Conscious Entities

If you haven’t already seen it, it’s well worth watching this charmingly animated talk by Iain McGilchrist on the two hemispheres of the brain. At a brisk pace he explains how people in the past went overboard with a false and over- simplified version of what the two hemispheres do and provides a fascinating corrective. You may feel that towards the end he goes a teensy bit overboard himself in a new direction.

Also from TED is this talk in which Antonio Damasio goes in pursuit of the self – in his view an essential component of consciousness – and unexpectedly tracks it down to the brain stem.

Finally, Sergey Bulanov has kindly drawn my attention to his new website devoted to his work on developing a non-computational artificial intelligence. Sergey was originally inspired by a book of logic problems: he invented a network system for solving them and in a second phase is seeking to generalise his approach.

Thanks to Sergey and to Jesús Olmo and Ivan Savov respectively for the other links.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute and St Andrew’s University have come up with some fresh evidence that chimps have a theory of mind (ToM) – that is to say that they are aware that other individuals possess knowledge and that what they know doesn’t always match what we know.

The researchers placed dummy snakes in the path of wild chimps: the chimps gave warning calls more frequently in the presence of others who, so far as they could tell, had no prior knowledge of the presumed hazard.

This kind of research is fraught with difficulty. Morgan’s Canon tells us that we should only use consciousness as an explanation for some item of behaviour where no simpler explanation is available, and similarly we should be reluctant to grant chimps ToM unless there is no alternative.  Couldn’t the explanation be, for example, that chimps who are alone are more likely to give warning calls, either because that response is just hard-wired, or because they are more fearful when alone? Alternatively, perhaps the observed behaviour could be largely explained if chimps are programmed to give a warning call, but only one, for each member of the troupe they spot or hear approaching?

Although I think Morgan’s Canon is absolutely the right kind of principle to apply, it is difficult to satisfy, and if read too literally perhaps impossible. We know from all the discussions of philosophical zombies that there are plenty of thoughtful people who find it conceivable that all of human behaviour could be produced without consciousness (at any rate, without the kind of consciousness that requires actual phenomenal subjective experience). If that’s really true then there are surely no cases in which behaviour can strictly be explained only by consciousness. It’s equally hard, going on impossible, to rule out every conceivable alternative explanation for the chimps’ behaviour – but the researchers were well aware of the problem and the key point of the research is the observation of circumstances where, for example, chimp A could be presumed to have heard an earlier warning, but chimp B could not. So we can take the claims they make as well grounded. It seems that with some inevitable margin of doubt we can reasonably take it as established that chimps do have ToM.

So what? We might have been willing to assume that that was probably the case anyway. We already know chimps are extremely bright and there are many who believe they can develop language skills which approach human levels. Language is what makes it so much easier to know for sure that human beings have ToM – they can tell us about it – so if chimps are anywhere near that level it’s really no surprise that they also have ToM. (Interesting, by the way that the current research uses the chimps’ proto-linguistic warning calls.) One further conclusion offered by the researchers themselves is that ToM must have emerged in the primate lineage at a point before the divergence of chimp and human ancestors: but that ain’t necessarily so. It could equally be that each lineage has developed a functionally comparable capacity in parallel, one which the latest shared ancestor need never have had.

Do we and our pongid cousins have the same ToM? In some respects obviously not. For one thing, we humans really do have actual academic theories of mind; and we write novels filled with the putative contents of minds that never existed. We have ToM on levels which completely transcend the mental lives of chimps. Are these, though, just fancy overlays on an underlying ability which remains essentially the same?  Alas, there’s no easy way of telling without knowing what’s going on in the chimp’s mind – what it is like to be a chimp – and Nagel long ago told us that that was impossible.

Attempting to know the unknowable is nothing new for us, though, so let’s at least briefly try to achieve the impossible. There are lots of possibilities for what might be passing through the chimp’s mind: by way of illustration it could be any of the following.

1. A cloudy sense of something indefinable but importantly snake-related which is missing in Chimp B.
2. A mental picture of Chimp B continuing to advance and stumbling on the snake.
3. A brief empathetic sense of being Chimp B, and a recollection that seeing the snake or hearing a warning has not occurred.
4. Routine enumeration of the troupe and its whereabouts leading to a realisation that Chimp B hasn’t been around for a while.
5. Occurence of proto-verbal content equivalent to uttering the sentence “Look there’s B, who doesn’t know about the snake yet!”

There are plenty of other possibilities: cataloguing them would in itself be a challenging task. Moreover, humans are clearly capable of operating on two or more of these levels at once, and it would be mere speciesism to assume that chimps are not. Still, can we pare it down a bit: given that chimps lack full-blown human linguistic abilities and are relatively limited in their foresight, can we plausibly hypothesise that cases like 5 and other involving relatively complex levels of abstraction are probably absent from the chimp experience? I’m not sure, and even if we can it doesn’t help all that much.

So instead I ask myself what state obtained in my own mind last time I warned someone about a potential hazard. Luckily I do remember a couple of occasions, but interestingly introspection leaves me quite uncertain about the answer. This could be a result of hazy memory, but I think it’s worse than that: I think the main problem is that so far as conscious thought goes I could have been thinking anything.  It feels as if there is no distinct single state of mind which corresponds to noticing that somebody needs to be warned about something; curiously I feel tempted to examine my own behaviour and conclude that if I did go on to warn someone, I must have been thinking that they needed warning.

That kind of approach is another option, I suppose: we can take a behaviourist tack and say that if chimps behave in a way that displays ToM, then they have it, and that’s all there is to be said about it. If we can’t formulate clearly what kind of behaviour that would be, that just means ToM itself turns out to be mentalistic nonsense.  The snag with that is that ToM is pretty certainly mentalistic nonsense to behaviourists anyway; so if we think the question is worth answering we have to look elsewhere.

We could get neuronal on this: we might, for example, be able to scan human and chimp brains and detect some distinctive patterns of activity which occur just when the relevant primate appears to be getting ready to issue a warning. If these patterns of activity occurred in the corresponding sections of the chimp and human brain (perhaps involving some of those special mirror neurons) we should be inclined to conclude that our ToMs were basically the same: if they occurred in different places we should be very tempted to conclude that evolution had recruited different sections of the two species’ brains to carry out the same function. This latter case is quite plausible – in human brains, for example, the areas used for speech don’t match the bits of the chimp brain used for vocalisations (which apparently correspond to areas used by humans only for involuntary gasps and cries and, strangely enough, for swearing).

Results like that might settle the evolutionary question; but not the deeper philosophical one. Even if we did use a different set of neurons, it wouldn’t prove we weren’t running the same ToM. Different human beings certainly use somewhat different arrays of neurons – no two brains are wired identically. If we came across the yeti and found he was fully up to human levels of consciousness, able to hold an impeccably normal human-style conversation with us and discuss ToM just as we do, and then we made the astonishing discovery that he had no prefrontal cortex and was using what in humans would have been his cerebellum to do his conscious thinking with, we would not on that account alone say he had a different kind of consciousness (at least, I don’t think we would).

