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INTRODUCTION

"Psychology is conceptual confusion with empirical method"
- Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 232e

Time and time again, analytic philosophers of mind tell us that consciousness is at the same time the most ordinary phenomenon and yet the biggest stumbling block to a complete understanding of the world around us. In this regard the opening sentence of Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind is typical in suggesting, "Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious" (Chalmers 1996: 3, cf. also Davies and Humphreys 1995: 1). Yet, despite having features which ought to make it a prime target for philosophical analysis, consciousness has been systematically ignored in the analytic tradition until recently. This is commonly observed. Hence the remarks of Dennett and Searle have a familiar ring:
Consciousness is regularly regarded, especially by people outside the field of philosophy, as the outstanding (and utterly baffling) challenge to materialist theories of mind. And yet, curiously enough, most of the major participants in the debates about mental content....have been conspicuously silent on the topic of consciousness. No theory, or even theory-sketch, of consciousness is to be found in the writings of Fodor, Putnam, Davidson, Stich, Harman, Dretske, or Burge, for instance (Dennett 1987a: x).
...one of the most amazing things about the past half century or so in analytic philosophy of mind is the scarcity of serious work on the nature of consciousness (Searle 1989: 193).
This lack of attention is now being redressed in an extraordinary fashion with books claiming insights into its nature flooding the market. The game to tame the mystery of consciousness by any means possible is now afoot. This has been attempted from a variety of angles, including by appeal to: the neurobiological (Crick 1994, Churchland 1989), the quantum mechanical (Penrose 1989, 1994a), the functional (Dennett 1991a, Lycan 1988) and the representational (Dretske 1995, Tye 1996).
But sceptics of these proceedings claim that there is a hard, conceptual problem which bars the possibility of making consciousness intelligible in terms of anything else. Failure to take this problem seriously brings ruin to all of these theories of consciousness. In its most general formulation the hard problem is a problem about intelligibility. Yet, Chalmers, who coined the term, has sometimes presented it as a problem about explanation. In this form it asks the puzzling question: Why should there be conscious experience at all? (Chalmers 1996: 4). I do not think this question is all that difficult. Or rather, to be precise, when it is asked in this general way it is just as difficult but just as inoffensive as the question: Why is there anything rather than nothing at all? I don’t think we should try to answer either this question or Chalmers’ question. However, when the latter is formulated in a more specific way it can be answered, as I hope to show in chapter three.
Yet there are other hard problems of consciousness. Indeed the hard problem can be broken down into at least two separate conceptual problems. Each of these concern the issue of intelligibility in different ways and consequently impact on issues concerning explanation. The first concerns the issue of how to characterise the nature of consciousness itself – I call this the phenomenology problem. The other concerns the issue of how to understand its relation to the physical – I call this the metaphysical problem.

1. The Phenomenology Problem
John Searle has recently dismissed the idea that there is any phenomenological problem. He writes:

There is a problem that is supposed to be difficult but does not seem very serious to me, and that is the problem of defining ‘consciousness’. It is supposed to be frightfully difficult to define the term. But if we distinguish between analytic definitions, which aim to analyze the essence of a phenomenon, and commonsense definitions, which just identify what we are talking about, it does not seem to me at all difficult to give a commonsense definition of the term: ‘consciousness’ refers to those states of sentience and awareness that typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue until we go to sleep again, or fall into a coma or die or otherwise become ‘unconscious’....Consciousness so defined is an inner, first-person, qualitative phenomenon (Searle 1997: 5).

Searle takes this definition to be obvious commonsense and within the space of a page attributes it to Descartes as the basis for his, "...dualism of conscious mind and unconscious matter" (Searle 1997: 6). But things are not as black and white as this. Descartes was not concerned with consciousness as Searle defines it. For example, he would not have recognised its qualitative character as being the motivating factor behind his dualism. His focus was on the irreducibility of the intellect, not on the character of experience. This is revealed when he tells us that his purpose was:
...to give such a full account of the entire bodily machine that we will have no more reason to think that it is the soul which produces in it the movements which we know by experience are not controlled by our will than we have reason to think that there is a soul in a clock which makes it tell the time (Descartes Description of the Human Body: AT XI §225–226).
