Maverick Philosopher

Bull Meets Shovel: Could Consciousness be a Conjuring Trick?

Top o' the Stack.

Thomas Beale writes,

Getting back to the topic of consciousness . . . . I think you will find this Royal Institution lecture by British neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey of interest.

 

He provides an outline of subjective phenomenal consciousness and how it could have evolved. One very interesting claim is that sentience could not have arrived prior to the evolution of mammals, since a) their neural transmission speed is much greater than cold-blooded animals and b) mammals are not tied to specific environments since they have inbuilt thermoregulation.

 

I interpret his claims as being a candidate for what Nagel seeks in his monograph Mind and Consciousness (2012) (a naturalistic theory of subjective consciousness) and also as refuting the general position of Dennett, i.e. that consciousness, qualia etc are just an illusion. Personally I think Dennett has failed to understand what he himself is saying when he claims that conscious experience is an 'illusion', as if calling it such makes it unreal.

 

Anyway, I believe you may find this an hour well spent.

 

Thanks for the link, Thomas, but I have only so many shovels. Given the bull your man has already spread, in the 2013 piece to which I respond in the Substack entry above, I am not inclined to waste fifty minutes watching a slow-moving video. Is there a transcript? Maybe he has come up with something better this time around. I rather doubt it. 

 

Perhaps you can summarize Humphrey's latest stab at the 'hard problem.' What is his solution? But first tell me what you accept and what you reject in my Substack article.

 

The Analysis of Qualia

London Ed sends the following for our rumination and delectation:

       This is not mine (Lycan's). But it is tricky:

1) Bertie is experiencing a green thing.

2) Suppose that there is no physical green thing outside Bertie’s head. But

3) There is no physical green thing inside Bertie’s head either.

4) If it is physical, the green thing is either outside Bertie’s head or inside it. Thus,

5) The green thing is not physical. [1,2,3,4] Thus,

6) Bertie’s experience contains a nonphysical thing. [1,5] Thus,

7) Bertie’s experience is not, or not entirely, physical. [6]

The argument seem to presuppose an act-object analysis of experiencing. Accordingly, there is the experiencing and there is that which is experienced, a green item, a green quale.  If the quale is not physical, then the experiencing is not, or is not entirely, physical.   The argument goes through. But then the experiencing cannot be a brain process (which I think is what Bill Lycan would want to maintain).

On an adverbial analysis of experiencing, however, it may be possible to uphold the view that experiencings are brain processes.   Accordingly, my sensing a green quale is my sensing green-ly. Thus there is no green object that appears: 'green' functions here not as an adjective that modifies a noun, but as an adverb that modifies the present progressive form of the verb 'to experience.'

The main problem with the adverbial analysis is that it gets the phenomenology wrong. If I see a green item, I see something that is green.  I do not see a green sensing or a sensing-greenly. This is so even if the green something I see does not exist! Ed will baulk here given that he upholds the dubious thin theory of existence. But surely I do not see a sensing-greenly, whatever that might mean. And that is the second problem. The locution 'sense-greenly' just makes no sense, unless it is replaceable salva significatione with 'sense something green.' The point is that 'sense-greenly' has no independent or irreducible sense. Since it does not, the adverbial theory is a non-starter.

'She ate quiche' makes sense, and so does 'She ate quickly.' But she ate-quiche-ly' means nothing unless it is a weird way of saying 'She ate quiche.'

Once again we seem to have landed in an aporetic 'pickle.'

Does Omniscience Require Incarnation? Pursuing Some Consequences

Dr. Vito Caiati  occasioned in  me a new thought the other day: that divine omniscience might require divine incarnation.  The gist of the thought is as follows. If God is all-knowing, then he possesses not only all knowledge by description, but also all knowledge by acquaintance. But it is not easy to see how God in his disincarnate state  could have all or any  knowledge by acquaintance of beings whose subjectivity is realized in matter.  And this for the simple reason that if God is a pure spirit then his subjectivity is real without being realized in matter.

One could know everything there is to know objectively  about bats but still not know subjectively, 'from the inside,' what it is like to be a bat in Thomas Nagel's sense.  Objective omniscience is compatible with subjective nescience.  To know what it is like to be a bat I would have to be one: I would have to have the physiological constitution of a bat.  And so for God to know what it is like to be a man dying on a cross God would have to be a man dying on a cross.  To have objective knowledge of every aspect of dying on a cross is not to experience dying on a cross. That's the rough idea.  It has interesting and troubling consequences which I didn't pursue on Saturday night. So I am pleased to hear from Jacques.

