How Matter Realises Itself
The explosion of books on consciousness over the past decade or so is something like the "return of the repressed". This phrase is used in psychoanalysis when something hidden or denied returns to awareness, bringing with it a charge of energy and insight. If dealt with properly, this can be of great help to both analyst and patient in understanding their situation and in making changes to it. Having denied any role or even significance to consciousness for so long, psychology is now in a position to understand the condition in which this rather absurd denial has left the discipline, and to do something to put it right. It is a pleasure to record the appearance of a book which is bound to help with this long-overdue process.
In the wide variety of styles in writing about consciousness poses quite a problem for teachers of psychology. On the one hand, they want something both accessible, so it will communicate the excitement and progress in the area, but which is also accurate and disciplined. It is also important to treat with caution the many books that are too closely linked to a personal vision. These often focus on what appears to be a mysterious gap in scientific knowledge and then recruit it to the particular convictions of the author. Quantum physics, for one obvious example, is all too often used as an analogy for psychological and social process with which it has nothing whatever to do.
There are now quite a number of good scholarly texts, both in psychology and in philosophy, that show just how developed the debate on consciousness has become. The area has some well defined positions and the controversies between them are sufficiently clear that the prospects for resolving some of them seem good. However, these texts are often too advanced for creating that arena of shared ideas in which education needs to progress. One of the virtues of "Understanding Consciousness" is that it finds a good balance between careful scholarly work and a more accessible treatment, indeed advocacy, of a particular position. It is difficult enough to stretch both teacher and student while remaining clear and focused throughout. It systematically treats the philosophical issues that must be addressed when considering consciousness. Better yet, it advocates a particular point of view without becoming blinkered or tendentious. All in all it is an ideal text for student and scholar alike and is bound to become a landmark in this rapidly expanding field.
The three sections of the book progress through a review of the mind-body problem (part 1), the problems of dealing with experience itself in science (part 2) and finally, with Velmans' own position on how to resolve these problems, which he terms 'reflexive monism' (part 3). In the first section particularly he does an excellent job in bringing quite subtle philosophical issues to life in plain language and without patronising the reader or oversimplifying matters. For example, the chapter titles of part 1 are all questions: "What is consciousness?", "Is there a conscious soul in the brain?" , "Are matter and mind the same thing?", "Are mind and consciousness just activities?" and "Could robots be conscious?". Part 2 likewise, deals with the problems of scientific phenomenology by approaching them directly and with a proper respect for what common sense gives us. What could have been an excuse for lapsing into the private language too many academics tend to use in this area, turns out to continue with the engaging and plain-language style of part 1.
This is just the sort of approach that gets students on board. While the chapters themselves show how difficult it is to arrive at any definitive answers to such questions, the argument moves steadily towards the author's own views, which form the core of part 3. In what he terms 'reflexive monism' the author aligns himself with those who, while they take consciousness to be integral with the physical world, see it as essentially epiphenomenal. That is, our sense of being intentional is an illusion. The sense of a freely chosen flow of intended actions is actually following rather than leading the events that make the choices. As Spinoza centuries before him, the author takes it that the unfolding of a natural order proceeds as it must, consciousness notwithstanding. Other contemporary figures have somewhat similar views, Chalmers, Reber and Hameroff are examples, but the author is careful to distinguish his position from them, mainly by denying the notion of supervenience, which would restore the common folk-psychology view of consciousness as the growing tip of a flow of freely-chosen action.
This sobering stance is argued through with meticulous care. For many people, radical epiphenomenalism is an anathema and it will make the book a provocative read. This is yet another reason to commend it as a boon to teachers who want to provoke discussion on this, the most central of issues in the science of mental life. However, for those who feel that consciousness is more than a mere post-hoc entailment of physics events, there will be plenty of loopholes in the last section to give them purchase. For example, little attention is given to evolution and hardly any to the cultural evolution that recent writers like Terence Deacon have demonstrated is so vital to our understanding of human awareness. The text is a precise logical exercise in thinking through the various propositions about consciousness that are now in play in philosophy and psychology. But precise logic can take us only so far. What would have helped to make the book more exciting would have been more of the wider vision that was just allowed to creep in the last chapter. If, as the author puts it in last few sentences of the text: " .... we participate in a process whereby the universe observes itself ... " then to espouse epiphenomenalism, even though it may be a triumph of logic, also seems like a failure of imagination.
Dr John Pickering lectures in the Psychology Department at the University of Warwick