Do zombies have rights?

Posted on January 19, 2014 by Peter

Existential Comics raises an interesting question (thanks to Micha for pointing it out). In the strip a doctor with a machine that measures consciousness (rather like Tononi’s new machine, except that that measures awareness) tells an unlucky patient he lacks the consciousness-producing part of the brain altogether. Consequently, the doctor says, he is legally allowed to harvest the patient’s organs.

Would that be right?

We can take it that what the patient lacks is consciousness in the ‘Hard Problem’ sense. He can talk and behave quite normally, it’s just that when he experiences things there isn’t ‘something it is like’; there’s no real phenomenal experience. In fact, he is a philosophical zombie, and for the sake of clarity I take him to be a strict zombie; one of the kind who are absolutely like their normal human equivalent in every important detail except for lacking qualia (the cartoon sort of suggests otherwise, since it implies an actual part of the brain is missing, but I’m going to ignore that).

Would lack of qualia mean you also lacked human rights and could be treated like an animal, or worse? It seems to me that while lack of qualia might affect your standing as a moral object (because it would bear on whether you could suffer, for example), it wouldn’t stop you being a full-fledged moral subject (you would still have agency). I think I would consequently draw a distinction between the legal and the moral answer. Legally, I can’t see any reason why the absence of qualia would make any difference. Legal personhood, rights and duties are all about actions and behaviour, which takes us squarely into the realm of the Easy Problem. Our zombie friend is just like us in these respects; there’s no reason why he can’t enter into contracts, suffer punishments, or take on responsibilities. The law is a public matter; it is forensic – it deals with the things dealt with in the public forum; and it follows that it has nothing to say about the incorrigibly private matter of qualia.

Of course the doctor’s machine changes all that and makes qualia potentially a public matter (which is one reason why we might think the machine is inherently absurd, since public qualia are almost a contradiction in terms). It could be that the doctor is appealing to some new, recently-agreed legislation which explicitly takes account of his equipment and its powers. If so, such legislation would presumably have to have been based on moral arguments, so whichever way we look at it, it is to the moral discussion that we must turn.

This is a good deal more complicated. Why would we suppose that phenomenal experience has moral significance? There is a general difficulty because the zombie has experiences too. In conditions when a normal human would feel fear, he trembles and turns pale; he smiles and relaxes under the influence of pleasure; he registers everything that we all register. He writes love poetry and tells us convincingly about his feelings and tastes. It’s just that, on the inside, everything is hollow and void. But because real phenomenal experience always goes along with zombie-style experience, it’s hard for us to find any evidence as to why one matters when the other doesn’t.

The question also depends critically on what ethical theories we adopt. We might well take the view that our existing moral framework is definitive, authorised by God or tradition, and therefore if it says nothing about qualia, we should take no account of them either. No new laws are necessary, and there can be no moral reason to allow the harvesting of organs.

In this respect I believe it is the case that medieval legislatures typically saw themselves, not as making new laws, but as rediscovering the full version of old ones, or following out the implications of existing laws for new circumstances. So when the English parliamentarians wanted to argue against Charles I’s Ship Tax, rather than rest their case on inequity, fiscal distortion, or political impropriety, they appealed to a dusty charter of Ine, ancient ruler of Wessex (regrettably they referred to Queen Ine, whereas he had in fact been a robustly virile King).

Even within a traditional moral framework, therefore, we might find some room to argue that new circumstances called for some clarification; but I think we would find it hard going to argue for the harvesting.

What if we were utilitarians, those people who say that morality is acting to bring about the greatest happiness of the greatest number? Here we have a very different problem because the utilitarians are more than happy to harvest your organs anyway if by doing so they can save more than one person, no matter whether you have qualia or not. This unattractive kind of behaviour is why most people who espouse a broadly utilitarian framework build in some qualifications (they might say that while organ harvesting is good in principle actual human aversion to it would mean that in practice it did not conduce to happiness overall, for example).

The interesting point is whether zombie happiness counts towards the utilitarian calculation. Some might take the view that without qualia it had no real value, so that the zombie’s happiness figure should be taken as zero. Unfortunately there is no obvious answer here; it just depends what kind of happiness you think is important. In fact some consequentialists take the utilitarian system but plug into it desiderata other than happiness anyway. It can be argued that old-fashioned happiness utilitarianism would lead to us all sitting in boxes that directly stimulated our pleasure centres, so something more abstract seems to be needed; some even just speak of ‘utility’ without making it any more specific.

No clear answer then, but it looks as if qualia might at least be relevant to a utilitarian.

What about the Kantians? Kant, to simplify somewhat, thought we should act in accordance with the kind of moral rules we should want other people to adopt. So, we should be right to harvest the organs so long as we were content that if we ourselves turned out to be zombies, the same thing would happen to us. Now I can imagine that some people might attach such value to qualia that they might convince themselves they should agree to this proposition; but in general the answer is surely negative. We know that zombies behave exactly like ordinary people, so they would not for the most part agree to having their organs harvested; so we can say with confidence that if I were a zombie I should still tell the doctor to desist.

I think that’s about as far as I can reasonably take the moral survey within the scope of a blog post. At the end of the day, are qualia morally relevant? People certainly talk as if they are in some way fundamental to value. “Qualia are what make my life worth living” they say: unfortunately we know that zombies would say exactly the same.

I think most people, deliberately or otherwise, will simply not draw a distinction between real phenomenal experience on one hand and the objective experience of the kind a zombie can have on the other. Our view of the case will in fact be determined by what we think about people with and without feelings of both kinds, rather than people with and without qualia specifically. If so, qualia sceptics may find that grist to their mill.

Micha has made some interesting comments which I hope he won’t mind me reproducing.

The question of deontology vs consequentialism might be involved. A deontologist has less reason — although still some — to care about the content of the victim’s mind. Animals are also objects of morality; so the whole question may be quantitative, not qualitative.

Subjects like ethics aren’t easy for me to discuss philosophically to someone of another faith. Orthodox Judaism, like traditional Islam, is a legally structured religion. Therefore ethics aren’t discussed in the same language as in western society, since how the legal system processes revelation impacts conclusion.

In this case, it seems relevant that the talmud says that someone who kills adnei-hasadeh (literally: men of the field) is as guilty of murder as someone who kills a human being. It’s unclear what the talmud is referring to: it may be a roman mythical being who is like a human, but with an umbilicus that grows down to roots into the earth, or perhaps an orangutan — from the Malay for “man of the jungle”, or some other ape. Whatever it is, only actual human beings are presumed to have free will. And yet killing one qualifies as murder, not the killing of an animal.

War on Consciousness?

Posted on November 3, 2013 by Peter

It may be a little off our usual beat, but Graham Hancock’s piece in the New Statesman (longer version here) raised some interesting thoughts.

