I have recently taken to posting questions on Twitter, asking for recommendations, advice, and ideas on philosophy-related themes. The replies have been fascinating, and in order to preserve them I have compiled a list of the most popular questions here. Click on the blue bird icon in the top right of a tweet to open the thread on Twitter. I shall post further compilations in the future.
October 2018
Which philosophy book or article has had the biggest effect on you — produced the biggest change in your views, attitudes, outlook, and actions?
Twitter can be mean. Let's do something to redress the balance by listing some our favourite tweeps — people who are thoughtful, wise, funny, or just plain nice. Your nominations, please!
I'm looking for good assessments of the cognitive benefits (if any) of bilingualism — preferably ones that avoid hype and offer a balanced survey of studies on the topic. Any recommendations, please?
it's said that it's easier to portray wickedness than goodness. What are the most convincing fictional representations of genuinely good people? (My nomination: Joe Gargery in Great Expectations.)
A claim I defend has been described as 'the silliest claim ever made'. What do you think is the silliest, or most outrageous, claim to have been seriously defended by a philosopher? (With a reference, pls, if available.)
Most philosophers are middle class. Have there been any attempts to develop working-class perspectives on philosophical issues? (The question invites humour — which is fine — but I am serious.)
if you could reinvent academia, how would you do it? (How would you change institutional structures, funding, teaching, research, career structure, access, public role, etc?)
Moriarty wants to kill Holmes but doesn’t want to run the risk of being convicted for murder. So he plans to get an innocent person to do the dirty work for him. Here’s what he does.
First, he persuades Holmes (with whom he is ostensibly on good terms) and three of his Baker Street Irregulars to take part in a real-life philosophical experiment. He will tie the three Irregulars to a trolley track, near to a spur on which Holmes will be tied. He will wait till there are a number of bystanders near where the spur branches off, then release a trolley down the main track in the direction of the Irregulars, and wait to see if one of the bystanders throws the lever to divert the trolley onto the spur. The experiment will provide the philosophical world with important data on the famous trolley problem.
Moriarty shows everyone that the trolley has an automatic braking mechanism that will prevent it hitting the Irregulars if the lever is not thrown. This mechanism really does work, but Moriarty has adjusted it so that if the trolley is sharply diverted onto another track, it will fail. Everyone agrees to take part.
It all goes to plan. Moriarty releases the trolley, a bystander, Doyle, sees the trolley and the people on the tracks, does some rapid moral reasoning, and operates the lever, believing that this will result in the death of the person on the spur. The trolley goes onto the spur, its braking mechanism fails, and Holmes is killed.
Moriarty’s plan has worked. Holmes is dead, yet Moriarty did not kill him. If Doyle had not intervened, no one would have been harmed. Instead, Doyle freely chose to do something which he believed would kill Holmes.
Or was there a flaw in the plan? Did Moriarty commit a crime? If so, what was it? Who is morally responsible for Holmes’s death? Does it matter if you think Doyle’s moral reasoning was faulty?
(Revised and expanded after twitter discussion with @JulianSales2, @FillinghamLydia, and @tylerhower.)
On 25 October 2017 I gave a keynote presentation at a conference on Self-Deception: What It Is and What It Is Worth, at the University of Basel. Family commitments prevented me from attending in person, so I spoke via Skype — which worked very smoothly, even for the Q&A. Many thanks to the organizers Anne Meylan, Marie van Loon, and Melanie Sarzano for inviting me and setting up the Skype link. Click here to see the slides from my talk
On Tuesday I posted a question on Twitter (prompted by a remark by @bowmanthebard). The question involved a version of the trolley problem, in which one has to choose between letting die and actively killing, but with the twist that the motive for choosing the active option is not to minimize loss of life (in this version it might actually increase it) but to preserve a life especially dear to one.
As the question generated some interest, I thought I would set out the thought experiment in more detail here. Another Twitter user @gjfitzgerald described my question as evil, since there is no way to answer it without guilt, so I call it The Evil Trolley Problem (not a perfect name, I admit, since it’s ambiguous). I’m not an ethicist, and I don’t know if this particular scenario has been previously discussed in the literature (if it has, I’d be grateful for references), though I’m sure the underlying issues have. My tweet provoked a number of responses — some darkly humorous — which I have collated with Storify.
Here is the problem:
You are walking by the railway line, where a group of local children are playing. Suddenly, there is a shout and you see that a runway trolley is thundering down the track. You run to warn the children and see that one child is trapped on the line. With horror you realize that it is your own child. The trolley will certainly kill your child if you do not act. Luckily, you are close to the points, and by operating a manual lever you can divert the trolley onto another track. But as you grasp the lever, you notice that another child, not known to you, is trapped on the other track. If you pull the lever, the trolley will certainly kill them.