So it looks to me as if we have a radical pattern of variation at both ends. All sorts of neuronal wiring (or maybe silicon or beer cans and string – why not?) will do at the bottom level; all sorts of cogitative content will do at the top levels. Somewhere in the middle is there a level of description where deciding that someone needs to be warned is just that and nothing else, and where we can meaningfully compare and contrast human and chimp?  I suspect there is, but I also suspect that it resides in something analogous to a high-level mental metacode of a kind we should need a proper theory of mind even to begin imagining.

Is trilled smell possible? Ed Cooke and Erik Myin raise the question in the JCS.  Why do we care? Well, for one thing smell has always tended to be the poor relation in discussions of conscious experience. The science of vision is so much better developed that seeing generally looks a more tractable area to attack, but arguably the discussion is somewhat lop-sided as a result; ‘seeing red’ isn’t necessarily a perfect epitome of all sensory experience, so a bit of clarification around smells might well be useful.

But the main point of asking the question is to test what Cooke and Myin call the independence thesis: the view that the experienced character of sensations includes a ‘something it is like’ over and above the gross physics of the business: that there’s an ultimate smelliness about smell that has nothing to do with the details of the sensory process. I would say there’s a range of possible positions here. Hardly anyone, I think would say that the physics of perception is irrelevant to how the experience seems. We know that that the wave structure of light and sound determines some of the characteristics of the experiences of vision and hearing, for example, and we know that smell is vaguer about location than vision because it depends on gases wafting around rather than sharply defined rays of light.  But beyond that the consensus breaks down. Some would say that these physical characteristics are just the basics and the real excitement lies in the ineffable qualities of experience. Purple is a thing in itself, not a blank sensory token which would do equally well for the smell of coffee, they might say.

Some would go further and accept that the qualities of experience are very largely determined by the physics of the medium and sensory apparatus, but that there’s a certain something beyond that which doesn’t reduce to the simple physics.  Rigorous materialists will be tempted to go further still and take the view that however complex and indefinable our experiences may seem, they are fully determined by the qualities of the processes that give rise to them: this of course, amounts to denying the existence of ineffable qualia. (My own view, for what it’s worth, lies an infinitesimal distance short of this extreme.)

Cooke and Myin’s approach is to look at the consequences of the independence thesis. If it’s true then we ought to be able to transfer the forms of one sensory modality to another without it losing its identity. So, in sound we can have a trill, a very rapid alternation of two notes; if independence is true, we ought to be able to have trilled smells.

Before tackling the thought experiment in more detail, Cooke and Myin provide a brisk review of some of the relevant science, including some odd and interesting facts. The smell of pressure-cooked pork liver is made up of 179 different compounds; airflow is indispensable to smell (having your nose full of smelly stuff or your receptors stimulated produces no sensation unless there’s airflow); and so sniffing is more important than you may have thought. It turns out that human beings are pretty well incapable of identifying single components of a smell when there are more than three – so much for perfume designers – and perception of smell is also very heavily conditioned by previous experience (if you’ve encountered smell b together with lemony smells in the past, you’ll tend to think smell b has lemony notes even when the lemon smells are objectively absent).  It looks as if we might each be working with a typical vocabulary of about 10,000 known smells, out of a theoretical 400,00 that the nose can distinguish: best estimates suggest that smell-space has a minimum of somewhere between 32 and 68 dimensions (as compared to human colour vision’s paltry 3).

Now we come to the thought-experiment itself.  It seems that Jesse Prinz has denied the possibility that a sound could become a smell merely by changing the structure of the experience (could the sound of a fire alarm ever become the smell of smoke?), so with fine daring, that is the first transition Cooke and Myin propose to anatomise in a thought-experiment.

Thought-experiments are always a little unsatisfactory because they don’t really force people to accept your conclusions in the way that a proper argument does. In this case, moreover, it seems to me there’s a particularly difficult trick to bring off because for the experiment to convince, Cooke and Myin want the transfer of properties to seem plausible; yet the more plausible it seems the more plausible independence seems too.  They want us to believe that they’re doing the best possible description of a transfer that could plausibly happen, in order to convince us that once we understand it it’s not plausible that it’s really a transfer at all.

However, I think they do a commendable job. First, sounds have to become less distinct in their onset and direction; they have to be more like generalised hums which float around appearing and dispersing slowly (no good for rapid warnings any more). The we have to imagine that we use our noses to detect sounds, that they only become perceptible when we breathe, and that sniffing or breathing deeply affects their intensity. We must imagine that it’s now a little more difficult to pick out single sounds when there are several at once: we might have to think about it for few moments and take some extra sniffs.

That’s not too bad, but there are bigger problems. We’ve noted that smell space appears to be huge; Cooke and Myin suggest we could enlarge sound space the same way by imagining that the differences in sound are like the differnces in timbre between musical instruments (though we have to suppose that we can readily distinguish the timbres of 10,000 or so different instruments). On the other hand, musical notes fit on an organised scale with perceptible relationships between different notes: smell doesn’t really have that, so we must drop it and assume that sounds are essentially monotonous. To round things off with behavioural factors, we should think of sound as no longer used for communication, but mainly for the evaluation of the acceptability of food, people and other biological entities; and we should imagine that sounds now have that characteristic of certain smells which allows them to evoke memories with particular potency.

If you’re still with the experiment, you’ll now have some intuitive idea of what it would be like if sounds had the structural and other characteristics of smells. But no, say Cooke and Myin: isn’t it apparent now that the sensations we’re talking about wouldn’t be sounds any more (in fact they would pretty much have become smells)? Isn’t it clear, in short, that in order to be trillable, smells would have to cease being smells? They go on to a further thought experiment in which smells become colours.

This is a valuable exercise, but as I say, thought experiments are not knock-down arguments, and I am willing to bet there wil in fact be plenty of people who are prepared to go along with Cooke and Myin’s transition but insist at the end that the sensations they’re imagining are still in some way sounds, or at least have a core soundiness which makes them different from echt smells. (You notice how I criticise the weakness of thought experiments and yet here I am doing something worse – a kind of third-person thought-experiment where I invite agreement that in certain odd circumstances other people would think in a certain way.)

Personally I think some of the most interesting territory revealed here is not so much at the ends of the transition as in the middle. The experiment raises the possibility of mixed modalities never before imagined, chimerical experiences with some of the characteristics of two or more different standard senses. Not just that, either, because we can invent new physical constraints and structures and develop possible sensory modalities which have nothing whatever in common with any real ones, if our imagination permits.

This gives Cooke and Myin some possible new ammunition. Do all these imaginary new modalities get their own essence, their own qualia? If we mix smell and hearing in different ways, do we have to suppose that there are distinct qualia of, er, smearing and hell?

For that matter, what if we took a subject (all right, victim) through the transition of sound to smell; and then separately gave him back sound? has he now got two distinct experiences of sound? Then if we move the new sound2 though the transition to smell, does he have two smells? And if we then give him back a separate sense of sound again? And so on.

I can’t help thinking it would be quite a Christmas present if we could have a sense with the spatial distinctness of vision, the structured harmonics of sound, and the immense dimensionality of smell. There would be some truly amazing symphonic odours to be painted.

Merry Christmas, all!

