Intentionality and Introspection

Some people, I know, prefer to get their philosophy in written form; but if you like videos it’s well worth checking out Richard Brown’s YouTube series Consciousness This Month.

This one, Ep 4, is about mental contents, with Richard setting out briefly but clearly a couple of the major problems (look at the camera, Richard!).

Introspection, he points out, is often held to be incorrigible or infallible on certain points. You can be wrong about being at the dentist, but you can’t be wrong about being in pain. This is because of the immediacy of the experience. In the case of the dentist, we know there is a long process between light hitting your retina and the dentist being presented to consciousness. Various illusions and errors provide strong evidence for the way all sorts of complex ‘inferences’ and conclusions have been drawn by your unconscious visual processing system before the presence of the dentist gets inserted into your awareness in the guise of a fact. There is lots of scope for that processing to go wrong, so that the dentist’s presence might not be a fact at all. There’s much less processing involved in our perception of someone tugging on a tooth, but still maybe you could be dreaming or deluded. But the pain is inside your mind already; there’s no scope for interpretation and therefore no scope for error.

My own view on this is that it isn’t our sense data that have to be wrong, it’s our beliefs about our experiences. If the results of visual processing are misleading, we may end up with the false belief that there is a dentist in the room. But that’s not the only way for us to pick up false beliefs, and nothing really prevents our holding false beliefs about being in pain. There is some sense in which the pain can’t be wrong, but thatks more a matter of truth and falsity being properties of propositions, not of pains.

Richard also sketches the notion of intentionality, or ‘aboutness’, reintroduced to Western philosophy as a key idea by Brentano, who took it to be the distinguishing feature of the mental. When we think about things it seems as if our thought is directed towards an external object. In itself that seems to require some explanation, but it gets especially difficult when you consider that we can easily talk about non-existent or even absurd things. This is the kind of problem that caused Meinong to introduce a distinction between existence and subsistence, so that the objects of thought could have a manageable ontological status without being real in the same way as physical objects.

Regulars may know that my own view is that consciousness is largely a matter of recognition. Humans, we might say, are superusers of recognition. Not only can we recognise objects, we can recognise patterns and use them for a sort of extrapolation. The presence of a small entity is recognised, but also a larger entity of which it is part. So we recognise dawn, but also see that it is part of a day. From the larger entity we can recognise parts not currently present, such as sunset, and this allows us to think about entities that are distant in time or space. But the same kind of extrapolation allows to think about things that do not, or even could not, exist.

I’m looking forward to seeing Richard’s future excursions.

18 thoughts on “Intentionality and Introspection

  1. My own view on this is that it isn’t our sense data that have to be wrong, it’s our beliefs about our experiences.

    I must confess, I find it hard to imagine how the two could peel away from each other like that. I mean, what does it mean to be in pain, but not to believe one is in pain? Or the other way around, to believe one is in pain, when one is not? Is there an example or something anybody could point me to?

    It just seems to open up the door to eliminativism: if I can believe myself to be in pain, while not actually being in pain, then what is it that the phenomenal experience of pain actually does, with respect to my beliefs? Why not get rid of it entirely?

  2. Most folk recognize the possibility of visual and auditory hallucinations. Might tactile hallucinations be possible? If not, what is the difference between sensory modalities which are subject to hallucination and those which are not? Is the relationship between the mechanical and the phenomenal different for some sensory modalities than for others? If so, how do we account for those differences?

  3. My take on this is that everyone is mostly right. I agree with Peter when he says “consciousness is largely a matter of recognition.” (Personally, I would drop the “largely”.) Meinong is right when he speaks of an ontology of two kinds of things. For me, those two things are physical stuff, which exists, and patterns, which are real. (Mainong would say patterns subsist? I dunno.) Some patterns are directly discernible in physical stuff, whereas some patterns cannot be. However, all patterns can be referenced by physical stuff via symbols.

    But Peter says we can recognize both objects and patterns. This is a mistake. We only recognize patterns. When we see our dentist, pre-conscious processes in our brain take the pixels from our retinas and build concepts like woman, face, etc. Other processes based on memory of past experience (if you’ve been to this dentist before) can be combined with the retina data to generate patterns that represent “Susan, my dentist”. It is this pattern which is the intentional object of the recognition. It may or may not be your belief that this pattern is associated with something that exists (physical stuff) or not.

    So when we talk about the infallibility of introspection, we can say we are infallible as to the pattern which is recognized. Our response to that pattern would be the same, regardless if the cause of that pattern was something in the world (damage to a foot) or a memory recalled in a dream. The pattern would still be called “pain”. And it’s certainly possible for things to go wrong during the pre-processing, but if you end up with a pattern that represents bad orange juice, bad orange juice is the experience, even if the cause was good milk.

