William G. Lycan

(From: Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Guven Güzeldere: The Nature of Consciousness. Philosophical Debates, MIT Press 1997, pages 755-771)

Locke put forward the theory of consciousness as "internal Sense" or "reflection"; Kant made it inner sense, by means of which the mind intuits itself or its inner state."¹ On that theory, consciousness is a perception-like second-order representing of our own psychological states events. The term "consciousness," of course, has many distinct uses.² My concern here is with that use according to which much of one's mental or psychological activity is unconscious or subconscious even when one is wide awake and well aware of other goings-on, both external and internal. I shall argue that what distinguishes conscious mental activity from un- and subconscious mental activity is indeed second-order representing.

Locke's idea has been urged in our own time by philosophers such as D. M. Armstrong and by psychologists such as Bernard Baars; I have previously defended it too.³ But some interesting criticisms have been raised against the view by a number of theorists. In this chapter I shall rebut a few; I am particularly concerned to overcome an objection due to Georges Rey.⁴

1

Armstrong states the Inner Sense doctrine as follows: "Introspective consciousness ... is a perception-like awareness of current states and activities in our own mind. The current activities will include sense-perception: which latter is the awareness of current states and activities of our environment and our body."⁵ As I would put it, consciousness is the functioning of internal attention mechanisms directed upon lower-order psychological states and events. I would also add (or make more explicit) a soupçon of teleology: Attention mechanisms are devices that have the job of relaying and/or coordinating information about ongoing psychological events and processes.⁶

Armstrong offers a plausible Just-So Story to explain the prevalence of introspective consciousness:

A slightly deflated version of this idea will figure in my own defense of the Inner Sense theory.

The Lockean thesis is a component of a wider project of mine: that of establishing the hegemony of representation. I am concerned to maintain a weak version of Brentano's doctrine that the mental and the intentional are one and the same-weak, because I am not sure that intentionality suffices for representation; but my claim is strong enough: that the mind has no special properties that are not exhausted by its representational properties. It would follow that once representation is (eventually) understood, then not only consciousness in our present sense but subjectivity, qualia, "what it's like," and every other aspect of the mental will be explicable in terms of representation, without the positing of any other ingredient not already well understood from the naturalistic point of view.⁸

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I should repeat and emphasize that my concern in this chapter is solely with the notion of conscious awareness, with the distinction between conscious mental states and un-, sub-, pre- or otherwise nonconscious mental states. In particular, I am not here addressing issues of qualia or phenomenal character, which I have resolved almost entirely satisfactorily elsewhere.⁹ There may be Inner Sense theorists who believe that their views solve problems of qualia; I make no such claim, for I think qualia problems and the nature of conscious awareness are mutually independent and indeed have little to do with each other. ¹⁰

2

The Inner Sense view of consciousness has a number of advantages, the first of which is that it does distinguish awareness from mere psychology and conscious states/events (in the sense indicated above) from mere mentation. We may plausibly suppose that many lower animals have psychologies and mentation, or at least internal representation, without awareness. Second, the view affords some grades of un- or subconsciousness; for example, a state/event may be unconscious just because it is unattended, but a Freudian wish to kill one's father may have been rendered unattendable by some masterful Censor. Further distinctions are available, for both animals and human beings.

Third, the Inner Sense account affords the best solution I know to the problem of subjectivity and "knowing what it's like," raised by B. A. Farrell, Thomas Nagel, and Frank Jackson. Georges Rey and I hit upon that solution independently a few years ago.¹¹ It involves the behavior of indexical terms in the proprietary vocabulary mobilized by the relevant attention mechanisms. But there is no time to rehearse it here.

Fourth, the Inner Sense view sorts out a longstanding issue about sensations and feeling. Consider pain. A minor pain may go unfelt, or so we sometimes say.¹² Even quite a bad pain may not be felt if attention is distracted by sufficiently pressing concerns. Yet such assertions as my last two can sound anomalous. As David Lewis once said, meaning to tautologize, "Pain is a feeling." When one person's commonplace sounds to another contradictory on its face, we should suspect equivocation, and the Inner Sense model delivers. Sometimes the word "pain" is used to mean just the first-order representation of damage or disorder, a representation that can go unnoticed. But sometimes "pain" means a conscious feeling or mode of awareness, and on that usage the phrase "unfelt pain" is simply self-contradictory; it comprehends both the first-order representation and the second-order scanning together. Thus the equivocation, which gave rise to the issue; the issue is dissolved.

3

The preceding point reveals a consequence of the Inner Sense theory that may disturb: Since an internal monitor is a physical device and so subject to malfunction, it might report falsely; the very fallibility of monitoring guarantees that a subject might register a first-order event incorrectly. Thus, the Inner Sense theory implies an appearance/reality distinction for subjectivity.

A Cartesian incorrigibilist would be appalled, of course. So would the Cartesian's unlikely bed-fellow, the Wittgensteinian incorrigibilist. Neither such animal abounds nowadays, thanks to the decline of Cartesian doctrine generally, the weakening of Wittgensteinian "conceptual truths," and Armstrong's specific arguments against incorrigibility of both sorts.¹³ It is generally con-ceded, at least, that one can or in theory might mistake and misdescribe the contents of one s own experience. Yet the Inner Sense view has two further implications that may be more troubling to the contemporary reader.

First in addition to misreporting the character of a first-order state, an internal monitor could in principle fire without anything like a proper

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cause, giving a false positive. Thus, the Inner Sense view predicts that it is possible for a person to be unveridically conscious or aware of a sensation that simply does not exist. You might introspect a sharp, severe pain, when there was in fact no pain at all.

I am happy to live with that theoretical possibility. Notice, first, that it is not as conceptually anomalous as it sounds. My description misleadingly suggests that you might feel a severe pain, with everything that is involved in feeling a severe pain, which would include all the first-order functional effects of the pain—withdrawal, wincing, involuntary crying out, favoring, and the like—while having no actual pain whatever. That suggestion is, I agree, truly weird. But it is not in fact a consequence of the Inner Sense theory. If(as the present hypothesis has it) there is no first-order pain sensation at all but merely a mendacious representation of one, there is no reason to think that every or any of those usual functional effects would indeed ensue. You would be introspecting something that had some of the qualitative aspect of a pain, but important elements would be missing. You might be in the position of the morphine patients who manifest "reactive dissociation," saying that they still feel the pain as intensely as ever but no longer mind it. (Remember that on my view, introspective awareness itself is just one of several normal effects of a first-order pain sensation, and largely independent of the sensation's other normal effects.)

