Along the lines of what Kenny discusses, someone could also define wizards to be anyone with deep knowledge enabling unusual capabilities. By that definition, scientists and engineers would be modern day wizards, or so a wizard-realist could argue. It's also worth noting that we can identify what it is about kings that makes them kings (such as ruler by inheritance, even if only ceremonially). Can we do the same with phenomenal consciousness?
The problem is I don't think the term "phenomenal consciousness" really clarifies. Some people take it to refer to the manifest image of consciousness (channeling Wilfid Sellars), what we might call "manifest consciousness." It seems like that's what you're aiming for with the "innocent" definition. Others take it to refer to the stronger concept, something simple, irreducible, fundamentally private, impossible to describe, yet subjectively apprehensible, what we might call "fundamental consciousness," in essence a theory about manifest consciousness that it's exactly as it seems with no hidden aspects.
The thing is, manifest consciousness, in and of itself, doesn't seem to have a hard problem. The hard problem seems specific to fundamental consciousness. If we say manifest consciousness does have a hard problem, then what about it makes it so? What can be identified that isn't the problematic traits many phenomenal realists are willing to throw overboard?
In any case, I'm an eliminativist toward fundamental consciousness but not manifest consciousness. As to the term "phenomenal consciousness", I take Pete Mandik's advice and mostly avoid it (Qualia Quietism), except when responding to someone else who's using it. (Or talking about its semantic indeterminism.)
Thanks, Mike. I prefer "consciousness" or "conscious experience" to "phenomenal consciousness" once it is clarified that what is meant isn't "access consciousness" or "self-consciousness" or any other the other nearby ideas with which "consciousness" can be confused. Maybe this is "manifest consciousness" in your and Sellars' sense.
I read people who associate "phenomenal consciousness" with naturalistically suspect properties to be making a substantive claim rather than a claim that is true by definition: phenomenal consciousness in fact has those properties. This gets murky because in defining consciousness they might also allude to those properties, but I take that allusion to be more in the manner of helping the reader pick out the intended concept rather than to be a matter of definitional stipulation.
On the hard problem: I do think it arises also for manifest consciousness. Once we've latched onto that concept, we can wonder what entities have it and how possession of it relates to possessing physical and functional properties. It *might* be that there's an answer to such questions -- so I don't think the problem has to be irresolvably hard -- but it is at least non-obvious. Functionalist definitions of consciousness have the converse vice: They don't respect the puzzlement we can feel, the openness, about the question of whether an entity with the relevant functional profile is really conscious.
Thanks Eric. I should own up that while I am using something like Sellars' manifest vs scientific image distinction, I have no idea if he himself used it for consciousness. I think the SEP on him says he was an early proponent of the hard problem, so I don't want to claim I'm representing his views on the mind.
The thing about manifest consciousness is we have to be careful not to think we're talking about it when we're actually discussing fundamental consciousness. For example, it seems like asking which entities have it, as though there is a binary yes or no answer, implicitly assumes fundamental consciousness. Otherwise we might instead ask: how much of, or what aspects of our manifest experience does entity X have? It seems obvious that the answer for a mammal is going to be a lot more than the answer for a garden snail, a c-elegans worm, or a jellyfish.
Guilty as charged as a functionalist. But then I think what I'm not respecting are the questions that arise from the theory of fundamental experience. To me, this is a question of competing theories: fundamental vs functional. Unless I'm overlooking something.
I’m thinking of the potential “minimal pair” of “wizard” and “magician”. If you’re watching stage performances that you are convinced are magical, and then learn that they’re tricks or illusions rather than magic, do you stop calling the person a magician? Most of us use the term “magician” for stage performers that we don’t believe are magical, but do manage to do their tricks, so we are happy when we learn there is no magic. But I’m not totally sure this is the only way for a person to go who actually thinks there’s magic! They think they discover that Houdini and Copperfield aren’t really magicians!
Imagine another case - we see Merlin, and he tells people he uses magic to call down fire from the heavens. Then we discover that he’s actually a time traveler from Connecticut, and he’s using a lightning rod and gunpowder. Do people still think he’s a wizard even though it’s not magic in the sense us moderns think?
