← New Books Network
New Books Network
Alexander Klein, "Consciousness is Motor: William James on Mind and Action" (Oxford UP, 2025)
01:06:20
Loading summary
Transcript41 lines
- [00:01]
Home Depot Announcer
It's time to bring on the blooms at the Home Depot with Spring Garden Deals. Find savings on hanging baskets and flowers to brighten your backyard or any space that needs instant color. Then get everything you need to plant and protect them, with low prices guaranteed on soil and mulch. Dig into Spring garden deals for four days at the Home Depot, now through May 10. Exquisite supply. See homedepot.com pricematch for details.
- [00:32]
Red Bull Announcer
Ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer All Day Play, you choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play Red Bull gives you wings. Visit red bull.com brightsummer ahead to learn more. See you this summer.
- [00:57]
Princeton University Press Announcer
It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4 through June 9. You can get 50% off nearly every single print, ebook and audiobook from Princeton University Press. Just go to press princeton.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation and Beyond Belief How Evidence Shows what really Works. There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on go to press princeton.edu and use the code spring50. That's S P R I N G50 press princeton.edu the sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some
- [01:47]
Alexander Klein
books welcome to the New Books Network
- [01:53]
Carrie Figdor
hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co host of the channel along with Sarah Tyson and Blaine Neufeld. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Alexander Klein, Canada Research Chair and Professor of philosophy at McMaster University. His new book, Consciousness Is William James on Mind and Action, is just out from Oxford University Press. When it comes to consciousness, William James is well known for his descriptions of it rather than his theory of it and its relation to the body. In his new book, Klein elaborates James theory of the evolutionary function of consciousness and how conscious states are always linked to the body and always trigger bodily motion, from physiological changes to purpose of behavior. Klein describes the vivisection experiments with headless frogs that led theorists to deny that consciousness was necessary for purpose of action or to affirm that consciousness depended on the whole nervous system and not just the brain. James Instead proposed an essential link between consciousness and purpose of action, in which the latter required an ability to entertain absent or future sensations. His book situates James in relation to contemporary debates regarding the functional role of consciousness, the search for neural correlates of and behavioral markers of consciousness and the embodiment of mind. Let's turn to the interview. Hello. Alexander Klein. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
- [03:46]
Alexander Klein
Thank you for having me.
- [03:48]
Carrie Figdor
This should be a really interesting conversation. William James is a very major figure in both philosophy and psychology. And as you note in your book, his most famous phrase for most of us philosophers is the quote about the bluing, buzzing confusion of consciousness. And as I take it, the main. One of the main goals of the book is to kind of dissuade us that that really is all he had to say about consciousness, that there's a lot more. And it's a lot more of contemporary relevance, actually. So before we get into the book, maybe you could tell us a word, a bit about yourself, how you got to philosophy and how you came to write the book.
- [04:39]
Alexander Klein
Yeah, thanks so well. How did I come to philosophy? Why don't I start there? I was a late bloomer in academics, and it really wasn't until the second year of my undergraduate that I started paying attention, doing the things that you should do in school. And I sort of. I don't know, I found myself taking a lot of different classes, but realizing that, you know, I hadn't necessarily done the legwork to be on top of, you know, the details in science and math and history. Philosophy, for me at the time was something that you could do without a ton of background preparation. You walk into philosophy class, it's about analyzing arguments, and there is much less emphasis on, like, having a firm grasp of, like, literary history or something. I always look back on that and think it's sort of ironic because I think I've become the kind of philosophy professor that wants my students to know things about other things. So like philosophy of science, I tend to teach in a way that you need to know some science. You can't just sort of calculate about what science might be like. I teach a lot of history of philosophy, and it's the same thing. I think you need to know some actual history about the periods that you're looking at to do responsible history of philosophy. So it's sort of ironic. I kind of came into philosophy attracted to it by this feeling that, you know, it's all about, you know, analyzing arguments and logic and that's sort of about it. But I don't know, somewhere along the line I turned into maybe a very different kind of philosopher. I got into James in graduate school. I went to Indiana University, which has this wonderful history and philosophy of science program, hps. And for me, James was interesting because he stood right at the sort of intersection between philosophy and science in his era. We kind of remember him in philosophy for his more purely, I don't know, theoretical contributions. People may read his Will to Believe article, for example. You already alluded to some of his colorful descriptions of consciousness which are sort of more on the, I don't know, theoretical or literary side. But when I started working on James in, at Indiana, you know, in a kind of history and philosophy of science context, the thing that stood out to me was like this rich kind of scientific work that he was initially doing. And indeed that initially sort of earned him an international reputation. Right. Like he is one of the founding figures of physiological psychology. He's coming of professional age at a time when psychology is going from this kind of, yeah, philosophical, maybe a prioristic enterprise where you're reflecting on the mind by introspecting, by doing conceptual analysis. He sort of hits the scene at a time that people realize that actually you can bring concerns from scientific physiology to bear on questions about the mind. And so he becomes one of the founding figures of physiological psychology, what's what's sometimes called the new psychology of the late 19th century. So that's really how I got interested in James is that he's doing all this interesting philosophical work. But to me it seemed to be quite cross pollinated with the scientific work. And of course, when you start reading the secondary literature on James, you realize that the philosophers have tended to focus almost exclusively on the more conceptual, even literary side of his work. And to me, surprisingly, they really have not paid close attention to the scientific work that built his reputation originally.