It’s not often these days, it seems to me, that a ‘theatre of consciousness’ is proposed or defended: if the idea is mentioned, it’s more commonly to dismiss it or to distance a theory from it.  All the more credit then, to Arnold Trehub whose Retinoid theory is just that, and a bold and sweeping example, too.

A retinoid system, at its simplest, is an array of neurons which captures and retains a pattern of activity in the retina, the sensitive layer at the back of the eye which translates light into neuronal activity. The retinoid array retains the topology of the original pattern and because the neurons are autaptic, ie they re-stimulate themselves, that pattern can be retained for a while. Naturally we need more than one such array to do anything much, and in fact the proposition is that a series of them act together to form a model of three-dimensional space. That makes it sound a simple matter, but of course it isn’t. Trehub proposes a series of mechanisms by which raw activity in the retina can be translated into a stable, three-dimensional model, making allowance, for example, for the way our foveas (the small central parts of the retinas that actually do most of the important work – our vision is actually only sharp in a tiny central area of the visual field) sweep restlessly but selectively across the scene and so on.

Those proposals look ingenious and plausible. I wonder a bit about what the firing of a neuron in the retinoid model of space actually represents, in the end? It isn’t simply patterns of retinal activity any more, because the original patterns have been amended and extended – so you might argue that the system is not as retinoid as all that.  It’s tempting to think that each point of activity is a bit like a voxel, a three-dimensional pixel or a single tiny brick in a model world, but I’m not sure that’s right either. It certainly goes beyond that because Trehub wants to bring in all the sensory modalities. How a spatial model works in this respect is not fully clear to me – I’m not sure how we deal with the location of smells, for example, something that seems inherently vague in reality. Perhaps smells are always registered in the retinoid as situated within the nose, although that doesn’t seem to capture the experience altogether; and what about hearing? It’s a common enough experience to hear a sound without having any clear idea of its point of origin, but it won’t quite do to say that sounds are located in the head either. I don’t know how “sounds sort of like it’s coming from over there” is represented in a spacial retinoid model. If we’re going on to deal with the whole world of mental phenomena, we’re clearly going to run into more problems over location – where are my meditations, my emotions, my intimations of immortality, my poignant apostrophisation of the snows of yesteryear?

Another key element in the system is a self-locus retinoid whose job is essentially to record the presumed location of the self in experienced space (and also, if I’ve understood correctly, imagined space, because we can use other retinoid structures to model non-existent spaces, or represent to ourselves our moving through locations we don’t actually occupy). This provides the basis for our sense of self, but importantly there’s much more to it than that.

Trehub suggests that the brain also provides a semantic token system, so that when we see a dog, somewhere in our brain a set of neurons that make up the ‘dog’ token start firing. We also have a token of the self-locus (roughly speaking this amounts to a token of ourselves or something like the idea of ‘me’), which Trehub designates I!  This gives us our sense of identity and pulls together all our tokens and perceptions. It also has an interesting role in the management of our beliefs. In Trehub’s view our beliefs are encoded by tokens in a semantic network as explicit propositions: whether we consider these propositions true or false is determined by a linkage with a special token which indicates the truth value, while a similar linkage to I! determines whether these beliefs belong to us. I presume a linkage to the ‘Fred’ token makes them, in our view, Fred’s beliefs, providing the basis of a ‘theory of mind’.

We now have in place the essentials for the theatre of consciousness: a retinoid-supported model of egocentric space (Trehub calls it egocentric, though it seems to me the self is always just to the side of it looking in), and a prime actor endowed with beliefs and perceptions. Trehub denies that we need an homuncular audience,  a ‘little man in our head’.  He casts us as actors on our own stage; if there is an audience it’s the unconscious parts of the mind. He accepts that the theatre is in a sense illusory – the representations are not the reality they stand in for – but he wishes to keep the baby even at the price of retaining that much bathwater.

So what can we say about all this? As a theory of consciousness it’s dominated to an unusual degree by vision and space. This fits Trehub’s view of consciousness: he regards the most basic form as a simple sense of presence in a space, with more complex levels involving an awareness of self and then of everything else. I’m not sure a spatially-based conception fits my idea of consciousness so well. When I examine my own mind I find many of the most salient thoughts and feelings have no location; it’s not that their location is vague or unknown, space just doesn’t come into it. Trehub suggests that when we think of a dog, we’re liable to have an image of a dog in our mind: while we can have one, it doesn’t seem an essential part of the process to me. If I’m thinking of an arbitrary dog, I don’t call up an image, let alone one situated in an imaginary space: if you ask me what colour or breed my arbitrary dog is, I have to make something up in order to answer. (In fact the position is complicated because reflection suggests there are actually at least half-a dozen different ways of thinking about an arbitrary dog: some feature images, some don’t.)

Second, the theory centres on a model of space, but I’m not sure how much having a model does for us. Putting it radically, if you can work out what you’re going to do with your model, why not do that to reality instead and throw the model away? Now of course, models are useful for working on counterfactuals; predicting outcomes, testing contingencies and plans, and so on, but here we’re mainly talking about perception. If we stick to pure perception, doesn’t it seem that the model merely introduces another stage where errors might creep in, a stage which apparently insulates us from reality to the point that our perceptions are actually in some sense illusions?  Trehub might respond that the model has evolved for its value in dealing with predictions and planning, but also provides current perception; maybe, but there’s another problem there. The idea that my current perception of the world and my plans about next week are essentially running on the same system is not intuitively appealing – they feel very different.

The inevitable fear with a model-based system is that the real work is being deferred to an implied homunculus; that the model is, in effect, there for a ‘man in our head’ to look at. Trehub of course denies this, but the suspicion is reinforced in this case by the way the model preserves the topology of the retinal image: isn’t it a little odd that, as it were, the process of perceiving a shape should itself have the same shape?

Trehub has a robust response available, however; the evidence shows clearly that the brain does in fact produce models of perceived objects, filling in the missing bits, resolving ambiguities and making inferences. Many optical illusions arise from the fact that the pre-conscious parts of our visual system don’t tell us which bits of the world they’ve hypothesised, but present the whole thing as truly and unambiguously out there. Perception is not, after all,  just a simple input procedure but a complex combination of top-down and bottom-up processes in which models can have an essential role. And while I don’t think the retinoid structure specifically has been confirmed by research, so far as my limited grasp of the neurology goes it seems to be fully consistent with the way things seem to work.  Although it may still seem surprising it’s undeniably the case, for example, that the visual pathways of the brain preserve retinal topology to a remarkable degree. So as a theory of perception at least, the retinoid system is not easily dismissed. As a model of general consciousness, I’m not so sure. Containing a model of x is not, after all, the same thing as being aware of x. We need more.

