Phil 101: Huxley on Conscious Automata

Just some brief notes on this material.

Officially Huxley doesn’t take a stand on whether consciousness requires souls (see the end of p. 29 in our selection). But it’s easiest to think about his position if we read him as though he were a dualist.

When thinking about the conscious states/events that may be going on in a creature’s mind, we can also include the “feelings of choosing” they may have (Huxley uses the term “volitions”). We can talk about these feelings while bracketing, until later in the course, questions about whether anyone/anything really succeeds of their own free will in influencing or controlling what happens.

1. The first large portion of Huxley’s article gives plenty of evidence buttressing Descartes’s claim that in animals consciousness isn’t needed to explain their bodily movements. He writes at the end of that part of the article:

   And would Descartes not have been justified in asking why we need deny that animals are machines, when men, in a state of unconsciousness, perform, mechanically, actions as complicated and as seemingly rational as those of any animals? (p. 28)

2. Nonetheless Huxley’s own view (largely motivated by thoughts about “continuity” in nature, but also by “demonstrations” like sticking things with a pin) is that movements in some animals’ nervous systems do cause conscious feelings, just as they do in our own.

3. Huxley does think that Descartes’ evidence and the evidence he added to it succeeds in showing something though — he doesn’t just stick his feet in the ground and say, no I can’t accept that. What he thinks the evidence shows is only that the conscious sensations aren’t what cause and explain the animal’s movements. That doesn’t mean the conscious feelings don’t exist (as Descartes thought). Huxley thinks the feelings are there, they just aren’t what explain the body’s movements. As he puts it, they may be “more or less conscious, sensitive, automata… conscious machines” (p. 28). Huxley writes:

   The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery. (p. 29)

He ends by asking whether the same considerations and arguments also apply to humans, and he thinks that arguably they do, but that it isn’t entirely clear, and he regards the question as open, he wants to go only as far as the reasons/evidence strictly support. But arguably yes this may also apply to us.

Roughly speaking, then, Huxley holds the view we saw described in earlier readings as epiphenomenalism. Though he doesn’t use that word himself. (Also matters are complicated because that’s only what his view is when we read him as a dualist. If he thought that conscious sensations were happenings in the brain, he’d look different. And officially he’s neutral between these possibilities.)