Jacques writes,

I agree that God has to become a human being in order to know everything. But, as you say, this seems to lead to further problems. Here are two things that come to mind. 

First, there would be the same problem with respect to every sentient being. God has to be one of us in order to know certain perspectival or subjective facts about us. But God also has to be a bat or a beetle, for the same reason, if God is to be truly omniscient.

It seems so.

But in addition, it's not enough for omniscience that God has been incarnated once as a certain type of being. After all, that would mean only that God knows what it's like to have been that human being--a male one, living in the Roman empire, etc. Surely God also needs to know what it's like to be a woman, or a Mayan, or whatever. And also needs to know what it's like to be me as opposed to you, and you as opposed to me. Does this mean that believing in an omniscient God rationally supports some kind of Hindu-ish or pantheistic theory over Christianity? (Or does it mean that Christianity properly understood implies that God is every single one of us, and every bat and beetle?)

This is much less clear.  You and I are two numerically different human beings, but I don't need to be you  in order to know what it is like to be you.  Despite the privacy of experience, most if not all of our sensory qualia are similar if not qualitatively identical.  Lacking the special powers of Bill Clinton, I can't feel your pain: I cannot live through numerically the same pain experiences you live though when you are in some definite kind of pain, such as non-migraine headache. Your experiencings are in your psyche; mine are in mine. But I know what it is like when you have a headache since the subjective qualitative features of the experiencings are the same or very similar.  What makes this possible is that we are animals of very similar physiological constitution.  I suspect that sensory qualia are universals of a sort.

I am not a woman and I so I don't quite know what it is like to experience menstrual cramps. But I know what muscle cramps are like, and so I have some basis for empathy with the distaff contingent of child-bearing years.

And so I would not go so far as to say that for God to know what it is like to be a human, he must be or become every human.  It suffices for him to become a human. Nor is it necessary that he become a woman for him to know what it is like to be a woman.

But then there is this consideration:

Is there something it is like to be me, this particular person, numerically different from every other person?  Sometimes I have the strong sense that there is.  Call it one's irreducible haecceity (thisness) or ipseity (selfness).  It is irreducible in that it cannot be reduced to anything repeatable or multiply exemplifiable or anything constructed out of repeatable  or multiply exemplifiable elements. This is a sort of quale that I alone have and experience and that no one distinct from me could have or experience. We are all unique, but each of us has his own uniqueness 'incommunicable to any other' as a scholastic might say. I sometimes have the sense that each of us is uniquely unique as a person, as a subject in the innermost core of his subjectivity. And sometimes it seems that I know what it is like to be this uniquely unique person, absolutely irreplaceable and (therefore?) infinitely precious  and of absolute worth.

If God exists, he is super-eminently uniquely unique and we, who are made in his image and likeness, are derivatively uniquely unique.

Trouble is, this notion of a uniquely unique haecceity tapers off into the mystical. For my thisness or your's or anything's is ineffable. It cannot be conceptually articulated or put into language. Individuum ineffabile est as a medieval Aristotelian might say.  Is the ineffable nonexistent because ineffable?   That was Hegel's view. Or is the ineffable existent despite being ineffable? That was the Tractarian Wittgenstein's view: Es gibt allerdings das Unaussprechliche.   One cannot eff the ineffable. Does this mean that it is not there to be effed? Or does it mean that effing is not the proper mode of access to the existent ineffable? I incline in the latter direction. 

Now suppose that each person at the base of his subjectivity is uniquely unique and is acquainted with his own irreducible haecceity and ipseity. How could God know anyone's haecceity?  He can't know it objectively, and to know my haecceity subjectively, as I know it, God would have to be me.  This leads on to the heretical thought that for God to be all-knowing, he would have to be every sentient being, as Jacques appreciates.

Second, it seems that having all objective knowledge precludes subjectivity and vice versa. While incarnated as a particular man, with a perspective and personality, God was not simultaneously aware of all objective facts. That kind of awareness would seem to make it impossible to have a perspective and a personality. So is true omniscience impossible? Either you know everything objective, or you know only something objective and only something subjective. I don't mind this result too much. I have no strong intuition that omniscience is possible. But then what should a Christian or other theist believe about God's knowledge? 