What would you do? There are only seconds left and there is no other option. Would you sacrifice an unknown child to save your own? If you would switch the trolley, would do the same if it it would result in more deaths? What if there were two children trapped on the other line or if there were a school bus stalled there? How many children would you sacrifice to save your own child?
The scenario is of interest because what most of us would do in the imagined situation is in contrast to what moral theory tells us we should do. I suspect that most of us would switch the trolley, even if it would result in many deaths. Yet I doubt if there are many moral theories that would dictate that course, or even judge it permissible, and most legal systems would, I assume, class it as murder. This in turn raises wider questions about how far moral theory should bend to human nature, and how we can reconcile our intense preference for our kin with our ideals of altruism and egalitarianism.
From 1st to 3rd of July 2015 I was in Granada, Spain, as an invited speaker at an interdisciplinary workshop on inner speech, jointly organized by the University of Granada and the University of the Basque Country. It a friendly and stimulating event, with some fascinating presentations and discussions. I talked about the function of inner speech, arguing that some inner speech acts are intentional actions that perform genuinely cognitive functions. Click here to see the slides from my talk
‘[F]undamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like for the organism.’
So writes Thomas Nagel in his famous 1974 paper ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ (p.436). It is a compelling thought and one that seems self-evidently true. (I remember coming up with the same idea when I was a teenager and thinking it a great insight, and I’m sure many others have had the same experience.) But is Nagel’s claim correct or might it be seductively wrong? It depends, I think, on how we interpret it. Here are two things it might mean.
The first is that having conscious experiences involves having a certain kind of introspective self-awareness — an awareness of one’s own mental responses to the world. For you to be conscious is for you to know what you are like as you respond to the world, as well as what the world is like as it affects you. I’ll call this introspective subjectivity. Introspective subjectivity, we might say, stresses the ‘like’ part of ‘what it is like to be’.
The second thing Nagel might mean is that to have conscious experiences is to have a form of immediate inner awareness that exists simply in virtue of being the thing one is and that is not dependent upon introspective mechanisms. I’ll call this intrinsic subjectivity. We might say that this stresses the ‘be’ part of ‘what it is like to be’.
These two kinds of subjectivity are very different. Introspective subjectivity is not essentially private. With the right apparatus, another person might monitor the same internal states my introspective mechanisms do and so share my introspective awareness. But intrinsic subjectivity cannot be shared. The only way someone could share what it’s like to be me in the intrinsic sense is to be me, or perhaps a duplicate of me.
Now there doesn’t seem to be any special difficulty in understanding how a creature could possess introspective subjectivity. it would just need to have suitable introspective mechanisms targeting its own internal responses and hooked up in the right way to the rest of its cognitive system. But intrinsic subjectivity looks like a complete mystery. How does this inner awareness arise? What exactly is the subject of it? Which things have it? What does it do? How can we even investigate it? These look like, well, hard problems.
In the literature on consciousness these two kinds of subjectivity aren’t always clearly distinguished. Some theories — most obviously panpsychist ones — are plainly theories of intrinsic subjectivity. If there is something it is like to be a rock, it’s not because the rock is capable of introspection. But other theories look like theories of introspective subjectivity. Higher-order representational theories, for example, attempt to explain consciousness in terms of the internal monitoring of experience. Yet these theories are often discussed as if they were alternative accounts of the same thing.
Nagel’s claim has become the standard starting point for theories of consciousness, but it doesn’t identify a unique explanandum and it has sent researchers off down very different paths. In my view, it is immensely plausible to think that conscious experience involves introspective subjectivity, and developing theories of introspective subjectivity should be a major research programme for cognitive science. But the pursuit of theories of intrinsic subjectivity is, I fear, misguided and futile.
Note: This is a revised version of a letter I sent to The Guardian, responding to a letter by Philip Goff, which itself commented on an article on consciousness by Oliver Burkeman. The letter was deemed too long for publication in the paper, so I am posting it here instead. It is written for a general audience.
As a member of the Daniel Dennett camp on the Greenland consciousness cruise referred to in Oliver Burkeman’s article, I should like to respond to Philip Goff’s letter of 28 January 2015. Goff advocates a radical solution to the Hard Problem of explaining how consciousness fits into the natural world. Consciousness, he argues, is not a physical process, but an intrinsic feature of all physical reality. Consciousness is not fundamentally material; rather, matter is fundamentally conscious. A consequence of this view is that everything is conscious to some degree: trees, stones, atoms, quarks — all have a little bit of consciousness. This panpsychist position offers a neat solution to the problem, and Goff argues for it with intelligence and elegance, but I find it hard to take it seriously.