- [09:04]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, well, I mean, that's interesting. One of the points you make in the book, and you concede this at a number of points is that
- [09:18]
Alexander Klein
all
- [09:18]
Carrie Figdor
that said, his main thrust seemed to be the theoretical parts. And even though he did do experimental work, his it's not as if he did. He was a great experimentalist. And the way I would sum that up was saying that the takeaway that I got was he was a great sort of synthetic theoretician. He was not a great experimentalist. Would you. I mean, that's what I got from, from that aspect of the book. Am I wrong in that?
- [10:03]
Alexander Klein
No, I think that's exactly right. But to me, this feature of James's Output is, how can I put it from the standpoint of doing history of philosophy. Well, let me put it this way. In the history of science, we tend to focus on experimentalists who develop the novel technique, who do the, you know, the, the novel experiment. And we name the experiments after the person like, I don't know, Foucault's pendulum or whatever. It. We tend in the history of science to pay less attention to people who make use of experimental results in a more synthetic way. And I think James is really in the second camp. He did, he did do some important experiments, he did make some important contributions, for example, to our understanding of balance, how balance is accomplished. You know, he, he did make a couple of experimental contributions, but you're absolutely right that, that's really not the basis of his reputation. Right. What he was really good at is having a kind of an encyclopedic grasp of the latest experimental research and the latest clinical observation. And then he had this ability to make philosophical sense of all of these empirical results. And that's a kind of skill that I think the history of science tends to neglect. But I think it's an important skill to my mind. When you look at philosophy of mind today and you look at how much so called empirically engaged philosophy of mind is being done today, or you look at philosophy of cognitive science, as it's sometimes called. To me, a lot of that work reminds me of the kind of stuff James was doing, right? Philosophers of mind doing empirically engaged work. They're not running the experiments, they are synthesizing experimental results and trying to make philosophical sense of them. In my mind, the late 19th century is a really interesting and neglected moment in the history of philosophy because you have a lot of people doing very similar empirically engaged work, especially on mind. And it looks to me like a precursor of what we would consider to be philosophy of cognitive science or empirically informed philosophy today. So, yeah, his reputation really should not be based on having done some super important experiments. It's this ability to synthesize empirical results and put them to philosophical use.
- [12:50]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, good, good. So some of the experiments you go into, you know, some detail, but I mean, the, the sort of the big controversy that, you know, that his later, you know, theorizing about consciousness is intended to resolve, actually, as I understand it, were vivisection experiments with so called pithed frogs. And I have to admit to being very queasy in reading all that because I suppose there's a big difference now in what we can ethically do to non human Animals that was apparently just simply not on the table back then. But it's hard to grasp the nature of the problem that he was trying to resolve unless you understand the experiments. So as painlessly as possible, can you say what these experiments with the pith frogs, the problem that they posed to psychologists at the time.
- [14:12]
Alexander Klein
Yeah. Let me preface this by acknowledging your reaction to the experiments, which I think is pretty widespread. These are gruesome experiments. I say in the book somewhere that they do shock the conscience and they're not things that I am in any way advocating that we revive and repeat. There are some moral problems with these experiments, in my view, and I'll describe them in a moment. But let me say also that, you know, in the first draft of this book manuscript, I had a referee, I had said somewhere, oh, these experiments are really not done anymore. They wouldn't pass muster in terms of, like research boards and all of this. And I had a referee sort of push back on that and say, are you sure? And, you know, started sending me examples of essentially vivisection experiments that are still being done. And I had to look a little deeper into this. And I realized that I would like to say that this sort of work is not done anymore. That is not true. These kinds of experiments are absolutely still done today. The difference is that as a research program, vivisection just doesn't dominate physiology in the way that it did in the 19th century. In the 19th century, there's a sort of sense that, like anybody who's anybody by the late 19th century is doing vivisection experiments in one way or another. That is not the case anymore, I think, thankfully. But I do want to just acknowledge that, yes, we have different standards. We sort of say you need to have a real benefit in view to justify doing vivisection experiments, I.e. experiments on live animals where you're removing or disconnecting various nervous structures. So, you know, maybe the standards are a bit higher, but. But it is. It is still done. Anyway, they're difficult experiments to talk about because they're a bit gruesome. But let me try to give you a quick sense of how they work and why some of them caused a lot of philosophical controversy. So the big one I talk about in the book was an experiment done on headless frogs originally by a physiologist named Edward Pfluger. So this is done in the early 1850s. I guess what you need to know about this is that it may be surprising, but frogs, and it turns out that many vertebrates can survive without A brain. Frogs and cold blooded creatures can even survive without a brain stem. The brain stem controls autonomic functions like heartbeat and respiration. But frogs can survive even without those brain structures in place. So that had long been known by the middle of the 19th century. But Pflueger did this