Jerry Fodor, in a review in the London Review of Books of Galen Strawson’s Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, opens the review with an ascerbic observation. I quote:
Consciousness is all the rage just now. It boasts new journals of its very own, from which learned articles overflow. Neuropsychologists snap its picture (in colour) with fMRI machines, and probe with needles for its seat in the brain. At all seasons, and on many continents, interdisciplinary conferences about consciousness draw together bizarre motleys that include philosophers, psychologists, phenomenologists, brain scientists, MDs, computer scientists, the Dalai Lama, novelists, neurologists, graphic artists, priests, gurus and (always) people who used to do physics. Institutes of consciousness studies are bountifully subsidised. Meticulous distinctions are drawn between the merely conscious and the consciously available; and between each of these and the preconscious, the unconscious, the subconscious, the informationally encapsulated and the introspectable. There is no end of consciousness gossip on Tuesdays in the science section of the New York Times. Periodically, Nobel laureates pronounce on the connections between consciousness and evolution, quantum mechanics, information theory, complexity theory, chaos theory and the activity of neural nets. Everybody gives lectures about consciousness to everybody else. But for all that, nothing has been ascertained with respect to the problem that everybody worries about most: what philosophers have come to call ‘the hard problem’. The hard problem is this: it is widely supposed that the world is made entirely of mere matter, but how could mere matter be conscious? How, in particular, could a couple of pounds of grey tissue have experiences?
Only this week I felt motivated (though I didn’t act upon it) to write a letter to the editor in reponse to an article in the New Yorker that features yet another fMRI story. We all accept that the “final frontier” is not extra-cranial, but lies in trying to explain the phenomenon of consciousness in the universe that is our mind. It seems that each week another “discovery” or potential application is found that has consciousness as the story. Even some neurophilosophers are now getting the celebrity treatment from the mainstream literati. Besides The New Yorker consciousness stories abound in Time Magazine, US News and World Report, The Chronicle of Higher Education (and many more besides).
So what’s going on here? As Fodor puts it, relative to all the hot air generated, there is little or nothing of substance to show for it. It is a mark of our current culture that several parties are in complicity, generating an unfounded techno-ebullience. The “mind-brain” is now culturally sexy. So against this backround we have an unrestrained marketing hypebole that infects scientists, journalists, and business – jointly and severally vulgarising what is indeed the most fascinating and intractable problem of all epochs.
manwithoutqualities 