Tag Archives: qualia

Whereof we cannot speak

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bokkenThe latest JCS features a piece by Christopher Curtis Sensei about the experience of achieving mastery in Aikido. It seems he spent fifteen years cutting bokken (an exercise with wooden swords, don’t ask me), becoming very proficient technically but never satisfying the old Sensei. Finally he despaired and stopped trying; at which point, of course, he made the required breakthrough. He needed to stop thinking about it. You do feel that his teacher could perhaps have saved him a few years if he had just said so explicitly – but of course you cannot achieve the state of not thinking about something directly and deliberately. Intending to stop thinking about a pink hippo involves thinking about a pink hippo; you have to do something else altogether.

This unreflective state of mind crops up in many places; it has something to do with the desirable state of ‘flow’ in which people are said to give their best sporting or artistic performances; it seems to me to be related to the popular notion of mindfulness, and it recalls Taoist and other mystical ideas about cleared minds and going with the stream. To me it evokes Julian Jaynes, who believed that in earlier times human consciousness manifested itself to people as divine voices; what we’re after here is getting the gods to shut up at last.

Clearly this special state of mind is a form of consciousness (we don’t pass out when we achieve it) and in fact on one level I think it is very simple. It’s just the absence of second-order consciousness, of thoughts about thoughts, in other words. Some have suggested that second-order thought is the distinctive or even the constitutive feature of human consciousness; but it seems clear to me that we can in fact do without it for extended periods.

All pretty simple then. In fact we might even be able to define it physiologically – it could be the state in which the cortex stops interfering and let’s the cerebellum and other older bits of the brain do their stuff uninterrupted – we might develop a way of temporarily zapping or inhibiting cortical activity so we can all become masters of whatever we’re doing at the flick of a switch. What’s all the fuss about?

Except that arguably none of the foregoing is actually about this special state of mind at all. What we’re talking about is unconsidered thought, and I cannot report it or even refer to it without considering it; so what have I really been discussing? Some strange ghostly proxy? Nothing? Or are these worries just obfuscatory playing with words?
There’s another mental thing we shouldn’t, logically, be able to talk about – qualia. Qualia, the ineffable subjective aspect of things, are additional to the scientific account and so have no causal powers; they cannot therefore ever have caused any of the words uttered or written about them. Is there a link here? I think so. I think qualia are pure first-order experiences; we cannot talk about them because to talk about them is to move on to second-order cognition and so to slide away from the very thing we meant to address. We could say that qualia are the experiential equivalent of the pure activity which Curtis Sensei achieved when he finally cut bokken the right way. Fifteen years and I’ll understand qualia; I just won’t be able to tell anyone about it…

No Problem

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Newton in doubtConsciousness is not a problem, says Michael Graziano in an Atlantic piece that is short and combative. (Also, I’m afraid, pretty sketchy in places. Space constraints might be partly to blame for that, but can’t altogether excuse some sweeping assertions made with the broadest of brushes.)

Graziano begins by drawing an analogy with Newton and his theory of light. The earlier view, he says, was that white light was pure, and colour happened when it was ‘dirtied’ by contact with the surfaces of coloured objects. The detail of exactly how this happened was a metaphysical ‘hard problem’. Newton dismissed all that by showing first, that white light is in fact a mixture of all colours, and second, that our vision produces only an inaccurate and simplified model of the reality, with only three different colour receptors.

Consciousness itself, Graziano says, is also a misleading model in a somewhat similar way, generated when the brain represents its own activity to itself. In fact, to be clear, consciousness as represented doesn’t happen; it is a mistaken construct, the result of the good-enough but far from perfect apparatus bequeathed to us by evolution (this sounds sort of familiar).

We should be clear that it is really Hard Problem consciousness that is the target here, the consciousness of subjective experience and of qualia. Not that the other sort is OK: Graziano dismisses the Easy Problem kind of consciousness, more or less in passing, as being no problem at all…

These days it’s not hard to understand how the brain can process information about the world, how it can store and recall memories, how it can construct self knowledge including even very complex self knowledge about one’s personhood and mortality. That’s the content of consciousness, and it’s no longer a fundamental mystery. It’s information, and we know how to build computers that process information.

Amazingly, that’s it. Graziano writes in an impatient tone; I have to confess to a slight ruffling of my own patience here; memory is not hard to understand? I had the impression that there were quite a number of unimpeachably respectable scientists working on the neurology of memory, but maybe they’re just doing trivial detail, the equivalent of butterfly collecting, or who knows, philosophy? …we know how to build computers… You know it’s not the 1980s any more? Yet apparently there are still clever people who think you can just say that the brain is a computer and that’s not only straightforwardly true, but pretty much a full explanation? I mean, the brain is also meat, and we know how to build tools that process meat; shall we stop there and declare the rest to be useless metaphysics?

