Crane on consciousness

Or to be more precise, Tim Crane on unconscious belief and conscious thought. Where Crane is Knightbridge professor of philosophy in the University of Cambridge and a professorial fellow of Peterhouse. And Knightbridge was another fellow of Peterhouse, who gave money for the chair's foundation on his death in 1677. I already forget what put me on his case.

In the past, my very limited exposure to modern philosophers in the pages of the likes of the TLS has not encouraged me. It all seemed terribly difficult and of very little bearing on the real world. And the present paper dives in with the word 'intentionality', a word which meant nothing to me but which I soon learn is of medieval scholastic origin. Soon learn that is from a handy open-access web site operated by Stanford (see reference 1) and found by google. Good for them - and I now know that 'intentionality is the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. The puzzles of intentionality lie at the interface between the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language'.

There seems, in this paper, to be a fog of terms derived from any two of intentionality, phenomenon and consciousness. I was reminded of the buzz word generators that used to be used as office ornaments by IT consultants. The fog is further compounded by stuff like 'a relational conception R is that of belief only if the following condition is met: (F) The thinker finds the first-person content that he stands in R to the content p primitively compelling whenever he has the conscious belief that p, and he finds it compelling because he has that conscious belief. (Peacocke 1993: 163)'.

The paper then moves onto classifying things, so perhaps a chap after my own heart after all. A colleague has identified seven different sorts of consciousness. Another does six and yet another does eight. Still others get excited about the recursion involved in thinking about thinking about things and go in for first order, second order and so on and so forth. Then, getting more interesting, the author settles down to the question of, given that one can be conscious of the red of a real pillar box (or of the real pain in one's big toe) and that one can also have the rather different conscious thought that pillar boxes are nearly all red, whether having the single label 'conscious' to attach to both phenomena is helpful.

There is discussion of P-consciousness, with P for phenomenon, and A-consciousness, with A for access. Where pain is a good example of the first sort, and the thought about the pillar box is a good example of the second. I start to fret a bit when it is suggested that the access means that I can, in some sense, choose to access the thought which is lurking somewhere in the unconscious. To my mind, while some of the time one can access knowledge by thinking thoughts like 'the chap I bumped into at TB last night and who talked a lot about concrete' and coming up with, a few seconds later 'Elias Sandberg', most of the time one does not do this. Most of the time thoughts pop into consciousness for reasons which are unknown. Generally, I thought the tone was too consciousness-centric, too much of a sense that our conscious self was in charge. I prefer a view where consciousness is just a froth on the surface, on the surface of some dark, swirling and largely unknown process. Unknown, that is, for the present.

But Crane does reasonably point out that it is hard to separate out different sorts of conscious events (and I agree with him that consciousness can usefully be thought of as a stream of discrete events, with sometimes large gaps between them) into well defined boxes. Things always seem to be slipping from one box into another at the edges.

There is discussion of conscious beliefs which the author dislikes, consciousness being a transient business while beliefs persist. I am with him on that.

There is discussion of whether events and states are different in kind. Where events occur in time and states persist through time. An inconclusive discussion of an interesting question.

All in all an interesting foray, but in the end I continue to prefer the engineering and scientific approaches. Where engineers try to build replicas of minds and scientists study them using the considerable armoury of modern science. This seems to me to be more likely to be fruitful than sitting on an ivory tower and just thinking out the answers in one's head. Rather in the way that the Christian monks did seven hundred years ago. (Given the the Muslims were rather ahead in those days, perhaps the Muslim monks did rather better).

PS: with thanks, once again, to wikipedia for the picture. Wikipedia seems to be a good source of high definition pictures, while a lot of the other freebies turned up by google are rather low definition, not much use for illustrative purposes.

Reference 1: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/.

Reference 2: http://www.timcrane.com/. Not all of his stuff hides behind a pay wall! And the paper in question was a nicely produced bit of typescript with not a statistic, chart, diagram or any other sort of illustration in sight.