(Overall though, I don’t think the terminology matters too much, but I think these cases are still interesting for thinking about how people use language.)
Nice examples. I agree those could go either way. About terms and essences in general, I'm a nominalist and pragmatist, and there are lots of cases I think could break in different directions depending on chance and situational factors. "Wizard" and "phenomenal consciousness" I regard as relatively clear cases -- but even there I'd allow some mushiness and chance. (This open up the possibility of a pragmatic argument for or against treating "phenomenal consciousness" in the way Kammerer does, if we treat current usage as indeterminate and shapable.)
Interesting article. I can see merit on both sides.
You write: Ultimately, I take this to be a socio-linguistic dispute about the meaning of the phrase "phenomenal consciousness", rather than a disagreement about the existence of (what I call) phenomenal consciousness.
I am not a philosopher, so take this with a grain of salt. I see your exchange with K as both a linguistic dispute and a fundamental disagreement, both being waged at the same time, with so much ambiguity in the available language that it is hard to tease the actual disagreement apart from the linguistic discussion.
I don't believe there is a stable definition of "phenomenal consciousness" - the first paper that introduced it was a disaster, with multiple different incompatible meanings, and the definition has not been cleared up since. There is not merely a range of usages where each meaning is individually consistent while being at odds with other meanings; the most common usages are themselves relying on strange hybrid concepts with internal contradictions. That means the term "phenomenal consciousness" can slot into most of the analogies you employ in your article.
For instance, I don't think it would be hard to find usages of phenomenal consciousness that map to spell-casting ability (wizardry), to the men who seem to cast spells (wizards by profession), or to their conjunction (true wizards, who are wizards by profession with wizardy). But none of those mappings can quite capture the confusion inherent in the most popular concept of phenomenal consciousness.
I don't share your hope that we can pick out an innocent meaning of phenomenality. Phenomenal consciousness is a mess as a concept, always employed with contentious assumptions behind it, so analogising it to concepts that are not a mess hides the messiness in a way that is potentially misleading rather then illuminating. The analogies are helpful in highlighting the ambiguities, but they would be even more useful as ways of picking out cleaner sub-concepts, which would then need new names.
In other words, I think we need to disambiguate different uses of "phenomenal consciousness", and this is long overdue. Discussions that fail to disambiguate it end up rather pointless, and they also end up difficult to distinguish from more substantive disagreements about the fundamental nature of reality.
BTW, I have not read your book, so you might have said more there. I will track it down.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment, Zinbiel. I agree with much of it. The concept is rather a mess. I do hope that there's a shared core that can be clarified, but I appreciate the reasonableness of those who think otherwise! My best attempt is in the chapter on defining consciousness in my 2024 book, but the core ideas are all also present in my similar 2016 paper is JCS, if you have the time and interest.
Thanks Eric, I will hunt them down. I am familiar with your chapter in Keith’s Illusionism book. I disagree with some of it, but I like the attempt. I’ll try to formulate a version of my own in the next 2-3 weeks. I have the material, but it is not a publishable length.
I haven't read this paper, but I appreciated your ambitious effort to define consciousness in your book, which I thought was a sincere and fair-minded approach. My only quibble there would be to take 'conscious experience' down to just 'experience', but everyone will have a quibble like that. I think definition by example may be the only way to proceed when we're talking about something that is so broad; it's hard to imagine a genus that would satisfy. I appreciate the call to keep metaphysical commitments out of the definition—yes, yes, yes, maybe an impossible target to hit, but a good one to aim for—and retaining a sense of openness and wonder about what consciousness means. "If you have an urge to analyze this concept, put that urge on hold for now. We employ unanalyzed concepts all the time. When I talk about 'furniture', you know what I mean despite the absence of a shared analysis." Yes! Because my god these discussions have gotten so freaking tedious! Surely everyone can afford to be more generous. Surely careers will not implode if we stop feigning befuddlement over every little thing.
