Is it possible to develop a discourse that describes human experience but avoids theoretical concepts such as consciousness and qualia, and do so in such a way that the difficult problems are resolved? It strikes me that Gordon Globus is attempting to do something like this. It seems an honorable project from the perspectives of both the analytic philosophy of mind and the postmodern celebration of multiple discourses. I want to suggest, however, that in his account the problems of qualia and consciousness are not really dissipated, but simply dressed up in different garb.
Even in the postmodern context there is no escaping metaphysics--Heidegger and Derrida agree on this, and Globus rightly indicates that metaphysical hegemony is built into our language. Globus too holds a metaphysical position, and when we struggle to understand Globus' position, we are trying to identify his metaphysics.
If I understand his position, his metaphysics resembles a Kantian materialism. What Globus calls a "world," Kant would call a phenomenal world. For Globus, a world is relative, not to apriori mental categories (as for Kant), but relative to a physical brain functioning according to apriori quantum rules. Kant, of course, thought that there was one universal phenomenal world relative to the rational mind; theoretical biologists revised this idea and suggested a set of species-relative perceptual worlds relative to the different kinds of brains and sense-organs possessed by different animal species. Globus wants to relativize it a bit more radically by his notion of parallel worlds relative to individual brains. What he calls "reality" is Kant's _ding an sich_, but one which we can know by quantum explanation (something that apparently for Globus does not involve theoretical constructs, unlike qualia).
But this doesn't solve the qualia or consciousness problem since he simply substitutes different wording for such things, and the problems are translated into these different terms. What does the "presence of the world" mean? What's it like when a world "unfolds'? He seems to borrow the concept of thrownness from Heidegger. But Heidegger describes thrownness not only as finding oneself always within a circumstance, but as experiencing it always from some particular disposition and always in some mood (_Stimmung_). Thrownness always has some kind of qualitative feel to it. If, to rid ourselves of qualia, we need to deny that qualitative feel, we are still left with the task of describing what thrownness actually means, and as far as I can see, for Globus, it means a brain floating around in quantum reality producing a phenomenal world. Still, Globus seems to admit that in some cases (e.g., phantom pain), part of this phenomenal world can be painful. So, he says, qualia are really qualities of the world. But if worlds are produced by individual brains, aren't the qualities of my world simply the qualia that I experience? Perhaps we would end up saying this in a different way, and perhaps I would ask my physician to help my brain create a different world (one without a phantom or pain). But I don't see how this resolves the problems involved in explaining why our experience is the way it is, or precisely how the brain makes it feel this way. As Globus states, "Reality is not world-like." So, on his terms, pain is not real, i.e., the world-quality is not genuinely to be found at the quantum level. As a result, the qualia question is simply revised: how do brains (or quantum processes) produce world qualities? Is this question any easier to answer than the one that asks how brains (or neuronal events) produce qualitative experience?
More than this, Globus' way of describing things raises a question about how we go about doing science. It doesn't seem problematic, in his terms, that we depend on consciousness (understood as having to do with "language, community, self-reflection and thought," rather than perceiving the world). But if we all live in our own phenomenal worlds (even if we live in more or less equivalent worlds," if the world-in-common is an illusion), and reality is not world-like, how do we access reality, and how do we justify our scientific theories about quantum effects, and so on? How do we know that, as he claims, retinal inputs express reality? How do such inputs "participate in the unfolding of worlds?" How do we know that retinal inputs aren't simply part of an already unfolded (scientific) world produced via linguistic communication among a community of scientists? Globus isn't an idealist, but, despite his post-metaphysical postmodernism, he wants to be a realist, and I'm not sure how he can be.
Shaun Gallagher
gallaghr@canisius.edu
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