What explains the "hard" problem of consciousness?: Commentary on Graziano et al., "Toward a standard model of consciousness", Cognitive Neuropsychology

"Graziano and colleagues (this volume) have proposed a new theory of consciousness, called Attention Schema Theory (AST), both in an attempt to dissolve the "hard" problem of consciousness and as a means of integrating what they take to be disparate rival theories of consciousness. Specifically, they suggest that the AST integrates the well-known Global Workspace (GW) theory of consciousness and the Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theory of consciousness, as well as illusionism about consciousness. Their suggestion is that the GW theory successfully explains what they call "i-consciousness" (also known as access consciousness), whereas HOT theory explains the brain's capacity to model itself (mistakenly) as having the mysterious property of m-consciousness (more generally known as phenomenal consciousness). In their words, "i-consciousness is what the brain actually has; m-consciousness is what the brain thinks that it has." (p.13) The effort to integrate these theorieswhich they rightly point out are normally considered as rivalsis both interesting and important. But we will suggest that there is a crucial sense in which those theories are already integrated in extant work on consciousness.

We will argue for three points in this commentary. First, we will show that the emphasis Graziano and colleagues place on our nave folk-dualism about the mind fails to get to the heart of the question of how the "hard" problem arises. Second, we will argue that there already exist successful theories that have integrated GW theory and something resembling HOT theory, notwithstanding failure to subsume them under an acronym; and these theories entail that there are no special properties attaching to phenomenally-conscious states (meaning that so-called "qualia" are illusory). Lastly, we will suggest that although AST may well have other virtues, it isn't obviously helpful in offering a solution to the "hard" problem of consciousness.

Intuitive dualism

Graziano and colleagues cite quite a bit of interesting evidence suggesting that ordinary people believe in strange mental properties. For example, they cite evidence from Gutersam, Kean, Webb, Kean, and Graziano ([10]) suggesting that people naturally and almost automatically attribute to people eye beams with telekinetic powers. They take this idea, and other ideas in the vicinity, to support the following claim: "The belief in a hard problem of consciousness, we suggest, owes itself partly to the deeply engrained intuition that the mind is a physically ghost-like, invisible essence that is generated inside of an agent." (p.35) We agree that dualistic intuitions are ubiquitous across cultures and historical eras. And we agree that tacit dualist beliefs may contribute to the "hard" problem of consciousness. (Specifically, they explain why scientists give more credence to the philosophical thought experiments that give rise to the problem than they otherwise would; see Carruthers, [ 6].) Dualist beliefs aren't sufficient to explain how the "hard" problem arises, however.

There are several considerations that support this claim. First, many of the intuitions that people have about, say, the immortality of the soul do not depend on any particular difficulty in accounting for phenomenal experience. In fact, getting people to appreciate the "hard" problem of consciousness often takes quite a bit of effort, even if dualist beliefs are taken for granted. One way to see this is to note that while Descartes ([ 9]) argued forcefully for dualism, he did so without engaging with the issue of phenomenal consciousness. On the contrary, his concerns were mostly directed towards the immateriality of thoughts and thinking, which aren't obviously phenomenal states at all.

In addition, the "hard" problem can arise even for those who are already convinced dualists. All that is really needed is a contrast between first-person and third-person perspectives on mental states. A dualist might argue, for example, that there could be a non-physical mind (a soul) containing beliefs, goals, and world- and body-representing perceptual states exactly like her own, but which lacks this feeling (the feeling of an experience of vivid red), and none of whose perceptual states feel like anything to undergo. (Since philosophers call the imagined living beings who would be microphysically identical with oneself while lacking phenomenal consciousness "zombies", one might call this "a zombie soul.") Since one can conceive of a zombie soul, belief in the physical nature of the mind can't be necessary for the "hard" problem of consciousness to arise; and so neither are dualist beliefs sufficient.

The phenomenal concept strategy

Perhaps more problematically, Graziano and colleagues fail to engage with a theory that does attempt to explain the intuitions that give rise to the "hard" problem, namely the phenomenal concept strategy (Balog, [ 1], [ 2]; Carruthers, [ 4]; Carruthers & Veillet, [ 7]; Loar, [12]; Papineau, [13]; Prinz, [15]; Tye, [17], [18]). Many have argued that there is a conceptual independence between first-person phenomenal concepts and the physical, functional, and representational concepts that are used to characterize access consciousness (i-consciousness) and that are invoked in GW theory; and that it is this independence that gives rise to the "hard" problem. Specifically, many proponents of the GW theory and nearby views have endorsed the claim that the "hard" problem only gets off the ground when a subject entertains a special class of higher-order thoughts about her own access-conscious mental states, giving rise to the illusion that those states possess special properties, or "qualia". (For the nearby views, see PANIC theory, Tye, [17]; and AIR theory, Prinz, [15]; for GW theory itself, see Dehaene, [ 8]; and Carruthers, [ 5].)

