THE OBJECTS OF PERCEPTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT

THE OBJECTS OF PERCEPTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHTAuthor(s): ARTHUR COLLINSSource: Social Research, Vol. 40, No. 1 (SPRING 1973), pp. 153-176Published by: The New SchoolStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40970131 .

Accessed: 25/06/2014 03:38

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The New School is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Research.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 193.104.110.48 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 03:38:54 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=newschool

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40970131?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


THE OBJECTS OF PERCEPTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN

PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT BY ARTHUR COLLINS

The Egocentric Sceptical Perspective

L here is a remarkable contrast between the general point of view of philosophical thought since the Renaissance, and especially empiricist thought, on the one hand, and the thought of the classical Greek philosophers, on the other. Modern thought has been dominated by an egocentric sceptical perspective to which Plato and Aristotle paid little or no attention. In calling this perspective "egocentric," I want to bring out the philosophical thought that what a man is directly aware of is always something that is present in his own conscious mind, and that in perception what he is aware of is his own perceptual state, presumed to be caused in him by the outer object he is commonly said to perceive. On this understanding, eath man is limited to his own states of consciousness for his immediate experience. The conscious states with which a man is acquainted in perception have been called at various times "ideas," "impressions," "images," "sense-data," "representatives," "representations," "appearances," "states of evidence," and "immediate perceptual beliefs." At present, the con- tention that these perceptual states, and conscious states generally, are actually physical activities in the brain has gained a considerable following.

However perceptual states are conceived, the idea that they are the objects of our awareness in perception brings with it the set of philosophical problems that has constituted the core of post- Renaissance philosophy. We have the philosophical job, for in-



154 SOCIAL RESEARCH

stance, of determining the metaphysical character of these immediate objects of our awareness. Can we say that our conscious states are themselves physical like objects and events in the external world? Or does consciousness have its own metaphysical standing that contrasts with what is material, outer and spatial? And what is the foundation of the unity of our conscious states that makes of them not a haphazard miscellany, but the interconnected experience of a person? These are the metaphysical problems of mind and body and of personal identity. The egocentric perspective also sets the stage for all the dominant epistemological problems. Since we are immediately aware only of our own conscious states, we must find justifiable inferences to lead us from those states to the existence and character of anything beyond them. We must infer the existence of outer material things, of consciousness other than our own, of God, and even, perhaps, of our own past conscious states. It is notoriously difficult to justify the required inferences, and for that reason it is right to think of the general philosophical framework within which these are the central problems as "sceptical." This does not mean that moderns are sceptics and solipsists. There is a widely shared willingness to adopt a sceptical starting point: In the absence of argument, for all we know there is no external world, there are no other minds, there is no God, and no past. Modern epistemological theories are organized with a view to improving on this original uncertainty. It has happened, conspicuously in the thought of Hume, that philosophers find all the required arguments unsatisfactory.

It is not difficult to trace the main historical roots of this egocentric sceptical perspective that distinguishes modern and classical

philosophy. Scepticism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was no mere academic exercise. Ancient scientific conceptions of

reality lay in ruins and their modern replacements had achieved neither recognition nor satisfactory formulation. The teleological physics of Aristotle had collapsed. Cosmology based on the thought that the heavens represent a distinctive and immutable order* constituted of special matter and obedient to special laws,



PERCEPTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS 155

had to be rejected. The geocentric solar system that made of the physical world an appropriate stage for the drama of human existence had to be set aside in favor of a view that offered no corresponding interpretation of the world in human terms. More important, these discarded theories fitted admirably with estab- lished religious conceptions of the world. Christian philosophers had for long construed Aristotle's teleological thinking in terms of the purposes of God, and thus conferred on nature, in the large and in detail, a comforting intelligibility that was sacrificed by the new scientific ideas. Finally, the scientific conceptions of Aristotle and the medieval thinkers were patently based on a simple realistic interpretation of the information available to the senses. The immutability of celestial things, the circular motions of the heavens, and the geocentric solar system were not arbitrary dogmas but features of reality that seemed to be revealed to perceptual inspection. Aristotle's physics, based on the view that the several forms of matter seek their proper place was also an empirical generalization founded on facts that seemed readily apparent to the senses. His theory of inertia: force must be expended to keep a body in motion at a constant velocity, coheres with the world of everyday experience, while the modern replacement appears to defy what we observe. So the Inquisitors examining Galileo's heretical views did not think of themselves as dogmatic representatives of vested interests but as heirs of a powerful and sensible tradition of thought that was being challenged by obscure views which were obviously contrary to the facts, and al- legedly supported only by appeal to tricky new optical devices and the arrogant reasonings of a few self-appointed savants. Con- versely, scientific thinkers of the generations of Galileo and Des- cartes were obliged to recognize that their own views entailed a systematic suspicion of perception. What appears to be the case to the senses represents at best a problem. Sensuous appearances are misleading and must be reconciled with the findings of a science based on the mathematical interpretation of nature.

