The following essay appears here with permission from Owen Flanagan

 

Subjective Realism and Phenomenal Consciousness

One thing many people fear about a naturalistic view of mind is that they think it will, in virtue, of identifying mind with brain make experiences a thing of the past. The worry goes something like this: The Cartesian picture of mind begins (and possibly ends) with recognition of the fact that we humans possess phenomenal consciousness, there is something-it-is-like first personally to be a subject of experience.  We our not mere information processors. We have experiences.  The scientific picture of mind identifies the mind with certain objective physical processes.  But the subjective and the objective can't be meshed or melded.  First-person phenomenal consciousness -- not only isn't -- it cannot even, in principle, be captured in the sort of third-person objective description normal science relishes.

A naturalistic theory of mind is not remotely adequate if it does provide an account of phenomenal consciousness.  And it can.  Token physicalism is the view that each and every mental event, each and every experience, is some physical event or other -- presumably some central nervous system event. We can accept the truth of token physicalism, and thus reject the cartesian view that denies it, while resisting the conclusion that the essence of a mental event is revealed completely or captured completely by a description of its neural level realizer.  The reason is this, and it applies uniquely to conscious mental events.  Conscious mental events are essentially Janus-faced and uniquely so.  They have first-person subjective feel and they are realized in objective states of affairs.  Speaking counterfactually, water and gold would be H20 and substance with atomic number  79, respectively, even if there were no subjects of experience, no sentient beings,  in the world.  Objective realism is true of water and gold.  

But even if a conscious mental state token, say, your experience here and now of seeing the image on the screen on this stage is realized, and realized necessarily, in some complex neural process n, it is not the case, speaking counterfactually that n could occur in a world without subjects.  Specifically it could not and would not occur in a world in which I am not giving this lecture and you are not participating as audience. It is fine with the token physicalist if for each of you, the neural realizer of the experience of reading the exact same sentence on the screen behind me is somewhat different so long as there is some neural realizer or other that is the experience of seeing or reading that sentence for you.

The objective states of affairs in brains that are conscious mental events are unique in producing first-personal feel -- phenomenality.  If certain objective states of affairs obtain then so do first-person feels, and if there are first-person feels then the relevant objective states of affairs obtain.  

The asymmetry between water and gold, on the one side, and conscious mental events, on the other, can be said to come to this: the nature of water and gold is essentially objective -- it is completely objective, ergo objective realism.  The nature of conscious mental events is such that despite being perfectly natural, objective states of affairs, they have as part of their essential nature the subjective feel they have. Call the basic idea subjective realism. Subjective realism says that the relevant objective state of affairs in a sentient creature properly hooked up to itself produce certain subjective feels in, for, and to that creature.  The subjective feel is produced and realized in an organism in virtue of the relevant objective state of affairs obtaining in that organism. It, the subjective feel, is, as it were, no more than the relevant objective state of affairs obtaining in a creature that feels things.  However, since the relevant objective state of affairs is only described or captured as the thing it is, in this case, a conscious mental event, as it is captured or felt by the organism itself, a completely third-personal neural description of it doesn't capture it.  The reason is that third-personal descriptions don't capture feels. Certain third-personal states of affairs are the realizations of feels, but the feels are only had or captured by (or in) the creatures in whom those states of affairs obtain.

Suppose 'blickety-block' activity is how seeing blue is realized for the type Homo sapiens sapiens, that is, suppose that unlike cases of semantically decoding of spoken or written speech, that the cell assemblies that underlie color perception are the same across members of our species. We can then say that when Pierre sees blue he is in blickety-block-state.  Blickety-block-state is how seeing blue is realized in all people.  But Pierre's seeing blue despite being realized by blickety-block activity in him is not realized solely in virtue of being blickety-block activity; it is realized in virtue of being blickety-block activity in him.  And it is in virtue of being realized in him in the right way that he sees blue.  Pierre's seeing blue is nothing more that Pierre's being in a certain objective psych-biological state.  But it is a state that produces, or better, that has as an essential feature, a certain feel for Pierre.  How and why it does so is, I take it, explainable fully in naturalistic terms.  Imagine that there is a complete neural description of what it going on in Pierre -- a complete description of blickety-block activity as it is uniquely realized in his nervous system.  This description as offered from the third-person perspective completely captures the fact that Pierre is seeing blue.  Indeed, if the entire causal picture from the external blue object to his experiencing it were filled out we might claim to have explained fully why Pierre is experiencing blue.  But neither description captures what it is like for Pierre to see blue.  The experience is only captured by Pierre first-personally.  It is not important that Pierre be able to say anything deep or interesting about what his experience is like.  It is enough that he experiences blue or is seeing-things-bluely.

