation is a state of the soul, and moderation with regard to alcohol is simply a particular way in which this moderation may express itself.

Moderation with regard to alcohol cannot be considered as an ethical issue independently from wider ethical issues, and not only because -- in the Christian tradition especially -- immoderate alcohol intake gets categorized as a species of gluttony. Whether a person can drink moderately speaks to the state of their soul; an inability to drink a reasonable amount of alcohol is not so much bad in itself as it is an indication that one suffers from a disordered soul. Indeed, consuming alcohol in moderation offers good practice at being moderate generally, and only though practice and habituation can one become moderate. Thus when the prohibitionist abstains from something in order to avoid excess he not only engages in a sort of excess of his own (and this might indicate a wider disorder), but deprives himself of an opportunity to improve the state of his soul.

Some cases do exist where one simply ought not to partake in some good he or she finds simply too tempting; this, of course, indicates something analogous to an illness in which one forgoes the mean because of excessive personal weakness. In these cases, abstinence stands as the best choice, but it must be considered a diminished good arising from a particular pathology; or to put it another way, an unfortunate circumstance arising from a psychological disability. This ought be viewed not with disdain but with a compassionate awareness that recognizes the situation as not ideal but best given the circumstances. We might think of other cases in which a supervening reason, such as the wishes of one's friends or family, might cause someone to justifiably forgo the mean. In these cases one must again realize that the circumstances do not allow for what is ideal, that those who rule out moderate behavior are wrong, and one must take special care not to let the spirit of immoderation spread beyond its current site of infection. One must always remember that all goods take place in a mean, and that in order for them to be accepted as good one must have incorporated the principle of moderation into one's soul.

The practice of moderation -- whether in alcohol, food, entertainment, time management, and so on -- ought to be viewed as the practice of training one's soul in virtue and as part of the process of achieving moral maturity. One gains personal stability and good judgment in this way and only in this way. By denying the goodness of alcohol or food one implicitly impugns the wider goodness of creation, and by avoiding moderation in this instance one falls prey to an extreme which makes it more difficult to practice moderation generally. Fortunately, those who oppose the use of alcohol very often do not let this tendency infect too deeply the other aspects of their lives and so prevent the prohibitionist attitude from causing any wider damage. However one must keep in mind as a Christian that only when the soul stands well ordered in a state of moderation can one receive creation as a gift by enjoying it without being enslaved by it, and only in this way can one maintain a relation to things which both affirms their goodness and places God as the source of all good things; only in moderation can asceticism be a celebration, rather than a condemnation, of creation.

Freedom, Ancient and Modern

One ought to take care when speaking of freedom as something valuable in itself; the truth of such an assertion depends entirely on which sense one uses "freedom." In political dialogue, freedom often indicates the absence of coercion: one can be considered free when he or she chooses without external compulsion. This notion of freedom probably goes beyond simply being ever-present in political conversation; it determines the plane on which the discussion takes place and different political positions often arise from slightly different permutations of this concept of freedom.

For example, libertarians (and usually fiscal conservatives) understand freedom to mean the absence of government interference; the libertarian considers a person free when the government leaves him to mind his own affairs as he wishes. The libertarian understands coercion primarily in the sense of external violence. The liberal, on the other hand, understands freedom not as an absence, but as the presence of the resources which allow a person to carry on his affairs. The liberal believes that one can only be considered free when he has sufficient resources to exercise his freedom, and therefore freedom takes on an active dimension. The liberal understands coercion as not only active intervention but as material deprivation. Social conservatives offer a third perspective in which the government maintains a moral society. By enforcing a stable society with a clear code of morality, the government protects the conservative's freedom from having to suffer from the spectacle of public immorality. Here, coercion signifies the imposition of morally undesirable behaviors which affect others.