‘Information’, as we’ve often noted before, is a treacherous, ambiguous word. If we mean something akin to data, then yes, computers can handle it; if we mean something akin to understanding, they’re no better than meat cleavers. Nothing means anything to a computer, while human consciousness reads and attributes meanings with prodigal generosity, arguably as its most essential, characteristic activity. No computer was ever morally responsible for anything, while our society is built around the idea that human beings have responsibilities, rights, and property. Perhaps Graziano has debunking arguments for all this that he hasn’t leisure to tell us about; the idea that they are all null issues with nothing worthwhile to be said about them just doesn’t fly.

Anyway, perhaps I should keep calm because that’s not even what Graziano is mainly talking about. He is really after qualia, and in that area I have some moderate sympathy with him; I think it’s true that the problem of subjective experience is most often misconceived, and it is quite plausible that the limitations of our sensory apparatus and our colour vision in particular contribute to the confusion. There is a sophisticated argument to be made along these lines: unfortunately Graziano’s isn’t it; he merely dismisses the issue: our brain plays us false and that’s it. You could perhaps get away with that if the problem were simply about our belief that we have qualia; it could be that the sensory system is just misinforming us, the way it does in the case of optical illusions. But the core problem is about people’s actual direct experience of qualia. A belief can be wrong, but an experience is still an experience even if it’s a misleading one, and the existence of any kind of subjective experience is the real core of the matter. Yes, we can still deny there is any such thing, and some people do so quite cogently, but to say that what I’m having now is not an experience but the mere belief that I’m having an experience is hard and, well, you know, actually rather metaphysical…

On examination I don’t think Graziano’s analogy with Newton works well. It’s not clear to me why the ‘older’ view is to be characterised as metaphysical (or why that would mean it was worthless). Shorn of the emotive words about dirt, the view that white light picks up colour from contact with coloured things, the way white paper picks up colour from contact with coloured crayons, seems a reasonable enough scientific hypothesis to have started with. It was wrong, but if anything it seems simpler and less abstract than the correct view. Newton himself would not have recognised any clear line between science and philosophy, and in some respects he left the true nature of light a more complicated matter, not fully resolved. His choice of particles over waves has proved to be an over-simplification and remains the subject of some cloudy ontology to this day.

Worse yet, if you think about it, it was Newton who first separated the two realms: colour as it is in the world and colour as we experience it. This is the crucial distinction that opened up the problem of qualia, first recognisably stated by Locke, a fervent admirer of Newton, some years after Newton’s work. You could argue therefore, that if the subject of qualia is a mess, it is a mess introduced by Newton himself – and scientists shouldn’t castigate philosophers for trying to clear it up.

Conversation with a Zombie

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dialogueTom has written a nice dialogue on the subject of qualia: it’s here.

Could we in fact learn useful lessons from talking to a robot which lacked qualia?

Perhaps not; one view would be that since the robot’s mind presumably works in the same way as ours, it would have similar qualia: or would think it did. We know that David Chalmers’ zombie twin talked and philosophised about its qualia in exactly the same way as the original.

It depends on what you mean by qualia, of course. Some people conceive of qualia as psychological items that add extra significance or force to experience; or as flags that draw attention to something of potential interest. Those play a distinct role in decision making and have an influence on behaviour. If robots were really to behave like us, they would have to have some functional analogue of that kind of qualia, and so we might indeed find that talking to them on the subject was really no better or worse than talking to our fellow human beings.

But those are not real qualia, because they are fully naturalised and effable things, measurable parts of the physical world. Whether you are experiencing the same blue quale as me would, if these flags or intensifiers were qualia, be an entirely measurable and objective question, capable of a clear answer. Real, philosophically interesting qualia are far more slippery than that.

So we might expect that a robot would reproduce the functional, a-consciousness parts of our mind, and leave the phenomenal, p-consciousness ones out. Like Tom’s robot they would presumably be puzzled by references to subjective experience. Perhaps, then, there might be no point in talking to them about it because they would be constitutionally incapable of shedding any light on it. they could tell us what the zombie life is like, but don’t we sort of know that already? They could play the kind of part in a dialogue that Socrates’ easily-bamboozled interlocutors always seemed to do, but that’s about it, presumably?

Or perhaps they would be able to show us, by providing a contrasting example, how and why it is that we come to have these qualia? There’s something distinctly odd about the way qualia are apparently untethered from physical cause and effect, yet only appear in human beings with their complex brains.  Or could it be that they’re everywhere and it’s not that only we have them, it’s more that we’re the only entities that talk about them (or about anything)?

Perhaps talking to a robot would convince us in the end that in fact, we don’t have qualia either: that they are just a confused delusion. One scarier possibility though, is that robots would understand them all too well.

