Consciousness — an introduction

I’ve been planning to discuss consciousness.  Today’s post is just a gentle introduction to the topic.  I expect to have further posts on this topic in coming weeks.

In a sense most of my posts have been about consciousness, though that probably was far from obvious to my readers.  Consciousness turns out to be a very difficult topic to discuss, as I have discovered.

Idealization

Much of philosophy appears to depend on idealization.  A person is treated as if an ideal rational agent, where “rational” is understood in terms of using logic as the means of reasoning.  To a first approximation, ontology appears to be a study of the logical objects that can be reasoned about.  And epistemology appears to emphasize the use of logic in reasoning about these objects.

The problem, however, is that the world is far from the assumed ideal place.

I have nothing against idealization.  I’m a mathematician, and mathematics is mostly idealization.  But you need to understand the limits of the idealizations that you use.

What is consciousness?

People disagree on what they mean by “consciousness”.  That’s one of the difficulties of discussing this topic.

Crossword puzzles

This post is not about how to solve a crossword puzzle.  It’s about what we can learn about truth by looking at those puzzles.

Let’s suppose that you have been working on a crossword puzzle.  And you think you have it solved.  So how can you tell whether you have the correct solution?  That is the question that I wish to examine.  And since “correct” is closely related to “true”, it is a question about truth.

Sudoku puzzles

Before looking more closely at crossword puzzles, let’s take a quick peek at Sudoku puzzles.  They make a good contrast with crossword puzzles.

The scientific and manifest images

In 1960, Wilfrid Sellars gave some lecturers on the Scientific Image of Man and the Manifest Image of man.  These were later published, and seem to be available on the net as a pdf file.  Roughly, the scientific image is how the world looks to science (particularly physics), while the manifest image is how it looks to us.

Right now, I am looking at a table (actually, my desk).  And it presents itself to me as a solid object with a smooth surface.  That solid object can be said to be part of the manifest image.  However, science describes it as mostly empty space, but with an array of atoms.  The atoms are separated by space.  To science (that is, to physics), there really isn’t a surface nor anything particularly smooth.  This array of separated atoms in space is part of the scientific image.

Why the difference?

I will mainly be looking at the differences between those images, and discussing why there is such a difference.

In recent posts, I have been discussing how we get information about the world by means of carving it up into parts.  The way that we carve up the world gives us the manifest image.  The way that science carves up the world gives us the scientific image.

Truth and reference

I recently posted this in a comment on another blog:

We cannot just take a sentence and ask if it is true. We first have to inquire about everything referenced by that sentence. If people don’t agree on the references, they won’t agree on the truth of the sentence.

It’s a rather obvious point.  Yet it is often overlooked.

Earlier this year, I proposed a modest theory of truth, in which I suggested that we judge the truth of a sentence based on whether it conforms with standards.  What I mainly had in mind, and what my example illustrated, were the standards that we follow for settling questions of reference.  Likewise, my posts about carving up the world are really all about how we go about finding ways to reference parts of the world.

Consciousness

In a way, the problems of consciousness are also closely connected with reference.  The so called “hard problem” arose because people thinking about AI (artificial intelligence) did not see how a computer could possibly be conscious.  Well, of course it cannot be conscious.  For to be conscious is to be conscious of something, to be conscious of a world.  Consciousness depends on reference.  Or, as philosophers usually say that, it depends on intentionality.