A God's eye view is a View from Nowhere (to allude to a title of one of T. Nagel's books.) An incarnate God would have to have a definite perspective and personality.  But then he could not be objectively omniscient. If, on the other hand, he were objectively omniscient, then he could not be incarnate.  That seems to be what Jacques is saying.

It might be replied that that Jesus qua God is objectively omnisicent but subjectively nescient, but qua man is objectively limited in knowledge but has knowledge of qualia. If that makes sense, then we could say that an incarnate God knows more than the same God aloof from matter. For then the incarnate God knows everything the disincarnate God knows plus what it is like to be a man, and by analogy what it is like to be a cat or a dog or any sentient being sufficiently similar in physiological make-up to a man.

Is true omniscience possible? If true omniscience requires knowing everything there is to know, both objectively  (by description) and subjectively (by acquaintance), then true or full omniscience is impossible, i.e., no one person could be fully omniscient.  What then should a Christian theologian say?

He could perhaps say this: God is omniscient in that he knows everything that it is possible for any one person to know.  Now it is not possible that any one person know everything both objectively and subjectively. Therefore, it is no restriction of God's omniscience that he does not know everything.

Could an eternal God know what time it is? Presumably not. Could God be both omniscient and ignorant with respect to future contingents?  Why not?  God knows whatever it it possible to know; future contingents, however, are impossible for anyone to know.

It is like the situation with respect to omnipotence. It is no restriction of God's omnipotence that he can do only what it is logically possible to do.  God is powerless to restore a virgin. But that's nothing against the divine omnipotence.

Must God Become Man to Know the Human Lot?

Vito Caiati, commenting on Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron:

In yesterday’s Good Friday post, you write, “The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated experience the worst of embodiment and be tortured to death.  For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he must experience the highest exaltation and the lowest degradation possible to a human. These extreme possibilities, though not actual in all, define being human.”

Why is the full scope and content of the human experience, including the most extreme pain and death itself, not known by God, who is omniscient, without the Incarnation? Why should the flesh, enmeshed in and limited by human sensory perception, be a necessary, supplementary mode by which such experience is conveyed to and hence shared by the Deity?

The question is why an omniscient God would have to enter the material world to know the full scope and content of human experience. If God is omniscient, then he knows everything. And if he knows everything, then he knows what it is like  to be a man undergoing torture and bodily death.  Why then must God compromise his purely spiritual status by Incarnation? Why can't God know what it is like to be a man without becoming a man?

To answer directly, one could know everything it is possible to know about a sentient organism without knowing what it is like to be that organism.  And so God, who knows everything it is possible to know about every type of sentient organism, and is therefore objectively omniscient with respect to every type of organism, is nonetheless subjectively nescient in that he does not and cannot know what it is like to be an organism of any type.  This is because he is not an organism of any type; he is a pure spirit.

Consider an ethologist who studies bats. Suppose he comes to know every objective fact about bats including exactly how they locate and perceive objects in their environment using echolocation, or 'bat sonar.'  Knowing all these objective facts, our scientist would still not know what it is like to be a bat. He would not know the subjective experiences that bats have when they detect, pursue, etc. objects in their environment.  He could know everything about the objective correlates in the bat's brain of the bat's experience, but he would not be able to know the subjective character of those experiences.  To know bat qualia, our scientist would have to be a bat.

Same with God: he would have to be a man to know what it is like to be a man, that is, to know 'from the inside'  the subjective character of human experience, its highs, lows, and doldrums.

These ruminations give rise to a number of further questions. But it is Saturday night, time to punch the clock, pour myself a drink, and rustle up some grub.

Aficionados will know that I am borrowing from Thomas Nagel, What is like to be a bat?  Here is a short video that treats of some of his ideas.

Russell, Sense Data, and Qualia

Reader K. G. writes,

I recently came across a passage in Russell's Mysticism and Logic which you may find interesting. In the essay "The Ultimate Constituents of Matter," Russell writes (p. 144), "… the existence of sense-data [qualia] is logically independent of the existence of mind, and is causally dependent upon the body of the percipient, rather than upon his mind.” [. . .] On the contrary, I propose that any tenable definition of qualia must construe them as mental items, i.e. items whose esse is their percipi. [. . .]