“Oh,” they might say, “Yes, of course we have those. But scanning through the literature it seems to us you humans only have a very limited appreciation of the qualic field. You experience simple local point qualia, but you have no perception of higher-order qualia; the qualia of the surface or the solid, or the complex manifold that seems so evident to us. Gosh, it must be awful…”

Alters of the Universe

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world alterBernardo Kastrup has some marvellous invective against AI engineers in this piece…

The computer engineer’s dream of birthing a conscious child into the world without the messiness and fragility of life is an infantile delusion; a confused, partial, distorted projection of archetypal images and drives. It is the expression of the male’s hidden aspiration for the female’s divine power of creation. It represents a confused attempt to transcend the deep-seated fear of one’s own nature as a living, breathing entity condemned to death from birth. It embodies a misguided and utterly useless search for the eternal, motivated only by one’s amnesia of one’s own true nature. The fable of artificial consciousness is the imaginary band-aid sought to cover the engineer’s wound of ignorance.

I have been this engineer.

I think it’s untrue, but you don’t have to share the sentiment to appreciate the splendid rhetoric.

Kastrup distinguishes intelligence, which is a legitimate matter of inputs, outputs and the functions that connect them, from consciousness, the true what-it-is likeness of subjectivity. In essence he just doesn’t see how setting up functions in a machine can ever touch the latter.

Not that Kastrup has a closed mind, he speaks approvingly of Pentti Haikonen’s proposed architecture; he just doesn’t think it works. As Kastrup sees it Haikonen’s network merely gathers together sparks of consciousness: it then does a plausible job of bringing them together to form more complex kinds of cognition, but in Kastrup’s eyes it assumes that consciousness is there to be gathered in the first place: that it exists out there in tiny parcels amendable to this kind of treatment. There is in fact, he thinks, absolutely no reason to think that this kind of panpsychism is true: no reason to think that rocks or drops of water have any kind of conscious experience at all.

I don’t know whether that is the right way to construe Haikonen’s project (I doubt whether gathering experiential sparks is exactly what Haikonen supposed he was about). Interestingly, though Kastrup is against the normal kind of panpsychism (if the concept of  ‘normal panpsychism’ is admissible), his own view is essentially a more unusual variety.

Kastrup considers that we’re dealing with two aspects here; internal and external; our minds have both; the external is objective, the internal represents subjectivity. Why wouldn’t the world also have these two aspects? (Actually it’s hard to say why anything should have them, and we may suspect that by taking it as a given we’re in danger of smuggling half the mystery out of the problem, but let that pass.) Kastrup takes it as natural to conclude that the world as a whole must indeed have the two aspects (I think at this point he may have inadvertently ‘proved’ the existence of God in the form of a conscious cosmos, which is regrettable, but again let’s go with it for now); but not parts of the world. The brain, we know, has experience, but the groups of neurons that make it up do not (do we actually know that?); it follows that while the world as a whole has an internal aspect, objects or entities within it generally do not.

Yet of course, the brain manages to have two aspects, which must surely be something to do with the structure of the brain? May we not suspect that whatever it is that allows the brain to have an internal aspect, a machine could in principle have it too? I don’t think Kastrup engages effectively with this objection; his view seems to be that metabolism is essential, though why that should be, and why machines can’t have some form of metabolism, we don’t know.

The argument, then, doesn’t seem convincing, but it must be granted that Kastrup has an original and striking vision: our consciousnesses, he suggests, are essentially like the ‘alters’ of Dissociative Identity Disorder, better known as Multiple Personality, in which several different people seem to inhabit a single human being. We are, he says, like the accidental alternate identities of the Universe (again, I think you could say, of God, though Kastrup clearly doesn’t want to).

As with Kastrup’s condemnation of AI engineering, I don’t think at all that he is right, but it is a great idea. It is probable that in his book-length treatments of these ideas Kastrup makes a stronger case than I have given him credit for above, but I do in any case admire the originality of his thinking, and the clarity and force with which he expresses it.

Haecceity

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knight 3This is the third in a series of four posts about key ideas from my book The Shadow of Consciousness; this one is about haecceity, or to coin a plainer term, thisness. There are strong links with the subject of the final post, which will be that ultimate mystery, reality.

Haecceity is my explanation for the oddity of subjective experience. A whole set of strange stories are supposed to persuade us that there is something in subjective experience which is inexpressible, outside of physics, and yet utterly vivid and undeniable. It’s about my inward experience of blue, which I can never prove is the same as yours; about what it is like to see red.

One of the best known thought experiments on this topic is the story of Mary the Colour Scientist. She has never seen colour, but knows everything there is to know about colour vision; when she sees a red rose for the first time, does she come to know something new? The presumed answer is yes: she now knows what it is like to see red things.