It’s the ‘war on drugs’ that is Hancock’s real target, but he says it’s really a war on consciousness…

This extraordinary imposition on adult cognitive liberty is justified by the idea that our brain activity, disturbed by drugs, will adversely impact our behaviour towards others. Yet anyone who pauses to think seriously for even a moment must realize that we already have adequate laws that govern adverse behaviour towards others and that the real purpose of the “war on drugs” must therefore be to bear down on consciousness itself.

That doesn’t seem quite right. It’s true there are weak arguments for laws against drugs – some of them based on bad consequences that arguably arise from the laws rather than the drugs – but there are reasonable ones, too. The bedrock point is that taking a lot of psychoactive drugs is probably bad for you. Hancock and many others might say that we should have the right to harm ourselves, or at any rate to risk harm, if we don’t hurt anyone else, but that principle is not, I think, generally accepted by most legislatures. Moreover there are special arguments in the case of drugs. One is that they are addictive. ‘Addiction’ is used pretty widely these days to cover any kind of dependency or habit, but I believe the original meaning was that an addict became physically dependent, unable to stop taking the drug without serious, possibly even fatal consequences, while at the same time ever larger doses were needed to achieve relief. That is clearly not a good way to go, and it’s a case where leaving people to make up their own minds doesn’t really work because of the dependency. Secondly, drugs may affect the user’s judgement and for that reason too should arguably be a case where people are not left to judge risks for themselves.

Now, as a matter of fact neither of those arguments may apply in the case of some restricted drugs – they may not be addictive in that strongest sense and they may not remove the user’s ability to judge risks; and the risks themselves may in some cases have been overstated; but we don’t have to assume that governments are simply set on denying us the benefits of enhanced consciousness.

What would those benefits be? They might be knowledge, enhanced cognition, or simple pleasure. We could also reverse the argument that Hancock attributes to our rulers and suggest that drugs make people less likely to harm others. People who are lying around admiring the wallpaper in a confused manner are not out committing crimes, after all.

Enhanced cognition might work up to a point in some cases: certain drugs really do help dispel fatigue or anxiety and sharpen concentration in the short term. But the really interesting possibility for us is that drug use might allow different kinds of cognition and knowledge. I think the evidence on fathoming the secrets of the Universe is rather discouraging. Drugs may often make people feel as if they understand everything, but it never seems to be possible to write the insights down. Where they are written down, they turn out to be like the secret of the cosmos apprehended by Oliver Wendell Holmes under the influence of ether; later he discovered his notes read “A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout”.

But perhaps we’re not dealing with that kind of knowledge. Perhaps instead drugs can offer us the kind of ineffable knowledge we get from qualia? Mary the colour scientist is said to know something new once she has seen red for the first time; not something about colour that could have been written down, or ex hypothesi she would have known it already, but what it is like. Perhaps drugs allow us to experience more qualia, or even super qualia; to know what things are like whose existence we should not otherwise have suspected. Terry Pratchett introduced the word ‘knurd’ to describe the state of being below zero on the drunkenness scale; needing a drink to bring you up to the normal mental condition: perhaps philosophical zombies, who experience no qualia, are simply in a similar state with respect to certain drugs.

That seems plausible enough, but it raises the implication that normal qualia are also in fact delusions (not an uncongenial implication for some). For drugs there is a wider problem of non-veridicality. We know that drugs can cause hallucinations, and as mentioned above, can impart feelings of understanding without the substance. What if it’s all like that? What if drug experiences are systematically false? What if we don’t really have any new knowledge or any new experiences on drugs, we just feel as if we have? For that matter, what about pleasure? What if drugs give us a false memory of having had a good time – or what if they make us think we’re having a good time now although in reality we’re not enjoying it at all? You may well feel that last one is impossible, but it doesn’t pay to underestimate the tricksiness of the mind.

Well, many people would say that the feeling of having had a good time is itself worth having, even if the factual element of the feeling is false. So perhaps in the same way we can say that even if qualia are delusions, they’re valuable ones. Perhaps the exalted places to which drugs take us are imaginary; but just because somewhere doesn’t exist doesn’t mean it isn’t worth going there. For myself I generally prefer the truth (no argument for that, just a preference) and I think I generally get it most reliably when sober and undrugged.

Hancock, at any rate, has another kind of knowledge in mind. He suggests that the brain may turn out to be, not a generator of consciousness but rather a receiver, tuned in to the psychic waves where, I assume, our spiritual existence is sustained. Drugs, he proposes, might possibly allow us to twiddle the knobs on our mental apparatus so as to receive messages from others: different kinds of being or perhaps people in other dimensions. I’m not quite clear where he draws the line between receiving and existing, or whether we should take ourselves to be in the brain or in the spiritual ether. If we’re in the brain, then the signals we’re receiving are a form of outside control which doesn’t sound very nice: but if we’re really in the ether then when the signals from other beings are being received by the brain we ought to lose consciousness, or at least lose control of our bodies, not just pick up a message. No doubt Hancock could clarify, given a chance, but it looks as if there’s a bit of work to be done.

But let’s not worry too much, because the idea of the brain as a mere receiver seems highly dubious. We know now that very detailed neuronal activity is associated with very specific mental content, and as time goes on that association becomes ever sharper. This means that if the brain is a receiver the signals it receives must be capable of influencing a vast collection of close-packed neurons in incredibly exquisite detail. It’s only fair to remember that a neurologist as distinguished as Sir John Eccles, not all that long ago, thought this was exactly what was happening; but to me it seems incompatible with ordinary physics. We can manipulate small areas of the brain from outside with suitable equipment, but dictating its operation at this level of detail, and without any evident physical intervention seems too much. Hancock says the possibility has not been disproved, and for certain standards of proof that’s right; but I reckon by the provisional standards that normally apply for science we can rule out the receiver thesis.

Speaking of manipulating the brain from outside, it seems inevitable to me that within a few years we shall have external electronic means of simulating the effects of certain drugs, or at least of deranging normal mental operation in a diverting and agreeable way. You’ll be able to slip on a helmet, flick a switch, and mess with your mind in all sorts of ways. They might call it e-drugs or something similar, but you’ll no longer need to buy dodgy chemicals at an exorbitant mark-up. What price the war on drugs or on consciousness then?

Now That’s What I Call Dennett

Posted on June 2, 2013 by Peter

Professors are too polite. So Daniel Dennett reckons. When leading philosophers or other academics meet, they feel it would be rude to explain their theories thoroughly to each other, from the basics up. That would look as if you thought your eminent colleague hadn’t grasped some of the elementary points. So instead they leap in and argue on the basis of an assumed shared understanding that isn’t necessarily there. The result is that they talk past each other and spend time on profitless misunderstandings.

Dennett has a cunning trick to sort this out. He invites the professors to explain their ideas to a selected group of favoured undergraduates (‘Ew; he sounds like Horace Slughorn’ said my daughter); talking to undergraduates they are careful to keep it clear and simple and include an exposition of any basic concepts they use. Listening in, the other professors understand what their colleagues really mean, perhaps for the first time, and light dawns at last.