Along the lines of what Kenny discusses, someone could also define wizards to be anyone with deep knowledge enabling unusual capabilities. By that definition, scientists and engineers would be modern day wizards, or so a wizard-realist could argue. It's also worth noting that we can identify what it is about kings that makes them kings (such as ruler by inheritance, even if only ceremonially). Can we do the same with phenomenal consciousness?
The problem is I don't think the term "phenomenal consciousness" really clarifies. Some people take it to refer to the manifest image of consciousness (channeling Wilfid Sellars), what we might call "manifest consciousness." It seems like that's what you're aiming for with the "innocent" definition. Others take it to refer to the stronger concept, something simple, irreducible, fundamentally private, impossible to describe, yet subjectively apprehensible, what we might call "fundamental consciousness," in essence a theory about manifest consciousness that it's exactly as it seems with no hidden aspects.
The thing is, manifest consciousness, in and of itself, doesn't seem to have a hard problem. The hard problem seems specific to fundamental consciousness. If we say manifest consciousness does have a hard problem, then what about it makes it so? What can be identified that isn't the problematic traits many phenomenal realists are willing to throw overboard?
In any case, I'm an eliminativist toward fundamental consciousness but not manifest consciousness. As to the term "phenomenal consciousness", I take Pete Mandik's advice and mostly avoid it (Qualia Quietism), except when responding to someone else who's using it. (Or talking about its semantic indeterminism.)
Thanks, Mike. I prefer "consciousness" or "conscious experience" to "phenomenal consciousness" once it is clarified that what is meant isn't "access consciousness" or "self-consciousness" or any other the other nearby ideas with which "consciousness" can be confused. Maybe this is "manifest consciousness" in your and Sellars' sense.
I read people who associate "phenomenal consciousness" with naturalistically suspect properties to be making a substantive claim rather than a claim that is true by definition: phenomenal consciousness in fact has those properties. This gets murky because in defining consciousness they might also allude to those properties, but I take that allusion to be more in the manner of helping the reader pick out the intended concept rather than to be a matter of definitional stipulation.
On the hard problem: I do think it arises also for manifest consciousness. Once we've latched onto that concept, we can wonder what entities have it and how possession of it relates to possessing physical and functional properties. It *might* be that there's an answer to such questions -- so I don't think the problem has to be irresolvably hard -- but it is at least non-obvious. Functionalist definitions of consciousness have the converse vice: They don't respect the puzzlement we can feel, the openness, about the question of whether an entity with the relevant functional profile is really conscious.
Thanks Eric. I should own up that while I am using something like Sellars' manifest vs scientific image distinction, I have no idea if he himself used it for consciousness. I think the SEP on him says he was an early proponent of the hard problem, so I don't want to claim I'm representing his views on the mind.
The thing about manifest consciousness is we have to be careful not to think we're talking about it when we're actually discussing fundamental consciousness. For example, it seems like asking which entities have it, as though there is a binary yes or no answer, implicitly assumes fundamental consciousness. Otherwise we might instead ask: how much of, or what aspects of our manifest experience does entity X have? It seems obvious that the answer for a mammal is going to be a lot more than the answer for a garden snail, a c-elegans worm, or a jellyfish.
Guilty as charged as a functionalist. But then I think what I'm not respecting are the questions that arise from the theory of fundamental experience. To me, this is a question of competing theories: fundamental vs functional. Unless I'm overlooking something.
I’m thinking of the potential “minimal pair” of “wizard” and “magician”. If you’re watching stage performances that you are convinced are magical, and then learn that they’re tricks or illusions rather than magic, do you stop calling the person a magician? Most of us use the term “magician” for stage performers that we don’t believe are magical, but do manage to do their tricks, so we are happy when we learn there is no magic. But I’m not totally sure this is the only way for a person to go who actually thinks there’s magic! They think they discover that Houdini and Copperfield aren’t really magicians!
Imagine another case - we see Merlin, and he tells people he uses magic to call down fire from the heavens. Then we discover that he’s actually a time traveler from Connecticut, and he’s using a lightning rod and gunpowder. Do people still think he’s a wizard even though it’s not magic in the sense us moderns think?