In the thinking of men like Galileo and Descartes, this suspicion



156 SOCIAL RESEARCH

of the data immediately available tö the senses was considerably reinforced by their own researches in the field of optics and the

physiology of perception. Convinced as they were of the inade-

quacy of a common-sense attitude about the objects of perception, it was quite natural for them to place a radical interpretation on the processes involved in perception which they investigated. Ac- cording to this interpretation, causal processes must be understood to give rise to sense impressions in men. These sense impressions are the objects of perceptual consciousness and, far from being themselves objects in the outer world, they provide a conspicuously unreliable guide to the nature of outer reality. Once this inter-

pretation of the objects of perception is accepted, the problem of the external world, the problem of other minds, and all the attendant problems of a threatening solipsism become inevitable.

So if we ask, "What is Aristotle's solution for the problem of other minds?" or, "How does Plato justify assertions about a material world on the basis of immediate experience?" we find no answers. These questions are unanswerable because they are based on the false supposition that Plato and Aristotle, like modern

philosophers, take it that men are acquainted at first hand only with the content of their own consciousness. The problem of other minds does not press us until we have agreed that in being conscious we are acquainted with our own minds. "There are these conscious states," we say, speaking of our own, "but are there any others?" The problem of the external world presses us only when we have agreed that as perceivers we are not acquainted with the external world but with our own perceptual states. "There are these objects of my awareness," we say, speaking of our perceptual states, "but with what confidence can I pronounce on existences outside of and independent of my consciousness?" Plato does not try to solve these problems because he does not adopt the

preliminary view out of which these problems grow. There are

sceptical motifs in Plato's thought, but it is not this egocentric scepticism. Systematic uncertainty is not derived, for Plato, from the idea of a gulf between the meager data available to one man's




consciousness and the hypothesis of a world of material things and other consciousnesses outside. Plato rejects the view that perception can be identified with knowledge not because he thinks that as perceivers we contact something short of the material world outside us. Perception does inform us, Plato thinks, about the world outside, but that information is at best opinion and never knowledge. Even Protagoras was no solipsist. "Man is the mea- sure of all things/' not because he cannot get beyond his own consciousness but because there can be no standard of truth against which conflicting beliefs might be judged.

Plato and Descartes on Perception

The Greeks were not unappreciative of the general understanding of perception that has been so interpreted by modern thinkers as to entail egocentrism and the problems of solipsism. In the Theaetetus, Socrates expounds a theory of perception which is a composite of views of Protagoras and Heraclitus. According to the theory set out there, the world is made up of two species of motions. There are fast motions and slow motions. Perception occurs in contacts between fast and slow motions, in the course of which two new motions, one of each sort, are produced. The new slow motion produced is a "perceived quality/' - the whiteness of something like a stone (in Socrates' illustration); the new fast motion is a "perceptual state," - the seeing of whiteness. Under the proviso that motions, rather than material things, are the ultimate constituents of the material world, this is a physicalistic account of perceptual consciousness. Sensitive entities, which we may think of as minds, brains, or eyes, are fast motions, as are the states induced in them by contact with such things as stones. Inanimate and insensitive things are slow motions, as are their perceivable qualities. Just as perceptual states come to exist in sensitive fast motions when they are stimulated by contact with slow motions, so the perceivable qualities of outer things come to exist as a consequence of their contact with sensitive entities. In other words,



158 SOCIAL RESEARCH

material objects cannot be said to have sensuous properties in themselves, but they take on sensuous properties in the course of being perceived. The particular quality that the object perceived will come to have depends upon the nature and condition of the perceiving organism.

Socrates does not expound all this for the sake of refutation. As nearly as one can tell from the dialogue, Plato thinks this theory of perception may well be correct. By accepting this theory and invoking the authority of other philosophers, Socrates is able to reject the hypothesis that perception is knowledge. For it follows from the Protagorean element in the theory that the character of perceived things is relative to the state of the perceiving organism, and from the Heraclitean element it follows that the material world is an unstable flux of continuous motions affording nothing permanent that might be an object of knowledge.

Although it sounds picturesque because it appeals to "motions," and although it leaves the physical and physiological facts entirely unspecified, this is a subtle theory of perception. As we shall see, it contains most of the important strands that have been prominent in philosophical analyses of perception up to the present. Most conspicuously, it presents the view that a perceptual state is produced in an organism as a causal consequence of interaction with the environment. It contains a version of the doctrine of secondary qualities l^ter articulated by Galileo and endorsed by a long tradition of illustrious thinkers, that is, the view that sensuous qualities like color do not characterize unperceived reality. Furthermore, Socrates' theory is calculated to account for perceptual aberrations: illusions and hallucinations, in terms of anomalous states of the perceiver, of which Socrates mentions madness, dreaming, and illness, which lead to the production of anomalous perceptual states and perceived qualities. This obligation to adjust one's thinking about perception in the light of aberrations has been a pervasive characteristic of modern thinking. Finally, the theory identifies perceptual states in a physicalistic and naturalistic way. These states are themselves physical activities induced by physical




interactions. This is the format of materialistic psychology like that of Hobbes, or the presently popular mind-brain identity theory, at least as far as perception is concerned.

