Not Objectifiable

A bold draft paper from Tom Clark tackles the explanatory gap between experience and the world as described by physics. He says it’s all about the representational relation.

Clark’s approach is sensible in tone and intention. He rejects scepticism about the issue and accepts that there is a problem about the ‘what it is like’ of experience, while also seeking to avoid dualism or more radical metaphysical theories. He asserts that experience is not to be found anywhere in the material world, nor identified in any simple way with any physical item; it is therefore  outside the account given by physics. This should not worry us, though, any more than it worries us that numbers or abstract concepts cannot be located in space; experience is real, but it is a representational reality that exists only for the conscious subjects having it.

The case is set out clearly and has an undeniable appeal. The main underlying problem, I would say, is that it skates quite lightly past some really tough philosophical questions about what representation really is and how it works, and the ontological status of experience and representations. We’re left with the impression that these are solvable enough when we get round to them, though in fact a vast amount of unavailing philosophical labour has gone into these areas over the years. If you wanted to be unkind, you could say that Clark defers some important issues about consciousness to metaphysics the way earlier generations might have deferred them to theology. On the other hand, isn’t that exactly where they should be deferred to?

I don’t by any means suggest that these deferred problems, if that’s a fair way to describe them, make Clark’s position untenable – I find it quite congenial in general – but they possibly leave him with a couple of vulnerable spots. First, he doesn’t want to be a dualist, but he seems in danger of being backed into it. He says that experience is not to be located in the physical world – so where is it, if not in another world? We can resolutely deny that there is a second world, but there has to be in some sense some domain or mode in which experience exists or subsists; why can’t we call that a world? To me, if I’m honest, the topic of dualism versus monism is tired and less significant than we might think, but there is surely some ontological mystery here, and in a vigorous common room fight I reckon Clark would find himself being accused of Platonism (or perhaps congratulated for it) or something similar.

The second vulnerability is whether representation can really play the role Clark wants it to. His version of experience is outside physics, and so in itself it plays no part in the physical world. Yet representations of things in my mind certainly influence my physical behaviour, don’t they? The keyboard before me is represented in my mind and that representation affects where my fingers are going next. But it can’t be the pure experience that does that, because it is outside the physical world. We might get round this if we specify two kinds of representational content, but if we do that the hard causal kind of representation starts to look like the real one and it may become debatable in what sense we can still plausibly or illuminatingly say that experience itself is representational.

Clark makes some interesting remarks in this connection, suggesting there is a sort of ascent going on, whereby we start with folk-physical descriptions rooted in intersubjective consensus, quite close in some sense to the inaccessibly private experience, and then move by stages towards the scientific account by gradually adopting more objective terms. I’m not quite sure exactly how this works, but it seems an intriguing perspective that might provide a path towards some useful insight.

The Dance of Life

What is experience? An interesting discussion from the Institute of Art and Ideas, featuring David Chalmers, Susana Martinez-Conde and Peter Hacker.

Chalmers seems to content himself with restating the Hard Problem; that is, that there seems to be something in experience which is mysteriously over and above the account given by physics. He seems rather nervous, but I think it’s just the slight awkwardness typical of a philosopher being asked slightly left-field questions.

Martinez-Conde tells us we never really experience reality, only a neural simulation of it. I think it’s a mistake to assume that because experience seems to be mediated by our sensory systems, and sometimes misleads us, it never shows us external reality. That’s akin to thinking that because some books are fiction no book really addresses reality.

Hacker smoothly dismisses the whole business as a matter of linguistic and conceptual confusion. Physics explains its own domain, but we shouldn’t expect it to deal with experience, any more than we expect it to explain love, or the football league. He is allowed to make a clean get-away with this neat proposition, although we know, for example, that physical electrodes in the brain can generate and control experiences; and we know that various illusions and features of experience have very good physiological explanations. Hacker makes it seem that there is a whole range of domains, each with its own sealed off world of explanation; but surely love, football and the others are just sub-domains of the mental realm? Though we don’t yet know how this works there is plenty of evidence that the mental domain is at least causally dependent on physics, if not reducible to it. That’s what the discussion is all about. We can imagine Hacker a few centuries ago assuring us loftily that the idea of applying ordinary physics to celestial mechanics was a naive category error. If only Galileo had read up on his Oxford philosophy he would realise that the attempt to explain the motion of the planets in terms of physical forces was doomed to end in unresolvable linguistic bewitchment!

