Christopher asked:

This is a response to a question answered by Shaun Williamson that I asked about ‘intelligence/ consciousness and evolution’ In this answer, it was stated that ‘Being conscious means having sensory awareness of the world and to have sensory awareness of the world you need sense organs and a nervous system’. My question regarding this is does this mean that if you are blind you are only 4/5 or 80, conscious? Given that we have 5 senses and your assertion that sensory awareness of the world is needed in order to be conscious, it follows that there are levels of consciousness. Therefore if someone with 5 working senses would he have a higher level of consciousness than someone without 5. If this is so, then wouldn’t that also end the discussion about AI and other natural organisms having consciousness.

Answer by Craig Skinner

I think that, in this context, we should speak of varieties, rather than levels, of consciousness. And that it doesn’t end discussion about AI and other natural organisms.

Doctors routinely assess ‘level’ of consciousness, especially if brain damage is suspected, and typically class the patient’s conscious level as:

* normal (fully conscious)
* clouded
* stupor (unconscious but rousable)
* coma (unconscious and unrousable)

So a healthy blind person is typically fully conscious, while a dead-drunk man with perfect senses can be stuporose.

Clearly, a blind person’s consciousness is impoverished, but typically she enriches it by making much more of other senses (especially touch) than fully-abled people. Likewise deaf people learn to understand speech by sight (sign language) rather than by hearing. And those with anosmia are rarely connoisseurs of food (flavour depends on smell as much as taste). In short, sensory impairment leads to a different sort of consciousness.

As regards other animals, don’t confuse consciousness with intelligence. Some animals have much better vision than us – birds of prey spot a mouse in a field from hundreds of feet up, some birds display with (to us) drab grey feathers that are seen in colours we can’t imagine by their potential mates with vision extending to the ultra-violet. And echolocating bats presumably have conscious experiences we can’t imagine. So some animals have consciousness richer than ours in some respects. The distinctive feature of human consciousness is self-consciousness, of which only glimmerings seem apparent in some other animals.

As regards AI, yes, sensory input was ignored for decades as ‘good-old-fashioned AI’ strove to produce ever more elaborate algorithms for digital computers. But now, AI is focussing on units which have sensory input, act in the world, learn and develop with time as we do, and in due course I see no reason for these not to be conscious.

Finally,

(a) is consciousness possible without sensory awareness, without a body at all say? Theists think so. Descartes thought so: he considered thought (reasoning, deciding, believing, willing etc) was confined to immaterial substance (res cogitans), so that God and angels think, but emotion has a bodily component (racing heart, sweating, faster breathing, whatever) so that animals have emotions, and humans, being an intermingling of the two substances, have both thought and emotions. I am inclined to think consciousness is necessarily embodied, whether carbon based, silicon based or whatever, but you must form your own view.

(b) would AI lack emotion? We are inclined to think only flesh and blood creatures can have real feeling, whereas androids like Mr Data, even aliens like Mr Spock, are strong on logic, lacking in feelings. I don’t think so. As Descartes held, emotions have a bodily component, specifically (we now know) chemicals such as adrenaline, testosterone or serotonin affecting brain function, and I don’t see why analogous hormonal/endocrine effects couldn’t be built in to suitably developed AI.

Craig Skinner at PhiloSophos.org

Answer by Shaun Williamson

No it doesn’t follow that there are different levels of consciousness only that there are different sorts of consciousness. Suppose your blind man is a super taster (ten percent of people are super tasters) then in some ways he is more conscious than me because I am not a super taster. So how would you access his percentage of consciousness now. Many birds have superior eyesight compared to humans. Does this mean they are more conscious than us. They certainly see more than us but perhaps they make less use of what they see.

The discussion about AI is a rather different discussion. Dogs like us have eyes so it is reasonable to think that they see. They also have ears so they must hear. Machines don’t have eyes or ears or brains because eyes and ears and brains are organic things that arise naturally. Like us dogs can be made unconscious by a blow to the head. So it is not clear what would be needed for us to describe a machine as conscious.

Wittgenstein said ‘Our languages contain the sum total of distinctions that men have found useful it to draw. So contrary to what most philosophers think (because philosophers fantasize about language and think language was made by God not by men) the question ‘Can a machine be conscious really reduces to the question ‘Will we ever find it useful to describe certain machines as conscious?’.

Shaun Williamson developed the Ask a Philosopher cgi script question.pl. He did his postgraduate studies on the philosophy of Wittgenstein.