I have not summarized this simply to call attention to Plato's anticipation of later thinking. What is remarkable and instructive here is that although Plato expounds and seems to subscribe to this understanding of perception, he does not thereupon become involved in the issues and problems of solipsism. Like Plato, Des- cartes rejects the claim that knowledge is or can be based upon perception. He too supposes that perception involves causal interaction with extended outer things that eventuates in the production of a perceptual state in the perceiver. Descartes, like Plato, takes it that perceptual aberrations undermine the epistemic pre- tensions of perception, and that sensuous qualities do not characterize outer things in themselves. Plato and Descartes both present our appreciation of mathematical truth as a paradigm of knowledge, and it is the deviation of perceptual belief from that paradigm that constitutes, for both thinkers, grounds for repudiating the claim that perception is knowledge. But Descartes adopts the egocentric sceptical perspective and Plato does not.

We cannot describe this contrast between Plato and Descartes by saying that they share an understanding of the nature of perception while Descartes also adopts the egocentric perspective which, in turn, sets the stage for the central concerns of modern metaphysics and epistemology. Descartes does not add solipsistic problems to Plato's philosophical agenda: he derives the egocentric sceptical perspective from the very understanding of perception that he shares with Plato. The derivation is easy to follow. Causal processes produce a perceptual state in a man, and Descartes, unlike Plato, regards that state as the true object of consciousness in perception. What a perceiver is aware of is an idea that has been caused in him. He has a constitutional but unjustifiable predis- position to attribute to the cause those features that he finds in the idea. When a man sees a white stone, according to Descartes, "white" really does apply to something of which he is aware, but



160 SOCIAL RESEARCH

it applies only to something that has been caused in his consciousness. This caused perceptual state in itself provides no ground for characterizing something outer as "white." On this interpretation, perceptual aberrations do not prove that things are not as they appear. For inner things are the only ones that ever really do appear, and they always are as they appear. Outer extended material things do not appear at all. Their existence must be inferred. The pattern of inference by means of which Descartes intends to escape from the prison of his own experience is mathematical proof. The existence of our own perceptual states yields no sup- port for the hypothesis that there is a corresponding reality outside of our minds. So Descartes proceeds to the proof of the existence of God, asserting that the idea of God, unlike perceptual ideas, does entail the existence of an outer cause to which we can re- ascribe the features that we find in the idea itself.

The empiricist tradition from the seventeenth century to the present does not accept the theological maneuver by which Des- cartes extricates himself from solipsism. Therefore, accepting roughly Descartes1 interpretation of the objects of consciousness in perception, empiricists have perennially wrestled with the task of constructing an adequate defense for everyday and scientific beliefs on a foundation of data provided only by perceptual states. It is important to note that on this understanding philosophy itself becomes a kind of super science. The Cartesian interpretation of the objects of consciousness identifies a special subject matter for which philosophy is expected to furnish a theoretical understanding. The metaphysical question, "What unifies all these perceptual states, making of them the coherent experience of a person?" is like the question "What makes all of these moving bodies into an organized solar system?'

' Both questions seem to demand an appeal to something that is not immediately evident in order to ex-

plain a range of phenomena that is accessible to us. And once

epistemology takes on the form of a science, with consciousness

providing data in the form of immediate experience, all other sciences must be subsumed to it. The existence of a subject matter




for physics is, for example, an hypothesis for epistemology. In this spirit, Hume constructed a theory enunciating laws for inner objects ("impressions and ideas" in his vocabulary), self-consciously comparing himself to Newtpn:

. . . and shall we esteem it worthy the labor of a philosopher to give us a true system of the planets, and adjust the position and order of those remote bodies; while we affect to overlook those, who, with so much success, delineate the parts of the mind, in which we are so intimately concerned? *•

The format of scientific theory construction has an enormous and wholly earned prestige for the modern intellectual temperament. But only the Cartesian interpretation of the objects of consciousness accords this format to metaphysics and epistemology themselves. For if it is just the outer world of which we are aware when we perceive, then physics itself deals with that reality, and metaphysics derives no sustaining subject matter from perception.

The decisive difference between the Platonic and Cartesian con- structions placed on the same understanding of perception, then, is the location of the object of perceptual consciousness. Both hold that perception consists in causal interaction of the perceiving organism and outer reality, resulting in the production of an inner perceptual state. Descartes does, and Plato does not, further assert that that inner state is what a man is actually aware of when he perceives. For Plato, perceptual consciousness requires the existence of an inner state, but perceptual consciousness is not consciousness of that inner state but always of something outer. The perceptual states themselves Plato calls "seeings" and "hearings" and so on. These are not the bearers of descriptive terms like "white" and "noisy." The proper owners of these qualities remain outside us. In the course of the causal process underlying perception, ". . . the eye (the fast motion) becomes filled with vision and now sees, and becomes, not vision, but a seeing eye, while the other parent of the color (the slow motion) is saturated with whiteness

i David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Selby Bigge (Oxford, 1902), p. 14.