    By the way, for a plausible explanation of how symbolic references described above can be done with just neurons, see Chris Eliasmith and Semantic Pointers.

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  4. From what I’ve read, perception and intentionality is a matter of prediction. We predict what we think is there and update those predictions (sometimes) based on the sensory data that comes in, sensory data that is sparse and gap ridden. That’s why two people can see the same thing but come away with very different perceptions of what was there.

    On the introspection of pain, I have a relative who was addicted to opioids. He felt intense back pain which he could only relieve by taking the prescribed painkiller. But it eventually turned out his back had long since healed. His experience of pain was real, but it was borne of addiction, not from problems in his back. Once he was weaned off the drug, the pain vanished (although it actually *intensified* horribly during the weaning process).

    Which seems to imply that, counter intuitively, pain is also an interpretation, a recognition, a type of prediction. Lisa Feldman Barrett in her book ‘How Emotions are Made’ also identifies emotions as predictions.

    Of course, another word we could use instead of “prediction” is “recognition”, which makes it Peter’s thesis with different terminology.

  5. That nice man Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (which could have been an excellent JK Rowling title)

    “…This amounts to defining a physical property as one which anybody could be mistaken in attributing to something, and a phenomenal property as one which a certain person cannot be mistaken about. (E.g., the person who has the pain cannot be mistaken about how the pain feels.) Given this definition, of course, it is trivially the case that no phenomenal property can be a physical one. But why should this epistemic distinction reflect an ontological distinction? Why should the epistemic privilege we all have of being incorrigible about how things seem to us reflect a distinction between two realms of being?

    “The answer presumably has to go something like this: Feelings just are appearances. Their reality is exhausted in how they seem. They are pure seemings. Anything that is not a seeming (putting the intentional to one side for the moment) is merely physical – that is, it is something which can appear other than it is. The world comes divided into things whose nature is exhausted by how they appear and things whose nature is not. But if a philosopher gives this answer he is in danger of changing from a neo-dualist into a plain old-fashioned Cartesian dualist, ‘mind-stuff’ and all. For now he has stopped talking about pains as states of people or properties predicated of people and started talking about pains as particulars, a special sort of particular whose nature is exhausted by a single property. Of what could such a particular be made, save mind-stuff?”

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  7. “On the introspection of pain, I have a relative who was addicted to opioids. He felt intense back pain which he could only relieve by taking the prescribed painkiller. But it eventually turned out his back had long since healed. His experience of pain was real, but it was borne of addiction, not from problems in his back.”

    Might your friend’s pain reasonably be described as a hallucination?

    More generally, Cognition, Respiration, Digestion.

    Can patterns exist absent the physical objects by which they are incarnated? Can “phenomenal properties” exist absent the brains that experience them? If phenomena can only be experienced by physical beings how can we argue they are not physical? It seems to me that to claim that “Feelings just are appearances. Their reality is exhausted in how they seem” is to ignore the neurological machinery that makes feeling possible. I don’t think there is any defensible ground between elimitivism and Cartesian dualism.

  8. Hi Michael Murden,

    “Might your friend’s pain reasonably be described as a hallucination?”

    In the sense that hallucinations are basically malfunctioning predictions or recognition? Definitely.

    “I don’t think there is any defensible ground between elimitivism and Cartesian dualism.”

    I’m a reductionist, but not an elimitivist reductionist. Which is to say, that I think just because we can understand some thing in terms of its constituent parts and structure, that doesn’t mean it’s rational to regard that thing as not existing. Doing so quickly leads you to consider that the only things that exist are elemental particles, and even they may be composites of other phenomena (strings, etc). It may be structure all the way down. If we can’t find meaning in the structures and patterns themselves, then we become mad-dog nihilists, a view I don’t find productive.

  9. Michael Murden:

    Might tactile hallucinations be possible?

    Sure, but hallucinations aren’t what this is about. After all, in hallucinations, you have a real experience, which just happens not to be veridical—i. e. you see something that isn’t there, but you actually *see* something, you have some visual experience. You’re still right about your experience, there’s just nothing out there that actually corresponds to it. I’m perfectly fine with that sort of thing, and indeed, have some experience of my own there.

    However, if you can be wrong about your experiences, that means you can believe to be in pain, while not actually being in pain. There is no pain-experience, yet you believe there is pain. This, I find difficult to imagine. I mean, maybe one could believe a stubbornly persistent itch to be a pain, but with something like this, you’d merely misidentify your experience, but you’d still be right about what sort of experience you have. Plus, if I can believe myself to be in pain without actually experiencing pain, and I have no way to tell the difference to a state where I actually am in pain, then what work does the experience of pain actually do? It seems we could then just do away with experience altogether, and follow Dennett et al.