Second, the mere theoretical possibility of the false positive does little to encourage the idea that such things can happen easily. Perhaps they do happen, as when an apprehensive child or medical patient mistakes a light touch or a sensation of cold for a pain, but those examples are usually mistaken perceptions of actual sensations. It is at best rare for a person to be aware of a pain but give no behavioral or other functional sign of pain. I suspect that our introspectors are well wired and virtually never fire for no reason at all. It is not as though they were external sense organs, prey to predictable perceptual illusions and at the mercy of unusual environmental setups; the first-order sectors they scan are immured right there in the brain with them, and there is little to threaten the informational connection. (Though one must never underestimate the power of drugs or lesions to sever what are normally very tight psychological connections; Wittgensteinian "conceptual truths" about mental states are often counterexampled by unusual clinical conditions.)

In making these two replies to the objection from false positives, I have used the vernacular of felt and unfelt pains, that is, the terminology that applies "pain" to the first-order representation of damage or disorder without requiring introspective awareness of that representation. If instead one prefers the more comprehensive use of "pain," then one will be frustrated in trying to use the term, for a false positive will not count as pain in that sense but will merely feel like pain, or have the introspective component of pain without the first-order sensory component. Perhaps we should now recognize a third sense of "pain," meaning just the introspective awareness (as) of pain, whether or not that awareness is veridical. In that third sense, trivially, you cannot feel pain when there is no pain, even if there is no first-order representation of disorder. (On the other hand, as against acknowledging the third sense, remember that an unveridical awareness of pain would not be accompanied by the other usual effects of the first-order sensation and would probably not be phenomenally very like veridical awareness of pain. Knowing oneself to be the victim of a false positive, one might or might not be moved to call one's state of awareness "pain"; this is something we cannot tell until we have documented and investigated an actual false-positive case.)

The Inner Sense theory's second potentially disturbing implication was recently noted by D. C. Dennett in Consciousness Explained.¹⁴ He raises the question of second-order seeming. "the bizarre category of the objectively subjective-the way things actually, objectively seem to you even if they don't seem to seem that way to you!"

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He thereupon "brusquely denies the possibility in principle of consciousness of a stimulus in the absence of the subject's belief in that consciousness." But the Inner Sense view affords a perfect model of just such a state of affairs: a first-order state is conscious in virtue of being scanned, and seems a certain way to its subject, but the scanning is not itself scanned. This would be precisely a case of consciousness of a stimulus in the absence of the subject's belief in that consciousness. Moreover, a second-order monitor could break down and make a first-order state seem to seem to me in a way that the state does not in fact seem to me.

Dennett calls this idea "metaphysically dubious" as well as impossible in principle. But his only argument is as follows, based on "first-person operationalism":

Well. Just to gratify Dennett's rhetorical curiosity: Yes, I, on reflection, really want to say that, or rather to insist on its perfect coherence as a factual possibility. Since the Inner Sense theory provides an excellent model for the second-order situation that appalls Dennett and since the theory may well be true, the second-order situation is without question a genuine possibility. (Remember, if the Inner Sense theory is false, that is a brutely empirical fact; certainly Mother Nature could have equipped us with banks of first-and second-order internal monitors, whether or not She did in fact choose to do so.) As for the strange aquatic facts, I see no reason to grant that they do "swim out of reach of" the outside observers, at least, since in principle a neuroscientist could observe a first-order state being scanned by an unscanned monitor and know just what was going on.

As before, I agree that the notion of an appearance/reality distinction for conscious awareness is odd on its face, and I am inclined to think that dramatic cases of appearance/reality gap are rare and pathological, but I see here no powerful objection to the Inner Sense view.

4

In correspondence,¹⁵ Fred Dretske has asked a good pair of questions about the Inner Sense theory: Why is consciousness (or just representation) of certain physical states enough to make those states themselves "conscious"? And more specifically, what is it that is so special about physical states of that certain sort, that consciousness of them makes them—but not just any old physical state—conscious? After all, we are conscious of (what are in fact) physical states of our stomachs; for that matter, through ordinary perception we are conscious of physical states of our skins, such as their being freckled, but no one would distinguish between "conscious" stomachs and "unconscious" stomachs, or between "conscious" and "unconscious" frecklednesses.

Indeed, why does the concept work that way (assuming it does work that way)? It may have something historically to do with the fact that until the twentieth century, the mental/psycho-logical was simply identified with the conscious, and so only recently have we had to adopt a taxonomic distinction between states we are aware of holding and states we are not. (I am assuming that there is such a distinction in reality, and I believe—what is not uncontroversial—that the distinction in theory applies to any ordinary mental state, not counting states already described as "being consciously aware of [such-and-such].")

What is it that is so special about physical states of that certain sort, that consciousness of them makes them "conscious"? That they

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are themselves mental. Stomachs and freckled patches of skin are not mental. It seems psychological states are called "conscious" states when we are conscious of them, but nonpsychological things are not.

Given the reality of the distinction between states we are aware of being in and states we are not aware of being in, the only remaining question is that of why the word "conscious" is thus dragged in as an adjective to mark it. My bet is that there is a grammatical answer. Maybe it is a transferred epithet: We begin with the adverbial form, as in "consciously thought" or "consciously felt," and when we make the verb into a noun, the adverb automatically becomes an adjective—as in the move from "meditatively sipped" to "took a meditative sip." That is fairly plausible; at any rate it is the best I can do for now.

In any case, it is important to see that the question pertains to the notion of conscious awareness itself, it is not a problem for or objection to the Inner Sense theory of awareness in particular.

5

Dretske makes a related, ostensibly more substantive criticism of the theory as I have stated it. He argues at some length that there is a sense of "conscious" in which, as he oxymoronically puts it, "an experience can be conscious without anyone—including the person having it—being conscious of having it" (p.263). As he says, this usage sounds "odd, perhaps even contradictory, to those philosophers who ... embrace an inner spotlight view of consciousness ' (as targets he cites Armstrong, David Rosenthal, and me in particular). In brief, his argument is that to perceive anything, whether or not one is conscious of doing that perceiving, is to be conscious of the thing perceived, and so to be "in a conscious state of some sort." (He notes that Armstrong actually agrees in principle, for Armstrong grants a sense in which any perceiver eo ipso enjoys "perceptual consciousness," whether or not she or he is conscious or aware of the perceiving itself.)¹⁶ Thus, the Inner Sense or "inner spotlight" view has gone wrong, at least by its implication that for a state to be a conscious state, its subject must be aware of being in it.