 

What are your thoughts on this argument?

 

I think you are confusing qualia with sense data.  I grant you that qualia are mental items, and that they cannot exist apart from minds.  But sense data are not qualia.  First of all, Russell does not use 'quale' (singular) or 'qualia' (plural) in the two essays you mention.  But he does tell us what he means by 'sense data':  ". . . I believe that the actual data in sensation, the immediate objects or sight or touch or hearing, are extra-mental, purely physical, and among the ultimate constituents of matter." (10th ed., 128)

 

Suppose I am staring at a blue coffee cup.  The particular blue that I visually sense, precisely as I sense it, is a sense datum: it is the direct or  immediate object of my visual sensing.  It is distinct from the sensing. The sensing is something I undergo or experience or live through; it is part of my mental life.  As such it is mental in nature.  The sense datum, however, is not mental.  It is not an episode of experiencing or part of an episode of experiencing; it is the direct object of  an experiencing.  For Russell, the blue sense datum is not only not mental; it is physical: it is a proper part of the coffee cup.  I read Russell in these essays as a bundle theorist: physical objects are bundles of sense data both synchronically and diachronically.

 

Note also that while a blue sense datum is blue, a sensing of a blue sense datum is not blue.  (An adverbialist who speaks of sensing-blue-ly gives up the act-object schema that Russell presupposes.) 

 

Sense data, then, are objects of sensings.  For Russell, they are extra-mental and indeed physical.  Qualia, however, are the phenomenal characters of experiencings.  For example, the felt quality, the what-it-is-like, of a twinge of pain, precisely as it is felt.  Or the smell of burnt garlic.  Or the taste of licorice. 

 

There are many tricky questions here.  Suppose I am given a piece of black, semi-soft candy and asked  what it is.  I put it in my mouth to find out.  I discover that it is a piece of licorice.  I seem to have discovered something objective about a physical object, namely, that this bit of candy is licorice.  This would suggest that the object of my gustatory sensing is extra-mental and indeed physical.  Or should we say merely that I had a gustatory experience with a certain phenomenal character and that the characteristic taste of the thing I put in my mouth is wholly mental in nature?

 

Intentionality Not a 'Hard Problem' for Physicalists?

The qualia-based objections are supposed to pose a 'hard' problem for defenders of physicalism.  The implication is that the problems posed by intentionality are, if not exactly 'easy,' then at least tractable.  An earlier post discussed a version of the knowledge argument, which is one of the qualia-based objections.  (Two others are the absent qualia argument and the zombie argument.)  It seems to me, though, that intentionality is also a damned hard problem for physicalists to solve, so hard in fact as to be insoluble within physicalist constraints and another excellent  reason to reject physicalism.

Before proceeding I want to make two preliminary points. 

The first is that the untenability of physicalism does not entail the acceptability of substance dualism. Contrapositively, the unacceptability of substance dualism does not entail the tenability of physicalism.  So if a physicalist wishes to point out the problems with substance dualism,  he is free to do so.  But he ought not think that such problems supply compelling reasons to be a physicalist.  For it is obvious that the positions stand to each other as logical contraries; hence both could be be false.

My second point is that considerations of parsimony do favor physicalism over dualistic schemes -- but only on condition that the relevant data can be adequately accounted for.  And that is one big  'only if.'  (See The Use and Abuse of Occam's Razor: On Multiplying Entities Beyond Necessity.)

An Argument Sketched.  Mary, Meet Marty.

We were talking about Frank Jackson's Mary.  Now I introduce Marty, a Martian scientist who like Mary knows everything there is to know about human brains and their supporting systems.  So he knows all about what goes in the human brain and CNS when we humans suffer and enjoy twinges and tingles, smells and stinks, sights and sounds, etc.  We will suppose that Marty's sensorium is very different, perhaps totally different than ours.  He may have infrared color qualia but no color qualia corresponding to the portion of the EM spectrum for which we have color qualia.  Marty also knows everything there is to know about what goes on in my head when I think about various things.  We may even suppose that Marty is studying me right now with his super-sophisticated instruments and knows exactly what is going on in my head right now when I am in various intentional states.