162 SOCIAL RESEARCH

and becomes, on its side, not whiteness, but a white thing, be it a stock or stone or whatever else may chance to be so colored/' 2 The

resulting conception is relativistic without being solipsistic. The white stone that I see might have been blue to me, had there been

disturbing influences on my nervous system. In either case, the ob-

ject of my awareness is outside of me. Perception involves acquain- tance with such objects and, therefore, yields opinion, and on the whole, true opinion. Plato reserves the term "knowledge" for an

apprehension of reality that is more stable, more penetrating, and more intellectually satisfying than mere recognition of the shifting features of the material world.

To recapitulate, there is a general understanding of perception which is shared by Plato and Descartes. It is held by both the rationalist and empiricist traditions. This understanding is at

present widely, perhaps universally, accepted. The central feature of this understanding is the idea that a perceptual state is produced in a man when he sees, hears, and so on. I believe that this understanding has been so widely accepted because it is correct. In Plato's thought, the concept of a perceptual state remained, from a scientific point of view, schematic and

speculative. Descartes fitted this understanding to the physics and

physiology available to him. For us, physiology provides an irresistible ground for the claim that there are perceptual states. Let us take it that this understanding of perception is, broadly speaking, true.

Accepting this background understanding of perception and, in

particular, the concept of an inner perceptual state, we will surely want to raise the question, "Is his perceptual state the true object of a man's awareness in perception, as Descartes takes it to be, or is it possible that the causal theory of perception and the attendant

concept of an inner perceptual state are compatible with the idea that in perception we are aware of the external world itself?" The structure of modern philosophy has been determined to a large extent by the Cartesian interpretation of perceptual states. So it is a matter of considerable importance if that interpretation is not

2 Plato, Theaetetus (Trans, by F. M. Cornford), 156 d-e.




necessitated by what we understand of perception. If what we might ironically call "Platonic realism" about the objects of perception is feasible, then we would need some further argument to generate the egocentric sceptical perspective without which the problems of solipsism do not arise. For my part, I think that the egocentric sceptical perspective by no means follows from what we understand about perception and, further, that the Cartesian interpretation of perceptual states as inner objects of awareness is itself incoherent and, therefore, no intellectual option. At the same time, the burden of the modern tradition is so heavily Carte- sian that a great deal of unlearning would have to take place before it could be wholly and securely set aside. For the present context, I propose a more modest goal. I will set out two powerful reasons for supposing that when we perceive, we are aware of things outside us and not of perceptual states within, although there must be such states within. Then, without taking these reasons to be decisive, I will consider the concept of consciousness itself with a view to making it intelligible to us that philosophers of the first rank should have made so serious an error on a point of such significance.

Perceptual Realism: Physiology The first reason for counting the outer world and not the inner

state as the object of awareness in perception is the fact that modern physiology and physics can now explain how we come to be aware of outer things, whereas this explanation is totally irrele- vant and our consciousness remains an inexplicable mystery if the object of our awareness is conceived of as inside us. To make this clear, let us consider the mind-brain identity theory. This will have the auxilliary advantage of illustrating the prevalence of Car- tesian thinking in the present. The leading proponent of the theory of mind-brain identity says

When I say "it looks to me that there is a yellow lemon," I am saying roughly that what is going on in me is like what is going on in me when there really is a yellow lemon in front of me, my eyes are open, the light is daylight, and so on. That is, our talk



164 SOCIAL RESEARCH

of immediate experience is derivative from our talk about the external world. Furthermore, ... we can see that our talk about immediate experience is neutral between materialism and dualism. It reports our internal goings-on as like or unlike what internally goes on in typical situations, but the dualist would construe these goings-on as goings-on in an immaterial substance, whereas the materialist would construe these goings-on as taking place inside our skulls.3

Here again, in ordinary perception the presence of an object is understood to figure in a causal process that produces something in the perceiver. What is thus produced is an "ongoing activity" for Smart, a "fast motion" for Plato, an "idea" for Descartes, and an "impression" for Hume. We are using "perceptual state" to cover whatever it is that is thus caused. The ongoing activity is the perceiver's "immediate experience" according to Smart, and in that sense, Smart is a Cartesian. I mean that Smart takes perceptual states to be the immediate objects of our awareness, although he diverges radically from Descartes when it comes to allocating a metaphysical status to perceptual states. Whatever their constitution, these are the objects with which we are in contact at first hand in perception, and we are able to report on their occurrence and find them like and unlike. Since these activities constitute immediate experience, our awareness of them is the foundation of our beliefs about anything that is not immediate experience and does not go on in us. The occurrence of one of these inner events prompts a man to say, "It looks to me that there is a yellow lemon," so, on Smart's understanding, if this occurrence has been caused in the right way, then there is a yellow lemon present. Since these inner activities are ordinarily caused by the presence of an outer object, we are able to talk with each other about inner objects by tying them to the "typical situations" in which the standard cause is present. Smart is not interested, in this context, in the sceptical aspects of the egocentric perspective he adopts here. Nonetheless, his program certainly does face the question that if the immediate object of my awareness in percep-

