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Consciousness as Existence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Ted Honderich
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Extract

The difference for present purposes between ourselves and stones, chairs and our computers is that we are conscious. The difference is fundamental. Being conscious is sufficient for having a mind in one sense of the word ‘mind’, and being conscious is necessary and fundamental to having a mind in any decent sense. What is this difference between ourselves and stones, chairs and our computers? The question is not meant to imply that there is a conceptual or a nomic barrier in the way of non-biological things being conscious. It may happen one decade that the other minds problem will shoot up the philosophical agenda and get a lot of attention as a result of a wonderful computer attached to perceptual and behavioural mechanisms, and that the thing will in the end be taken as conscious, rightly. Our question is not what things can be conscious, but what the Property or nature of consciousness is.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 43 , March 1998 , pp. 137 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1998

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References

1 For an exposition of this fundamental conception of physicality, see Quinton, Anthony, The Nature of Things (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973) pp. 46–53.Google Scholar

2 Davidson, Donald, ‘Mental Events’, in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Honderich, Ted, A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and Life Hopes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)Google Scholar, chapters 2–3, or Mind and Brain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)Google Scholar, chapters 2–3.

3 For more of the incoherence objection to functionalism, see ‘Functionalism, Identity Theories, The Union Theory,’ in The Mind-Body Problem: The Current State of the Debate, ed. Szubka, T. and Warner, R. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)Google Scholar.

4 I was driven, alas, to tolerate or anyway contemplate this sort of thing in ‘Consciousness, Neural Functionalism, Real Subjectivity’, American Philosophical Quarterly 32/4 (10 1995), 379Google Scholar. It is to be confessed, too, despite pp. 64–5 of ‘Seeing Things,’ Synthese, 98 (1994)Google Scholar, that in that paper there is a great deal that seems, as you might say, in another world from the view that follows here. But it wasn't all wrong. Some of ‘Seeing Things’ would have echoes in a further development of the present view.

5 The most numbing of these dualisms, perhaps, well beyond ghostly stuff, is to be found in Popper, K. R. and Eccles, J. C., The Self and Its Brain (Berlin: Springer, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where to conscious and neural events a Self is added.

6 Nagel, Thomas, ‘What Is It Like To Be A Bat,?’ The Philosophical Review 83 (1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in his Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)Google Scholar. See also Sprigge, Timothy, ‘Final Causes.’ Supplementary Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 45, (1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Searle, John, The Rediscovery of the Mind (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 132.Google Scholar

8 Nagel, Thomas, ‘Qualia’, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

9 It is the burden of my ‘Consciousness, Neural Functionalism, Real Subjectivity’ that Searle's admirable attempt to characterize consciousness in The Rediscovery of the Mind does not come to grips with the fundamental reality of it.

10 The distinction is taken from Ayer, A. J., The Central Questions of Philosophy (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1973).Google Scholar

11 See above, p. 137.

12 A Theory of Determinism or Mind and Brain, chapters 1, 2.

13 Donald Davidson, ‘Mental Events’ and other papers in his Eassays on Actions and Events.

14 For, further arguments against a revised phenomenalism, see ‘Seeing Qualia and Positing the World’, in A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays, ed. Griffiths, A. Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

15 See above, pp. 147–8.

16 See above, p. 140, and A Theory of Determinism, pp. 77–83.

17 ‘Dependence,’ in Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Audi, Robert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

18 Cf., alas, ‘Seeing Things’, p. 52.

19 See above, pp. 152–3.