kind of unusual experiment on living headless frog. And it goes like this. He starts by dripping a bit of acid on the side of the frog and then observing which foot the frog uses to wipe off the acid. Now, so far so good. Like people had known for a long time that living headless creatures still have a ton of reflexes preserved, right? So a defensive reflex where like the foot kind of snaps into action and wipes away the acid. And that by itself was not very surprising when Pflueger did his experiment. But Pflueger had caused a huge philosophical controversy because of sort of the second step in the experiment. What he does is he impedes that original foot that has been used to do the wiping. In the first step. Sometimes he amputates the leg, sometimes he, you know, sews it up in some way. But he basically prevents the frog from using that foot to wipe. He then repeats the procedure. He drips the acid in the same place. And apparently what you observe is that the frog will typically dry for a little bit to wipe away the acid with that original foot. But it won't just kind of helplessly wave away, wave around its stump, right? Like if this was like a blind reflex, that's what you would expect, right? You put the acid in the same place. If it's a reflex, you should just get the same response. But that's not what happens right after the frog, you know, is like waving away, waving around its stump a bit. It, it tries different means to wipe away the acid. And so typically what it will do is it will reach around in an awkward way with the other foot and use that other foot to wipe away the acid. And there's a number of means, ends, choosing kinds of examples like this, that these headless frauds were shown to be capable of. So, okay, why is that philosophically interesting? Well, it looks like you have an example of purposive action, right? It's like goal directed behavior. You've got a case where the creature seems to have a goal in view, in mind, however you want to put it. And it's trying different means to achieve that goal. Now for a fully intact frog, this perhaps not surprising that, you know, a frog is capable of goal directed behavior. But for a frog that has no brain that is a very surprising result, right? Means ends choosing has often been appealed to as a marker that a creature is conscious, right? A very common view in the history of psychology has been that means ends choosing is made possible by the conscious mind, right? We are able to try different means to achieve an end. Because we are conscious. We can hold a goal, as I said before, in view, right? We can hold it in mind. So here we've got a creature that has no brain at all. It has no brain stem. I mean, it has really no brain structures in place at all. And it is capable of means ends choosing. That is very surprising. Luger and yet a number of allies concluded that probably there's some measure of consciousness in a brainless frog. This sort of view went along with what grew into emergentism and philosophy of mind. Because people on Pfluger's side developed a kind of holistic story about consciousness, right? Where, okay, maybe consciousness arises from a whole nervous system, you know, if it's sort of complexly enough structured. But this reading of the experiment was challenged almost immediately. You have, um, a number of people on the other side who think, okay, this is preposterous. If the frog is no brain, it no brain structures at all. There's no way it's conscious. And what this should really tell us is that actually purposive behavior is not a very good marker for consciousness. But so what you got was this kind of stalemate, right? You could sort of accept means ends choosing as a marker for consciousness. And then you read the experiment as supporting some kind of holism about the emergence of consciousness from the nervous system. Or you could go in the other direction, right? And say, okay, what this shows us is that means ends choosing is not a good marker of consciously guided action. And the people on that other side tended to support much more mechanistic views of physiology. Eventually, this kind of experiment was used to support epiphenomenalism. So TH Huxley is the classic example of this. He looked at the Pflueger experiment and he said, look, just as you look at the headless frog and you see that it's capable of performing purposive actions even without a brain. Even without consciousness, he would say. Huxley said, well, we have to reason the same way. Even about healthy, intact human beings, right? Maybe even when we walk and talk and do very sophisticated purposive things in our lives. Maybe the lesson we should learn from the frogs is that that kind of sophisticated purpose of action that human beings are capable of is probably possible in a purely mechanical way. You know, it can be caused by a fully intact brain and conscious experience needs play, needs to play no role in the production of this kind of activity at all. So one experiment, two very different interpretations of the experiment. You go one way and you get something like emergentism. You go the other way and you get epiphenomenalism and a sort of severely mechanistic view of physiology. Well, it was a kind of interesting conundrum.
- [23:42]
Carrie Figdor
Yeah.
- [23:44]
New Books Network Announcer
Hey, NBN listeners, We're running our 2026 New Books Network audience survey and we'd love just a few minutes of your time. NBN has been bringing you in depth conversations with authors and scholars for over 15 years. We haven't done a comprehensive audience survey since 2022, and a lot has changed since then. It's time to hear from you again. Here's why we're asking. We want to understand who, listening, what subjects and podcasts you love most and where you'd like to see us grow. Your responses help us tell NBN's story to the publishers, libraries and institutions we partner with. When we can show that our listeners are serious readers, lifelong learners, and heavy library users, it opens doors to new partnerships, better resources, and ultimately a stronger NBN for everyone. And one more thing, if you leave your email address at the end of the survey, you'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to bookshop.org a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. We really appreciate your support. Now go take the survey.
