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Eric Schwitzgebel

Perplexities of Consciousness (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology) Hardcover – January 28, 2011

by Eric Schwitzgebel (Author)

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Do you dream in color? If you answer Yes, how can you be sure? Before you recount your vivid memory of a dream featuring all the colors of the rainbow, consider that in the 1950s researchers found that most people reported dreaming in black and white. In the 1960s, when most movies were in color and more people had color television sets, the vast majority of reported dreams contained color. The most likely explanation for this, according to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, is not that exposure to black-and-white media made people misremember their dreams. It is that we simply don't know whether or not we dream in color. In Perplexities of Consciousness, Schwitzgebel examines various aspects of inner life (dreams, mental imagery, emotions, and other subjective phenomena) and argues that we know very little about our stream of conscious experience.

Drawing broadly from historical and recent philosophy and psychology to examine such topics as visual perspective, and the unreliability of introspection, Schwitzgebel finds us singularly inept in our judgments about conscious experience.

Print length

238 pages
Language

English
Publisher

A Bradford Book
Publication date

January 28, 2011
Dimensions

6 x 0.56 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0262014904
ISBN-13

978-0262014908
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Editorial Reviews

Review

I highly recommend to take a good time with this book. Its reading is worthy for all people interested in psychology, philosophy of mind, cognitive sciences and consciousness studies.

(David Fajardo-Chica Metapsychology)

About the Author

Eric Schwitzgebel, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, is the co-author (with Russell T. Hurlburt) of Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic (MIT Press, 2007).

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ A Bradford Book; 0 edition (January 28, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 238 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0262014904
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262014908
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.56 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,322,077 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,436 in Consciousness & Thought Philosophy

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Eric M. Van

One of the Handful of Necessary Books About Consciousness

Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2018

Scientific theories are *explanations of data.* A scientific theory of consciousness (in the sense of subjective experience) will not only need to provide a general explanation for why and how it exists; it will also need to explain the details of our experience.

But just what are those details? It’s a fundamental vexation of conscious experience that it can only be reported upon rather than objectively observed. Furthermore, the reports can vary. Do we dream in color or black and white? To what degree does a coin held at an angle appear flat rather than three-dimensional? Do we have constant tactile experience (however dimly, in the background) of our feet within our shoes, or the shirt on our back? The answers to such questions depend on who you ask, and when.

These are some of the “perplexities” of consciousness that Schwitzgebel explores here. It’s really a scientific book in philosophical drag; at its heart is an exhaustive and invaluable compilation and analysis of studies of self-reports addressing questions like these (the above trio are the topics respectively of chapters 1, 2, and 6). Some of the cited work is Schwitzgebel’s own—he has given subjects beepers, set them off at random, and asked for reports (peripheral vision, feet in shoes) of their experience at that moment. (Each chapter but one is based on a paper Schwitzgebel has previously published, but the book never reads like a compilation.)

The results of both Schwitzgebel’s literature review and his own work are startling. There is a disconcertingly large variance in self-reports of the same experiential condition. There is a surprising lack of correlation between what people expect to report—what they have believed their subjective experience to be—and what they report when properly interrogated or guided—what they seem in fact to be experiencing. In his late chapters, Schwitzgebel argues persuasively that our naïve introspection of consciousness is grossly unreliable. We lack a good, reliable set of data for our missing scientific theory of consciousness (hereafter STOC) to explain, and we can never have such a data set. Schwitzgebel is therefore hugely pessimistic about the prospects for an STOC.

And now this review goes wryly offbeat. I am convinced that he is dead wrong with that pessimism, but this criticism (of a very small part of the book) is meant to point out that his work is hugely more valuable and important than anyone realizes (judging from the rank of the book here within its subtopic, and its number of reviews), including Schwitzgebel himself.

Scientific theories need not initially explain all of the available data in full detail. In the case of consciousness, our initial theory need only to do two things. First, it must explain the agreed-upon aspects of consciousness—the subjective experiences of foveal color vision and severe pain being the canonical examples. Second, it must explain the inconsistency and unreliability of all other self-reports. In other words, all of the perplexing data that Schwitzgebel has gathered and discovered form a single important meta-datum that any STOC must explain. This is actually a help to the construction of such a theory, not a hindrance.

And in fact, even in the absence of an STOC Schwitzgebel’s meta-datum leads to two hypotheses, one about the ontological nature of experience and the other about its neural correlates. All of the perplexities can then be explained by adding a rather startling consequence of what David Chalmers calls “the paradox of phenomenal judgment.” But I imagine that’s the topic for a different book rather than a review of this one.

9 people found this helpful

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joegw

Thought-provoking Challenge to the Reliability of Introspection

Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2016

As I first started reading "Perplexities of Consciousness," I wondered whether I would want to read a whole book about questioning introspection. I'm glad that I did, because the author does an excellent job casting doubt upon our abilities to reliably examine our own thinking and perceiving. In each of the chapters, Schwitzgebel tackles a subject such as dreaming in color, the abundance or sparsity of consciousness, what we "see" with our eyes closed, etc., and proceeds to demonstrate that it's not clear what the right answers are since so many experts (and experimental subjects) disagree (the author challenges the reader to try out the experiments and it is quite worthwhile to do so). The book is well-written, though I found a couple of sections slow going with details more useful for researchers in the field than the lay person with a deep interest in consciousness (that would be me). Fortunately one can skim those sections without losing much. I expect that I'll be thinking about this book and the perplexities it raises for a long time.

