J.D. Trout has recently pointed out the strong agreement among philosophers that ‘explanation’ gains its conceptual grounding in the broader notion of ‘understanding.’ [1] An explanation is a good explanation in so far as it provides a greater understanding of the world.  Because philosophers are largely taken up in the task of an analysis of scientific and causal explanation, the notion of understanding is invoked to serve the purposes of elucidating the nature and importance of these kinds of explanation.

However, when the question arises as to whether or not scientific explanation is the only form of legitimate explanation, not all philosophers consistently maintain this appeal to understanding.  Those arguing for the autonomy of ‘historical’ explanation do appeal to understanding; explaining personal actions and cultural events requires an independent mode of understanding, usually by means of some sort of empathy. [2] Yet those more hopeful of the imperialistic enterprise of scientific explanation are not so eager to appeal to understanding in order to resolve the dispute.  The authority that grants legitimacy to explanation is rejected when this legitimacy is questioned; the result is an anarchy that leaves philosophers up to their own metaphysical commitments.

This is a disappointing error. The appeal to understanding does present itself as a perfect candidate as one of the possible ways to speak across the ‘explanatory gap.’  If explanation gains its significance within the concept of understanding, philosophers should also be willing to look to this concept in order to arbitrate among different kinds of explanation.  Intuitions regarding understanding may not always agree, but it is clear that understanding is an epistemological concept and one linked necessarily to our normative notions about knowledge.  If a belief about the world is true and has sufficient justification or warrant for that kind of belief to qualify for knowledge, then we would say that sufficient conditions have been met for an individual to gain access to a certain understanding of the world.  In turn, the expanse and coherence of our warranted beliefs (e.g. scientific ‘world-picture’) will determine the depth of our understanding. Knowledge is a necessary, yet insufficient, condition for a deep understanding of the world. 

Further, if there are genuinely different kinds of knowledge, there would appear to be different possible modes of understanding.   Scientific understanding entails only propositional knowledge. [3]   However, as I will argue, there is a distinct, non-cognitive way of knowing (i.e. knowing what-it-is-like-to-be) that generates a mode of understanding with content that is not entirely propositional, if propositional at all. Explanation generated from this mode of understanding will therefore not be fully contained within scientific explanation.  I will seek to illustrate how non-reductive philosophers (e.g. Maxwell, Nagle, Jackson, and Chalmers) have unfortunately passed over this kind of knowledge, along with the independent non-physicalist mode of understanding it produces.  The success of this argument has therefore only brought anemic results; for example, persuaded by this argument, David Chalmers was able to accommodate the non-physical in what still looks like a world fully explained by scientific explanation.

The Problem of Definition

Some might insist that more precise constraints must be given to our definitions if we are to truly adjudicate between different kinds of explanation. Just what is physical explanation?  Does scientific explanation differ from physical explanation? How exactly must scientific explanation differ from historical explanation? 

I am convinced that basic intuitions and common notions with respect to these questions are sufficient.  Consider the kind of explanation that we would be apt to give when asked why Winston Churchill said, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never.” [4]   To explain why Churchill spoke these words when he did, it might be natural to appeal to an historical sketch of his life, along with the cultural situation of his hearers.  Necessarily antecedent for a thorough explanation would be a direct appeal to our own understanding of what-it-is-like to persevere under trials in view of a moral good, along with imagining the emotion that Churchill and his listeners might have had upon the speaking of these words.  This kind of explanation is readily available to us, and it is natural and intuitive.  However, a scientific explanation or physical explanation of why Churchill spoke these words seems not only prima fascia impossible, but unintelligible. [5]

Our understanding of what qualifies as a physical or scientific explanation has become fairly precise.   As Jackson noted “…it is reasonable to suppose that physical science, despite its known inadequacies, has advanced sufficiently for us to be confident of the kinds of properties and relations that are needed to give a complete account of non-sentient reality.” [6]   There may not be necessary and sufficient definitions available to us, but this does not entail that we do not have a sufficient conception of what physical explanation is, and therefore, of that which is not physical explanation.  If I were pressed for a description however, I would say that we arrive at a physical or scientific understanding by stripping down [7] more anthropomorphic descriptions (personalistic, sensuous, and perspectival) to the “patterns, regularities, and symmetries,” [8] or as David Chalmers would say, modulo consciousness, the “structure and dynamics” [9] of the world.  I think that this is more than sufficient for our purposes, and so I will go on.

