A Place for Consciousness

Gregg Rosenberg's book A Place for Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World was published a few months ago by Oxford University Press.  Even before publication this book had a sort of cult following among people interested in "radical" approaches to the metaphysics of consciousness.  Broadly speaking, Rosenberg defends a Russell-style metaphysics on which consciousness is grounded in the intrinsic categorical properies of certain physical processes, and in particular is closely tied to the intrinsic nature of causation itself.  This is by far the most detailed development of a Russell-style metaphysics of consciousness that I know of.  He also has a chapter with a novel anti-physicalist argument, a chapter responding to philosophical critics of anti-physicalist arguments, chapters on the "boundaries" of consciousness and on panpsychism, and a lot of material on understanding causation in its own right.  I don't agree with everything here (and I'm still trying to understand all the details of the positive theory), but it's well worth reading.

There's already some discussion of the book on the web.  Apart from Rosenberg's own website and an Amazon page, Steve Esser's weblog "Guide to Reality" has a summary and an evaluation.  The Physics Forum website has threads discussing the book here and here.  Much of this discussion is by philosophically-interested nonphilosophers, who are often less conservative than professional philosophers where radical views of consciousness are concerned.  But there is a lot of meaty analytic philosophy in Rosenberg's book (like my own book on consciousness, Rosenberg's book is a revised version of his Ph.D. thesis from Indiana University), and I'd encourage interested philosophers to come to grips with it.

Comments

[Peli]

Is it just me, or is it starting to look like the Russellian view is slowly turning from an esoteric anecdote to the new non-reductionist mainstream?

What I would really like to know is how this position is viewed by the non-dualist hardcore phenomenological-realists like Ned Block or Thomas Nagel who wait for a conceptual revolution to unite the objective and subjective. It seems to me like the Russell-style position should solve their problems quite nicely, but I don't know of any reference made by them to such positions.

[djc]

I think there's something to this. The Russellian view (those unfamiliar with it might see the section on "type-F monism" in "Consciousness and its Place in Nature") probably has more potential than any other view to accommodate nonreductive intuitions about consciousness while also accommodating the considerations in favor of materialism. Among aficionados, the view has become very popular. E.g. in the final poll at the 2002 Summer Institute, type-F monism was the most popular view (8 votes out of 28, just beating type-B materialism with 7). The view still has some work to do in penetrating mainstream philosophy of mind, though, where a lot of people still overlook it as an option.

I don't know of anywhere where Block discusses the view in print, though I've talked with him a bit about it. Nagel discusses the view on pp. 25-28 of "The Psychophysical Nexus". He has some sympathy with the view, but objects that (i) the view implausibly denies that physical properties are intrinsic, (ii) it is too close to reducing the physical to the mental for his tastes, and (iii) the view doesn't really explain the subjectivity of the mental. On the first two points, proponents can reasonably hold that the view is consistent with the physical properties being intrinsic, and that (at least in versions of the view that are closer to neutral monism than panpsychism) it needn't reduce the physical to the phenomenal. See e.g. Daniel Stoljar's "Two Conceptions of the Physical" for a version that will deny (i) and (ii). I think (iii), and related issues in the vicinity such as the unity and homogeneity of consciousness, are probably the biggest residual issue for this sort of view.

[ghr]

I'm a fan of Stoljar's work and of Nagel's. One of the things I hope APFC accomplishes is to move the discussion beyond what I call the "horse betting" stage in which philosophers and scientists simply express their intuitive preferences about very general position statements.

The central methodological message of the book is that to get an actual theory -- which is the goal -- we have to pay less attention to our intuitive preferences and more attention to justified standards of theory construction. Positions like "the experiential arises from the non-experiential" or "physical properties intuitively seem to be intrinsic properties" are potential end-points, not starting points, and whether we ever arrive at them should be a function of more basic considerations.

In this spirit, in APFC I really wanted to force myself to go beyond exploring the general shape of a position statement, which is what I see as being the state of the art in the philosophical literature about type-F views, and construct an actual theory. I have hoped there is real value in being explicit at each step about the general principles of theory construction that I feel force the choices that I make. By doing this, I think I have short-circuited traditional criticisms and I hope to show that only the real act of theory construction can force enough detail to move discussion of these issues to a new level.

I think seeing this done, seeing that it is possible to do, is a basic value proposition for the book even for those who feel they cannot go themselves to the place I end up. For example, within APFC there is clearly no question of whether subjectivity has been explained. Also, APFC argues very precisely for the reasonableness of the view that physical properties are extrinsic, and I think it provides a sober answer, without ducking issues, to critics who believe this view is too close to reducing the physical to the mental. Those critics won't find comfort in the answer, but they will find an answer that challenges them. Measured against an attempt at real depth of detail, I hope generic considerations like Nagel's and Stoljar's are no longer seen as adequately grappling with the reality of the choices that have to be made.