Tiffany asked:

Kant’s theory is categorized as one that focuses on and evaluates ‘intent’ rather than consequences because consequences of our actions cannot always be controlled by us. Consequently, if someone dies as a result of one of our actions and it wasn’t our intent to kill is it still morally wrong because circumstances and contingencies do not provide excuses when following Kant’s categorical imperative.

Answer by Peter Jones

Hello Tiffany.

I find your question muddled. If we did not intend to kill then the deed was not murder. It may have been carelessness, but intent would be everything. If we intend to help someone but end up hurting them then this would be a morally sound act, just a rather unskilled one.

If we intend the greatest possible good for the greatest possible number of people then our actions will always be morally sound for Kant. But a problem arises when we think that we know the consequences of our actions. This is hubris and arrogance. We can know our intentions, but in their overall context we can have no idea of the consequences. They will reverberate through history long after we are gone.

There is therefore a slight complication with the categorical imperative. We may intend to live according to it, but we can still cause a great deal of misery due to our limited knowledge of the situation. No doubt some people would say that invading Iraq was intended to create the greatest good. But taking a guess at what action would create the greatest good while knowing for certain that such an act will cause widespread misery is a strange approach to morality and a crime against Kant.

It seems to me that circumstances and contingencies are all we have to work with. They are what decides what action we should take. Take away the circumstances and contingencies and what is left?

Peter Jones at PhiloSophos.org

Lauren asked:

I have a question in my textbook that I was wondering if you could help. The question is:

How would Heraclitus have responded to the following statement? ‘Heraclitus’ theory is wrong because the objects we see around us continue to endure throughout time; alhtough a person, an animal or plant may change its superficial qualities, it still remains essentially the same person, animal or plant throughout these changes. In fact, we recognize change only by contrasting it to the underlying permanence of things. So permanence, not change, is the essential to reality.’

Answer by David Robjant

He would have responded that he was talking about flow, not change.

Possibly he would also have pointed out that the final line of the statement is somewhat silly, since both permanence and change seem to be observable features of reality, and it is hard to know what sense to attach to the claim that one but not the other is ‘essential’. And beyond the fact that enduring and changing are ordinary enough, change and endurance are also grammatically necessary to each other. This is because you cannot have any ‘it’ that is changing, outwith something that endures through that change.

This grammatical point is made by both Plato and Wittgenstein, and ad nauseum in modern discussions of Heraclitus. But presenting it as the last word would seriously misdirect the argument, if Heraclitus were talking about something other than change. And in my view (and the view of Iris Murdoch), Heraclitus was talking about something other than change. That, in short, is my argument in ‘Nauseating Flux; Iris Murdoch on Sartre and Heraclitus’ at the European Journal of Philosophy 21, 2013 http://philpapers.org/rec/ROBNFI.

David Robjant at PhiloSophos.com

Answer by Peter Jones

Good question. But it contains an error, and the error is the solution. The objects we see around us do not endure through time. They change in every moment. You may say that it is their attributes that change and that there is some underlying ‘essence’ that is unchangeable, but you will never find this persisting object. It is not there. This is the ‘problem of attributes’. An object is made out of attributes, but to what do those attributes belong? They must belong to a phenomenon that has no attributes. How can a phenomenon have no attributes and yet nevertheless be a phenomenon? The obvious answer is that it cannot.

It is consciousness that perceives permanence, or thinks it does, when it reifies successive momentary states by grouping them together as persistent objects. It is a high level view that breaks down at smaller scales. Here is Colin McGinn as a teenager, trying to figure out which part of an object actually is the object. Like everyone else he is unable to find any such object. (From The Making of a Philosopher). He has no better idea these days having become a professor.

“[P]icture me sitting on a bench staring at a British mailbox on a blustery spring day in Blackpool. I had just been reading about the questions of substance and qualities, and was suitably transfixed. Is an object the sum of its qualities or does it have an existence that is some way goes beyond its qualities? The mailbox had a variety of qualities – it was red, cylindrical, metal, etc. – but it seemed to be more than just the collection of these; it was a thing, a ‘substance,’ that had these qualities. But what was this substance that had those qualities? Did it lie behind them in some way, supporting them like the foundation of a house? If so, what was this underlying thing like – what qualities did it have? If it had some qualities, wouldn’t there be the same problem again, since it would also have to be distinct from these qualities? But if it had no qualities, what kind of thing could it be? How could these be something that had no qualities? So maybe we should say that there is nothing more to a mailbox than the qualities it manifests. And yet how can an object be just a set of abstract qualities? Isn’t it more solid and concrete than that?… I had a vague mental image of a grey amorphous something that constituted the underlying mailbox, to which its various manifest qualities mysteriously were attached… Yet as soon as I replaced this fuzzy image with the qualities by themselves, trying to think of the mailbox as just a ‘bundle of qualities,’ the object itself seemed to disappear.”