What Mary Really Gained

Non-reductive philosophers have been furthering an argument of a particular form over that last 37 years [10] in the attempt to limit the materialist picture.  I will refer to the historical expression of this argument as the “what Mary didn’t know” tradition, as this was the title of the argument’s climatic expression.  As I will seek to illustrate, it is not clear if the argument ever attempted to reveal just what it was that Mary did not know before she left her black-and-white room for the first time, which perhaps offers explanation for why the argument did in fact fail to demonstrate what Mary truly gained.  The devastating result is that the “what Mary didn’t know” tradition has missed what I believe to be an entire non-physicalist mode of understanding, the kind of understanding that really should have been the whole point to begin with.

Maxwell’s original 1966 argument went like this: “In having this brain process [which is contingently identical to the experience of seeing red] occur in one’s own brain for the first time something wholly new is learnt; one discovers what red things are like…” [11]   So in 1966, Mary [12] discovered, or learned, what red things are like. In a recent publication, Maxwell now says that Mary gained further “personalistic information.” [13]  

Nagel’s 1974 “What is it like to be a bat” argument concluded in a similar spirit that some facts and some concepts are accessible only from a particular point of view. [14]   In other words, once Mary knows what-it-is-like to experience red (i.e. from the subjective point of view) she gains further concepts (those concepts requiring a particularly human “structure” of experience), which produce propositional knowledge about the world in addition to all the physical (objective) facts.

In 1986, Frank Jackson carried out this approach in the most explicit fashion. Jackson granted that Mary could in principle imagine what it is like to see red before leaving her black and white room, but until the actual perception, she could not have “knowledge about” [15] (propositional knowledge) her experience, and therefore would lack knowledge about the experience of others while still in her black and white world.  And Jackson was precise about just what Mary gained: via learning, Mary gained knowledge that, not necessarily knowledge how, nor knowledge by acquaintance.  Jackson granted Churchland’s assumption that if what Mary gained was merely an entirely new mode of understanding, a new and autonomous kind of knowing (i.e. knowing what-it-is-like-to-be), then the argument was lost; physicalism would be true, for Mary would not have learned a new propositional fact.

If these arguments succeed, it is still not clear to what extent materialism is damaged.  These arguments are for the purpose of showing that there are certain known facts that are not, strictly speaking, physical facts.  Experience is employed, but only as a reduced time-slice of one aspect of Mary’s visual field.  Mary learned a fact about what-it-was-like, in a timeless void, to be appeared to brute-redly.  It is revealing to note that Chalmers, who was eventually persuaded by this argumentative tradition, was merely forced to allow this redness to be added to his otherwise materialist world picture. Consciousness becomes the impersonal qualia-object, “alongside space-time, spin, charge, and the like.” [16]  

Paradoxically, Chalmers does make a fascinating contrast between reductive explanation, which he considers “mystery reduction,” from non-reductive explanation, which he labels “comprehensible and enlightening,” “illuminating,” and “deep” explanation. [17]   This language is clearly meant to reflect the traditional historical/scientific distinction, [18] but the mere mentioning of the distinction is where Chalmers leaves it. In recent personal correspondence, I asked Chalmers for some further elaboration; Chalmers stated in response that he just finds this distinction intuitive and noted that he was not referring to any particular philosopher or publication.  And it is clear that his desire to take consciousness seriously (1996) does not parallel a desire to take historical explanation seriously. [19]

But what Mary gained that is so important to the question of understanding, and thus for the very possibility of non-scientific explanation, is not the propositional knowledge of a new fact.  Perhaps propositional knowledge is a result of what she immediately gained when walking out of the black and white room, but it does not signify the antecedent knowledge itself. What would have produced this new propositional knowledge was the knowledge of what-it-is-like to see red.  Mary knew what-it-was-like-to-be; there was knowledge of what something was like for Mary.  This is Nagle’s own language, and yet he does not appear to grant the importance at all for what kind of understanding this distinct kind of knowledge might have produced for Mary other than the propositional knowledge of a new, non-physical fact.