Here I believe the issue is purely verbal. Although I cannot myself hear a natural sense of the phrase "conscious state" other than as meaning "state one is conscious of being in," the philosophical use of "conscious" is by now well and truly up for grabs, and the best one can do is to be as clear as possible in one's technical specification.'⁷ Let us then grant a sense, whether natural or merely technical, in which a state of perceiving is a conscious state, whether or not its subject is conscious of being in it.¹⁸ But the Inner Sense theory of consciousness is not and has never pretended to be a theory of "perceptual conscious-ness in Dretske's and Armstrong's sense. It is a theory of conscious awareness, of "conscious states" in my original sense of: states one is conscious of being in.

Dretske adds a more specific objection to the Inner Sense theory (pp.279-280). Distinguishing between awareness of things, which is referentially transparent, and awareness of facts, which presupposes mobilization of particular concepts, he argues as follows. Suppose a person has two experiences, E(Alpha) and E(Beta), which differ subtly in their contents, and the person does introspect the two but fails to register the difference.¹⁹ If the person is merely "thing-aware" of a first-order psychological state without being "fact-aware" of the state, and if that thing-awareness is supposed to constitute the state's being a conscious state, then the person's

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(Further, the Inner Sense theory "multiplies the problems by multiplying the facts of which we are not aware.")

This is puzzling on its face, since the topic of epistemic access arises rather suddenly; the Inner Sense account was offered as a theory of the conscious /"nonconscious" distinction in our original sense, not as a contribution to epistemology. Besides, introspection conceived as inner perception normally does improve one's epistemic position, for although it is indeed possible for one to be thing-aware of a first-order state without being fact-aware of being in that state, the thing-awareness will often directly give rise to fact-awareness, just as in the case of ordinary external perception.

I suspect that what motivated these remarks of Dretske's was as follows: In the section of his paper that surrounds the present objection, Dretske is contrasting the Inner Sense view with a close relative, David Rosenthal's "Higher-Order Thought" theory,²⁰ which is also a major target of his essay; and it seems Dretske means the objection comparatively. This is, I believe he means to say that if his original criticism is damaging to the Higher-Order Thought account, it refutes the Inner Sense view even more decisively. Thus, he has argued (correctly) that being the object of a higher-order thought is not what makes a state conscious in the sense of "perceptual consciousness." But at least a higher-order thought would make the state's subject aware that she or he was in that state, which is something; by contrast, a mere higher-order thing-awareness of the state would not (eo ipso) even yield that fact-awareness, and so is completely irrelevant to perceptual consciousness.

If this interpretation of Dretske's objection is correct, the objection again simply goes wide of my own position. For (again) I am using Inner Sense to explicate conscious awareness, not "perceptual consciousness."

Dretske's point is of independent interest, however. Whatever the exact function(s) of introspection may be, we may be fairly sure that Mother Nature intended introspection to confer some cognitive benefit, and a theory of introspective awareness that masked this or made it unintelligible would be to that extent a bad theory. Dretske is right to insist that mere thing-awareness of a first-order state would be a cognitive idler. So I must reemphasize my presumption that internal monitoring normally or often does give rise to introspective belief; and it should also be noted that, again on the model of external perception, introspection presents its object under an aspect, as being a certain way. I have argued elsewhere that such introspective aspects and "ways" are important, though ineffable.²¹

6

Rosenthal makes a direct argument against the Inner Sense account.²² It begins with the claim that "perceiving always involves some sensory quality." That claim might be taken by a naive Inner Sense theorist to help explain the qualitative dimension of a conscious first-order sensory state: perhaps the first-order state is felt to have a qualitative or phenomenal aspect because it gives rise to an internal perception that itself "involves some sensory quality." But as Rosenthal briskly points out, that way lies regress, for the sensory quality of the second-order state would remain to be explained.

The failure of the naive idea just mentioned is no embarrassment to my own Inner Sense view, since that view bears no responsibility for explaining qualia or phenomenal character. But Rosenthal rides his initial claim further. If perceiving always involves some sensory quality and if internal monitoring is perceiving, then internal monitoring itself must indeed involve some sensory quality. A dilemma ensues: Either the quality is just the same quality as that exhibited by the first-order state being scanned, or it is some sec-

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ond, higher-order sensory quality. But the former is at best unmotivated and presumably false: "When we see a tomato, the redness of our sensation is not literally the same property as the redness of the tomato." And if the latter, "it's a mystery just what mental quality a higher-order perception could have. What mental qualities are available other than those we're conscious of when we're conscious of our first-order sensory states?"

My main reply to this is to reject the extension of Rosenthal's initial claim to internal monitoring itself. The Inner Sense theorist does not contend (at least neither Armstrong nor I contend) that internal monitoring is like external perception in every single respect. And in particular, we should not expect internal monitoring to share the property of involving some sensory quality at its own level of operation. The sensory properties involved in first-order states are, according to me,²³ the represented features of physical objects; for example, the color presented in a visual perception is the represented color of a physical object. First-order states themselves do not have ecologically significant features of that sort, and so we would not expect internal representations of first-order states to have sensory qualities representing or otherwise corresponding to such features.

I did concede that introspection represents a first-order state under an aspect, or as being a certain way, and that "way" doubtless has something to do with the first-order state's own quale or sensory quality. So if Rosenthal's term "mental quality" is taken more broadly than "sensory quality" in his original sense, it is possible that the second horn of his dilemma can be grasped, and every scanning of a first-order sensory state does "involve" some distinctive mental quality that is distinctively related to the first-order sensory quality. I agree with Rosenthal that if one wants to maintain this, one must demystify it, but I shall leave that discussion for another time,²⁴ especially since I have blocked the inference to his disjunctive step in the first place.

