Tag Archives: phenomenal experience.

Can we talk about this?

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Can we even talk about qualia, the phenomenal parts of conscious experience? Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent, as Wittgenstein advised, not lingering to resolve the paradoxical nature of the very phrase ‘whereof we cannot speak’ – it seems to do the very thing that it specifies cannot be done. We see what he meant, perhaps.

There is certainly a difficulty of principle in talking about qualia, to do with causality. Qualia have no causal effects – if they did, they would be an observable part of the world of physics, and it is part of their essential definition that they are outside, or over and above, the mere physical account. It follows, notoriously, that whatever we say or write about qualia cannot have been caused by them. At first glance this seems to demolish the whole discussion; no-one’s expressed belief in qualia can actually be the causal result of experiencing them.

But it is possible to talk sensibly of things that did not cause the talk. It takes a weirdly contorted argument to defend the idea that when I refer to Julius Caesar, the old Roman himself caused me to do it, but perhaps we can lash something together. It’s worse that I can talk of Nero and Zero the rollicking Romans, who existed only as heroes of a cartoon strip. If you’re still willing to grant them some causal role in physics, perhaps somehow through the material existence of the paper and ink in which they were realised, remember that I can even talk intelligibly about Baesar, who has no existence whatever, and in all likelihood was never spoken of before. He really cannot have caused me to write that last sentence.

So I would say that the absence of causal effects does not provide a knock-down reason why I cannot speak of qualia, though the fact that the other cases without causality involve entities that are fictions or delusions cannot be comfortable if I  want my qualia to be real. It seems as if there must be a sort of pre-established harmony effect going on, so that my words remain truthful on the matter even though they are not causally determined by it, which feels, as technical metaphysicians say, kind of weird.

But apart from the difficulty of principle, it seems awfully difficult to speak of qualia in practice too. How can we verbally pick out a particular quale? With real things, we choose one or more of their most salient attributes; with imaginary entities, we just specify similar properties. But qualia have no individual attributes of their own; the only way to pick them out is by mentioning the objective sensation they accompany. So, we typically get a quale of red, or a red quale. This is pretty unsatisfactory, because it means many interesting questions are excluded from consideration. We cannot really ask whether every sensation has a quale; we cannot ask how many qualia there are, because our way of referring to them just has baked into it the assumption that they exactly match up with the objective sensations. If green, as a matter of fact, was the only colour with no qualia, the fact would be occluded from us by the only language we can use to discuss the matter.

All of this might seem enough to justify our concluding that talk of qualia adds nothing to talk of objective sensations, so that even if, by some uncovenanted harmony, our talk of qualia proves to be metaphysically true, it has absolutely no informative value, and might as well be abandoned. What remains is the unconquerable conviction that there is something there, or to use the little phrase on which so much metaphysical weight has been rested, ‘there is something it is like’ to, for example, see red.

Can this phrase be explicated into something clearer? The first problem is the ‘it’; are we actually speaking of anything there? To me it seems that the ‘it’ in ‘something it is like’ is as merely grammatical as the ‘it’ in ‘it is raining’, which does not cause us to entertain the idea that there is something ineffable and non-physical about precipitation. The second problem is the ‘like’ which suggests we are making a comparison while leaving it quite unclear what is being compared. Is seeing red meant to be like seeing another colour? Is seeing red phenomenally meant to be like seeing red objectively (whatever that would mean)? In fact we seem obliged to conclude that no actual comparison is being made. Suppose we assert of hang-gliding or our first taste of champagne ‘there’s nothing like it!’  Are we managing here to assert after all that these experiences are unaccompanied by qualia? Surely not. If anything we’re saying that the relevant qualia are exceptionally powerful.

In the end, doing my honest best, I think ‘there is something it is like to see red’ simply asserts that the experience of seeing red really exists. I’m fine with that, and there are genuine mysteries attached; but there still seems to be nothing more we can say about qualia as a result. Haven’t we all been a bit too accepting for a bit too long of ‘there Is something it is like’?

Why would you even think that?

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More support for the illusionist perspective in a paper from Daniel Shabasson. He agrees with Keith Frankish that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, and (taking the metaproblematic road) offers a theory as to why so many people – the great majority, I think – find it undeniably real in spite of the problems it raises.

Shabasson’s theory rests on three principles:

  • impenetrability,
  • the infallibility illusion, and
  • the justification illusion.