Suppose I am now thinking about dogs. I needn't be thinking about any particular dog; I might just be thinking about getting a dog, which of course does not entail that there is some particular dog, Kramer say, that I am thinking about getting. Indeed, one can think about getting a dog that is distinct from every dog presently in existence! How? By thinking about having a dog breeder do his thing. If a woman tells her husband that she wants a baby, more likely than not, she is not telling him that she wants to kidnap or adopt some existing baby, but that she wants the two of them to engage in the sorts of conjugal activities that can be expected to cause a baby to exist.  Same with me.  I can want a dog or a cat or a sloop or a matter transmitter even if the object of my wanting does not presently exist.

So right now I am thinking about a dog, but no presently existing dog.  My thinking has intentional content. It is an instance of what philosophers call intentionality.  My act of thinking takes an object, or has an accusative. It exhibits  aboutness or of-ness in the way a pain quale does not exhibit aboutness of of-ness.   It is important to realize that my thinking is intrinsically such as to be about a dog:  the aboutness is not parasitic upon an external relation to an actual dog.  That is why I rigged the example the way I did.  My thinking is object-directed despite there being no object in existence to which I am externally related.  This blocks attempts to explain intentionality in terms of causation.  Such attempts fail in any case.  See my post on Representation and Causation.

The question is whether the Martian scientist can determine what that intentional content is by monitoring my neural states during the period of time I am thinking about a dog. The content before my mind has various subcontents: hairy critter, mammal, barking animal, man's best friend . . . .  But none of this content will be discernible to the Martian neuroscientist on the basis of complete knowledge of my neural states, their relations to each other and to sensory input and behavioral output. To strengthen the argument we may stipulate that Marty lacks the very concept dog. Therefore, there is more to the mind than what can be known by even a completed neuroscience. Physicalism (materialism) is false.

The argument is this:

1. Marty knows all the physical and functional facts about my body and brain during the time I am thinking about a dog.
2. That I am thinking about a dog is a fact.
3.  Marty does not know that I am thinking about a dog.
Therefore
4. Marty does not know all the facts about me and my mental activity.
Therefore
5. There are mental facts that are not physical or functional facts, and physicalism is false.

Credit where credit is due:  The above is my take on a more detailed and careful argument presented here by Laurence BonJour.  Good day!

Against Functionalism in the Philosophy of Mind: Argument One

In my last philosophy of mind post on property dualism I posed a problem:

My problem, roughly, is that I don't understand how a physical particular (a brain, a region of a brain, a brain event, or state, or process) can instantiate one or more irreducibly mental properties. Why should there be a problem? Well, if a physical particular is exhaustively understandable in terms of physics (and the sciences based on it) then there is just nothing irreducibly mental about it, in which case it cannot instantiate an irreducibly mental property.

At the end of that post I provided an answer to that question:

Mental properties are functional properties. So when we say that x, a brain event say, has a mental property, all we mean is that it stands in certain causal relations to sensory inputs, behavioral outputs, and intervening brain events. So what makes the brain event mental is simply the relations in which it stands to inputs, outputs and other brain events. Once you grasp this, then you grasp that the brain event can be wholly physical in nature despite its having a mental property. Mental properties are not intrinsic but relational.

The answer, in short, is that mental properties are not intrinsic properties.  But then I wrote,

Unfortunately, this won't do. Felt sadness has an intrinsically mental nature that cannot be functionally characterized. A subsequent post will spell this out in detail.

This is the subsequent post.

Suppose Socrates Jones is in some such state as that of perceiving a tree. The state is classifiable as mental as opposed to a physical state like that of his lying beneath a tree. What makes a mental state
mental? That is the question.

The functionalist answer is that what makes a mental state mental is just the causal role it plays in mediating between the sensory inputs, behavioral outputs, and other internal states of the subject in question. The idea is not the banality that mental states typically (or even always) have causes and effects, but that it is causal role occupancy, nothing more and nothing less, that constitutes the
mentality of a mental state. The intrinsic nature of what plays the role is relevant only to its fitness for instantiating mental causal  roles, but not at all relevant to its being a mental state.

Consider a piston in an engine. You can't make a piston out of chewing gum, but being made of steel is no part of what makes a piston a piston. A piston is what it does within the 'economy' of the engine. Similarly, on functionalism, a mental state is what it does. This allows, but does not entail, that a mental state be a brain or CNS state. It also allows, but does not entail, that a mental state be a state of a  computing machine.