The important qualification in this remark concerns ‘the movements which we know by experience are not controlled by our will’. It is made precisely because, for Descartes, volition essentially involves the intellect and he had several reasons to doubt that our intellect could be reduced to the mechanical (see Descartes Discourse on Method: part five, §55–57, cf. also Cottingham 1992). And, although he does periodically speak of feelings, sensations and awareness, he distinguishes these as being bodily to the extent that they are not connected with thought. For example, in his Fifth Set of Replies he makes this point explicitly with respect to sensations. He writes:
...as for movement and sensation, I refer them to the body for the most part, and attribute nothing belonging to them to the soul, apart from the element of thought alone (Descartes Fifth Set of Replies: §351)
Only in so far as a sensation or feeling had an intellectual aspect did he regard it as essentially mental. It is with this in mind that commentators suggest that, for Descartes, "...the term ‘thought’ served as the most general expression for the common property of all mental acts" (Kahn 1979: 23, cf. also Nelkin 1996: 7). Malcolm translates this claim into contemporary lingo when he suggests, "If every human sensation includes thought, and if thought is propositional content together with propositional attitude, then at the very centre of every sensation of ours there is a proposition" (Malcolm 1977: 45, cf. Kenny 1973). Put otherwise, awareness of is really awareness that; i.e. awareness of a propositional kind. As a result Descartes saw nothing controversial in the idea of animal experimentation, since it followed that if animals lack intellect they have no mentality whatsoever. For example, they were incapable of feeling pain. Creatures without a capacity for intellectual thought were regarded as mere machines. This view also inspired an inappropriately mechanistic understanding of biology.
Although all this may seem outrageous today, it makes perfect sense precisely because Descartes did not recognise or define the phenomena of consciousness in the way which Searle suggests is nothing but plain commonsense. It is to this extent both misleading and anachronistic to regard him as proposing that the mind-body problem is really a problem about consciousness. His formulation of the mind-body problem is not ours. The best one could say is that today’s problem of consciousness is framed in a similar way.
In what appears, prima facie, to be the basis for a similar charge, Hamlyn notes that in Aristotle’s writings, "...there is almost a total neglect of any problem arising from psychophysical dualism and the facts of consciousness" (Hamlyn 1968: xiii, cf. also Wilkes 1995: 122, Nussbaum and Putnam 1995: 30–31). I want to consider both of these claims in turn and compare them to Descartes’ position. This will nicely highlight the pertinent issues. I shall take the second one first. For while it is true that Aristotle does not speak of the qualitative character of experience in the manner which has grown familiar since the heyday of empiricism, there are two features of his approach worthy of note.
Firstly, Aristotle distinguished intellectual capacity (nous) from our capacity for sentient response. Indeed this has led one Aristotelian scholar to wonder:
If nous is so radically different, how is it connected to the other parts of the soul which are the actualizations of bodily structures? We are sentient animals in virtue of our hylomorphic soul. Are we rational animals in virtue of two distinct souls, the one that makes us animals and ‘a different kind’ that makes us rational? Is human nature constituted by one essence or two? (Kahn 1992:
361).
Although talk of essences is not my preferred language, the position I advocate in this book is akin to Aristotle’s to the extent that I think it is crucial to distinguish sentience from intellect. Indeed most of De Anima is devoted to understanding the non-cognitive character of the various sense modalities (Putnam 1994: 3–7). His work is valuable not least because it serves as corrective to the empiricist idea that experience must be passive if it is non-cognitive (cf. Nelkin 1996: 1). I characterise this divide by marking a difference between the conceptual and the nonconceptual. Within the domain of the latter I draw a further distinction between the experiential and the intentional.
