"Actualism" : Honderich on Consciousness

Philosophy of Mind
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Ted Honderich got a genuine grip on that especially slippery sign “consciousness.” He understood philosophy as the attempt to achieve such a grip.

Philosophy is the line of life owed to a certain impulse … to reduce to clarity and thereby get a systematic and comprehensive hold on the nature of one or two of the fundamental parts of reality…Good thinking is getting a clear hold. That is the real impulse in philosophy.

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Here is a sample of his “actualism.”

The difference between me now and a chair in this room, it can be said, is that for me a world exists, and for the chair a world does not exist. Or rather, as I prefer to say, my consciousness now consists in the existence of a world.

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Here’s another:

Your being conscious right now, for just a start, is to you something’s being there isn’t it? Something beingright there, something given, something somehow or other existing, also something being had, immediate, open, for something else, something not deduced from anything else, proximal rather than distal, and so on and so on.

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I don’t care currently about the rest of his philosophy, and my focus is really on the thesis itself, which I also find — more or less – in other thinkers. But Honderich is fascinating as a relatively “dry” exponent of this approach to consciousness. This “unsweetened” and “ordinary language” presentation has the advantage that it doesn’t tempt one toward a dismissal in terms of head shop drivel.

For me this connects to the primacy of perception and ontological perspectivism. But I really don’t want to over-control this thread. I instead want to open this can of worms again.

So have at it people !

I request that you include a paraphrase of what you take Honderich to be saying. Even if you don’t follow the links to get more background.

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In my own lingo, consciousness is the “being” not only of a world but of the world. This sign “being” does not point at a “clay” that the world is made of, “mind” for instance. Not at all. Emphatically not that.

My mom is “conscious” of that old red couch because it is “there” for her or “present” for her as a “red soft thing” that is recognized as that old red couch, which is also “there” for others, and indeed as that old red couch.

My mom’s consciousness ( bless her heart ! ) is the “being” of the world from a point of view that is not my own. I confess that this familiar fact is uncanny. It’s freaky. No one consulted me. But I acknowledge as a belief that was always tacit in the way I talked to her and is now far more explicit. I claim that this is what we already non-theoretically mean by “consciousness.”

The common mistake, as I see it, largely stems from an inherited indirect realism that pretends to believe that the lived red coach is “inside the pineal gland.” This almost “forces” the theorist to get confused on the issue of consciousness, so that consciousness becomes a mysterious stuff.

The oldest and still popular conspiracy theory is perhaps that the sense cannot be trusted, that perception lies. Now of course we have perceptual glitches, etc. But pretending to doubt perception in general is —as I see it — insincere. Perhaps sincerely insincere, because “floating mouth belief” is “theory spit” from a mouth that floats 10-feet above the neck, at least while a certain “just-a-game” is being played.

But, following Honderich, I’d say instead that consciousness is just the presence of stuff ( like red couches) that is not itself a stuff. The hard part is reading this noun, which indeed is an entity, as a pointer to the “presence” of entities in general.

For context, it’s no accident that I embrace the tone of positivism, because I am up against ( in my own eyes) a mystified dualistic scientism on the one hand and a spiritualism that doesn’t want to understand on the other hand. I come more from the side of scientism, and the virtue on that side is that mystification is consciously perceived as a bug rather than a feature. So I am “biased” toward that side in the choice of positivistic rhetoric. I mention this in passing. Is it relevant ? Perhaps, and definitely if we acknowledge that larger self-conceptualizations intensely affect how we “meet” a new thesis.

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Some clarity required here: because this is the crux of the issue.

First of all the chair is part of the world, agree?

Secondly, subjective experience is also part of the world eg consciousness yours, mine, others etc.

what you are implying is that because the chair is not conscious to it, the world does not exist … so now I should ask… if you sit on the chair … does the world exist without it ?

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Not first and second.

The chair is “there” for Joe. That “there-ness” is not a “picture stuff” in Joe’s pineal gland.

I mean at least that I reject indirect realism and “consciousness as internal stuff.”

This requires a rethinking of the structure of objects, which tends toward an ontological perspectivism.