Consider the imaginary creatures that philosophers call "zombies", for example, which are supposed to be physically, functionally, and representationally identical to oneself while nevertheless lacking this-feeling (the feeling of a vivid experience of red, say). The idea is that zombies are conceivable because of the conceptual disconnect between the third-person concepts invoked in common-sense psychology and cognitive science, on the one hand, and first-person concepts grounded in acquaintance with one's own experiences, on the other. The reason phenomenal consciousness does not seem reducible to access-consciousness is because the way we think and talk about them differs radically. We think about access-consciousness using third-person concepts and yet we can think about what are, in fact, our own access-conscious mental states by invoking first-person concepts.

There is quite a bit of controversy concerning how best to characterize these first-person phenomenal concepts. Some have thought that they are a special class of recognitional concept (Carruthers, [ 4]; Loar, [12]), others that they involve a sort of mental quotation of one's own experiences (Balog, [ 1]; Papineau, [13]). And yet others have said that phenomenal concepts are a distinctive class of indexical concept, referring non-descriptively to one's attended conscious contents (Levin, [11]; Perry, [14]; Schroer, [16]). We won't enjoin these debates here (although see Carruthers, [ 5]). What all proponents of the phenomenal concept strategy agree on, however, is that no matter how one cashes out these first-person concepts, they are independent of any third-person characterization.

The result is that the "hard" problem of consciousness can be explained away. One can maintain that phenomenally conscious experience just is nonconceptual (fine-grained) content made available in the global workspace (there are no mysterious properties or qualia), and that what gives rise to the so-called "hard" problem is just the distinctive way in which it is possible for us to entertain higher-order thoughts about those contents. The reason why one can think that even if one knew all the physical, functional, and representational facts about the mind one still wouldn't have explained why one's experience of red should feel like this, is just that the concept employed in the latter (higher-order) thought lacks any conceptual connections with third-person conceptions of experience. It is the higher-order thoughts that are left dangling, failing to be entailed by a complete physical / functional description of the mind; but what those thoughts pick out (access-conscious experience) is fully physically explicable, as are the higher-order thoughts themselves.

Although we think it unfortunate that Graziano and colleagues fail to engage with what we regard as the most successful strategy for explaining (away) the "hard" problem of consciousness, in what follows we will make some brief remarks about their own contribution to the debate.

Attention schema theory

Graziano and colleagues suggest that m-consciousness arises out of the mind's own model of its own attentional processes. It is quite unclear to us how this attention-schema idea is supposed to explain the "hard" problem of consciousness, however. What we suspect is that Graziano and colleagues think that dualistic beliefs are built into the internal workings of the attention schema, while assuming that these beliefs are sufficient for the problem of consciousness to arise. The first of these ideas may well be correct, although we are doubtful. (It seems to us more likely that dualism arises from a clash between the structure of our nave physics and the structure of our nave psychology; see Bloom, [ 3]; Carruthers, [ 6].) But we are confident that dualist beliefs by themselves aren't sufficient for consciousness to seem problematic to people.

If one is a convinced physicalist (as one should be), then of course there is a problem in explaining how there can be non-physical properties inherent in the mind, just as the AST claims. But the "hard" problem of consciousness is defined, not by dualism as such, but rather by the thought experiments (zombies, the explanatory gap, inverted qualia, and the rest) that make it seem that consciousness is beyond the reach of any third-person explanation, whether physicalist or dualist. For as we have already noted, even a dualist (or an idealist, who thinks that everything is non-physical) confronts the "hard" problem of consciousness. For the dualist can think, "no matter how much I know about the functional and representation facts concerning the mind, those facts can never explain why a perception of red should feel like this." And likewise, a dualist can conceive of a zombie version of herself. So even if Graziano and colleagues are correct that dualistic beliefs are built into the theory-of-mind's nave model of attention, that won't explain why the problem of consciousness seems so hard. In contrast, GW theory together with considerations about how we employ phenomenal concepts are sufficient to explain how the "hard" problem of consciousness arises, as well as enabling one to dissolve that problem.

Conclusion

Graziano and colleagues have put forward an interesting theory of consciousness that is both thoroughly physicalist and attempts to unify two other well-known strategies for explaining consciousness (GW theory and HOT theory). We have suggested, however, that the virtues of combining GW theory with capacities for higher-order thought (in the form of phenomenal concepts) have already been explored in the literature. Their own theory, in contrast, is insufficient to address the problem. While dualistic beliefs can easily make the mind seem mysterious, they don't by themselves give rise to the sorts of thought experiments that constitute the "hard" problem of consciousness."

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