3 J. J. C. Smart, "Materialism," Journal of Philosophy, LX (1963).




tion is always an inner activity, then what justifies my claims about any other things and, in particular, how can I possibly know when typical situations obtain?

Smart assumes that his view is consonant with science. Material- ism always derives encouragement from the thought that dualism is wrapped up with tender-minded, spiritualistic and religious world-views. The underlying ground for the mind-brain identity theory is the idea that brain activities can be correlated with immediate experiences, and this idea is supposed to be taken over directly from the science of physiology itself. So theorists of the mind-brain think that if any view is in touch with empirical science, it must be theirs. This is far from the case. In fact, the mind-brain identity theory guarantees that perceptual consciousness shall remain an impenetrable mystery.

I want to stress that the physiological facts with which the ma- terialists are impressed are not to be disputed. Even on the sur- face, these facts are as compatible with the Platonic interpretation as with the Cartesian. On Plato's interpretation, when the right causal processes take place and the right perceptual state eventuates, a man perceives. That means that he then sees things or hears, and what he is aware of is what he sees or hears. On Plato's interpretation, the physiological account helps make it intelligible to us how this wonderful thing can happen - how it is that a man can be aware of things outside of him, how he is able to distinguish them, and find them like and unlike one another. But if we regard the perceptual state, the inner activity, as itself the object of awareness, then physiological explanations shed no light at all. If we think that a man can report on something going on in him that has been caused by physical and physiological processes, and if we think that a man can find these inner products like and unlike one another, we arrive at the following questions: "How does it happen that men are aware of these activities in their brains? What underwrites our capacity to note features of these inner states and com- pare them with one another?" Since, on this interpretation, the whole physiological story has been told just in the creation of the



166 SOCIAL RESEARCH

object of awareness, that is, the brain activity, there is nothing left to be said in answer to the question, "How are men able to detect these activities?"

"If he sees a lemon, then something must be going on in him." This inference is surely compelling. If a man could see a lemon with nothing going on in him that was not also going on when he did not see anything, then vision would be magical. But we are not at all obliged to concede that the thing that goes on, the activity that is absolutely indispensable if a man is to see anything, is what he is able to report on when he sees. The nervous system underwrites our capacity to make out things in the world. But the activities in the nervous system neither suggest nor explain any capacity to be aware of those goings-on themselves. In the last

analysis, the identity theory, seeking to be unsentimental and scientific, itself makes perceptual consciousness magical. Physi- ology can contribute to our understanding of perceptual consciousness only if we suppose that the object of consciousness is outside us. If we take ourselves to be immediately aware of the opera- tion of our nervous system, that understanding is lost. There is a scientific spirit represented in the thought "Well, if he sees that, there must be something going on in him. He couldn't just make out a physical object by no means at all/' This thought is just as compelling when it is something within his body that a man detects. We would never be convinced by the view that no physiological machinery is required in order to feel toothaches or itchy toes. So, too, it would be compelling were we aware of things in our brains and could report on them and find them like and unlike. As it stands, we know of no physiological structures which could be supposed to operate in us making us aware of events in our brains. The brain is itself insensitive and falls within the scope of no receptors and no organs of perception. So there is an irony in making the brain the locus of everything of which we are aware. By construing perception as acquainting us with brain events, identity theorists commit themselves to the idea that we can detect physical occurrences by no means at all. Far from en-




dorsing it, the identity theorist must ultimately reject the inference "since he is aware of that, something must be going on in him." Furthermore, when this inference is employed, it draws upon what we do know in physiology: we know about receptors, and the retina, and the optic nerve. But when it is rejected, as it must be by mind-brain identity theorists, when we regard events in the brain as automatically objects of awareness, then we draw upon what we do not know in physiology. Only the thought that the brain is vastly complicated, and that its workings are but dimly, partially, and provisionally understood, enables us to entertain the hypothesis that we might be directly aware of its activities as we are supposed to be directly aware of our immediate experiences. Wittgenstein said that philosophical explanations that would not make any sense in another sphere are accepted in psychological contexts because we make appeal to "the mere occultness of the mental." The mind-brain identity theory makes appeal to the mere occultness of the neural.