Note that this isn’t my own crazy idea. One crucial influence is Mach, but there are many. It’s a largely forgotten alternative to dualism. It’s mostly already in the later famous work of Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic. The early positivists were often phenomenalist, and this is basically phenomenalism. But I emphasize that phenomenalism does not “keep the internal representation” and “throw away the world.” No. It “collapses” the distinction as confused from the beginning. We might say that the mind is no longer conceived as a “container.” The subject is instead a “POV,” which is there in how and which part of the world is “present.”

This is also the “pure realism” briefly sketched in Wittgenstein’s TLP.

I don’t think the world is “there” for the chair. But I think the chair is there my mom and Joe who lives down the street, if he happens to show up. To me it’s just a brute fact that we share objects via perception. I don’t try to explain it. I try to first acknowledge it.

I claim that all science — and even ordinary conversation and sanity itself ---- takes “common access” to qualitative perceptual objects for granted, so it’s basically silly or confused to try to stuff these objects in pineal glands. For pineal glands are then stuffed into pineal glands which are themselves stuffed into pineal glands. Indirect realism is silly. If it’s not silly, then it turns out to be direct realism with footnotes.

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Oh gawd. Penrose (I think) had to endure H almost losing his temper about this on an edition of In Our Time.

I don’t think you have to be emphatic to get our philosophical juices going. Let consciousness be clay, just sculpted so as to be conscious. Where conscious means, causing the sculpture itself to think it has internal sculptures that aren’t clay.

That’s a habit of thought (among sculptures) sufficiently entrenched to create division when questioned?

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I can’t allow it. I say this jokingly but sincerely.

My goal is first to be understood. I will even wallow in criticism if I feel that my critic has heard me in the first place. On this particular issue, I almost never feel understood. @Andy and I seem to agree at least on this crucial point.

“Being” as I intend it is emphatically not the name of a stuff.

I could quote scripture ( Wittgenstein and Heidegger) in order to pull on ye olde rhetorical lever. Fasching is less known, but his papers are basically saying the same-enough thing. Obviously I don’t mean an appeal to authorities. I mean rather a cynical appeal to familiarity.
I’d rather be dismissed as “nonsense” ( however unenjoyable that is ) than be misunderstood as “oh you mean idealism, like mind stuff, of course.”

It’s a risky tactic, but there are lots of different readers out there. I experiment with different strategies. I confess that I am cynical about “hard problem etc” because I personally find it all too uncritically locked into assumption that I personally reject.

A “sturdy” position is as bad or as good as the position. And this badness or goodness, seems to me, is always someone’s situated judgment. Specificity is exclusive. To be anyone definite enough to remember is to annoy every other definite person, at least on points of difference. You can say that I have pushed some chips into the pot, that I have arrived after a few decades on what I take to be a sweet spot. I am “only” paraphrasing and synthesizing some crucial influences — and philosophy doesn’t matter — but here we are. I am reckless enough ( or confident enough ) to bring a sack lunch to this particular trench.

This confidence is not my confidence that many or any will be convinced. It’s more like : who else has managed to arrive here ?

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Oh dang, you thought I meant new clay? I meant brain clay, just in a state of consciousness. I thought you would allow that?

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I reject identity theory. I mean of course the brain is related. But my consciousness of the chair is the being-there of the chair.

If it helps, “ontological perspectivism.” Not subjective idealism. Not objective reality broadcasting “information stuff” to “pineal glands” that then generate “inner theatre bubbles.”

Very close really to Ayer in LTL. His approach is a little crude, but basically my own. I would not say that objects are “logical constructions from neutral sense-data,” but that’s not so far off. Note that “sense-data” are just “the given.” And Ayer’s approach is still too “atomic” and insufficiently “lifeworld” and “Heidegger stuff.” I just want to emphasize that:

experienced chairs are not in pineal glands, not on internal screens

I don’t believe that anyone believes it. I mean they may cough up the words, but then they forget this pose and go live ordinary life among shared objects that are “not in the their heads.” If I am complain-y here, it’s more like Seinfeldian comic rage.

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They regularly double down on it, if they feel our explanation is poorer than it.

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Penrose wouldn’t answer the question.

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