Lycan’s Homuncular Functionalism

Philosopher William Lycan defends a materialist, representational theory of mind that he calls “homuncular functionalism” and that posits that “human beings are ‘functionally organized information-processing systems’ who have no non-physical parts or properties.” Lycan does recognize “the subjective phenomenal qualities of mental states and events, and an important sense in which mind is ‘over and above’ mere chemical matter” (Lycan, 1987). But he defends materialism in general and functionalist theories of mind in particular by arguing for what he calls the “hegemony of representation,” in that “there is no more to mind or consciousness than can be accounted for in terms of intentionality, functional organization, and in particular, second-order representation of one's own mental states” (Lycan, 1996).

Functionalism and Representation

Reviewing “an explosion of work” in consciousness studies by philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, Lycan is “struck by an astonishing diversity of topics that have gone under the heading of ‘consciousness’”—he lists more than 15, only six of which, he says, deal with “phenomenal experience,” that is, qualia and the explanatory gap. From this he draws “two morals.”

First, he says, “no one should claim that problems of phenomenal experience have been solved by any purely cognitive or neuroscientific theory.” (Here Lycan finds himself in “surprising agreement with Chalmers.”) Second, and perhaps more importantly, he says, some of “the theories cannot fairly be criticized for failing to illuminate problems of phenomenal experience”—because that is not what they intend to do, that is, “they may be theories of, say, awareness or of privileged access, not theories of qualia or of subjectivity or of ‘what it’s like’” (Lycan, 2004).

Lycan defends “the Representational theory of the qualitative features of apparent phenomenal objects: When you see a (real) ripe banana and there is a corresponding yellow patch in your visual field, the yellowness ‘of’ the patch is, like the banana itself, a representatum, an intentional object of the experience. The experience represents the banana and it represents the yellowness of the banana, and the latter yellowness is all the yellowness that is involved; there is no mental patch that is itself yellow. If you were only hallucinating a banana, the unreal banana would still be a representatum, but now an intentional inexistent; and so would be its yellowness. The yellowness would be as it is even though the banana were not real” (Lycan, 2004).

The Explanatory Gap

Lycan agrees that the “explanatory gap” is real. But this is for two reasons, he argues, “neither of which embarrasses materialism.”

First, he says, “phenomenal information and facts of ‘what it’s like’ are ineffable. But one cannot explain what one cannot express in the first place. (The existence of ineffable facts is no embarrassment to science or to materialism, so long as they are fine-grained ‘facts,’ incorporating modes of presentation.)”

Second, he says, “the Gap is not confined to consciousness in any sense or even to mind; there are many kinds of intrinsically perspectival (fine-grained) facts that cannot be explained” (without first conceding a pre-existing identity) (Lycan, 2004).

Critical Reception and Defense of Materialism

In their review, Thomas Polger and Owen Flanagan describe Lycan's view as, roughly, that “conscious beings are hierarchically composed intentional systems, whose representational powers are to be understood in terms of their biological function.” They call the view “teleological functionalism” or “teleofunctionalism” and state that “the homuncular part, for which Lycan and Daniel Dennett argued convincingly, is now so widely accepted that it fails to distinguish Lycan's view from other versions of functionalism. This, by itself, is a testament to the importance of Lycan's work” (Polger & Flanagan, 2001).

In his review, Frank Jackson explains that when Lycan argues that “there is no special problem for physicalism raised by conscious experience,” he is rightly distinguishing two questions. “Does consciousness per se raise a problem? And: Do qualia pose a special problem?” Lycan answers the first question on consciousness by defending an “inner sense account of consciousness,” holding that “consciousness is the functioning of internal attention mechanisms directed at lower-order psychological states and events.” Jackson is less satisfied by Lycan's rejection of the knowledge argument, which Jackson calls “the most forceful way of raising the problem posed by qualia for physicalism” (Jackson says this “as someone who no longer accepts the argument”) (Jackson, 1997).

According to Jackson, Lycan is confident that phenomenal nature is exhausted by functional role. In other words, “for Lycan, it is very hard for functional nature to fail to exhaust phenomenal nature. Almost anything you might cite as escaping the functional net is, by his lights, functional after all.” Moreover, Lycan has “the nature of conscious experience exhausted by the intentional contents or representational nature of the relevant kinds of mental states” in that “the representational facts which make up a package [are] sufficient to capture in full the perceptual experience” (Jackson, 1997).

Lycan attacks neurobiological conventional wisdom in that “all too often we hear it suggested that advances in neuroscience will solve Thomas Nagel's and Frank Jackson's conceptual problem of ‘knowing what it’s like.’” To Lycan, “this is grievously confused. For Nagel's and Jackson's claim is precisely that there is an irreducible kind of phenomenal knowledge that cannot be revealed by science of any kind. Nagel's and Jackson's respective ‘Knowledge Arguments’ for this radical thesis are purely philosophical; they contain no premises that depend on scientific fact.”

Lycan now presses his sharp point. “Either the arguments are unsound or they are sound. If they are unsound, then so far as has been shown, there is no such irreducible knowledge, and neither science nor anything else is needed to produce it. But if the arguments are sound, they show that no amount of science could possibly help to produce the special phenomenal knowledge. Either way, neither neuroscience nor any other science is pertinent.”

Lycan seems sure that the “what it’s like to be” and knowledge arguments are unsound, and he can go about formulating his Representational theory of mind, standing squarely in the materialist camp. (I [RLK] am not so sure. It is my uncertainty that motivates this Landscape of Consciousness.)