Ted Honderich - Actual Consciousness

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• Ted Honderich 2014

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(p.v) To Ingrid, John, and Kiaran

I am grateful to many past and present: anonymous manuscript readers A, B, and C for OUP, Ken Adams, Igor Aleksander, Freddie Ayer, Andrew Bailey, John Bickle, Ned Block, Bill Brewer, Justin Broackes, Harold Brown, Alex Byrne, John Campbell, Neil Campbell, David Chalmers, Matthew Chrisman, Andy Clark, Paul Coates, Tim Crane, Dan Dennett, Jerry Fodor, Richard Frackowiak, Chris Frith, Sebastian Gardner, James Garvey, Nicholas Georgalis, Marcus Giaquinto, Carl Gillett, Pat Haggard, Stuart Hampshire, Alastair Hannay, John Heil, Ingrid Coggin Honderich, Nicholas Humphrey, Jaegwon Kim, Robert Kirk, Stephen Law, Jonathan Lowe, Derek Matravers, Colin McGinn, Brian McLaughlin, Alan Millar, Peter Momtchiloff, Barbara Montero, Christina Musholt, Paul Noordhof, Matthew Nudds, Anthony OHear, David Papineau, Ingmar Persson, Stephen Priest, Zenon Pylyshyn, Howard Robinson, Andy Ross, Mark Sainsbury, Susan Schneider, Tim Shallice, Aaron Sloman, Barry C. Smith, Paul Snowdon, Jeremy Stangroom, Helen Steward, Tom Stoneham, Barry Stroud, Peter VanInwagen, Johnny Watling, Jonathan Webber, Bernard Williams, Richard Wollheim, Edmond Wright, and John Young.

This inquiry is into what is the subject or a subject of almost all writing and research on consciousness. That is consciousness as we ordinarily think of it. The inquirys aim is a theory or analysis of this consciousness, an answer to the general question of what it is to be conscious in this ordinary way, what the nature of that is, what the fact isand also to answer three particular questions, as other inquiry into the nature of consciousness itself does not. What is it to be conscious in seeing or otherwise perceiving something and, in generic senses, thinking something and wanting something.

Also unlike other philosophy and science, it takes some time to do what it assumes to be necessary as a preliminary and subsequently shows to have been. That is to arrive at an adequate initial clarification of consciousness in general as we ordinarily think of it. This it does mainly by considering five leading ideas in the philosophy and science of consciousness persisting in this early twenty-first century. The five ideas are of qualia, something it is like to be a thing, subjectivity, intentionality or aboutness, and phenomenality.

By way of linguistic and thus conceptual data with respect to consciousness found in the leading ideas and elsewhere, a database, the inquiry does arrive at an initial clarification of ordinary consciousness in general, a figurative one. In this first part of the theory or analysis of consciousness that isactualism, ordinary conciousness is initially clarified as actual consciousness. What it is for you to be conscious is identified, non-circularly enough, as somethings being actual. The principal questions about the nature of consciousness in general that need to be answered, then, are two.

What is it that is actual? What is it for it to be actual?

The answers to the two questions are approached by considering the existing theories of consciousness that are abstract and physical functionalism, the former found to be closely related to traditional dualism, and also considering a further range of existing theories. From all these theories are acquired further criteria for a successful theory of the nature of consciousness, certainly not figurative. A further prerequisite is an inquiry into the objective physical world.

Wholly literal and explicit rather than figurative answers to the two questions comprise the main body or principal part of the theory or analysis of consciousness that is actualism. The answers to the question of what is actual are different in the three cases of consciousness in perceiving, thinking, and wanting. The answers are that to be actual is to be in different ways subjectively physical, to exist in this way.

With perceptual consciousness, the theory is an externalism, very different from the externalisms of Putnam, Burge, No and Clark. It is to the effect that being perceptually conscious is not a state of affairs inside our heads, not a cranialism. Rather, perceptual consciousness consists in the fact of subjective and indubitably physical worlds, (p.xiv) worlds out there. They are rightly named real worlds, no less real for there being myriads of them and for their dependencies on both what is inside heads and on the objective physical world.

With both cognitive and affective consciousness, however, as against perceptual consciousness, the theory is an internalism. It has to do with representations, the fact of dependent representations and nothing else, some of them comprising the special case of attention to subjective physical worlds. Neither perceptual consciousness nor cognitive and affective consciousness are unconscious mentalitymentality not actually conscious. What is said of cognitive and affective consciousness as well as perceptual consciousness makes for neither a universal nor a pure representationism.

Of certain remaining questions, one is whether actualism in addition to answering its two principal questions satisfies the criteria or conditions of adequacy earlier established. Another remaining question is that of whether it was right in the first place to settle on the subject of consciousness as we ordinarily think of it. There are the alternatives among others, the alternatives common in science, that include unconscious mentalitymentality not actual.