I do agree with Goff on one important point: Consciousness, as we ordinarily conceive of it, cannot be explained by the physical sciences. The Hard Problem, as posed by David Chalmers, can’t be solved by cognitive science. Goff draws the moral that consciousness is not physical in the ordinary sense. I draw the moral that we are conceiving of consciousness wrongly. We are mistaken about what consciousness is.
Our conception of consciousness is derived from introspection — from mentally ‘looking inwards’ at our experiences. When we do this, our experiences seem to have a private ‘phenomenal quality’ to them (think of the sensation of seeing a vibrant green leaf, or smelling coffee grounds, or running one’s fingers over a silk scarf). These phenomenal qualities (or ‘qualia’) seem almost magical and utterly different from the mundane physical properties of our brains.
But maybe that’s an illusion. Maybe when we introspect, what we are aware of are certain patterns of brain activity that seem magical and nonphysical but aren’t really. Moreover, as another cruise participant, Nicholas Humphrey, argued, maybe these brain processes were shaped by evolution precisely to seem magical to introspection. In his 2011 book Soul Dust Humphrey argued that evolution adapted pre-existing neural systems to create an inner ‘magic show’ which carries immense adaptive benefits — enriching our lives and our experience of the world, enhancing our sense of self, and deepening our engagement with each other. In short, maybe evolution has hardwired us to think that we have a magical inner life, and the problem of consciousness is a benign trick that nature has played on us.
Most people, I find, think this suggestion is just as crazy as panpsychism. If there’s one thing we are absolutely certain of (the argument goes) it’s our experience. We may doubt that there is a green patch in front of us, but we can’t doubt that we are having an experience with a green phenomenal quality. This takes us back to the origins of the Hard Problem in Descartes’ sceptical thought experiment mentioned in Oliver Burkeman’s article. There’s something right about this. If we suspect that our senses are misleading us about the external world, then we retreat to more cautious and secure claims about how things seem to us. But (I would argue) such claims should not be construed as infallible reports of the nature of our experiences. Being cautious about the external world doesn’t make us infallible about the interior one. We may be sure that we’re introspecting something, but can we rule out the possibility that we’re mistaken about its nature, just as we may be about the nature of external things? After all, to the spectator a good illusion of something is indistinguishable from the thing itself.
Of course, it’s not so simple to solve the problem of consciousness. For one thing, we need to explain what it means to say that experiences seem to have phenomenal qualities. (It better not mean that they generate further experiences which really do have phenomenal qualities. Otherwise we’d merely have moved the Hard Problem back a step.) But thinking of consciousness as involving an illusion changes the questions we have to answer, and does so, I believe, in a productive way.
On the cruise I proposed the name ‘illusionism’ for the sort of position I have been describing, and the term ‘the Illusion Problem’ for the problem of explaining how the consciousness illusion is created. (I wasn’t claiming to have originated the position or the problem; Daniel Dennett has advocated illusionism for decades, and Nicholas Humphrey has done pioneering work on the Illusion Problem.) For me, the attraction of illusionism is that it allows us to give full weight to the intuitions that motivate views like Goff’s — consciousness really does seem weird — without requiring us to endorse a weird metaphysics. Maybe it’s time to stop banging our heads against an illusory Hard Problem and start trying to solve the hard-ish but solvable Illusion Problem?
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The talks from the consciousness cruise, including Jesse Prinz’s introduction to my paper on illusionism, my reply, and the following discussion, were videoed by the Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies and can be viewed on the centre’s Youtube channel. Here is the full playlist.
Over the summer I recorded an interview for the ‘Philosophy Bites’ podcast series, created by Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds. Nigel and I talked about the hard problem of consciousness and my own approach to it, which treats qualia as illusory. You can listen to the podcast below.
If you enjoy Philosophy Bites, please consider donating, subscribing, or becoming a patron. There are details of how to do so on the Philosophy Bites homepage.
On 21 August 2014, Maria Kasmirli and I gave a joint paper at the ‘Knowing Minds’ conference in Sheffield, held to mark the retirement of George Botterill from the University of Sheffield after 26 years. It was a pleasure to take part, to see so many old friends again, and most of all to express our gratitude to George, under whom we had both studied during our time at Sheffield. Our paper, which was titled ‘Shall we go upstairs? The ethics of implicated consent’, discussed issues surrounding the giving of consent by indirect means. Here are the slides from our talk.