If there is no object there can be no unchanging object. Yet I think you are right to say that we see change against a background of permanence. So what is unchanging? If it is not the object nor the subject then what is it? This is a question that cannot be answered once we have rejected the answer given by mysticism. Heraclitus answers it when he says ‘We are and are-not’. His point is that objects do not exist as we usually think they do, and this includes you and me. To the extent that we ‘are-not’ we may be unchanging. But in this state we would not be objects or subjects. Objects and subjects would be impermanent.

Obviously this needs to be a much longer discussion, probably an endless one, but I hope this sheds some light on Heraclitus. If you study the Buddhist notion of impermanence it will help make sense of him. Perhaps Parmenides and Zeno also. Bon voyage.

Peter Jones at PhiloSophos.com

Maggie asked:

1. Who are we?

4. How should we live?

Answer by Tony Boese

We, if you mean human kind, are talking apes rocketing around space on an organic spaceship known as the Earth going to another sector of space at an incredible speed. We likely came from bacteria, which in turn came from another organic spaceship (Mars seems likely given recent discoveries).

How you take that information will inform the answer to #4. If you consider being a talking ape on a spaceship to be worrisome and wish we were something more, then the way to live becomes difficult to figure and could be anything from hedonistic rampage to monk like isolation and asceticism. There are, of course, various religious and nationalist standards for action; however, I personally take a very simple ‘that it harm none, do what you will’ standard, and if called upon to make a decision that will necessarily hurt at least someone, then a carefully context-sensitive utilitarianism.

Tony Boese recently completed his MA in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He is a Pathways Mentor.

Answer by Peter Jones

This seems to be four ways of asking the same question. The answer, if there is one, can be found only in religion. It might be possible to reach it in metaphysics, but there would be no way to verify that the answer is correct by the use of logic. To know the answer would mean, well, knowing the answer. It would not mean reading it in a book or guessing. There is only one doctrine that claims such knowledge is possible, and the route to it would be self-study, contemplation, meditation, yoga, or whatever else helps us to see why the Oracle advises us to ‘know thyself’. Consequently there is only one literature where we find the answer given in anything like an authoritative way, and that is the literature of the wisdom traditions.

But finding the answer in a book is unlikely to satisfy your search for knowledge. It would have to be discovered empirically, with no possibility of error, to count as knowledge. In short, you are the only person who can answer your questions to your own satisfaction. Still, the answer can be found in the books, as food for thought, put there by people who claim that we will find the answer if we do the work. I’m not going to answer you by claiming I know the answers. I just have my beliefs, one of which is that it is possible to know the answers if we do the work.

Peter Jones at PhiloSophos.com

Armando asked:

Do you find a weakness with the following proof considering the nature, or essence, of consciousness as immaterial.

I write a note to my assistant to lift a 20 pound weight. He performs the action. I have caused a movement and work without any transfer of energy to my assistant. This psychological energy, the transfer of information, is a nonphysical ‘energy’. I find the mind to be the utilizing of the physical brain by the consciousness, as defined as that which knows, or is aware. That is, in the brain, somehow the phenomenon of consciousness can interact with the physical nature of the brain to produce effects and thinking. But the knowing (awareness) is preverbal (not limited by thought), and most likely outside of time and space constraints. It seems contradiction to have consciousness be nonphysical and affecting the physical but so is light also waves and particles at the same time.

Answer by Craig Skinner

Good question, interesting suggestion.

I do find a weakness with your proof. You fail, as did Descartes and all others who have tried, to explain how an immaterial mind and the material (physical) world interact. Your scenario misplaces where the explanation is required. The transfer of your wish from you to your assistant does involve energy in the usual way – muscle actions by you to type the note, send it electronically or walk to his desk; patterns of photons from the paper or computer screen enter your assistant’s eyes, nerve impulses travel from his eyes to brain. The unexplained bits are how your thought ‘I want my assistant to lift the weight’ makes something happen in your brain to set off the train of nerve impulses, muscle actions etc, how brain events in your assistant looking at the note produce his thought ‘I will lift the weight’, and how this thought makes things happen in his brain to produce the needed muscle action. All very mysterious if mind is immaterial.