Impenetrability says that we have no conscious access to the processes that produce our judgements about sensory experience. We know as a matter of optical/neurological science that our perception of colour rests on some very complex processing of the data detected by our eyes. Patches of paint or groups of pixels emitting exactly the same wavelengths of light may be perceived as quite different colours when our brains take account of the visual context, for example, but the resulting colours are just present to consciousness as facts. We have no awareness of the complex adjustments that have been made.

This point is particularly evident in the case of colour vision, where the processing done by the brain is elaborate and sometimes counter-intuitive. It’s less clear that we’re missing out on much in the way of subtle interpretive processing when we detect a poke in the eye. Generally though, I think the claim  is pretty uncontroversial, and in fact our limited access to what’s really going on has been an important part of other theories such as Scott Bakker’s Blind Brain.

Infallibilty says that we are prone to assume we cannot be wrong about certain aspects of our experience. Obviously most perceptions could be mistaken, but others, more direct, seem invulnerable to error. I may be mistaken in my belief that there is a piano on my foot, or about the fact that my toe is crushed; but surely I can’t be wrong about the fact that I am feeling pain? Although this idea has been robustly challenged, it has a strong intuitive appeal, perhaps partly out of a feeling that while we can be wrong about external stuff, mental entities are perceived directly, already present in the mind, and therefore immune from the errors that creep in during delivery of external information.

Justification is a little more subtle; the claim is that for any judgement we make, we believe there is some justification. This is not the stronger claim that there is good or adequate justification, just the view that we suppose ourselves to have some reason for thinking whatever we think.

Is that true? What if I fix my thoughts on the fourth nearest star to Earth which has only one planet orbiting it, and judge that the planet in question is smaller than Earth? If I knew more about astronomy I might have reasons for this judgement, but as matters stand, though I feel confident that the planet exists, I have no reasons for any beliefs about its size relative to Earth.

In such a case, I believe Shabasson would either point to probable justifications I have overlooked (perhaps I am making a mistaken but not irrational assumption about a correlation between size and number of planets) or more likely, simply deny that I have truly made the relevant judgement at all. I might assert that I really believe the planet is small, but I’m really only playing some hypothetical game. I think in fact, Shabasson can have what he needs for the sake of argument here pretty much by specification.

Given the three principles, various things follow. When we judge ourselves to be having a ‘reddish’ experience, we must be right, and there must be something in our mind that justifies the judgement. That thing is a quale, which must therefore exist. This follows so directly, without requiring effortful reasoning, it seems to us that we apprehend the quale directly. Furthermore, the quale must seem like something, or to put it more fully, there must be something it seems like: if there were nothing a quale were like, there would be no apparent difference between a red and a green quale; but it is of the essence that there are such differences.

What is it like? We can’t say, because in fact it doesn’t exist. Though there really are justificatory properties for our judgements about perceptions, they are not phenomenal ones; but impenetrability means we remain unaware of them. Hence the apparent ineffability of qualia. Impenetrability also gives rise to an impression that qualia are intrinsic; briefly it means that the reddish experience arrives with no other information, and in particular nothing about its relation to other things; it seems it just is. Completing the trio, qualia seem subjective because given ineffability and intrinsicality, they are only differentiable through introspection, and introspection naturally limits access to a particular single subject.

I don’t think Shabasson has the whole answer (I think, in particular, that the apparent existence of qualia has to do with the particular reality of actual experience, a quality obviously not conveyed by any theoretical account), but I think there are probably several factors that account for our belief in phenomenal experience, and he gives a very clear account of some significant ones. The use of the principle of justification seems especially interesting to me; I wonder if it might help illuminate some other quirks of human psychology.

Time travel consciousness

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In What’s Next? Time Travel and Phenomenal Continuity Giuliano Torrengo and Valerio Buonomo argue that our personal identity is about continuity of phenomenal experience, not such psychological matters as memory (championed by John Locke). They refer to this phenomenal continuity as the ‘stream of consciousness’. I’m not sure that William James, who I believe originated the phrase, would have seen the stream of consciousness as being distinct from the series of psychological states in our minds, but it is a handy label.

To support their case, Torrengo and Buonomo have a couple of thought experiments. The first one involves a couple of imaginary machines. One machine transfers the ‘stream of consciousness’ from one person to another while leaving the psychology (memories, beliefs, intentions) behind, the other does the reverse, moving psychology but not phenomenology. Torrengo and Buonomo argue that having your opinions, beliefs and intentions changed, while the stream of consciousness remained intact would be akin to a thorough brainwashing. Your politics might suddenly change, but you would still be the same person. Contrariwise, if your continuity of experience moved over to a different body, it would feel as if you had gone with it.

