* * * D R A F T * * *

By Wallace Matson

University of California, Berkeley

1. LEAD-IN

Chalmers's book is a good read. It is written with an infectious enthusiasm for the subject that reminds one of Darwin, and for the most part in a clear and forthright style. Chalmers is not afraid of candidly drawing the consequences of his contentions ("biting the bullet"). He takes consciousness seriously, according to his lights. I admire his insouciance in printing the Calvin & Hobbes cartoon strip {{ Figure 3.1, page 95}} that pulls the rug out from under himself. And I plan to try his recipe for curried black-eyed pea salad the next time we have black-eyed peas in the house.

Chalmers writes (page 22) that "Conscious experience is always tied to cognitive processing, and it is likely that in some sense it arises from that processing." Here he is on the right track. If only he had omitted the words "always tied to", he would have been entirely right, and could then have omitted as redundant the remainder of the sentence after the comma; and, indeed, the rest of the book.

2. SPINOZA AND CHALMERS

Chalmers does not mention Spinoza. Their differences are very great, the greatest being that Spinoza is emphatically a monist -- mind and body are "one & the same thing, expressed in two ways. " {{Ethics Part 2 Proposition 7 Scholium.}} Spinoza is as far as possible from being an epiphenomenalist -- his attribute of thought is just as extensive & just as causally efficacious as that of extension. As for panpsychism: well, there is one -- only one -- passage where he seems to espouse it: "...all individuals, albeit in different degrees, are animate." {{Ibid. Prop. 13 Schol.}} However, Spinoza's attribute of Thought is not Consciousness. This Attribute is the totality of Ideas. Spinoza's attribution of an "anima" to everything is a trivial consequence of his holding that there is an Idea of everything plus his definition of Mind as the idea of body. It has no implication of universal consciousness. Indeed, it is doubtful whether Spinoza has a theory of consciousness at all. Moreover, Chalmers's whole philosophy rests on the notion that Zombies are logically possible, which to him means that there is a possible world containing zombies; whereas Spinoza emphatically denies that there are any possible worlds besides the actual world. {{ "Things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than is the case." Op. cit. Part 1 Prop. 33.}}

Somewhat offhandedly, I mentioned Arnold Geulincx (1625-69) -- the Two Clocks man -- to Randy as rather closer than Spinoza to Chalmers, on account of the separation, in both, of the physical from the mental, and the need, for Geulincx, of God's activity to coordinate them, which amounts to the same thing as Chalmers's postulation of fundamental and inexplicable "bridge laws." But Chalmers is more interesting than Geulincx.

3. DESCRIPTION AND REVISION

For he has produced -- most surprisingly, at the end of the 20th century -- a revisionary metaphysic. Such systems are intriguing, exciting even, as they shake us up, almost literally: Here, can't you see, you've been looking at things all wrong! This is the way they really are!

Descriptive metaphysicians such as Aristotle, Locke, and Spinoza aim at articulating world views setting out explicitly what they take to be the presuppositions of the informed common sense of their time, particularly the best validated results of the natural sciences. The aim is clarification and systematization. On the other hand, revisionists like Plato and Berkeley conceive of themselves as having had insights into the true nature of reality that have not been given to others, and their task as that of correcting, in a fundamental way, the current outlook on how things are. They are the Don Quixotes of philosophy, idealists in both senses. Typically they declare that science is all very well but must be kept in its place. The metaphysical revisionist aims to turn the hitherto accepted conceptual world upside down, to produce something like a paradigm shift but even more cataclysmic. Plato with the Forms, Leibniz with the Monads, Berkeley with his Ideas -- these are the great revisionists. And now Chalmers presents us with his counterworld of Phenomena, Consciousness taken so seriously as to be exalted, like Dulcinea del Toboso, far above the humdrum world of causation and explanation.

