Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (12 page)

We now turn to a slightly different aspect of consciousness. This
chapter has concentrated upon sensations and qualia. But our consciousness is also largely made up of thoughts. Thoughts are
strange things.They have`representational' powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there. It doesn't, on the face of it,
point towards anything beyond itself, such as a fact or putative fact.
(Some thinkers deny this. They think, for instance, that a sensation
of pain is a perception of bodily injury, and that this perception
represents the body as injured, just as the thought that tomorrow is
Friday represents tomorrow as being Friday. I leave the reader to
ponder how plausible this is.) The representative nature of
thoughts, sometimes called their intentionality or directedness, is
itself highly puzzling. If we imagine thoughts as kinds of `thing'
present in consciousness, the question becomes how a `thing' can
in and of itself point towards another thing (a fact or state of affairs). Certainly a signpost, for instance, can point towards a village. But that seems to be a matter of the way it is taken. A signpost
doesn't in and of itself represent the way to the village. We have to
learn how to take it. We could imagine a culture in which the same
physical object, which is to us a signpost, had a quite different function: a display board, or a totem, or a piece of abstract art. We see this with animals: when you point at something, dogs typically pay
attention only to the pointing finger, to their owners' irritation.
Whereas it seems incoherent to imagine a creature with the same
thoughts as us, but who hasn't learned to take those thoughts in the
way that we do. It is the `take' that makes the thought.

Probably the right reaction to this is to deny that thoughts are
things at all. The mistake of supposing that to every noun there
corresponds a `thing' is sometimes called the mistake of reification.
Thinkers frequently charge one another with mistaken reifications. It is people who think, and their doing so is not the matter of
some kind of blob being present either in the brain or the mind.
This is true even if the blob is thought of as a small sentence written in the brain. Thinking is a matter of taking the world to be one
way or another, and so taking it is a matter of our dispositions
rather than a matter of what things are hanging out inside us.

Perhaps it ought to be no more puzzling that we can think about
absent states of affairs-distant states, and past and future statesthan that we can pay attention to the world at all. Yet it is a feat that
sets us apart from other animals. Animals can presumably perceive
the world, but we are nervous about supposing that they can represent to themselves distant and past and future states of affairs.Yet
we can certainly do so.

The most popular current approach to this is to concentrate
upon the way in which we can attribute thoughts to the wellfunctioning person. It should be something about a person's
behaviour that enables us to interpret him or her as thinking
about yesterday, or concentrating upon the weather predicted
for the weekend. Thoughts are expressed in both linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour, and perhaps we can hope for some kind
of reduction: `X thinks that p' if and only if X's plans or desires or
behaviour are somehow in line with the world being such that p.
The trick would be to till out the `somehow in line'. It is fair to say
that nobody has successfully done that. But there are suggestions
about how to go. We say that an intelligent system, such as a guided
missile, thinks that there is a plane a mile away and two hundred
feet up if its systems point it in a direction that is appropriate to
there being a plane in that place-given its aim (or function) of
bringing down planes. Similarly we might say of a person that she
thinks the weather will be fine at the weekend if her behaviour is
appropriate, given her aims (or functions), to that being the
weather at the weekend. The difficulty would be to fill out this
thought without relying in other ways on other mental states of the
subject, and this is what nobody knows how to do.

I leave thinking aside for the moment. Instead, in the next two
chapters I consider two more elements in our view of the world
that also nourish Cartesian dualism.The first is a range of thoughts
about our own freedom. The second is a range of thoughts about
our own identity.

Lucretius, De Rerun Natura

OR, IN A SLIGHTLY LESS elevated tone:

The last chapter had us thinking about what the brain produces:
elements of consciousness such as thoughts, or sensations, or qualia. But when we think about ourselves, we are conscious of
other things as well. We don't only register the world, as we take it
to be. We act in it. We concentrate on alternatives. We deliberate
and do things. We take control. How should we think about that?

THE BONDS OF FATE

We usually regard ourselves as free agents. We live our lives within
an open space of possibilities. We deliberate which ones to pursue,
and having deliberated, we choose. I went to the mountains this
year for a holiday, but I could have gone to the seaside. It was my
choice. I could not have gone to the Moon, because it was not feasible.

We seem to be conscious of our freedom. Consciousness of freedom seems closely allied to any kind of consciousness at all. When
we thought of Zombies in the last chapter, we probably imagined
jerky, robotic, Frankenstein creations, slaves to particular programs, acting inflexibly and unintelligently. But we are not like
that, are we?

Sometimes we are proud of our freedom: we are not mere creatures of instinct and desire. We can pull ourselves together and
fight to control our obsessions or addictions. We deserve praise
when we succeed. If we fail, we may deserve and sometimes receive
punishment. Freedom brings responsibility, and people who abuse
it deserve blame and punishment. But nobody deserves punishment for failing to do something if they could not do it. It would be
most unjust to punish me for not having gone to the Moon, or to punish a man in prison for not keeping an appointment outside
the prison, for example. Here the obstacles are beyond the agent's
control. That means, he or she is not to blame.

So our moral reactions as well as our ordinary thinking seem to
presuppose that sometimes, even if we acted badly, we could have
done otherwise.

But might this consciousness of freedom be an illusion? Could
we ever really have acted otherwise than we did?

Lucretius and the young man at the beginning of the chapter
can be given an argument:

The past controls the present and future.

You can't control the past.

Also, you can't control the way the past controls the present
and future.

So, you can't control the present and future.

In fact, you can't control anything at all, past, present, or future.

The first premise of this argument is a thumbnail version of the
doctrine known as determinism, which can be put by saying that
every event is the upshot of antecedent causes. The state of the
world at any moment is the result of its state immediately before,
and evolves from that preceding state in accordance with unchanging laws of nature. The second premise looks certain. The
third reminds us that we cannot control the laws of nature-the
ways in which events give rise to one another. And the conclusion
certainly looks to follow.

People who accept this argument are called hard determinists,
or incompatibilists, since they think that freedom and determinism
are incompatible.

Perhaps to restore human freedom we should deny determinism? We might be optimistic about doing this, because the best
current science of nature, quantum physics, is standardly interpreted as postulating uncaused events. In the quantum world,
there are microphysical events that `just happen'. On these interpretations one system can be in exactlythe same state as anotherthere are no `hidden variables'-and yet in one system a quantum
event occurs, and in the other it does not. Such events have no
cause: they just happen, or do not happen. Quantum physics gives
them a probability, but cannot determine, from the state of play at
one moment, whether such an event will happen or not in the immediate future.

But this is not quite what we wanted: it is introducing an element of randomness into things, but not an element of control or
responsibility. To see this, think of the full neurophysiological state
of your brain and body. Events follow their causes. If sometimes
little fits and starts occur at a micro level you can hardly be held responsible for any differences that do arise from the fits and starts.
You can't control electron jumps. If they are genuinely indeterministic, nothing can control them. It is just as much bad luck if
one jumps the wrong way, as if your good intentions were frustrated by outside accidents beyond your control. Putting the accident into your brain does not restore your responsibility.

If anything, physical indeterminism makes responsibility and
the justice of blame even more elusive.This is sometimes called the
dilemma of determinism. If determinism holds, we lose freedom
and responsibility. If determinism does not hold, but some events 'just happen', and then, equally, we lose freedom and responsibility.
Chance is as relentless as necessity.

FIG TREES AND WATERFALLS