Another celebrated case asks whether I could have a ‘zombie’ twin, identical to me in every physical respect, who did not have these purely subjective aspects of experience – which are known as ‘qualia’, by the way. We’re allowed to be unsure whether zombie twin is possible, but expected to agree that he is at least conceivable; and that that’s enough to establish that there really is something extra going on, over and above the physics.

Most people, I think, accept that qualia do exist and do raise a problem, though some sceptics denounce the entire topic as more or less irretrievable nonsense. Qualia are certainly very odd; they have no causal effects, so nothing we say about them was caused by them: and they cannot be directly described. What we invariably have to do is refer to them by an objective counterpart: so we speak of the quale of hearing middle C, though middle C is in itself an irreproachably physical, describable thing (identifying the precisely correct physical counterpart for colour vision is actually rather complex, though I don’t think anyone denies that you can give a full physical account of colour vision).

I suggest we can draw two tentative conclusions about qualia. First, knowledge of qualia is like knowledge of riding a bike: it cannot be transferred in words. I can talk until I’m blue in the face about bike riding, and it may help a little, but in the end to get that knowledge you have to get on a bike. That’s because for bike riding it’s your muscles and some non-talking parts of your brain that need to learn about it; it’s a skill. We can’t say the same about qualia because experiencing them is not a skill we need to learn; but there is perhaps a common factor; you have to have really done it, you have to have been there.

Second, we cannot say anything about qualia except through their objective counterparts. This leaves a mystery about how many qualia there are. Is there a quale of scarlet and a quale of crimson? An indefinite number of red qualia? We can’t say, and since all hypotheses about the number of qualia are equally good, we ought to choose the least expensive under the terms of Occam’s Razor; the one with the fewest entities. It would follow from that that there is really only one universal quale; it provides the vivid liveliness while the objective aspects of the experience provide all the content.

So we have two provisional conclusions: all qualia are really the same thing conditioned differently by the objective features of the experience; and to know qualia you have to have ‘been there’, to have had real experience. I think it follows naturally from these two premises that qualia simply represent the particularity of experience; its haecceity. The aspect of experience which is not accounted for by any theory, including the theories of physics, is simply the actuality of experience. This is no discredit to theory: it is by definition about the general and the abstract and cannot possibly include the particular reality of any specific experience.

Does this help us with those two famous thought experiments? In Mary’s case it suggests that what she knows after seeing the rose is simply what a particular experience is like. That could never have been conveyed by theoretical knowledge. In the case of my zombie twin, the real turning point is when we’re asked to think whether he is conceivable; that transfers discussion to a conceptual, theoretical plane on which it is natural to suppose nothing has particularity.

Finally, I think this view explains why qualia are ineffable, why we can’t say anything directly about them. All speech is, as it were, second order: it’s about experiences, not the described experience itself. When we think of any objective aspect, we summon up the appropriate concepts and put them over in words; but when we attempt to convey the haecceity of an experience it drops out as soon as we move to a conceptual level. Description, for once, cannot capture what we want to convey.

There’s nothing in all this that suggests anything wrong or incomplete about physics; no need for any dualism or magic realm. In a lot of ways this is simply the sceptical case approached more cautiously and from a different angle. It does leave us with some mystery though: what is it for something to be particular; what is the nature of particularity? We’ve already said we can’t describe it effectively or reduce it theoretically, but surely there must be something we can do to apprehend it better? This is the problem of reality…

[Many thanks to Sergio for the kind review here. Many thanks also to the generous people who have given me good reviews on amazon.com; much appreciated!]

Early Qualia

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Locke with flowersThe problem of qualia is in itself a very old one, but it is expressed in new terms.  My impression is that the actual word ‘qualia’ only began to be widely used (as a hot new concept) in the 1970s.  The question of whether the colours you experience in your mind are the same as the ones I experience in mine, on the other hand, goes back a long way. I’m not aware of any ancient discussions, though I should not be at all surprised to hear that there is one in, say, Sextus Empiricus (if you know one please mention it): I think the first serious philosophical exposition of the issue is Locke’s in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

“Neither would it carry any imputation of falsehood to our simple ideas, if by the different structure of our organs, it were so ordered, that the same object should produce in several men’s minds different ideas at the same time; e.g. If the idea, that a violet produced in one man’s mind by his eyes, were the same that a marigold produces in another man’s, and vice versa. For since this could never be known: because one man’s mind could not pass into another man’s body, to perceive, what appearances were produced by those organs; neither the ideas hereby, nor the names, would be at all confounded, or any falsehood be in either. For all things, that had the texture of a violet, producing constantly the idea, which he called blue, and those that had the texture of a marigold, producing constantly the idea, which he as constantly called yellow, whatever those appearances were in his mind; he would be able as regularly to distinguish things for his use by those appearances, and understand, and signify those distinctions, marked by the names blue and yellow, as if the appearances, or ideas in his mind, received from those two flowers, were exactly the same, with the ideas in other men’s minds.”

