Milinda’s Questions

Kevin Kim, in his comment to my previous post, asks for “my take on the mind/body problem.” Well, Kev, that’s a bit like asking for my take on the meaning of life, the history of civilization, the possibility of a unified field theory, and what women really want. In other words, it’d take a while.

In the meantime: a few days ago, while sorting through the mounds of clutter in the midst of which I dwell, I found a document I’d typed up years ago sort of classifying the main questions that can be raised concerning the mental and the physical. Its skeleton came from an article by Güven Güzeldere entitled “The Many Faces of Consciousness: A Field Guide”, particularly Section XV, which I started annotating with my own thoughts. “The Many Faces” was written as an introduction to
The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates, which, a few years ago at least, was the state-of-the-art anthology in philosophy of mind. To keep this post brief, and also because I have a hard time figuring out what I was thinking back then, I’m going to omit my own annotations, and just reproduce here the crucial passage from Section XV of the paper.

The Four W Questions and The Further-How Question

1. What are the media and mechanisms of consciousness? Can consciousness occur in any type of material substance, or does it have to have a specific kind of underpinning (e.g., a carbon-based molecular structure)? And what are the underlying mechanisms that facilitate consciousness?

2. Where is, if anywhere, the locus of consciousness? Can consciousness be localized in a specific organ, the brain (or a module in the brain), or is it endemic to the whole of the nervous system? Where is the seat of consciousness?

3. Who can be said to be a conscious being? Using consciousness as a type-identifying predicate, one can ask: Is a chimp, a spider, a protozoan, or a robot conscious or nonconscious? (In a slightly different sense of consciousness, one can also ask of a person in a coma, or in sleep, or in a petit mal seizure whether she is conscious or unconscious.

4.Why is there consciousness at all, and what is the role it plays in the general scheme of mental life and behavior of an organism? To put it in evolutionary terms, which function does consciousness serve such that it was selected as a trait in the phylogeny of certain classes of living things?

5. How does consciousness arise in, or emerge from, its underlying substance, structure, and mechanism, in the way it does?

Now that that exists in digital form on this site, it may serve as a prolegomenon to future discussions of these issues; at any rate, I can now throw away a couple of pages of hardcopy clutter.