Revisionary metaphysical systems, instead of being based on broad surveys of ascertained and alleged facts, typically rest, like inverted pyramids, on a single luminous truth the significance of which has been overlooked by everybody else. For Plato it was that words are the names of the things they mean. For Leibniz it was that whatever is complex must be composed of simples. For Berkeley, that nothing but an idea can be like an idea. From these simple beginnings came Plato's two-tiered world, Leibniz's "tables as colonies of souls" (as Russell described it), Berkeley's abolition of matter. Chalmers's epiphany is: zombies are logically possible. {{He advances two further arguments for his thesis that phenomena are not supervenient on psychology: the possibility of subjective color reversal, and the allegation that "Mary," who knows all the facts about colors but then, for the first time in her life, experiences something red, thereby learns an additional fact. I pass these by, as both are based on the mistaken Nagelian assumption that we observe our experiences and find them vastly different from what is given in observations of brain events. See Wallace Matson, Sentience (University of California Press 1976), chapter 3. Additionally, concerning Mary: It's impossible (logically!) for one subject of phenomena to have access to another subject's experience -- that's all there is here. 'You can't get there from here' follows necessarily from the centering of subjectivity. As for Mary's "knowing all the physical facts" -- Mary is, after all, only human. If she knows the complete physiological theory, then she knows that some of those facts are experiences. But knowing that doesn't enable her to have them -- to know them 'by acquaintance.' And she knows why she can't -- their centeredness is a feature they necessarily have. This is where the curious fact that I am not you comes in. By the bye: One can in fact know quite a lot about what it's like to be a bat. One can know, for example, that it's unpleasant to have one's wing cut off, or to starve; that the nighttime sky is more stimulating for it than for us -- 'busier'; etc. I know (or can learn) something about what echo location feels like, and I can extrapolate, the way I have some notion of what it must feel like to be a great wine connoisseur -- dig those wild currant overtones. I know quite a lot of what it feels like to be you, & it's only a question of degree down to the bat. I don't know this by acquaintance, of course, but the theory behind it is grounded in necessity, because minds are brains, and there is no other-brains problem. }}

Metaphysics, both descriptive and revisionary, has been in general disfavor through the 20th century, particularly in the Anglophone philosophical world. So it was surprising that a new system should burst onto the scene in the last decade of the century. But here it is.

Now, what is revisionary about it chiefly is its breathtaking rejection of intentional causation and explanation. We are told over and over that consciousness, for which the author also over and over tells us he - almost alone - "takes seriously," is "explanatorily superfluous" -- everything in the physical world would go just as it does if there were no consciousness. As long as the neurons fire properly, Joan of Arc will get burnt and the Sistine Chapel will get painted, though Joan will feel nothing and nobody will ever have either a religious or an aesthetic experience. For this view there is no precedent in the history of philosophy, as far as I know, unless you count the fictitious Anaxagorean of Plato's Phaedo who would explain Socrates's sitting in his prison by a disquisition on bones and sinews.

Chalmers's argument for these astonishing conclusions depends entirely on the contention that a zombie is logically possible, meaning that there is a posssible world containing a zombie (animal just like us physically, and behaving just like us, but devoid of consciousness). Chalmers knows there is such a world because, following Kripke, it is just obvious that there is nothing self-contradictory in the concept of a zombie. He has challenged doubters who think there is, to come up with it, and they haven't done so. {{A discussion of the Kripke intuition that might have given Chalmers pause is missing from his bibliography: Michael Della Rocca, "Kripke's Essentialist Argument Against the Identity Theory," Philosophical Studies 69 (1993), 101-112.}}

That is the whole argument. Non-self-contradictory = logically possible = actual in some possible world. Not actual in this world, of course {{Though Chalmers does not, in my opinion, give a convincing account of how this can be known, since his zombies behave exactly like conscious beings, including the giving of indignant negative answers to the question "Are you a zombie?"; and since in his view consciousness enters into no causal relations with the "psychological" part of us, no apparatus could detect any difference}}, for in this world there are "bridge laws" that tack consciousness onto neuron firings and so forth. But these uniquely "psychophysical" laws are empirical, so there are possible worlds where they don't obtain, and that is enough to show that "the phenomenal" is detachable from "the psychological," as he confusingly calls the goings-on in the brain. If so, and given that the split leaves all the executive powers on the "psychological" side, then consciousness is not needed to explain behavior, indeed, could not do so. Zombies (presumably) didn't paint the Sistine Chapel, organize Dachau, or raise the prime interest rate; but there is a possible world just like this one except that Michelangelo, Hitler, and Greenspan and the other ten billion humanoids (plus all the beasts as well) were never conscious. And evolution, in that world, led to the neuron firings that guided the brushes, cattle cars, and mortgage signings exactly as here. {{"[Hodgson] also makes an appeal to evolution, but ... evolution selects for certain physical processes directly, and psychophysical laws do the rest, ensuring that consciousness will evolve alongside those processes. Like all fundamental laws, these psychophysical laws are universal, so we do not need an evolutionary explanation of why these laws hold in the first place." Chalmers, Reply to David Hodgson, in "Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness," on Internet.}}

The notions underlying this world view include three kinds of possibility and necessity -- logical, physical, and metaphysical; and 'law of nature.' In discussing them I shall begin with a bit of history, the relevance of which I hope to make apparent later.