To illustrate, suppose my cat Zeno and I are startled out of our respective reveries by a loud noise at time t. Given the differences  between human and feline brains, presumably man and cat are not in type-identical brain states at t.  (One of the motivations for functionalism was the breakdown of the old type-type identity theory of Herbert Feigl, U. T. Place. J. J. C. Smart, et al.)  Yet both man and cat are startled: both are in some sense in the same mental state, even though the states they are in are neither token- nor type-identical. The   functionalist will hold that we are in functionally the same mental state in virtue of the fact that Zeno's brain state plays the same  role in him as my brain state plays in me. It does the same  mediatorial job vis-a-vis sensory inputs, other internal states, and  behavioral outputs in me as the cat's brain state does in him.

On functionalism, then, the mentality of the mental is wholly relational. And as David Armstrong points out, "If the essence of the mental is purely relational, purely a matter of what causal role is played, then the logical possibility remains that whatever in fact plays the causal role is not material." This implies that "Mental states might be states of a spiritual substance." Thus the very feature of functionalism that allows mentality to be realized in computers and nonhuman brains generally, also allows it to be realized in spiritual substances if there are any.

Whether this latitudinarianism is thought to be good or bad, functionalism is a monumentally implausible theory of mind. There are the technical objections that have spawned a pelagic literature: absent qualia, inverted qualia, the 'Chinese nation,' etc. Thrusting these aside, I go for the throat, Searle-style.

Functionalism is threatened by a fundamental incoherence. The theory states that what makes a state mental is nothing intrinsic to the state, but purely relational: a matter of its causes and effects. In us, these happen to be neural. (I am assuming physicalism for the time being.)  Now every mental state is a neural state, but not every neural state is a mental state. So the distinction between mental and nonmental neural states must be accounted for in terms of a distinction between two different sets of causes and effects, those that contribute to mentality and those that do not. But how make this distinction? How do the causes/effects of mental neural events differ from the causes/effects of nonmental neural events? Equivalently, how do psychologically salient input/output events differ from those that lack such salience?

Suppose the display on my monitor is too bright for comfort and I decide to do something about it. Why is it that photons entering my retina are psychologically salient inputs but those striking the back of my head are not? Why is it that the moving of my hand to to adjust the brightness and contrast controls is a salient output event, while unnoticed perspiration is not?

One may be tempted to say that the psychologically salient inputs are those that contribute to the production of the uncomfortable glare sensation, and the psychologically salient outputs are those that manifest the concomitant intention to make an adjustment. But then the salient input/output events are being picked out by reference to mental events taken precisely NOT as causal role occupants, but as exhibiting intrinsic features that are neither causal nor neural: the glare quale has an intrinsic nature that cannot be resolved into relations to other items, and cannot be identified with any brain state. The functionalist would then be invoking the very thing he is at pains to deny, namely, mental events as having more than neural and causal features.

Clearly, one moves in a circle of embarrassingly short diameter if one says: (i) mental events are mental because of the mental causal roles they play; and (ii) mental causal roles are those whose occupants are mental events.

The failure of functionalism is particularly evident in the case of qualia.  Examples of qualia: felt pain, a twinge of nostalgia, the smell of burnt garlic, the taste of avocado.  Is it plausible to say that such qualia can be exhaustively factored into a neural component and a causal/functional component?  It is the exact opposite of plausible.  It is not as loony as the eliminativist denial of quali, but it is close.  The intrinsic nature of qualitative mental states is essential to them. It is that intrinsic qualitative nature that dooms functionalism.

I conclude that if the only way to render property dualism coherent is by construing mental properties as functional properties, then property dualism is untenable.

Could Qualia Terms and Neuroscience Terms Have the Same Reference?

I made the point that the vocabularies of phenomenology and neuroscience are radically disparate, such that nonsense arises when one says things like, 'This burnt garlic smell is identical to a brain state of mine.'  To which a Viet Nam veteran, altering the example,  replied by e-mail:

. . . when a neuro-scientist says your smelling this odor as napalm is nothing but a complex neural event activating several regions of the brain..., he isn't claiming you can replace your talk about smells with talk about neural signals from the olfactory bulb. Different ways of talking have evolved for different purposes. But he is saying that beneath these different ways of talking & thinking there is just one underlying reality, namely, neural events in our brain.

 The idea, then, that is that are are different ways of referring to the same underlying reality.  And so if we deploy a simple distinction between sense and reference we can uphold the materialist/physicalist reduction of qualia to brain states.  Well, I have my doubts . . . .

