Tallis on Memory: A Smile at Waterloo Station

About Aboutness

Raymond Tallis

Philosophers often remind us, and each other, that mental contents have the property of ‘aboutness’. Indeed, this is their distinguishing feature. Perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, desires, and hopes, are all about things, events, states of affairs, past, present or future, actual or possible. So far, so obvious. Or so it should be. Nevertheless, this aboutness – or to use the philosophers’ preferred term, intentionality – has generated a vast literature in the philosophy of mind, and has been the subject of heated debate, just because it lies at the root of the fundamental differences between the mental and the physical. It makes mind difficult to fit into the cosmos as seen through what Daniel Dennett (in Consciousness Explained, 1991) called ‘the prevailing wisdom’ that “We can (in principle!) account for every mental phenomenon using the same physical principles, laws and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition and growth.”

We can test this claim by looking at something very basic: vision. How do I see this cup in front of me? The physical side of the story is that some of the light bouncing off the cup enters my eyes, tickles up my retinas, and sets in train neural activity terminating in and processed by the visual cortex. Is that the whole story? It doesn’t seem so. While the continuous causal connection between the cup and my brain describes how the light gets in, it hardly explains how the gaze looks out.

An effect in the visual cortex being caused by events on the surface of the cup seems to involve “the same physical principles, laws and raw materials” that operate throughout the material world. But what about the intentional relationship between my mental experiences and the cup: the fact that my experience is about the cup? My experience being about the cup seems to point in a direction opposite to that of a physical cause. Do the effects in the visual cortex reveal the cup by reaching back to their own causes on the surface of the cup? That’s not the kind of thing observed in the physical world. Besides, if the cortical activity revealed the cup by reaching back to its causal ancestors, why would it bypass more recent ancestors such as the events in the retina? Why isn’t our experience about our retinas? And, moreover, why does it stop at the goings on in the surface of the cup, and not reach further back?
This is only the beginning of the troubles besetting those who would like to assimilate mental contents, with their intentionality, into the physical world...