4. THE CREATION OF POSSIBLE WORLDS

Chalmers says "the notion of a logically possible world ... is something of a primitive" {{Page 66}} which it "is useful to think of ... as a world that it would have been in God's power (hypothetically!) to create, had he so chosen." {{page 35; he goes on to say that "a male vixen is logically impossible; ... a flying telephone is logically possible." "[E}very conceivable world is logically possible" page 66.}}

Actually Chalmers makes contact with the history of philosophy (and theology) in this conception. The idea of logical possibility was generated in medieval controversy about God's omnipotence. It was agreed that omnipotence didn't mean God could make a contradiction true,{{As e.g. St. Peter Damian had asserted}} but that was not really a limitation on His power. For contradictions, since they assert something and then immediately take it back, in the result describe nothing, therefore nothing that God either could or could not do.

Medieval philosophy also incubated the notion of Law of Nature, in the physical sense in which we speak of e = mc2 as a law of nature. This locution, never used by the Greeks, {{ It would have been nomos physeos -- intolerably oxymoronic, since nomos and physis, 'convention' and 'nature,' marked precisely the opposition that was a central topic of discussion at the same time the Greeks were inventing science. What they said they were doing was simply studying 'nature' -- physis -- of course, showing that it was not a chaos but a cosmos, an orderly system. Philosophers of science make themselves philologically ridiculous when they latch on to the Greek word for law and write of 'nomic' this and 'nomological' that.}} started out as a full blown theory: in Genesis 1 not only does God create the things that make up the world, He tells them explicitly, in a few instances anyway, how to behave, e.g. "Be fruitful and multiply." It is basic to the Judaic outlook that the existence of the world is the result of God's command; and so is how things are to behave (the Laws of Physics) and how they ought to behave (the laws of morality). This is not how other peoples, including the Greeks, looked at things. Their gods (or the ancestors of their gods) produced the world, but by honest toil, not by issuing commands. {{Nor did they produce morality by issuing commands, any more than the multiplication table; it was already "there."}}

We still speak of the planets as "obeying" Kepler's Laws. This is a metaphor, on the model of the citizen obeying the prescriptions of the traffic code. A dead and harmless metaphor? Usually, no doubt; the textbooks point out that the laws of nature are descriptive whereas human (or divine) laws are prescriptive, and that is supposed to take care of it. Nevertheless, major metaphors seldom die altogether; they may be all the more misleading just because they are no longer recognized as metaphorical. This is the case with Law of Nature: it is still at its baneful work in the Chalmers version of Genesis, revised and speeded up to three days instead of six: First day, the things; second day, the laws they are to obey; third day, consciousness. While Chalmers brings God into his metaphysic only heuristically, he takes literally and seriously the distinctions implied in this sequence. There could be worlds with the same sorts of things as in this one, but in which those things behaved quite differently -- flying telephones for example. This is what I mean by saying that the metaphor of law of nature as God's command lingers on. You and I, transported to Saudi Arabia, will behave differently because we will be obeying different laws. It is in these terms and in accordance with this model that Chalmers distinguishes "structure" (things) and "dynamics" (laws), which he claims are the two distinguishable and separable factors in physics, including brain physiology {{or "psychology" as he calls the material side (portion? aspect?) of the mind }}.

This is an untenable distinction. It makes no sense to suppose that God might create the planets on Monday, warehouse them overnight, and come back Tuesday morning to endow them with gravity. To create planets is to create gravitating bodies. To be sure, maybe 'logically' God could create big spherical gizmos that didn't gravitate, but they wouldn't be planets. They would be shplanets {{ adopting Gil Harman's useful 'sh' prefix}} -- and even so they would have to 'obey' some laws or other from the first moment, even if they just sat there -- and whatever 'laws' they 'obeyed' would be inextricable from their shplanetary if temporary natures.