I agree with Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and others that conscious experiences are irreducible to physical states. I have endorsed the idea that felt pain, phenomenal pain, pain as experienced or lived through (er-lebt), the pain that hurts, has a subjective mode of existence, a "first-person ontology" in Searle's phrase. If this is right, then phenomenally conscious states cannot be reduced to physical states with their objective mode of existence and third-person ontology. As a consequence, an exclusively third-person approach to mind is bound to leave something out. But there is an objection to irreducibility that needs to be considered, an objection that exploits Frege's distinction between sense and reference.

The basic idea is that linguistic and epistemic access to one and the same item can be had in different ways, and that duality of linguistic and/or epistemic access need not be taken to argue ontological duality in that to which one gains access. Reference to one and the same item can be routed through different senses or modes of presentation (Frege's Darstellungsweisen). Different terms, with different senses, can be used to target one and the same referent. 'Morning Star' and 'Evening Star,' though differing in sense, can be used to refer to the same celestial body, the planet Venus.  

Why not say something similar about the physical state I am in when I feel pain? Why not say that there are two ways of accessing the same physical state? The one mode of access is via neuroscience, the other is 'from the inside' via the pain's qualitative feel to the one who endures it. If so, there are not two states or events one physical and the other mental differing in mode of existence; there is exactly one state or event, and it is physical. Dualism is avoided. The upshot is that, contra Nagel, the third-person physicalistic approach to the mind does not leave anything out. One may go on to tax Nagel, Searle, and Co. with illicitly inferring a difference in mode of existence from a difference in mode of linguistic/epistemic access. Something like this objection is made by Christopher Peacocke in his review of Nagel's The View from Nowhere (Philosophical Review, January 1989.)

It's a nice try, a very nice try. And it is exactly what one would expect from someone who takes an objectifying third-person view. What's more, it would be in keeping with Occam's Razor if mind could be seamlessly integrated into nature. Unfortunately, the pain I am in is not a mode of presentation, or means of epistemic access, to the underlying brain state. Thus the Fregean analogy collapses. The sense of 'morning star' mediates my reference to Venus; but my pain quale, even if it is caused by the brain state, does not mediate my reference to it.

Let me see if I can make this clear. The suggestion is that the same physical reality appears, or can appear, in two different ways, a third-person way and a first-person way, and that this first-person way of access is no evidence of a first-person way of being. One problem is the one I just alluded to: there is no clear sense in which a pain quale is an appearance of a brain state. The former may be caused by the latter. But that is not to say that the pain quale is of the brain state. The felt pain does not present the brain state to me. It does not present anything (distinct from itself) to me. After all, the felt pain is a non-intentional state. No doubt it has a certain content, but not an intentional or representational content. One can describe it without describing what it is of, for the simple reason that there is nothing it is of. An intentional state, however, cannot be described without describing what it is of.

The Fregean sense/reference analogy therefore breaks down. The basic idea was that one and same reality can appear in different ways, and that the numerical difference of these ways is consistent with a unitary mode of existence of the reality. A felt pain, however, is not an appearance of a reality, but an appearance that is a reality. The appearing of a felt pain is its being, and its being is its appearing. And because this is so, the felt pain is a distinct reality from the brain state. Not only is it a distinct reality, it is a distinct reality with a distinct, irreducibly subjective, mode of existence.

Nagelus vindicatus est. There is something essentially incomplete about a third-person approach to reality. It leaves something out, and what it leaves out is precisely that which makes life worth living. For as Wilfrid Sellars once said to Daniel Dennett over a fine bottle of Chambertin, "But Dan, qualia are what make life worth living!" (Consciousness Explained, p. 383)

In vino veritas.

I made the point that the vocabularies of phenomenology and neuroscience are radically disparate, such that nonsense arises when one says things like, 'This burnt garlic smell is identical to a brain state of mine.'  To which a Viet Nam veteran, altering the example,  replied by e-mail:

. . . when a neuro-scientist says your smelling this odor as napalm is nothing but a complex neural event activating several regions of the brain..., he isn't claiming you can replace your talk about smells with talk about neural signals from the olfactory bulb. Different ways of talking have evolved for different purposes. But he is saying that beneath these different ways of talking & thinking there is just one underlying reality, namely, neural events in our brain.