Perceptual Realism: Phenomenology

The second reason for regarding the outer world as the home of the objects of perceptual awareness is that only the outer world can provide objects that will fit our descriptions of the things of which we are aware. Vision can acquaint a man with something yellow, or at least with something that looks yellow and, so, with something that could be yellow. For the mind-brain identity theory, the objects of immediate experience are activities in the brain. But surely it cannot be some activity in my brain that I call "yellow" and that might, in fact, be yellow. Of course, Smart does not say that what is going on in me when there is a yellow lemon present is itself yellow. He allows that "yellow," along with "sour," "lemon-shaped," and "lemon," belong in the external world, the world of causes of brain activities. But if this brain activity is the immediate object of my report, and it is not yellow,



168 SOCIAL RESEARCH

sour, and shaped like a lemon, then nothing that I am aware of is yellow, sour, and shaped like a lemon.

My brain activity can be called "my seeing of a yellow lemon," and that is what Plato calls it. Then it is understandable if my perceptual state does not have properties appropriate to external objects: a seeing of a yellow lemon is not a yellow seeing. All this can make sense just as long as we do not take the perceptual state to be my immediate experience. For a man can see insofar as he can make out things that are yellow. Vision acquaints us with things that can be seen and not with seeings of them. For an object of perceptual consciousness, we need something that can be yellow, sour, and lemon-shaped. An activity in our own brain will not fulfill these requirements.

On this point, Plato profits from the fact that he leaves the details of the causal process underlying perception quite unspecified. Something is caused in men when they perceive, but as to the character of what is caused, its location in the man, and the details of the causal process, Plato remains flexible and unspecific. When a philosopher expounds the same theory with the physiological details filled in, he runs the double risk of, first, confusing the physiological activities specified with the object detected in perception and, second, deriving spurious confidence in his mis- take from the prestige of physiology itself. He accepts the message-carrying conception of the nervous system at face value, but neglects the question, "Who reads this message and how is it perceived?" The optic nerve is an information channel, and in the brain an event occurs that is subtly correlated with the external cause and conditions of stimulation. This necessary correlation makes the brain event something like a coded picture. The coded picture is supposed to be the message, unless we demand a further causal step from the brain into a nonmaterial mind. Philosophical confidence in this conception is enhanced by the thought that a man will not see a yellow lemon if the right brain event does not occur, and he will see a yellow lemon if it




does, and this is independent of the actual presence of an outer

object. In an hallucination, the "right" thing happens in the brain in the absence of the standard external cause. Then it

appears that we have at best the choice that Smart offers: the brain

activity is itself the immediate experience, or the immediate ex-

perience must be brought even further "inside" as a spiritual event in a nonmaterial mind. In either case, that is, on either Smart's or Descartes' understanding, when a man reports on the objects of his perceptual consciousness shorn of the customary causal hypotheses concerning the causes of that consciousness, he reports on something within him.

This is widely taken to be inevitable if we are to allow for perceptual aberrations. But in fact, it makes both normal and aberrant perception unintelligible. Here is how we go wrong: We remind ourselves that a man could have just the same experience without the usual, or without any, outer object; the phenomenology of perceptual experience then presses us. Look- ing on the ordinary colorful and noisy scene, we reflect, "It could be just like this even though there were nothing out there." By this we mean that a man might make out things that were colored and noisy although the colors and noises made out were not features of anything outside. The whole point of taking aberrations into account, then, derives from the fact that men can apply color terms, spatial relation terms, and the like, to something that they "see" although the outer object is missing. Our situation is in no way advanced by substituting an inner object, a br^in state, that cannot possibly be the owner of the sensuous

qualities we detect. An hallucinated lemon will be very like a lemon and not at all like a brain event. In order to accommodate aberrations, brain-mind theorists make the immediate experience in an hallucination a brain event. Then it must be a brain event in ordinary perception too. We thought first that hallucination is like vision in that a man might be aware of something colored in both cases. Now we find that he is aware of something colored in neither case. Instead of providing something to be



170 SOCIAL RESEARCH

what it is that we are aware of in either case, identity theory provides something that cannot be what we are aware of in either case.

There is no use resuscitating dualism in the hope that a nonmaterial mind might be the true home of the objects of perceptual consciousness. Whatever the metaphysical character of the perceptual state, it should be something like a seeing or a hearing. To make a seeing a nonmaterial item or event will not make it something yellow. The objects of perception and of hallucination require space. Only extended things can be colored and stand in spatial relations to one another. The space of which our bodies occupy portions is the only space where there is room for such things. How are all these spatial things to be deployed in a nonmaterial mind? Shall we say, "Somehow they are?" A man who thinks that that may be so is driven on a relentless search for an inner object of perception. He is driven to take up all the features and constituents of the physical world with which he is familiar and try to relocate them in a mysterious, nonmaterial, nonspatial, inner counterpart of the world.