It seems a good trick to me (and for the undergraduates, yes, by ‘good’ I mean both clever and beneficial); in his new book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking Dennett seems covertly to be playing another. The book offers itself as a manual or mental tool-kit offering tricks and techniques for thinking about problems, giving examples of how to use them. In the examples, Dennett runs through a wide selection of his own ideas, and the cunning old fox clearly hopes that in buying his tools, the reader will also take up his theories. (Perhaps this accessible popular presentation will even work for some of those recalcitrant profs, with whom Dennett has evidently grown rather tired of arguing…. heh, heh!)

So there’s a hidden agenda, but in addition the ‘intuition pumps’ are not always as advertised. Many of them actually deserve a more flattering description because they address the reason, not the intuition. Dennett is clear enough that some of the techniques he presents are rather more than persuasive rhetoric, but at least one reviewer was confused enough to think that Reduction ad Absurdum was being presented as an intuition pump – which is rather a slight on a rigorous logical argument: a bit like saying Genghis Khan was among the more influential figures in Mongol society.

It seems to me, moreover, that most of the tricks on offer are not really techniques for thinking, but methods of presentation or argumentation. I find it hard to imagine someone trying to solve a problem by diligently devising thought-experiments and working through the permutations; that’s a method you use when you think you know the answer and want to find ways to convince others.

What we get in practice is a pretty comprehensive collection of snippets; a sort of Dennettian Greatest Hits. Some of the big arguments in philosophy of mind are dropped as being too convoluted and fruitless to waste more time on, but we get the memorable bits of many of Dennett’s best thought-experiments and rebuttals. Not all of these arguments benefit from being taken out of the context of a more systematic case, and here and there – it’s inevitable I suppose – we find the remix or late cover version is less successful than the original. I thought this was especially so in the case of the Giant Robot; to preserve yourself in a future emergency you build a wandering robot to carry you around in suspended animation for a few centuries. The robot needs to survive in an unpredictable world, so you end up having to endow it with all the characteristics of a successful animal; and you are in a sense playing the part of the Selfish Gene. Such a machine would be able to deal with meanings and intentionality just the way you do, wouldn’t it? Well, in this brief version I don’t really see why or, perhaps more important, how.

Dennett does a bit better with arguments against intrinsic intentionality, though I don’t think his arguments succeed in establishing that there is no difference between original and derived intentionality. If Dennett is right, meaning would be built up in our brains through the interaction of gradually more meaningful layers of homunculi; OK (maybe), but that’s still quite different to what happens with derived intentionality, where things get to mean something because of an agreed convention or an existing full-fledged intention.

Dennett, as he acknowledges, is not always good at following the maxims he sets out. An early chapter is given over to the rules set out by Anatol Rapoport, most notably:

You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”

As someone on Metafilter said, when Dan Dennett does that for Christianity, I’ll enjoy reading it; but there was one place in the current book where I thought Dennett fell short on understanding the opposition. He suggests that Kasparov’s way of thinking about chess is probably the same as Deep Blue’s in the end. What on earth could provoke one to say that they were obviously different, he protests. Wishful thinking? Fear? Well, no need to suppose so: we know that the hardware (brain versus computer) is completely different and runs a different kind of process; we know the capacities of computer and brain are different and, in spite of an argument from Dennett to the contrary, we know the heuristics are significantly different. We know that decisions in Kasparov’s case involve consciousness, while Deep Blue lacks it entirely. So, maybe the processes are the same in the end, but there are some pretty good prima facie reasons to say they look very different.

One section of the book naturally talks about evolution, and there’s good stuff, but it’s still a twentieth century, Dawkinsian vision Dennett is trading in. Can it be that Dennett of all people is not keeping up with the science? There’s no sign here of the epigenetic revolution; we’re still in a world where it’s all about discrete stretches of DNA. That DNA, moreover, got to be the way it is through random mutation; no news has come in of the great struggle with the viruses which we now know has left its wreckage all across the human genome, and more amazing, has contributed some vital functional stretches without which we wouldn’t be what we are. It’s a pity because that seems like a story that should appeal to Dennett, with his pandemonic leanings.

Still, there’s a lot to like; I found myself enjoying the book more and more as it went on and the pretence of being a thinking manual dropped away a bit. Naturally some of Dennett’s old attacks on qualia are here, and for me they still get the feet tapping. I liked Mr Clapgras, either a new argument or more likely one I missed first time round; he suffers a terrible event in which all his emotional and empathic responses to colour are inverted without his actual perception of colour changing at all. Have his qualia been inverted – or are they yet another layer of experience? There’s really no way of telling and for Dennett the question is hardly worth asking. When we got to Dennett’s reasonable defence of compatibilism over free will, I was on my feet and cheering.

I don’t think this book supersedes Consciousness Explained if you want to understand Dennett’s views on consciousness. You may come away from reading it with your thinking powers enhanced, but it will be because your mental muscles have been stretched and used, not really because you’ve got a handy new set of tools. But if you’re a Dennett fan or just like a thoughtful and provoking read, it’s worth a look.

…but something is necessary

Posted on August 19, 2012 by Peter

Last time I suggested that we might approach the Hard Problem of qualia by first solving the impossible problem of why the world exists at all (what the hell, eh?). How would that work?

Qualia, of course, are the redness of red, the indescribable smelliness of the smell of fish, and so on; the subjective, phenomenal, inexpressible qualities of experience, the bit that the scientific account always leaves out. They are often described as the ‘what it is like’ of an experience, and have been memorably characterised as what Mary, who knows everything about colour, learns when she actually sees it for the first time.

My case is that a large part, perhaps all, of the strange ineffability of qualia arises because what we’re doing is mismatching theory and actuality. It should not really be a surprise that the theory of red coloration does not itself deliver the actual experience of redness, but there is some mysterious element in actual real-life experience that puzzles us. I suggest the mysterious extra is in fact haecceity, or thisness; the oddly arbitrary specificity of real life, which sits oddly with the abstract generalities of a theoretical description. So it would help to know why the actual world is so arbitrary and specific: why it isn’t a featureless void, or a geometric point, or a collection of eternal Platonic archetypes. If we knew that we might know something about qualia; and also, I think about ourselves, since we too are arbitrary and specific, not abstract functions or sets of information, but real one-off items.

So can we therefore answer Jim Holt’s question for him? Some caution is certainly in order. Speculative metaphysics is like hard drink; a little now and then is great, but you need to know when to stop or you may find your credibility, if not your coherence, diminishing. But I think we can sketch out a tentative view which will clarify a few points and indicate some promising lines of inquiry which may well be rather helpful.

Let’s step back and look at the overall cosmic problem more empirically: the world does in fact exist and does seem to be rich and complex. What kind of overall chronology would make sense for a world like that? It could be one that starts, putters along for a finite time, and then stops. It could be one that stretches back indefinitely into the past but eventually stops at some point in the future, or one that started at a definite point in the past but goes on indefinitely. It could be indefinitely prolonged at both start and end. Or it could be one that goes round in a permanent loop.