Interestingly, Locke chose colours which are (near enough) opposites on the spectrum; this inverted spectrum form of the case has been highly popular in recent decades.  It’s remarkable that Locke put the problem in this sophisticated form; he managed to leap to a twentieth-century outlook from a standing start, in a way. It’s also surprising that he got in so early: he was, after all, writing less than twenty years after the idea of the spectrum was first put forward by Isaac Newton. It’s not surprising that Locke should know about the spectrum; he was an enthusiastic supporter of Newton’s ideas, and somewhat distressed by his own inability to follow them in the original. Newton, no courter of popularity, deliberately expressed his theories in terms that were hard for the layman, and scientifically speaking, that’s what Locke was. Alas, it seems the gap between science and philosophy was already apparent even before science had properly achieved a separate existence: Newton would still have called himself a natural philosopher, I think, not a scientist.

It’s hard to be completely sure that Locke did deliberately pick colours that were opposite on the spectrum – he doesn’t say so, or call attention to their opposition (there might even be some room for debate about whether  ‘blue’ and ‘yellow are really opposite) but it does seem at least that he felt that strongly contrasting colours provided  a good example, and in that respect at least he anticipated many future discussions. The reason so many modern  theorists like the idea is that they believe a switch of non-opposite colour qualia would be detectable, because the spectrum would no longer be coherent, while inverting the whole thing preserves all the relationships intact and so leaves the change undetectable. Myself, I think this argument is a mistake, inadvertently transferring to qualia the spectral structure which actually belongs to the objective counterparts of colour qualia. The qualia themselves have to be completely indistinguishable, so it doesn’t matter whether we replace yellow qualia with violet or orange ones, or for that matter, with the quale of the smell of violets.

Strangely enough though Locke was not really interested in the problem; on the contrary, he set it out only because he was seeking to dismiss it as an irrelevance. His aim, in context, was to argue that simple perceptions cannot be wrong, and the possibility of inconsistent colour judgements – one person seeing blue where another saw yellow – seemed to provide a potential counter-argument which he needed to eliminate. If one person sees red where another sees green, surely at least one of them must be wrong? Locke’s strategy was to admit that different people might have different ideas for the same percept (nowadays we would probably refer to these subjective ideas of percepts as qualia), but to argue that it doesn’t matter because they will always agree about which colour is, in fact yellow, so it can’t properly be said that their ideas are wrong. Locke, we can say, was implicitly arguing that qualia are not worth worrying about, even for philosophical purposes.

This ‘so what?’ line of thought is still perfectly tenable. We could argue that two people looking at the same rose will not only agree that it is red, but also concur that they are both experiencing red qualia; so the fact that inwardly their experiences might differ is literally of no significance – obviously of no practical significance, but arguably also metaphysically nugatory. I don’t know of anyone who espouses this disengaged kind of scepticism, though; more normally people who think qualia don’t matter go on to argue that they don’t exist, either. Perhaps the importance we attach to the issue is a sign of how our attitudes to consciousness have changed: it was itself a matter of no great importance or interest to Locke.  I believe consciousness acquired new importance with the advent of serious computers, when it became necessary to find some quality  with which we could differentiate ourselves from machines. Subjective experience fit the bill nicely.

 

Personhood Week

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Banca RuritaniaPersonhood Week, at National Geographic is a nice set of short pieces briefly touring the issues around the crucial but controversial issue of what constitutes a person.

You won’t be too surprised to hear that in my view personhood is really all about consciousness. The core concept for me is that a person is a source of intentions – intentions in the ordinary everyday sense rather than in the fancy philosophical sense of intentionality (though that too).  A person is an actual or potential agent, an entity that seeks to bring about deliberate outcomes. There seems to be a bit of a spectrum here; at the lower level it looks as if some animals have thoughtful and intentional behaviour of the kind that would qualify them for a kind of entry-level personhood. At its most explicit, personhood implies the ability to articulate complicated contracts and undertake sophisticated responsibilities: this is near enough the legal conception. The law, of course, extends the idea of a person beyond mere human beings, allowing a form of personhood to corporate entities, which are able to make binding agreements, own property, and even suffer criminal liability. Legal persons of this kind are obviously not ‘real’ ones in some sense, and I think the distinction corresponds with the philosophical distinction between original (or intrinsic, if we’re bold) and derived intentionality. The latter distinction comes into play mainly when dealing with meaning. Books and pictures are about things, they have meanings and therefore intentionality, but their meaningfulness is derived: it comes only from the intentions of the people who interpret them, whether their creators or their ‘audience’.  My thoughts, by contrast, really just mean things, all on their own and however anyone interprets them: their intentionality is original or intrinsic.