I plan to feature more of these discussion videos as a bit of a supplement to the usual menu here, by the way.

Haecceity

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!]

Mine, all mine

mineFollowing on somewhat from the idea of there being a quale of being me, the latest JCS includes a paper by Marc Slors and Fleur Jongepier about Mineness without Minimal Selves.

‘Mineness’ here is the quality of our experiences that makes them feel like ours, their first-person givenness. Slors and Jongepier say that the majority of theories explain this in terms of how the experience relates to a minimal self; although different terminology is used all these theories have in common that they rely on ‘internal’ structure, whereas Slors and Jongepier want instead to advocate  a view based on external structure.

What does that all mean? The typical theory – they use Dan Zahavi as a representative case – says that there are three elements; the object experienced, the experiencing, and the subject who experiences. Some have argued that there can’t be experience without an experiencer, but we have to remember that a figure as august as Hume held that there was no subject apart from the stream of experience, no core ‘me’, or at least not one that he could perceive in himself. Now although the subject is indeed not part of the experience per se, it is experientially linked with it in this structure, and that’s why it has the feel of belonging to me. In a way this comes down to the commonsensical claim that experiences feel like mine because they relate to me; not surprising that that should be a popular point of view.

That structure, however, takes no account of time: it is, as it were, an instant view: Slors and Jongepier don’t think this will do. They quote Metzinger saying that he experiences his leg as having always been part of him, and his experiences as part of a stream of consciousness. They hold that this diachronic aspect of experience cannot be left out. Moreover, while they grant that some version of the internal structure described above could be bodged up to allow for continuous experience, it could not easily take account of more distant memories, which they hold to be equally important.

I’m not sure I see this. We’ve talked about unfortunate patients who have no ability to form new long or medium term memories: they exist in a kind of small temporal island, never able to remember how they got where they are and hypothesising that they regained consciousness only a few minutes ago. These people are nevertheless perfectly lucid and articulate and apart form the absence of memory seem to be having unimparied experiences which seem to be thier own just as much as anyone else’s do. Slors and Jongepier would probably point  out that they retain memories from their earlier lives, before their brains were damaged: but if we hypothesise a person with no memories would we also deny them any sense of owning their experiences? I don’t really see why.

Anyway, Slors and Jongepier propose a coherentist theory which does not merely say that experience has to fit into a larger ‘psychobiography’ and dispense with the minimal self. The final, curious element in the theory is the claim that this essential coherence of experience with a background biography is not itself an object of experience. Indeed, it’s the fact that the coherence is not experienced that makes the experience feel like mine.

This seems odd at first sight: how can the absence of an experience of coherence make an experience feel like my own? Putting it informally I think the gist is that it is, as it were, the absence of surprise that lets us know things are familiar. Experiences seem like mine because they slide into the stream of consciousness without a splash.

It is an ingenious theory which seems to capture some aspects of phenomenology rather well; but in the end I don’t feel motivated to adopt it: it isn’t really solving any problems for me. I’m inclined to think that all direct experience seems like mine just because it is direct; my experiences are, as it were, right there, while the external world (and even more so someone else’s experiences) are matters of conjecture and inference. I suppose that means I’m hanging on to my minimal self for the moment.

Perplexities of Consciousness

Picture: Eric Schwitzgebel. Eric Schwitzgebel, author of the excellent Splintered Mind blog (and Professor of Philosophy at University of California at Riverside) has a new book out, Perplexities of Consciousness, which sows doubt and confusion where they have never been sown before.  Like Socrates, Schwitzgebel wants to make us wiser by showing us that we know much less than we thought. It has often been thought that while we might easily be wrong about the world and the things in it, we weren’t prone to being wrong about how the world looks to us: Schwitzgebel seeks to show that in many respects we actually suffer from unresolvable confusions about even that, and worse, in some cases we’re demonstrably wrong. Subjective experience may be a matter of there being something it is like to see red or whatever; but we actually have no clear idea of what that something is (or what it is like).

