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!]

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.

Panpsychist Consciousness

Picture: star. The JCS has devoted its latest issue to definitions of consciousness. I thought I’d done reasonably well by quoting seventeen different views, but Ram L. P. Vimal lists forty, in what he acknowledges is not a comprehensive list. There is much to be said about all this – and Bill Faw promises a book-length treatment of the thoughts offered in his paper – but much of the ground has been trodden before.

A notable exception is David Skrbina’s panpsychist view. I have been accused in the past of being unfair to panpsychism, the belief that everything has some mental or experiential properties, and I remain unconvinced, but I was genuinely interested in hearing how a panpsychist would define consciousness. I think  panpsychists, who believe awareness of some kind is a fundamental property of everything, face a particular challenge in defining exactly what consciousness. For one thing they don’t enjoy the advantage which the rest of us have of being able to contrast the mindless stuff around us with mindful brains – for panpsychists there is no mindless stuff.  But sometimes it’s coming at a problem from a strange new angle that yields useful insights.

Skrbina very briefly puts a case for panpsychism by noting that even rocks maintain their own existence with a degree of success and respond to the impacts and changes of their environment.  This amounts, he suggests, to at least a simple form of experience, and hence of mind. But mind, he says,  has two aspects: the inner phenomenal experience and an outward-facing intentional/relational aspect. Both of these are characteristic of the mental life of all things; he acknowledges at least a prima facie difficulty over what counts as a ‘thing’ here, but it includes such entities as atoms, rocks, tables, chairs, human beings, planets, and stars.  In a footnote, Skrbina cites Plato and Aristotle as allies in thinking that stars might have a mental life, together with JBS Haldane’s view that the interior of stars might shelter minds superior to our own (perhaps not quite the same view – the existence of minds within stars doesn’t imply that the stars themselves have minds any more than the existence of minds in France suggests that France has its own mentality) and Roger Penrose who apparently has speculated that neutron stars may sustain large quantum superpositions and thus conceivably a high intensity of consciousness.

Skrbina does not, of course, believe that rocks have minds exactly like our own, and suggests that material complexity corresponds with mental complexity, so that there is a spectrum of mental life from the feeble, unremembered glimmerings experienced by rocks all the way up to the fantastically elaborate and persistent mental evolutions hosted by human beings. This is convenient, since it allows Skrbina to find a place for subconscious and unconscious mental activity, which can be regarded as merely low-wattage mentality, whereas on the face of it panpsychism seems to make unconsciousness impossible. But, he says, there is a fundamental continuity, and this applies to consciousness as well as general mentality. Consciousness, he suggests, is the border, the interface between the inward and outward aspects of mentality, and since everything posesses both of those, everything must have at least a simple analogue of consciousness. It might be better, he suggests, if we could find a new word for this common property of consciousness and reserve the term itself for the human-style variety, since that would accord better with normal usage, but we are nevertheless talking about a spectrum of complexity, not two different things.

Skrbina’s exposition is brief, and he only claims to be providing a pointer toward a promising line of investigation. The idea of consciousness as the linkage or interface between inner and outer mentality does have some appeal. Skrbina’s distinction between inner and outer corresponds approximately to a view which is widely popular about there being two basic kinds of consciousness;  the phenomenal, experiental variety and the rest. Famously this kind of distinction is embodied in David Chalmers’ hard/easy problem distinction and Ned Block’s a-consciousness and p-consciousness, to name only two examples; the pieces in the JCS provide other variations.  Why not regard consciousness as the thing that brings them together, even if you’re not attracted by panpsychism?

Well, I don’t know. For one thing I think the non-phenomenal half of the mind is usually short-changed.  Besides phenomenal awareness, we ought also to distinguish between agency, intentionality, and understanding, all large mysteries which really deserve better than being smooshed together. We could still see consciousness as the thing that brings it all together, perhaps, but that doesn’t exactly appeal either: it seems too much like saying that the human body is the thing that holds our bones and muscles together; better to say it’s the thing they help to make up.

I must confess – and this perhaps is unfair – to being put off by Skrbina’s description of consciousness as the luminous upper layer of the mind. Apart from the slightly confusing geometry (it’s the upper layer of the mind, but between the inner and outer parts), I don’t see why it’s luminous, and that sounds a bit like the resort to poetry sometimes adopted by theologians who have run out of cogent points to make. Still, he deserves at least a couple of cheers for offering a new approach, something he rightly advocates.

