No True Scotsman Has a ‘Real Problem’ with Consciousness
Prologue
Looks like I’ve done it again. The lurking — reading — what-the?!?- article idea thing. This time from a year-old article on the ‘real problem of consciousness’ and a particular response to it. My self-worth in terms of creativity is taking a beating. But before we jump into the guts of things, a little critical thinking is warranted.
Most may have heard of the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy. It’s a bit of dodgy thinking that, as Medium writer points out, is about moving the goalposts to avoid the problem of evidence making you look like a dick (and ending up looking an even bigger one). No Scotsman would eat eggs — Uncle Angus eats eggs — Yeah, but Angus is not a true Scotsman. Attributed to English philosopher Antony Flew (1975), more recently it’s been described as a fallacy of presumption (Manninen, 2019). This came to mind while reading the article and the response.
The ‘Real’ Problem
In “Still Evolving #5: The Real Problem of consciousness”, Medium writer concludes the ‘real problem’ of consciousness must be solved for moral reasons because the future of humanity depends on it. The imperative is not explained, but it’s nonetheless a great idea.
For those who aren’t familiar with the proposition about consciousness, it’s considered in some academic and intellectual circles to be a problem. Geleta provides a basic but clear explanation of this that is worth reading. In short, science and philosophy can describe what consciousness appears to be in a lot of detail in physical (functional and mechanistic) terms. What they can’t do is explain why rocks evolved to be able to smell roses. In the now widely used bit of jargon, the former is the ‘easy’ problem because there’s answers, the latter is the ‘hard’ problem because there’s not.
It’s a kind of academic/intellectual thing that is interesting for those who make a living out of, and/or are interested in, it. However, to generalize wildly, we can be excused for thinking that it’s not seen as a problem to most, at least not in these terms. It’s something we’re told we are, and experience unremarkably in each living moment, but beyond that?
Well, Geleta raises a profoundly important point. The intellectual gamespersonship around the distinction between ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ problems is a distraction. Even if the game is won and the ‘hard problem’ is solved or proven to be false, what about people will change? What is important is whether we know enough to be able to change things about people in a way that makes for a better future, not why rocks evolved to smell roses.
The ’real’ problem is that “[w]e want the future to be full of minds that flourish, not suffer.” This is hard to disagree with. After all, apart from the ~5% of those of us at the extremes of the standard distribution curve in psychological terms, it’s not unreasonable to suppose rest of us would generally prefer life be less stressful, less suffering, a little more chill. And it is certainly no stretch to suppose we would also want this for our immediate descendants, and theirs, and so on. So, what can be done?
Of Scotsmen and Consciousness
We’re told that the ‘real’ problem of consciousness, according to neuroscientist, Anil Seth, is neither the ‘easy’ or ‘hard’ versions but that we cannot explain, predict, or control subjective conscious experience. This is a simplification of Seth’s terminology “phenomenological properties of conscious experience”.
As Geleta explains, this is a lot of complex abstract words to describe what you and I, we all, are personally, subjectively experiencing any time we are conscious. So, if you are losing the will to be so while reading this (😂), then you are experiencing a complex state of mental affairs (‘mind’) of a particular combination of sensory perception (seeing, hearing, tasting, etc.), understanding (meaning, judging, etc.), feeling (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral), and emotion (sadness, anger, joy, fear, disgust) that is seemingly impossible, or at least very very hard, to translate into words. For the eagle-eyed, yes this is the ‘content’ and arguably not the properties, but the distinction is an important one if better future people is our goal.
The reason for being reminded of the No True Scotsman fallacy was that the ‘hard problem’, while clearly explained, is argued as not being a ‘real’ problem. The reason it is not a ‘real’ problem is because it has no scientific foundation. ‘Realness’ at least in respect of consciousness, as proposed by Seth, arises from being able to explain, predict, and control subjective conscious experience. If this rings air raid sirens and alarm bells in any way, you’d be easily forgiven.
Me, Myself, and I
So, to the particular response to the article. It was fascinating in a kind of slow-motion train wreck way. The slow-motion train wreck was that the writer gave the game away before ‘winning the race’. They observed that they were both being, and studying being, conscious for a very long period of time, and so was about to drop a profundity that ought be listened to. It was deeply ironic in terms of both the response, and the thrust of the article, for it went on to allude to how the scientific method (think: falsification) could benefit from somehow being adapted to accommodate Buddhist practices. However, we were left wondering as it stopped short of actually saying how and why. What seemed important was pointing out ‘truth’.