  10. That we see is an arrow pointing in opposite directions–then intention can become our means to-be-here…

  11. I’ve believed I was in pain and been mistaken. Only for a half second, until I realized it was just an unpleasant vibration. This was at the dentist, ironically enough. Sometimes they don’t give me enough novocaine, and I have to be ready to object before the drill gets too far in that case. Anyway, I don’t see why that half second shouldn’t count.

    Any time you describe something in words, you run the risk of error.

  12. We don’t have to suppose we are incorrigible about how something feels, e.g., painful, to acknowledge that it feels (or felt) like something. So there’s no reason to go eliminativist about experience just because we can be wrong about it retrospectively (just in case anyone was suggesting that). In fact, it could be argued that we don’t have epistemic access to qualia since they are the basic terms in which the world appears to us. We’re not in a representational relation to phenomenal contents such as pain, red, sweet, etc. although we can recognize, name and report them (sometimes mistakenly), rather we consist of them as conscious subjects. As a result, we’re not in a position to specify anything further about their what-it’s-like quality, even though there is something it is like to undergo them. This seems to me an inevitable consequence of our being, as knowers, in a representational relation to reality: there will necessarily be bottom level representational elements that can’t themselves be further characterized but that serve to characterize the world (including the body), e.g., pain, red, sweet, etc.

  13. “that the objects of thought could have a manageable ontological status without being real in the same way as physical objects”
    …Isn’t thought (objects of thought) simply a means, a physical means, a real means for meanings of oneself…

    Being always get confused in science…

  14. Paul Torek:

    I’ve believed I was in pain and been mistaken. Only for a half second, until I realized it was just an unpleasant vibration.

    If that’s all there is to being wrong about your experience, then I’ve got no qualms with it (see my example about a persistent itch). After all, you’re still right about how your experience feels to you—it feels ‘like that’—you just briefly mischaracterize that feeling. The thesis I thought was behind the fallibility of introspection is that one could be wrong about what these experiences actually feel like—like, say, having a red-experience, and believing it to feel like a green-experience.

    Tom Clark:

    We’re not in a representational relation to phenomenal contents such as pain, red, sweet, etc. although we can recognize, name and report them (sometimes mistakenly), rather we consist of them as conscious subjects.

    I would think that it is exactly because we’re not in a representational relation to our experience that it’s hard to see how we could be wrong about it: after all, when we’re wrong about something in the external world, it’s exactly because that representational relation goes awry. That is, the fallibility of our knowledge of the external world is exactly because it’s mediated, and this mediation can go wrong; contrary to that, experience is immediate, so it strikes me as difficult to make room for error. Indeed, if one were to suppose that knowledge of our experience—and we certainly do have such knowledge—is itself mediated, opening up room for error, one needs to specify a medium, and what could that be? What am I in contact with that delivers knowledge of my experience to me? This just strikes me as homuncular.

  15. Oh, by the way, I think it’s kinda hilarious that this got reblogged at some blog for ‘Health and Fitness recipes’—seems like their content aggregator just saw something about ‘consciousness’, and lumped it in with all kinds of new-age stuff…

  16. Jochen: “I would think that it is exactly because we’re not in a representational relation to our experience that it’s hard to see how we could be wrong about it…”

    Agreed, there is nothing epistemically right or wrong about how basic qualia feel, but as you and Paul and Peter note, beliefs about and reports of what we feel can be right or wrong, e.g., anticipating being in pain, we respond to a stimulus as if we felt pain (flinch, yelp, etc.) when on second thought we actually felt something else. But I take it even these are pretty rare instances since any phenomenal quality sustained in experience for more than a second or so is difficult to misrecognize and misreport, e.g., it’s hard to confuse red with blue even in a short flash exposure (I expect psycho-physical experiments have been conducted on this). But what do we know about our experienced red per se apart from its similarity and contrast relations to other colors? Nada.

  17. Unrelated… “it doesn’t take a quantum leap to see a big bang become fundamental interacting forces then galaxies and evolutions, we are part of this continuum in representing qualia/value–that part of the universe cosmos which sees itself”…

  18. “I’ve believed I was in pain and been mistaken. Only for a half second, until I realized it was just an unpleasant vibration.”

    Since your brain creates pain in response to nerve sensor stimuli, perhaps you really were in pain until your brain decided that it wasn’t appropriate, given the stimuli, and stopped the pain.

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