So, at least, most people would say (though others would energetically contest that description). In a similar way my personhood is real or intrinsic: I just am a person; whereas the First Central Bank of Ruritania has legal personhood only because we have all agreed to treat it that way. Nevertheless, the personhood of the Ruritanian Bank is real (hypothetically, anyway; I know Ruritania does not exist – work with me on this), unlike that of, say, the car Basil Fawlty thrashed with a stick, which is merely imaginary and not legally enforceable.

Some, I said, would contest that picture: they might argue that ;a source of intentions makes no sense because ‘people’ are not really sources of anything; that we are all part of the universal causal matrix and nothing comes of nothing. Really, they would say, our own intentions are just the same as those of Banca Prima Centrale Ruritaniae; it’s just that ours are more complex and reflexive – but the fact that we’re deeming ourselves to be people doesn’t make it any the less a matter of deeming.  I don’t think that’s quite right – just because intentions don’t feature in physics doesn’t mean they aren’t rational and definable entities – but in any case it surely isn’t a hit against my definition of personhood; it just means there aren’t really any people.

Wait a minute, though. Suppose Mr X suffers a terrible brain injury which leaves him incapable of forming any intentions (whether this is actually possible is an interesting question: there are some examples of people with problems that seem like this; but let’s just help ourselves to the hypothesis for the time being). He is otherwise fine: he does what he’s told and if supervised can lead a relatively normal-seeming life. He retains all his memories, he can feel normal sensations, he can report what he’s experienced, he just never plans or wants anything. Would such a man no longer be a person?

I think we are reluctant to say so because we feel that, contrary to what I suggested above, agency isn’t really necessary, only conscious experience. We might have to say that Mr X loses his legal personhood in some senses; we might no longer hold him responsible or accept his signature as binding, rather in the way that we would do for a young child: but he would surely retain the right to be treated decently, and to kill or injure him would be the same crime as if committed against anyone else.  Are we tempted to say that there are really two grades of personhood that happen to coincide in human beings,  a kind of ‘Easy Problem’ agent personhood on the one hand and a ‘Hard Problem’ patient personhood?  I’m tempted, but the consequences look severely unattractive. Two different criteria for personhood would imply that I’m a person in two different ways simultaneously, but if personhood is anything, it ought to be single, shouldn’t it? Intuitively and introspectively it seems that way. I’d feel a lot happier if I could convince myself that the two criteria cannot be separated, that Mr X is not really possible.

What about Robot X? Robot X has no intentions of his own and he also has no feelings. He can take in data, but his sensory system is pretty simple and we can be pretty sure that we haven’t accidentally created a qualia-experiencing machine. He has no desires of his own, not even a wish to serve, or avoid harming human beings, or anything like that. Left to himself he remains stationary indefinitely, but given instructions he does what he’s told: and if spoken to, he passes the Turing Test with flying colours. In fact, if we ask him to sit down and talk to us, he is more than capable of debating his own personhood, showing intelligence, insight, and understanding at approximately human levels. Is he a person? Would we hesitate over switching him off or sending him to the junk yard?

Perhaps I’m cheating. Robot X can talk to us intelligently, which implies that he can deal with meanings. If he can deal with meanings, he must have intentionality, and if he has that perhaps he must, contrary to what I said, be able to form intentions after all – so perhaps the conditions I stipulated aren’t possible after all? And then, how does he generate intentions, as a matter of fact? I don’t know, but on one theory intentionality is rooted in desires or biological drives. The experience of hunger is just primally about food, and from that kind of primitive aboutness all the fancier kinds are built up. Notice that it’s the experience of hunger, so arguably if you had no feelings you couldn’t get started on intentionality either! If all that is right, neither Robot X nor Mr X is really as feasible as they might seem: but it still seems a bit worrying to me.

Quantized qualia

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pixelated eyeYou’ve heard of splitting the atom: W. Alex Escobar wants to split the quale. His recent paper (short article here) proposes that in order to understand subjective experience we may need to break it down into millions of tiny units of experience.  He proposes a neurological model which to my naive eyes seems reasonable: the extraordinary part is really the phenomenology.

Like a lot of qualia theorists Escobar seems to have based his view squarely on visual experience, and the idea of micro-qualia is perhaps inspired by the idea of pixels in digitised images, or other analytical image-handling techniques.  Why would the idea help explain qualia?

I don’t think Escobar explains this very directly, at least from a philosophical point of view, but you can see why the idea might appeal to some people. Panexperientialists, for example, take the view that there are tiny bits of experience everywhere, so the idea that our minds assemble complex experiences out of micro-qualia might be quite congenial to them.  As we know, Christof Koch says that consciousness arises from the integration of information, so perhaps he would see Escobar’s theory as offering a potentially reasonable phenomenal view of the same process.