The point of this brief comparison is to stress that, philosophically speaking, issues about how we ought to understand consciousness are not as open and shut as Searle makes out. It is not obvious how to define consciousness or its features. For we might ask: Is it structured? Is it passive or active? Is it conceptual or nonconceptual? Does it have irreducibly qualitative aspects or not? I explore these questions in the first two chapters. However, as it happens, I agree with Searle in thinking that denying or ignoring the qualitative aspects of experience is phenomenologically unacceptable. In this regard I believe Cartesian intellectualism about experience, which makes one suspicious of qualia, is the most common impediment to progress with respect to the phenomenological problem.
Once we recognise that experiences exist and that they are, at bottom, nonconceptual, we have means to deal with puzzles about the ineffable character of subjectivity. In particular, by viewing matters in this light, we can see why it is folly to attempt to produce a theory of consciousness and reduce experience to something that it is not. This is useful for although the phenomenology problem has remained largely unaddressed by the Anglo-American tradition, when it has been seriously confronted the end result has been quite unsatisfactory. My way of dealing with consciousness is precisely not by attempting to reduce it or by asking us to re-configure our understanding of its character under the auspices of some new theory. Rather my hope is that once we recognise its essentially nonconceptual character and the way in which we understand the consciousness of others, we will be cured of this tendency.
In all, the quest for an adequate theory of consciousness can be fruitfully compared with the Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail. According to one version of the legend, Arthur’s knights were given the quest to scour the length and breadth of the land in order to locate the cup of Christ so as to restore their ailing king. However their quest concluded only when Arthur realised that the Grail is not, in fact, a precious worldly item but a metaphor for self-realisation. His sickness was brought on because he had forgotten his status and responsibility as king. Similarly I maintain, the quest for a theory of consciousness will not end with the location or discovery of the right theory. It will cease only when we forego this quest and denounce such attempts, for only then will we be in a position to understand the nature of consciousness and its essential, but partial, role in enabling us to form conceptual perspectives.

2. The Metaphysical Problem
It will be rightly objected that the real source of our felt need to produce a theory of consciousness is not that we confusingly think that we can capture or reproduce its character by some conceptual means – rather, it is that we need such a theory in order to understand how consciousness fits in the world order. This takes us straight to the heart of the mind-body problem, the hard problem, or as I call it, the metaphysical problem. And here it is interesting to note that although we can find the image of our experiential version of this problem in Descartes, Hamlyn is right to think that Aristotle did not recognise it at all. How can this be so? Answering this question helps us to understand the real source of the problem. Burnyeat puts his finger on it when he writes:
Aristotle’s philosophy of mind is no longer credible because Aristotelian physics is no longer credible, and the fact of that physics being incredible has quite a lot to do with there being such a thing as the mind-body problem as we face it today (Burnyeat 1995a: 16, Burnyeat 1995b).
The suppressed premise in Burnyeat’s remark, covered by the phrase ‘quite a lot to do’, is of course that it is not just our physics, but our metaphysics which has taken a new direction in the post-Cartesian era. Hence the reason why Aristotle’s physics did not give succour to the mind-body problem is precisely because it was embedded in a larger, teleological world-view that saw the form/matter distinction running throughout all nature (cf. Wilkes 1995: 117). In contrast, apart from making special room for human intellect, Descartes took his metaphysical guidance about the nature of reality from the developing physics alone. He holds a prominent place amongst the founders of classical physics because he was inclined to treat all matter as definable in terms of mathematical laws and as having no essential nature other than that of quantity. Matter, for him, was not different in different things. It was not relative to form. Hence it was not different in air, earth, fire or water. It was mere extension (size, shape, etc.); it had no other essence or qualities. In a claim that was shocking for his time, he wrote:
We have thus seen that the nature of corporeal substance consists in its being something extended (res extensa) (Descartes The Principles of Material Things: §XIX).
