What follows was written as an overview of my ideas for an email list. (There’s actually a minor edit where I’ve changed my mind about nomenclature.) There are no references, and some familiarity with the issues is assumed. (Later: my thinking on these matters has changed slightly recently. I don’t presently have time to rewrite this page, but I now use “perspectives” instead of “aspects” thus: “a dual perspective theory” and “subjective and objective perspectives”. This is to clarify that, though my thinking developed out of dual aspect theories, it is now about psychological perspectives, or ways of thinking, rather than metaphysics.)
I’ve been working for years on my own approach to the “hard problem”, but haven’t previously gone public with an overview, and I’d be interested in any comments. This thesis might be seen as very radical, but I think it’s obvious that something radical is required to move us on beyond our current (and long-standing) difficulties.
The first step is to accept that consciousness is ontologically, as well as epistemologically, subjective. As a consequence it is, in principle as well as in practice, impossible to identify either any operational principles whereby a conscious machine could be designed, or any objective criterion for deciding whether an organism or machine is conscious, because that is a matter of opinion, not one of fact. And the concept of “free will” stands and falls with consciousness.
Many people will be offended by that suggestion. I used to be one such myself–I used to think eliminativists were terrible people–until I discovered we can take that view and still use the concepts of consciousness and free will.
We need to reevaluate subjectivity, and upgrade its status. Our personal experience of making choices with relative freedom is entirely sufficient to establish the validity of the concepts of consciousness and free will within that context, even though they are meaningless in purely scientific terms. So this eliminativism is strictly confined to science, and folk philosophy is preserved. Consciousness and free will can even be called “real,” if that is understood to be based on pragmatism or instrumentalism rather than objectivity. For instance, I have no doubt that, in the sense that I’d like it to be true, I have a genuine choice of tea or coffee at my morning break–even though habit will incline me towards coffee. More generally, for social and psychological reasons, it is extremely important that people feel they have choices–and for all practical purposes it’s true that they do.
This is a dual aspect theory, where the explanation is psychological rather than philosophical: mental and physical aspects of reality are basically subjective and objective. Subjectivity and objectivity are “modes of mental operation,” though nearly all normal mental activity features a mix of them or compromise between them, so they are perhaps best understood as extremes.
Maximal objectivity has advantages that are too well understood to need repeating here, but the disadvantage that all morals and values, along with concepts such as consciousness and free will, become null and void.
The state known as “the zone” in sports training circles, or “flow” in the writings of Csikszentmihalyi, and is called “absolute subjectivity” by DT Suzuki, is a likely candidate for the position of extreme subjectivity. It has the advantage of enhanced performance of skills, along with others well documented by Csikszentmihalyi.
It should be noted, however, that the concepts of consciousness and free will occur in the area of activity in which subjective and objective modes are mixed, not at either extreme. Unfortunately, in the mixed mode, there’s always a potential for confusion between subjectivity and objectivity, as in the case of the “hard problem”: attempting to explain consciousness in maximally objective, scientific terms is a category error.
I consider both extreme and mixed modes all to be equally valid, though one will be more useful than the others in any given context. For instance, the zone is the most appropriate mode while playing competitive tennis, and maximal objectivity while working on scientific theories. Most social interaction utilises the mixed mode, though some forms of it, such as lovemaking, will tend towards the subjective extreme, in which thought is reduced or eliminated and action is spontaneous.
Dennett’s intentional stance plays an important part in my thinking, but I differ from Dennett on its basis. He sees it primarily as a means of predicting the behaviour of others using rationality, while I replace that with empathy: your first move in trying to predict what someone else might do would usually be to imagine yourself in their place. I agree with Evan Thompson that empathy plays an important part in the development of consciousness, and I disagree with those who say we have to attribute consciousness before we can empathise: that is a logical deduction, not a psychological fact.
The subject/object dual aspect theory accords very well with a certain view of information. I add another stance to Dennett’s array of physical, design and intentional stances: the formal stance. To adopt this stance is just to focus on form rather than substance, which is what physicists do when they use the concept of physical information–the holographic principle is a very good example. Physical information is an extreme case but we all take the formal stance every time we think in terms of form or information.
Intentional information, which is the ordinary concept in common use, can be considered as encoded in physical information, being en/decoded in use, in alignment with Wittgenstein’s concept of meaning as use, the context being the key. Consciousness then becomes seen as information use, being a stream or streams of intentional information. This is a generalisation of Wittgenstein’s concept of meaning from language (or communication) to all meaning and significance. Objectively, excluding use from consideration, there is nothing but physical information.
