Abstract
Many philosophers and scientists claim that there is a ‘hard problem of consciousness’, that qualia, phenomenology, or subjective experience cannot be fully understood with reductive methods of neuroscience and psychology, and that there is a fact of the matter as to ‘what it is like’ to be conscious and which entities are conscious [13]. Eliminativism and related views such as illusionism argue against this. They claim that consciousness does not exist in the ways implied by everyday or scholarly language. However, this debate has largely consisted of each side jousting analogies and intuitions against the other. Both sides remain unconvinced. To break through this impasse, I present consciousness semanticism, a novel eliminativist theory that sidesteps analogy and intuition. Instead, it is based on a direct, formal argument drawing from the tension between the vague semantics in definitions of consciousness such as ‘what it is like’ to be an entity [41] and the precise meaning implied by questions such as, ‘Is this entity conscious?’ I argue that semanticism naturally extends to erode realist notions of other philosophical concepts, such as morality and free will. Formal argumentation from precise semantics exposes these as pseudo-problems and eliminates their apparent mysteriousness and intractability.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
This article is oriented towards phenomenal consciousness, rather than Block’s related concept of access consciousness [7]; most philosophical and scientific study of consciousness centers on the former, and the latter is less semantically problematic. I thank Keith Frankish for discussion of this distinction.
- 2.
Debates on consciousness fallibilism are beyond the scope of this paper, but one argument is that the move from ‘I directly observe my experiences’ to ‘My experiences exist’ still hinges on logic, such as modus ponens from the conditional, ‘If I directly observe something, it exists’, and we cannot have absolute certain in even basic logic. Nonetheless, debates on eliminativism do not hinge on fallibilist or infallibilist claims.
- 3.
McGinn [39] can be read as gesturing at such a distinction in his argument that the ‘property P, instantiated by the brain, in virtue of which the brain is the basis of consciousness’ is ‘closed to perception’, though the distinction is not developed in the sort of detail required here. I thank David Chalmers for raising this point. There is also a similar point made by Gloor in Footnote (18) [27].
- 4.
Eliminativism is not always materialist or physicalist. Eliminativists tend to think dualist explanations are incorrect, but it is possible that the best explanations of conscious-seeming mental phenomena will invoke phenomena outside physical reality as currently understood. Under semanticism, even if we were to find such explanations, we would still need to decide whether to categorize those phenomena as conscious, non-conscious, or indeterminate.
- 5.
It may be that even staunch defenders of consciousness’ existence would be eliminativists under my view. I take this as confirmation that the argument is sound and that intellectual consensus is more tractable than commonly assumed, but with other approaches to philosophical inquiry, one can take this as rendering the eliminativist position trivial and thus uninteresting. I thank David Chalmers and Jake Browning for developing this point.
- 6.
Labeling philosophical concepts is challenging, given almost every plausible English word already has an established meaning, especially the most meaningful words. ‘Semanticism’ fortunately only has one significant established usage, as far as I can tell. According to Akiba, ‘Semanticism about vagueness (or the semantic theory of vagueness) holds that vagueness exists only in language and other forms of representation and not in the world itself’ [1]. While this internalist view is related to my argument, it is not isomorphic, and given a large majority of potential philosophical terms (e.g., ‘relevant word’ + ‘ism’) have already been used somewhere in the field, ‘semanticism’ still seems to be the best descriptor.
- 7.
As Putnam says, ‘the logical primitives themselves, and in particular the notions of object and existence, have a multitude of different uses rather than one absolute “meaning”’ [47]. I am not claiming that there is a univocal or unambiguously correct definition of existence. In fact, much of my criticism of the current consciousness debate can be read as a rejection of that claim, at least in the sense that for a definition to be correct, we need to specify criteria. My choice of meaning is thus only motivated as the best operationalization of the term that I know of for the purpose of resolving debate over the nature of consciousness. Without such operationalization, we could not make progress one way or the other.
- 8.
We can define existence more strongly, requiring the categorization of all entities. The strong and weak versions of existence both seem worth consideration to me, and the argument for consciousness semanticism works with both. I thank Keith Frankish for raising this point.
- 9.
Sometimes the referent of ‘conscious’ is not an entity per se, but a mental state itself, such as, ‘Is anger conscious?’ or ‘Is the vestibular sense conscious?’ I take these claims to be similarly vague in most cases. The exception is a deictic definition of consciousness, in which they may be true by definition, but as I discuss below, the one example does not constitute a definition that can be extended to the world at large.
- 10.
With definitions that are at least somewhat precise, such as those defining consciousness as ‘brain or no brain’ or ‘integrated information’, we can of course assign coherent probabilities in some cases (e.g. an animal with no brain or a computer with no integration has zero probability of consciousness). While these definitions are interesting to discuss, they have not been widely endorsed in the literature.