A word about the notion of an "experience". Prosecuting Rosenthal's objection against me in correspondence, Fred Dretske has asked whether unscanned perceivings or unfelt pains count as experiences and whether there is an introspective experience involved in scanning over and above the first-order perceiving itself. To this I reply that the term "experience" is subject to the same sort of ambiguity I ascribed in section 2 to the word "feeling." One can use "experience" merely to mean a first-order perceiving or sensory state, in which case there can be unconscious experiences, or one can reserve the term for monitored sensings or monitorings of sensings, in which case "conscious experience" becomes a redundancy. I do not see any substantive issue that outruns this verbal choice.

7

An initial flaw in the version of the Inner Sense theory as stated so far is that it makes a Cartesian assumption recently highlighted by Dan Dennett:²⁵ that there is some determinate stage of in-formation processing that constitutes the locus of conscious mental states/events. More specifically, "Cartesian materialism" is the (usually tacit) assumption that there is a physically realized spatial or temporal turnstile in the brain, a stage where "it all comes together" and the product of preprocessing is exhibited "to consciousness."

Dennett attacks that assumption. However natural it may be, it is gratuitous and empirically implausible. First, it is a priori unlikely that Mother Nature has furnished the human brain with any central viewing room or single monitor to do the viewing, nor is there any positive neurophysiological of such an organ. Second, Dennett argues at length that the famous "temporal anomalies" of consciousness discovered by psychophysical research, such as color phi, the cutaneous rabbit, and Libet's "backward referral" of sensory experiences,²⁶ are anomalous only so

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long as Cartesian materialism is being assumed; jettison the assumption, and the phenomena are readily explained. Dennett's analyses of the experimental data are not completely uncontroversial,²⁷ but I find them convincing on the whole, and it is hard to think how anyone might defend Cartesian materialism on purely neurophysiological grounds.

The point is not just that there is no immaterial audience in the brain or just that there is no undischargeable homunculus but that there is no such locus at all, however physically characterized—no single Boss Unit or even CPU within the brain to serve as chief executive of my utterings and other actions. The central nervous system is as central as it gets. There is, if you like, a "stream of consciousness": "We are more-or-less serial virtual machines implemented—inefficiently—on the parallel hardware that evolution has provided for us," "Joycean" machines that formulate synthesized reports of our own passing states,²⁸ though the reports are never entirely accurate.

The Inner Sense theory has it that conscious awareness is the successful operation of an internal scanner or monitor that outputs second-order representations of first-order psychological states.²⁹ But an "internal scanner sounds very much as though it presupposes an internal audience seated in a Cartesian Theater, even if it and the theater are made of physical stuff. Is the Inner Sense view not then committed to Cartesian materialism?

It is not hard to come up with a pretty damning collection of direct quotations. Armstrong spoke of "the portion of the computing space made available for administering the overall plan." And (just to save you looking) I myself wrote of an internal scanner's "delivering information about ... [a first-order] psychological state to one's executive control unit."³⁰ For shame. There may be an "executive control unit" in some functional sense, but very probably not in the sense of being: that agency, arrival at which makes information conscious.

But it should be clear that the Inner Sense view is not per se committed to Cartesian materialism. For even if an internal scanner resembles an internal audience in some ways, the "audience" need not be seated in a Cartesian Theater. There need be no single, executive scanner, and no one scanner or monitor need view the entire array of first-order mental states accessible to consciousness. Accordingly, there need be neither a "turn-stile of consciousness" nor one central inner stage on which the contents of consciousness are displayed in one fixed temporal order. An internal monitor is an attention mechanism that presumably can be directed upon representational subsystems and stages of same; no doubt internal monitors work selectively and piecemeal, and their operations depend on control windows and other elements of conative context. On this point, the Inner Sense theory has already parted with Cartesian materialism.

A qualification: We should not throw out the integration-and-control baby with the Cartesian bathwater. The operation of an internal monitor does not eo ipso constitute consciousness. We can imagine a creature that has a panoply of first-order states and a rich array of monitors scanning those states but in such a way that the monitors' output contributes nothing at all to the creature's surrounding psychology, maintenance, or welfare. The outputs might just go unheard, or they might be received only by devices that do nothing but turn patches of the creature's skin different colors. For consciousness constituting, we must require that monitor output contribute-specifically to the integration of information in a way conducive to making the system's behavior appropriate to its input and circumstances. Though the latter formulation is vague, it will do for present purposes; the requirement rules out the ineffectual monitors without falling back into the idea of a Cartesian Theater or single CPU.

(This is a good juncture at which to underscore and deepen the teleological cast I am imparting to the Inner Sense theory. I said that for an internal monitor to count in the analysis of consciousness,

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in the present sense of "conscious," the monitor must have monitoring as its function, or one of its functions. But that is not all. To count in the analysis of my consciousness, the monitor must do its monitoring for me. A monitor might have been implanted in me somewhere that sends its outputs straight to Reuters and to CNN, so that the whole world may learn of my first-order psychological states as soon as humanly possible. Such a device would be teleologically a monitor, but the wire services' monitor rather than mine. More important, a monitor functioning within one of my subordinate homunculi might be doing its distinctive job for that homunculus rather than for me; for example, it might be serving the homunculus's event memory rather than my own proprietary event memory.³¹ This distinction blocks what would otherwise be obvious counter-examples to the Inner Sense view as stated so far.)

Rejection of Cartesian materialism is not only compatible with the Lockean view. In an important way, it supports the Inner Sense theory. It predicts introspective fallibility of two characteristic sorts. First, as Dennett emphasizes, the result of an introspective probe is a judgment made by the subject, which judgment does not (or not eo ipso) simply report a "presentation" to an inner audience. And the "temporal anomalies" alone should have made us question the reliability of introspective reports. Introspection gets small temporal details wrong. That tends to confirm rather than to impugn the Inner Sense view of consciousness. If conscious awareness is indeed a matter of introspective attention and if introspection is the operation of a monitor or self-scanner, then such anomalies were to be expected, for monitors and scanners are characteristically fallible on details, and Dennett shows admirably how such devices might corporately mix up temporal sequence in particular.

Second, if there is no single Cartesian Theater, then there should be no single optimal time of probing a first-order process. More strongly, Dennett argues that probing "changes the task", it interferes with the very process it purports to be monitoring. That too is good news for the Inner Sense theory, for if introspection is the operation of a monitor or self-scanner, then revisionary effects of the present sort are again just what we should have expected; monitoring instruments (such as ammeters) typically do affect the values of the magnitudes they measure.³²

Thus the Inner Sense theory of consciousness survives the collapse of Cartesian materialism, and is even strengthened by it.

