How Illuminating Is the Light?

guest post by Andrew Y. Lee

in reply to Eric's Aug 29 critique of his "Light and Room" metaphor for consciousness

In “The Light & the Room,” I explore a common metaphor about phenomenal consciousness. To be conscious—according to the metaphor—is for “the lights to be on inside.” The purpose of my piece is to argue that the metaphor is a useful conceptual tool, that it’s compatible with a wide range of theories of consciousness, that it illuminates some questions about degrees, dimensions, and determinacy of consciousness, and that it disentangles a systematic ambiguity in the meaning of ‘phenomenal consciousness’.

In “Is Being Conscious Like 'Having the Lights Turned On?'”, Eric Schwitzgebel reacts to the piece. The central point in Eric’s post is that metaphors invite ways of thinking. And so, we can ask: Do the ways of thinking invited by the metaphor of the light and the room clarify or obfuscate philosophical theorizing about phenomenal consciousness? In other words: how illuminating is the metaphor of the light?

There’s a lot that Eric and I agree on. We agree that metaphors invite ways of thinking. We agree that this metaphor is flexible enough to be adaptable to a wide range of views about consciousness. We agree that if a metaphor becomes overstretched, then it may be best to abandon it rather than contort it. And we agree that this metaphor affords opportunities for creative brainstorming and exploring novel (even weird!) ideas about consciousness.

To highlight where I think we diverge, I’ll say a bit about the following two questions:

1. Which ways of thinking does the metaphor actually invite?

2. What should we make of the fact that the metaphor invites certain ways of thinking?

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Which ways of thinking does the metaphor actually invite? Someone who takes the metaphor to suggest that consciousness exhibits wave-particle duality, that the speed of consciousness is invariant across all reference frames, or—as Eric notes—that minds literally contain sofas, would be overextending the metaphor. Just because the metaphor elicits a thought doesn’t mean that the metaphor invites that as a way of thinking.

Does the metaphor invite the idea that consciousness involves knowledge? Here’s a reason for skepticism. If you turn the lights on in a room, you don’t automatically come to know all visible facts about the room. At best, you come to be in a position to acquire that knowledge. But that’s compatible with thinking that it can sometimes be hard to acquire such knowledge and that you can be mistaken in all sorts of ways about what’s in the room. Think about the last time you were convinced you lost your keys, even though they were in plain sight!

What I think the metaphor does invite (but not mandate) is the idea that we stand in a special epistemic relationship to our own experiences. But what that epistemic privilege amounts to is left open by the metaphor. You could accept the metaphor and think that our knowledge of what’s inside the room is no more reliable or secure than our knowledge of the external world. You could accept the metaphor and think that we’re directly acquainted with the objects in the room (but not with anything outside the room). You could even accept the metaphor and think both!

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What should we make of the fact that the metaphor invites certain ways of thinking? Well, the central purpose of the metaphor is to illustrate the concept of phenomenal consciousness. The question, then, is whether the ways of thinking invited by the metaphor facilitate a grasp of the concept of phenomenal consciousness.

A live question in the philosophy of consciousness is whether there can be borderline cases of consciousness, meaning entities that are neither determinately conscious nor determinately not conscious. The term ‘borderline consciousness’ is sometimes prone to misinterpretation. But the metaphor of the light can be used to guide one towards the intended sense of the term. The question, as I note in my piece, “isn’t merely about whether it’s hard to know whether the lights are on or off” and “isn’t merely about whether the light might be very dim,” since in both those scenarios the light might still be determinately on. Instead, the question is whether the lights could be in a halfway state between on and off. That’s a much more puzzling possibility.

Now, I agree with Eric that the metaphor invites (but does not mandate) the idea that nothing is borderline conscious. But is this a flaw of the metaphor? It’s indeed controversial whether there can be borderline consciousness. But it’s not particularly controversial that the idea of borderline consciousness is counterintuitive. In fact, Eric himself has noted that it’s “highly intuitive” that consciousness doesn’t admit of borderline cases, and that “such considerations present a serious obstacle to understanding what could be meant by ‘borderline consciousness’.” This seems to suggest that the concept of phenomenal consciousness itself invites (even if it doesn’t mandate) the impossibility of borderline consciousness.

You could reasonably argue that these intuitions against borderline consciousness aren’t decisive. Personally, I think the intuitions are tracking the truth: I favor the view that nothing is borderline conscious. But I spend a good deal of time in my piece making a case for resisting those intuitions. After all—you might think—“it’s very rare to see sharp cutoffs in nature; if you look closely enough, you’ll nearly always find shades of gray.” Even though we’re unable to conceive of borderline consciousness, perhaps we have sufficient theoretical reasons to postulate its existence. Even if hazy states of half-light strike us as obscure, perhaps we ought to attribute the obscurity to mere limits of our imagination. Just because an invitation is extended doesn’t mean that one has to take it.

But when teaching a concept, it’s often useful to elicit intuitions invited by that concept (even if those intuitions turn out to be defeasible). And if the concept of phenomenal consciousness invites a certain set of intuitions, then a metaphor for phenomenal consciousness may reasonably also invite those intuitions.

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I’ve argued that (1) not all thoughts elicited by the metaphor are ways of thinking invited by the metaphor, and that (2) some ways of thinking invited by the metaphor are also ways of thinking invited by the concept of phenomenal consciousness itself. With these points in mind (in the room?), let me now briefly consider the other cases Eric mentioned.

It’s natural to think that the unity of consciousness is transitive, just as it’s natural to think of each illuminated room as a discrete unit. But one could argue for a view where—surprisingly—there can be overlapping subjects. The idea that conscious subjects can overlap is counterintuitive, but worth exploring. And a picture where the illuminated rooms can overlap is strange, but one that may well be worth drawing.

It's natural to think there can be differences in phenomenal character without differences in subjectivity (a point I explain in more detail in my piece). But you could favor a picture where the objects in the room are made out of light. This isn’t the most obvious way of developing the metaphor. But that strikes me as a good thing, since (as I argue elsewhere in more detail) nearly every theory of consciousness generates a natural distinction between subjectivity and phenomenal character.

What about cognition? Eric notes that it’s natural to think that the light doesn’t affect the shape of the furniture in the room. Still, there are other properties of furniture—such as color—that may very well be modulated by the light. However, the interpretive significance of all this strikes me as unclear. Cognition—whether conscious or unconscious—is a dynamic process. But the metaphor doesn’t contain any dynamic elements. This isn’t because the metaphor invites the idea that there’s no such thing as cognition. Instead, the metaphor—at least in its most basic form—is silent on questions of cognition (just as it’s silent on questions about, say, neuroanatomy).

I’ll close with one other idea invited by the metaphor. Consider illusionism about consciousness. The metaphor—trivially—invites a picture where there really is a light. So, it invites a realist way of thinking about consciousness. But according to illusionists, there isn’t really such a thing as phenomenal consciousness, at least not in the way that philosophers typically think about it. Now, an illusionist could take issue with the metaphor by saying that it invites a realist way of thinking. But most illusionists embrace the fact that they have a radical view of consciousness. Because of this, I think even illusionists can find the metaphor useful. It’s compelling to think that there really is a light. But for illusionists, there’s merely illusion, and no real illumination.

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At the beginning of this post, I invoked a metaphor for my metaphor (a metametaphor). A metaphor—at least when used to illustrate a concept, idea, or theory—is a tool. Some tools are better than others, and some tools are ill-suited for certain tasks. Tools aren’t necessarily in competition; different tools can serve different functions. But most tools are designed with a specific function in mind. And to use a tool well, one needs to understand its designated function.

The main reason I like the metaphor of the light and the room is because I think it’s a useful tool. The main task of my article is to put this tool to work in eliciting some important distinctions about the structure of consciousness. The metaphor can be misinterpreted, just as literal tools can be misused. And if a tool is systematically misused, then that may be a sign that there’s a design flaw. But a good tool—when used well—can enable us to create new things that would have been hard to make without the tool. And the metaphor of the light and the room—in my opinion—is a good tool.

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