To put the point more succinctly, there is no real distinction between what a thing is and what it does (can do). Or: things can't have the same structures (all the way down!) but different dynamics. Or, to lapse into what I gather has become the preferred idiom since my retirement, dynamics are supervenient on structure.

This difference between Greek and Jew -- the order of the cosmos as expression of the inherent nature of things vs. the order of the creation as obedience to God's Law -- is a far more significant difference than that between poly- and monotheism. With the triumph of Christianity the Jewish view supplanted the Greek. This being the origin of the expression and the concept Law of Nature, it is why when in the later middle ages science on the Greek model began to stir again after a millennium of slumber, the scientists and philosophers, most of whom kept their day jobs as theologians, conceived of their inquiries -- into the rainbow for instance -- as attempting to determine the laws that God had prescribed for His creation.

This way of looking at the matter had consequences undreamt of in Greek philosophy. One was the contingency of the world. God in no sense had to create the world as He did, so there could have been a world very different from this one, had He chosen. Indeed, there being no limits on what an omnipotent Being could create, there were "infinite possible worlds". This was not a Greek idea. {{There were Greek speculations about other worlds, but that is not the same thing: it is the difference between present-day searches for other, possibly inhabited, planets, on the one hand, and, on the other, "possible world semantics."}}

Before God's choice, all the possible worlds -- including this one, the one that eventually got the divine nod -- were distinct objects of God's thought, and so, all of them had a sort of shadowy Meinongian reality. And so one could speak intelligibly of the different characteristics of various possible worlds. According to the Mosaic way of looking at things, they could differ from each other in containing different objects, or in containing the same objects which, however, behaved in obedience to different laws; or in both ways at once. That is to say, a thing is different from what it does.

This is the source of the notion of logical possibility/impossibility, another derivation from God's omnipotence and not found in Greek philosophy. Greek notions of possibility and necessity presupposed the actual world -- to the Greeks a redundant phrase in any case. Necessity was simply what "could not be otherwise."

In sum: the notions of

<> The contingency of the world

<> Infinite possible worlds

<> Logical possibility (as distinguished from 'physical')

<> Distinction between things and what they do

<> Laws of nature

all owe their origins and, at least at their inception, their justifications to the Mosaic conception of the world as created and directed by an omnipotent, intelligent, and willful God. They are part of this world view; they were not part of the Greek world view. When Newton wrote that "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being" this is what he meant. So was it with Leibniz when he showed how God must have chosen to create the "best of all possible worlds".

5. CONSCIOUSNESS DAY

The crucial divide, however, in the Chalmersian Genesis is not between the first and second day, between things and laws, but between second and third -- before consciousness and after consciousness. The first and second days get the closed physical system all set up. If God rested after the second day, all the physical structure and dynamics would be in place. So all the physical things, and all the events they took their parts in, would be, and would go on, just as they do in this world (the one we live in). This includes all animals, including us, for they and we, physically considered, are nothing but structure and dynamics, all taken care of already.

In other words, at the conclusion of the second day, God had finished creating a zombie world.

If that is so, what then would God's point have been in going ahead on the fourth day to create consciousness? Chalmers does not tell us. If the Supreme Being {{Was He conscious?}}had never got around to making people conscious, they still would have screamed if bound to stakes and set afire, but not in agony -- they would not really have felt any pain. Now -- after the work of the fourth day -- they would. That would be offset to a certain extent by the circumstance that now they would not merely ooh and ahh when drinking a fine Bordeaux or having great sex, they really would be experiencing pleasure. But on balance who could gainsay Schopenhauer, who would have regarded this addition -- this kind of "taking consciousness seriously," namely, creating pain and tacking it on to the behavior -- as profoundly Satanic?

Well, after all, it is consciousness that Chalmers takes seriously, not God. And to take consciousness seriously seems for him to amount simply to the insistence that it is there -- not to impute any point to it. This is a quintessentially fin-de-XXe-siecle sensibility. In deference to my years I must beg to be excused from sharing it. I can go so far as to contemplate the possibility that Nature does some things in vain, but not a whopper like this. I feel a difficulty, which would disappear if only we might suppose that consciousness, instead of being something only hooked on to the executive transactions of the brain tissues and dangling from them like tin cans behind a wedding limousine, is identical to (some of) those transactions; and, being identical to what admittedly has causal powers, is itself a causal power: that pain, for example -- the conscious "phenomenal" feeling, not the (allegedly) merely physical and unconscious "psychological" stimulation of C-fibers -- is the warning system without which no mobile organism can hope to survive and evolve. That, it seems to me -- and I will be so immodest as to claim that I am just as good at intuiting as Kripke or Chalmers -- is what consciousness is: the seat of intentionality, guiding human and other animal affairs, and no metaphysically mysterious stuff but (relatively) plain physiology. Why not?