It seems to me that one reason for this neglect on Nagel’s part, which appears to be the same reason for Chalmers’ ability to grant the argument while maintaining a pseudo-materialist view, is that what Mary gains in these arguments is actually not at all the knowledge of what-it-is-like-to-be.  Knowing what-it-is-like-to-be is the immediate result of simply being conscious. This knowledge is not a result of any reduced element of consciousness, but is rather only the result of the holistic unity of what I will call ‘real consciousness.’  Real consciousness cannot be sufficiently denoted in terms of a mere timeless visual field or an abstracted emotion.  Real consciousness is the unity of the entire non-cognitive, personal mode of being, with organic layers of structure amongst the different sensory inputs, bodily sensations, moods, and emotions, at any given time t.  Further, this vertical, time-sliced structure is also structured over a horizon of time; there involves an active interplay during the present between immediate remembered past and the immediate anticipated future. [20]    As Nagel stated, those “identifying characteristics of the mind” are “its special type of unity both at a time and over time….” [21]

The nature of phenomenal memory highlights this.  When we remember what it was like to hike through the Adirondacks in the fall, we are not necessarily remembering facts about the color of the leaves or facts about the strain on our legs.  We are essentially remembering, non-cognitively, what-it-is-like-to-be a person hiking through fall-colored mountains. In fact, upon analysis, it seems as though phenomenal memory corrects propositional memory.  For example, often our consciousness adds deeper color and richer flavor to past experience as it is phenomenally recalled; phenomenal memory appears to have the function of embedding experience within a structured phenomenal history.  A particular experience can be hued and spiced when it is called up and those elements less consonant with the historical flow of experience are suppressed and as those elements more consonant are accentuated. What were upon immediate experience stagnant realities can gain crescendos or decrescendos depending on the context in which it is embedded. 

And this is not simply misrepresentation, but can function as an editing for a more accurate recollection.  Our aesthetic attunement and proper perception of the important themes and tones of immediate experience is always, to a degree, unrefined and numb; phenomenal memory’s recapitulation of our experience can put us where we should have been.  Take for example the case of lack of sleep or pain; those around you on any occasion may be experiencing one thing, where you are experiencing something quite different—deadened in your experience due to pain or sleepiness, or perhaps uncontrolled rage.  This sort of phenomenal memory, combined with imagination, immediate multilayered experience (e.g. perceptions, moods, and emotions), and a personal-identity acting into the future, is what we might call the content of our irreducible knowledge of what-it-is-like-to-be. 

This is not to say that consciousness cannot be analyzed into discrete parts.  We do this all the time, and speak of emotions as distinct from moods, and distinguish the different sense modalities.  We can also genuinely take a visual field at any time t and analyze it in terms of its colors, shapes, focus, depth, and the like.  However, we do not come to know what-it-is-like in this discrete fashion.  As soon as an element of experience, such as perception, is stopped in time and analyzed out of the unity of consciousness, this element is immediately stripped of its personal nature.  It is no longer a part of what it is for me to be me, but now an impersonal, objective visual field.  It may represent in some fashion an element of experience that I knew about, but it is no longer an element of my knowledge of what-it-is-to-be.

  Why allow Churchland to trivialize this element of Mary’s existence? In fact, why not rather see this element of Mary’s existence, this sui generis knowledge of what-it-is-like-to-be found in the unity of Mary’s consciousness, as the very grounds for a mode of understanding the world independent of scientific explanation?  Why has this sui generis knowledge that Mary gained, which poses a far greater challenge to materialism than the addition of a few non-physical facts, been implicitly (explicitly in the case of Jackson) disparaged or entirely overlooked by the “what Mary didn’t know” tradition? 