- [24:57]
Carrie Figdor
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you go through a number of the, you know, the figures involved in this, but let's, let's kind of stick to James here. So what did he, you know, how did he, how did he approach the problem? I mean, what did he, what did he argue?
- [25:16]
Alexander Klein
Yeah. So let me start by saying James was not like a methodologist. He's not writing explicitly about his methodology. He sort of jumped into the problem and, and gave his own solution. So some of this is my attempt to reconstruct what he was actually doing. But here's my take on it. James looks at these experiments and the first thing he does is he kind of abandons this approach of trying to find markers for consciousness, like Luger and one of his allies, G.H. lewis and T.H. huxley. These are figures I talk about. They're all starting to think about consciousness by sticking on board some marker or other of consciousness, like some observable behavior. For Huxley, it's like observable anatomical structures, but they're starting with some kind of observable marker that they take to be as evidence of consciousness. And then when they find it in a creature, or they don't find it in a creature, they sort of start theorizing from there. But I think James saw very early on that this kind of marker methodology is just bound to lead to these kinds of stalemates, right? Because how do you establish that a particular behavior is or is not a reliable marker of consciousness? It seems like you need to be able to collect a bunch of samples of creatures that are conscious, and you need to show that this behavioral marker, like, really correlates with this set of creatures. But of course, how do you know that the set of creatures you're looking at really is conscious in the first place? It seems you need a marker in order to make that judgment to begin with. So there's a sort of bootstrapping problem, right, that when you approach questions of consciousness purely through this kind of marker methodology, you end up in this kind of endless circle of like, you need a marker to identify the conscious creatures, right? You need to be able to identify the conscious creatures before you can get a marker. And so one of James's earliest writings on this debate sort of pinpoints that problem and says, like, we gotta go in a different direction. So what's his solution? His solution is essentially to build up a functional framework about consciousness. And what I mean by a functional framework is he built up an evolutionary theory about why consciousness probably evolved, and then a related physiological theory about how consciousness might accomplish its adaptive function, as he thinks inside the sort of physiological economy of creatures. And so the basic approach is to say, look, if you have a kind of well founded, you know, empirically supported functional framework in place that can underwrite, you know, this or that being a marker of consciousness. But he shifted the focus from just, you know, trying to theorize about markers to trying to build up a functional framework to understand how consciousness might be actually operating in the body. So that's the kind of outline.
- [28:41]
Carrie Figdor
Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to get into that. But before we move on, I mean, it's, in a way it's kind of ironic because, you know, nowadays, as I'm sure you're aware in comparative psychology and a lot of effort going into trying to understand consciousness and non humans, particularly in the absence of verbal report as the main marker, Marker theories, you might say, are all the rage these days. They've come back roaring. And I sort of wonder, is this completely wrongheaded? Would James think that what people are doing now, you know, 100 years later or so, is, like, wrongheaded for the reasons that you've just. That you've just described? Because it certainly sounds like everybody's, like, gone up the wrong alley again.
- [29:52]
Alexander Klein
So I guess just to give a direct answer to the question, my view is, yes, this is completely misguided. I mean, one of the things that I. One of the lessons that I hope people working in consciousness science today might take away from this book is that the history suggests that this kind of methodology is just not going to end well. You know, there are more sophisticated versions of the marker method being advocated today. I think the iterative method is the kind of. The most sophisticated version we have on hand right now. And you have a lot of the kind of leading lights of consciousness science advocating this method. The iterative method essentially says, look, let's start with a kind of intuitively plausible breadbasket of consciousness markers, and let's try to iteratively refine them over time by looking at which markers seem to cluster together more often. And the hope is that we start with something that might be kind of down and dirty, but with repeated experimental testing, we might be able to refine this set of markers. I think the hope is that repeated testing is going to cause convergence among theorists. It's going to cause us to, as a sort of community of researchers, to come closer and closer together on what we think are reliable markers. I think that history suggests that the opposite conclusion is probably more likely. Right. That repeated experimentation is probably, over time, going to be more likely to produce divergence. The problem is that markers. And I think if you look at consciousness science today, you can see this. What marker of consciousness, or what set of markers of consciousness you accept, inevitably, is going to depend on your more detailed theory about what consciousness is and what it does. And so if you try to say, well, we're just going to set aside the functional questions, and we're just going to try to get an agreement on the markers, I just think it's bound to fail. The real action, the real question should be about what is the function of consciousness? What is it actually doing? Why do we have it? And the questions about markers, I think, need to fall out of that. There's this sort of aspiration that we can. Some researchers say, well, we need a theory, light approach. We need to, as much as possible, set aside our theoretical commitments and just try to get a convergence on markers. I mean, I think the moral of the story of the, you know, the 19th century debate I'm looking at is that has not gone well in history. Right. Because you're always free to accept or reject markers based on whatever your kind of ulterior philosophical or functional framework is. Yeah. So I'm not a fan of the marker approach today. And I think that there are other ways to proceed.