The thing is, in different ways all these options seem to give us a universe which is unmotivated. If there is a final state in which the universe stops, why not go to that state in the first place – why spend time getting there? If the universe goes in a circle and ultimately reaches the state in which it started, why bother leaving the initial state? Our current view paints a picture of a Universe wound up by a cataclysmic Bang and then steadily running down through expansion and increasing entropy, to nothing, or as near nothing as makes no great difference: but it seems odd to start the world with a flagrant contradiction of the principle of decline that afterwards governs its development. The only world that makes sense in these admittedly vague terms is one that is going somewhere, but somewhere it will never finally reach: the only one that does that, I think, is one that starts and then goes on, not merely expanding, but transcending its earlier states and rising to higher levels of complexity indefinitely.

That doesn’t quite tell us why there is anything at all. What caused this indefinite existential transcendence in the first place? Some kind of ontic horror vacui? An inherent cosmic desire for there to be more stuff? One of the things I noticed in reading Jim Holt’s book was that there are one or two gaps in our conceptual toolkit when we embark on this quest. One of those is that we are looking for a causal explanation but we don’t really have any clear idea of what causation is at a fundamental level. Let me here just breezily offer the suggestion that the laws of causation assert the identity of one state of the world with a later state of the world: so for example to say that the world featured me striking a match in certain appropriate conditions at one moment is equivalent (under these laws) to saying there was fire at a slightly later moment. Now if that is true, the only possible causes of the existence of the cosmos at its first moment are either its non-existence at any earlier moment or its own existence at that first moment (if you allow simultaneous causation). I think this says the universe is either necessarily gratuitous or gratuitously necessary, but I’ll leave it with you there for now.

Why do the contents of the world seem so arbitrary and random? I suggest there are two reasons. First, the ongoing transcendence which drives the universe is nomic as well as ontic. It’s not just that there’s more stuff, there are more, and more complex, underlying laws. Our view of the long-term past and future is therefore obscured: the ancient universe was not just physically smaller but metaphysically impoverished or cramped, too, and long-term extrapolations are systematically thrown off by this. If we could understand the process properly, it may be that things would look less random – though I grant that for the moment this must be an optimistic article of faith rather than a rigorously deduced conclusion.

Let me just pour myself a bit of a digression here on the nature of the laws of nature. It is common to speak of the laws of nature or the laws of physics although this is clearly a metaphor, and a very old one. Few people, I would guess, suppose that the laws of nature are literally written down in some cosmic text and enforced by angelic police officers – although it is not uncommon to suppose that the mathematics we use to describe the world is actually what controls it, which I think may be a similar error. So what are these laws? One problem for us is that not only are they not written down in any cosmic text, they’re not written down on paper in earthly texts either: so far as I know, no-one has ever set down a comprehensive list of the Laws of Nature. Physics textbooks set out a number of laws, indeed, but these tend to be the non-obvious ones, rather in the way that early dictionaries included only ‘hard’ words. The nearest thing to a full statement might be in those efforts to produce a Naïve Physics that ended up (in my opinion) producing something that actually struck the normal mind as far weirder than mere Newtonian physics; but they were explicitly setting out a misconceived version of the laws.

It’s consequently hard to feel assured that all relevant examples have been covered: but again I will cut boldly to the chase and suggest that all laws of nature are in fact laws of conservation. They can all be reconstituted as assertions of the continued existence of an underlying entity in different cases, usually at different times. Certainly it seems that any law which can be stated in the form of an equation must be of this kind, because the equation of x with y essentially tells us that the quantity of underlying z of which they are both expressions remains the same whichever form we take it in. Laws which assert, or contain, a constant, clearly state the existence of a continuing fundamental entity in even clearer form.

If that’s true, then perhaps the laws of nature could be restated as a list of existential assertions (though some of the entities whose existence is asserted would be a little unfamiliar), which with a list of values would give us a comprehensive anomic account of the world.

Be that as it may, and getting back to the main point, it is at any rate clear that besides any confusion arising from any nomic evolution which may be going on, certain features of the world arise out of the operation of causality over time. Now it could be that time itself is actually constituted by the ontic growth of the universe (the steady drip of extra stuff providing the steady tick of the moments); but in any case that growth clearly requires time. It may be that some of the deep constant features of the universe are sustained in their existence directly by the same inscrutable principle which caused the universe to come into existence in the first place; but others definitely depend on a long stream of complex causality, and this is surely where the haecceity primarily comes in. We could say that everything is necessary, but that while some things are necessary in the light of metaphysics, others are necessary in the light of history.

To restate that: it may well be that the universe in which we find ourselves is actually the only possible one, and the product of a necessary ontological (and nomological) evolution; but the necessity of the details is both obscured from us by the nature of the evolution itself and also genuinely different from the direct necessity of the underlying features in that it derives its necessity through causation over time.

That’s why actual experience and actual qualia seem so strange and so difficult to capture theoretically. I hope that makes sense of some kind and perhaps appeals to some degree: I’m away now to sleep it off.

Smelling secret harmonies

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Peter

Is trilled smell possible? Ed Cooke and Erik Myin raise the question in the JCS. Why do we care? Well, for one thing smell has always tended to be the poor relation in discussions of conscious experience. The science of vision is so much better developed that seeing generally looks a more tractable area to attack, but arguably the discussion is somewhat lop-sided as a result; ‘seeing red’ isn’t necessarily a perfect epitome of all sensory experience, so a bit of clarification around smells might well be useful.

But the main point of asking the question is to test what Cooke and Myin call the independence thesis: the view that the experienced character of sensations includes a ‘something it is like’ over and above the gross physics of the business: that there’s an ultimate smelliness about smell that has nothing to do with the details of the sensory process. I would say there’s a range of possible positions here. Hardly anyone, I think would say that the physics of perception is irrelevant to how the experience seems. We know that that the wave structure of light and sound determines some of the characteristics of the experiences of vision and hearing, for example, and we know that smell is vaguer about location than vision because it depends on gases wafting around rather than sharply defined rays of light. But beyond that the consensus breaks down. Some would say that these physical characteristics are just the basics and the real excitement lies in the ineffable qualities of experience. Purple is a thing in itself, not a blank sensory token which would do equally well for the smell of coffee, they might say.

Some would go further and accept that the qualities of experience are very largely determined by the physics of the medium and sensory apparatus, but that there’s a certain something beyond that which doesn’t reduce to the simple physics. Rigorous materialists will be tempted to go further still and take the view that however complex and indefinable our experiences may seem, they are fully determined by the qualities of the processes that give rise to them: this of course, amounts to denying the existence of ineffable qualia. (My own view, for what it’s worth, lies an infinitesimal distance short of this extreme.)

Cooke and Myin’s approach is to look at the consequences of the independence thesis. If it’s true then we ought to be able to transfer the forms of one sensory modality to another without it losing its identity. So, in sound we can have a trill, a very rapid alternation of two notes; if independence is true, we ought to be able to have trilled smells.