6. LOGICAL POSSIBILITY WITHOUT GOD

Because zombies are logically possible! Chalmers and Kripke can imagine them, {{And Searle too, alas, which I suppose is why, instead of pointing out what in particular were the premisses of Chalmers's argument and what was wrong with them, he was content to maintain that whatever they were, they reduced themselves to absurdity.}} and anything they can imagine is logically possible.

Now let's see ...

If we subtract God, what is left of the notion of logical possibility and of possible worlds? The definitions: That is logically possible the concept of which does not involve contradiction; and Possible world = any consistent set of propositions. ((Chalmers, however, has qualms about linguistic conceptions of possible worlds; note 30, p. 366.}} OK. But how can we tell whether a concept is free of contradiction? By trying to imagine an instance of it. If we can do so, affirmative; if not, negative. And how do we tell whether a set of propositions is consistent? That is very hard. Even in mathematics it can't, in general, be done otherwise than by modelling the set with objects from the actual world.

The imagination test won't do. All sorts of logically impossible things are imaginable, as we know from the fact that people (including me) imagine them: time travel, commensurable diagonals, squared circles, magnetic monopoles. Escher drew elegant pictures of some. And not only imagined but believed: virtually the entire population of the earth now believes that December 31, 1999, will be the last day of the 20th century and second millennium, despite the fact, frequently pointed out, that this is equivalent to the contradiction 0 = 1. Conversely, many things that are not only logically possible but in some cases (we have good reason to believe) actual can't be imagined, by lots of people or even everybody: 21-dimensional strings, the Big Bang, the non-existence of God, locomotives moving without horses inside. {{If some of these examples are controversial, that only reinforces my point.}}

7. IDENTITY AND LOGICAL POSSIBILITY

But one thing certainly is logically impossible: that any thing should not be what it is. Positively put, every thing necessarily is what it is, it could not be otherwise than what it is.

Concepts are our constructions. But not every word signifies a concept. Proper names do not.{{Pace Searle.}} 'Hesperus,' for example, is only a label, a verbalized pointing: 'that bright thing up there in the pre-dawn sky.' 'Phosphorus' is another such label. The astronomer's planet, on the other hand, is a concept: it is something like 'object moving in a determinate elliptical orbit around the Sun,' and has all and only the characteristics explicitly assigned to it by the theory in which it is an element. The orbit is specified in purely mathematical terms. That of Hesperus can be determined by making a series of observations and reducing them to a curve. Likewise for Phosphorus. Now lo & behold -- the orbit of Hesperus is identical to that of Phosphorus; moreover, the extrapolation of the one, when it is not visible, gives a position that is the same as that of the other which is visible. Conclusion: Hesperus = Phosphorus. And this is necessarily so: there is no 'possible world' in which Hesperus is not Phosphorus.

This schema of identification is typical of mature science: water = H20, sulfur = element 16, etc. They couldn't be otherwise -- couldn't, that is, if the stuffs of which these words (not concepts) are the labels, have been properly identified with the elements in the theories. {{This qualification is what keeps even the hardest science from consisting of categorically necessary truths. We can't be certain that Venus will stay on the theoretical orbit if we haven't ruled out the possibility, e.g., of a supervolcano on the planet capable of acting as a jet engine.}} But once the identification has been made, the term (water, Hesperus, etc.) that once was a mere label no longer is; it has been superseded, for serious purposes, by the concept; and there is no longer any possibility in any sense that water = XYZ or Hesperus is not Phosphorus.

'Possible world' then has an innocent and even salutary sense: as rather poetical term for a domain of hypotheses worth investigating. But the aim of science is to rule out possibilities, and when it does, as often happens, there is nothing left.