We will still undoubtedly wonder what we can say of perceptual aberrations if we agree that all objects of perceptual consciousness are outer objects. This is partly a matter of natural curiosity, but mostly it is a question sponsored by the misunderstandings about perception that have long dominated our thought. In illusions, things are not as they appear. Something that is not yellow looks yellow. It is something outside in the world that looks yellow, and is not. The trouble in hallucinations is that men "see" things that do not exist. They see things that are not there in the space in front of them. Still, that is where they see what they do see. In such a case, a man does not really see anything and so is not aware of any object, although he may think that he sees and is aware of what he sees. His trouble is not that he takes one kind of object for another, an inner object for an outer object. He "sees" what isn't there at all. As far as inner goings-on are concerned, the hallucinating man is




just another theorist. "Something very queer is going on in my nervous system," he will say. He will say this not by way of re-

porting on something going on that he is aware of. He will say it because he sees something that does not exist, knows it does not exist, and thinks there must be some explanation. Only when we have felt the strange grip of egocentric philosophy do these under- standings become inadequate. Only then do we insist that there must be something yellow if something looks yellow, and that there must be a birdlike object somewhere if a man hallucinates a bird. If this grip is relaxed, the facts of perceptual aberration will not incline us to internalize the objects of our perceptual consciousness.

Consciousness

In sum, the reasons that we have given for preferring the Pla- tonic to the Cartesian interpretation of the objects of perceptual consciousness are these: First, if we suppose that the objects of our awareness are the causal products of interaction with the environment and, hence, are inner objects conceived either physically or spiritually, we can make no use of physics and physiology in explaining how it is that we are aware of these objects. Objects of perceptual consciousness become mysteriously self-illuminating events. On the Cartesian interpretation, both our common sense and our scientific understanding of the processes involved in perception are preempted in explaining how the object of consciousness comes to exist in us. Why we should be conscious of these things is bound to remain a permanent mystery. Second, if we suppose that the objects of awareness are perceptual states, then our own descriptions of the things of which we are aware become mysterious. Our perceptual states cannot literally possess the sensuous features that are exactly what we want to ascribe to the objects of our perceptual consciousness. Seeings and hearings cannot have the features of things heard and seen. On the Cartesian interpretation, perceptual states are the only objects of perceptual con-



172 SOCIAL RESEARCH

sciousness, so that our inclination to ascribe sensuous features to

any things at all is bound to remain a mystery. If this is so, we must wonder that philosophers have pressed on

in the elaboration of theories that will perpetuate the mysteriousness of their subject matter. This willingness comes in

part from the universal impression that consciousness is mysterious. The fact that we are conscious at all seems to fly in the face of the conception of reality to which consciousness itself gives rise. We are conscious of things. They are not simply there. They are there as objects of our perception, attention, thought, and mem- ory. In the idiom of phenomenology, this ' 'being- there-to-us" of things in the world, of our bodies, of events inside and outside of our bodies, is what strikes us as mysterious and almost super- natural. Awareness seems an incredible illumination, a magical spark of light in what would be, without consciousness, a cold and bleak order of mere physical existence. In the realm of physical existence, things come into being and pass away, things impinge upon one another, things are moved, modified and destroyed. How can our awareness of such things and events be included among these things and events? So the fact of consciousness astonishes us and our mystification creates a tolerance for theories that are also mysterious.

Consciousness inevitably strikes us as illumination from outside the realm it illumines. Being conscious, we have a perspective. Every point within the world of which we are conscious falls within the scope of this perspective. Consciousness carries the

apparent implication of its own existence outside the sphere of things of which we are conscious. Consciousness reveals a world to us and seems to imply our own apartness from the world revealed. Faced with this apparent implication, two courses seem

open to philosophers: On the one hand, we can accept the apparent implication and make the difference between our conscious states and the reality of which we are conscious into a metaphysical classification of substances. This is mind-body dualism. On the other hand, we can reject the implication of the otherness of




consciousness and try to find a metaphysical home for our conscious states within the realm that our consciousness illumines. This is materialism and mind-brain identity.

Mindjbody dualism does have one virtue that materialism lacks: it tries to do more justice to our feeling of the overwhelming significance and mysteriousness of the fact of consciousness. But it also offends very powerful intuitions. Dualism is irremediably occult and unscientific. It flourishes only in the soil of discredited spiritualistic world views. Dualism fails utterly to cohere with our naturalistic recognition of ourselves as animals. Worst of all, dualism threatens to destroy the reality of the material world revealed to the senses in favor of the implied reality of consciousness itself. For when states of our own minds, the contents of our consciousness, come to be thought of as constituting an existence in themselves, we are bound to reflect that this is the only reality of which we can be sure. When we think of perceiving or ex- periencing something as a question of being in a certain conscious state, that is, as our consciousness taking on a certain cast or modification, we are led to concede that all that we really know is that our consciousness is as it is. We need an argument to rescue the world onto which consciousness was originally thought to be a marvelous and mysterious window. Furthermore, we are forced to allow that each of us is only in touch with his own conscious states. So solipsism threatens to reduce existence to the minimum of the sequence of one's own states of awareness. What a dismal and ironic prospect for the conception of ourselves that begins by crediting us with a special and a virtually divine capacity to ap- prehend the world!

