consciousness

How Anti-Physicalism Slides into Antiscience

Richard Brown Leave a comment

Change my mind

I have long thought that there is something deeply anti-scientific about the way that certain people argue against physicalism, and in particular the way they defend panpsychism. This summer, before the premiere of Phil Halper’s video Panpsychism Debunked: Why Consciousness Isn’t Everywhere, which I’m in along with Ken Williford and Josh Weisberg (I didn’t pick the title!), I posted on Bluesky that panpsychism is antiscience and invited people to change my mind. Philip Goff answered the video with one of his own, and I answered his with mine, once I figured out OBS (my first attempt, an hour on just the first seven minutes of his video, was lost to a frame rate setting).

“Antiscience” is a strong word, so I want to be careful about what I mean. I am not saying that anti-physicalists are anti-science, or that panpsychism or dualism, the views, are. If one adopts a certain philosophy of science then one can see panpsychism as largely compatible with the findings of modern science. Nor am I saying that arguing against physicalism is antiscience. To argue against physicalism you need an argument, and Philip, who has been on Consciousness Live! more than once and with whom I have had a lot of good arguments over the years, is right that making one is not anti-scientific. What I object to is what usually comes with the arguments: the certainty that they succeed, the sense that this is just obvious, and the demand that the physicalist show, right now, how consciousness could be physical. One can reject physicalism, and argue against it, without any of that, but it is difficult!

What I mean by antiscience

It is hard to define antiscience, but as I understand it, it is typically committed to at least two claims. The first puts the burden in the wrong place: it has got to make sense to me, right now, and until you can show me how something could be true, I am entitled to say that it isn’t. The second is certainty about what science can’t do: it is obvious that the arguments succeed, so whatever science finds, it can’t settle this question.

Back in December 2024 I put both claims in terms of specialness. As I said then, “Specialness comes from requiring that we be able to understand why [physicalism] is true,” or else from claiming that we already know enough to know that it is false. Either way, our understanding gets treated as a test that nature has to pass.

The first claim is the one I run into most. Someone on Bluesky told me he wasn’t making a logical argument against physicalism; it was just that science has no account of how qualities arise from quantities, and that makes experience mysterious enough to justify thinking it is something else. But a missing account is a reason to keep looking, not a reason to think there is nothing there to find. The burden is on whoever wants to add something to what science already posits, and “I can’t see how” doesn’t discharge it.

I am not attributing the second claim to anyone uncharitably. When I posted that “physicalism is the scientific option in so far as there is no good reason to go beyond science,” Philip responded that “because consciousness is not publicly observable, the scientific data is limited to establishing correlations.” I agreed that physicalism goes beyond the data; every theory does. But this year he went further. “The success of science has no bearing on this dispute,” he wrote, and he described himself as defending “the standard anti-physicalist view that physicalism can be ruled out on a priori grounds.” That is the second claim, about as plainly as anyone could state it.

The two claims work together. Russellian panpsychism is built to agree with physics about everything physics says, so it is hard to see what physics could find that would count for or against it. That by itself would just be underdetermination, and choosing between empirically equivalent theories on other grounds is ordinary philosophy of science. But Philip doesn’t say the evidence leaves the question open; he says physicalism can be ruled out a priori. And the success of physical explanation everywhere else is evidence about which kind of theory to bet on here, so it does bear on the dispute. The case against physicalism has to come from introspection and reflection rather than from the sciences, and at bottom it is that we can’t see how experience could be physical (or, in Philip’s stronger version, that we can see that it isn’t). The first claim does the work and the second protects it from evidence.

Why call this antiscience rather than just philosophy? Because the demand that nature make sense to us, right now, has a terrible track record. Newton himself thought that one body acting on another at a distance was “so great an absurdity”that no competent thinker could fall into it, and his theory won on the evidence anyway. Feynman said that nobody understands quantum mechanics, and it is the best-confirmed theory we have. And Dennett had a name for the slide from the first claim to the second, Philosophers’ Syndrome: “mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity” (Dennett 1991).