Back in 2007 Schwitzgebel published a book Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic with Russell Hurlburt which examined Hurlburt’s method of Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES). In DES subjects are asked to record their inward experience at random moments (prompted by a beeper) and are subsequently put through a fairly searching interview. This earlier book, as it happens, is currently the subject of a special issue of the Journal of  Consciousness Studies.  The book’s title sets up a confrontation, but in fact it’s clear that Hurlburt has a good deal in common with Schwitzgebel: the development of a special method for clarifying inner experience implicitly concedes that error is a serious possibility. The differences seem to be partly a matter of how well DES can really work, and partly a difference of agenda, with Schwitzgebel addressing the issues at a more radical and demanding philosophical level.

There is history to all this, of course: introspectionists like Wundt and Titchener once claimed that with careful training our inner experience could be described scientifically in great detail. The catastrophic collapse of that school of thought led on to the absurd over-reaction of behaviourism, which denied the very existence of inner experience. Only now, we might say, does it seem safe for Hurlburt to venture into the scorched territory of introspection and see if with a slightly different tack, a new beginning can be made.

Schwitzgebel’s new book gives us plenty of intriguing reasons to be pessimistic about that project. The book shows its origins in a series of separate papers, but it does cohere around  central themes, finding ambiguity and conflicting testimony just where we might hope for certainty.

First off it asks: do you dream in black and white? This used to be a common question and there was apparently an era when a large proportion of people thought they did. Nowadays no-one seems to think they dream without colour and in the more distant past the question never seemed to come up (dost thou dream in woodcut or tapestry?). Schwitzgebel very plausibly suggests that the idea of monochrome dreams is tied to the prevalence of black and white films and television. Perhaps if you asked, many people would now say they dream in 2D?  I’ve had dreams that apparently took place at least partly in the world of some video game.

You may feel that the question is actually meaningless and that dreams don’t typically either have or lack colour. Perhaps they are pure narrative, and asking whether they are in black and white makes no more sense than asking whether Pride and Prejudice was written in colour. Certainly if we extend the questioning and begin to ask whether dreams are in Technicolor, or what screen format or resolution they use (or in my case perhaps whether they were Xbox or PS2) the discussion starts to seem absurd; but could we deny that people might dream in black and white, at least sometimes? It doesn’t seem too difficult to imagine that you might. It is possible that the prevalence of monochrome moving images actually changed the way people dreamed for a while; but it seems probable we must admit that some people were in fact mistaken about the qualities of their own dreams, and we must certainly accept that there was a degree of uncertainty. So Schwitzgebel has his wedge in position.

Second, he asks: do things look flat? He cites sources who say that a coin viewed at an angle looks elliptical: not to me, he objects (at least not unless I view it very obliquely, when I can sort of see it that way); if coins look elliptical to you does the world in general similarly look flat? Schwitzgebel addresses the idea that the coin in fact looks like its projection on to a flat surface and raises some objections: in fact, he claims there’s no way to make the geometry of ‘flattism’ make sense. He suspects that here again people’s intuitions have been captured by ‘technology’ – in this case people are thinking of how objects would be represented in a drawing or photograph. He remarks that some theorists have claimed that stereoscopic vision involves systematic doubling of perceived objects; while it’s true that if we focus on something far away we can see two images of a finger held close to our face, Schwitzgebel finds it a very odd idea that most of the objects in our field of vision are normally doubled (I agree – I also agree with him that the world doesn’t look all that much flatter when viewed with one eye rather than two).

Now we move on to academic, questionnaire-based research into our mental imagery, and it seems Galton is to blame for first spreading the idea that this sort of thing worked. Curiously, Galton’s research found that the scientists in his sample were predisposed to deny the existence of mental imagery altogether, while the other subjects were more likely to accept it;  a result which no-one has been able to duplicate since. Perhaps back then people thought mental imagery was an airy-fairy poetic business which hard-nosed scientists should reject.  It turns out, moreover, that there is little or no correlation between reporting vivid mental imagery and being good at tasks which apparently require mental visualisation, such as comparing rotated 3d shapes. This is odd: why would evolution give us vivid mental imagery if it doesn’t even help with tasks that require vivid mental images?  Again it seems that our own reports are all but useless as a guide to what’s really going on in there. We may claim to visualise a table, but under questioning we usually turn out to be unable to provide details, or become confused, or pause to imagine up some more details.