- 11.
I am not the first to suggest that consciousness is a vague concept and that this leads to problems in conventional approaches to understanding consciousness. For example, Papineau writes, ‘My thesis will not be that there is anything vague about how it is for the octopus itself. Rather, the vagueness lies in our concepts, and in particular whether such phenomenal concepts as pain draw a precise enough boundary to decide whether octopuses lie inside or outside’ [33].
- 12.
Another category is dualist or non-physical phenomena, which are commonly posed as answers to, ‘What is consciousness?’ As noted above, the semanticist argument does not rely on physicalism. If interactionist dualist phenomena exist or if non-interactionist dualist phenomena exist and we have dualist means of knowledge production, then they could be part of a precise definition of consciousness, and semanticism applies. If non-interactionist dualist phenomena exist and we are limited to physical means of knowledge production, then they could not be a part of a precise definition of consciousness, and semanticism applies.
- 13.
Currently this semanticism argument seems conclusive, but to consider another argument, the existence of consciousness would make the world more complicated than a world without it because it adds an extra feature, which adds the weight of parsimony in favor of semanticism relative to most non-eliminativist views. Absent the semanticism argument, since parsimony is not conclusive (i.e., it is a heuristic, not a proof), it would then need to be weighed, rather subjectively, against the intuition that consciousness exists as a property. Moreover, some realist views would consider consciousness realism to be more parsimonious.
- 14.
Some terms are ambiguous simply because of indexicality, where the term is ambiguous until placed in a certain context, such as ‘me’ (which depends on who is using the word) or ‘the first item in the list’ (which depends on which list is being referred to). An example of an indexical property is ‘in our group’ (which classifies entities based on whether they are in the group of the speaker). This is not the sort of ambiguity I’m referring to here.
- 15.
One could argue that even atomic elements may not be entirely precise. What if scientists encounter an atom identical to a gold atom but with a new, undiscovered subatomic particle included? This seems impossible based on current physics, but most epistemic views imply we cannot completely eliminate its possibility. In this case as in others, we can accommodate much vagueness by speaking of atomic elements given our current physical models but not by presuming a discoverable answer as to which entities constitute the element in scenarios when those physical models no longer apply.
- 16.
An unreliable intuition is still interesting and worth discussion, but less reliability should correspond to proportionally less evidential weight in our beliefs.
- 17.
One may respond that any ‘seeming’ is itself consciousness. I take this to be an uncommon and almost always dismissed definition upon reflection, but if one’s definition of consciousness extends that widely across human mental activity, then of course it exists. It simply does not get us anywhere in our understanding of the mind.
- 18.
Because of the strength of religious doctrine circa 1500, the geocentrism intuition may have felt even stronger than the consciousness intuition at that time.
- 19.
I view semanticism as a precisification of logical positivism alongside eliminativism, anti-realism, and so on, but a full development of such ideas is beyond the scope of this paper.
- 20.
It is possible that the precise phenomena associated with consciousness may be tightly clustered in feature space. For example, with advanced brain imaging and thalamic bridging, we may notice that all adult, non-vegetative humans share a specific information processing system, and when we turn that circuit off (e.g., through transcranial magnetic stimulation), subjects consistently report, ‘Wow, everything is exactly the same, except now it doesn’t feel like anything to be me’, a more generalized version of pain asymbolia. Then we notice that if and only if we place this circuit into artificial intelligence (e.g., the ‘emotion chip’ in Star Trek) does the AI report a ‘what it is like’ to be them. No other circuits have this effect. In this hypothetical scenario, while semanticism would still be correct, it would not matter much in practice because the vagueness could be somewhat resolved by empirical experimentation. Of course, this sort of scenario seems extremely unlikely, especially the consensus of consciousness evaluations of dissimilar entities, such as simple computer programs or alien species. We could differentiate the philosophical view that consciousness will not become precise without further precisification (‘semantic eliminativism’, ‘semantic illusionism’, or semanticism, developed and defender in this paper) from the empirical view that there will not be a convergence of views on such a precisificiation (‘convergence eliminativism’ or ‘convergence illusionism’).
- 21.
I sympathize greatly with physicists defending the Everett or Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is easy for eliminativists like me to imagine an alternate history of theoretical physics where the notion of wavefunction collapse was never assumed (analogous to never assuming consciousness realism) and Many-Worlds took off as the default interpretation in the early 1900s instead of taking until at least the 1980s to catch on among quantum field theorists. I also hear woes from theoretical physicists who see a morass keeping string theory in place despite its challenges. Similar dynamics obtain in theology. Consciousness realists ask, ‘Without the reality of consciousness, can we still have compassion for and seek to protect other beings? How can we prevent suffering if suffering does not exist?’ Religious people ask their nonreligious alters, ‘If God doesn't exist, why don’t you just steal and murder like a selfish hedonist?’ The nonreligious person replies, ‘how scary it would be if my belief in God were the only compelling reason I had to not steal and murder’.