Unfortunately Escobar has taken a wrong turning, as others have done before, and isn’t really talking about ineffable qualia at all: instead, we might say he is merely effing the effable.

Ineffability, the quality of being inexpressible, is a defining characteristic of qualia as canonically understood in the philosophical literature. I cannot express to you what redness is like to me; if I could, you would be able to tell whether it was the same as your experience. If qualia could be expressed, my zombie twin  (who has none) would presumably become aware of their absence; when asked what it was like to see red, he would look puzzled and admit he didn’t really know, whereas ex hypothesi he gives the same fluent and lucidly illuminating answers that I do – in spite of not having the things we’re both talking about.

Qualia, in fact, have no causal effects and cannot be part of the scientific story. That doesn’t mean Escobar’s science is wrong or uninteresting, just that what he’s calling qualia aren’t really the philosophically slippery items of experience we keep chasing in vain in our quest for consciousness.

Alright, but setting that aside, is it possible that real qualia could be made up of many micro-qualia? No, it absolutely isn’t! In physics, a table can seem to be a single thing but actually be millions of molecules.  Similarly, what looks like a flat expanse of uniform colour on a screen may actually be thousands of pixels. But qualia are units of experience; what they seem like is what they are. They don’t seem like a cloud of micro-qualia, and so they aren’t. Now there could be some neuronal or psychological story going on at a lower level which did involve micro units; but that wouldn’t make qualia themselves splittable. What they are like is all there is to them; they can’t have a hidden nature.

Alas, Escobar could not have noticed that, because he was too busy effing the Effable.

More qualia than we thought?

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What follows is a draft passage which might eventually form part of a longer piece: I’d appreciate any feedback. – Peter

redline

scribeLet’s ask a stupid question that may not even be answerable. How many qualia are there? It is generally assumed, I think, that this is like asking how long  is a piece of string: that there is an indefinite multiplicity of qualia, that in fact, for every distinguishable sensation there is a matching distinct quale.

As we know, colour is always to the fore in these discussions, and the most common basic example of a quale is probably the colour quale we experience when we see a red rose. I think it is uncontroversial that all sensory experiences come with qualia (uncontroversial among those who believe in qualia at all, that is), although the basis for that appears to be purely empirical; I’m not aware of any arguments to show that all categories of sensory experience must necessarily come with qualia. It would be interesting and perhaps enlightening if some explorers of the phenomenal world reported that, say, the taste of pure water had no accompanying qualia – or that for some, slightly zombish people it had none, while for others it had the full complement of definite phenomenal qualities. To date that has not happened (and perhaps it can’t happen?); it seems to be universally agreed that if qualia exist at all, they accompany every sensory experience.

I think it is generally believed that feelings, phenomenal states with no direct relation to details of the external world, have qualia too. Pain qualia are often discussed, with feelings of hunger and pleasure getting occasional mentions; qualia of emotions are also mentioned without provoking controversy. It seems in fact that all experience is generally taken to have accompanying qualia, including dream or hallucinatory experience, and perhaps even certain memories.

In fact there seems to be an interesting, debatable borderline in memory. Vividly recalling a piece of music in real time seems, I would say, to have the same qualia as hearing it live through the ears (Or are the qualia of memories fainter? Do qualia, as a matter of fact, vary in intensity? Or is that idea a kind of contamination from the effable experiences that pair with each quale? It could be so, but then if there is no variation in intensity qualia must be sort of binary, fully on at all times – or fully off – and that doesn’t feel quite right either.) In general the same might be claimed for all those memories that involve some ‘replay’ of experience or feelings; the replay has qualia. Where nothing is held before our attention, on the other hand, there’s nothing. The act of merely summoning up a PIN number as we use it does not have its own qualia; there’s nothing it is like to recall a password, though there might be something it is like to search the memory for one, and something unpleasant it is like to panic when we fail.

There is certainly room for some phenomenological exploration around these areas, but that more or less exhausts the domain of qualia as I understand it to be generally recognised. I think, however, that it actually stretches a little further than that. There is, in my view, something it is like to be me, something properly ineffable and separable from all the particular sensations and feelings that being me entails. If this is indeed a quale (and of course since this is an ineffable matter I can only appeal to the reader’s own introspective research) then I think it’s in a category of its own. We might be tempted to assimilate it to the feelings, and say it’s the feeling of existing. Or perhaps we might think it’s simply the quale that goes with proprioception, the complex but essential sense that tells us where our body is at any moment. Those are respectable qualia no doubt, but I believe there’s a quale of being me that goes beyond them.

To that we can add a related and problematic entity which uniquely links the Hard and Easy problems, a phenomenal state we could call the executive quale, that of being in charge. We feel that consciousness is effective, that our conscious decisions have real heft in respect of our behaviour.