In the real world, the knowledge that Mary would gain is the knowledge of, for example, what-it-is-like to escape a black and white dungeon to enjoy, for the first time, a walk through the lush colored and fragrant rose-garden.   In the real world, Mary would have gained an entirely different mode of understanding, grounded in a sui generis kind of knowing; in turn, this second mode of understanding, we would expect, generates a kind of “explanation” that would be autonomous from the scientific.  Knowing what-it-is-like is the front door into a non-scientific world. And of course, this is the mode of understanding prerequisite for poetry, biography, elements of history, and knowledge of persons.  Historical explanation does appear to be grounded in a kind of knowledge and understanding that will not permit reduction to scientific explanation.

Objections? 

There are objections to looking at experience in this way.  Some for example, deny the phenomenal world all together, and appear to wish we would consider them as zombie brothers and sisters.  I suppose that if you are a non-conscious functional equivalent to a human being, then this thesis might be difficult for you to completely ‘grasp.’  In your case, I suppose, you would be correct; there really isn’t anything it is like to be you.  If this is the case, I am sorry.  But I know that there is something it is like to be me, and I’m fairly convinced that I know others who know what it is like to be themselves; and that is about all I want to say to this kind of objection.

There is a more subtle version of this objection however that I believe warrants a few words.  In a recent article, P.M.S. Hacker asks, “Is There Anything it is Like to Be a Bat?” [22]   I don’t recall an answer to the question, but since according to Hacker “…qualia are figments of the philosophical imagination,” one might have a vague intuition as to what the answer might be.  Hacker is a stern grammarian for those who want to talk about their mental lives.  When referring to our consciousness, ‘what it is like,’ ‘what it is like to be me,’ and ‘what it is like for me’ are usually meaningless statements.   From these statements, which Chalmers, Searle, and Ned Block are all guilty of, Hacker has formulated the necessary definition: “An experience is a conscious experience if and only if there is something which it is like for the subject of the experience to have it,” which we all know does not make sense. Do we know of experience that isn’t consciousness? 

And why the problem with the basic ideas of ‘something it is like’ or the ‘feel of’ consciousness?  The problem is that there is no necessary feel of experience and therefore there is not necessarily something it is like to undergo that experience.  These ideas come into play, says Hacker, only as we express our emotive evaluation of our experience.  We usually don’t have any attitude at all towards our experience, and so this is only a minor occurrence.  Further, our emotive response to experience can be identical for different kinds of experience.  For example, I might have precisely the same kind of elation with respect to winning a million dollars as I might when I realize the woman I’m courting is willing to marry me.  Therefore, this feeling of elation is independent of the nature of these experiences.  It is not surprising then, Hacker thinks, that Nagel nowhere tells us precisely what it is like to be Nagel; this inability on Nagel’s part is sufficient evidence to the fact that there really isn’t something there is like to be Nagel in the first place. 

But it is not clear that Hacker has taken into account the non-cognitive nature of what-it-is-like-to-be; by definition, what-it-is-like is not directly translatable into propositional descriptions. So why demand that Nagel must directly translate what-it-is-like into propositional descriptions?  Certainly, when I, Searle, Chalmers, or Block refer to what-it-is-like, we speak in a sense metaphorically, or if you will, poetically.  That is all we really can do when referencing the unity of non-cognitive knowledge of what-it-is-like.  Of course, when taken as dry grammar-perfect prose, the statement “this is what it is like for me to be me” doesn’t make much sense (“me to be me”?!).  But what’s wrong with it as poetry?  There is certainly something I am referring to isn’t there?  Why does not Hacker get the poetry?  Is Hacker a zombie? [23]  

My conclusion is this: Keeping consciousness intact qua consciousness will be a keeping of ourselves from these kinds of mistakes, and in the case of Chalmers’ “taking consciousness seriously,” a keeping of ourselves from the hypocrisy of not practicing what we preach.  If we succeed in doing this, we will have opened ourselves up to admitting a robust, sui generis kind of knowledge, the knowledge of what-it-is-like-to-be.  Once we have that, we have a non-cognitive mode of understanding, which we must appeal to, pace analytic grammarians, in a non-scientific mode.  We will have walked through the front door of non-scientific understanding, and thus, when the need arises, non-scientific explanation.