Far more plausible (to me) is to say either that thoughts are brainstates, or, better I think, that thoughts are properties of brainstates. Thus, just as a postbox has the property of redness, so certain brainstates have the property of ‘feeling a wish that my friend lift a weight’ in the person whose brain it is. Now there is no interaction problem. The mind is just the mental aspect of the brain’s activity, felt in the person whose brain it is. I’m not suggesting that this property dualism is agreed on all sides, but the notion that consciousness is a feature of special states of matter seems to me to be on the right track.

You talk of the mind utilizing the brain. The mind being ‘out there’ as it were (outside time and space you suggest) and the brain tuning in to it, rather than the brain producing consciousness. This is just another way of stating dualism versus physicalism. The idea of the brain as a receiver/ displayer (a bit like a TV set) has been held by some famous philosophers, for example William James. It’s a popular idea for those who think souls can enter/ leave bodies, and can exist in a spirit world ‘on the other side’ (I suppose this would be outside time and space), and that I was, say, a Roman centurion in a previous life, or that near-death experiences can occur when there is no brain function.

I am unconvinced by it all. Of course if you pursue the tuning-in idea you have to ask whether there are many separate minds out there, each getting paired off with a brain. And are the minds all identical at the start, differing later according to the particularities of the brain, body and environment that lodges each – questions here for Descartes, Plato and Christians. Or is there just one mind (Universal Spirit, God, the Absolute), and each human brain gets a bit of it – Spinoza was keen on something like this. Maybe some animals also get tiny minds or teensy bits of the Big Mind. Some scientists, notably those working on near-death experiences, speculate that brains are indeed receivers of consciousness, the latter ‘stored in a non-local dimension as fields of information’ to quote van Lommel (2013). But it turns out that this ‘wave aspect of our indestructible consciousness in the non-local space is inherently not measurable by physical means’, so his hypothesis is safely immune from refutation. He may as well say, with you, it is stored outside space and time. How Karl Popper would have lambasted such pseudoscience.

I’m unsure how the particle/ wave theory of light bears on the mind-brain problem. Is it that it’s a genuine example of a dualism? (it does seem to be). Incidentally I’m not sure that light is waves and particles at the same time. I think any particular experimental setup either shows light behaving as waves (interference effect), or shows light behaving as particles (no interference effect). I suppose if you had an experiment of the one type running on one table in the lab, and an experiment of the other type on another table, one would show light as waves, the other would show light as particles, so that in that sense light behaves as waves and particles at the same time, but in different setups.

Craig Skinner at PhiloSophos.com

Shiresse asked:

Which branch of metaphysics, cosmology or ontology, seem to you the shorter route to understanding of what is real? why do you choose it? use real life example to justify your claim.

Answer by Peter Jones

Metaphysics would be my choice for an intellectual understanding. But then I see metaphysics, ontology and cosmology as indistinguishable. Such an understanding would be limited, however, and may not even justify being called ‘understanding’.

The shortest route, the longest route, and the only route would be going and finding out. The practices of Buddhism, Sufism, Taoism and so forth are expressly designed to generate such a knowledge of reality. Lao Tsu claims to know what is real, and he claims that he knows because he can ‘look inside myself and see’. But analysis can bring us to the same conclusion as his, as is shown by F.H. Bradley in his metaphysical essay Appearance and Reality, and physics can at least debunk the idea that it is obvious what is real and what is not. A lot depends on what we mean by ‘real’. I would recommend Bradley, and a maybe a search on ‘dependent origination’.

I cannot think of a current professional philosopher that I would recommend on this issue since the entire industry seems to have disappeared up its own backside, but if you are able to understand any physics then you might like Ulrich Morhoff. He is busy trying to show that QM does not require the reality of the phenomena it describes and, rather, requires their unreality. If he succeeds then physics may be one way to distinguish between the real and the unreal.

Since you ask I would choose yoga (in its original meaning) as the only route to such an understanding, since the people who become skilled at it are the only people who have ever claimed to have acquired it, and I feel it is significant that they all agree with each other.

Peter Jones at PhiloSophos.com