Before tackling the thought experiment in more detail, Cooke and Myin provide a brisk review of some of the relevant science, including some odd and interesting facts. The smell of pressure-cooked pork liver is made up of 179 different compounds; airflow is indispensable to smell (having your nose full of smelly stuff or your receptors stimulated produces no sensation unless there’s airflow); and so sniffing is more important than you may have thought. It turns out that human beings are pretty well incapable of identifying single components of a smell when there are more than three – so much for perfume designers – and perception of smell is also very heavily conditioned by previous experience (if you’ve encountered smell b together with lemony smells in the past, you’ll tend to think smell b has lemony notes even when the lemon smells are objectively absent). It looks as if we might each be working with a typical vocabulary of about 10,000 known smells, out of a theoretical 400,00 that the nose can distinguish: best estimates suggest that smell-space has a minimum of somewhere between 32 and 68 dimensions (as compared to human colour vision’s paltry 3).

Now we come to the thought-experiment itself. It seems that Jesse Prinz has denied the possibility that a sound could become a smell merely by changing the structure of the experience (could the sound of a fire alarm ever become the smell of smoke?), so with fine daring, that is the first transition Cooke and Myin propose to anatomise in a thought-experiment.

Thought-experiments are always a little unsatisfactory because they don’t really force people to accept your conclusions in the way that a proper argument does. In this case, moreover, it seems to me there’s a particularly difficult trick to bring off because for the experiment to convince, Cooke and Myin want the transfer of properties to seem plausible; yet the more plausible it seems the more plausible independence seems too. They want us to believe that they’re doing the best possible description of a transfer that could plausibly happen, in order to convince us that once we understand it it’s not plausible that it’s really a transfer at all.

However, I think they do a commendable job. First, sounds have to become less distinct in their onset and direction; they have to be more like generalised hums which float around appearing and dispersing slowly (no good for rapid warnings any more). The we have to imagine that we use our noses to detect sounds, that they only become perceptible when we breathe, and that sniffing or breathing deeply affects their intensity. We must imagine that it’s now a little more difficult to pick out single sounds when there are several at once: we might have to think about it for few moments and take some extra sniffs.

That’s not too bad, but there are bigger problems. We’ve noted that smell space appears to be huge; Cooke and Myin suggest we could enlarge sound space the same way by imagining that the differences in sound are like the differnces in timbre between musical instruments (though we have to suppose that we can readily distinguish the timbres of 10,000 or so different instruments). On the other hand, musical notes fit on an organised scale with perceptible relationships between different notes: smell doesn’t really have that, so we must drop it and assume that sounds are essentially monotonous. To round things off with behavioural factors, we should think of sound as no longer used for communication, but mainly for the evaluation of the acceptability of food, people and other biological entities; and we should imagine that sounds now have that characteristic of certain smells which allows them to evoke memories with particular potency.

If you’re still with the experiment, you’ll now have some intuitive idea of what it would be like if sounds had the structural and other characteristics of smells. But no, say Cooke and Myin: isn’t it apparent now that the sensations we’re talking about wouldn’t be sounds any more (in fact they would pretty much have become smells)? Isn’t it clear, in short, that in order to be trillable, smells would have to cease being smells? They go on to a further thought experiment in which smells become colours.

This is a valuable exercise, but as I say, thought experiments are not knock-down arguments, and I am willing to bet there wil in fact be plenty of people who are prepared to go along with Cooke and Myin’s transition but insist at the end that the sensations they’re imagining are still in some way sounds, or at least have a core soundiness which makes them different from echt smells. (You notice how I criticise the weakness of thought experiments and yet here I am doing something worse – a kind of third-person thought-experiment where I invite agreement that in certain odd circumstances other people would think in a certain way.)

Personally I think some of the most interesting territory revealed here is not so much at the ends of the transition as in the middle. The experiment raises the possibility of mixed modalities never before imagined, chimerical experiences with some of the characteristics of two or more different standard senses. Not just that, either, because we can invent new physical constraints and structures and develop possible sensory modalities which have nothing whatever in common with any real ones, if our imagination permits.

This gives Cooke and Myin some possible new ammunition. Do all these imaginary new modalities get their own essence, their own qualia? If we mix smell and hearing in different ways, do we have to suppose that there are distinct qualia of, er, smearing and hell?

For that matter, what if we took a subject (all right, victim) through the transition of sound to smell; and then separately gave him back sound? has he now got two distinct experiences of sound? Then if we move the new sound2 though the transition to smell, does he have two smells? And if we then give him back a separate sense of sound again? And so on.

I can’t help thinking it would be quite a Christmas present if we could have a sense with the spatial distinctness of vision, the structured harmonics of sound, and the immense dimensionality of smell. There would be some truly amazing symphonic odours to be painted.

Merry Christmas, all!

When incredulities meet

Posted on September 4, 2011 by Peter

Picture: qualintentionality. Sometimes mistakes can be more interesting than getting it right. Last week I was thinking about Pauen’s claim, reasonable enough, that belief in qualia is ultimately based on the intuitive sense that experience and physics are two separate realms. The idea that subjective stuff, the redness of red and so on, could be nothing but certain jigs danced by elementary particles, provokes a special incredulity. What’s the famous quote that sums that up, I thought? Something about…

This phenomenal quality is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it.

That captures the incredulity quite nicely. However, it dawned on me that it was Brentano, and he didn’t say ‘phenomenal quality’, he said ‘intentional inexistence’.

So it turns out we have two incredulitites, one about qualia – subjectivity or ‘what it is like’, one about intentionality – ‘aboutness’ or meaningfulness. To me, they have a very similar feel. So what do we say about that? I can see four reasonable possibilities.

The resemblance is superficial: just because your mind boggles at two different things, it doesn’t mean the two things are identical.
The incredulity is the same because it’s not specifically attached to qualia or intentionality, it’s just characteristic of mental phenomena of all kinds.
The incredulity arises from intentionality, and qualia have it because they are intentional in nature.
The incredulity arises from qualia, and intentionality has it because it arises out of qualia.

Although 1. is a very rational line to take, I can’t help feeling there is at least a little more to it than that. I don’t detect in myself a third incredulity – I don’t feel that nothing in subjectivity could possibly account for intentionality, or vice versa: that remains to be examined. And to put it no higher, it would be nice if we could tidy things up by linking the two problems, or even perhaps reducing one to the other. One inexplicable realm is bad enough.

I suppose 2. is what Brentano himself might have said. I don’t know whether we’d now be quite so quick to bestow the mystery on all mental phenomena: it doesn’t seem so implausible now that calculation or choosing a chess move might be nothing more than a special kind of physical activity. Moreover, if the problem doesn’t come from intentionality or qualia, we seem to have a third problem distinct from either, which is unwelcome, and a slight difficulty over the relationships. It doesn’t seem much of an answer to say that qualia seem strange and non-physical because they’re mental, unless we can go on to say a lot more about the spookiness of the mental and why it attaches to subjective experience the way it does.