Applying this to the case under consideration: There is nothing internally contradictory in the concept of a thought as being a brain event, or in the theory that all thoughts are brain events -- not associated with them by "bridge laws," but being the very same things, as water is H20. And all the evidence we have points in this direction. If this identification is correct, if it is true that thoughts are brain events, then it is necessarily true, it couldn't be otherwise. There is no need to multiply necessities beyond necessity; this, as the Greeks knew, is the only kind there is. {{This is closest to what Chalmers calls "metaphysical" necessity, or "secondary intention." For reasons unclear to me, he fails to see that the "primary" and "secondary" can't coexist -- the latter, if established, supersedes the former, as Copernicanism supersedes sunsets.}}

So, if thoughts are brain events of kind C, then, since 'necessarily =' is symmetrical, brain events ("psychology") of kind C are thoughts, from which it follows that Superzombie is impossible -- 'logically' if you like, but this adverb is really superfluous.

Now that we have got clear about that, let us consider some less abstract reasons for rejecting the notion of the Chalmersian zombie.

8. SIZING UP

Although Chalmers refers merely to "a zombie" or sometimes "my zombie twin" (which he says he has grown to love), I shall call this being Superzombie because he is much superior to the zombies of horror movies. Those creatures shuffle slowly around, never alter their blank expressions, and if they speak at all, do so in disjointed mutterings. That is, they behave 'like sleepwalkers,' and this is no accident: if we try to imagine what a being with no 'soul' (= no consciousness) would be able to do, this is precisely what our experience suggests: she could do all -- and only -- the things we can do 'in our sleep.' Maybe drive a car from home to work, though that would be stretching it.

I, like everyone else, can imagine a zombie. {{The word is not simply made-up but has an etymology, which, however, is unmentionable.}} My zombie would be unable to do countless things that conscious people (and other animals) routinely do. For instance, she could not get a joke. I can even imagine Superzombie. My zombie and Superzombie will differ in behavior when told a joke. Superzombie will laugh and slap his knee (or wince and tear his hair, or blush, or file a harassment charge, or yawn superciliously or ....). And yet -- I think Chalmers would agree -- Superzombie does not 'get' the joke. Getting a joke is, by logical necessity, a conscious process.

Let's simplify, and suppose that there is only one kind of joke, the apperception of incongruity, and only one response (for humans or Superzombies) to jokes: the giggle. How then are we to explain giggling behavior? In Hempel-Chalmers fashion, as: There is a law of nature that when people perceive incongruities, they giggle. Input: incongruous remark or situation. Output: giggle. -- Now I have no trouble with this, so far. There is indeed a law of human behavior that (first approximation) people laugh at incongruities, and qua law it is just as well established as Boyle's Law. What, however, is an incongruity? I hope I need not take time to argue that there is not even in principle any way to specify in purely physical terms what situations and remarks are incongruous. There is, therefore, no way of specifying what the input to the ears or eyes must be to produce the output. Yet people, like Mr. Justice Brennan, know it when they see it -- when, that is, it comes to their consciousness. Incongruity is an evaluative notion, the applicability of which is not specifiable in terms of any set of 'objective' criteria expressible as a computable algorithm. And yet it is a concept in terms of which laws of nature can be formulated.

If jokes are too trivial to count, consider the elegant first sociological law to be formulated, that of Gresham, Bad money drives out good. Of course it is not a basic law of physics, but it is a law for all that. It describes the behavior of physical objects (namely people) accurately, and it is used successfully in making verifiable predictions. So it must be among the Laws that God decreed on the second day. And it would describe the behavior of the zombies who would be the people if God rested after the second day.

How can that be? What is money? There can be no physical description of money as such, for anything from shells to magnetic fields can count as money. Moreover, 'good' and 'bad' in the statement of the law are value terms, which notoriously are not "in the world," as Wittgenstein remarked. All the same, Gresham's Law is purely descriptive.

Must there not have been, then, a fourth day of creation, in which God enacted Gresham's Law {{and Watterson's Law: Real zombies never get the giggles; etc. etc.}}? Chalmers, I gather, would say no; Gresham's Law was really already there on the second day, though in the form of some immensely complicated story about neuron firings in connection with stacking up bits of metal (or whatever) into different piles accordingly as whether or not their edges had been filed (or whatever). In fact, however, there is not any physical regularity whatsoever that can be identified as objects 'obeying' Gresham's Law, let alone a pattern that could be extrapolated to make predictions. To turn Wittgenstein upside down: An external process is in need of an internal criterion.