These interpretations of freedom arise out of a particular philosophic formulation of freedom: freedom as the autonomy of will. In this sense, human beings can be called free if one's choices do not get determined by outside forces but by one's will alone. One sees this quickly in the debate over determinism: some philosophers argue that all the choices a person makes have already been decided. Even if the cause of all decisions were to be found as the will, human beings would still not be considered free because the will is not autonomous (in that it could not have chosen otherwise). In this philosophic interpretation of freedom one can be called free only if the source of his or her decisions -- the will -- could choose any number of different ways and chooses based on a pure act of will in which no reference point behind the will can be found.

This understanding of philosophy is without doubt a modern one; one which has lost a higher idea of freedom. This higher sort of freedom requires something very like the kind of freedom described previously, it requires the capacity to choose without external compulsion. However, this sort of freedom does not consist in autonomy, but depends on one's essence. Freedom is the manifestation of who one is. This even applies in a limited way to non-rational life: a flower, if it receives nutrients and sunlight, grows and expresses what it means to be a flower. If it suffers deprivation of sunlight or nutrients it dies or becomes deformed in such a way that it no longer shows what it means to be a flower then its freedom has been infringed.

Similarly with a person: if one is an artist and has the means and opportunity to pursue one's artwork, one possesses freedom in respect to being an artist. If one does not have the resources to express oneself as an artist, one is not free. The uniqueness of human beings lies in our ability to express many different sorts of essences, to be free and unfree with regard to these different essences, and to govern these various expression with our rational faculty. Freedom does not mean simply choosing, it means choosing what is in accord with our nature.

Though human beings can express different essences, one stands out as particularly basic. The essence of human being seems to include and delimit things such as artistry. Indeed, it seems other human potentialities depend on -- and perhaps are only a modification of -- human nature. Therefore, one could reasonably suggest that the primary sense of freedom consists in how well a person manifests the human essence; a person's freedom for the most part means how well he or she lives up to what it means to be human.

This necessarily entails limits on the autonomy of the human will; the sheer exercise of the will does not in itself constitute freedom and can actually result in bondage. Certain action of the will acquire a significance beyond the will itself, a significance grounded in human nature. This means not all choices can be considered equivalent, that some choices stand in accord with one's human nature (in existential language: some choices are authentic) and other choices violate one's nature as a human being (existentially, these choices are inauthentic). At the one end we have virtuous activity; not virtue in the sense of conforming to universal moral law, but virtue in the (Greek) sense of human excellence. The virtuous man stands out as particularly showing what it means to be a human being; put another way, the virtuous man manifests his human nature well. On the other end we could think of vices, not as an instance which violates some universal moral law, but as activity which betrays one's own human nature. Degrading activities such as torture or prostitution stand out here as obvious examples.

At this point one who holds the modern view of freedom might say that even degrading activities express one's freedom, that if one prevents another from such things one violates his or her right of choice. In order to hold this position, one cannot simply propose that human nature is not static but dynamic, and that norms from one group cannot be applied to other groups. Few great philosophers would say that human nature can be expressed in a static fashion; most -- at least most among the ancients -- would be at home with the Aristotelian position that human nature comes to be through commonly shared meaning in a community. Further, and more to the point, in order to call an activity degrading one must mean that it does a disservice to the one who performs it; one must say that through degrading acts one misrepresents and reduces who he or she is. This relies on a coherent notion of a human essence, regardless of whether it is dynamic or static, grounded transcendentally or practically. Therefore, our opponent must either hold that there is no such thing as human nature, or that in principle it is necessary that some actions degrade ones essence. If one believes the concept of human essence to be without content, one can hardly argue about human freedom since by discussing human freedom one already operates with some latent concept of humanity.