The next chapter raises the interesting question of human echolocation. Nagel famously took bats as his example of a creature whose inner experience we could not hope to imagine because it had a sense we entirely lacked. With amusing irony Schwitzgebel’s case here is based on the fact that we do have some echolocation after all; we’re just not normally aware of it. With a little practice we can learn how to stop short of a wall just by making regular noises and picking up the echo (if you’re going to try this at home, I recommend taking some precautions to ensure that your nose isn’t the first part of you to detect the wall unambiguously).  Some blind people are well aware of this echolocating ability, but (a real score for Schwitzgebel) they misperceive it.  Typically they describe the experience as being about pressure on the face, and nothing to do with hearing: but experiments with blocked ears and covered faces show clearly that they’re wrong about their own experiences.

I mentioned Titchener earlier: Schwitzgebel gives an interesting account of his methods. Whereas these days one would typically try to capture the subject’s impressions as fresh as possible, uncontaminated by the experimenter’s own prejudices, Titchener and his contemporaries took the opposite view: until you were very thoroughly trained in discrimination of your impressions, your testimony was worthless. Schwitzgebel explains how Titchener’s researchers were trained to pick out ‘difference tones’, illusory notes heard under certain conditions.  (You can try it out for yourself on Schwitzgebel’s own page here. There is other useful stuff on his home page including abstracts and draft chapters.)  Some of these tones are debatable and only a minority claim to be able to hear them: are the others failing to hear them, or hearing them and failing to discriminate? Titchener apparently has no answer.

The next chapter returns to earlier concerns about whether experience is sparse or abundant:  are things outside the centre of our attention still constantly present in consciousness (abundant), or do they drop out (sparse).  Schwitzgebel previously used the terminology ‘rich’ and ‘thin’, and we discussed some earlier Hurlburtian experiments of his. It will come as no surprise to find that Schwitzgebel, who quotes radically opposing views from a variety of sources, regards the matter as unresolved and possibly unresolvable; but I must say that this time round I couldn’t see any reason why we shouldn’t just conclude that experience is sometimes sparse and sometimes abundant. There’s no doubt that sometimes when we focus narrowly on one thing, we lose track of everything else; and it seems hard to deny that at times we also pay vigilant attention to our surroundings in general. Couldn’t it simply be that consciousness can have a wide or a narrow beam, at least partly under our own control?

Schwitzgebel now feels ready for a direct assault on the doctrine that our knowledge of our own experience is infallible.  He warms up by questioning whether we know what emotion is, conceding (rather dangerously?) that his wife can sometimes judge his emotional state better than he can himself. What neutral yardstick he uses to confirm his wife’s diagnosis is not altogether clear.

Why is it, he asks, that scarcely anyone, even the most vigorous sceptics, seriously questions the infallibility of introspection on certain points? The core argument seems to be that we can be wrong about the way things are, but we cannot be wrong about the way they appear to us. But why not? Schwitzgebel claims the argument rests on equivocation between two senses of  ‘appear’ , one of them epistemic as in ‘it appears to me that…’.  I don’t know whether the argument actually rests so much on the word ‘appear’ , but it seems a valid and interesting claim that there are two levels at work here: our experience and our beliefs or claims about it, with no special reason to think that the latter must be magically veridical.

Now there is a kind of rock-bottom argument available here; I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used, but it may be in the back of the minds of those who argue for infallibility. This is that eventually you get below the level where truth and falsehood apply. If you pare experience down enough, you get to a point where it just is: it’s not actually that it’s infallible, more that it’s beyond the realm of fallibility or infallibility. To be fallible, to have truth values, there has to be an element of intentionality (and the right kind, too, with an appropriate ‘direction of fit’ – I don’t think desires can be false), but at the rock bottom level, this is absent. If I just experience without any thoughts about it at all, fallibility doesn’t come into it.

I dare say Schwitzgebel might accept that up to a point, although he could reasonably point out that our experience is in practice completely suffused with a kind of intentionality; unconscious parts of our mind do an awful lot of interpretation before reports from our senses reach us and arguably pretty well everything is presented to us ‘as’ something, not just as mere sense-data (the kind of intentionality involved, that lets part of our brain add implicit messages to the conscious part about ‘that there being a table’ and so on is interesting, probably very important, and totally obscure); though generally it seems we can ‘look through’ to the basic sense-impressions if we want.

The question then is perhaps whether there is some very simple level of intentionality that can be added to the rock-bottom experience without any chance of its being wrong yet without it having the kind of trivial self-validation (‘This is the sentence I wrote’) that Schwitzgebel rightly excludes. Could it be that along with the experience itself we have an accompanying belief which says something like “Yeah, that…” which can’t really be wrong?  I still find it hard to resist the idea that there’s something infallible in there.