The Cartesian universe is thus divided into intellectual substances, on the one hand, and mere matter in extension, on the other. This is what Ryle refers to as the ‘Two worlds myth’ and the ‘Official doctrine’ (cf. Ryle 1949: ch. 1). This is, of course, all overly familiar, but it is important to note the source of the split world view. For, on their own, Descartes’ pioneering ideas about the physical are not sufficient to generate the mind-body problem. It stems from the fact that the formulation of a new physics played an overriding part in his project of trying to find a single, unitary system for describing all that happens in the world – one which had all the certainty of mathematics (cf. Cottingham 1992: 5). The mind-body problem as we have inherited it must be understood in light of this grand metaphysical ambition. For Descartes did more than advance our scientific understanding by incorporating his views on mechanics into a philosophical world-view; he challenged and undermined the more hospitable and tolerant scholastic Aristotelianism that previously dominated.
In many respects, today’s materialism or physicalism is the direct descendant of Descartes’ metaphysical system, sans the commitment to mental substances. Today’s twist is, if there are any mental phenomena, then they must be physical in nature. So, whereas Descartes made room for humanity, the descendants of the Enlightenment threaten to squeeze us out completely. In so far as it does not do this, physicalism must at least face up to the metaphysical problem of consciousness. As formulated today, this is essentially a problem about understanding the relation between the experiential and the physical. Fodor nicely captures the character of the difficulty and the spirit of hopelessness that generally pervades much of the intellectual community with respect to it.
Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness (Fodor 1992: 5, cf. also Nagel 1994: 65, Gouen and Forman 1994: 5).
But not everyone is as forlorn as Fodor. Witness, for example, Flanagan’s proposed ‘natural method’ for tackling this issue. On this approach we are advised to, "...use information from the psychological or phenomenological levels to generate neural hypotheses" (Flanagan 1991: 53). However, sceptics argue that while it may be possible to chart the various relations or correlations between conscious experiences and neurophysiological events which underpin them, there has been no headway (some say there can never be) with respect to making transparent the general relation that holds between these two domains. Or, for those who think the relation is one of identity, the problem can be expressed as a puzzle about how to understand the relation between our ways of speaking about the two domains.
But many who admit that there is such a hard, metaphysical problem comfort themselves by suggesting that consciousness is unique in its resistance to incorporation into the physical world. They claim that, on the whole, physicalism is fine as a general metaphysical framework and that experiences are alone in being cantankerous and resistant to the understanding. For example, Nagel tells us that conscious awareness is the source of the real mind-body problem (cf. Nagel 1979, 1986). And, in a similar vein, Galen Strawson remarks:
The question about experience is the difficult question. I think it is really all there is to the mind-body problem: nothing else that we are inclined to think of as mental raises any deep philosophical difficulty, so far as the general mind-body problem is concerned (Strawson 1994: 44).
Thus analytic philosophers generally feel confident about the prospect of naturalising representational content. As McGinn notes, "Books and articles appear apace offering to tell us exactly what mental aboutness consists in, while heads continue to be shaken over the nature of consciousness" (McGinn 1991: 24). Chalmers echoes this kind of optimism, by saying:
The psychological [e.g. functional, representational] aspects of mind pose many technical problems for cognitive science, and a number of interesting puzzles for philosophical analysis, but they pose no deep metaphysical enigmas (Chalmers 1996: 24).