That is plausible enough, but there are undoubtedly people would refuse to accept it because they would deny that this separation of phenom and psych is possible, or crucially, even conceivable. This might be because they think the two are essentially identical, or because they think phenomenal experience arises directly out of psychology. Some would probably deny that phenomenal experience in this sense even exists.

There is a bit of scope for clarification about what variety of phenomenal experience Torrengo and Buonomo have in mind. At one point they speak of it as including thought, which sounds sort of psychological to me. By invoking machines, their thought experiment shows that their stream of consciousness is technologically tractable, not the kind of slippery qualic experience which lies outside the realm of physics.

Still, thought experiments don’t claim to be proofs; they appeal to intuition and introspection, and with some residual reservations, Torrengo and Buonomo seem to have one that works on that level. They consider three objections. The first complains that we don’t know how rich the stream of consciousness must be in order to be the bearer of identity. Perhaps if it becomes attentuated too much it will cease to work? This business of a minimum richness seems to emerge out of the blue and in fact Torrengo and Buonomo dismiss it as a point which affects all ‘mentalist’ theories. The second objection is a clever one; it says we can only identify a stream of consciousness in relation to a person in the first place, so using it as a criterion of personal identity begs the question. Torrengo and Buonomo essentially deny that there needs to be an experiencing subject over and above the stream of consciousness. The third challenge arises from gaps; if identity depends on continuity, then what happens when we fall asleep and experience ceases? Do we acquire a new identity? Here it seems Torrengo and Buonomo fall back on a defence used by others; that strictly speaking it is the continuity of capacity for a given stream of consciousness that matters. I think a determined opponent might press further attacks on that.

Perhaps, though, the more challenging and interesting thought experiment is the second, involving time travel. Torrengo is the founder of the Centre for Philosophy of Time in Milan, and has a substantial body of work on the the experience of time and related matters, so this is his home turf in a sense. The thought experiment is quite simple; Lally invents a time machine and uses it to spend a day in sixties London. There are two ways of ordering her experience. One is the way she would see it; her earlier life, the time trip, her later life. The other is according to ‘objective’ time; she appears in old London Town and then vanishes; much later lives her early life, then is absent for a short while and finally lives her later life. These can’t both be right, suggest Torrengo and Buonomo, and so it must surely be that her experience goes off on the former course while her psychology goes the other way.

This doesn’t make much sense to me, so perhaps I have misunderstood. Certainly there are two time lines, but Lally surely follows one and remains whole? It isn’t the case that when she is in sixties London she lacks intentions or beliefs, having somehow left those behind. Torrengo and Buonomo almost seem to think that is the case; they say it is possible to imagine her in sixties London not remembering who she is. Who knows, perhaps time machines do work like that, but if so we’re running into one of the weaknesses of thought experiments methodologically; if you assume something impossible like time travel to begin with, it’s hard to have strong intuitions about what follows.

At the end of the day I’m left with a sceptical feeling not about Torrengo and Buonomo‘s ideas in particular but about the whole enterprise of trying to reduce or analyse the concept of personal identity. It is, after all, a particular case of identity and wouldn’t identity be a good candidate for being one of those ‘primitive’ ideas that we just have to start with? I don’t know; or perhaps I should just say there is a person who doesn’t know, whose identity I leave unprobed.

Architectonics and the Hard Problem

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twinsCan we solve the Hard Problem with scanners? This article by Brit Brogaard and Dimitria E. Gatzia argues that recent advances in neuroimaging techniques, combined with the architectonic approach advocated by Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, open the way to real advances.

But surely it’s impossible for physical techniques to shed any light on the Hard Problem? The whole point is that it is over and above any account which could be given by physics. In the Zombie Twin though experiment I have a physically identical twin who has no subjective experience. His brain handles information just the way mine does, but when he registers the colour red, it’s just data; he doesn’t experience real redness. If you think that is conceivable, then you believe in qualia, the subjective extra part of experience. But how could qualia be explained by neuroimaging; my zombie twin’s scans are exactly the same as mine, yet he has no qualia at all?

This, I think, is where the architectonics come in. The foundational axiom of the approach, as I understand it, is that the functional structure of phenomenal experience corresponds to dynamic structure within brain activity; the operational architectonics provide the bridge . (I call it an axiom, but I think the Fingelkurts twins would say that empirical research already provides support for a nested hierarchical structure which bridges the explanatory gap. They seem to take the view that operational architectonics uses a structured electrical field, which on the one hand links their view with the theories of Johnjoe McFadden and Sue Pockett, while on the other making me wonder whether advances in neuroimaging are relevant if the exciting stuff is happening outside the neurons.) It follows that investigating dynamic activity structures in the brain can tell us about the structure of phenomenal, subjective experience. That seems reasonable. After all, we might argue, qualia may be mysterious, but we know they are related to physical events; the experience of redness goes with the existence of red things in the physical world (with due allowance for complications). Why can’t we assume that subjective experience also goes with certain structured kinds of brain activity?