8

Christopher Hill offers a putative criticism of the Inner Sense theory (which he calls "the inner eye hypothesis"):³³

When a sensation is transformed by being attended to, Hill calls this "volume adjustment"; when a sensation is brought into being by active introspection, Hill speaks of "activation." It becomes clear (p.126) that these two phenomena are themselves the "data" on which Hill thinks the Inner Sense theory founders.

Now what exactly is the difficulty? In particular, why cannot the Inner Sense theorist grant both that scanning a first-order state can cause a change in the character of that state and that aiming one's internal monitor at a particular sector of one's phenomenal field can bring a sensation into existence? Either of these scenarios seems entirely realistic, and I for one do not doubt that they are sometimes realized.

In making the reply just offered, I am in effect advancing the claim that volume adjustment and

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activation are matters of internal scanning plus certain causal results, and perhaps Hill would object to that reductive analysis. But he uses almost overtly causal language himself. "The phenomenal field is often profoundly changed by the process of coming to attend to a sensation" (p. 125, italics mine); and if he has in mind some noncausal understanding of volume control or of activation, he does not make it explicit.

A clue is provided by the following passage.

This suggests that Hill is thinking of visual scanning as entirely passive, as unable to affect the intrinsic properties of the object scanned; analogously, he may think of "inner vision" or internal monitoring as passive in just the same way.³⁴ At any rate, that would explain why he thinks the phenomena of volume adjustment and activation require different sorts of active introspection, additional to the "inner eye" sort. But as I have emphasized, I do not think of internal monitoring in that passive, vicarious way; I not only grant but insist that it often does affect the phenomenal field being scanned. So if I am understanding Hill's critique correctly, my own Inner Sense theory is immune to it.

9

On at last to Rey's objection. The objection is that if all it takes to make a first-order state a conscious state is that the state be monitored by a scanner that makes integrative use of the information thus gleaned, then consciousness is a lot more prevalent than we think. Any notebook computer, for example, has devices that keep track of its "psychological" states. (If it be protested that no computer has genuinely psychological states—for example, because it has neither authentic intentional states nor sensory states—that is inessential to the point. Once we had done whatever needs to be done in order to fashion a being that does have first-order intentional and sensory states, the addition of an internal monitor or two would be virtually an afterthought, a trifling wrinkle, surely not the sort of thing that could turn a simply nonconscious being into a conscious being.) For that matter, individual subsystems of our own human psychologies doubtless involve their own internal monitors, and it is implausible to grant that those subsystems are themselves conscious.

Several replies may be made to this. First, for consciousness we should require that our monitor emit a genuine representation, not just physical "information" in the Bell Telephone sense or a simple nomological "indication" in the Wisconsin sense. But that is of little help, since surely our subsystems do contain monitors that output genuine representations.

Second, it should trouble no one that he or she has proper parts that are conscious. The proper part of you that consists of you minus your left arm is conscious, as is the part consisting of you minus your skin and most of your musculature. Other (individually) expendable chunks include your entire gastrointestinal tract, your auditory system, much of your cortex, and possibly much of a hemisphere. Each of your respective complementary proper parts is conscious, even as we speak.

But it may be said that the second reply is of little more help than the first, for each of the large proper parts I have mentioned would qualify, mentally speaking, as being you, if taken on its own. Its consciousness is your consciousness; at least, there is nothing present to its consciousness that is not also present to yours. But the sort of

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case that worries Rey is one in which self-monitoring is performed by a silent, subterranean subsystem, perhaps one of "all those unconscious neurotic systems postulated in so many of us by Freud,... [or] all those surprisingly intelligent, but still unconscious, subsystems for perception and language postulated in us by contemporary cognitive psychology" (p.11). What troubles Rey is that he or you or I should contain subsystems that are conscious on their own though we know nothing of them, and whose conscious contents are not at all like ours.

It does sound eerie. But I am not so sure that the individuation of consciousnesses is so straightforward a business. For one thing, that the contents of one consciousness coextend with those of mine hardly entails that the first consciousness is (=) mine; they still may be two. For another, the commissurotomy literature has raised well-known thorny questions about the counting of consciousnesses in the first place,³⁵ and it is abetted in that by thought experiments such as Dan Dennett's in his classic "Where Am I?" and a more recent one by Stephen White.³⁶ My own preference is to doubt there to be any fact of the matter, as to how many consciousnesses live in a single human body (or as to how many bodies can be animated by the same consciousness).

A third reply to the argument: In his own essay on Rey's objection,³⁷ Stephen White enforces a distinction that Rey himself acknowledged but slighted: the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness. Rey had argued that if we already had a nonconscious perception-belief-desire machine, the addition of a "self" concept would be trifling (just as would be that of a simple internal monitor); one need only give the machine a first-person representation whose referent was the machine itself—that is, add the functional analogue of the pronoun "I" to the machine's language of thought. But White argues on the basis of an ingenious group-organism example that the matter is hardly so simple and that the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness is far larger and more important than Rey allowed. Surprisingly, having a functional inner "I" does not suffice for being able to think of oneself as oneself; nor does mere consciousness as opposed to self-consciousness confer person-hood or any moral status. And it turns out on White's analysis that although subsystems of ours might count as conscious, they would not be self-conscious in the way we are. That difference helps to explain and assuage our reluctance to admit them to our own country club.³⁸ I find White's defense of these claims quite convincing.³⁹

But I do not invest much in these second and third meditations as replies to Rey's objection. I have presented them mainly for the purpose of softening you up.

10

So I turn to my fourth and (chez me) most important reply. It is emphatically to deny (what John Searle has recently asserted with unsurprising boldness)⁴⁰ that consciousness is an on-off affair—that a creature is either simply conscious or simply not conscious. (If Searle did not exist I would have to invent him, for he actually puts it that way: "Consciousness is an on/off switch; a system is either conscious or not" [p. 83].) I maintain that consciousness comes in degrees, which one might describe as degrees of richness or fullness.⁴¹ We human beings are very richly conscious, but there might be more complex and/or more sophisticated organisms that are more fully conscious than we. "Higher animals" are perhaps less fully so; "lower" animals still less, and so forth.