Evaluating (say) beads or pieces of metal or paper as money in the first place, then as good or bad money, are examples of what I call "sizing up." {{Matson, op. cit., Chapter 5.}} Sizing up a situation involves:

1. Picking out certain features in the 'sensuous manifold' as distinct, delimited.

2. Recognizing some of them (the 'foreground') as more important than others and from those not distinguished (the 'background').

3. Apperceiving the whole which the important features comprise.

4. Relating this whole to one's interests.

5. Finally, sometimes, going ahead to consider what to do.

The first four elements are found in every apprehension of meaning, including the linguistic. The ability to size up has been built into animals primarily because it is absolutely necessary for success at the Churchlandian "Four Fs" that determine survival, that is, the first four elements are for the sake of the fifth.

Sizing up is the core conscious activity. It is what neither zombies nor even Superzombie can do. It is the center of rational activity too, which, pace Aristotle, is not peculiar to humans. Any animal that has to get its dinner while avoiding being dinner, that is, any animal at all except perhaps a few parasites, must behave rationally, which consists in acting in an interest-maximizing fashion tailored to the world out there. The raw data of mere physical sense perception are not enough; the data must be processed with regard to values, as sketched above, and this processing is not computable (pace Hobbes). It is what we do every moment of our conscious lives (but only then), and without attending to it it is hopeless to attempt to explain our behavior or to understand how evolution could have proceeded from amoeba to philosopher. {{Sizing up is something that we do. In a way, it is not wrong to say that it is something that the brain does, for there is every reason to believe that the process goes on chiefly there (as opposed to in the liver or heart or big toe). But it would be misleading to put it that way, for it would encourage the disastrous mistake of supposing that the brain sizes things up and then reports its appreciation of the situation to us. This would be to slip back into homunculus thinking. There is a homunculus, all right, but we are him, and what we read is the world, not an internal representation of it. There is an internal representation, but it is the reading, not what is read. }}

The pseudo-problem of how consciousness can break into the closed physical system to cause behavior results from failure to recognize the identity of consciousness and brain events. {{In part also to uncritical acceptance of the billiard-ball view of causation as always involving the exertion of physical force. From C's being the cause of E, it does not follow that C must do something to bring E about. The cause of E is whatever explains E. Static entities can be causes as can emotions, abstractions, even negativities. The Nibelung's ring caused the destruction of Valhalla, 'twas love and love alone that caused King Edward to lose the throne, barbarism and religion caused the fall of the Roman empire, and lack of oxygen causes death. But rings, love, barbarism, and lacks don't do anything. They are not agents. Agents are often causes, but the notion of cause is altogether distinct from that of agency. Agents are not always causes either. The axe and the executioner were the agents of Charles I's execution, but they were not the causes of it.}}

The data for sizing up -- pains and locations, for example -- and the process itself, issuing in fears, tactics, and so on, are (part of) the activity of the brain -- the neuron firings etc. Consequently, explaining in detail these "psychological" events is explaining consciousness, in the same sense that explaining evaporation and condensation, the Coriolis force, the motions of heated and cooled gases, etc., is explaining the weather. When the brain physiology has all been wrapped up, there will be nothing left to do.

Before that can happen, however, it seems likely that some new concepts will have to be developed, analogously to how a satisfactory theory of electricity and magnetism had to wait for Faraday's breakthrough in conceiving of the field. Maybe that will enable us to get some grip on how it is possible for a material system to display intentionality, which is the "hard" mind-body question -- to which neither I nor, as far as I have heard, anyone else has an answer, or even an idea of what an answer might look like. Because at present we have no better model of the mind than the digital computer, which, however, we know cannot be adequate. {{ See Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do; Matson, op. cit.}} This problem, however, lies entirely within the province of science. Philosophers who meddle with it will only muddle it further, as they would have if they had presumed to lay down principles to guide the men whose names now designate the units of the electrical and magnetic phenomena they investigated. Thank goodness no early 19th century metaphysician had the chutzpah to proclaim that magnetism can't be 'supervenient' on electric current, 'since I can imagine one without the other,' and then, borrowing a white coat, to announce, TA-DA!, his discovery of a 'bridge law': 'Where an electric current is flowing there's always some magnetism around too' -- which, being a universal and fundamental law of nature, can't have any explanation and doesn't need any..... -- But I digress. To repeat, the hard question is how physical things can refer, not whether they can -- we already know they can. Here we are. That's what we're doing right now.