What about the self, then? It’s natural that given Trehub’s spatial perspective he should focus on defining the location of the self, but that only seems to be a small, almost incidental part of our sense of self.  Personally, I’m inclined to put the thoughts first, and then identify myself as their origin; I identify myself not by location but by a kind of backward extrapolation to the abstract-seeming origin of my mental activity. This has nothing to do with physical space.  Of course Trehub’s system has more to it than mere location, in the special tokens used to signify belonging to me and truth. But this part of the theory seems especially problematic.  Why should simply flagging a spatial position and some propositions as mine endow a set of neurons with a sense of selfhood, any more than flagging them as Fred’s?  I can easily imagine that location and the same set of propositions being someone else’s, or no-one’s. I think Trehub means that linking up the tokens in this way causes me to view that location as mine and those propositions as my beliefs, but notice that in saying that I’m smuggling in a self who has views about things and a capacity for ownership;  I’ve inadvertently and unconsciously brought in that wretched homunculus after all.  For that matter, why would flagging a proposition as a belief turn it into one? I can flag up propositions in various ways on a piece of paper without making them come to intentional life. To believe something you have to mean it, and unfortunately no-one really knows what ‘meaning it’ means – that’s one of the things to be explained by a full-blown theory of consciousness.

Moreover, the system of tokens and beliefs encoded in explicit propositions seems fatally vulnerable to the wider form of the frame problem. We actually have an infinite number of background beliefs (Julius Caesar never wore a top hat) which we’ve never stated explicitly but which we draw on readily, instantly, without having to do any thinking, when they become relevant (This play is supposed to be in authentic costume!): but even if we had a finite set of propositions to deal with the task of updating them and drawing inferences from them rapidly becomes impossible through a kind of combinatorial explosion. (If this is unfamiliar stuff, I recommend Dennett’s seminal cognitive wheels paper.) It just doesn’t seem likely nowadays that logical processing of explicit propositions is really what underlies mental activity.

Some important reservations then, but it’s important not to criticise Trehub’s approach for failing to be a panacea or providing all the answers on consciousness – that’s not really what we’re being offered.  If we take consciousness to mean awareness, the retinoid system offers some elegant and plausible mechanisms. It might yet be that the theatre deserves another visit.

The analogy with a digital computer has energised and strongly influenced our thinking about the human mind for at least sixty years, beginning with Turing’s seminal paper of 1950, ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’, and gaining in influence as computers became first real, and then ubiquitous. Whether or not you like the analogy, I think you’d have to concede that it has often set the terms of the discussion over recent decades. Yet we’ve never got it quite clear, and in some respects we’ve almost always got it wrong.

In particular, I’d like to suggest: consciousness is an output, not processing.

At first sight it might seem that consciousness can’t be an output, on the simple grounds that it isn’t, well, put out. Our consciousness is internal, it goes on in our heads – how could that be an output? I don’t, of course, mean it’s an output in that literal sense of being physically emitted: rather, I mean it’s the final product of a process, in this case a mental process. It may often be retained in our heads, but in some sense it’s the end of the line, the result.

It may be worth noting in passing that consciousness is pretty strongly linked with outputs in the simpler sense, though: so much so that the Turing test is based entirely on the ability of the testee to output strings of characters which gain the approval of the judges. Quality of output is taken to be the best possible sign of the presence of consciousness.

Wait a minute, you may say, consciousness isn’t a final output, it’s surely part of the process: what goes on in our conscious mind feeds back into our further thoughts and our behaviour. That’s the whole point of it, surely; to allow more complex and detached forms of processing to take place so that our true outputs in behaviour will eventually be better planned and targeted?

It’s true that the contents of consciousness may feed back into our mental processes, and that must be at least partly why it exists (its role in forming genuine verbal outputs is probably significant too) – I’m not suggesting consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon, like, as they say, the whistle on a train. Items from consciousness may be inputs as well as outputs. To take an unarguable example, I’ve never managed to remember how many days there are in each month: but I have managed to remember that little rhyme which contains the information. So if I need to know how many days there are in August, I recall the rhyme and repeat it to myself: in this case the contents of my consciousness are helpfully fed back into my mind. Apart from clunky manoeuvres of this kind, though, I think careful introspection suggests consciousness does not feed directly back into the underlying mental processes all that often. If we want to make a decision we may hold the alternatives in mind and present them to ourselves in sequence, but what we’re waiting for is a feeling or a salient piece of reasoning to pop into our minds from some lower, essentially inscrutable process: we’re not normally putting our own thoughts on the subject together by hand.  I think Fodor once said he had no conscious access to the mental processes which produced his views on any philosophical issue: if he inspected the contents of his mind while cogitating about a particular problem all he came up with were sub-articulate thoughts approximately like “Come on, Jerry!”  I feel much the same.

With apologies if I’m repeating things I’ve said before, I think it may help if I mention some of the confusions that I think arise from not recognising the output nature of consciousness. A striking example is Dennett’s odd view that consciousness might involve a serial computer simulated on a parallel machine. We know, of course, that when people speak of the brain being ‘massively parallel’ they usually mean that many different functional areas are promiscuously interconnected, something radically different from massively parallel computing in the original sense of a carefully managed set of isolated processes; but Dennett seems to be motivated by an additional misunderstanding in which it is assumed that only a serial process can give rise to a coherent serial consciousness. Not at all: the outputs from parallel and serial processing are identical (they’d better be): it’s just that the parallel approach sometimes gets there quicker.

It’s a little unfair to single out Dennett: the same assumption that properties of the underlying process must also be properties of the output consciousness can be discerned elsewhere: it’s just that Dennett is clearer than most. Another striking example might be Libet’s notorious finding that consciousness of a decision arrives some time after the decision itself – but of course it does! The decision is an event in processes of which consciousness is the output.

It’s hard to see consciousness as an output, partly because it can also be an  input, but also because we identify ourselves with our thoughts. We want to believe that we ourselves enjoy agency, that we have causal effects, and so we’re inclined to believe that our thoughts are what does the trick – although we know quite well that when we move our arm it’s not thinking about it that makes it happen. This supposed identity of thoughts and self (after all, it’s because I think, that I am, isn’t it?) is so strong that some, failing to find in their thoughts anything but fleeting bundles of momentary impressions , have concluded there is no self after all. I think that level of scepticism is unwarranted: it’s just that our selves remain inscrutably shadowed to direct conscious observation. “Know thyself”, said the inscription on the temple of the Delphic oracle – alas, ultimately we can’t.

The New Scientist suggests that zoned-out rats may give us a clue to consciousness.

It’s all to do with the Default Mode Network, or DMN. You might think that when we stop concentrating on a particular task and sit back for a few quiet minutes the level of activity in our brains would fall, but it turns out this isn’t really so: instead, more or less the same level of activity appears to continue, but it switches to a different set of areas – in particular, a linked set of areas in the cortex and elsewhere. This is the DMN, but what is it doing?

A completely honest answer, I think, would be that we don’t exactly know except that it’s something other than concentrating on a task.  In human subjects the DMN seems to be associated with daydreaming, but also with other detached modes of thought.  Why would this help explain consciousness? It seems that in patients with locked-in syndrome, where consciousness is fully retained but the patient is unable to move, the DMN is functioning normally, whereas in persistent vegetative syndrome, where consciousness is absent, it is disrupted.

I can think of a further reason to think that this might shed light on consciousness. It’s not much of a stretch to see DMN activity as being the kind of thinking that isn’t directly related to inputs and outputs. When we’re working on a task those are crucial, but one plausible account of the role of consciousness is exactly that it lets us escape from giving instant responses to our surroundings and lets us develop longer-term plans, deeper understanding, and more complex behaviour. If the DMN represents useful mental activity detached from inputs and outputs it is exactly the thing whose existence the behaviourists denied, which is pretty much the same as one conception of consciousness.