Two points must be made immediately. The first is that the hunt for Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCCs) is hardly new. The advocates of architectonics, however, say that approaches along these lines fail because correlation is simply too weak a connection. Noticing that experience x and activation in region y correlate doesn’t really take us anywhere. They aim for something much harder-edged and more specific, with structured features of brain activity matched directly back to structures in an analysis of phenomenal experience (some of the papers use the framework of Revonsuo, though architectonics in general is not committed to any specific approach).

The second point is that this is not a sceptical or reductive project. I think many sceptics about qualia would be more than happy with the idea of exploring subjective experience in relation to brain structure; but someone like Dan Dennett would look to the brain structures to fully explain all the features of experience; to explain them away, in fact, so that it was clear that brain activity was in the end all we were dealing with and we could stop talking about ‘nonsensical’ qualia altogether.

By contrast the architectonic approach allows philosophers to retain the ultimate mystery; it just seeks to push the boundaries of science a bit further out into the territory of subjective experience. Perhaps Paul Churchland’s interesting paper about chimerical colours which we discussed a while ago provides a comparable case if not strictly an example.

Churchland points out that we can find the colours we experience mapped out in the neuronal structures of the brain; but interestingly the colour space defined in the brain is slightly more comprehensive than the one we actually encounter in real life. Our brains have reserved spaces for colours that do not exist, as it were. However, using a technique he describes we can experience these ‘chimerical’ colours, such as ‘dark yellow’ in the form of an afterglow. So here you experience for the first time a dark yellow quale, as predicted and delivered by neurology. Churchland would argue this shows rather convincingly that position in your brain’s colour space is essentially all there is to the subjective experience of colour. I think a follower of architectonics would commend the research for elucidating structural features of experience but hold that there was still a residual mystery about what dark yellow qualia really are in themselves, one that can only be addressed by philosophy.

It all seems like a clever and promising take on the subject to me; I do have two reservations. The first is a pessimistic doubt about whether it will ever really be possible to deliver much. The sort of finding reported by Churchland is the exception more than the rule. Vision and hearing offer some unusual scope because they both depend on wave media which impose certain interesting structural qualities; the orderly spectrum and musical scale. Imaginatively I find it hard to think of other aspects of phenomenal experience that seem to be good candidates for structural analysis. I could be radically wrong about this and I hope I am.

The other thing is, I still find it a bit hard to get past my zombie twin; if phenomenal experience matches up with the structure of brain activity perfectly, how come he is without qualia? The sceptics and the qualophiles both have pretty clear answers; either there just are no qualia anyway or they are outside the scope of physics. Now if we take the architectonic view, we could argue that just as the presence of red objects is not sufficient for there to be red qualia, so perhaps the existence of the right brain patterns isn’t sufficient either; though the red objects and the relevant brain activity do a lot to explain the experience. But if the right brain activity isn’t sufficient, what’s the missing ingredient? It feels (I put it no higher) as if there ought to be an explanation; but perhaps that’s just where we leave the job for the philosophers?

The Wonder of Consciousness

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langsamHarold Langsam’s new book is a bold attempt to put philosophy of mind back on track. For too long, he declares, we have been distracted by the challenge from reductive physicalism. Its dominance means that those who disagree have spent all their time making arguments against it, instead of developing and exploring their own theories of mind. The solution is that, to a degree, we should ignore the physicalist case and simply go our own way. Of course, as he notes, setting out a rich and attractive non-reductionist theory will incidentally strengthen the case against physicalism. I can sympathise with all that, though I suspect the scarcity of non-reductive theorising also stems in part from its sheer difficulty; it’s much easier to find flaws in the reductionist agenda than to develop something positive of your own.

So Langsam has implicitly promised us a feast of original insights; what he certainly gives us is a bold sweep of old-fashioned philosophy. It’s going to be a priori all the way, he makes clear; philosophy is about the things we can work out just by thinking. In fact a key concept for Langsam is intelligibility; by that, he means knowable a priori. It’s a usage far divorced from the normal meaning; in Langsam’s sense most of the world (and all books) would be unintelligible.