Having put forth the ancient way of thinking about freedom, we might consider for a moment the coherency of the modern version. It seems that, if this sort of freedom is a good, the things which restrict it are bad. In the political sphere, we might think of certain laws, the absence of resources, or the imposition of riotous immorality as restricting freedom. But if we think beyond the political sphere to the wider implications of such freedom, we find something more controversial. It seems that autonomy is violated by every instance of specificity. That is, insofar as we are something concretely, we limit ourselves. Every time one chooses, one limits himself. If one chooses to be a liberal, for example, in that instant he closes off the possibility that he chose to be a conservative--even if he changes his mind later. If one chooses to travel to France, one cannot simultaneously be in Australia. Every time one exercises one's freedom, one simultaneously limits it. Even refusing to take stands and make decisions closes off possibilities, for temporality itself refuses such absolute autonomy. Existing in any definite way places restrictions on the will, and it is for precisely this reason that the theologian David Bentley Hart accuses the modern form of freedom as fundamentally nihilistic. The very act of existing requires us at every moment to be something definite, to close off our choices. The only way one can be absolutely autonomous: one must escape existence altogether. Modern nihilism can be directly linked with the demand for absolute freedom of will.

Part of the blame for this, ironically enough, lies with theology. David Hart describes how William of Occam introduced the notion of freedom as autonomy into theology as nominalism, which later became systematized as Calvinsim. I quote at length from his book The Beauty of the Infinite:

[W]hen nominalism largely severed the perceptible world from the analogical index of divine transcendence, and thus reduced divine freedom to an ontic voluntarism, and theophany to mere legislation, such that creation and revelation could be imagined only as manifestations of the will of a god who is, at most, a supreme being among lesser beings, theology and philosophy alike were surrendered to a kind of elected darkness; and when the nominalists, or those of the factio occamista who followed them, succeeded in shattering the unity of faith and reason, and so the compact between theology and philosophy (or as, in an Occamist moment, Luther phrased it, "that whore"), both were rendered blind... For theology, of course, this represents an incalculable impoverishment: it contributed to a quite unbiblical dread of the goodness of creation, a misconstrual of divine glory as a supernatural corollary to the majesty of the sheer power of a human monarch, the idolatrous diminution of God to the condition of a composite being -- rather than the source of all being -- whose acts could, like ours, be indifferently related to his essence, expressing or dissimulating his nature... At a critical moment in cultural history -- not that there were not various fateful moves in the history of Western theology that led to it -- many Christian thinkers somehow forgot that the incarnation of the Logos, the infinite ratio for all that is, reconciles us not only to God, but to the world, by giving us back a knowledge of creation's goodness, allowing us to see again its essential transparency -- even to the point, in Christ, of identity -- before God. The covenant of light was broken. God became, progressively, the world's infinite contrary. And this state of theological decline was so precipitous and complete that it even became possible for someone as formidably intelligent as Calvin, without any apparent embarrassment, to regard the fairly lurid portrait of the omnipotent despot in book III of his Institutes -- who not only ordains the destiny of souls, but in fact predestines the first sin, and so brings the whole drama of creation and redemption to pass (including the eternal perdition of the vast majority of humanity) as a display of his own dread sovereignty -- as a proper depiction of the Christian God. One ancient Augustinian misreading of Paul's ruminations on the mystery of election had, at last, eventuated in fatalism. (131-132)

Calvin, in Hart's view, systematizes the perversion of freedom. Omnipotence, instead of indicating that God, in his transcendence, is always the full and perfect expression of himself, indicates instead the infinite power to dominate and control others in a way analogous to political power. But God's absolute freedom in the higher sense would mean a restriction on the autonomy of the will; God cannot do a great number of conceivable things, for this would be at odds with what it means to be God – or put another way, this autonomy would actually violate God's freedom. When freedom gets reduced to the autonomy of will it becomes theologically possible for God to willfully bring about evil, as Calvin makes evident.

A full return to the full notion of freedom transforms not only theology, but philosophical anthropology and politics. It would reopen the question of human nature with a certain urgency, for – as Aristotle notes in the Nicomachean Ethics – the more understanding one has of human nature, the better one understands how to be virtuous; this, certainly, offers a better standard than adherence to universal laws. This, in turn, leads to political questions; as men are social animals, their freedom manifests in their engagement with others. However, it transforms the level of political discussion as well, for if freedom consists in manifesting the human essence, politics becomes the place in which this can be enacted practically.