The Psychoanalytic Pushback Against Philosophy Of Consciousness
Studies like that consciousness of bacteria one from a couple of days ago sometimes get appropriated for "see, humans aren't all that special" kinds of moves. But everything rhetorical - everything that reserves a special place for the intersubjective relationship mediated by discourse - militates against that kind of leveling. Now the trivial answer to that is to embrace some kind of vulgar self-help mysticism about the "special place" that humans have in the world - but that precisely begs all of the questions that the study purports to answer. That's the tactic of an overly impertinent undergrad - someone who claims to sweep away really nuanced distinctions with some pretentious statement (the really rigorous way to make the same move is to do it through Heidegger - this is how John Haugland differentiates AI from humans).
But it's probably impossible to 'just crack' this study's implications. It has the feel of something that's incredibly careful - which means that, without knowing anything about the terrain of the argument, it probably backstops against a lot of easy distinctions. At any rate, it would take some pretty rigorous lessons in the philosophy of consciousness debate to anticipate what's going on downstream. You'd also have to gamble on the chance of finding a distinction that previous brilliant scholars have missed - which isn't a good bet, since many of them undoubtedly had an aptitude for this kind of philosophy in the first place.
But the emphasis on "consciousness" has the feel of being a pretty narrow disciplinary debate, on disciplinary terms that ought not be extrapolated. Which is not to take anything away from the idea that debate should occur within circumscribed disciplinary bounds - but it does cut off the move to smuggle the conclusions of the study ("consciousness is a continuum") into domains in which consciousness has a looser definition.
After the jump: why conclusions in the philosophy of consciousness tell us very, very little about anything but what's going on in the field of philosophy of consciousness.
We're skeptical about the degree to which the philosophical term of art "consciousness" can be usefully applied within the horizon of critical theory. The traditions that give rise to American speech, Continental philosophy, etc seem to be dealing with something that's essentially different. Here's how that post about bacterial consciousness starts:
Cognitive science must have an answer for two key questions: what is cognition, and what kinds of creatures or systems are cognitive? Descartes argued that only humans were cognitive agents due to their rationality, reflectiveness and perhaps creativity.
That's textually true as far as it goes. But the readings of Descartes then diverge between philosophy of consciousness on one hand and what we might call philosophy of the subject (through Kant, into the Continental post-Kantian tradition, etc) on the other. The relationships are hopelessly tangled, but we think that we can make a reasonably good case that philosophers of consciousness are not dealing with the subject.
We have very little choice but to accept that Lyon's work calls into the question the degree to which human consciousness (again, in a strict term of art sense) can be separated from bacterial consciousness. But it's not hard to see that there is something different between humans - who have subjectivity - and bacteria - which are certainly not complex enough for anything like reflexivity.
Zizek has an elegant example on this point. Imagine a rat that's being moved around by scientists - the scientists control its actions through electrodes that they have plugged into its brain. They push this button, the rat moves left; this button causes it to go right. The crucial biological question is 'how does the electrical pulse go from that part of the brain to the leg", and it can probably be explained fully on those terms.
But there is still an interesting question (interesting for humanities people, at least) that is not exhausted by that explanation. We might call it the psychoanalytic question: how is that experience subjectivized? In other words, how does the rat experience the impulse to move right or left? Is it experienced "coercively" as a compulsion from without - does that rat experience the physical action of moving his legs this way and that without knowing "why"? Or is it experienced as a compulsion from within - does the rat seem to itself to conclude that it wants to move this way and that?
Or, more probably, is the experience not "subjectivized" at all - are the terms in which we're describing the experience, in a way, "foreign" to the rat? Unknown. Are they exclusive to humans? Probably not. Are they found in bacteria? Eh - probably not. And so subjectivity seems to be something different - something 'higher' - than "mere" consciousness.
The Cartesian move might be to posit "subjectivity = consciousness + reflexivity". That's probably insufficient for the rhetorical and argumentative tradition, which would also want to insist on the constitutively intersubjective nature of subjectivity. But it does seem like debates about the subject are dealing with something different that what the philosophers of consciousness take as their object of study - and that conclusions in one domain need to be independently analyzed within, rather than just imported into, the other.
References:
* Bacteria Seem To Be Doing A Lot Of Thinking These Days [IIS]
Previously:
* What If The Lacanian Gaze Wasn't Totally Stupid?
* Bacteria Seem To Be Doing A Lot Of Thinking These Days