It’s a great point though; a strong and well-founded attack on such an important and well-accepted dogma has to be of great value. It forces us into greater clarity even if in the end it isn’t accepted.

The book winds up with consideration of another engaging and interesting issue. What do you see when you turn out the light? (I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine, as Lennon and McCartney argued in their seminal work.)  Apparently little attention has been given to what things look like when our eyes are closed in normal light, but the book unearths quite a sequence of views about what we can see when our eyes are closed in the dark. Grey bands feature strongly in the older reports and then seem to drop out of favour: specks of light turn up fairly regularly, but you won’t be surprised to hear that there is in the end no real consensus but a quantity of misplaced confidence. I think it’s perhaps a little surprising so few people seem to say that when their eyes are closed in the dark they see nothing.  Trying it myself I find I have to sort of insist on seeing and then get some very dim lines and grids, and flashes of amorphous shapes in brighter colour. This kind of thing might well have a good explanation in neurology and the more or less random firing of isolated neurons that respond to lines, grids, or patches of colour.  At times, strangely, I had to do something hard to describe to stop my imagination intervening in what I was experiencing and livening things up.  Overall, it doesn’t look too promising a field for research to me, but, as Schwitzgebel suggests, why not see what you think (or see what you see)?

So in conclusion, what’s the verdict? I think Schwitzgebel’s case is essentially successful; his contention that there’s more to deal with here than we may have realised seems hard to deny.  This is salutary and also interesting; and since the subject is engaging and much of the discussion is readily accessible, I think the book deserves a wider readership outside the philosophical village.

I think it was Russell who said that when acting on a vigorous mind, scepticism produces new energy rather than despair: so can we add any positive conclusions to the overwhelmingly negative ones in the book?  I’m left with two main thoughts. First, there is a philosphical case to be answered in the central assault on infallibility.  Second, I think a great deal of the ambiguity and contradiction exposed by Schwitzgebel comes from the sheer complexity of the task. We ourselves, the experiencing entities, are pretty complex, with different levels of conscious and unconscious thought interacting in a variety of ways.  Second, the ways we can experience and think about things is limitlessly varied.  I don’t think it would be difficult to list fifty significantly different ways of  ‘thinking about’ a table, with and without explicit imagery.  Accordingly in many cases I think simple misunderstandings over what type of experience we’re talking about are more than half the problem. Perhaps Galton’s scientists thought ‘mental imagery’ meant what I would call ‘voluntary hallucination’; perhaps for those monochrome dreamers ‘black and white’ just meant dreams where colour wasn’t specifically salient. Taking all these problems together with a certain natural human variability, I think we might find explanations.  It wouldn’t be trained subjects we need, just better terminology and a more clearly developed common understanding.  I say ‘just’ – in fact it’s quite a tall order but not, I think, hopeless.

Mystery

Picture: shrouded in mystery.
Picture: Blandula. I’d like to say a word for mystery. I think Haldane summed it up:

…the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

Picture: Bitbucket. I hate that quote so much!  The complacent fake modesty; the characteristic Oxford attitude of mingled superiority and second-ratism:  don’t you go thinking you can apply your mind to these weighty issues, little man; the best you can do is listen reverently to the words of our mighty predecessors. Footnotes to Plato! Footnotes to Plato!

Picture: Blandula. Good grief, what a reaction! Well, then, let me quote someone you ought to like better; Leibniz:

…it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds, that is to say, by means of figures and motions. And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which push one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception.

It’s interesting, incidentally, that Leibniz should have picked a mill. In these days of computers, it’s natural for us to talk of thinking machines, but it must have been a much less obvious metaphor then; especially a mill, which doesn’t produce any very complex behaviour… though Babbage called the central processor of the Analytical Engine the ‘mill’ didn’t he… and of course Leibniz himself designed calculating machines, so perhaps a mechanical metaphor was more natural to him than it perhaps was to his readers… Anyway! The point is, this is a good example of a recurrent theme where someone holds up for our examination a mental phenomenon – in this case perception – and holds up as it were in the other hand the physical world, and says it’s just obvious that the latter cannot account for the former.

Here’s Brentano.

Every mental phenomenon is characterised by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction towards an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. This intentional in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We could, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.