The irony seemed obvious. The sense of suffering in the subtext of the response was palpable, even as the intent to direct towards an apparent solution discovered millennia ago by the Buddha was well-meaning, noble. The basic argument of the article was that we have an obligation to future persons to reduce suffering — to facilitate a “…future to be full of minds that flourish” which is also well-meaning, noble. However, while the response suggested the means in the article (science) was wrong, both advocated for what is a thoroughly analytical process and perspective through which to ‘solve’ the problem. In doing so, any one of a number of metaphors for missing an important point came to mind — putting the cart before the horse, missing the woods for the trees, not seeing beyond the end of our noses…
Removing The Person
Anyone who recoiled even a little from Seth’s proposition of being able to understand subjective conscious experience sufficiently to be able to control it may know the old philosophy joke about behaviourism. Two behaviourists bumped into each other on the way to work. One said to the other, “well, you’re obviously feeling fine this morning, how am I?” The absurdity is hilarious; that there were academics and psychologists who seriously advocated this thesis? Maybe not so. Focussing on the “phenomenological properties of conscious experience” instead of the physical correlates won’t change this, merely the terminology used. The presumptions are the same. And while focussing on properties is understandable — no study could address all of subjective content in any meaningful way — it nonetheless begs the question of whether there is something important lost when the properties are reduced out of the content.
If we are to attribute any kind of ‘problem’ to consciousness in terms of better future people, we might be given to wonder if the one-size-fits-all reductive approach is going to be of any great utility, for the same reason a behaviourist theory of mind was shown to be false, even if a little true. It was looking for the wrong point of leverage. For if we want to enable a future that is “full of minds that flourish”, and who doesn’t, then we necessarily need to start from a present that has the seeds of flourishing in it. And so the question, the challenge, is where would we find these seeds? This is why the response to the article was so notable. It was ‘evidence’ of where this ground lies; inside each of us.
That it would be a good thing to focus on the ‘real problem of consciousness’ is surely a great objective to set. However, understanding mind from an abstract phenomenological perspective will arguably not address it because it presumes the person has no place in the equation — “…it doesn’t require that the experiencer is a “person” ”. This is not Geleta offering an ill-considered opinion, it is baked into the very core of the reductive process on which science and philosophy stand. To borrow from American political philosopher, John Rawls, it denies the separateness of persons, and in doing so arguably removes from the reach of most people the benefits a scientific and/or philosophical understanding of the relationship might offer. In other words, most of us will be baffled by what our limits as persons may naturally suggest is bullshit.
What we can say is ‘hard’ about the problem of consciousness, other than how rocks evolved to smell roses, is that, in order to explain it, the ‘person’ is extinguished. The ‘person’ is of no relevance to a theory that seeks to remove the locus of explaining, predicting, and controlling, from exactly what most of us think makes us a person, the content of our subjective conscious experience. It is no more than leading a horse to water and shouting, “DRINK!!!!”, at it.
The irony of the response to the article articulated by example the very thing the Buddha realised, we are the cause of our own mental suffering. When stripped of the canon that buries this under mounds of philosophy and theory, the fundamental objective was to reduce suffering in the world. How this might be done is to start with the person as a person, not as an abstraction. And there’s an obvious start point for this, the person themselves. It seems unsurprising that other spiritual teachings from around the same time included similar kinds of wisdom — no amount of leading a horse to water will make it drink. Only the horse can do that. Even more so a human person.
The ’Real Hard’ Problem?
Even if consciousness research is redirected towards the relationship between mind and personal subjective experience reduced to phenomenological properties, is it plausible to expect change? As Geleta rightly points out about answering the ‘hard problem’, probably not because that is not how the world is. The fundamental state of the world is one of continuous change. So, there will always be a ‘why?’ And as long as the ‘why?’ of consciousness is being asked from the outside looking in, it will, necessarily, never answer the question in a way that is morally sound, and most probably also not philosophically sound. For any answer from this perspective will always be paternalistic, no matter how close to true it is even as it can never be completely true. Researching the relationship between mind and ‘the phenomenological’ in the absence of each person is just more of the same that has not provided answers to date.
No, the ‘real hard’ problem is the same one that has been around for millennia. How can people be better people in a moral sense in and of themselves? The ‘answer’ has also been around for a similarly long time. Log — splinter — eye. Improve the basic unit of human society by means of the basic unit improving itself in relation to that society, and the rest follows, naturally, over time. The ‘answer’ is not an answer but a process, and a spiritual one at that.
As hackneyed and glib as this claim may be, ‘science’ has to date been of little help in this regard, i.e. in spiritual (mental) terms, even as it has nonetheless been of huge help in material (physical) terms. But, the danger, of course, is over-reaction, a rush to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In this regard, the recent trends towards subjective relativism, sovereign individualism, and spiritual dogmatism is as much of an existential moral concern as understanding how to control subjective conscious experience.
It’s no small irony that controlling subjective experience has a fundamentally moral dimension to it. As fundamental as the dualistic nature of lived experience. If from the outside, it is repugnant. If from the inside, it is revelatory. If consciousness research is to be redirected anywhere, maybe the latter is the way to go?
