Aware: Introduction

Nouns and other bits of grammar

Philosophers throughout history have spent much time trying to define words. Most of these philosophical words are substantive ones, meaning there is some real substance behind the word that gives it meaning. And one of the most important words of today is “consciousness”. If we have consciousness, they say, then we have some substantial property that makes us aware of the world, or of ourselves, or of the logical truths of mathematics and so on.

English words ending in -ness (there are differing conventions in other Indoeuropean languages[1]) often modify adjectives, and so it is with this: consciousness is the state of being conscious. The suffix makes a noun of an adjective – from around the fourteenth century, and in philosophy the seventeenth century on English philosophy as the faculty or ability that makes us able to be aware of things – our own mind, our feelings, the world around us. So, if we are conscious, we must have consciousness. Can one be conscious but not have consciousness? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to ... umm, never mind. But this is my objection to pretty much the last two centuries of western philosophy of mind. I am most certainly a conscious being (some of the time), but do I have some mystical magical property, consciousness? I do not think so. This book is an attempt to argue this in enough detail that specialists can see where I am coming from but the general reader isn’t bored to death.

I was inspired to write this by reading Peter Godfrey-Smith’s book Metazoa (2020). He is an able writer, had a professorship at NYU before moving to the University of Sydney in his native Australia and he has direct experience with cephalopods to boot. Peter argues that sentience (a slightly more technical term than consciousness) is something that is wholly physical, and yet we cannot fully account for it that way. There is, in the words of the title to a famous 1974 paper by philosopher Thomas Nagel, a “what it is to be like” a sentient being (in Nagel’s paper, a bat[2]). That “what’s it like” gets a technical term, from Latin, quale, or plurally, qualia. Putting ideas into Latin also tends to make substantive nouns, by the way. I’d rather just call them “feels”. Like most philosophy, there are predecessors to this view. I shall name it phenomenalism, for that is what the qualia are about.

In the reaction to atomistic, or materialistic, atheism, as the seventeenth century Platonist at Cambridge, Ralph Cudworth, called it, later Greek and Roman philosophers held that

... Men and Brutes are not mere Machins, neither can Life and Cogitation, Sense and Consciousness, Reason and Understanding, Appetite and Will, ever result from Magnitudes, Figures, Sites and Motions ... (The true intellectual system of the universe. 1671, I. i. p36)[3]

In Cudworth’s day, Descartes had said of the physical world that it was just quantities of things (magnitudes) and motions. Thomas Hobbes, argued further that only matter existed, and human souls were phantasms . Cudworth himself opposed atheism and materialism (which he took to be the same thing, as many do even today). Since then, many philosophers have argued against similar materialisms as being damaging to religious belief, and more recently a number of philosophers have followed Nagel in supposing that a physical view of the world cannot accommodate our experience, without the religious motivation so far as I can tell. Godfrey-Smith’s essay, also written for general readers, is the latest version of this. He’s not alone.

By the way, most bats use echolocation, a sense we do not have, maybe, which is what Nagel used as the illustration of the irreducibility of feels. But around 30% of bat species don’t, in the family of flying foxes (also called megabats, or Megachiroptera). So would Nagel agree we can know what it is like to be a fruit bat, if they have no senses we do not also have? And a number of blind humans can echolocate quite well, not for nothing. Philosophical intuitions are always much simpler than the real world. Ask a biologist about tigers sometime, after reading Kripke or Putnam.

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[1] “… the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat.”

[2] In French, consciousness is conscience, and in German Bewusstein (etymologically, awareness).

[3] Coincidentally, or not, this is the first use I can find of Consciousness as a substantive noun in English, as indicated by the then-prevalent convention of capitalising all names and nouns.

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