This is enough, I hope, to see how one might be committed to the truth of physicalism (token or type) about the conscious mind without being committed to the claim that the essence of an experience is captured fully as the experience it is by describing its neural realizer.  

For many it produces a mental cramp to think the thought that mental events are neural events but that their essence cannot be captured completely in neural terms.  Such is the power of objective realism, a doctrine that is true for most of the things and types of things in the universe, but that is not true for experiences. The cramping can be eased, I propose, by accepting that the subjective realist is claiming nothing mysterious.  It is simply a unique, but nonmysterious fact about conscious mental states that they essentially possess a phenomenal side. Don't mention that, and possibly how, they appear first-personally and you haven't described one, possibly two, of their essential features. Your metaphysic is incomplete. See things in the Janus-way recommended and the intuition that gives rise to the thought that there is an unbridgeable explanatory gap between conscious mental states and their realizers is deflated, possibly it disappears.  Or, so it seems to me.

There is another, related way to make the point in favor of subjective realism.  This way of making the point turns on paying attention to indexicals, in particular to pronouns.  "I" is an essential indexical from the point of view of the subjective realist because it essentially and uniquely captures, or at least, it essentially marks the first-person feels that I have been discussing.  Description and explanation in normal mind science is in an objective third-personal or impersonal idiom:  

 

When an individual organism, O, sees a blue cube there is binding of activity in the color and shape sectors of the brain.  

 

Generalizations of this sort do not capture first-personal feel.  They assume that there is first-personal feel but they don't capture it.  First-personal feel is only captured by the subject of experience.  And this is why the first-personal pronoun is needed to explicitly mark experiences.  I say "explicitly mark" because sentences like "Blue cube, here, now" also do the job, but only if it is assumed that the subject is, as it were, marking herself as the site of the 'blue-here-now' experience.

    The main point of this last part of the therapeutic exercise, can be summed up this way: The individual gripped by the Cartesian idea that we possess non-physical minds, makes this sensible demand on any naturalistic view that could even be entertained as a replacement view: “Don't mess with phenomenal consciousness.  It is a given that I and all my compatriots are subjects of experience.  So you will need to say more than that a physicalist conception of mind is simpler than a dualist view to remotely capture my interest.  There are all sorts of views that are simpler than their opponents -- for example, that water is the only element is simpler than every view which countenances more than one element -- but that fail because they are miserably simplistic. The simplicity of a view is only an interesting feature of that view when it explains everything that both views agree needs explaining.  And in the case of mind, one thing, perhaps the main thing that needs explaining is how experience is possible, how there could be phenomenal consciousness in a material world.”

But we have now seen how this can be done.  This of course does not mean that enough has been said to win over the Cartesian.  The subjective realist is a physicalist who claims that she can meet the plausible demand of the Cartesian to account for, or at least to leave ample space for -- phenomenal consciousness.  For the subjective realist, as for the Cartesian, it is fundamental fact that phenomenal consciousness exists and is in need of explanation. Indeed, for her it is a law of nature that humans, as well as all other creatures that have experiences, have their own experiences in virtue of the way they are hooked up to themselves and to the world

It is this sort of thinking that makes it credible (although not decisive) to claim that the regulative assumption that mental events are brain events (in a suitably hooked-up nervous system) has reached the status of being a constitutive thesis.  That is, it was initially assumed, but has panned out as highly plausible.  It explains everything the Cartesian view can explain but in a nonmysterious way that fits much better, than the Cartesian view, into a unified naturalistic picture of the world.