The New Scientist and others speak of the DMN as associated with introspection, but I can’t see the evidence for that. To be daydreaming or thinking in general terms about stuff that is or might be going on is not introspection. I think there’s some confusion going on here between thinking internally and thinking about what’s going on internally: and perhaps a further suggestion that introspection= self-awareness = consciousness: those are tenable but debatable equations which don’t seem to be vindicated or disproved by the mere existence of the DMN. So perhaps the excitement is premature.

The rats are not that reassuring either. The New Scientist reports that analogues of the human DMN have been found in monkeys, and now even in rats. That’s interesting, but unless we rate the consciousness of rats unusually highly it seems to show that the DMN  cannot explain any uniquely human level of consciousness. Fair enough: I don’t disdain rat consciousness altogether: but it’s worse than that because, as I understand it, the evidence currently suggests that younger human children don’t have an identifiable DMN. It would be somewhat weird to attribute to rats a level of reflective consciousness which is absent in human infants – wouldn’t it?  If more were needed to put us off, it is not quite 100% agreed that the DMN is in fact a functional entity in itself; it could yet turn out to be more like the mere absence of the TPN, the Task Positive Network which is its opposite (or complement) – the similar set of areas which appear to work together when we’re engaged in a specific task. Perhaps the level of neuronal activity in the brain stays high, not because the DMN is really processing anything, but because the brain just uses a lot of energy to tick over?

Still, if the DMN doesn’t explain what consciousness is, it’s hard to resist the view that it’s telling us something about how it works. Problems with the DMN have been put forward as possible causes of Alzheimer’s, autism, and schizophrenia (I think everything has been put forward as a possible cause of schizophrenia). The range of problems is perhaps an indication of the vagueness of the theories. There is some good evidence of a correlation between Alzheimer’s and disrupted DMN: but then the DMN includes quite a siginficant sampling of some important areas of the brain, so that may not mean all that much. It could be that when consciousness is disrupted the DMN tends naturally to get disrupted too, without that implying that the DMN actually runs or constitutes even the less-focused forms of consciousness.

At the end of the day what we’re left with is that our brains – and even rat brains – don’t use the same circuits for task-related and non-task related activity, but go through a fairly large-scale switch of resources.  Even if we’re idly daydreaming about driving into town already, it seems we bring in a different set of neurons to do it with. There has to be some good reason for this, but what…?

The latest issue of the JCS is all about pain.  Pain has always been tough to deal with: it’s subjective, not a thing out there in the world, and yet even the most hardline reductionist materialist can’t really dismiss it as an airy-fairy poetic delusion. We are all intensely concerned about pain, and the avoidance of it is among our most important moral and political projects. When you step back a bit, that seems remarkable: it’s easy to see more or less objective reasons why we should want to prevent disease, mitigate the effects of natural disasters, prevent wars and famines – harder to see why near or even at the top of the list of things we care about should be avoiding the occurrence of a particular kind of pattern of neuronal firing.

It’s hard even to say what it is. It seems to be a sensation, but a sensation of what? Of…. pain? Our other sensations give us information, about light, sound, temperature, and so on. Pain is often accompanied by feelings of pressure or heat or whatever, but it is quite distinct and separable from those impressions. In itself, the only thing pain tells us is: ‘you’re in pain’.  It seems sensible, therefore, to regard it as not a sensation in the same way as other sensations, but as being something like a kind of deferrable reflex: instead of just automatically moving our arm away from the hot pan it tells us urgently that we ought to do so. So it turns out to be something like a change in our dispositions or a change of weightings in our current projects.  That kind of account is appealing except for the single flaw of being evident nonsense.  When I’m in the dentist’s chair, I’m not feeling a change in my dispositions or anything that abstract, I’m feeling pain – that thing, that bad thing, you know what I mean, even though words fail me.

If it’s hard to describe, then, is pain actually the most undeniable of qualia? From some angles it looks like a quale, but qualia are supposed to have no causal effects on our behaviour, and that is exceptionally difficult to believe in the case of pain: if ever anything was directly linked to motivation, pain is it.  Undeniability looks more plausible: pain is pre-eminently one of the things it seems we can’t be wrong about. I might be mistaken in my belief that my hand has just been sheared off by a saw:  that ‘s a deduction about the state of the world based on the evidence of my senses; I don’t see how I could be wrong about the fact that I’m in agony because no reasoning is involved: I just am.

One of the contributors to the JCS might take issue with that, though. S. Benjamin Fink wants to present an approach to difficult issues of phenomenal experience and as his example he offers a treatment of pain which suggests it isn’t the simple unanalysable primitive we might think. In Fink’s view one of the dangers we need to guard against is the assumption that elements of experience we’ve always, as it happens, had together are necessarily a single phenomenon.  In particular, he wants to argue for the independence of pain and suffering/unpleasantness. Pain, it turns out, is not really bad after all (at least, not necessarily and in itself).

Fink offers several examples where pain and unpleasantness occur separately. An itch is unpleasant but not painful; the burning sensation produced by hot chillies is painful but not unpleasant (at least, so long as it occurs in the mouths of regular chili eaters, and not in their eyes or a neophyte’s mouth). These examples seem vulnerable to a counterargument based on mildness: itches aren’t described as pains just because they aren’t bad enough; and the same goes for spicy food in a mouth that has become accustomed to it. But Fink’s real clincher is the much more dramatic example of pain asymbolia. People with this condition still experience pain but don’t mind it. It’s not at all that they’re anaesthetised: they are aware of pain and can use it rationally to decide when some part of their body is in danger of damage, but they do so , as it were coldly, and don’t mind needles being stuck in them for experimental purposes at all. Fink quotes a woman who underwent a lobotomy to cure continual pain: many years later she reported happily that the pain was still there: “In fact, it’s still agonising. But I don’t mind.”

These people are clearly exceptional, but it’s worth noting that even in normal people the link between nociception, the triggering of pain-sensing nerve-endings, and the actual experience of pain is by no means as invariable and straightforward as philosophers used to believe back in the days when some argued that the firing of c-fibres was identical with the occurence of pain. Fink wants to draw a distinction between pain itself, a sensation, and suffering, the emotional response associated with it; it is the latter, in his view, which is the bad thing while pain itself is a mere colourless report. As a further argument he notes research which seems to show that when subjects are feeling compassion, some neural activity can be seen in areas which are normally active when the subjects themselves are feeling pain. The subjects, as it were, feel the the pain of others, though obviously without actual nociception.

So is Fink right? I think many people’s first reaction might be that unpleasantness just defines pain, so that if you’re feeling something that isn’t unpleasant, we wouldn’t want to call it pain. We might say that people with asymbolia experience nocition (not sure that’s really a word but work with me on this) but not pain. Fink would say – he does say – that we ought to listen to what people say. Usage should determine our definition, he says, we should not make our definitions normatively control our usage.  But he’s in a weak position here. If we are to pay attention to usage, then surely we should pay attention to the usage of the vast majority of people who regard pain as a unitary phenomenon, not to a small group of people with a most unusual set of experiences which might have tutored their perceptions in unreliable ways. I’m not sure it’s clear that asymbolics, in any case, insist that what they’re aware of is proper, echt pain – if they were asked, would they perhaps agree that it’s not pain in quite the ordinary sense?