I suppose we could go dualist here, and say that mental things exist in a separate domain in which both qualia and meanings participate. Isn’t something like that the main reason dualists are dualists, in fact? Taking that route involves the usual problems of explaining the interaction between worlds and indeed, giving some explanation of how the second world works. If we don’t give that latter explanation we seem only to have deferred the issues.

It might be easier if we said something along the lines of the mental being essentially a different level of explanation within a monist universe. For me, that looks at least a starter so far as intentionality goes, but not for qualia. They’re not really a level of explanation – they’re not explanatory at all, quite the reverse. This brings out some interesting differences. In the case of qualia we already have a pretty full scientific account of how the senses work. We pretty much know what we’d reduce qualia to, if we’re in the market for a reduction. In a sense, the way is clear: there’s no work in the ordinary world that we need qualia to do, we just need an extra ineffable zing from somewhere, something we could arguably dispense with. For intentionality, things are much worse. There is no scientific account of meaning, we don’t really know how the brain deals with it, yet it is an essential part of our lives which can’t be dismissed as airy-fairy obscurantism. Curiously, of course, it’s qualia which are seen as the Hard Problem, while intentionality is part of the easy one. I suppose this is because when we contemplate intentionality, it doesn’t seem intractable. We may not know how it works, but it looks like the kind of thing we could get a grip on given a couple of insights; whereas there seems no way of scaling the smooth glassy wall presented by qualia.

Here’s a thought: if we’re saying that the two issues are different facets of the same problem, we ought to be able to apply the established qualia arguments to intentionality and still make sense, shouldn’t we? We can’t do it the other way because I don’ t think there are any arguments for the existence of intentionality – nobody denies it.

So: the zombies go quite well, at first sight, anyway: we’d say that intentionality zombies (another kind – sorry) look and behave like us, but never actually mean what they say or understand the words they read. By some process they come out with appropriate responses, but in the same sort of sense as the original zombies, the lights are all out.

Then instead of inverted spectra, we’d have inverted meanings. This is trickier, because there’s no tidy realm of meaning equivalent to the spectrum we can use – unless we co-opt the spectrum itself and say that when you mean red, you say blue… That doesn’t seem to work. Could we say that you actually mean the negation of everything you say, but for some reason act otherwise…? Maybe not.

Alright, let’s try Mary: Intentionality Mary was brought up without ever grasping the meaning of anything, but she understands everything there is to know about cognition… That doesn’t seem to make sense.

The problem is always that qualia have no causal effects, whereas meanings and intentions absolutely do: in fact if anything the problem with them is explaining their efficacy. Noting this, we can see that actually even the zombies didn’t really work: we can believe in people who behave like us without having real experience, but it’s surely nonsensical to say that our counterparts without desires or intentions would behave the same way as us, unless we’re really only talking about some kind of quale of desire or intention.

So if qualia and intentionality are radically different in some respects, the differences might provide at least a hint that ‘both mental’ is not a good enough explanation for the two incredulities.

What about option 3? Could it be that the incredulity we’re concerned with is basically attached to intentionality, and qualia only have it because they are intentional in nature? On the face of it it seems quite reasonable to think that the redness we experience is about the rose, and that it’s the special magic aboutness that adds the extra ineffable quality. With other qualia, though, it’s not so clear. If you take happiness to be qualic, what is it about? We can of course be happy about particular things, but that’s distinct from just being happy. Moreover, there’s plenty of intentionality without qualia: an account book is suffused with intentionality. In fairness, that’s only the derived kind – accounts only mean what we make them mean – perhaps it’s only the original intentionality of our thoughts that bestows qualicity? But with intentionality, we expect content. We believe and desire and think that x or y, with x or y being capable of expression in words: but it’s the whole point of qualia that there’s nothing like that available.

Option 4 says qualia are fundamental and intentionality springs from them. John Searle has actually put this view forward (in addition to his view that intentionality is the business of of imposing directions of fit on directions of fit). The suggestion here is that, for example, the feeling of hunger is about food in some basic, primitive sense, and that it’s on similar qualia that all our meaningfulness is built. The example has a definite appeal, and there’s something attractive about rooting intentionality in the ‘three Fs’ of survival: making it not some celestial mystery but a particular slant that arises out our nature as competitive and social biological creatures. But there are problems. We must remember that the quale of hunger has no causal effects: it’s only the functional counterpart that actually causes us to speak or seek food, so the connection between the quale and the expression of beliefs or desires is broken. We may suspect for other reasons that it’s not really the quale at work here: the sense in which hunger means food looks very like H.P.Grice’s natural meanings (those spots mean measles). We may suspect that this is really what makes the example seem to work, yet completely inanimate and non-qualic things can have this kind of meaning (those clouds mean rain), so although it is an excellent place to start looking for an analysis of intentionality, it doesn’t seem to be a matter of qualia.

Personally, I would reaffirm the view I’ve often set out before: I haven’t a clue what’s going on.

Closing the Gap

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Peter

Picture: mind the gap. One way of setting up the vexed question of qualia is to claim that there is an explanatory gap between what science tells us about our sensory organs and nervous system on the one hand, and actual real experience on the other. Nothing in the biological/physical story, it’s claimed, tells us what the redness of a rose or the smell of violets is actually like, and nothing of that kind ever could. The two aspects of the experience do not connect with each other. In the latest JCS, Michael Pauen sets out to show us that that supposed gap does not exist.

He attacks from four angles. First, the thought-experiments put forward to point out the gap are inconsistent: second, they require the first-person view to have a special privilege which it hasn’t; third, the arguments for the gap are circular, resting on the same intuition they set out to vindicate. Finally, he offers a historical argument to show that apparent gaps of a similar kind have disappeared in the past as our scientific understanding grew: there’s no reason to think that this one too will stop seeming plausible when we understand things better.

We’ve often discussed the thought-experiments in question. There’s Mary, brought up in monochrome but knowing all the science, who nevertheless knows something more, it’s claimed, when she sees what redness is really like. There are the ‘zombies’, creatures exactly like us in every physical detail and consequently in behaviour too, yet having no real experiences: the possibility of such beings, if you accept it, proving that there’s more than just physics going on. There are also the many variants of the inverted spectrum, where what I experience when I see blue is what you experience when you see red; our inability to discover or communicate this difference once again proving the existence of the gap.

What’s inconsistent about all that? Pauen introduces a new kind of zombie (Another new kind of zombie? There must be a dozen kinds in the literature already.) . These are part-time zombies. Some of the time they do have subjective experience just like us, at other times, as it were, the lights go out for a while. The intermittent nature of their experience doesn’t affect their behaviour, of course, because ex hypothesi zombies are all exactly like their non-zombie equivalents in all physical matters. Moreover, because their zomboid episodes leave no physical traces in their brains, they can’t remember whether or not they had experiences at any given time. For that matter, we can’t tell whether we are part-time zombies ourselves, because we wouldn’t remember in either case. In fact, we can’t tell whether we ever did have subjective experience: so the theory of the gap ultimately undermines our reasons for believing in the gap in the first place.

