How Can You Narrow the Topic of Consciousness?

John Wilkins is one of the more reasonable of the atheist bloggers I've read, even as I don't agree with him, quite often.   I do have some respect for him but I'm not willing to let that respect for him keep me from disagreeing with him when I do.  I've been having an argument at his blog on the topic of consciousness, it began with his post questioning if the "hard problem", scientifically addressing consciousness,  is really all that hard.   Nailing down consciousness and defining it as a material phenomenon has been an ongoing project of materialists and the devotees of materialistic scientism, especially in the post-WWII period.   No less a figure than Francis Crick made it his quest to do that and destroy the possibility of believing in God.   I've read that at Crick's funeral his son admitted that his father's quest  had failed.    Just as an aside, it's astonishing how many scientists, especially as they get older and aren't engaged in productive work, have set themselves the task of killing off God.  You don't have to guess at their motives because a lot of them have said that in the clearest terms.    I can't help but think they are recapitulating the last decades of Bertrand Russell after his career in mathematics and philosophy were dealt a death blow of their own by contemporary physics and Kurt Godel.

One of the things this exposes is how little even eminent scientists need to understand the foundations of science, making their claims to fame at higher levels while, in their extra-scientific, philosophical ramblings,  claiming that radical reductionism is the real key to understanding stuff.  This while exempting themselves from understanding the basic level of science and frequently being angry when those are brought up in evaluating their most extravagant, non-scientific claims, especially those purported to be science.   In most of science much can be taken as "given" and not mentioned, including that basic level.  But whenever you want to address something in which that level is intimately involved, you don't have that luxury.  In modern physics the way in which human beings perceive and think about the things studied turns out to be among the major considerations that has to be address, it can't be overlooked.  In some areas of modern logic,  the impossibility of resolving some of the most basic considerations of how we think, especially situations seen as paradoxical, makes achieving the most basic level of closure impossible.  And those are problems at a level just above where consciousness meets articulate thought, consciousness resides at a more basic level than any of them.

One of the common methods of disposing of consciousness is familiar to those who have read some of the now discontinued philosophical game of logical positivism.   In that game any difficult problems that kept them from coming to their desired conclusion was declared to be "meaningless", by fiat, and this was supposed to make philosophy more like science.  It insists on having it both ways, of pretending to be radically reductionist by pretending that the problems of that effort in dealing with consciousness are "meaningless" because they escape their preferred method of analysis.   Not surprisingly, most people don't recognize their right to make those kinds of declarations, depending on our personal experience and observations more than the decree handed down from some obscure corner of a university department.   The reaction to that refusal is often quite bitter and hinges on a deep conviction of an entitlement to be obeyed on the part of those who choose not to.   Wilkins is one of the least prone to that among blog atheists, but I'm unable to name any others, off hand.

I haven't fully digested this argument Russell made in 1905 in this area but these passages should give his admirers some pause in making reductionist assertions about consciousness.  Under linings are mine.

The difficulty in speaking of the meaning of a denoting complex may be stated thus: The moment we put the complex in a proposition, the proposition is about the denotation; and if we make a proposition in which the subject is `the meaning of C', then the subject is the meaning (if any) of the denotation, which was not intended. This leads us to say that, when we distinguish meaning and denotation, we must be dealing with the meaning: the meaning has denotation and is a complex, and there is not something other than the meaning, which can be called the complex, and be said to have both meaning and denotation. The right phrase, on the view in question, is that some meanings have denotations.

But this only makes our difficulty in speaking of meanings more evident. For suppose that C is our complex; then we are to say that C is the meaning of the complex. Nevertheless, whenever C occurs without inverted commas, what is said is not true of the meaning, but only of the denotation, as when we say: The center of mass of the solar system is a point. Thus to speak of C itself, i.e. to make a proposition about the meaning, our subject must not be C, but something which denotes C. Thus `C', which is what we use when we want to speak of the meaning, must not be the meaning, but must be something which denotes the meaning. And C must not be a constituent of this complex (as it is of `the meaning of C'); for if C occurs in the complex, it will be its denotation, not its meaning, that will occur, and there is no backward road from denotations to meaning, because every object can be denoted by an infinite number of different denoting phrases.

----

One interesting result of the above theory of denoting is this: when there is an anything with which we do not have immediate acquaintance, but only definition by denoting phrases, then the propositions in which this thing is introduced by means of a denoting phrase do not really contain this thing as a constituent, but contain instead the constituents expressed by the several words of the denoting phrase. Thus in every proposition that we can apprehend (i.e. not only in those whose truth or falsehood we can judge of, but in all that we can think about), all the constituents are really entities with which we have immediate acquaintance. Now such things as matter (in the sense in which matter occurs in physics) and the minds of other people are known to us only by denoting phrases, i.e. we are not acquainted with them, but we know them as what has such and such properties. Hence, although we can form propositional functions C(x) which must hold of such and such a material particle, or of So-and-so's mind, yet we are not acquainted with the propositions which affirm these things that we know must be true, because we cannot apprehend the actual entities concerned. What we know is `So-and-so has a mind which has such and such properties' but we do not know `A has such and such properties', where A is the mind in question. In such a case, we know the properties of a thing without having acquaintance with the thing itself, and without, consequently, knowing any single proposition of which the thing itself is a constituent.

Of the many other consequences of the view I have been advocating, I will say nothing. I will only beg the reader not to make up his mind against the view --- as he might be tempted to do, on account of its apparently excessive complication --- until he has attempted to construct a theory of his own on the subject of denotation. This attempt, I believe, will convince him that, whatever the true theory may be, it cannot have such a simplicity as one might have expected beforehand.


If I had Russell here, one of the things he would need to clear up would be if when he says: In such a case, we know the properties of a thing without having acquaintance with the thing itself, and without, consequently, knowing any single proposition of which the thing itself is a constituent. it would have been better to say "we know some properties". But that's hardly the only question that arises from his assertions, including his motives which I don't trust.