Drescher on False Reification

In Good and Real, an ambitious attempt to "demistify paradoxes from physics to ethics", Gary Drescher discusses the "false reification" of concepts in the philosophy of mind (2005: 50ff). The fallacy of reification is familiar in other areas of philosophy, but to my knowledge Drescher is the first to apply it specifically to consciousness (although he acknowledges Dennett [1991] as a source of inspiration). Today I want to discuss a few of his insights, and I'll maybe go into more detail with my thoughts on them in a future post.

First off, what is false reification? It occurs when we mistakenly interpret our empirical observations as identifying a new and distinct entity. In the case of consciousness, that basically means identifying "being conscious" as a property over and above the cognitive processes that we are conscious of. A simple, non-cognitive example of false reification is the historic notion of vitalism. It used to be believed that there was a separate life-force that endowed living things with life, animating them in a way that non-living things could not emulate. We know now that no such vital life-force exists, and that being alive is in fact no more than a function of the biological processes that compose living things. Whereas vitalism supposed that biological processes involved an extra 'spark of life', modern biology simply identifies life with certain biological processes. We can say that vitalism falsely reified life, believing it to be a distinct entity or property over and above the physical processes that instantiate it. 

Similarly, many philosophical puzzles can be neatly side-stepped if we avoid falsely reifying consciousness. A common mistake, according to Drescher, is to view consciousness as being an intrinsic property of mental events that we discover when we examine those events. "Rather," he writes, "the examination of a mental event [. . .] is what constitutes that event's consciousness" (Drescher 2005: 49). Under this interpretation, it is no surprise that whenever we examine a mental event, we find that event to be conscious. Like the light that turns on whenever we open a refrigerator, consciousness 'turns on' whenever we focus on or examine a particular mental event (ibid.). The false reification that we commit here is to think of consciousness as something extra that we must discover within a conscious system, beyond the physical processes that constitute that system.

Quale, not quail.

The false reification of qualia can also result in philosophical confusion. A quale is a philosophical term referring to the conscious sensation of an experience, for example the feeling of what it is like to see red or hear a loud noise. A famous thought-experiment asks what would happen if you were able to 'invert your spectrum' - that is, make everything look the opposite colour to what it does now. So red would look green, blue would look orange, and yellow would look purple (or something like that, the precise details are unimportant). Would you notice any difference? If colour-qualia have an existence independent of the physical process of colour perception, then perhaps you might - but to argue that they do is to commit a false reification. Our conscious experience of a colour just is the act of perceiving that colour, and so the inverted spectrum experiment is simply incoherent. It just isn't possible that we could perceive everything in the same way that we do now, but with the colours inverted. There are no independent qaulia that we can switch around in order to make the experiment work.

A final, related false reification can occur when we consider our motivations for certain actions. Put (extremely) simplistically, we are motivated by a desire to experience pleasurable things and avoid painful things. So it seems natural to say things like "you want to eat chocolate becuase it just tastes good; you want to avoid stubbing your toe becuase that just feels bad" (Drescher 2005: 77). Intuitively this makes sense, but Drescher thinks that it gets things the wrong way round. There is no property tasty that is intrinsic to chocolate, and no property painful that is intrinsic to toe-stubbing. Rather it is the fact that we have a natural desire for sugar that makes chocolate taste good, and the fact that we have a natural aversion to harming ourselves that makes toe-stubbing painful. So pain and tastiness are constituted by these evolved processes, and to view them as intrinsic properties that we aim for (or aim to avoid) is to falsely reify them.

Thus concludes my whistle-stop tour of Drescher's views of false reification in the study of consciousness. His book is very interesting, although I'm doubtful of his central claims concerning free will and determinism in chapters 5-7. More on those next week, perhaps, or for now you can just re-read my previous post on the topic.

• Dennett, D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown and Company.
• Drescher, G. 2005. Good and Real. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press