The first target is phenomenal experience; here Langsam is content to use the standard terminology although for him phenomenal properties belong to the subject, not the experience. He speaks approvingly of Nagel’s much-quoted formulation ‘there is something it is like’ to have phenomenal experience, although I take it that in Langsam’s view the ‘it’ that something is like is the person having the experience, which I don’t think was what Nagel had in mind. Interestingly enough, this unusual feature of Langsam’s theory does not seem to matter as much as we might have expected. For Langsam, phenomenal properties are acquired by entry into consciousness, which is fine as far as it goes, but seems more like a re-description than an explanation.

Langsam believes, as one would expect, that phenomenal experience has an inexpressible intrinsic nature. While simple physical sensations have structural properties, in particular, phenomenal experience does not. This does not seem to bother him much, though many would regard it as the central mystery. He thinks, however, that the sensory part of an experience – the unproblematic physical registration of something – and the phenomenal part are intelligibly linked. In fact, the properties of the sensory experience determine those of the phenomenal experience.  In sensory terms, we can see that red is more similar to orange than to blue, and for Langsam it follows that the phenomenal experience of red similarly has an intelligible similarity to the phenomenal experience of orange. In fact, the sensory properties explain the phenomenal ones.

This seems problematic. If the linkage is that close, then we can in fact describe phenomenal experience quite well; it’s intelligibly like sensory experience. Mary the colour scientist, who has never seen colours, actually will not learn anything new when she sees red: she will just confirm that the phenomenal experience is intelligibly like the sensory experience she already understood perfectly. In fact because the resemblance is intelligible – knowable a priori – she could work out what it was like before seeing red at all. To that Langsam might perhaps reply that by ‘a priori’ he means not just pure reasoning but introspection, a kind of internal empiricism.

It still leaves me with the feeling that Langsam has opened up a large avenue for naturalisation of phenomenal experience, or even suggested that it is in effect naturalised already. He says that the relationship between the phenomenal and the sensory is like the relation between part and whole; awfully tempting, then, to conclude that his version of phenomenal experience is merely an aspect of sensory experience, and that he is much more of a sceptic about phenomenality than he realises.

This feeling is reinforced when we move on to the causal aspects. Langsam wants phenomenal experience to have a role in making sensory perceptions available to attention, through entering consciousness. Surely this is making all the wrong people, from Langsam’s point of view, nod their heads: it sounds worryingly functionalist. Langsam wants there to be two kinds of causation: ‘brute causation’, the ordinary kind we all believe in, and intelligible causation, where we can just see the causal relationship. I enjoyed Langsam taking a pop at Hume, who of course denied there was any such thing; he suggests that Hume’s case is incomplete, and actually misses the most important bits. In Langsam’s view, as I read it, we just see inferences, perceiving intelligible relationships.

The desire to have phenomenal experience play this role seems to me to carry Langsam too far in another respect: he also claims that simply believing that p has a phenomenal aspect. I take it he wishes this to be the case so that this belief can also be brought to conscious attention by its phenomenal properties, but look; it just isn’t true. ‘Believing that p’ has no phenomenal properties whatever; there is nothing it is like to believe that p, in the way that there is something it is like to see a red flower. The fact that Langsam can believe otherwise reinforces the sense that he isn’t such a believer in full-blooded phenomenality as he supposes.

We can’t accuse him of lacking boldness, though. In the second part of the book he goes on to consider appropriateness and rationality; beliefs can be appropriate and rational, so why not desires? At this point we’re still apparently engaged on an enquiry into philosophy of mind, but in fact we’ve also started doing ethics. In fact I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that Langsam is after Kant’s categorical imperative. Our desires can stem intelligibly from such sensations as pain and pleasure, and our attitudes can be rational in relation to the achievement of desires. But can there be globally rational desires – ones that are rational whatever we may otherwise want?

Langsam’s view is that we perceive value in things indirectly through our feelings and when our desires are for good things they are globally rational.  If we started out with Kant, we seem to have ended up with a conclusion more congenial to G.E,Moore. I admire the boldness of these moves, and Langsam fleshes out his theory extensively along the way – which may be the real point as far as he’s concerned. However, there are obvious problems about rooting global rationality in something as subjective and variable as feelings, and without some general theory of value Langsam’s system is bound to suffer a certain one-leggedness.

I do admire the overall boldness and ambition of Langsam’s account, and it is set out carefully and clearly, though not in a way that would be very accessible to the general reader. For me his views are ultimately flawed, but give me a flawed grand theory over a flawless elucidation of an insignificant corner every time.