I’m also not convinced that suffering, or unpleasantess, is really a well-defined entity in the way Fink requires. Unpleasantness may be a slight lapse of manners at a tea-party;  you might suffer badly on the stock exchange while happily sipping a cocktail on your sun-lounger. I’m not sure there is a distinct complex of emotional affect we can label as suffering at all. And if there is, we’re back with the sheer implausibility of saying that that’s what the bad stuff is: when I hit my thumb with a hammer it doesn’t seem like a matter of affect to me, it seems very definitely like old-fashioned simple pain.

If we’re going to take that line, though, we have to account for Fink’s admittedly persuasive examples, in particular asymbolia.  Never mind now what we call it: how is it that these people can experience something they’re willing to call pain without minding it, if it isn’t that our concept of pain needs reform?

Well, there is one other property of pain which we’ve overlooked so far.  There is one obvious kind of pain which I can perceive without being disturbed at all – yours. We may indeed feel some sympathetic twinges for the pain of others, but a key point about pain is that it’s essentially ours. It sticks to us in a way nothing else does: it’s normal in philosophy to speak of the external world, but pain, perhaps uniquely, isn’t external in that sense: it’s in here with us.  That may be why it has another property, noted by Fink, of being very difficult to ignore.

So it may be that subjects with asymbolia are not lacking emotional affect, but rather any sense of ownership. The pain they feel is external, it’s not particularly theirs: like Mrs Gradgrind they feel that

‘… there’s a pain somewhere in the room, but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.’

What do we even mean when we speak of consciousness? As we’ve noted before, there are many competing and overlapping definitions, and in addition it’s pretty clear that the phenomenon itself is complex and that the word refers, in different contexts, to a number of different things.

A few years back, Thomas Natsoulas had a determined go at clarifying the position in his paper “Concepts of Consciousness”.  For his framework he fell back on the old debating society standby of consulting the dictionary. You might ask whether this was necessarily the best way to go: lexicographers have their own priorities, after all. They typically aim to report the way a word is used; if it’s used in ways that are inconsistent or taxonomically incomplete, that isn’t a problem for them. On the other hand, the use of dictionary definitions does bring in an element of neutrality, and protects Natsoulas against any charge of skewing his definitions to support his own theoretical views: and the dictionary in question was no less a tome than the complete Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a mighty work of scholarship whose views on almost any subject are not to be lightly dismissed. Natsoulas himself says he sees merit in looking at ordinary, common-sense ideas, which can help remedy the potentially problematic lack of work by psychologists on the conceptual side.

The OED gives six senses of ‘consciousness’. The first, which we can call c1, strikes a modern reader as odd: it is knowing something together, joint or shared knowledge: con-scire as the derivation of the word suggests. There is a definite suggestion of the shared knowledge being a guilty secret, perhaps even an echo of con-spire. Although c1 is the ancient sense of the Latin root and seems to have enjoyed a brief revival in the seventeenth century it is no longer current and does not at first seem to offer us much enlightenment on the modern concept. Natsoulas, however, points out that it captures the idea of consciousness as a social, interpersonal thing. He quotes Barlow:

…consciousness is something to do with a relation between brains rather than a property of a single brain.

Barlow, it seems, went on to suggest that internal consciousness was a kind of ‘rehearsal for recounting’, which is interesting.

If we doubt that c1 is really important, I suppose we might ask ourselves what the state of mind would be of a human being who never at any stage since birth met another communicative entity. I don’t think I’d be ready to say that such a person could not be conscious, but their consciousness would surely be lacking in some important respects.

C2 follows on in a way: it is in effect knowledge shared with oneself, knowing that you know. This sounds like the HOT (Higher Order Theory) and HOP (Higher Order Process) theories which approximately say that a thought is conscious when accompanied by an awareness of that thought. It’s also reminiscent of those, like Dennett, who see the internalisation of talking to oneself as the origin of consciousness.

Natsoulas quotes Vygotsky:

 A function which initially was shared by two people and bore a character of communication between them gradually crystallised and became a means of organisation of the mental life of man himself

It almost begins to look as if the OED has a rather cogent theory of consciousness.

C3 is awareness, of or that, anything, whether obects in the world or one’s own thoughts. Natsoulas insists there must be an object for this form of consciousness: even the thought that ‘I am having no thoughts’ actually has a content, he points out. Being conscious without content is in his eyes properly reserved for c6. He notes that the OED seems to include with c3 a veridicality requirement the claim is that if a man is aware of a bush, but thinks it is a rabbit, he is not really aware of the bush. Natsoulas, rightly I think, disagrees, insisting that even false awareness is still awareness. I think we must certainly preserve the possibility of being aware of something without having to have correct knowledge of its real nature.

I’m not sure whether the indirect awareness of memory falls into this category or the next, but there seems to be an overlap because c4 is, to adopt the OED’s Locke quotation:

…the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind…

which appears to be a subset of c3. Interestingly the OED seems to think that the primary use of c3 is awareness of one’s own mental contents, while using it to mean awareness of actual objects in the world is ‘poetic’. Natsoulas concludes that in this respect Englsh has moved on a bit since the OED last looked, but you have to admire the magisterial coherence of the OED view in which consciousness begins by being shared knowledge, becomes knowledge you share with yourself, in which form it is naturally about your own internal states, but by metaphorical extension can also mean your awareness of the external world.

I say c4 seems to be a subset of c3: perhaps as a result, Natsoulas says experimenters are often bedevilled by confusion between the two, claiming that a subject’s inability to report a stimulus shows they were never aware of it (whereas the subject can be aware of the stimulus withoug being aware that they are aware).

There might seem to be some dangers in the self-reference of c4,  but Natsoulas points out that there’s no problem in well-managed higher orders. If there were a ban on higher orders, he argues, introspection could never get properly started.

c5 is not a form of consciousness but rather a set of all the occurrent and previous mental states which putatively make up the individual’s existence. This is the sense in which science fiction stories speak of your consciousness being transferred to another body, or to a machine. The OED gives us a quote from Locke:

If the same consciousness can be transferr’d from one thinking substance to another, it will be possible that two thinking substances may make  but one person…

Natsoulas is quite happy with the idea that consciousness is not to be identified with the substrate, Locke’s ‘thinking substance’, but he raises some difficulties. What set of states is adequate to constitute a specific consciousness? Must it be all of them? That seems too strong, because if I were to lose one of my memories, I should not thereby lose my identity – I forget things all the time. Perhaps it has to everything I could recall – and some forgotten or unconscious things might still be shaping my mind. Worse, I can remember experiences yet fail to have the feelng that they are really my experiences.

Some would regard this defining set of mental states as the ego, or the ‘I’, which is a way of looking at it: but attempts to use a static central ‘I’ as the thing that pulls it all together are doomed in Natsoulas’ eyes. He thinks that with appropriate care we can use c5 and take account of the vivid and persuasive sense of an inner source without having to grant its ontological reality.

c6 is approximately equivalent to ‘awake’ and the opposite of unconscious. Searle, in typical commonsensical style, once used c6 as his definition of consciousness:

‘Consciousness’ refers to those states of sentience and awareness that typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue until we go to sleep again, or fall into a coma or die or otherwise become ‘unconscious’.