- [33:06]
Carrie Figdor
I can tell that. And I'm. I'm not, you know, I'm not going to, you know, know this is not a debate about markers, but it's a discussion of James's own views. Right. So, okay, so he thinks you need to talk about the adaptive function first. And one of the things. So in this regard. Okay, so let's get into more detail because the question that I was going to raise will probably come up in a bit. So he brings in this idea of prudent action. Prudent action, regulation, and the idea that the function of consciousness, the adaptive function, I take it, of consciousness, is to regulate our choices, the means, ends, choices for future action in a way that is at least initially prudent. And you can describe what he means by that a bit more. So could you say a bit more about how exactly he hypothesizes the function of consciousness? Yeah.
- [34:29]
Alexander Klein
Yeah. Great. Okay. So, um, I think the first thing to say is that you have to understand the sort of order of explanation at play in James, if I can put it that way. So the people that James is responding to are trying in some sense to explain consciousness. They're trying to understand what is consciousness and like, how does it emerge from the nervous system. I mean, I think that project that he's responding to is not so different from the way people talk about consciousness today. We want to explain consciousness like we're looking for the, you know, the MCC's right, the neural correlates of consciousness to try to understand, like, what's happening under the hood that gives rise to this interesting phenomenon. In a certain sense, James does not really set out to explain consciousness itself. What he is really trying to explain is the observable results in these kind of gruesome experiments that we've talked about. Consciousness comes in as a kind of, in the context of an argument to the best explanation for explaining the observations. Right. So in a certain sense, consciousness comes in through the scientific backdoor for James. Right. It's like not the thing he's trying to explain, but it's a thing that turns out to be helpful, to explain other things, if that makes sense. So how does this get us to prudence and evolution? So basically, I think his fundamental observation about these headless creatures is that, okay, creatures that have their hemispheres removed. So maybe I should set it up this way, right? There's a ton of experiments being done in James's day that's quite specific. It's not just like cutting off the head of a creature, which is sort of how these experiments originated. But by the time James is writing about this, people are being very, very precise in, like, knocking out very specific brain regions and then seeing what incapacities result from that. And one of the things James observes is that in the case of a frog, at least, which is one of the most commonly used creatures in these experiments, and that frogs, you know, if you only remove the cerebral hemispheres, right, you leave everything else in place, the midbrain, the brainstem, but you just take out the hemispheres. James says that unless you are a trained physiologist, unless you have worked with these creatures quite a lot, you might not even notice a difference in their behavior. Like, they are capable of a remarkable number of tasks. You put them in different sort of experimental setups, and they can perform in remarkably sophisticated ways. But James notes that they seem to have a kind of mechanical quality to their responses. Right. So if you shine a light and kind of poke the frog in the hind legs or whatever, then the frog will hop towards the light. It will hop around an obstacle that you put in its place, right? It will, like, navigate, choose different paths, do things like this. But if you don't stimulate the frog without the brain hemispheres, without the cerebral hemispheres, if you don't stimulate it in any way, it's just going to sit there, but it's not going to do anything. It's not going to initiate action. Moreover, when you do stimulate such a frog, you do this thing where you shine the light and you get it to move, it tends to react to those stimulations in more or less the exact same way every time you stimulate it. So if you, you know, James gives the example of working with a decerebrated frog where he puts it on his hand, he inclines his hand downwards a little bit so it's angled. And he says the frog will kind of hop back up the hand, but it will do this every single time he does this experiment where every single time he tilts his hand down, it sort of hops right back up the hand in exactly the same way. And he gives a Number of examples of this, right? If it's swimming, you know, if he throws the decerebrated frog in the water, it will start to swim. I think he says that if he puts a stick in the hand of the frog, it will instantly stop swimming. It's almost like you have the control over this creature that you would have over, like a mechanical toy. So he essentially summarizes this deficiency in decerebrated frogs, brainless frogs, saying that they lack a capacity for prudent action. So prudence is. He has a little slogan about prudence. He says that prudence is a matter of being able to pause, postpone, nicely weigh one motivation against another. Right. It's. It's essentially a kind of flexibility and ability to sort of evaluate that these brainless frogs lack. So this sort of sets up the experimental problem, right? How do you explain this specific deficiency? How do you explain the fact that these de cerebrated frogs are capable of all kinds of remarkable stuff they can do? Means, ends choosing. They can learn, right? They can, you know, they're capable of all kinds of interesting actions that some have taken to be consciousness markers, and yet they're not really capable of this prudent action. Right. They don't seem to be capable of truly flexible behavior.
- [40:37]
Carrie Figdor
Can I. Can I interrupt for a second? So the original experiments involved a frog that was seemingly performing a very prudent action of trying to get the acid off with the other foot because it couldn't use the original foot. That looks like. That looks like prudent action to me. I mean, you do more experiments and more complicated things, you will always show more complicated behavior. But it seems like the original experiments, you know, if you're just, you know, drawing a conclusion from, you know, one or one type of experiment, already showed the prudence.
