In Being No One, Thomas Metzinger attempts to develop a thorough and systematic approach to consciousness and subjectivity – one based fundamentally on a teleofunctionalist and naturalist view of consciousness. In other words, an approach to consciousness that presents it as necessarily supervening on a neural basis and as subject-to and a product-of evolutionary pressures. Perhaps surprisingly, in many ways Metzinger’s project comes across as a neurological updating of Kant’s project. Instead of the ‘conditions’ of possible experience, Metzinger deduces the ‘constraints’ constitutive of phenomenal consciousness and self-consciousness. Unlike Kant, however, Metzinger refuses to describe consciousness in a single, unitary way. With the advances in psychology, neuroscience and phenomenology, we can now achieve a much more detailed and nuanced view of consciousness. One of the most significant aspects of Metzinger’s work is therefore the integration of deficient forms of phenomenal consciousness – ones where a particular constraint may be absent as the result of neurological damage. The end result is a set of necessary and contingent constraints for consciousness to occur. The addition or subtraction of a particular constraint leads to entirely different forms of consciousness.
To give an example of this, here is the list of 10 constraints for full-fledged everyday consciousness to appear (note, this is not yet self-consciousness – a phenomenon which requires similar constraints, but that I hope to cover later):
(1) Global availability
(2) Activation within a window of presence
(3) Integration into a coherent global state
(4) Convolved holism
(8) Offline activation
(9) Representation of intensities
(10) The homogeneity of simple content
Using global availability as an example, we can begin to also draw some other important analytic distinctions. This first constraint – global availability – refers to information being available to the neurophenomenal system on 3 separate levels: attentional, behavioural, and cognitive. Straightforwardly enough, on a phenomenological level this means, respectively, that we can focus our attention on an object, that we can generate motor responses to an object, and that we can conceive of an object. Just as each constraint may be missing, so too can each of these 3 levels be missing. The most obvious example that Metzinger gives is of the extremely subtle shades of color – we can attend to these, and we can behaviourally use this information, but we cannot conceive of these and put them into concepts. There is an intrinsic ineffability to the subtle nuances of colors that restricts our ability to identify them. For example, we can attentionally distinguish between Red-41 and Red-42 when they are both placed before us, but we cannot identify Red-41 as Red-41 on its own. We have no concept capable of identifying this patch of color as Red-41 and not Red-42 before us. In this case then, the cognitive aspect of global availability is absent.
A more extreme case, and a philosophically even more interesting case, occurs in blindsight. Individuals with this condition are unable to consciously perceive a specific portion of their world. They are missing all three aspects of global availability. Surprisingly, however, in experiments, these individuals reveal that they still have some relation to this information – they can even successfully ‘guess’ whether a wavelength presented to them is red or blue. In other words, there is a subconscious level of neural processing that is still capable of using this information from the senses, but this information is never made globally available. This, therefore, gives an example of how a missing constraint affects the neurophenomenal system as a whole. The phenomenal aspects entirely disappear, but the information is still functioning at a different level.
Already, we can begin to sense some of the important ways in which Metzinger differs from Kant. We’ve already mentioned that unlike Kant’s single characterization of experience (the categories and forms of intuition, plus sensible content), Metzinger provides a much more nuanced view of phenomenal experience. Secondly, unlike Kant, Metzinger refuses to make the transcendental subject the ultimate foundation of these phenomenal conditions. Instead, following the success of neuroscience, it is the brain (and evolution) that must ultimately produce the conditions underlying our experience. This entails that at each step, Metzinger provide some functional explanation of the constraint – what it adds to the organism that helps in its survival.
For example, we can look at the third constraint – integration into a coherent global state. This constraint entails that our phenomenal experience is not only a combination of various events, but is also holistic. Unlike simple unity, this experiental holism means that it is not a mere set of independent events, but rather a set of parts integrated into a whole. They are all coherently related together. What this enables the organism to do is to establish what Metzinger will call a ‘world-zero’. This refers to the untranscendable experience of being situated into a coherent and stable world. In other words, it is the source of naive realism – the simple belief that there is a stable world (although not necessarily that ‘we’ are in a world, yet). Functionally, the evolutionary value stems from the fact that this gives the organism a reference point for any hypotheses, planning or simulation of possible actions. With a reference point in world-zero, the organism can now begin to compare models of actions and try to discern the best plan. It is, clearly, a key evolutionary step.
Like Kant, however, Metzinger falls into a significant problem – one that has gone unanswered so far (2/3 of the way through the book). As Kant was unable to provide knowledge of the noumenal world, so too Metzinger ultimately seems unable to ground his neurological knowledge in the nature of reality. As Metzinger points out numerous times, there is no guarantee that our conscious experiences and the cognitive knowledge built upon them are accurate representations of reality-in-itself. He frequently points out that phenomenal immediacy and phenomenal certainty are not equivalent to epistemic immediacy and certainty. What may be given to us a immediately and intuitively present has no necessary relation to what is actually causing our experience. If our neurological structures produce conscious experience in such a way, the question becomes: what is the status of knowledge derived from these constructed experiences?
We can presume that this knowledge is at least functionally adequate, insofar as our evolutionary success would seem impossible otherwise. But this in and of itself does not constitute knowledge in a rigorous sense. In a brief section on the formation of the temporal present, Metzinger goes so far as to point out that the simultaneity of our experience – the fact of our phenomenal experience occurring within a bounded temporal moment – need not be replicated in the world. In other words, despite our intuitions about there being a single, temporally linear world (an intuition premised upon the dynamism of experience), there is no necessary correlate of this representation outside of consciousness. If this is the case, however, then it’s quite possible to question the epistemic status of neuroscience, since it is a body of knowledge subject to the same constraints outlined by Metzinger. He does argue that consciousness must necessarily be embodied – and so we have reason for some form of realism – but it is also possible that a brain in a vat would give the same phenomenal experience as a fully embodied and active organism. We have knowledge of the necessity of a physical embodiment, but we have no knowledge of what this realm actually consists of.
There seems to be to be a few possible answers to this problem. Perhaps the most common one is to see science as a form of pragmatism that simply makes no claims to absolute truth and instead develops open-ended theories that are then tested against empirical reality. A sort of reciprocal conditioning occurs between praxis and theory. The problem is that this seems to make scientific truth merely a rigorous form of intersubjective agreement, thereby sidestepping science’s realist implications. Another response is to argue that evolution has given us the means to establish accurate knowledge – a position suggested by the apparent evolutionary success of our knowledge. However, Ray Brassier has convincingly argued against this in Nihil Unbound, showing that this relies on untenable metaphysical presuppositions. Perhaps, though, this problem is what leads Brassier to Laruelle insofar as Laruelle’s non-philosophy offers a form of philosophy (or knowledge) that refuses to take itself as self-sufficient. Instead, radical immanence is determining-in-the-last-instance of all attempts to conceptualize the emergence of cognition. Knowledge, even neuroscientific knowledge, cannot logically present itself as being metaphysically self-sufficient – it requires this unobjectifiable immanence as its presupposition. Perhaps…