Revelation

The centerpiece of Philip’s case is what he calls revelation. In Consciousness and Fundamental Reality he says that when we attend to a conscious state and form a direct phenomenal concept of it, “the complete nature of the type to which it belongs is apparent to the concept user” (Goff 2017, 107). Attend to a pain and you know exactly what pain is.

What I said in the video is that there is something underhanded about the way this is defined. “Complete nature” is ambiguous. It could mean the experiential nature, what it is like for me to be in pain, and in that sense I think revelation is true. Or it could mean the metaphysical nature, what pain ultimately is. In that sense revelation is false, and Philip has to agree.

Here is why. On Philip’s view, as on mine, a pain is ultimately made up of, or grounded in, things that are not themselves pains. For the panpsychist they are micro-experiences (or, on the cosmopsychist version Philip has defended, a cosmic consciousness); for me they are neural processes. Either way, attending to my pain does not show me what grounds it. I don’t find neurons in my pain, but I don’t find micro-experiences there either. They have to be inferred, and there is very little we can say about them. Philip saw a version of this problem himself years ago, when he argued that revelation is inconsistent with our consciousness turning out to be “constituted of the experiential being of billions of micro subjects of experience” (Goff 2006, 57, quoted in Roelofs 2020). So when he says, a page after the definition, that there is “nothing in any way hidden from you about the reality of how you’re feeling,” the innocuous reading is true and the strong reading is false by his own lights. You read the definition and nod along, and then out comes the rabbi from the hat: since the complete nature of pain is revealed and nothing neural shows up in it, pain can’t be neural.

When Philip was on Consciousness Live! I put it to him that what grounds a state isn’t part of the nature that gets revealed. That is just the innocuous reading, and Philip has to agree with it, since on his view the grounds of a pain are hidden too. But then revelation is as compatible with pain’s being grounded in neural processes as it is with its being grounded in micro-experiences. To get anti-physicalism out of revelation you need a third reading, on which what is revealed is pain’s essence and that essence is not physical. That is the conclusion written into the definition, and it is the underhandedness I was complaining about.

I’m not the only one who finds this fishy, and it isn’t just physicalists. Torin Alter has spent much of his career defending the knowledge argument and the zombie argument, and when he was on Consciousness Live! recently he told me that, although he admires Philip’s work, he doesn’t see why anything in those arguments shows that experiences “don’t have backsides.” He also has no sympathy with the recent turn to an intuition of distinctness, which he called “a step backwards.”

I take the innocuous reading very seriously. A few months ago I broke my ankle skateboarding, badly, and while I waited for the ambulance the pain took all of my attention. Then they gave me fentanyl and it was just gone. No one could ever convince me that the way I felt before the fentanyl was the same as the way I felt after. I knew everything there was to know about how it felt from the inside. None of that told me what it was underneath.

Philip’s argument for revelation is an inference to the best explanation. Some introspective judgments are “super-justified,” held with something close to the confidence we have in basic arithmetic (Goff 2017, 112). I accept super-justification. But the innocuous reading explains super-justification just as well as the strong one. If I know what my two experiences are like, I can tell that they are similar without knowing anything about what underlies them. So the best explanation of super-justification doesn’t favor strong revelation, and only strong revelation makes trouble for physicalism.

This is where revelation connects to antiscience. Super-justification gives us something close to certainty about how our experiences feel. The strong reading quietly transfers that certainty to what they are, and that is where the confidence that physicalism has already been ruled out comes from. If attending to a pain really revealed its complete nature, nothing neuroscience could find would ever matter.

Selective skepticism

The correlations argument has the same shape. Because consciousness is not publicly observable, Philip says, science can only establish correlations between brain states and experiences, and so every theory of consciousness goes beyond the data. True! But so does every identity claim in science. No experiment shows that water is H2O, as opposed to being perfectly correlated with H2O. We accept the identity because it explains everything the correlations explain, and does so more simply. Ned Block and Robert Stalnaker made this case in detail a long time ago (Block and Stalnaker 1999).

When someone on Bluesky told me that the conjunction of all statements made by science is compatible with there being no subjective experience at all, I replied that by the same reasoning “The conjunction of all statements made by science is compatible with the fact that there is no water at all.” Nobody would accept that, and anyone who had insisted on it before modern chemistry would have been wrong. If correlations plus simplicity are good enough for water, why aren’t they good enough for pain? Chemists accepted that water is H2O long before they could explain why ice floats.

The answer, when it comes, is always some version of the same thing: we know what pain is in a way that we don’t know what water is. The careful version is that “water” picks out whatever plays the water role, so the facts about water follow a priori from the physics (Chalmers and Jackson 2001), while “pain” isn’t a role concept at all. Plenty of physicalists grant that last part. What does the anti-physicalist work is the further claim that our concept of pain hands us pain’s essence, and that is revelation again. (In two-dimensional terms, revelation is the claim that a phenomenal concept’s primary and secondary intensions coincide, which my Type-C view denies. Chalmers says his argument can do without it, but then it shows at most that consciousness has non-physical modes of presentation, and only if zombies are ideally conceivable, which is what is in dispute.) So the skepticism is selective, and revelation does the selecting. The same goes for the charge that a physical explanation of consciousness is a category mistake. Philip’s version is that “physical science is all about what stuff does,” and feeling isn’t a matter of what stuff does. But nobody found out that feeling isn’t something stuff does. That is the conclusion, dressed up as a premise.

Vitalists were just as sure that chemistry could never explain life. The usual reply is that life was always a matter of what stuff does, and consciousness isn’t. But how do we know that? By attending to our experiences, which is to say, by revelation.

Appearance is not nature

A lot of the popular arguments run the same way. Experiences don’t seem to have locations, or parts, or mass. Brain processes have all three. So, the argument goes, they can’t be the same thing. Someone on Bluesky put it to me in exactly these terms: for two things to be identical they have to share all of their properties, and consciousness and brain processes share none.

But not seeming to have a property is not the same as lacking it. As I said at the time, “You sound like someone insisting that superman can’t be Clark Kent because one wears glasses and the other doesn’t.” Water doesn’t appear to have parts either, but, as I put it later in the same exchange, “I think drops of water are made of parts even though it doesn’t appear that way” (here). If pain is a brain process, then it is located wherever that process is, even if it seems to be located somewhere else, or nowhere at all. That is just what it would be like if physicalism were true.

Some versions are cruder than others. Back in the early 2000s, when I was a graduate student, someone at a reception after a talk heard me say that I liked the identity theory. “Let me ask you this,” he said. “I have a pain in my toe, but I don’t have a brain state in my toe, so my pain can’t be a brain state. How does the identity theory answer that?” I was so dumbfounded that I didn’t answer right away, and he looked smug, as though he had actually made a coherent point against my view! The answer is that the toe is where the pain is felt to be, not where the experience itself is happening. People who have lost a leg can feel pain in a foot that is no longer there, and wherever that pain is, it isn’t in the foot. (It’s even funnier than he knew: there are sensory neurons running right into your toe, so there are brain states in your toe! There is no central nervous system state in your toe, but that is what the peripheral nervous system is for. I dare not think what he would have said had he learned about the gut brain, haha.)

Physicalists have been pointing this out from the beginning. U.T. Place called it the phenomenological fallacy: supposing that when we describe our experience we are describing “the literal properties of objects and events on a peculiar sort of internal cinema or television screen” (Place 1956). David Papineau has a nice diagnosis of why the appearance is so compelling. When we think about a pain with a phenomenal concept we use something like the pain itself, and when we think about it in neural terms we don’t, so the neural description seems to leave the pain out. He calls the resulting inference the antipathetic fallacy (Papineau 2002, 170–71). The appearance is real, and it even has an explanation, but it is not a window onto the metaphysics.

What would change my mind

Physicalism is a metaphysical position, and I have never claimed otherwise. As I said to someone who thought I had, “I already agreed that physicalism is a metaphysical position. The point is that it is the one best supported by the evidence.” My commitment is also more modest than people tend to think. As I put it to Torin, I’m not claiming to know that physicalism is true; what I’m committed to is that it hasn’t been ruled out a priori. It could turn out to be false. If the science of consciousness ever needed to posit something that the rest of science doesn’t, I would follow it there.

Armchair arguments also cut both ways. Years ago I argued that we can just as easily conceive of shombies, creatures who are physical duplicates of us and whose consciousness is wholly physical, and of non-physical zombies, creatures who duplicate us in every non-physical respect but lack consciousness. If conceiving of zombies refutes physicalism, conceiving of these refutes dualism (Brown 2008; Brown 2010). The lesson I drew is that the a priori arguments cancel out, and the empirical evidence should decide.

I told a version of this story years ago (Brown 2010, 49), and I put it to Torin again. Imagine someone in 1768 defending the Aristotelian view that water is a simple element. Told that it might be a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, she says she can imagine a world microphysically identical to ours, H2O and all, but with no water. It turns out she was imagining something contradictory; it only seemed conceivable to her. What we know that she didn’t is not some extra stuff. It is a theory, chemistry backed up by physics, that makes it intelligible how a clear liquid can have parts. In the end both sides are betting on what future theories will look like. I’m betting it will be more of the same, as it was with water. The anti-physicalist is betting on something that has never happened before.

Torin’s reply was that his side has an advantage, since it can accept the premises of the knowledge argument, which he thinks are probably true. Fair enough; that is exactly where we disagree. But notice how he holds the view. He told me that “there’s room for reasonable disagreement,” that he doesn’t claim the argument is certainly true or that we have anything like a decisive reason to accept it, and that he is “always open to” the possibility that he has made a mistake. That is what arguing against physicalism without the antiscience looks like.

What I won’t accept is the certainty that we already know, from the armchair, that physicalism is false, or the demand that physicalists show, right now, how consciousness could be physical before anyone is entitled to believe it. That is what I mean by antiscience. It don’t mean to impugn anyone’s character. Nor do I mean to say you can’t argue for you believe. The issue is over what the argument asks us to believe about evidence. So by all means, change my mind. Just do it with empirical evidence.

References

Alter, T., and R. Brown. 2026. “Consciousness Live! Discussion with Torin Alter.” YouTube video.

Block, N., and R. Stalnaker. 1999. “Conceptual Analysis, Dualism, and the Explanatory Gap.” Philosophical Review 108 (1): 1–46.

Brown, R. 2008. “Non-Physical Zombies.” Blog post.

Brown, R. 2010. “Deprioritizing the A Priori Arguments against Physicalism.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 17 (3–4): 47–69.

Brown, R. 2026. “The Underhandedness of Revelation Based Arguments Against Physicalism.” YouTube video.

Chalmers, D. J., and F. Jackson. 2001. “Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation.” Philosophical Review 110: 315–61.

Dennett, D. C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown.

Goff, P. 2006. “Experiences Don’t Sum.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (10–11): 53–61.

Goff, P. 2017. Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. New York: Oxford University Press.

Goff, P. 2026. “Is Panpsychism Debunked?” YouTube video.

Halper, P. 2026. “Panpsychism Debunked: Why Consciousness Isn’t Everywhere.” YouTube video.

Newton, I. 1693. Letter to Richard Bentley, 25 February 1692/3. The Newton Project.

Papineau, D. 2002. Thinking about Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Place, U. T. 1956. “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?” British Journal of Psychology 47 (1): 44–50.

Roelofs, L. 2020. “Consciousness, Revelation, and Confusion: Are Constitutive Panpsychists Hoist by Their Own Petard?” Dialectica 74 (1): 61–93.

SEP Entry on Higher-Order Theories Gets Worse

Richard Brown Leave a comment

I am currently very, very busy, and I am not just talking about my attempt to get the true secret ending in my NG+ play through of Black Myth: Wukong, or how many celestial ribbons I need to upgrade my gear 😉 But seriously things are pretty hectic for me all around. At LaGuardia I am teaching four classes in our short six week winter semester (General Psychology, Ethics and Moral Issues, Critical Thinking, and Introduction to Philosophy) and at New York University I am filling in as an adjunct for one semester teaching two undergraduate classes (Philosophical Applications of Cognitive Science and Minds and Machines). To top it off, I am teaching the Neuroscience and Philosophy of Consciousness class at the Graduate Center with Tony Ro. That is a lot, even for me! (LaGuardia’s spring semester starts in March so I’ll worry about that later!)…I am also working on a couple of papers, but that is pretty much going to have to wait until I am not teaching five days a week.

But even so, I just noticed (well I noticed a week or so ago but see above, I’ve been busy!) that there was an update to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on higher-order theories of consciousness and I had to make a couple of comments about it.

There is a lot I would complain about in this article in general, and I have long used it as an example of the way in which the introductory material on higher-order theories is misleading and confusing, but I will set that aside for now and focus on the part directly relating to my views about the higher-order theory, which I quote below.

Brown (2015) challenges the common basic assumption that HOT theory is even a relational theory at all in the way that many have interpreted it (i.e., as including two distinct mental states related to each other). Instead, HOT theory is better construed as a HOROR theory, that is, higher-order representation of a representation, regardless of whether or not the target mental state exists. In this sense, HOT theory is perhaps better understood as a non-relational theory.

I have a lot of problems with this paragraph! First, it cites my paper on this from 10 years ago but nothing that I have written on this topic since then! It is true that when I wrote the cited paper I had not worked out out my position in all of its details but I have done a lot of work since then trying to do so. But even in that early paper I do not challenge the basic assumption that the higher-order thought theory is even a relational theory.

What I do is to argue that the Traditional Higher-Order Thought theory, as it is usually talked abut, is ambiguous as between a relational (like Gennaro) and non-relational (like Rosenthal) version. Rosenthal’s theory is a Traditional non-relational HOT theory and Gennaro has a Traditional relational theory. My actual argument is that higher-order theories needs to be mixed non-traditional theories that incorporate relational and non-relational elements for different jobs, but that is another story altogether! I also reject the theoretical posit of higher-order thoughts. I do not think of the kind of higher-order representations I posit as ordinary folk-psychological thoughts that I could think on my own at will. That is the Rosenthal view and I have always found it to be a bit strange. But ok, these hairs can be split another day.

Gennaro continues saying,

…if the qualitative conscious experience always goes with the HOT (including in cases of misrepresentation noted in section 4), then it seems the first-order state plays no relevant role in the theory.

Gennaro means this to be objecting to the HOROR theory and its claim that the higher-order state is itself the phenomenally conscious state. Amusingly, Gennaro here fails to realize that Rosenthal’s own theory is a non-relational theory! So if the objection he raises is supposed to work against my view then it also works against Rosenthal’s.

He then cites Rosenthal’s objection to me without realizing that the way he has set things up that amounts to Rosenthal objecting to Rosenthal! More importantly, I respond directly to the points being made in my book, including to the quote that he uses. He says, “…Rosenthal (2022) points out that Brown’s modified view conflates

a state’s being qualitatively conscious with a necessary condition for qualitative consciousness…there’s rarely anything it’s like to be in a HO state, and HO states are almost never conscious….[i]t’s the first-order state that’s qualitatively conscious. (Rosenthal 2022: 251–252)

On my view Gennaro and Rosenthal are here trying to identifying phenomenal consciousness with state-consciousness, something which I argue in my book itself stands in need of an argument in support. Yes, the higher-order representation is a necessary condition for the first-order mental state to be state-conscious but I argue that state consciousness should be separated from phenomenal consciousness. A state is phenomenally conscious when there is something that it is like for the subject to be in that state. Rosenthal and Gennaro seem to agree implicitly with this. Rosenthal says that there is rarely anything that it is like to be in the relevant higher-order state and it is clear that he is intending this to mean that we are rarely aware of ourselves as being in the higher-order state (I.e. the higher-order state is not usually state-conscious).

I agree with all of that! But in order for this to count as an objection to my view it must be the case that there cannot be something that it is like for one when one is not aware of the state one is in. This amounts to the transitivity principle, (which I argue is the uniting feature of the Traditional higher-order approach) and I explicitly reject the transitivity principle!

In my book I give what I call my HORORibly simple argument (as a nod to Lycan’s original simple argument as follows.

1. A phenomenally conscious state is one which, when one is in that state, there is something that it is like for one to be in it.

2. The state that, when one is in that state, there is something that there is like for one to be in it, is the state of inner awareness.

3. Thus, the phenomenally conscious state is the state of inner awareness.

4. Inner awareness is a representation of one’s own mind.

Thus, a phenomenally conscious state is a representation of one’s own mind.

Put this way we can see that Rosenthal and I disagree about premise 2 and maybe premise 1 but I am not confusing or conflating any kind of necessary condition for any thing else. I am denying that what Rosenthal calls ‘qualitative consciousness’ (insert eye roll) is phenomenal consciousness. It is state-consciousness and they are not the same thing (though they are related).

Let me stress that I feel weird about being somewhat indignant about someone not reading my book or being unaware of my views. I don’t usually expect that anyone will have any familiarity with my work before criticizing my views! However, it does seem to me in this case (of writing an entry for the most widely read online encyclopedia of philosophy) it should have been done. As it is this article pretty badly misunderstands my position and makes no attempt to get it correct. I might be overly suspicious but one can’t help but take this somewhat personally. This entry was originally written by Peter Carruthers and has recently been taken over by Rocco Gennaro, which explains a lot.

I have previously reviewed Gennaro’s book and papers for NDPR and written on this blog about the way in which I think he misunderstands Rosenthal’s approach to higher-order theories. He responded to my post and I invited him to come on Consciousness Live! and have a a discussion with me but he declined (the offer still stands on my end). Gennaro was at one of my talks at Tucson and afterwards asked me a question that directly pertains to the complaint above and we talked about it over dinner. A less paranoid person might think that the pattern of citations suggests that he wrote it before my book came out and the review process took a long time. Perhaps; but the general theme of my work has been made clear to Gennaro for some time. He also definitely knows my email/how to contact me if he wanted to clarify some of my views! All I can say is that had I botched something this bad I would want to correct it immediately.

Ah well, as a humble community college teacher I am still sort-of honored to be mentioned at all in this prestigious scholarly source (and one assumes some editorial heavy-handedness was applied to get even that given how ridiculous all of this is). Maybe someday someone will update that entry to reflect the actual landscape of the debate about higher-order theories of consciousness. The only real question is whether that might get done before we get GTA 6, haha, I mean before the whole debate is empirically mooted!

Animal Consciousness and the Unknown Power of the Unconscious Mind

Richard Brown Leave a comment

Things are about to get really (I mean really) busy for me and so I probably won’t be doing much besides running around frantically until August 2026 (seriously even by my standards it’s going to be a rough ride for a while). Of course I will post the Consciousness Live! discussions once they start (Sept 18) and I am looking forward to Block’s presentation at the NYU Philosophy of Mind discussion group so may try to get to something here and there. At any rate we have been having some very interesting discussions in the philosophy of animal consciousness and society class. We have been discussing the markers and ‘tests’ approach and we read Bayne et al Tests for Consciousness in Humans and Beyond and Hakwan Lau’s The End of Consciousness (there was another paper but I’ll leave it aside for now). There were a lot of good points that came up in the class but I want to focus on the issue that is important to me, which is the methodological/evidential one I discussed in the previous post on this class.

Andrews seems to be trying to frame things by making a distinction between two positions you might have towards animals. The first is that we assume that animals, or a particular organism, is not conscious at all and then we look for markers that would raise our credence that the animal was conscious. So, we look at fish and see if they behave a certain way with respect to tissue damage, etc. If the fish is damaged and seeks a pain reliever then probably that indicates it is conscious and if it doesn’t then not. The second issue assumes that animals are conscious but that we need to establish that they have this or that specific conscious experience. As I am understanding this at this point she sees that marker approach as belonging to the first camp and the tests approach belonging to the second, though I might have misunderstood that point.

I can see why, if you are arguing with a certain type of philosopher/scientist, this may be how you are thinking of tings but I do not think it helps with the methodological challenge to studying animal consciousness. This can bee seen by the response to the argument that I gave in the previous post. That argument relied on the empirical claim that anything that you associated with consciousness could likely be done without consciousness. So when I point out that blindsight seems to suggest that you can have sophisticated behavior without consciousness one response was to say, ‘yeah but that doesn’t show that the blindsight patient has no conscious experience’. Another was ‘yeah but the blindsight subject is a conscious subject’. These are subtly different.

The first is taking the blindsight argument to be suggesting the conclusion that animals are not conscious. The second is suggesting the conclusion that being conscious played an important role in the process that led to the now unconscious behavior. So, the blindsight subject was normally sighted for a period of their life and they had normal visual perception and consciousness. Perhaps that played an important role in their learning how to do what they did and now, even though the process is automatic and can be done unconsciously, that doesn’t mean it could always be done unconsciously. These are good and interesting points but they do not defuse the methodological tension that I am pressing.

As I have said before, I don’t take the issue to be whether animals are conscious or not since I take that to be intuitively obvious; and you may take it to be intuitively obvious that they are not conscious. That is irrelevant since I do not base my beliefs in animal consciousness on science. If you were to ask me if science does support my belief about animals I would say that we at this point do not have scientific evidence that animals are, or are not, conscious because of this methodological issue.

Suppose there is a behavior, neural process, or function, which you take to be associated with consciousness (as either a test, marker, or whatever). Suppose that you think this is a marker or a test, or whatever. I will take as my example a certain pattern of neural activation in the fusiform face area. Suppose that we found that pattern when people looked at faces but not when they looked at houses. Does that indicate that finding that pattern is good evidence that they consciously saw the face? No. The reason is that we have found that same pattern of activation in cases that we have good reason to think are unconscious. (side note: that could be disputed and it is interesting to think about those arguments but lets save that for later). So, this pattern shows up when the subject consciously sees the face and also when the subject does not consciously see the face (but the face is present). Now suppose that someone finds this kind of pattern in a non-human animal. Is that evidence that the animal consciously sees a face? Or is it evidence that this process occurs unconsciously as it did in some human cases? Unless we had some way of telling the two kinds of neural activations apart we should conclude neither that the animal consciously nor that it unconsciously saw the face.

More to the point it would be irresponsible to loudly proclaim that this is evidence that the animal did consciously see the face until the issue above was resolved. None of this suggests that the animal is unconscious. It only suggests that the proposed marker/test is insufficient to establish that until we know the extent of the unconscious mind.

From there one might want to mount the more general argument that anything could be done unconsciously. That is an empirical question that the field should take seriously. Most reasonable people I know of are not saying we should think animals are unconscious, or that science suggests that only mammals/birds are conscious. We are saying that we don’t really know how powerful the unconscious mind is, this hasn’t fully investigated empirically. We have some reason to think it is quite powerful indeed, and some reason to think maybe not. Until we resolve this issue we should be cautious about grand declarations about what science has shown about animals and seriously address these methodological issues.

Philosophy of Animal Consciousness

Richard Brown 2 Comments

The fall 2025 semester is off and running. I have a lot going on this semester, with Consciousness Live! kicking off in September, and teaching my usual 5 classes at LaGuardia. Since the Graduate Center Philosophy Program recently hired Kristen Andrews I have been sitting in on her philosophy of animal consciousness and society class she is offering. We are very early in the the semester but the class is very interesting and I think that Andrews will have a positive impact on the culture at the Grad Center, which is very nice!

It also allows me to address some issues that have long bothered me. As those who know me are aware, I was raised vegetarian and am now vegan. I strongly believe in animal rights and yet also reluctantly accept the role that animals play in scientific research (at least for now). I have always considered it beyond obvious that animals are conscious and that vegetarianism/vegainsim is required on moral grounds because of the suffering of animals (but also I would say there are other reasons to not eat meat).

At the same time I have long argued that we have a conundrum on our hands when it comes to animals. All we have are third-person methods to address their psychological states and they cannot verbally report. In addition we know that many things that seemingly involve consciousness can be done unconsciously. More specifically we can see in the human case that there seem to be instances where people can do things without being able to report on them (like blindsight). Given this the question opens up as to whether any particular piece of evidence one offers in support of the claim that animals are conscious truly supports that claim (given that it might be done unconsciously).

These two claims are not in tension since the first is a moral claim and the second is an epistemic/evidential/methodological claim.

To be honest I have largely avoided talking about animals and consciousness since to me it is hot-button topic that has caused many fights and loss of friends over the years. When one grow up the way I did one sees a great moral tragedy taking place right out in the open as though it is perfectly normal. It is mind-numbingly hard to “meet people where they are” on this issue (for me; to be clear I view this as a shortcoming on my part). Trying to convince people that animals are conscious or trying to convince them that since they are they should be treated in a certain way, and to met with the lowest level of response over and over takes a very special personality type to endure (and I lack it).

Then I met and started working with Joe LeDoux, who has very different views about animals. When I first met Joe he seemed to think that animals did not have experience at all. He also seemed to think that people like Peter Carruthers and Daniel Dennett shared his view, and so that it was somewhat mainstream in philosophy. I remember once he said “there is no evidence that any rat has ever felt fear,” and I was like, but you study fear in rats, so…uh, ????

Over the course of much discussion (and only slightly less whiskey) we gradually clarified that his view was that mammals are most likely conscious but we cannot say what their consciousness is like since they done’t have language. In particular they don’t have the concept ‘fear’ and so can’t be aware of themselves as being afraid. So, whatever their experience is like in a threatening condition it is probably wrong to say that it is fear, since that does seem to involve an awareness of oneself as being in danger. Joe thinks rats can’t have this kind of mental state but I am not so sure. This is an interesting question and I’ll return to it below.

Joe and I largely agreed on the methodological issue, even if we disagreed on which animals might be conscious. The way this has shown up in my own thinking is that I have tried to use this methodological argument to suggest that we won’t learn much about human consciousness from animal models. This suggests we should stop using them in this kind of research until we have a theory of phenomenal consciousness in the human case. Then we can see how far it extends.

This now brings me to Andrews. She has been arguing that we need to change the default assumption in science from one that holds we need to demonstrate that animals are conscious to just accepting this as the background default view: All animals are conscious. Her argument for this is, in part, that we don’t have any good way to determine if animals are conscious (i.e. the marker approach fails). She also argues that we need what she calls a “secure” theory of consciousness which could answer these questions. Since we don’t have that we should just assume that animals are consciousness. This, she continues, would allow us to make progress on other issues in the science of consciousness.

So it seems we agree on quite a bit. We both think that only a well-established “secure” theory of consciousness would allow us to definitively answer the question about animals. We both agree that the marker approach isn’t successful (though for slightly different reasons). We also both agree that the “demarcation” problem of trying to figure out which animals are conscious or where to draw the line between animals that are and are not conscious should be put aside for now.

But I don’t agree that we should change the default assumption. This is because I don’t think the default assumption is that animals are not conscious. The default assumption is this: any behavior that can be associated with consciousness can be produced without consciousness. That should not be changed without good empirical reason because we have good empirical reasons to accept it. However, even if we did change that default assumption we would still face the methodological challenge above with respect to the particular qualities, or what it is like for the animal. So, for now at least, I still think the science of consciousness is best done in humans.

Consciousness Without First-Order Representations

Richard Brown Leave a comment

I am getting ready to head out to San Diego for the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness 17th Annual meeting. I have organized a symposium on the Role of the Prefrontal Cortex in Conscious Experience which will feature talks by Rafi Malach, Joe Levine, Doby Rahnev, and me! A rehearsal of my talk is below. As usual any feedback appreciated.

Also relevant are the following papers:

1.(Lau & Brown) The Emperor’s New Phenomenology? The Empirical Case for Conscious Experience without First-Order Representations

2. (Brown 2012) The Brain and its States

The ASSC Students have also set up the following online debate forum: http://theasscforum.blogspot.com/2013/06/symposium-1-prefrontal-cortex.html

A longer video explaining the Rahnev results can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gQYdGRbkpE

Lot’s of ways to get involved in the discussion!

[cross-posted at Brains]