- [41:25]
Alexander Klein
Great. So now. Now we get into more details about what exactly prudence means. Right? There's the sort of, you know, general characterization. But James actually gives us two more detailed ingredients of prudent action. And he thinks that the headless frog in the original experiment that does the means ends choosing. He thinks that that frog has only one of the two required ingredients for prudence. So he does think that truly prudent action involves the capacity to choose. It involves this means ends choosing. That's sort of ingredient number one for this capacity. But ingredient number two is what he calls responsiveness to absent sensations. Absent sensations is like, I mean, I guess it's James's coinage. James is not big on, like, technical terminology and like, you know, coining Special words that he gives precise definitions to. But absent sensations is one of his phrases that recurs quite a lot in his writing. What is it? An absent sensation is essentially an idea of something that is not being presented to you at the moment that you have the idea. So maybe a concrete example would be useful. James gives us this example of hiking on a trail and coming upon a snake that's in your way. When you look at the snake and try to figure out what to do, you have to entertain different courses of action, right? So maybe you think, okay, maybe I'll try to like, jump over the snake. But you know, if I get bit, that could be a big problem. So you think about that state of affairs. Or maybe you think like, okay, another option is turn around, go the other way. But man, it's getting dark and you know, I don't know if I'll get out of the woods in time, you know, well, I still have light. Maybe that's dangerous. When you think in that way, you are entertaining these absent sensations in the sense that you know the potential bite that you might get if you try to jump over the snake. That bite is not something you're experiencing now, right? It's a representation of something that's absent. The same thing for the, I don't know, the. Like turn around and change your navigation idea. Like, that's not something you're actively doing. You're thinking about something that you're not doing right now. Truly prudent capacity for truly prudent action for James requires not just means, ends, choosing, but it requires this capacity to entertain what he calls absent sensations. The bit that I told you before about the. The fact that the frog without the hemisphere is if you just leave it on the table and you don't stimulate it in any way. James takes that to be evidence that these frogs have. Have a kind of diminished capacity for entertaining absent sensations. The thought is that when we initiate action spontaneously, so to speak, what we're doing is we are catching an idea of some not presently actual state that we want to attain, right? If I, you know, am sitting in my office and I get the idea to go, you know, go to the kitchen to get some orange juice, that action is in some sense initiated by my anticipating this state of affairs that is not yet actual. So he's going to account for the quiescence, if I can call it that, of these decerebrated frogs, right? They're like, they don't do anything if you just leave them to themselves. He accounts for this by saying that they have this diminished capacity for entertaining absent sensations. And so in that respect, he thinks that you see a kind of incapacity for really prudent behavior in these creatures. The behavior is more mechanical than you would expect with a creature that has a true capacity for prudence. And there's no spontaneity, there's no initiation of a sort of novel course of. Of action outside the context of a stimulation.
- [45:49]
Carrie Figdor
So, I mean, I think in. In modern terms, and. And one might say, and. And tell me how he's different, you know, that you need a capacity for, you know, mental representation, you know, of future action, whatever, and that. That's what this. These, you know, pith frogs no longer have. Right?
- [46:16]
Alexander Klein
You're trying to get me in trouble, Carrie.
- [46:18]
Carrie Figdor
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, I'm trying to. I'm trying to elicit, you know, you know, today we would talk about, you know, again, I mean, you know, the capacity for, you know, not just some sort of automatism like, you know, you. You mentioned that, you know, earlier in the book, and, you know, which may not be, you know, may not be reflexive. I mean, you know, reflex. You know, there can be plenty of actions that don't require you to posit some sort of internal representation and entertaining internal representations of future action or results of them or how I will feel or how I anticipate feeling. They would still count in today's vernacular, as a form of internal representation.
- [47:16]
Alexander Klein
Oh, the reason I'm. That's absolutely right. That reading of James, I think, is absolutely right. And the reason I'm kidding with you here about getting me into trouble is. And maybe I should just say this for people who are not steeped in the kind of modern Cogsci world, you know, nowadays you have the split between an activist and, you know, people who have a more traditional representationalist approach to mind. The inactivists today tend to be very. How shall we put it? Skeptical of representations. They think you can do all or most of what we want to do in cognitive psychology without any concept of representation at all. And to the extent that James and figures in his circle like Dewey have been, I don't know, appealed to in modern philosophy of cognitive science, they've tended to be recruited to that enactivist side of things. And so you're not the first philosopher who said to me, so hang on a second, you're telling me that representations turn out to be central to James's approach to mind? I think they. They are. Representation is his word. Uses that word constantly. And it is very hard to see how this inception of consciousness. And, you know, he's got a related account of volition, which is sort of part of this bigger evolutionary story of how consciousness might produce this prudent behavior. Well, it doesn't really work unless you have representation of absent things. The big thing that you need for James is a representation. Well, let me put it this way. The big thing you need for James in order to have, you know, prudent regulated action is you need to have future directed representations. So anticipations of states of affairs that might happen if you were to do such and such. That is a representation of something that's not present. And. Yeah, so that is very important to his system.