In saying this, I am shifting my sense of conscious slightly, for there is not obviously any great spectrum of degrees of whether something has an internal monitor scanning some of its psychological states. (Actually there probably is a significant spectrum, based on the extent to which monitor output contributes to integration of information and to control; as was conceded at the

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time, I did leave the formulation vague. But I will not rest anything on this.) The paronymy works as follows. A thing is conscious, at all, if it is conscious to any degree at all—that is, if it has at least one internal monitor operating and contributing etc. We might call this "bare" or "mere" consciousness. The thing may be more richly or more fully conscious if it has more monitors, monitors more, integrates more, integrates better, integrates more efficiently for control purposes, and so forth.

Actually I have not yet achieved paronymy, for I have located the degrees in the modifiers ("richly" and "fully") rather than in the basic term conscious' itself, which so far retains its original sense. But I do still mean to shift its meaning, for I want to allow at least a very vague sense in which some "barely' conscious devices are not really conscious; I take that one to be the ordinary sense of the word. But I would insist that that sense still affords a largeish spectrum of degrees. (Granted, this needs defense, and I shall provide some shortly.)

My principal answer to Rey is, then, to deny his intuition. So long as it contributes in the way aforementioned, one little monitor does make for a little bit of consciousness. More monitors and better integration and control make for fuller and fuller consciousness.⁴²

Rey conjectures (p.24), as a diagnosis of his own chauvinist intuitions about machines, that if consciousness is anything, it is like an "inner light" that is on in us but could be off or missing from other creatures that were otherwise first-order-psychologically and functionally very like us; that is why he finds it so obvious that machines are not conscious even when they have been hypothetically given a perception-belief-desire system like ours. (Naturally given his conditional assumption, he asks why we should believe that we are not just very complicated perception-belief-desire machines and offers the eliminative suggestion that we are therefore not conscious either; consciousness is not anything.)⁴³ But I see no reason to grant the conditional conjecture. I have no problem saying that a device whose internal monitor is contributing integration-and-control-wise is conscious of the states reported by the monitor. There is a rhetorical difference between saying that a device is conscious of such-and-such and saying that it, itself, is ... conscious! But that is only a rhetorical difference, barring my slight paronym above. What is special about us is not our being conscious per se but that we monitor so much at any given time and achieve so high a degree of integration and control.

Thus two remarks made by psychologists and quoted by Rey as "astonishing" him by their naivete' do not astonish me in the slightest:

Depending on what Knapp meant by "anticipatory organization," this is not far wrong. If anticipatory organization implies internal monitoring that contributes, or if the "combination of ... [the] factors into learning" involves such monitoring, or both, I endorse the statement.

No quarrel there either, assuming again that the "combining" is done in part by contributory monitoring.

The main obstacle to agreement with my matter-of-degree thesis is that we ourselves know only one sort of consciousness from the inside, and that one is particularly rich and full. We have elaborate and remarkably non-gappy visual models of our environment; we have our other four main sense modalities, which supplement the blooming, bursting phenomenological garden

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already furnished by vision; we have proprioception of various sorts that orient us within our surroundings; and (most important) we have almost complete freedom of attention within our private worlds; we can at will attend to virtually any representational aspect of any of our sensations that we choose. (All this creates the Cartesian illusion of a complete private world of sensation and thought, a seamless movie theater. There is no such completeness even phenomenologically, what with failings like the blind spot and the rapid decay of peripheral vision, but the illusion is dramatic.) Now, since this is the only sort of consciousness we have ever known from the inside and since the only way to imagine a consciousness is to imagine it from the inside, we cannot imagine a consciousness very different at all from our own, much less a greatly impoverished one. What we succeed in imagining, if we try to get inside the mind of a spider or a notebook computer, is either an implausible cartoon (with anthropomorphic talk balloons) or something that hardly seems to us to deserve the title "consciousness." It is a predicament: We are not well placed to receive the idea that there can be very low degrees of consciousness.⁴⁶

11

Now, finally, for a bit of argument:

1. Consider the total mental states of people who are very ill, or badly injured, or suffering the effects of this or that nefarious drug. Some such people are at some times called semiconscious. Any number of altered states are possible, many of them severely diminished mental conditions. For some of these, surely, there will be no clear Searlean "yes" or "no" to the question, "Is the patient conscious?" but only a "To a degree" or "Sort of."

2. We could imagine thousands of hypothetical artifacts, falling along a multidimensional spectrum having at its low end ordinary hardware store items like record changers and air-conditioners and at its high end biologic human duplicates (indistinguishable from real living human beings save by their histories).⁴⁷ Along the way(s) will be robots of many different sorts, having wildly different combinations of abilities and stupidities, oddly skewed and weighted psychologies of all kinds. Which are conscious"? How could one possibly draw a single line separating the whole seething profusion of creatures into just two groups?

3. For that matter, the real world provides a similar argument (for those who favor the real world over science fiction). Consider the phylogenetic scale. Nature actually contains a fairly smooth continuum of organisms, ranked roughly by complexity and degree of internal monitoring, integration, and efficient control. Where on this continuum would God tell us that Consciousness begins? (Appropriately enough, Searle himself declares deep ignorance regarding consciousness and the phylogenetic scale.)⁴⁸

4. If argument 3 does not move you (or even if it does), consider human infants as they develop from embryo to fetus to neonate to baby to child. When in that sequence does consciousness begin?

I do not say that any of these arguments is overwhelming. But taken together—and together with recognition of the imaginative predicament I mentioned prior to offering them—I believe they create a presumption. At the very least, they open the door to my matter-of-degree view and make it a contender. Therefore, one cannot simply assume that consciousness (if any) is an on-off switch. And Rey's argument does assume that.

Thus I do not think Rey has refuted the Inner Sense view.

Notes

This chapter is a very much expanded venion of "Consciousness as Internal Monitoring, I," in J. E. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, 9: Al, Connectionism, and Philosophy of Psychology (Atascadero,

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CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1995). I had planned a separate sequel but instead have been allowed by the editorS to incorporate all the additional material here.

I am grateful to Joe Levine, Ned Block, Georges Rey, Chris Hill and Fred Dretske for extensive comments and discussion.

1. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A. C. Fraser (New York: Dover Publications, 1959), II, ch. I, sec. 3, p.123; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), A23/B37, p.67.

