Consciousness and Objective Reality
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We do not at present have even the outline of an adequate theory of the place of mind in the natural order. We know that conscious mental processes occur as part of animal life, and that they are intimately connected with behavior and with the physical activity of our nervous systems and those of other animals. But at the more general, one might say cosmological, level, we know essentially nothing, for we do not understand why those particular connections exist. Our knowledge is entirely empirical and ad hoc, not theoretical. Much discussion in the philosophy of mind is concerned with the problem of intentionality: what it means to attribute content to mental states like belief, desire, thought, perception, and so forth. This topic also links discussion of the relation between the mind and the brain with discussion of the relation between natural and artificial intelligence, and of the possibility of ascribing mental states to computers, in some distant future stage of their development. However I believe that the most fundamental problem in the area is that of consciousness. While consciousness in the form of pure sensation does not in itself guarantee intentionality, I believe true intentionality cannot occur in a being incapable of consciousness. The nature of this relation is very unclear to me, but its truth seems evident. We may assign meaning to the operations and output of an unconscious computer, as we can assign meaning to words in a book, but the computer can't mean or intend anything itself by what it says or does. For this reason I believe it is at present not possible to speculate fruitfully about the question whether artificially created physical systems could have minds. We can say nothing interesting about this when we know so little about why we have minds, or why the other natural organisms to which we find it natural to attribute mental states have them. What is it about a system constructed as we are that explains why it can feel, perceive, want, believe, and think? Until we can begin to answer that question at some level of generality, we are unlikely to say anything useful about whether systems of a radically different physical type could do those things. Ultimately, a person's opinion concerning this question will depend not merely on his scientific beliefs but on his philosophical beliefs about the mind-body problem. That is because it is a philosophical question, what a general theory of mind would have to account for to be adequate. There are those who believe, for example, that mental states can be defined in terms of their causal role in the control of the organism. When this definition refers to a system of interacting states, definable entirely in terms of their relations to physical inputs, behavioral outputs, and to one another, the view is called functionalism. If functionalism were correct as an account of what it is for a being to have a mind, or to be the subject of mental states, then nothing more would be required for a general theory of the physical conditions of mind than an account of how physical materials can be put together to construct systems whose functional organization was of the right type. To explain this would be a stupendous task; and it is not at all obvious that the same functional organization that characterizes a mouse, let alone a human, could be embodied in a completely different type of physical system, in the way that much simpler functions like addition can be carried out by different physical machines. But at least we can understand the general character of the question. The possibility of an alternative physical realization of visual perception, for example, would depend both on the functional analysis of that mental faculty and on the possibility of replicating that type of functional operation in a structure physically quite different from the standard biological model. Such a theory would enable us to consider the possibility of the eventual construction of artificial minds, through the creation of systems which mimic the behavior and functional organization of human and other animal organisms. I believe, however, that functionalism, though part of the truth, is not an adequate theory of mind, and that the complete truth is much more complicated and more resistant to understanding. In addition to their functional role in the explanation of behavior and their concrete physiological basis, conscious mental states have characteristics of a third type, familiar to us all, namely their subjective experiential quality: how they are or how they appear or feel from the point of view of their subjects. However true it may be that mental states and processes play a functional role in the behavioral life of the organism, these experiential or phenomenological qualities of conscious experience are not simply equivalent to those functional roles. And however closely tied these phenomenological qualities may be to specific neurophysiological conditions, they are quite clearly not analyzable in terms of the physical description of those conditions.
Source Publication
The Mind-Body Problem: A Guide to the Current Debate
Source Editors/Authors
Richard Warner, Tadeusz Szubka
Publication Date
1994
Recommended Citation
Nagel, Thomas, "Consciousness and Objective Reality" (1994). Faculty Chapters. 1315.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1315