- [49:23]
Carrie Figdor
Right, okay. But, you know, to kind of, you know, to be a bit concessive in a way. I mean, you. The. I mean, the title of the book is Consciousness is Motor. It's not, as you. As you make clear in the book, it's not the is of identity. It's an is of predication, essentially. And you do state at various points where he thought that all conscious thoughts naturally trigger bodily motion, are motor in that sense, and all mental states are conscious. So even if we concede some sort of role for at least future directed representations, the thrust of the book and of James as you present him is this connection with motor, with either motor representation or action or bodily motion in some very broad Samus. So there's no such, as you put it also, there's no such thing as just trying. There's always some sort of boundary, bodily responsiveness or element to conscious thought. So maybe you can elaborate a bit more on that rather than sort of conceding, well, yeah, there has to be a role here of some kind for representation. The key bit is the motor bit for him.
- [51:00]
Alexander Klein
Right. So, yeah, let me say two things. First of all, by saying that representations are essential to this broader theory of consciousness. I'm not saying that consciousness gets reduced to representation. I'm not saying that all consciousness is representational. I'm saying that consciousness cannot perform its adaptive role, its adaptive function, without sometimes having representational content. So, you know, that's the first thing. He's not a representationalist in the way we would talk about that view today. He has representations in this, in his theory, but that's a bit of a softer view on this issue of triggering bodily motion. So this is another very fundamental commitment of James's. So. So he thinks that we have conscious mental states in order to make changes in the body, he thinks, from an evolutionary Perspective, it just doesn't make sense that we would evolve to have some sort of capacity for conscious states that are in themselves not hooked up with bodily change. Like, from an evolutionary standpoint, presumably you got to make some change in the body in order to make a creature more reproductively successful. Like, you know, he thinks that, you know, the, the idea that we develop conscious mental states, but then have to sort of separately develop another capacity to translate those conscious mental states into action. He just thinks that sounds too complicated, right? So there's like a parsimony argument here that if consciousness is a. Is a trait, if it's a naturally evolved trait, probably it has a direct and consistent connection with bodily change. And he motivates this idea with a number of experiments in his own day that people are doing, showing that a lot of these experiments are on non human animals. They just show that even if you set aside the way mental states might change our volitional actions, non human animals show all kinds of autonomic responses to very simple changes in sensation. So he gives you like a ton of these examples, like these examples where if you beat a drum, I forget what creature this is run on, but you beat a drum, you can measure the constriction in certain muscular tracts. You know, they're very subtle, but measurable. If you, you know, galvanic skin response, whatever. There's all kinds of ways that they measure very, very subtle autonomic changes in response to just like a boatload of different types of stimuli. And so James is essentially making a conjecture, right? Like, well, maybe all conscious mental states trigger bodily motion in one way or another. I think it's very important to note that, again, it's not always triggering purposive action in the sense of like an intentional action, a volitional action. Sometimes, again, it's just a kind of autonomic change. But he thinks that ideas are sort of set up naturally to change the body in some way. The reason this is philosophically interesting from the standpoint of the theory of action is that it commits James to denying that there's any kind of special mental state called like a trying or an attempting. So philosophers of action today, many philosophers of action, are committed to the idea that trying is a separate thing from sort of entertaining. It's one thing to entertain the thought of going to get the orange juice in the kitchen. It's another thing to actually sort of do that, right? It's another thing to try to actually do that. So a lot of philosophers of action think of those two things as like separate ingredients, separate causal ingredients in the action. James has a sort of, you know, which is plausible, right? Like, it does seem like there's a difference between thinking about getting some orange juice and acting on it, right? What is the difference? James's view is sort of surprising, right? His view is that all other things being equal, when I think of going to the kitchen, I just go to the kitchen. Like, the thought of going to the kitchen on James's view is enough to get me to go to the kitchen in itself, because ideas tend to trigger, especially these future directed anticipatory ideas, they tend to trigger the actions that are represented for James. James faces sort of the opposite problem that a lot of causal theorists of action today face. So like if today the problem is to explain, well, how is it that my thinking of going to the kitchen like, triggers the action of going to the kitchen? James's problem is how come when I, how come I don't act on all the things I entertain? Like, I can talk to you here and think about going to the kitchen to get some juice, but I don't act on it? Why not?
- [56:25]
Carrie Figdor
Right?
- [56:25]
Alexander Klein
Like that's James problem. Why? And how is it possible for us not to act on our thoughts sometimes? And his answer is essentially that when you don't act on an idea like this, especially an anticipatory idea like this, what's going on is just that you have other intentions that are sort of rivaling for the attentional spotlight. So in some sense I can think about going to the kitchen while I'm talking to you, but I have this stronger idea. I would like to finish the podcast, right? Like, so James's account of not acting is an account of, well, we can have rival intentions and, you know, not all of our present intentions can sort of be enacted all at once. But the consequence of this is that in a certain sense there is no trying in James's view. You just have ideas and you act on them. What we think of as trying for James is a. So let me soften this a little bit. There is a kind of trying for James, but it's, as he puts it, purely moral, using that term in the old fashioned sense of mental.
- [57:41]
Carrie Figdor
Right.