The mind-brain identity theory then appears to be what is left in consequence of the spectacular failure of dualism. But it does not make anything intelligible to us. We are left without answers to the questions, "How can this physical event be a conscious state?" "How can one physical event deserve to be called awareness of another such event, or awareness of itself?" "How can our awareness of something be just another item in the realm of things



174 SOCIAL RESEARCH

of which we are aware?" Shall we say that these questions and the attendant sense of mystery enveloping the concept of consciousness are only the psychological remnant of discarded metaphysical schemes, a system of illusions generated by prescientific enthu- siasm? The mind-brain identity theory requires us to think that such is the case.

Our discontent, however, does not derive from the disappoint- ing meagerness of the mind-brain identity theory, but from features that it shares with dualism. Materialism, like dualism, accepts the responsibility for finding a metaphysical home for conscious states and mental events. It is precisely these states and events for which the mind-brain theory claims, first, correlation with brain activities and, then, identity with brain activities. Materialism and dualism have the same concept of the data for which some theory of mind is supposed to account. They are con- tending theories that differ only in their metaphysical commit- ment. But dualism did not fail only because it introduced an incredible metaphysical status: the mental. Much more important, dualism failed because it led to the mentalizing of everything of which we are conscious. The existence of anything more than our mental states became for dualism a tenuous hypothesis concerning the causal processes that eventuate in these conscious states themselves. Here consciousness has appropriated its ob-

jects. All consciousness is awareness of consciousness itelf. All evidence concerning the character and existence of external things, including the character and existence of the alleged causal processes, must consist wholly in the occurrence of other conscious states. There can be no real justification for regarding all of these states as evidence for anything at all. There can be no question of comparing our own conscious states with those of others in the

hope of founding outer reality on the evidence of interpersonal constancies among perceptual states. Imprisoned in the sphere of his own consciousness, each man must regard both the material and the psychic existence of others, not as a source of evidence for the stability of a public reality, but as further hypotheses standing




in the same desperate and unsatisfiable need for evidence as the as- sertion of the real existence of outer inanimate objects.

All this derives from the acceptance of conscious states as the true objects of consciousness. The same egocentric disaster is inevitable no matter what theory of mind is offered for data so conceived. This forlorn scepticism is not a consequence of the rash metaphysical gestures of dualism. The mind-brain identity theory, distracted by the spurious metaphysical largesse of dualism and encouraged by its own corresponding austerity, neglects this considerable problem as though it were magically solved in the course of saying that conscious states are identical with activities in the brain.

In contrast, if we impress on ourselves the thought that the state of being conscious of something is not itself an object of consciousness, we are immediately relieved of these perplexities and the problems of solipsism fall away. Now the existence of a characteristic state of being conscious of such and such becomes an hypothesis and not the data and the outer world becomes a realm of data and not an hypothesis. The several sciences have the theoretical job of explaining the character and structure of the objects of our consciousness, but there are no "super sciences" of epistemology and metaphysics. Once inner states of consciousness cease to be regarded as data, perception affords no subject matter for such sciences. The hypothesis that there are specific conscious states in a conscious creature is, of course, retained. Physiology retains the job of identifying these states, describing them in detail, explaining how they come to exist and, in the course of all this, explaining how it is that animals are able to perceive things around them.

If the outerness of the objects of perceptual consciousness is accepted, it is possible to put our understanding of perception in order and to accept what illumination of perception science can afford us. I do not think, however, that this suffices to remove the feeling of mystery surrounding the concept of consciousness and of perceptual consciousness in particular. We grope for some



176 SOCIAL RESEARCH

question, "How is this possible? How can we be aware of things?" What we ask is hard to formulate in detail and still harder to answer. For obviously, we do not want the scientific facts to be presented again. We are beset by the conviction that if we had all the facts, consciousness would still be a mystery.

One consideration accounts at least partially for our residual perplexity. The background of modern thought about mind and consciousness, and certainly the background of my own thought about mind and consciousness, is profoundly determined by the conception of the objects of consciousness which we have found untenable. The issues, the points at which explanation seems to be demanded, and the sense of mystery and puzzlement have, for me, only an amorphous existence apart from the framework of thought within which dualism and materialism appear as alter- natives, of which one or the other must be correct. I presume to see as far as the total rejection of these theories and to understand to some extent the misconceptions out of which they arise. But I do not have any clear idea about what we would want to say or ask about mind and consciousness from a perspective in which these theories, having been long set aside, no longer furnished an ineluctable framework of ideas, issues and problems. I would offer some statement, however insecure and speculative, on this grand topic were I not so uncertain about the nature of the questions about consciousness that we might plausibly put to ourselves once we have become fully accustomed to the fact that it is the outer world of which we are aware when we perceive.



THE OBJECTS OF PERCEPTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT

Documents

Transcript of THE OBJECTS OF PERCEPTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT