Challenge
Schwitzgebel's Unreliable Introspection, Indeterminate Boundaries, Metaphysical Humility
Real Experience, Unreliable Introspection, Vague Boundaries
Schwitzgebel holds that phenomenal consciousness is real but denies that introspection gives reliable access to it or that it has sharp boundaries. He argues that for some systems, such as a garden snail, it may be neither determinately true nor false that there is something it is like to be them. His ‘crazyism’ adds that every theory of mind and cosmos has bizarre consequences and none compels belief, so his position sets constraints on theories rather than offering one.
Eric Schwitzgebel
What consciousness is
Schwitzgebel identifies phenomenal consciousness only by example: whatever obvious feature is shared by seeing colours, feeling pain, vivid emotion, imagery, dreaming, and conscious thought, and lacked by hormone regulation, standing knowledge, and unconscious sensory processing.
Mind and body
Left open. Recognizing experience commits one neither to dualism nor to the claim that qualia are scientifically inexplicable, and materialism, dualism, panpsychism, and idealism all yield bizarre consequences when fully developed.
Mechanism
The borderline consciousness quadrilemma: across the continuum of Earthly systems, either almost nothing is conscious, everything is, a sharp boundary exists somewhere, or consciousness is vague. The first two are implausible, and no naturalistic theory can explain a single synapse flipping experience on, so consciousness is vague.
Core claims
- Mid-twentieth-century Americans reported dreaming in black and white and later, after colour television, in colour, which suggests that reports track cultural models more than experience.
- Careful observers disagree about visual imagery, the richness of peripheral vision, and constant tactile experience of the feet, and no principled method settles these disputes.
- Theories such as Integrated Information Theory, Global Workspace Theory, and higher-order theories specify conditions that come in degrees while treating consciousness as all-or-nothing, so they owe an account of where the cutoff falls.
- Every developed metaphysics of mind defies common sense (universal bizarreness) and none compels rational belief (universal dubiety).
Criticisms
Smithies and Spener argue that the failures Schwitzgebel cites are domain-general, not specific to introspection, and historical variation in reports may reflect changing descriptions, not changing experiences. Critics also charge that borderline consciousness mistakes vagueness in our concept for vagueness in the world, and Kammerer argues materialists can deny group consciousness on principled grounds.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Uncertain
- Schwitzgebel holds that current theories give weak grounds for deciding which artificial systems are conscious, and some may be borderline cases with no determinate answer.
- Survival beyond death: Uncertain
- Since no metaphysics of mind compels belief on this view, the question of survival is left open.
- Meaning and purpose: Uncertain
- Crazyism holds that something bizarre must be true about mind and cosmos but that we cannot know what.
- Virtual immortality: Uncertain
- Without a settled metaphysics of mind, whether a digital copy would be conscious cannot be decided.
Related theories
- Frankish’s Illusionism (Critique)
- Integrated Information Theory (Critique)
- Kammerer’s Introspective Illusionism (Contrast)
- Birch’s Comparative Sentience: Consciousness Profiles Across Diverse Minds (Compatible)
Sources
- Perplexities of Consciousness, Eric Schwitzgebel (2011)
- The Unreliability of Naïve Introspection, Eric Schwitzgebel (2008)
- Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White?, Eric Schwitzgebel (2002)
- If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious, Eric Schwitzgebel (2015)
- Borderline Consciousness, When It's Neither Determinately True nor Determinately False That Experience Is Present, Eric Schwitzgebel (2023)
- The Weirdness of the World, Eric Schwitzgebel (2024)
- Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic, Eric Schwitzgebel and R. T. Hurlburt (2007)
- How a Materialist Can Deny That the United States Is Probably Conscious, F. Kammerer (2015)