Abilities don’t matter

Picture: bike. Sam Coleman returned in a recent paper (JCS vol 16, n0 2-3) to the old perennial of Mary the colour scientist.  As you may know, Frank Jackson’s story about Mary was intended to establish that there was something important – qualia – which the simple physical account of the world omitted. Mary, we’re told, knows everything that could possibly be known about colour from a scientific point of view (far more than any living scientist knows, or could know).  She knows all the physical facts. But she has never experienced colour; when she sees a red rose for the first time, doesn’t she learn something new – ie what red looks like? If you agree, then, it is argued, you must agree that there are things in heaven and earth not dreamt of in physicalist philosophy.

One standard riposte to this line of argument is to deny that Mary learns any new facts when she sees red for the first time:  instead, she merely acquires a new ability. Now she can recognise red, when she couldn’t do before; but she doesn’t actually know any new facts about redness or the human optical system. (After all, the phrase ‘she knows what red is like’ literally suggests that she can give a list of things which are like a red object, and say whether the colour of a given object resembles red or not – which sounds a lot like recognition.) We might mention other abilities; the ability to remember or imagine redness, in particular – but none of these involve new knowledge in the ordinary sense, any more than acquiring the ability to ride a bike involves learning new facts. You can read as many books about bicycles as you like: you’ll still fall off the first time you get on one.

Coleman aims to knock this line of argument on the head, not by refuting it but by showing it to be irrelevant. Most attacks on the Ability Hypothesis, he says, address what he calls its inner face directly. They seek to show that what happens to Mary cannot be boiled down to the gaining of an ability – perhaps because all such abilities involve factual knowledge – or they set out to show directly that Mary does indeed learn new facts.  These strategies tend, he says with some justice, to end up mired in a clash of intuitions with no clear way forward.

Instead, then, he concedes that if we wish, we can see what happens to Mary as the acquisition of some new abilities; he addresses instead what he calls the outer face of the problem. What about the analogy of bike-riding? Proponents of the Ability Hypothesis say it does not depend on factual knowledge, and it’s true it doesn’t come from academic book-reading. But what does it involve? Surely it’s all about keeping our balance? That’s a matter of teaching your muscles how to respond quickly and appropriately to certain sensations of tipping over.  So hang on, it actually involves knowledge of what it feels like to wobble – what certain kinds of phenomenal experience are.  Is this kind of knowledge factual knowledge?  Never mind the answer for the moment – all we need do is notice that this is exactly the kind of question we were asking about Mary’s experience of redness in the first place. The Ability Hypothesis has merely taken us back to where we started – so we need not waste our time on it.

A neat piece of footwork, I think, and Coleman’s analysis of the phenomenal element in abilities such as bike-riding, ear-waggling, and the use of chopsticks provides an interesting new insight, worth having in its own right. (Readers may be interested in the Phenomenal Qualities Project, whose three-year mission is due to begin next month; Coleman is co-investigator to Paul Coates and the list of project members includes some stellar names.)

Where are we left with Mary meanwhile, though? Should we now accept the refutation of physicalism she represents? No, I would say, but then again yes.

One thing that’s sure about Mary is that if she does acquire new knowledge, it is knowledge of some special kind. It isn’t the sort we can write down and transmit in words – that much is true ex hypothesi, because if it were that kind of knowledge, it would be among the things Mary already knows. It’s tempting to denounce this kind of knowledge as metaphorical or worse, but let’s merely ask whether it’s fair to expect the theory of physicalism to include it.  Theories, after all, are expressed in words, and typically written down; if we’re dealing with facts that can’t be dealt with that way it seems only reasonable to conclude that no theory could deal with them and that they must remain extra-theoretical.  Physicalism might then be incomplete in some sense, but we have no reason to think it isn’t as complete as any theory could be.  How much is it reasonable to ask?

And yet, and yet…  We’re talking here about what things are like;  this somehow still feels like a problem where more could be said after all. We can’t expect that our theories should deliver ineffable reality itself, but doesn’t it seem that there is some tantalising last elucidation obtainable here, if only we knew how to go about it?