In my view this appraisal is mistaken. Firstly, as Hodgson and Lowe have argued, many of the activities that Chalmers regards as merely functional, such as discrimination, recognition and language use, are bound up with experience in crucial ways, at least in the case of adult humans. Consider, as I argued in The Presence of Mind, that only creatures who are able to contrast and compare perspectives meet the minimal requirement for conceptual thought and speech. In that book I argued that basic forms of nonconceptual intentionality, exhibited by even very simple organisms are best understood by appeal to a modest biosemantics, not by means of causal or informational theories of content. Nevertheless, I claimed that nonconceptual intentionality plays a vital but partial role in making conceptual development possible. What I did not claim, although I also think it is true, is that nonconceptual experience also plays an essential role in such development. But although such experience is also nonconceptual, it is distinct from the intentionality of such responses. This is because experience is essentially subjective in character in a way that intentionality is not. I make my arguments for these conclusions in chapters one and two. However, the point I want to emphasise here is that, given transitivity, there are no easy problems even when it comes to understanding conceptual forms of consciousness (Lowe 1995: 266, Hodgson 1996: 69).
Connectedly, even if we ignore the typical adult human case, the claim that physicalism is doing well is only evidentially supported by developments in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, if we ignore the very deep problem of naturalising intentionality or representational content. Naturally if we put this issue aside, then it is no surprise that physicalism is smoothly compatible with causal and informational accounts of the workings of internal mechanisms, no matter how complex they are. But explaining how creatures manage to co-ordinate their behaviour in this respect is a far cry from explaining why they act, in a sense that specifies what they are supposed to be doing. The latter question introduces a normative dimension which is elusive from a causal or merely informational point of view. Explanations concerning the mechanisms which underpin action answer to a different set of concerns than those of importance when explaining the directedness of action. It is on these grounds that I advocated scepticism about causal and informational theories of representational content in The Presence of Mind. But if that analysis is correct, it casts doubt on the grander ambitions of cognitive science with respect to understanding the nature of the mind. In this light I find it is doubly ironic that some theorists hope to explain consciousness by appeal to a naturalised theory of representation.
Although clearly different in a crucial respect, the twin problems of consciousness are connected to the problem of content in precisely the way that Chalmers thinks they are not. Content and consciousness are deep metaphysical problems and ought to be regarded as such by physicalists. But, as consideration of Descartes’ position reveals, they are only problems for physicalists. From a distance, its advocates appear not unlike plumbers trying desperately to fix the broken taps of a sink. They fiddle and fiddle with their eyes focused on the taps; one marked ‘content’ and the other marked ‘consciousness’. But it escapes their notice that the real trouble lies in the pipes themselves, with the underlying metaphysics. In this light the predominant, seemingly unshakeable faith, in the truth of physicalism is curious. By my reckoning physicalists have done nothing to advance our understanding of either representational content or consciousness. In a word, it is a doctrine that is absent of mind. In this respect at least Descartes’ dualism is to be preferred in that it makes room for the mental.
If this charge can be made to stick, it is doubly damning since at the very least, whatever else they have or have not achieved, physicalists regard themselves as having produced a metaphysical account which is clearly superior to Cartesian dualism. Hence making this charge stick is a tall task. It involves not just a critique but also an exposition. For although we are frequently told that physicalism is the word of the day, there isn’t a consensus on the meaning of the word. One of my tasks in chapter four is to identify, as far and as charitably possible, a minimal yet non-vacuous definition of physicalism. In doing so I look to its roots in classical physics for inspiration. Only against this background is it clear why certain kinds of phenomena, such as experience, must be outlawed. This analysis also reveals why explanatory accounts, which employ softer notions such as emergence, are forlorn when it comes to explaining experience. Any explanatorily ambitious version of physicalism, strong or mild, will lack the resources to make experience intelligible in its physical terms. Physicalism, in any of its standard reductive or non-reductive forms, is doomed to failure. Only in its most minimal ontological guise, which abandons the attempt to solve the metaphysical problem, is the doctrine at all plausible.