- 22.
Eliminativism and illusionism are gateway drugs to panpsychism, in the sense that they encourage us to focus on specific mental features such as nociception that exist in a wide range of entities. However, discussion of panpsychism is beyond the scope of this paper and, predictably, hinges on exactly how we define panpsychism.
- 23.
This kind of moral anti-realism also seems to constitute a counterargument to moral uncertainty [38], the idea that we should account for being factually wrong about morality, analogous to empirical uncertainty, though a version of moral uncertainty could persist where the moral agent simply decides to care about their future moral preferences and account for new occurrences changing those. There may also be a sort of Pascal’s wager for moral realism where anti-realists should account for the expected realist value of their actions, but I am not persuaded by such argumentation because it hinges on the plausibility of moral realism, whereas to me it seems semantically mistaken and thus cannot be assigned even a tiny probability.
- 24.
There are differences in the current discourses on these topics. For example, while consciousness is mostly referred to as a fact-of-the-matter of which discovery is at least theoretically possible (if not practical), some other concepts are more often properly acknowledged as useful fictions, where we are merely smoothing out a scatterplot of intuitions, which would remove the force of my argument. Currently it seems to me that none of these discourses fully acknowledge that fictitious, subjective nature of their object of study. Instead of trimming the literature with Occam’s razor, it may be so distended that we need to launch Occam’s nuke.
References
Akiba, K.: How Barnes and Williams have failed to present an intelligible ontic theory of vagueness. Analysis 75(4), 565–573 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anv074
Andreotta, A.J.: The hard problem of AI rights. AI Soc. 36(1), 19–32 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-00997-x
Anscombe, G.E.M.: An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Hutchinson University Library, London (1959)
Anthis, J.R., Paez, E.: Moral circle expansion: a promising strategy to impact the far future. Futures 130, 102756 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2021.102756
Baars, B.J.: A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1988)
Bateson, M., Desire, S., Gartside, S.E., Wright, G.A.: Agitated honeybees exhibit pessimistic cognitive biases. Curr. Biol. 21(12), 1070–1073 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.05.017
Block, N.: On a confusion about a function of consciousness. Behav. Brain Sci. 18(2), 227–247 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00038188
Blumberg, A.E., Feigl, H.: Logical positivism. J. Philos. 28(11), 281–296 (1931)
Bowles, N.: Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy. The New York Times, New York (2018)
Cappelen, H.: Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2018)
Carnap, R.: Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie (1928)
Chalmers, D.J.: Consciousness and its place in nature. In: Stich, S.P., Warfield, T.A. (eds.) Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford (2003)
Chalmers, D.J.: Facing up to the problem of consciousness. J. Conscious. Stud. 2(3), 200–219 (1995)
Chalmers, D.J.: Moving forward on the problem of consciousness. J. Conscious. Stud. 4(1), 3–46 (1997)
Chalmers, D.J.: The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1996)
Chalmers, D.J.: The meta-problem of consciousness. J. Conscious. Stud. 25(9–10), 6–61 (2018)
Chalmers, D.J.: Verbal disputes. Philos. Rev. 120(4), 515–566 (2011)
Chomsky, N., Smith, N.: New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2000)
Churchland, P.S.: The Hornswoggle problem. J. Conscious. Stud. 3(5–6), 402–408 (1996)
Churchland, P.M.: The rediscovery of light. J. Philos. 93(5), 211 (1996)
Cleland, C.E., Chyba, C.F.: Defining ‘life.’ Orig. Life Evol. Biosph. 32(4), 387–393 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020503324273
Dennett, D.: Facing backwards on the problem of consciousness. J. Conscious. Stud. 3(1), 4–6 (1996)
Dennett, D.: Magic, Illusions, and Zombies: An Exchange, The New York Review. WW Norton and Company, New York (2018)
Dennett, D.: The milk of human intentionality. Behav. Brain Sci. 3(3), 428–430 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0000580X
Díaz, R.: Do people think consciousness poses a hard problem? Empirical evidence on the meta-problem of consciousness. J. Conscious. Stud. 28(3–4), 55–75 (2021)
Frankish, K.: Illusionism as a theory of consciousness. J. Conscious. Stud. 23(11–12), 11–39 (2016)
Gloor, L.: Moral Anti-Realism Sequence #2: Why Realists and Anti-Realists Disagree, Effective Altruism Forum (2020). https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/R8vKwpMtFQ9kDvkJQ/p/6nPnqXCaYsmXCtjTk