2. See my" What Is 'The' Problem of Consciousness?," manuscript.

3. D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), and "What Is Consciousness?" in The Nature of Mind and Other Essays (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). Baars, "Conscious Contents Provide the Nervous System with Coherent, Global Information," in R. Davidson, G. E. Schwartz, and D. Shapiro (eds.), Consciousness and Self-Regulation, VoL 3 (New York: Plenum Press, 1983), 3: 41-79; A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. Lycan, Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 1987), ch. 6.

4. "A Reason for Doubting the Existence of Consciousness," in Davidson, Schwartz, and Shapiro, Consciousness, pp.1-39.

5. Armstrong, "What Is Consciousness?" p.61.

6. There is a potential ambiguity in Armstrong's term introspective consciousness": Assuming there are attention mechanisms of the sort I have in mind, they may function automatically, on their own, or they may be deliberately mobilized by their owners. Perhaps only in the latter case should we speak of introspecting. On this usage, "introspective" consciousness may or may not be a result of introspecting. Armstrong himself makes a similar distinction between "reflex" introspective awareness and "introspection proper," adding the suggestion that "the latter will normally involve not ouly introspective awareness of mental states but also introspective awareness of that introspective awareness" ("What Is Consciousness?" p.63).

7. Armstrong, "What Is Consciousness?" pp.65-66. Robert Van Gulick has also written illuminatingly on the uses of consciousness, though he does not focus so specifically on introspection; see particularly "What Difference Does Consciousness Make?" Philosophical Topics 17(1989):21 1-30.

8. I began this project with respect to subjectivity and qualia respectively in chapters 7 and 8 of Consciousness. Parts of it have also been pursued by Gilbert Harman ("The Intrinsic Quality of Experience," in J. E. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, 4: Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1990), Sydney Shoemaker ("Phenomenal Character,"Nous 28[1994]:21-38), and Michael Tye ("Qualia, Content, and the Inverted Spectrum." Nous 28[1994]:159-83).

9. In Consciousness. See also my "Functionalism and Recent Spectrum Inversions," unpublished manuscript, and "True Colors," in preparation.

10. When I made this point emphatically after a presentation of this material at the National Endowment for The Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute on "The Nature of Meaning" (Rutgers University July, 1993), Bill Ramsey responded much as follows: "I see; once you've got the explanandum whittled all the way down, as specific and narrow as you want it, the big news you're bringing us is that what internal monitoring really is, at bottom, is ... internal monitoring!" That characterization is not far 'wrong. Though the Inner Sense doctrine is not tautologous and faces some objections, I think it is very plausible, once it has been relieved of the extraneous theoretical burden of resolving issues that are not directly related to the "conscious"/ "nonconscious" distinction per se.

Incidentally, I do not ofihand know of any Inner Sense proponent who does claim that the theory resolves qualia problems. Yet there is a tendency among its critics to criticize it from that quarter; I conjecture that such critics are themselves confusing issues of awareness with issues of qualitative character.

11. Rey, "Sensations in a Language of Thought," in E. Villanueva (ed.), Philosophical Issues, L Consciousness (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1991), and "Sensational Sentences," in M. Davies and G. Humphreys (eds.), Consciousness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992); Lycan, "What Is the 'Subjectivity' of the Mental?" in Tomberlin, Philosophical Perspectives.

12. From a current novel: "Each step was painful, but the pain was not felt. He moved at a controlled jog down the escalators and out of the building." John Grisham, The Firm (New York: Island Books, Dell Publishing, 1991), p.443.

David Rosenthal offers a nice defeisse of unfelt pain, in "The Independence of Consciousness and Sensory Quality," in Villanueva, Phitosophical Issues. See also

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David Palmer's "Unfelt Pains," American Philosophical Quarterly 12(1975):289 98.

13. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind, pp.100 15. But see also G. Sheridan, "The Electroencephalogram Argument Against Incorrigibility," American Phitosophicat Quarterly 6 (1969):62-70.

14. D. C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston:

Little, Brown, 1991), pp.132-33.

15. See also Dretske's "Conscious Experience," Mind

102(1993):263-83.

16. Armstrong, "what Is Consciousness?" p.59.

17. Certainly we should all conscientiously obey Mary Lycan's Maxim: "No professional philosopher is qualified to pronounce on the 'folk sense' or 'ordinary use' of any philosophically contentious term (unless the philosopher happens also to be a professional anthropologist and has done the requisite surveys)." None of us gets to kidnap words like "conscious." Perhaps it is time for "conscious" to take its proud place on Neurath's list of forbidden terms, but I will not urge that as yet.

To illustrate the terminological situation (and to vent some annoyance): At least two reviewers of my book have emphatically complained that its title is false advertising and that it is not about consciousness at all—despite its offering accounts of conscious awareness (ch. 6), "what it's like" (ch. 7), subjectivity/perspectivalness (ch. 7), and qualia (ch. 8). Though I insist on keeping all those issues and further close relatives sharply separate from each other, I am baffled as to what matter of "consciousness" I have ignored.

18. However, I will not resist remarking that the Dretske-Armstrong usage has the vice of making Armstrong's own term, "perceptual consciousness," redundant; the occurrence of "consciousness" within it is gratuitous. Also, we need no special theory of consciousness in the perceptual sense, since a theory of "perceptual consciousness" would just be a theory of perception itself and its intentionality

I note that Rosenthal's usage agrees with mine: "Whatever we may discover about consciousness, it is presumably uncontroversial that, if one is wholly unaware of some mental state, that state is not a conscious state." "Explaining Consciousness," manuscript, p.3.

19. Cf. Irvin Rock, The Logic of Perception (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 1983).

20. David Rosenthal, "Two Concepts of Consciousness, Philosophical Studies 94(1986):329-59; "Thinking That One Thinks," in Davies and Humphreys, Consciousness, Dretske's nomenclature confuses the issues a bit, for he lumps both Rosenthal's theory and nune under the heading of "inner spotlight" theories, while in the present context he also rightly distinguishes Higher-Order Thought from Inner Sense, and acknowledges that the two are mutual competitors at least in a small way. See Rosenthal's own objection to Inner Sense, discussed in section 5 below.

