There
is a convenient device that is repeatedly, and perhaps overly, used to set out
some or other position in the humanities. It works in the following way. You criticize
one approach as excessive and then another as insufficient. Then you present
your own middling position that is ‘just right’. Its
strength is a matter of being able to overcome the twin flaws of the original
binary pair. This is Dietrich and Hardcastle’s favored way
of setting out their case for a science of consciousness. The excessive and
insufficient positions are respectively identified as naturalist and mysterian.

Naturalists
about consciousness are charged with failing to recognize that ‘The
problem of consciousness is completely intractable. We will never understand
consciousness in the deeply satisfying way we have come to
expect from our sciences.’ Naturalists imagine that one day we will have a
satisfactory theory of consciousness that explains its relation to brain
processes (its supervenience base). In this respect, they are
overly-optimistic. On the other hand there are the mysterians, ‘those
who believe that there will never be any scientific theory of consciousness’.
They underestimate the chances for a science of consciousness because they misunderstand
just what it is that science does.

The
authors reject the overly-optimistic view of naturalism because it fails to get
rid of two important intuitions. Firstly, the zombie intuition that
there could be creatures just like us but lacking in consciousness. Secondly,
the Cartesian intuition that our conscious experiences could be exactly as they
are irrespective of how the world is. Both are in tension with the idea that
once the low level properties of the brain are fixed, so too are the properties
of consciousness. Dietrich and Hardcastle’s point is that cannot get rid of
these intuitions by observing just how consciousness arises. Whenever we
are in a position to observe consciousness we are always, already conscious.
There is no outside vantage point.

As
it stands, this argument is rather truncated and underdeveloped, but so too is
the version set out in the text. Be that as it may, a rejection of naturalism on
some grounds is an attractive position to take. Explaining consciousness
does look like a very good candidate for being an insolvable philosophical
problem. New work provides interesting insights but not solutions.

Given
this (attractive) rejection of naturalism, the reader might wonder just why the
authors consider themselves to be anything other than mysterians. The
difference they claim turns on a distinguishing feature of their account of the
mysterian position. They identify it with not one commitment but two: (1) a
commitment to the intractability of explaining consciousness on whatever
grounds. (The standard mysterian view exemplified by Colin McGinn’s
claim that we just don’t have the right kind of brain to solve the problem.);
and (2) a further commitment to viewing science as a provider of satisfactory explanations.
Together these two positions imply the impossibility of a science of
consciousness.

Dietrich
and Hardcastle claim that their own view is not mysterian by virtue of
accepting the former position while rejecting the latter. There can be a
science of consciousness after all, but it won’t explain
consciousness. Instead it will involve taxonomies, correlations and
predictions. It will relate various conscious processes with neural processes
without explaining the ultimate nature of the relation. Big questions of
ontology/metaphysics will be set aside.

This
is all well and good, but there are two serious problems here. Firstly,
although there are lots of mysterians in the limited sense of people who
endorse some version of (1), it is not obvious just who endorses the extended
mysterian position which involves endorsing (2). A quite general problem with
the expository device of appealing to big binary contrasts is that the relevant
literature, being rather sophisticated, is unlikely to stack itself up into
conveniently contrasting piles. That this is a problem is accepted by the
authors, but the concession is exiled to the endnotes for the first chapter.
(They do, however suggest that Jerry Fodor might just about qualify.)

Secondly,
Hardcastle and Dietrich set themselves an impossibly difficult task. As the
latest number in the eminently useful Advances in Cognitive Research series
the text is situated as a contribution to an ongoing dialogue across
disciplines such as philosophy, cognitive science and linguistics. However, it
is intended to be a conversation stopper, or at least a conversation changer. ‘Our
goal in this book is to end fruitless debate about the metaphysical status of
consciousness, and to clear the way for a decent science of consciousness by
removing from it any guilt it may have at not explaining consciousness’.

A
deep vein of empiricism may be detected here. Empiricism of this sort has
traditionally gone along with (been correlated with) hostility towards metaphysical
appeals beyond the observable to something ultimately explanatory. On such an
approach real problems are the problems on which we can make progress and these
are epistemological not metaphysical. They are about the limits of our
knowledge and not about what is ultimately the case. Dietrich and Hardcastle,
in spite of a certain radicalism air given to their program, are closely
aligned with this very traditional rejection of metaphysics. Their hostility
extends to speculation about dualism versus materialism, freewill versus
determinism and unspecified but apparently intractable matters whose
intractability is taken to be bound up with their relation to consciousness.
The intractable problem of consciousness is the source of philosophy.

Once
it is understood that consciousness gives rise to these central problems of
philosophy, we will finally be able to move on, although where we move to is
less clear. ‘It might be that our conclusions render business as
usual in philosophy otiose.’ This is, with all due respect to an interesting short
volume, rather a large claim. Moreover, it trades on the assumption that
identifying the source of philosophy is not itself an intractable metaphysical
problem. If it is then Dietrich and Hardcastle are already in the
metaphysical-speculation business (which is just where they don’t
want to be). If, on the other hand, it is not an intractable metaphysical
problem then we are owed some account of exactly why this is the case. The
authors might well be able to make such case, and do so convincingly, but as
matters stand they have not done so.

Be
that as it may, although the stated and repeated aims of the volume are a tad
overambitious (and although the typos are a little too frequent and
off-putting) this is a volume which can grow on the reader. It is a worthwhile
and limited contribution to the dialogue about consciousness, but not a radical
conversation changer.

© 2006 Tony Milligan

Tony Milligan completed his
doctorate on Iris Murdoch at Glasgow University where he currently tutors in
philosophy. He also teaches philosophy with the Lifelong Learning Centre at the
University of Strathclyde.

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology