Being and Consciousness: On a New Way to Conceive of the Mind-Body Relation

I

It is not an exaggeration to maintain that Thomas Nagel’s paper, “What is it Like to Be a Bat?”, which originally appeared in 1974, fundamentally altered the field of the philosophy of mind. By raising his titular question and inviting us to imagine what it might be like to be a bat, or what it might feel like to be one, Nagel helped focus the philosophical discussion on what he took to be an essential feature of consciousness. As Nagel put it, “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism”.¹ This “something it is like” feature, which is known among researchers of consciousness as a “phenomenal property of consciousness” or “qualia”, constitutes the qualitative nature of conscious experience, and as such, Nagel claimed, constitutes the subjective point of view. It has to do with the central important and ubiquitous feature of our conscious lives, namely, that they are typically characterized by a felt quality: there is something it feels like to experience consciously the taste of the Zinfandel wine, the softness of a lover’s embrace, or the pain in one’s toe. Indeed, these phenomenal features constitute the very substance of our lives, without which our existence would be utterly empty of all the variety and riches that can make a life worth living, but which can also drive one to despair. Importantly, however, according to Nagel’s argument, those essential features of consciousness, as subjective, could not possibly be captured by the scientific or objective point of view on the world. They just don’t belong to the world as discovered or as discoverable and understood by physics, chemistry, biology, or neurophysiology. Put differently, they are not, it seems, part of the material world. How, then, is phenomenal consciousness, those conscious states characterized by a what-it-is-like, related to the world of matter? How to understand the relation between such conscious states and matter, between the subjective and the objective, in a positive way?

This is a central question in the cluster of problems that make up the mind-body problem, and it has bedeviled thinkers for centuries, at least since Descartes’ proposal that the mind is a radically distinct kind of thing or substance, an immaterial thing, which, though not extending in space like our physical body, interacts causally with it. Others, more suspicious of the notion of an immaterial substance and the mysteries it introduces, have preferred to regard conscious mentality as a kind of immaterial property: just as a physical thing could have a physical property such as being five feet long, so it can have the immaterial property of being in conscious pain. Still others have chosen to embrace the scientific point of view wholeheartedly and regard consciousness in all its aspects as identical to the physical, specifically, to some neural states of the brain, or perhaps, to the micro elements that constitute fundamental physics.² This approach, however, raises an intriguing issue of its own: how can the experience of the sweet smell of the rose just be one and the same thing as neurons firing in the brain?³

But is it possible that a fundamentally different way to think about consciousness’ relation to the body is available, one already implicitly contained in Nagel’s famous question? Interestingly, in some of his formulations, as in the one quoted above, Nagel italicizes the locution “to be”, as if to emphasize that the notion of being at work here is of some significance. Nagel, however, does not proceed to explain it. Indeed, while discussions of Nagel’s paper⁴ emphasize the notion of phenomenal consciousness, or the distinction between the two points of view Nagel articulates in the paper, the subjective and the objective, or focus on the semantics of “what it’s like” phrases or whether the phrase “what it is like” is technical talk or not,⁵ the question regarding the concept of being employed in the paper is not addressed.

As I argue here, however, this is precisely where the key to a radically new way – a metaphysical way – to understand the consciousness-body relation lies, that is, one that involves a distinct and unique concept of being, a concept which I will dub “subjective being”. This concept of being, unexplored in philosophy hitherto, indicates a relation of sorts between the organism and its conscious states. This relation is the link that connects the body to conscious experience, the objective to the subjective. Specifically, I will articulate the view that to be an organism, that is, to be it oneself – in the subjective being sense of “to be” – is to undergo phenomenally conscious states. Indeed, it is the conviction motivating the thoughts in what follows that it is only by introducing new concepts such as subjective being into philosophy that we can move beyond the stalemates that have defined the philosophy of mind in recent decades.

II

To get started, let me first provide some examples of the concept of subjective being. As we shall now see, it is quite familiar. Consider the following expressions:

1) ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ (henceforth, “Nagel’s question”).

2) ‘I wonder what it is like to be a lamprey’.

3) ‘There is nothing it feels like to be a rock or a chair’.

4) ‘Being John Malkovich must be exhausting’.

What do we mean by the “to be” or “being” locutions in these instances? What concept of being is employed in such expressions? That we understand the concept of being at work in such formulations, at least to some degree, is clear: we wield it in the everyday or semi-mundane instances just mentioned seemingly felicitously, and we seem to understand its use in professional philosophical discussion, as in Nagel’s question. When Nagel asks what it is like to be a bat or claims that ‘an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism’, it seems we understand what he means. Nevertheless, as noted, this concept has not heretofore been recognized by philosophy as distinct and has accordingly not been explicitly thematized. But how should this concept be understood?

The challenges here are considerable since being, as has been known in philosophy since the time of the ancient Greeks, is multifarious and perplexing. As Aristotle said in his Metaphysics, “being is said in many ways”, and as Heidegger claimed more than two thousand years later in his Being and Time, the question of the meaning of “being” has become “obscure and without direction”. So, to get some further clarification on the thesis propounded here, the notion of subjective being must be illuminated, and to achieve that task, it must first of all be distinguished from other notions. As I will try to show, subjective being is distinct from the central concepts of being familiar to us from the history of philosophy, namely, being as attribution of property, being as existence, and being as identity.

Let me first explain a bit more what is meant by the claim that the concept expressed by the “to be” in Nagel’s question and the other formulations given above is distinct from these other concepts. What I mean is that the concept cannot be replaced by them: it expresses a sense that cannot be captured by these other concepts, which is why attempts to replace it by means of these other concepts while preserving the sense of the original formulations in which it appears fail. Rather, the view is that subjective being is sui generis. Let us now turn to the more familiar ways to understand being and see how subjective being stands with respect to them.

The first sense of being I shall consider is that of property attribution, used when we judge, for example that “The bug is black” or “The bug is big”. In these instances, a certain property, i.e., the property of being black or big, is attributed to the entity which is the bug.⁶ Though this is a complex matter, I believe this sheds no light on the concept of being at work in Nagel’s question and the other formulations. To hold that the “to be” in Nagel’s question plays the role of property attribution is to hold that that the term “bat” in the question refers to the property attributed by the “to be”. But this is to conflate the categories of an individual or particular thing with that of a property. “Bat” in Nagel’s question does not refer to a property (such as “black”, “big”, or “has a positive charge”), and so the “to be” in “to be a bat” does not play the role of attributing the property of being a bat to anything. Rather, “bat” in Nagel’s question refers to a particular with certain properties, or an individual entity or substance with certain properties: the question asks us to posit a (stereotypical) bat, namely, a particular or individual animal with certain characteristic properties, and asks what it is like to be that individual, propertied thing. Properties are ways for things to exist (“hot”, “red”, etc.), while terms like “bat” are terms for kinds, which are not properties but substantial universals, which can be instantiated by particular objects. Kind terms indicate not ways for something to exist, but tell us what something is (see Lowe 2006, pp.90-93). The “to be”, then, is distinct from the concept of being as property attribution.

Another way to see this is to consider sentence 4) above: when we express a judgment like 4) or when we judge that there is something it is like to be John Malkovich, it seems that with the proper name we wish to refer to particular being, not to a property. The same is the case when we wonder, “I wonder what it is like to be you”: “you”, I think it is plausible to hold, does not refer to a property, but to the particular propertied person before me.

Further, suppose a bat is presented to me, and suppose, for the sake of argument, that to be a bat is a kind of property. Now, it seems that in such a situation I can then judge correctly, assuming I possess the requisite knowledge, that this entity before me has the property of being a bat. But having established this, I can now wonder about being the particular propertied entity before me and about whether being it feels like anything. Thus, to be the bat before me is a further, additional matter beyond the matter of the entity before me possessing certain properties. And, correspondingly, the concept of being it, the bat, goes beyond the concept of being as property attribution.

A second way to understand the concept of being is as expressing existence or non-existence, that is, the reality or unreality of something, as in the judgments “there is a bug on the rug”, or “there is no milk in the fridge”, or, as in Descartes’ dictum, “I am”. But this approach too, as should be clear, fails to capture the sense of the “to be” phrase in Nagel’s question and the other formulations. This is so since it is not the existence of the bat or of bats in general that is at issue in the question: the “to be” in the question is not used to ask about a bat’s existence or assert the existence of this or that bat, etc.; rather, its assumed or posited existence is already implicitly presupposed by the question that concerns what it is like to be it. In other words, we are asked by the question to posit an existing bat, and then consider being it, being the existing entity. Indeed, if presented with a bat, I can judge that it exists (it is right there before my eyes), but then, in addition, I can wonder about what it is like to be it. If this is right, then the question about being the bat goes beyond the matter of its existence, and so the concept of being at work in Nagel’s question and the other formulations is a distinct one than that of existence.

The third sense of being to be considered is being as the relation of numerical identity. We make use of the concept of this relation when, for example, we assert a truth such as “A is A”, or when we judge that “the (in)famous, nineteenth-century, moustache-bearing philosopher is Nietzsche”. Can this sense of being capture the sense of the “to be” in Nagel’s question? Let me explain why I think the answer is No.

Consider the judgment ‘there is something it is like to be a bat’. If the “to be” here just means numerical identity, then, it seems, the phrase “to be a bat” must, if anything, relate the bat to itself, that is the bat, not to any something-it-is-like. In other words, when we judge that ‘there is something it is like to be a bat’ we don’t mean to say that bats are numerically identical to certain phenomenal conscious experiences. The same point can be made with the help of ‘there is nothing it feels like to be a stone’. Surely the judgment is not meant to claim that an absence of phenomenal conscious states is numerically identical to a stone. It thus seems that the notion of being in Nagel’s question and the other formulations – namely, the notion of subjective being – does not relate, as in numerical identity, the entity (e.g. a bat) to itself, but rather relates it to something else, namely, to what it feels like to be that entity.

We can thus already get a sense of the distinctness of the concept of being at work in Nagel’s question and the other expressions: this concept cannot be captured in terms of the more familiar concepts of being.

It might be thought that the concept of being in Nagel’s question and the other expressions can be captured using some other notion, that is, a notion that is not one of the traditional concepts of being. Specifically, the suggestion is that Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” could be interpreted as “What is it like to have bat experiences?”, where “experiences” is to be understood as referring to episodes, states, or processes characterized by phenomenal consciousness; episodes, states, or processes it feels like something to have or undergo. In this way, an entity’s having of experiences, is supposedly substituted for being the entity. This suggestion, however, cannot work. The concepts of an entity’s having experiences and being an entity are distinct, for while being an entity does not imply the entity’s having experiences and so there being any thing it is like to have them, an entity’s having experiences does by definition imply there being something it is like to have them. Consequently, the “to have experiences” phrase, when used to replace the “to be” locution in such a statement as “there is nothing it is like to be a rock”, cannot help us express the same thought that it does and so cannot replace it.

III

How, then, should the “to be”, that is, subjective being, be understood? As suggested above, subjective being denotes a relation, and the relation denoted by subjective being relates an entity such as a bat or a human or a rock to its phenomenally conscious states, or the absence thereof, as the case may be. It is the relation that relates the objective to the subjective: to be the entity (object, organism), that is, to be it oneself, is to experience certain characteristic phenomenally conscious states, that is, to undergo certain subjective states (or to not experience anything). When we judge that there is something it is like to be a bat, we first, in effect, posit a bat, and then judge that being one, being it oneself, is to undergo certain characteristic subjective experiences.

The concept of subjective being, I wish to suggest, thus points to a difference: a difference between an object or an entity (organism, thing) and being it. A difference that in some cases, as in the case of the bat, amounts to something, given that there is something it is like to be a bat, and in some other cases, as in the case of the rock, amounts to nothing, since there isn’t anything it is like to be a rock. This difference can be called a metaphysical difference: it refers to the radical difference between the physical entity or thing on the one hand, and what goes beyond it, or the meta-physical, i.e., the conscious mind, on the other.

Let me further explain these ideas by looking at two issues: the first concerns what reason there is to interpret the “to be” as a relation of sorts, and the second concerns more specifically determining the items the relation relates, that is, the relation’s relata. Starting with the first issue, consider again the expressions “What it is like to be a bat?” or “there is nothing it is like or feels like to be a rock”. Considering these instances, I think there is prima facie reason to think of the “to be” employed by these expressions as a kind of a relation: if we examine the surface structure of such expressions, it appears to resemble the structure of expressions that evidently involve relations. Thus, we can compare Nagel’s “what is it like to be a bat?” to “what is the successor of the number four?” or “what is the object located to the right of the vase?”. In all three cases, I wish to suggest, we are asking about a reality of some kind – a certain kind of phenomenal conscious states, a certain natural number, a certain physical object, respectively – that is implicitly assumed by the question to stand in a certain relation – that of subjective being, that of succession, that of spatial proximity – to another object or reality: the bat, the number four, the vase, respectively. Similarly, we can compare “there is nothing it is like to be a rock” to “there is nothing to the right of the vase”: in these cases, an object (the rock, the vase) is claimed to be standing in a relation to the absence of something.

But what reason is there to think the objective and the subjective should be thought of as the terms or the relata which subjective being relates? Assuming that there is something it is like to be a bat, and that this consists of the bat’s subjective life, i.e. of its phenomenal consciousness, then it seems natural to assume that what is thought in the concept of “bat” in the judgment “there is something it is like to be a bat” and thus what is related in the judgment to the bat’s consciousness, does not include those subjective states of the bat, but rather the bat as an object, that is, the bat as conceived from the objective point of view, i.e. as a physical thing of sorts. In other words, when we judge “there is something it is like to be a bat” we are in effect judging that to be the bat as objectively conceived, to be the object which is the bat, is to undergo certain phenomenally conscious subjective states. In this sense, we can see how subjective being is used to related the subjective to the objective.

Now, what the objective conception of a thing is is of course a difficult matter to determine, but we can assume that to conceive an entity objectively is to think of it from the third-person perspective, or “from the outside”; a conception that comes in degrees, can vary from one thinker to the next, and in its most sophisticated form consists of our scientific conception of the thing in question. Thus, to conceive of the bat objectively is to conceive of it, minimally, as a thing with certain external features, but also in terms of its behavior, and – at a higher grade of sophistication and complexity – its anatomy, neurophysiology, etc., or, to generalize, in terms of its physical properties. Or consider the judgment that holds that “there is nothing it is like to be a rock”. Here too, by “rock”, one conceives of the rock objectively, from the objective point of view, that is, as an object of sorts which possesses a variety of physical properties, and asserts that to be the object which is the rock amounts to no subjectivity at all. In all instances involving this concept of being, we reflect on an entity objectively, or from the outside, and then relate it, by considering being that entity, to its various phenomenally conscious, subjective states: to its feelings, emotions, sensations, moods, affects, etc., or the absence thereof.⁷

Importantly, to emphasize, the relation of subjective being, as here understood, is not merely a term or concept that resides only in the mind. That is, if it is true that to be a bat is to undergo such-and-such experiences, then this is true regardless of our awareness or conception of it, which implies that the relation of subjective being holds in reality itself. It is a real relation that has real “consequences”: to be something, that is, to be an entity with various physical properties, at least in the case of some things, is to undergo phenomenally conscious states, that is, to have subjectivity.

IV

To shed further light on the relation of subjective being it will be instructive to compare it to the relation of numerical identity. We can start with the following observation. While numerical identity relates every reality to itself and only to itself: A=A, or this bat= this bat, in the case of subjective being, to be A (as in “to be a bat”), is M, where M is something totally other than A, indeed, metaphysically other than A, that is, a conscious state, or nothing at all (e.g. to be a rock is not to experience anything). Symbolizing subjective identity with the “=S” sign, we can state that A=S M, where this should be read as “to be object A is to undergo conscious experiences M”. This means, as we can clearly see, that in contrast to numerical identity, in the case of subjective being, the two terms used to refer to A and B are not co-referential, but refer to radically different things: an object on the one hand, i.e., some physical thing or organism, and conscious experiences on the other hand.

Furthermore, while numerical identity, as said, takes all realities of whatever kind as its relata, whether these are conscious states, atoms, or numbers, subjective being takes all and only things or objects (e.g. organisms) on the one hand, and relates an individual object, A, which I will refer to as the base relatum, to a metaphysically distinct reality, on the other, or to nothing at all (=S M, consciously minding, or nothing at all).⁸ The reason for the claim that subjective being applies to all (bona fide) objects (thing, entities, substances) is that with respect to every object we can legitimately ask, “what is it like to be it?” or assert that “there is something it feels like to be it” or “there is nothing it feels like to be it”.⁹

Another important difference between the two relations is this: I can judge a priori that A, whatever it is, and however it is conceived of, is identical to itself,¹⁰ but I cannot do the same when it comes to subjective being. Here what A is, or rather, how it is conceived, matters, in the following way: First, whether there is something at all it is to be A in the sense of subjective being cannot be deduced analytically from the objective concept of A, where the objective concept is a concept of the thing as thought of from the objective, third-person point of view. This is not to deny that an objective concept of A can give me reason for thinking that there is something it is to be A – reasons related to the thing’s physical constitution and behavior – or that there is nothing at all to be it. Thus, the objective concept of a rock, in contrast to that of a bat, gives good reason for thinking there is nothing it is like to be it in the subjective sense. But this fact, namely, that there is nothing it is like to be it, cannot be analytically deduced from the objective concept of a rock. In other words, there is nothing contradictory, sticking to the objective concept of a rock, about a rock with experiences. Second, what it is to be A, when there is something it is like to be it, cannot be known a priori just on the basis of the objective concept of A. Put differently, what being that thing is – when it is anything at all – can only be known a posteriori by actually being that thing.¹¹

Further points of comparison with numerical identity can be made. The relation of numerical identity is characterized by symmetry, reflexivity, and transitivity. How do things stand with subjective being? First, subjective being is asymmetrical. While “the morning star = is the evening star” is just as true as its reverse, “to be a bat is to undergo certain experiences” ≠ “to be the undergoing of certain experiences is a bat”. Second, the relation of subjective being is irreflexive: bat ≠S bat: what it is like to be an entity is not an entity itself. Finally, the relation is intransitive: this is so because what being X is, given that it is not a thing or an object but a subjective experience, cannot itself in turn be the base relatum for another iteration of the subjective being relation, since the base relatum for subjective being, as explained above, can only be an object.

Despite these dissimilarities, subjective being and numerical identity share a couple of features. First, in both cases the relation’s relata do not exist independently of each other. Thus, in the case of numerical identity where A=A, there are no two distinct and independently existing A’s that come to be related by means of identity. Similarly, in the case of subjective being, what it is like to be A, namely B, is not something that exists independently of A and only comes to be related to it by means of subjective being: subjective being does not relate independently real relata. Neither does A cause B or bring it about. Rather to be A is B, or, B is what to be A is.

Second, and relatedly, in the case of numerical identity, it is enough to posit a reality of any kind for it to stand in a relation of identity to itself. Its standing in a relation of identity to itself follows automatically from its reality – there is no need to add any property to it so as to make it stand in this relation, that is, to turn it into a relatum. Rather, its very reality implies being a relatum of the identity relation. Thus, once a chair comes into being, say, the relation of it being identical to itself immediately obtains – no property need be added to the chair for it to stand in the relation of identity to itself. Similarly, in the case of subjective being, once an object A is posited, it automatically stands in the relation of subjective being to something or nothing at all; its very reality implies being a relatum of this relation. That is, in the specific case of a bat, for instance, for it to stand in the relation of subjective being, no extra kind of “thing” or property needs to be added to it; it does not have to be “primed” in any way for it to become a relatum of subjective identity. So once there is a bat, there is something it is like to be it.

V

Let me now turn to address an objection to the view so far presented. The issue is this: it seems, on the face of it at least, that we have reason to think that the judgment “there is something it is like to be a bat” is true: judging on the basis of bats’ behavior and physiology, it seems quite plausible to hold that bats have conscious experiences of a certain kind. But if a judgment as “there is something it is like to be a bat” employs a distinct concept of being, signifying a relation between the objective and the subjective, then this means that subscribing to the truth of this judgment would then commit one to the reality of this distinct relation; it would mean committing oneself to the metaphysical view that this relation holds between objects and subjective experience in the world, and from this commitment one might recoil.¹² One might reason: “Initially this judgment appeared rather plausible, but I can now see that it comes with a rather inconvenient metaphysical baggage, and so I wish to retract my endorsement of it”.

I don’t think, however, that this response, while understandable, is forced upon us: recognizing that a claim one takes to be true or plausible has certain metaphysical implications one was not previously aware of does not necessarily imply that one should now abandon one’s initial allegiance to the claim. To give an analogy – though, of course, this is but an analogy – suppose there are good reasons to be a realist about certain kinds of mathematical entities. Would the subsequent conceptual discovery that these entities possess hitherto unknown mathematical properties rationally necessitate abandoning one’s realist view about them? I don’t see why.

It is perhaps a recognition of the ontological implications of one’s initial belief accompanied by an adherence to an additional principle such as Ockham’s Razor that might justify the abandonment of the initial belief. But here too, it matters greatly how one implements the principle: on one possible reading, the principle states that one should not multiply entities beyond the minimum theoretically required. But then, to use the principle in our case – the case of subjective being – so as to justify the abandonment of the judgment at issue, one would have to explain why the assumption of the reality of such as a relation as subjective being is not theoretically required. One would have to show, specifically, that one has at one’s disposal an at-least-equally attractive view of the relation between subjectivity and the body which is also metaphysically thinner. Whether a case for this could be made is of course a very difficult matter to resolve and I certainly cannot go into further detail here, but the history of the philosophy of mind does not give one reason to be optimistic about the prospects of the available and known views to provide a more satisfying account of this relation.

Of course, if the metaphysical commitments were theoretically costly then this would be a different story. That is, if, for instance, the commitments clashed with other well-established commitments of ours, appeared to be nonsensical, or led to contradiction somewhere in our system of beliefs or our metaphysics, then these would be good reasons to reject them and judgments that entailed them. But, as far as I can see, this is not the case with subjective being.

One might nevertheless have the nagging doubt that even if bats have experiences and even if subjective being is indeed a distinct concept, this concept need not relate in reality itself the bat to its experiences. If, however, by “need not” the idea is meant that we might be wrong and subjective being might not be found in reality itself, then I agree. But this was never asserted to be the case. The thought is merely that we have reason to accept the judgment as true, and that taking it as true involves commitment to the belief that subjective being denotes a real relation. No infallibility is asserted here.

V

But of what significance is this new way to understand the mind-body relation? What implications does it have for philosophy and the sciences of consciousness? Needless to say, many of the details of this view have to be worked out, most importantly its implications for understanding mind-body interaction. Nevertheless, the following can be said.

A first point to make follows quite straightforwardly from the reflections provided above: if the relation between the organism and consciousness is that of subjective being, and if the latter is distinct from the more familiar relations of numerical identity or causality, then the central traditional approaches to the mind-body relation are false: consciousness should not be identified with the physical (whether at the micro or macro level) or seen as caused by it. Furthermore, and in contrast to some panpsychic views that have been gaining popularity recently,¹³ consciousness does not lie at the foundation of all physical reality; it is rather certain highly complex physical systems (that involve something like a brain, for example) that are such that to be them is like something.¹⁴

At the same time, however, the view propounded here is physicalistic in the sense that it does not assume and need not assume the existence of something like an immaterial, Cartesian substance, nor the existence of immaterial properties of physical things: besides the relation of subjective being, the view only needs assume the reality of particular physical things and their various physical properties, since the undergoing of phenomenal consciousness, on this view, is what it is to be a physical thing, not a thing in itself (whether material or physical). Nevertheless, phenomenal consciousness, of conscious experience, is real: the reality of the conscious mind is preserved as something that goes beyond the reality of the physical. This is so since, on this view, the physical does not comprehend all that is real: there is also what can be regarded as the metaphysical, which includes what it is to be the physical, which is (at least in some instances) the phenomenally conscious mind.

We should also make explicit a point that was presupposed in the discussion so far, namely, that even though the main example used was that of biological organisms, nothing in the argument hangs on this: subjective being can be carried beyond the case of organisms. Thus, the concept of subjective being could be applied to all instances of phenomenal consciousness: in all such cases, it is the relation of subjective being that could be regarded as relating the entity to its subjectivity (or lack thereof), whether that entity is an organism or an artificial entity such as a robot. Needless to say, this in itself cannot help us settle the question of whether there is a subjectivity to relate to a given entity or not; the suggestion is only that if there is, it is related to the entity by means of subjective being. Concretely, if a certain silicon-based artificial intelligence system is conscious in the sense at issue here, then the relation of its consciousness, or subjective life, to its material substrate should be understood as follows: to be the silicon-based system which makes up this artificial intelligence unit is to undergo its various conscious, subjective states.

The claim, however, that non-organic systems could also possess consciousness, where the latter is related by subjective being to its material “base”, is not to be understood as siding with the view, favored by some functionalists, that the specific kind of matter out of which a system is made makes no difference and it is rather the functional organization of the system that counts for the reality of consciousness. Quite the opposite, since it is being the system that matters, including all of its various physical properties, it is not merely what the system does, but what it is made out of, i.e., its various physical properties, that can make a difference to consciousness, since it is these properties that the relation of subjective being relates to consciousness, if present.¹⁵ Put differently, two functionally indistinguishable systems, one carbon-based and the other silicon-based, would not necessarily both possess consciousness if one of them does, and if both of them do, the qualitative character of the conscious subjectivity associated with each could differ.

But what could the physical properties be, such that their possession would make a system such that being it is consciously minding? A result of the view propounded here, is that those properties would not bear their special nature on their sleeve, so to speak. Otherwise put, there would be nothing unique about these physical properties qua physical properties that would make one suspect that it is the possession of them that differentiates between a rock and a bat consciousness-wise. This is so because, on the view suggested here, it is not the physical properties themselves, or their various interactions, that cause consciousness or that could be regarded as identical to consciousness; rather, it is to be those properties, or rather, the propertied system or entity, that is to undergo consciousness, while the relation of subjective being itself is not a physical property and is as such undetectable from the objective or scientific point of view.

This implies that the empirical, scientific science of consciousness has its limits: science, as our most sophisticated realization of the objective point of view, cannot capture all of reality. Science can thus describe and analyze the brain, for instance, in a comprehensive and thorough way and ideally deliver a perfect understanding of its chemical, physiological, and neural elements and the multifarious ways in which these interact and the various patterns they help bring about, leaving nothing out, and still would not catch a glimpse of the subjective reality that these physical elements are related to by subjective being. This conclusion resembles, of course, Frank Jackson’s (1982) famous argument about Mary the scientist, who had complete knowledge of physical reality, but could still not derive from this knowledge facts concerning what it is like to see a red apple. The view presented here explains this result: since undergoing conscious experiences or states is being the physical (i.e. a certain specific physical system), and since being the physical is distinct, indeed, metaphysically distinct than the physical, knowledge of the physical by itself, complete as it may be, will never, as a matter of principle, yield knowledge of consciousness.

In addition, and relatedly, thinking about consciousness as related to the physical by subjective being helps shed new light on the “hard problem” of consciousness promulgated by David Chalmers. The problem, succinctly put, is expressed by Chalmers by the question, “Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?” (Chalmers 1995, p.201). But if the explanation sought by the “why” question raised here is a scientific one, and if the view articulated here is on the right track, then no answer to such a question is forthcoming: the hard problem is insuperable precisely because of the metaphysical gap that yawns between the body and consciousness, namely, what I called the metaphysical difference.

Finally, the view helps establish or restore to consciousness or subjectivity their unique place in in the world in a manner which, I believe, fits our intuitions. Specifically, it seems we have a strong sense that while we are on the one hand intimately related to this object which is our body, we also regard ourselves, on the other hand, as not mere objects or things, but as subjects. I maintain, however, that in all approaches hitherto, the question of how to make metaphysical or ontological sense of subjectivity, has not been adequately answered. Thus, in materialistic or physicalistic approaches – whether of the identity or functionalist kind, not to mention the eliminativistic kind which seem to deny the very phenomenon of subjectivity¹⁶ – subjectivity, by being identified or reduced to the material thing, becomes another objective phenomenon, and so disappears into the object. Cartesian approaches, while seemingly more aware of the uniqueness of the subject, nevertheless regard the mind as another kind of thing – a res cogitans – alongside the material thing, and thus miss its special metaphysical status. In contrast, in transcendental approaches in the German tradition of Kant or Schopenhauer, while these might accord a special distinct metaphysical status to the subject and make a point of sharply distinguishing the subject from the object, the subject becomes a mysterious non-material entity (a transcendental subject or ego) of obscure ontological status, such that it is not clear how to find room for it in the natural world. Moreover, transcendental positions that start with the knowing subject tend to lose the objective material world altogether and collapse into some form of idealism.

In contrast, the view offered here accords subjectivity and consciousness their rightful metaphysical status, but without succumbing to Cartesian or property dualism, on the one hand, or bald, reductive, materialistic or starkly eliminativistic views, on the other, and without losing the reality of the material world. Rather, it places subjectivity and consciousness firmly within the physical world, yet in such a way that these are not diluted into brain states or a functionally organized whole. Thus, on my view, we are not the world or a part of the world in the sense of numerical identity; neither are we being-in-the-world (Heidegger). Rather, every subjective consciousnesses is what it is to be a part of the world, and this relation of being, subjective being, accounts for our subjectivity. We can now provide a response to Nagel’s “main question, [that is,] how anything in the world can have a subjective point of view” (Nagel 1986, p.30): a necessary condition for a subjective point of view is the relation of subjective being. In the case of human subjectivity, to be the human organism is also a sufficient condition.¹⁷

References

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