This time we’re not talking about perception as such, but about intentionality: though Brentano claims it’s characteristic of every mental phenomenon.

Then again, Nagel.

If we acknowledge that a physical theory of mind must account for the subjective character of experience, we must admit that no presently available conception gives us a clue how this could be done. The problem is unique. If mental processes are indeed physical processes, then there is something it is like, intrinsically, to undergo certain physical processes. What it is for such a thing to be the case remains a mystery.

It would be easy to find similar sources in which people contrast the pinkish-grey jelly in the skull with the sparkling abstract mental life it apparently sustains. These claims tend to have two things in common. The first is, they are essentially ostensive. There isn’t really an argument being offered at this point, more a demonstration; we’re just being shown. Look at this; then look at that;  see?

Second, the claims are emphatic: they insist. It’s obvious, they say, just look: no-one could think that this was that.  These things have nothing whatever in common.

Picture: Bitbucket. Of course they’re emphatic: they want to hurry us on past the sketchy part before we pause and ask why this shouldn’t be that. They’ve bundled the idea into its coat, thrust its hat into its hands, and are shoving it out the front door because they’re afraid that otherwise we might entertain it for a while.

Picture: Blandula. If they didn’t want us to entertain the idea, why would they write about it? No. The absence of argument here isn’t a weakness; on the contrary, it’s a demonstration of the case. The very fact that we can’t give arguments for the existence of our mental life proves its utter distinctness; we can’t prove it, we can only notice it. But, and this is the reason for the emphasis, what noticing!  ‘In your face’ doesn’t begin to get it; phenomenal experience is inside your face; it’s so emphatically there you could fairly say it defines the word.  

What I’m saying is that these claims have a special quality; simply to pay careful attention to them is itself to experience their validity. The reality and distinctness of the mental world really deserve for once that much-misused term ‘self-evident’.

Picture: Bitbucket.  It’s going to be very convenient if the absence of argument is taken to make a claim self-evident. Proving six impossible things before breakfast will be child’s play.

Actually, I think you are giving us an argument, but it’s so feeble you prefer it not to be recognised: the argument from bogglement. It runs: I can’t see how this could be that; it follows that it’s somehow cosmically distinct. The falsity of the argument, once stated is too obvious too require further comment, but let me just remind you of all those people who couldn’t imagine how the earth could possibly be moving.

Dennett has pointed out in a similar context that mysterians rely on passing off complexity as ineffability. Of course we don’t know all the details of how particular physical events in the world trigger neuronal events in the brain, let alone how that vastly complex series of functions constitutes experience. Even if we had the information, we couldn’t hold it all in mind at once. But our inability to do that, and any bogglement which may arise, does not in any way tend to show that there is no complete story.

Now Dennett would say that if only we could hold in mind all the details of the physical account, all this fantastically complex stuff, then the bogglement would vanish. But I’m not sure about that. Let me confess something: I too, boggle at the task of understanding the incomprehensible complexity of mental phenomena. But I boggle at other things too. Take computers. Now I think I can say without claiming to be an expert that I know how computers work.  I’ve played around with one or two high-level programming languages; I’ve dabbled in machine code; I’ve run up a couple of routines for imaginary Turing machines. In short, I know how it works. And yet, it still sometimes looks like magic; my mind still boggles sometimes at what I see computers doing. Now if I can get bogglement from something I understand quite well and know is a 100% physical process, it follows that my boggling at the brain and what it does shows nothing. 

Picture: Blandula. It’s not the bogglement that matters; it’s the undeniable direct experience. It’s not because we don’t understand experience that we say it’s something distinctly non-physical; it’s because we can see it’s distinctly non-physical.  To me I confess it seems to need some kind of educated perversity to deny this. Colin McGinn has pointed out that conscious experience is non-spatial: it has no position or volume.  I don’t know quite what we should say about that – abstractions like numbers are non-spatial too in what seems a different sort of way (if I mention Plato, will you start shouting again?); but it captures something about the obvious – patent – irreducibility of the mental.

I mean, just give it fair consideration; lift your eyes out of that two-dimensional world you’re cycling round and round and just notice that there’s another whole aspect to the world. To think it possible is in this case to realise it’s true, I believe.

Picture: Bitbucket. You know, you’re right.

Picture: Blandula. You see it?

Picture: Bitbucket. No, you’re right that with you there is no argument.