21. Lycan, "What Is the 'Subjectivity' of the Mental?" See also "A Limited Defense of Phenomenal Information," in T. Metzinger (ed.), Consciousness (Ferdinand Schöningh-Verlag 1995).

22. "A Theory of Consciousness," Report No.40, Research Group on Mind and Brain, Zentrum fir Interdisziplinäre Forschung, Bielefeld, Germany, 1990; and "Explaining Consciousness," pp.7-8. Besides his direct argument against Inner Sense, Rosenthal deploys an ingenious line of reasoning designed to show that every conscious state is accompanied by a higher-order thought, which if sound would support the Higher-Order Thought theory. Rosenthal might then argue further that Inner Sense is expendable and should be expended by means of Occam's Razor. His argument is based on the distinction between expressing a thought and reporting a thought and on the claim that all and only conscious states are reportable by their owners; for the record, I reject the latter claim.

23. Consciousness, ch. 8.

24. For some predominantly negative discussion of the issues involved here, see my "Functionalism and Recent Spectrum Inversions."

25. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, D. C. Dennett and M. Kinsbourne, "Time and the Observer: The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15(1992):183-201.

26. P. Kolers and M. von Grünau, "Shape and Color in Apparent Motion," Vision Research 16(1976):329-35; F. A. Geldard and C. E. Sherrick, "The Cutaneous 'Rabbit': A Perceptual Illusion," Science 178(1972): 178-79; B. Libet, "Cortical Activation in Conscious and Unconscious Experience," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 9(1965):77-86.

27. E.g., B. J. Baars and M. Fehling, "Consciousness Is Associated with Central as Well as Distributed Processes," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15(1992):203-4, and B. Libet, "Models of Conscious Timing and the Experimental Evidence," Behavioral and Brain Sciences

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213-15. Dennett and Kinsbourne reply to their critics in "Authors' Response," Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 234-43.

28. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, pp.218, 225.

29. For convenience, I shall continue to speak of the states that get monitored as "first-order" states, but this is inaccurate, for introspective states can themselves be scanned. This will be important later on.

30. Consciousness, p.72.

31. On such distinctions, and for more illuminating examples, see chs. 3 and 4 of ibid.

32. One might be tempted to infer (something highly congenial to Dennett himself) that introspection is woefully fallible, unreliable to the point of uselessness. But that inference would be unjustified. Though the "temporal anomalies" alone should have made us question the reliability of introspective reports, notice that the scope of unreliability exhibited by the anomalies is very small, tied to temporal differences within the tiny intervals involved, a small fraction of a second in each case.

33. Christopher Hill, Sensations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 5. That piece and this section of the chapter continue a dialogue begun by a preprint of Hill's paper, "Introspective Awareness of Sensations," Topoi 6(1987):9-22, and my response in ch. 6 of Consciousness.

34. This likely possibility was called to my attention by Roger Sansom.

35. For a survey and discussion, see C. Marks, Cornmissurotomy, Consciousness and the Unity of Mind (Montgomery, VT: Bradford Books, 1979).

36. Dennett, "Where Am I?" in Brainstorms (Montgomery, VT: Bradford Books, 1978), reprinted in D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.), The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self" and Soul (New York: Basic Books, 1981); see also D. H. Sanford, "Where Was I?" in Hofstadter and Dennett, The Mind's I. White, "What Is It Like to Be a Homunculus?" Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 68(1987): 148-74.

37. White, "What Is It Like to Be a Homunculus?"

38. Moreover, as he observes (p.168), we have no access to unproblematic examples of consciousness in the absence of self-consciousness, and that fact contributes to an important predicament that I shall expound below.

39. He maintains that no notebook computer is self-conscious even if some are conscious in a less demanding functional sense. (I believe White would accept my claim that mere consciousness is more prevalent than philosophers think; see p.169.) But I do not see that his analysis of self-consciousness generates that result, since his main concern was to argue only that self-consciousness is restricted to the highest level of organization in a group organism, a result that does not help deny self-consciousness to whole computers. (white has explained in conversation that his analysis alone was not intended to do that; he has other means.)

40. John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

41. I have defended this thesis before, in "Abortion and the Civil Rights of Machines," in N. Potter and M. Timmons (eds.), Morality and Universality (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), pp.144-45.

Searle himself goes on, in Rediscovery of the Mind, to qualify his "on-off" claim: "But once conscious, the system is a rheostat: there are different degrees of consciousness"; he speaks of levels of intensity and vividness. Thus, it seems, our real disagreement is over not degrees per se but the question of whether a creature or device could have a much lower degree of consciousness than is ordinarily enjoyed by human beings and still qualify as being conscious at all.

42. I should emphasize again that a monitor makes for consciousness when what it monitors is itself a psycho-logical state or event. My suggestion that notebook computers are after all conscious is conditional on the highly controversial assumption that such computers have psychological states such as beliefs and desires in the first place.

43. By way of further diagnosis (p.25), Rey offers the additional conjecture that our moral concern for our living, breathing conspecifics drives us to posit some solid metaphysical difference between ourselves and mere artifacts, as a ground of that concern. He opines that we need no such ground in order to care more for human beings than for functionally similar machines, but he does not say what he thinks would ground that difference in care.

44. Peter H. Knapp, "The Mysterious 'Split': A Clinical Inquiry into Problems of Consciousness and Brain," in G. Globus, G. Maxwell and I Savodnik (eds.), Consciousness and the Brain (New York: Plenum Press, 1976), pp.37-69.

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45. E. Roy John, "A Model of Consciousness," in G.E. Schwartz and D. Shapiro (eds.), Consciousness and SelfRegulation (New York: Plenum Press, 1976), 1:1-50.

46. Samuel Butler said, "Even the potato, rotting in its dank cellar, has a certain low cunning." But I grant the potato has no internal monitors.

47. This is the one argument I gave in "Abortion and the Civil Rights of Machines."

48. "I have no idea whether fleas, grasshoppers, crabs, or snails are conscious" (p.74). He suggests that neurophysiologists might find out, by a method of apparent-consciousness-debunking, viz., looking for evidence of "mechanical-like tropism to account for apparently goal-directed behavior in organisms that lacked consciousness" (p.75); he pooh-poohs "mechanical-like" functional processing as being in no way mental or psychological. On this, see D. C. Dennett's review of The Rediscovery of the Mind, Journal of Philosophy 90(1993): 193-205.