3. The Need to Go Beyond
Having come this far, I go on to argue in chapter five that a minimal ontological physicalism does little better than dualism and compares unfavourably with the metaphysics of absolute idealism. Specifically, I claim that Bradley’s version of absolute idealism provides a more satisfactory means of understanding our place within nature. It better characterises our situation with respect to the real and in doing so resolves the very tensions which give rise to the metaphysical problem. In defending absolute idealism, my strategy is unlike that of many other writers in this field. Indeed it is best seen as a complete reversal of the standard approach. I do not advance a theory of consciousness which attempts to show how it fits within the current physicalist framework. Rather I question the validity of that framework itself in the hopes of making room for consciousness in the natural world, thereby doing justice to both consciousness and science. My claim is that the metaphysical problem is not a problem to be solved, but one to be avoided. Moreover it is no accident that it can only be formulated against the background of materialism or physicalism. In this regard Shear is right to say of the most prominent absolute idealist, that:
...Hegel developed an idealistic theory of the universe evolving dialectically out of ‘Spirit’ or consciousness itself....[From this perspective] the ‘hard problem’ if articulable at all, would not be the central philosophical anomaly it is today (Shear 1995: 197).
But he also adds, "...these views have all been dropped by the wayside in our modern scientific world and the materialist view has come to be so dominant that it is generally regarded as simple common sense" (Shear 1995: 197, cf. also McDonough 1991). Moreover the idea that, "...the universe [is] material in nature and unfold[s] like a machine according to precise, mathematically articulable laws gained ascendancy and became the context of our Western intellectual discourse" (Shear 1995: 195). Whether or not this view can now be said to be commonsensical, it is the general unquestioned philosophical backdrop of physicalism that frames discussions and debates concerning the naturalness or otherwise of various phenomena, as Burnyeat’s quotation makes clear. This is the real source of the metaphysical problem. Endorsing absolute idealism enables us to avoid it.
Nevertheless there are reasons why absolute idealism is less than credible in modern eyes. In chapter six I attempt to defuse two reasons for thinking it is a non-starter. Firstly, I argue that, contrary to the opinion of some, it was not refuted earlier this century. Secondly, and more importantly, although it is at odds with the metaphysics inspired or guided by natural science, it is not at odds with our best understanding of the natural sciences themselves. I make this case by comparing its virtues in the domain of the philosophy of science with two versions of naturalised metaphysics, one which advocates unity and one which advocates rampant pluralism. I argue that at the level of theorising, we ought to favour the autonomy of the sciences on the grounds that the intelligibility problem is not unique to the psychological domain. It is not just content and consciousness that are ill-behaved in a way that precludes reduction and bars the development of single unified science or ideal physics. I examine cases from other quarters such as the biological sciences and quantum mechanics. Since I believe that neither these nor the psychological phenomena mentioned can be coherently ignored, this provides strong evidence against the idea that an unified metaphysics can be had if we follow the lead of the natural sciences. Yet I propose that the metaphysical unity which is presupposed by absolute idealism is more appealing than the kind of contradictory pluralism proposed by some like Dupré (cf. Dupré 1993).
Finally, I further argue in chapter seven that absolute idealism has the right epistemological and metaphysical resources to provide a sound understanding of the nature of truth and the continuity of transtheoretical reference. Hence it enables us to understand the character of scientific progress better than traditional accounts from within the analytic tradition. This is because a Bradleyian conception of truth fits both with the softer notions of correspondence standardly defended by today’s philosophers of science and enables us to accommodate the anti-linguistic turn of those philosophers who, like Hacking, want us to give more attention to nonconceptual intervening as opposed to representing.
As a final note to the reader, it will be observed that during the course of this book the same themes keep re-emerging in various different ways and places. Initially I regarded this as a fault and I had thought to streamline the material and corral the discussions so they followed one another in neat logical succession. However, in the end I have decided not to do this because I believe there is a valuable effect of amplification to be had. It is good to recognise how one is invariably drawn back to the same issues and prone to the same kinds of mistakes, time and again, when thinking about consciousness. Nonetheless in order to avoid monotony, where such connections exist I have relied on internal cross-referencing rather than repeating earlier arguments in full glory.