 The idea, then, that is that are are different ways of referring to the same underlying reality.  And so if we deploy a simple distinction between sense and reference we can uphold the materialist/physicalist reduction of qualia to brain states.  Well, I have my doubts . . . .

I agree with Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and others that conscious experiences are irreducible to physical states. I have endorsed the idea that felt pain, phenomenal pain, pain as experienced or lived through (er-lebt), the pain that hurts, has a subjective mode of existence, a "first-person ontology" in Searle's phrase. If this is right, then phenomenally conscious states cannot be reduced to physical states with their objective mode of existence and third-person ontology. As a consequence, an exclusively third-person approach to mind is bound to leave something out. But there is an objection to irreducibility that needs to be considered, an objection that exploits Frege's distinction between sense and reference.

The basic idea is that linguistic and epistemic access to one and the same item can be had in different ways, and that duality of linguistic and/or epistemic access need not be taken to argue ontological duality in that to which one gains access. Reference to one and the same item can be routed through different senses or modes of presentation (Frege's Darstellungsweisen). Different terms, with different senses, can be used to target one and the same referent. 'Morning Star' and 'Evening Star,' though differing in sense, can be used to refer to the same celestial body, the planet Venus.  

Why not say something similar about the physical state I am in when I feel pain? Why not say that there are two ways of accessing the same physical state? The one mode of access is via neuroscience, the other is 'from the inside' via the pain's qualitative feel to the one who endures it. If so, there are not two states or events one physical and the other mental differing in mode of existence; there is exactly one state or event, and it is physical. Dualism is avoided. The upshot is that, contra Nagel, the third-person physicalistic approach to the mind does not leave anything out. One may go on to tax Nagel, Searle, and Co. with illicitly inferring a difference in mode of existence from a difference in mode of linguistic/epistemic access. Something like this objection is made by Christopher Peacocke in his review of Nagel's The View from Nowhere (Philosophical Review, January 1989.)

It's a nice try, a very nice try. And it is exactly what one would expect from someone who takes an objectifying third-person view. What's more, it would be in keeping with Occam's Razor if mind could be seamlessly integrated into nature. Unfortunately, the pain I am in is not a mode of presentation, or means of epistemic access, to the underlying brain state. Thus the Fregean analogy collapses. The sense of 'morning star' mediates my reference to Venus; but my pain quale, even if it is caused by the brain state, does not mediate my reference to it.

Let me see if I can make this clear. The suggestion is that the same physical reality appears, or can appear, in two different ways, a third-person way and a first-person way, and that this first-person way of access is no evidence of a first-person way of being. One problem is the one I just alluded to: there is no clear sense in which a pain quale is an appearance of a brain state. The former may be caused by the latter. But that is not to say that the pain quale is of the brain state. The felt pain does not present the brain state to me. It does not present anything (distinct from itself) to me. After all, the felt pain is a non-intentional state. No doubt it has a certain content, but not an intentional or representational content. One can describe it without describing what it is of, for the simple reason that there is nothing it is of. An intentional state, however, cannot be described without describing what it is of.

The Fregean sense/reference analogy therefore breaks down. The basic idea was that one and same reality can appear in different ways, and that the numerical difference of these ways is consistent with a unitary mode of existence of the reality. A felt pain, however, is not an appearance of a reality, but an appearance that is a reality. The appearing of a felt pain is its being, and its being is its appearing. And because this is so, the felt pain is a distinct reality from the brain state. Not only is it a distinct reality, it is a distinct reality with a distinct, irreducibly subjective, mode of existence.

Nagelus vindicatus est. There is something essentially incomplete about a third-person approach to reality. It leaves something out, and what it leaves out is precisely that which makes life worth living. For as Wilfrid Sellars once said to Daniel Dennett over a fine bottle of Chambertin, "But Dan, qualia are what make life worth living!" (Consciousness Explained, p. 383)

In vino veritas.

Like, What Does It Mean? Notes on Nagel

Thomas Nagel’s “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” (Philosophical Review, 1974, reprinted in Mortal Questions, Cambridge, 1979, pp. 165-180) is a contemporary classic in the philosophy of mind, and its signature ‘what is it like’ locution has become a stock phrase rather loosely bandied about in discussions of subjectivity and consciousness. The phrase can be interpreted in several ways. Clarity will be served if we distinguish them.