This is a useful argument: still, I think Pauen may underestimate how far committed dualists might be prepared to go in digging in on this issue. Why has the experience got to leave physical traces in the brain, they might ask – I might just remember it spiritually. Pauen in reply would no doubt point out that such a spiritual memory could never have physical effects, so nothing they say with a physical mouth or write with a physical hand could ever have been caused by those ineffable experiences. This is certainly an uncomfortable position for the dualists to be in, but it really only expands and dramatises the bind they were already in about the acausal nature of qualia, and you could argue that it’s only a little worse than the problems about interaction with the physical world which dualists have always faced. Somehow they seem to live with it.

Pauen’s second argument is meant to show that there’s no privileged first-person access to qualia: what does that actually mean? It’s obvious that you can’t, strictly, see things from my perspective without being me: but the explanatory gap also requires that there are facts about my experience (facts, presumably, about what it is like) that you can never get to know from the third-person perspective (if you could get to know everything from the third-person view there would be no gap). Pauen argues that if the subjects can recognise qualia, there must be some resulting difference in their epistemic or functional dispositions: these in turn will be recognisable from the third-person point of view. Contrariwise, if there is no functional difference, the subjects themselves will be unable to recognise the qualia, because the mere ability to do so would itself constitute a functional difference. Although I think he’s right about this, I think he has again assumed more agreement than some would be prepared to give. I suppose most people these days are broadly functionalist in a general sense, but not everyone would accept that the ability to recognise the presence or absence of qualia has anything to do with functional dispositions, if that is to be read as referring to functional dispositions of physical matter. It’s tough to see how it could be otherwise, but there are mouths ready to bite that bullet.

Why is that? Why do people live with positions that involve such bad, unresolved philosophical problems? I think the dualists might say: look Michael, we know this is severely problematic – they don’t call it the hard problem for nothing – but what can we do? These qualia are right there, immediately obvious. It’s as if you’d come up with some really cogent arguments to show we had no heads, arguments we couldn’t fault. In those circumstances we’re forced to say, sorry Michael, but we just have not been decapitated – we just haven’t – so for the time being we’re going to have to work on the assumption that there’s something wrong with your case for acephaly even though just at the moment we can’t give you an unproblematic alternative.

Ah, but that plays into Pauen’s hands, because his third argument addresses the strength of the intuition behind qualia. He points out, quite rightly, I think, that we generally start with a strong feeling that there is something it is like; then the various arguments get presented to validate this intuition. But on examination all of the arguments rest in the end on the same intuition. It is logically open to us to just deny that Mary learns anything new, to deny the possibility of zombies, and dismiss the issue of the inverted spectrum as meaningless. No argument compels us to do otherwise, it’s just that the same basic intuition is supposed to lead us in the other direction. Intuitions, Pauen points out, don’t prove anything.

That’s right of course, but there are a couple of things to be said. The first is that I don’t think the advocates of qualia actually suppose they’re putting forward a tight logical case. The arguments are, as it were, ostensive, they don’t deduce the existence of qualia, they simply display it. What we’re offered is not really arguments so much as what Dennett calls ‘intuition pumps’, less powerful but legitimate tools if used properly.

Second, in calling them ‘intuitions’, Pauen sells these impressions a bit short. There are intuitions and intuitions: here we’re not talking about a hunch that people have qualia, we’re talking about having qualia right in your face, having them in the most direct and unmediated manner – a manner which some might even argue had a special immunity from error (I can be wrong about the fact that I’m seeing a rose, but can’t be wrong about the fact that I seem to be seeing a rose (Eric Schwitzgebel might have something to say about that though)). For those who believe in them, qualia may be ineffable, but they’re also undeniable in a unique way denied to mere feelings about things are likely to be.

Or so you may think: but Pauen’s last argument is the historical one that things which one seemed irreducible to us have often ended up being perfectly explicable once we knew a bit more about the underlying science. In general Pauen is arguing against the view that there is an explanatory gap in principle, but here his argument also implicitly rebuts those who, like Colin McGinn, never claimed qualia were mysterious in themselves, only forever mysterious to us. I don’t suppose anyone ever changed their mind because the opposition’s retelling of events convinced them they were on the wrong side of history, but I found Pauen’s account, which takes up a substantial part of the paper, enlightening. Besides Fechner and Du Bois-Reymond he picks out Descartes for particular attention, and it was refreshing to see him given fair and accurate treatment for once instead of being blamed for imaginary theatres and what have you.

On this general historical argument I again think Pauen is basically right. It is already possible to explain many aspects of vision in ways which tend to reduce the sense of ineffability a bit, and no doubt this will continue to develop. But that may not do the job of dispelling all the magic. Part of the sensation of mystery about qualia, I suspect, does come from a certain mere bogglement over the difference between first and third person view; and a large part comes from the inexplicable haecceity of the world and even worse, of ourselves. These things are not going to stop bothering people any time soon.

Simples Consciousness

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Peter

Picture: Paul Churchland. There is a lot of interesting stuff over at the The Third Annual Online Consciousness Conference; I particularly enjoyed Paul Churchland’s paper Consciousness and the Introspection of Apparent Qualitative Simples (pdf), which is actually a fairly general attack on the proponents of qualia, the irreducibly subjective bits of experience. Churchland is of course among the most prominent, long-standing and robust of the sceptics; and it seems to me his scepticism is particularly pure in the sense that he asks us to sign up to very little beyond faith in science and distrust of anything said to be beyond its reach. He says here that in the past his arguments have been based on three main lines of attack: the conditions actually required for a reduction of qualia; the actual successes of science in explaining sensory experience, and the history of science and the lessons to be drawn from it. Some of those arguments are unavoidably technical to some degree; this time he’s going for a more accessible approach and, as it were, coming for the qualophiles on their own ground.

The attack has two main thrusts. The first is against Nagel, who in his celebrated paper What is it like to be a bat? claimed that it was pointless to ask for an objective account of matters that were quintessentially subjective. Well, to begin with, says Churchland, it’s not the case that we’re dealing with two distinct realms here: objective and subjective overlap quite a bit. Your subjective inner feelings give you objective information about where your body is, how it’s moving, how full your stomach is, and so on. You can even get information about the exhausted state of certain neurons in your visual cortex by seeing the floaty after-image of something you’ve been staring at. Now that in itself doesn’t refute the qualophiles’ claim, because they go on to say that nevertheless, the subjective sensations themselves are unknowable by others. But that’s just nonsense. Is the fact that someone else feels hungry unknowable to me? Hardly: I know lots of things about other people’s feelings: my everyday life involves frequent consideration of such matters. I may not know these things the way the people themselves know them, but the idea that there’s some secret garden of other people’s subjectivity which I can never enter is patently untrue.

I think Churchland’s aim is perhaps slightly off there: qualophiles would concede that we can have third-person knowledge of these matters: but in our own experience, they would say, we can see there’s something over and above the objective element, and we can’t know that bit of other people’s feelings: for all we’ll ever know, the subjective feelings that go along with feeling hungry for them might be quite different from the ones we have.