Natsoulas takes this to be the kind of consciousness that has no requirement as to content: you could be conscious in this sense while thinking anything or nothing. In fact although the medical salience of the concept is clear, it seems too open-ended to be of much analytical use.  We should certainly be willing to speak of a dog being conscious (or unconscious) in this sense, and I think we’d be willing to push that usage much further – certainly to fish and quite possibly to an ant in certain circumstances. We’re not, then, speaking of anything narrowly defined: c6 means something like ‘the state when whatever mental activity normally goes on during periods of activity, is going on’.

I think it is open to debate whether this OED-based six-way definition gives us sufficient tools to tackle the probem of consciousness. It does not seem to capture Ned Block’s distinction between a- and p-consciousness, more or less the distinction between the targets of the Hard and Easy problem: yet that is one of the most-quoted and used of definitions.  I think we might also look for sharper and more useful distinctions between internal and external awareness.

Still, it is a useful exercise, and Natsoulas proceeds to do something with the results, positioning the six senses along four different axes:  intersubjectivity, objectivation, apprehension and introspection (this seems to cry out for a diagram, though I appreciate that rendering a four-dimensional space graphically intelligible is a non-trivial matter.

Natsoulas makes little of this concluding exercise, presenting it as a kind of run-through to help get things clear. But it seems obvious that what he’s offering is a potential reduction, abstracting away from the six OED definitions to define a consciousness space of four dimensions. Not the least interesting aspect of this is that it implies the conceptual possibility of unknown forms of consciousness which would be situated in unpopulated regions of the space. Suppose, for example, we have a form of consciousness with high intersubjectivity, but low objectivation, apprehension, and introspection? My imagination begins to fail me, but I think that would be a kind of diffuse but powerful general empathy. I’m surprised this aspect has not been explored.

I see that this piece on nature.com has drawn quite a bit of attention. It provides a round-up of views on the question of whether free will can survive in a post-Libet world, though it highlights more recent findings along similar lines by John-Dylan Haynes and others. The piece seems to be prompted in part by Big Questions in Free Will a project funded by the John Templeton Foundation, which  is probably best known for the Templeton Prize, a very large amount of cash which gets given to respectable scientists who are willing to say that the universe has a spiritual dimension, or at any rate that materialism is not enough. BQFW itself is offering funding for theology as well as science: “science of free will ($2.8 million); theoretical underpinnings of free will, round 1 ($165,000); and theology of free will, round 1 ($132,000)”. I suppose ‘theoretical underpinnings’, if it’s not science and not theology, must be philosophy; perhaps they called it that because they want some philosophy done but would prefer it not to be done by a philosopher. In certain lights that would be understandable. The presence of theology in the research programme may not be to everyone’s taste, although what strikes me most is that it seems to have got the raw end of the deal in funding terms. I suppose the scientists need lots of expensive kit, but on this showing it seems the theologians don’t even get such comfortable armchairs as the theorists, which is rough luck.

We have of course discussed the Haynes results and Libet, and other related pieces of research many times in the past. I couldn’t help wondering whether, having all this background, I could come up with something on the subject that might appeal to the Templeton Foundation and perhaps secure me a modest emolument? Unfortunately most of the lines one could take are pretty well-trodden already, so it’s difficult to come up with an appealing new presentation, let alone a new argument. I’m not sure I have anything new to say. So I’ve invited a couple of colleagues to see what they can do.

Free will is nonsense; I’m not helping you come up with further ‘compatibilist’ fudging if that’s what you’re after. What I can offer you is this: it’s not just that Libertarians have the wrong answer, the question doesn’t even make sense. The way the naturenews piece sets up the discussion is to ask: how can you have free will if the decision was made before you were even aware of it? The question I’m asking is: what the hell is ‘you’?

Both Libet’s original and the later experiments are cleverly designed to allow subjects to report the moment at which they became aware of the decision: but ‘they’ are thereby implicitly defined as whatever it is that is doing the reporting. We assume without question that the reporting thing is the person, and then we’re alarmed by the fact that some other entity made the decision first. But we could equally well take the view that the silent deciding entity is the person and be unsurprised that a different entity reports it later.

You will say in your typically hand-waving style, I expect, that that can’t be right because introspection or your ineffable sense of self or something tells you otherwise. You just feel like you are the thing that does the reporting. Otherwise when words come out of your mouth it wouldn’t be you talking, and gosh, that can’t be right, can it?

Well, let me ask you this. Suppose you were the decision-making entity, how would it seem to you? I submit it wouldn’t seem any way, because as that entity you don’t do seeming-to: you just do decisions. You only seem to yourself to have made the decision when it gets seemed back to you by a seeming entity – in fact, by that same reporting entity.  In short, because all reports of your mental activity come via the reporting entity, you mistake it for the source of all your mental activity. In fact all sorts of mental processes are going on all over and the impression of a unified consistent centre is a delusion. At this level, there is no fixed ‘you’ to have or lack free will. Libet’s experiments merely tell us something interesting but quite unworrying about the relationship of two current mental modules.

So libertarians ask: do we have free will? I reply that they have to show me the ‘we’ that they’re talking about before they even get to ask that question – and they can’t.

Not much of a challenge to come up with something more appealing than that! I’ve got an idea the Templeton people might like, I think: Dennettian theology.

You know, of course, Dennett’s idea of stances. When we’re looking to understand something we can take various views. If we take the physical stance, we just look at the thing’s physical properties and characteristics. Sometimes it pays to move on to the design stance: then we ask ourselves, what is this for, how does it work? This stance is productive when considering artefacts and living things, in the main. Then in some cases it’s useful to move on to the intentional stance, where we treat the thing under consideration as if it had plans and intentions and work out its likely behaviour on that basis. Obviously people and some animals are suitable for this, but we also tend to apply the same approach to various machines and natural phenomena, and that’s OK so long as we keep a grip.

But those three stances are clearly an incomplete set. We could also take up the Stance of Destiny: when we do that we look at things and ask ourselves: was this always going to happen? Is this inevitable in some cosmic sense? Was that always meant to be like that? I think you’ll agree that this stance sometimes has a certain predictive power: I knew that was going to happen, you say: it was, as it were, SoD’s Law.

Now this principle gives us by extrapolation an undeniable God – the God who is the intending, the destining entity. Does this God really exist? Well, we can take our cue from Dennett: like the core of our personhood in his eyes, it doesn’t exist as a simple physical thing you can lay your hands on: but it’s a useful predictive tool and you’d be a fool to overlook it, so in a sense it’s real enough: it’s a kind of  explanatory centre of gravity, a way of summarising the impact of millions of separate events.

So what about free will? Well of course, one thing you can say about a free decision is that it wasn’t destined. How does that come about? I suggest that the RPs Libet measured are a sign of de-destination, they are, as it were, the autopilot being switched off for a moment. Libet himself demonstrated that the impending action could be vetoed after the RP, after all. Most of the time we run on destined automatic, but we have a choice. The human brain, in short, has a unique mechanism which, by means we don’t fully understand, can take charge of destiny.