Harris, J., Anthis, J.R.: The moral consideration of artificial entities: a literature review. Sci. Eng. Ethics 27(4), 1–95 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-021-00331-8
Hofstadter, D.R.: I Am a Strange Loop. Basic Books, New York (2007)
van Inwagen, P.: Existence, ontological commitment, and fictional entities. In: Loux, M.J., Zimmerman, D.W. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2005)
Jackman, H.: Construction and continuity: conceptual engineering without conceptual change. Inquiry 63(9–10), 909–918 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1805703
Kneer, M., Colaço, D., Alexander, J., Machery, E.: On second thought: reflections on the reflection defense. In: Lombrozo, T., Knobe, J., Nichols, S. (eds.) Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, vol. 4. Oxford University Press, Oxford (forthcoming)
Knoll, V.: Verbal disputes and topic continuity. Inquiry 1–22 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1850340
Knuth, D.E.: Mathematics and computer science: coping with finiteness. Science 194(4271), 1235–1242 (1976). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.194.4271.1235
Korzybski, A.: Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company, Lancaster (1933)
Lewis, C.I.: Mind and the World-Order. C. Scribner’s Sons, New York (1929)
Lewis, D.K.: On the Plurality of Worlds. Basil Blackwell, Oxford (1986)
MacAskill, W., Bykvist, K., Ord, T.: Moral Uncertainty. Oxford University Press, New York (2020)
McGinn, C.: Can we solve the mind-body problem? Mind, XCVIII 391, 349–366 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/XCVIII.391.349
Misak, C.J.: Verificationism: Its History and Prospects. Routledge, London (1995)
Nagel, T.: What is it like to be a bat? Philos. Rev. 83(4), 435–450 (1974). https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914
NASA: Life’s Working Definition: Does It Work?: Interview with Carol Cleland (2003). https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/life's_working_definition.html
Orilia, F., Swoyer, C.: Properties. In: Zalta, E.N. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, Stanford (2020)
Papineau, D.: Thinking about Consciousness. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2002)
Pietroski, P.M.: Conjoining Meanings. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2018)
Putnam, H.: Meaning and reference. J. Philos. 70(19), 699 (1973). https://doi.org/10.2307/2025079
Putnam, H.: The Many Faces of Realism. Open Court, Chicago (1987)
Quine, W.V.: Two dogmas of empiricism. Philos. Rev. 60(1), 20 (1951). https://doi.org/10.2307/2181906
Ramsey, W.: Eliminative materialism. In: Zalta, E.N. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, Stanford (2020)
Rosen, G.: Modal fictionalism. Mind 99, 395 (1990)
Russell, B.: Idealism. The Problems of Philosophy. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1912)
Ryle, G.: The Concept of Mind. Hutschinson’s University Library, London (1949)
Speaks, J.: Theories of meaning. In: Zalta, E.N. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, Stanford (2021)
Strawson, G.: Appendix: dunking Dennett. Estudios de Filosofia 59, 9–43 (2019)
Strawson, G.: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery. It’s Matter. The New York Times, New York (2016)
Strawson, G.: The Consciousness Deniers (2018)
The Brain Dialogue: Towards a Conscious-O-Meter (2016). https://www.cibf.edu.au/towards-a-conscious-o-meter
Tomasik, B.: The Eliminativist Approach to Consciousness, Center on Long-Term Risk (2015). https://longtermrisk.org/the-eliminativist-approach-to-consciousness
Tononi, G.: Consciousness as integrated information: a provisional manifesto. Biol. Bull. 215(3), 216–242 (2008). https://doi.org/10.2307/25470707
Wittgenstein, L.: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York (1922)
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for insight from Kelly Anthis, Matthew Barnett, Peter Brietbart, Liam Bright, Jake Browning, Rachel Carbonara, David Chalmers, Patricia Churchland, Rodrigo Diaz, Kynan Eng, Keith Frankish, Douglas Hofstadter, Peter Hurford, Tyler John, Ali Ladak, Tom McClelland, Kelly McNamara, Seán O’Neill McPartlin, Caleb Ontiveros, Jay Quigley, Jose Luis Ricon, Ilana Rudaizky, Atle Ottesen Søvik, and Brian Tomasik.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Anthis, J.R. (2022). Consciousness Semanticism: A Precise Eliminativist Theory of Consciousness. In: Klimov, V.V., Kelley, D.J. (eds) Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures 2021. BICA 2021. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 1032. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96993-6_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96993-6_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-96992-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-96993-6
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)