Wittgenstein and the conscious mind

Imagine we have a complete science of the world that’s given us an account of the nature of reality, the nature of the mind and our engagement with the world. It seems to me that philosophers would still want to ask questions. There’s a gap that science doesn’t close. There’s something that the philosopher’s after when science is finished. And the question is, what would count as a philosophical explanation?

Wittgenstein was puzzled by and haunted by that question. We know what scientific explanations are. We know that hunger to really understand and put ourselves in the right place to get a grip on what’s going on in cell biology, or the brain, or even the chemical structure of the foods that we eat. But what is a philosophical explanation, and what would satisfy us?

Wittgenstein worries that sometimes philosophers are trying to do a sort of über-science. It’s as though we want not just the physics, but something beyond the metaphysics; we’re looking for the essence or the structure of reality, or language, or mental life. Wittgenstein begins to doubt that such a quest will deliver anything useful, but he thinks we still do seek explanation.

Explanations in philosophy are often not the giving of more information or an account of causal mechanism. Sometimes they’re just about seeing things in the right way, having an insight. It’s very interesting that when you look at Wittgenstein’s criticism of Freud – far from being the crude criticism that says Freud was dabbling in talk of unconscious states, and what could those possibly be – Wittgenstein criticises Freud by saying he’s too scientific. Freud gives us a causal explanation when what we really want is a conceptual explanation.

Philosophical explanations for Wittgenstein are very different from scientific explanations. Sometimes they’re just about seeing things as they really are instead of looking for some underlying story or cause. But sometimes there’s no need for explanation. In Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, Wittgenstein asks, to a man who has lost in love, what will help him – an explanation? To which the answer is obviously no, not an explanation. He must just bear things as they are. He has to take them as he finds them. So sometimes we do away with explanation.

You can think in modern terms of something similar. Just before people have an epileptic seizure, they sometimes feel an imminent sense of revelation and aura, as though there’s going to be a divine revelation made available to them. And they want to have that explained. But we sometimes have to tell them that there’s no revelation. This is just a neuronal storm when the two hemispheres are swapping electrical signals at great speed. So sometimes we have to talk people out of wanting an explanation – there’s nothing there.

A good example of Wittgenstein reminding us not to look for explanations where none is needed, but to look for better descriptions of how things really are, is in the conversation he had with his pupil, Elizabeth Anscombe, who became his literary executor. Anscombe said to Wittgenstein, ‘You can see why people thought that the sun went round the Earth.’ And Wittgenstein says, ‘Really? Why is that?’ Anscombe replies, ‘Well, it looks that way.’ But Wittgenstein says, ‘And how would it look if the Earth went round the sun?’ The answer, of course, is exactly the same. So this is an example of how you describe things in the right way and there’s no longer a problem, and we don’t have to seek special explanations.

We can see the problems that Wittgenstein raises for us, and the new way in which he raises them, when we look at problems that are still persistent in philosophy today, like the problem of consciousness. Often, the problem of consciousness is posed as the question: how can the grey matter inside my skull give rise to these private conscious experiences, these memories, these images, these feelings that are just mine? How do these elusive and ephemeral things arise out of physical stuff?

There are things that Wittgenstein got wrong, and where modern neuroscience has given us reasons to revise some of his philosophical thinking. Wittgenstein says that a man could not be in pain and wonder whose pain it was. Pain seems to announce itself to the owner as “my pain”.

However, in the case of people who’ve suffered brain lesions or neural damage, left parietal damage, they can sometimes have a hand or an arm which they no longer recognise as their own. The patient will say to the doctor, ‘That’s not my arm.’ The doctor may ask, ‘Whose arm is it?’ And the patient might reply, ‘It’s your arm’, or ‘It’s my husband’s arm.’

Now, with some of those patients, if you then prick the skin with a pin, there is a pain. You can ask the patient, ‘Is there pain?’ They’ll say, ‘Yes.’ ‘Is it your pain?’ ‘No.’ ‘Whose pain is it?’ The patient may say they don’t know or that it’s the pain of whoever’s arm this is. So, the very idea that it seemed conceptually impossible for someone to wonder whose pain it was when they felt pain is now made possible, not by a special philosophical example, but by a real-life case of the strange pathologies that we find in modern neuroscience and neurology.

What we’re finding out from neuroscience is that when everything’s functioning well, we imagine we have a unified consciousness. I feel my body, I see things around me, I’m conscious of my feelings and my thoughts and my mental states, and they all seem to take place in one sphere. They’re commingling and they’re part of the unified self.

What we’re able to see now, with the help of modern neuroscience and some of these tragic patient cases, is that the sense of self is actually just that. It’s a sense of self, and it depends on many systems: awareness of our body, awareness of our limbs, our senses providing the right information. But when any of that is damaged or broken, we can end up fragmented, and we can have different levels of consciousness, or parts of consciousness that are not speaking to other parts.

Then, the question is why isn’t it like that most of the time? In his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks looks at these curious reports of patients, thinking how bizarre, how strange. Instead, perhaps we should ask ourselves why we are not more like that, given that we know there are all these subsystems that make it possible for us to have a continued conscious sense of self.

Wittgenstein has told us to question everything and to try to see things as they are, rather than some tidied up and philosophically advantageous version of them. So we have to take his moral and his recommendations at his own word and apply it to some of his own thinking.

We’ve learned things from the surprises that neuroscience provides us with as to how the brain works, and how the systems that provide us with information about our self are organised, enabling us to look at new cases. Wittgenstein would have taken it as the right thing to do: to remind ourselves not to take anything for granted, but to try to see how things really are. That includes both the cases where these systems are working perfectly, where we have conscious minds that are unified and putting us in touch with ourselves and the world around us, but also the cases where things break down and that doesn’t happen. Then we see that things are more complicated than even Wittgenstein thought.