(Overall though, I don’t think the terminology matters too much, but I think these cases are still interesting for thinking about how people use language.)
Nice examples. I agree those could go either way. About terms and essences in general, I'm a nominalist and pragmatist, and there are lots of cases I think could break in different directions depending on chance and situational factors. "Wizard" and "phenomenal consciousness" I regard as relatively clear cases -- but even there I'd allow some mushiness and chance. (This open up the possibility of a pragmatic argument for or against treating "phenomenal consciousness" in the way Kammerer does, if we treat current usage as indeterminate and shapable.)
Interesting article. I can see merit on both sides.
You write: Ultimately, I take this to be a socio-linguistic dispute about the meaning of the phrase "phenomenal consciousness", rather than a disagreement about the existence of (what I call) phenomenal consciousness.
I am not a philosopher, so take this with a grain of salt. I see your exchange with K as both a linguistic dispute and a fundamental disagreement, both being waged at the same time, with so much ambiguity in the available language that it is hard to tease the actual disagreement apart from the linguistic discussion.
I don't believe there is a stable definition of "phenomenal consciousness" - the first paper that introduced it was a disaster, with multiple different incompatible meanings, and the definition has not been cleared up since. There is not merely a range of usages where each meaning is individually consistent while being at odds with other meanings; the most common usages are themselves relying on strange hybrid concepts with internal contradictions. That means the term "phenomenal consciousness" can slot into most of the analogies you employ in your article.
For instance, I don't think it would be hard to find usages of phenomenal consciousness that map to spell-casting ability (wizardry), to the men who seem to cast spells (wizards by profession), or to their conjunction (true wizards, who are wizards by profession with wizardy). But none of those mappings can quite capture the confusion inherent in the most popular concept of phenomenal consciousness.
I don't share your hope that we can pick out an innocent meaning of phenomenality. Phenomenal consciousness is a mess as a concept, always employed with contentious assumptions behind it, so analogising it to concepts that are not a mess hides the messiness in a way that is potentially misleading rather then illuminating. The analogies are helpful in highlighting the ambiguities, but they would be even more useful as ways of picking out cleaner sub-concepts, which would then need new names.
In other words, I think we need to disambiguate different uses of "phenomenal consciousness", and this is long overdue. Discussions that fail to disambiguate it end up rather pointless, and they also end up difficult to distinguish from more substantive disagreements about the fundamental nature of reality.
BTW, I have not read your book, so you might have said more there. I will track it down.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment, Zinbiel. I agree with much of it. The concept is rather a mess. I do hope that there's a shared core that can be clarified, but I appreciate the reasonableness of those who think otherwise! My best attempt is in the chapter on defining consciousness in my 2024 book, but the core ideas are all also present in my similar 2016 paper is JCS, if you have the time and interest.
Thanks Eric, I will hunt them down. I am familiar with your chapter in Keith’s Illusionism book. I disagree with some of it, but I like the attempt. I’ll try to formulate a version of my own in the next 2-3 weeks. I have the material, but it is not a publishable length.
I haven't read this paper, but I appreciated your ambitious effort to define consciousness in your book, which I thought was a sincere and fair-minded approach. My only quibble there would be to take 'conscious experience' down to just 'experience', but everyone will have a quibble like that. I think definition by example may be the only way to proceed when we're talking about something that is so broad; it's hard to imagine a genus that would satisfy. I appreciate the call to keep metaphysical commitments out of the definition—yes, yes, yes, maybe an impossible target to hit, but a good one to aim for—and retaining a sense of openness and wonder about what consciousness means. "If you have an urge to analyze this concept, put that urge on hold for now. We employ unanalyzed concepts all the time. When I talk about 'furniture', you know what I mean despite the absence of a shared analysis." Yes! Because my god these discussions have gotten so freaking tedious! Surely everyone can afford to be more generous. Surely careers will not implode if we stop feigning befuddlement over every little thing.