I think my destiny is to hang on to the day job for the time being.

Sometimes mistakes can be more interesting than getting it right. Last week I was thinking about Pauen’s claim, reasonable enough, that belief in qualia is ultimately based on the intuitive sense that experience and physics are two separate realms. The idea that subjective stuff, the redness of red and so on, could be nothing but certain jigs danced by elementary particles, provokes a special incredulity. What’s the famous quote that sums that up, I thought? Something about…

This phenomenal quality is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it.

That captures the incredulity quite nicely. However, it dawned on me that it was Brentano, and he didn’t say ‘phenomenal quality’, he said ‘intentional inexistence’.

So it turns out we have two incredulitites, one about qualia – subjectivity or ‘what it is like’, one about intentionality – ‘aboutness’ or meaningfulness. To me, they have a very similar feel. So what do we say about that? I can see four reasonable possibilities.

1. The resemblance is superficial: just because your mind boggles at two different things, it doesn’t mean the two things are identical.
2. The incredulity is the same because it’s not specifically attached to qualia or intentionality, it’s just characteristic of mental phenomena of all kinds.
3. The incredulity arises from intentionality, and qualia have it because they are intentional in nature.
4. The incredulity arises from qualia, and intentionality has it because it arises out of qualia.

Although 1. is a very rational line to take, I can’t help feeling there is at least a little more to it than that. I don’t detect in myself a third incredulity – I don’t feel that nothing in subjectivity could possibly account for intentionality, or vice versa: that remains to be examined. And to put it no higher, it would be nice if we could tidy things up by linking the two problems, or even perhaps reducing one to the other. One inexplicable realm is bad enough.

I suppose 2. is what Brentano himself might have said. I don’t know whether we’d now be quite so quick to bestow the mystery on all mental phenomena: it doesn’t seem so implausible now that calculation or choosing a chess move might be nothing more than a special kind of physical activity. Moreover, if the problem doesn’t come from intentionality or qualia, we seem to have a third problem distinct from either, which is unwelcome, and a slight difficulty over the relationships. It doesn’t seem much of an answer to say that qualia seem strange and non-physical because they’re mental, unless we can go on to say a lot more about the spookiness of the mental and why it attaches to subjective experience the way it does.

I suppose we could go dualist here, and say that mental things exist in a separate domain in which both qualia and meanings participate. Isn’t something like that the main reason dualists are dualists, in fact? Taking that route involves the usual problems of explaining the interaction between worlds and indeed, giving some explanation of how the second world works. If we don’t give that latter explanation we seem only to have deferred the issues.

It might be easier if we said something along the lines of the mental being essentially a different level of explanation within a monist universe. For me, that looks at least a starter so far as intentionality goes, but not for qualia. They’re not really a level of explanation – they’re not explanatory at all, quite the reverse. This brings out some interesting differences. In the case of qualia we already have a pretty full scientific account of how the senses work. We pretty much know what we’d reduce qualia to, if we’re in the market for a reduction. In a sense, the way is clear: there’s no work in the ordinary world that we need qualia to do, we just need an extra ineffable zing from somewhere, something we could arguably dispense with. For intentionality, things are much worse. There is no scientific account of meaning, we don’t really know how the brain deals with it, yet it is an essential part of our lives which can’t be dismissed as airy-fairy obscurantism.  Curiously, of course, it’s qualia which are seen as the Hard Problem, while intentionality is part of the easy one. I suppose this is because when we contemplate intentionality, it doesn’t seem intractable. We may not know how it works, but it looks like the kind of thing we could get a grip on given a couple of insights; whereas there seems no way of scaling the smooth glassy wall presented by qualia.

Here’s a thought: if we’re saying that the two issues are different facets of the same problem, we ought to be able to apply the established qualia arguments to intentionality and still make sense, shouldn’t we?  We can’t do it the other way because I don’ t think there are any arguments for the existence of intentionality – nobody denies it.

So: the zombies go quite well, at first sight, anyway: we’d say that intentionality zombies (another kind – sorry) look and behave like us, but never actually mean what they say or understand the words they read.  By some process they come out with appropriate responses, but in the same sort of sense as the original zombies, the lights are all out.

Then instead of inverted spectra, we’d have inverted meanings. This is trickier, because there’s no tidy realm of meaning equivalent to the spectrum we can use – unless we co-opt the spectrum itself and say that when you mean red, you say blue… That doesn’t seem to work. Could we say that you actually mean the negation of everything you say, but for some reason act otherwise…? Maybe not.

Alright, let’s try Mary: Intentionality Mary was brought up without ever grasping the meaning of anything, but she understands everything there is to know about cognition… That doesn’t seem to make sense.

The problem is always that qualia have no causal effects, whereas meanings and intentions absolutely do: in fact if anything the problem with them is explaining their efficacy. Noting this, we can see that actually even the zombies didn’t really work: we can believe in people who behave like us without having real experience, but it’s surely nonsensical to say that our counterparts without desires or intentions would behave the same way as us, unless we’re really only talking about some kind of quale of desire or intention.

So if qualia and intentionality are radically different in some respects, the differences might provide at least a hint that ‘both mental’ is not a good enough explanation for the two incredulities.

What about option 3? Could it be that the incredulity we’re concerned with is basically attached to intentionality, and qualia only have it because they are intentional in nature? On the face of it it seems quite reasonable to think that the redness we experience is about the rose, and that it’s the special magic aboutness that adds the extra ineffable quality. With other qualia, though, it’s not so clear. If you take happiness to be qualic, what is it about? We can of course be happy about particular things, but that’s distinct from just being happy. Moreover, there’s plenty of intentionality without qualia: an account book is suffused with intentionality. In fairness, that’s only the derived kind – accounts only mean what we make them mean – perhaps it’s only the original intentionality of our thoughts that bestows qualicity?  But with intentionality, we expect content. We believe and desire and think that x or y, with x or y being capable of expression in words: but it’s the whole point of qualia that there’s nothing like that available.

Option 4 says qualia are fundamental and intentionality springs from them. John Searle has actually put this view forward (in addition to his view that intentionality is the business of of imposing directions of fit on directions of fit). The suggestion here is that, for example, the feeling of hunger is about food in some basic, primitive sense, and that it’s on similar qualia that all our meaningfulness is built. The example has a definite appeal, and there’s something attractive about rooting intentionality in the ‘three Fs’ of survival: making it not some celestial mystery but a particular slant that arises out our nature as competitive and social biological creatures. But there are problems. We must remember that the quale of hunger has no causal effects: it’s only the functional counterpart that actually causes us to speak or seek food, so the connection between the quale and the expression of beliefs or desires is broken. We may suspect for other reasons that it’s not really the quale at work here: the sense in which hunger means food looks very like H.P.Grice’s natural meanings (those spots mean measles). We may suspect that this is really what makes the example seem to work, yet completely inanimate and non-qualic things can have this kind of meaning (those clouds mean rain), so although it is an excellent place to start looking for an analysis of intentionality, it doesn’t seem to be a matter of qualia.

Personally, I would reaffirm the view I’ve often set out before: I haven’t a clue what’s going on.