This, I think, is the very thing that many people are concerned to deny: the feeling of being causally effective; but to date I don’t think it has been regarded as a quale. For some people, who wish to deny both real agency and real subjectivity, the conjunction will seem logical and appealing – to others perhaps less so…

Structural Qualia

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structureKristjan Loorits says he has a solution to the Hard Problem, and it’s all about structure.

His framing of the problem is that it’s about the incompatibility of three plausible theses:

  1. all the objects of physics and other natural sciences can be fully analyzed in terms of structure and relations, or simply, in structural terms.
  2. consciousness is (or has) something over and above its structure and relations.
  3. the existence and nature of consciousness can be explained in terms of natural sciences.

At first sight it may look a bit odd to make structure so central. In effect Loorits claims that the distinguishing character of entities within science is structure, while qualia are monadic – single, unanalysable, unconnected. He says that he cannot think of anything within physics that lacks structure in this way – and if anyone could come up with such a thing it would surely be regarded as another item in the peculiar world of qualia rather than something within ordinary physics.

Loorits approach has the merit of keeping things at the most general level possible, so that it works for any future perfected science as well as the unfinished version we know at the moment. I’m not sure he is right to see qualia as necessarily monadic, though. One of th best known arguments for the existence of qualia is the inverted spectrum. If all the colours were swapped for their opposites within one person’s brain – green for red, and so on – how could we ever tell? The swappee would still refer to the sky as blue, in spite of experiencing what the rest of us would call orange. Yet we cannot – can we? – say that there is no difference between the experience of blue and the experience of orange.

Now when people make that argument, going right back to Locke, they normally chose inversion because that preserves all the relationships between colours.  Adding or subtracting colours produce results which are inverted for the swappee, but consistently. There is a feeling that the argument would not work if we merely took out cerulean from the spectrum and put in puce instead, because then the spectrum would look odd to the swappee.  We most certainly could not remove the quale of green and replace it with the quale of cherry flavour or the quale of distant trumpets; such substitutions would be obvious and worrying (or so people seem to think). If that’s all true then it seems qualia do have structural relationships: they sort of borrow those of their objective counterparts.  Quite how or why that should be is an interesting issue in itself, but at any rate it looks doubtful whether we can safely claim that qualia are monadic.

Nevertheless, I think Loorits’ set-up is basically reasonable: in a way he is echoing the view that mental content lacks physical location and extension, an opinion that goes back to Descartes and was more recently presented in a slightly different form by McGinn.

For his actual theory he rests on the views of Crick and Koch, though he is not necessarily committed to them. The mysterious privacy of qualia, in his view, amounts to our having information about our mental states which we cannot communicate. When we see a red rose, the experience is constituted by the activity of a bunch of neurons. But in addition, a lot of other connected neurons raise their level of activity: not enough to pass the threshold for entering into consciousness, but enough to have some effect. It is this penumbra of subliminal neural activity that constitutes the inexpressible qualia. Since this activity is below the level of consciousness it cannot be reported and has no explicit causal effects on our behaviour; but it can affect our attitudes and emotions in less visible ways.

It therefore turns out that qualia re indeed not monadic after all; they do have structure and relations, just not ones that are visible to us.

Interestingly, Loorits goes on to propose an empirical test. He mentions an example quoted by Dennett: a chord on the guitar sound like a single thing, but when we hear the three notes played separately first, we become able to ‘hear’ them separately within the chord. On Loorits’ view, part of what happens here is that hearing the notes separately boosts some of the neuronal activity which was originally subliminal so that we become aware of it: when we go back to the chord we’re now aware of a little more information about why it sounds as it does, and the qualic mystery of the original chord is actually slightly diminished.

Couldn’t there be a future machine that elucidated qualia in this way but more effectively, asks Loorits?  Such a machine would scan our brain while we were looking at the rose and note the groups of neurons whose activity increased only to subliminal levels. Then it could directly stimulate each of these areas to tip them over the limit into consciousness. For us the invisible experiences that made up our red quale would be played back into our consciousness, and when we had been through them we should finally understand why the red quale was what it was: we should know what seeing red was like and be able for the first time to describe it effectively.

Fascinating idea, but I can’t imagine what it would be like; and there’s the rub, perhaps. I think a true qualophile would say, yes, all very well, but once we’ve got your complete understanding of the red experience, there’s still going to be something over and above it all; the qualia will still somehow escape.

The truth is that Loorits’ theory is not really an explanation of qualia: it’s a sceptical explanation of why we think we have qualia. This becomes clear, if it wasn’t already, when he reviews the philosophical arguments: he doesn’t, for example, think philosophical zombies, people exactly like us but without qualia, are actually possible.

That is a perfectly respectable point of view, with a great deal to be said for it. If we are sceptics,  Loorits’ theory provides an exceptionally clear and sensible underpinning for our disbelief; it might even turn out to be testable. But I don’t think it will end the argument.