5 people found this helpful

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Shaby

A good read

Reviewed in the United States on December 21, 2011

Perplexities of consciousness is an excellent work, it is clear, concise and easy to read. The work focuses on why humans in general are poor judges of their conscious phenomenology or their ongoing conscious experience. Schwitzgebel challenges the reader through various avenues - what color do we dream in? do objects appear flat or elliptical? What do we see when our eyes are closed? Are we constantly receiving (and aware) of feedback from our shoes etc.? In all these cases, Schwitzgebel's philosophical argumentation takes the following form: 1) Opinions regarding the above mentioned phenomena vary tremendously, even among "experts" in the field, 2) it is not possible for opinion to vary this much, C) We really do not know the answers to these basic questions and thus we are not aware of our ongoing conscious and basic phenomenology.

My critiques: 1) The book does not focus on consciousness except in one chapter where the different "models" of consciousness are assessed such as the sparse, abundant, and moderate views. Consciousness is never clearly defined in the book. Rather the book has to do with "introspection" going wrong. 2) I find it difficult to accept a scenario where my introspection can be wrong, I've no doubt that my sensory or cognitive machinery may err, however, I introspect correctly on these incorrect mental states. An example of introspection going wrong would be someone introspecting pleasure- however they are not in any physical or mental state of pleasure and thus their introspection is wrong. However, if I view the world as being red all the time because of a problem in my retinal machinery, it is clear that my senses are wrong, however, my introspection is still correct to say "the world appears red". If I see the world in color, but my visual areas in the brain translate this into a red world, once again, my introspection leads me to believe the world is red. Is this really an introspective problem? I am not convinced as such.

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J. Hamlyn

Is introspection a skill?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 24, 2014

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"I wish I could find my way through this morass. I can't. So I aim to drag you down into it with me."—Eric Schwitzgebel

Could regular practice or disciplined training enhance our introspective acuity or is introspection impervious to all attempts at improvement? Why is the literature and research on introspection so riven with disagreement and is there the slightest hope of resolving even just one of the many conflicts that beleaguer the study of what for many of us is such a seemingly familiar and incontestable part of experience?

These, and many related questions are raised by Eric Schwitzgebel's provocative book "Perplexities of Consciousness" (2011) which seeks to thoroughly undermine any unjustified certainties we might harbour about our inner world. In seven chapters of scrupulous research and analytical enquiry, Schwitzgebel mounts a devastating case against introspection that should leave even the most stalwart of advocates baffled by the puzzles and bamboozled by the paradoxes.

Why, for instance, was it so common during the mid 20th Century for people to report only ever dreaming in black and white? Does a tilted circular coin look elliptical or simply circular and tilted. How can the lines in some optical illusions appear to be different lengths even when we know they are the same? What is the exact sequence of colours that comprise the fading of an after-image? Were you aware of your left foot before I just drew your attention to it? Are you aware of every sensation currently stimulating your body or of only the portions that you attend to? Reports gathered from numerous studies are radically at odds over these kinds of questions and the signs that some form of resolution can be found are—at least if Schwitzgebel is to be believed—vanishingly remote.

Much as I admire, Schwitzgebel's impeccable research and thought provoking inquisitiveness I have to declare a serious disagreement with his project as a whole and therefore the assumptions on which it stands. Schwitzgebel is by no means a fool but I would contend that the study of introspection is little more than a fool's errand, one that is guaranteed only ever to end up mired in incomplete and inconclusive findings for reasons that I hope to make clear.

Despite Schwitzgebel's attempts to remain objective in this study, one underlying assumption goes unchecked. He is evidently under the impression that introspection is a skill that can be improved. From this seemingly innocuous assumption flow all of the perplexities that swell the pages of this book.

Introspection, like thought or mindedness more generally, is best conceived not as a skill in-and-of-itself but as an essential component in the exercise of skills. Several prominent philosophers have pointed this out already, most notably Gilbert Ryle or Norman Malcolm in his 1977 essay: "Thinking". If introspection were a skill, it would be a singular exception to the rule that improvement comes through practice. We can't improve introspection simply by regular and determined acts of introspection. You don't learn what horses look like by determined introspection. You learn what horses look like through the observation of horses (or images or models of horses)—preferably aided by the use of a representational medium of some kind.

The perplexities Schwitzgebel so assiduously uncovers are the consequence of extricating the mental from the performative. When the mental is considered in this way and scrutinised in isolation from what it enables, then of course the results will be skewed, contradictory and incoherent. Why should this route of enquiry be any more conclusive or revealing regarding our abilities than a corresponding study of the performative component of skills stripped of all dependence on mind? Are robots skilful?

Treating introspection in isolation from the skills of which it forms an integral part and expecting it to yield reliable results is like expecting a shaken bag of Lego to produce interesting constructions. Lego needs to be interacted with by minded creatures in order to realise its potential. The surprises to which Lego often leads are neither the result of random variation nor of intuitive foresight. They are the result of an interplay between expectation and unexpected discovery, of prediction and speculative experiment. This process is iterative, accumulative and reliant upon ongoing feedback. Without this indispensable interplay we are left either with impoverished introspection or unproductive random variation. Neither is of much efficacy on its own and hence the perplexities of trying to make sense of introspection divorced from the skills it both enables and in part constitutes.

"Perplexities of Consciousness" is a book to be ambivalent about (hence the 3 stars). As a tool for understanding consciousness it is of doubtful value but as a body of evidence to challenge the idea that introspection is a skill, it could barely be more authoritative. It is curious though that Schwitzgebel is not led by the evidence he gathers to the realisation that there is something seriously amiss in standard accounts of consciousness, something that can only be resolved by radical reconceptualisation along the lines that I have sketched, lines that Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, J.L. Austin, Norman Malcolm and Donald Brook have already mapped out but that seem to have been all but forgotten by contemporary philosophy. The morass of which Schwitzgebel speaks is simply a figment of unalloyed introspection.

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