- [57:41]
Alexander Klein
He thinks that, you know, if I have a difficult decision to make, maybe deliberating about, like, which of my intentions to allow to be enacted. But that's a kind of mental battle for him. It's a battle to kind of hold our attention fixed on one option over some other tempting rivals, and to hold it fixed long enough that it sort of wins out in the attentional spotlight and the action is enacted. This classic example is getting out of bed on a cold day. You may lie in bed, your covers feel warm and comfortable. You may in some sense have the intention to get out of bed and to get started with your day. But James thinks this is actually a kind of mental struggle for the temptation to get out of bed, to sort of win out in the attentional spotlight from the temptation just to keep enjoying this warm cover. So, yeah, there's a weird way in which trying, at least in the way it's understood in philosophy of action today. Right. In terms of a kind of special state that translates the intention or the thought into an action that is not a thing on James's view. Right. Brian o' Shaughnessy is this wonderful phrase, Right. He calls these kinds of triangs the mental pineal gland. Right. It's the thing that's supposed to translate the purely mental thought into a bodily action. James has, in a certain sense, no mental pineal gland. All the thoughts trigger change unless there's, you know, some complicating circumstance.
- [59:27]
Carrie Figdor
I see. Okay, good. So we're just about out of time, unfortunately. You know, there's plenty more to talk about, but we'll have to, you know, leave it to listeners and future readers to kind of discover more about James on their own. So to kind of wrap up, can you say what you're working on now? Are you doing more James work or. Yeah. What's on your short to medium term horizon?
- [60:05]
Alexander Klein
Yeah, I have two broad directions for my research right now. One is to kind of expand the approach that I've developed in this book into a broader methodology. I even have a fancy name for it. I call it Historically Informed Scientific Philosophy. Pompous names aside, the thought is, look, sometimes looking at the history of science and philosophy can provide useful lessons to contemporary theorizing. I have other projects in this vein that I'm doing at McMaster. I have a working group where a number of us are doing this kind of work, trying to bring historical reflection to dare on contemporary theorizing, especially in cognitive science. So history, historically informed scientific philosophy. This is like, this is one avenue that I've been working on. And the other is at McMaster. We have the Bertrand Russell archives, We have all of Bertrand Russell's papers, correspondence, library. It's a tremendous collection. So the other project I have in sort of early phases is a project reflecting on the kind of intellectual relationship between James and Russell. I've done some initial work on this Already. And I think that, you know, people may be surprised to hear this, but, you know, Russell hated James's pragmatism. That's sort of well known to most philosophers. Many of us had to read some of those criticisms of James's pragmatism in, you know, intro to Philosophy classes or whatever. But when you actually look at the development of Russell's thought, especially in the 1910s and the 1920s, do you see that Russell was actually remarkably deeply involved with reflecting on James's psychological work, his work in philosophy of mind, and then eventually in the metaphysics of mind as well? I think that relationship is much more complicated and interesting than people have understood. One dimension of this is political. James was one of the founders of the Anti Imperialist League in the United States. And there's a way in which scientifically informed philosophers of James's era, end of Russell's era, tended also to be invested in a kind of cosmopolitan worldview. Russell was a huge fan of James's political work. He was a huge fan of James's moral equivalent of war essay. He has a number. James had a number of works on pacifism that Russell cited built on, you know, you may know that During World War I, Russell was, you know, actively opposed to British involvement in the war. He was actively promoting pacifism. He was jailed for these political views. So you have a quite complex and interesting connection between Russell and James. You have the rejection by Russell of James's pragmatism about truth. And yet you have, I think, a great influence from James's broader approach to mind on Russell. So much so that Russell, by the 1920s, actually comes over to a number of views that James himself had advocated. So that is a growing book project as well.
- [63:45]
Carrie Figdor
Great. Well, that sounds very, very exciting. I'm sure it will have a lot of interested readers as well. But we do need to wrap up today's podcast. But I want to thank you for illuminating us so much on James's broader thoughts on consciousness than the usual sort of caricature or very shorthand version that many people get. So, thank you and good luck with your work, with your ongoing projects.
- [64:22]
Alexander Klein
Except, can I just say, before we close, I just. I love this podcast. I'm so grateful that you do it. I'm a fan of the podcast. It's. I'm so tickled and thankful to be able to be on the podcast. I just think for professional philosophers is just such a useful outlet to have sophisticated discussions about philosophical texts that we can listen to on pod. I just. I love this podcast. It's great. So thank you for doing it, and thank you for having me.
- [64:49]
Carrie Figdor
Oh, well, I appreciate that. I wasn't expecting that. Okay. But thanks again. Okay, bye.
- [64:55]
Alexander Klein
Thank you. Bye. Bye.
- [64:57]
Carrie Figdor
You've been listening to an interview with Alexander Klein, Canada Research Chair and Professor of philosophy at McMaster University. We've been talking about his new book, Consciousness is Motor. William James on Mind and Action, which is just out from Oxford University Press. I'm Carrie Figdor. This is New Books in Philosophy, a podcast with the New Books Network. I hope you enjoyed the podcast and thank you for listening.