But Churchland has not overlooked this and addresses it by moving on to the bat thought-experiment itself. Nagel claims we can’t know how it feels to be a bat, he says, but this is because we don’t have a bat’s history. Nagel is suggesting that if we have all the theoretical information about bat sensitivity we should know what being a bat is like: but these are distinct forms of knowledge, and there’s no reason why the possession of one should convey the other. What we lack is not access to a particular domain of knowledge, but the ability to have been a bat. The same unjustified claim that theoretical knowledge should constitute subjective knowledge is at the root of Jackson’s celebrated argument about Mary the colour scientist, says Churchland: in fact we can see this in the way Jackson equivocates between two senses of the word ‘know’: knowing a body of scientific fact, and ‘knowing how’ to tell red from green.

The second line of attack is directed against Chalmers, and it’s here that the simples of the title come in. Chalmers, says Churchland, claims that a reductive explanation of qualia is impossible because subjective sensations are ultimately simples – unanalysable things which offer no foothold to an inter-theoretical reduction. The idea here is that in other cases we reduce away the idea of, say, temperature by analysing its properties in terms of a different theoretical realm, that of the motion of molecules. But we can’t do that for subjective qualities. Our actual experiences may consist of complex combinations, but when we boil it down enough we come to basic elements like red. What can we say about red that we might be able to explain in terms of say neurons? What properties does red have? Well, redness, sort of. What can we say about it? It’s red.

Churchland begins by pointing out that our experiences may turn out to be more analysable than we realise. Our first taste of strawberry ice cream may seem like a simple, elemental thing, but later on we may learn to analyse it in terms of strawberry flavour, creaminess, sweetness, and so on. This in itself does not prove that there isn’t a final vocabulary of simples lurking at the bottom, of course. But, asks Churchland, how will I know when I’ve hit bottom? Since every creature’s ability to discriminate is necessarily limited, it’s inevitable that at some point it’s going to seem as if I have gone as far as I could possibly go – but so what? Even temperature probably seemed like a simple unanalysable property once upon a time.

Moreover, aren’t these unanalysable properties going to be a bit difficult to handle? How do we ever relate them to each other or even talk about them? Of course, the fact that qualia have no causal properties makes this pretty difficult already. If they don’t have any causal effects, how can they explain anything? Qualophiles say they explain our conscious experience, but to do that they’d need to be registered or apprehended or whatever, and how can that happen if they never cause anything? As an explanation, this is ‘a train wreck’.

Churchland is quite right that all this is a horrible mess, and if Chalmers were offering it as a theory it would be fatally damaged. But we have to remember that Chalmers is really offering us a problem: and this is generally true of the qualophiles. Yes, they might say, all this stuff is impossible to make sense of; it is a train wreck, but you know, what can we do because there they are, those qualia, right in front of your nose. It’s pretty bad to put forward an unresolved mystery, but it would be worse to deny one that’s palpably there.

On the point about simples, Churchland has a point too: but there does seem to be something peculiarly ungraspable here. Qualia seem to be a particular case of the perpetual give-away argument; whatever happens in the discussion someone will always say ‘the trouble is, I can imagine all that being true, and yet I can still reasonably ask: is that person really having the same experience as me?’ So we might grant that in future Churchland will succeed in analysing experience is such a way that he’ll be able to tell from a brain scan what someone is experiencing, conclusions that they will confirm in great detail: we can give him all that and still feel we don’t know whether what we actually experience as red is what the subject experiences as blue.

Churchland thinks that part of the reason we continue to feel like this is that we don’t appreciate just how good some of the scientific explanations are already, let alone how good they may become. To dramatise this he refers back to his earlier paper on Chimerical colours (pdf). It turns out that the ‘colour spindle’ which represents all possible colours is dealt with in the brain by a neuronal area which follows the Hurvich-Jameson model. The interesting thing about this is that the H-J model is larger than the spindle: so the model actually encodes many impossible colours, such as a yellow as dark as black. Presumably if we stimulated these regions with electrodes, we should experience these impossible colours.

But wait! There is a way to hit these regions without surgery, by selectively exhausting some neurons and then superimposing the after-image on a coloured area. See the paper for an explanation and also a whole series of practical examples where, with a bit of staring, you can experience colours not in nature.

These are well worth trying, although to be honest I’m not absolutely sure whether the very vivid results seem to me to fall outside the colour spindle: I think Churchland would say I’m allowing my brain to impose sceptical filtering – because some mental agent in the colour processing centre of my brain doesn’t believe in dark yellow, for example, he’s whispering in my ear that hey, it’s really only sort of brown, isn’t it?

For Churchland these experiments show that proper science can make predictions about our inner experience that are both remarkable and counter-intuitive, but which are triumphantly borne out by experience. I do find it impossible not to sympathise with what he says. But I can also imagine a qualophile pointing out that the colour spindle was supposed to be a logically complete analysis of colour in terms of three variables: so we might argue that these chimerical colours are evidence that analyses of sensory experience and the reductions that flow from them tend to fail and that the realm of colour qualia, quite contrary to the appraently succesful reduction embodied inthe colour spindle, is actually unconstrained and undefinable. And why are these experiments so exciting, the qualophile might ask, if not because they seem to hold out the promise of new qualia?

The Character of Consciousness

Posted on November 14, 2010 by Peter

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Picture: Chalmers. The Conscious Mind was something of a blockbuster, as serious philosophical works go, so a big new book from David Chalmers is undoubtedly an event. Anyone who might have been hoping for a recantation of his earlier views, or a radical new direction, will be disappointed – Chalmers himself says he is a little less enthusiastic about epiphenomenalism and a little more about a central place for intentionality, and that’s about it. The Character of Consciousness is partly a consolidation, bringing together pieces published separately over the last few years; but the restatement does also show how his views have developed, broadening into new areas while clarifying and reinforcing others.

What are those views? Chalmers begins by setting out again the Hard Problem (a term with which his name will forever be associated) of explaining phenomenal experience – why is it that ‘there is something it is like’ to experience colours, sound, anything? The key point is that experience is simply not amenable to the kind of reductive explanation which science has applied elsewhere; we’re not dealing with functions or capacities, so reduction can gain no traction. Chalmers notes – justly, I’m afraid – that many accounts which offer to explain the problem actually go on to consider one or other of the simpler problems instead (more contentiously he quotes the theories of Crick and Koch, and Bernard Baars, as examples). In this initial exposition Chalmers avoids quoting the picturesque thought experiments which are usually used, but the result is clear and readable; if you never read The Conscious Mind I think you could perhaps start here instead.

He is not, of course, content to leave subjective experience an insoluble mystery and offers a programme of investigation which (to drastically over-simplify) relies on some basic correspondences between the kind of awareness which is amenable to scientific investigation and the experience which isn’t. Getting at consciousness this way naturally tends to tell us about the aspects which relate to awareness rather than the inner nature of consciousness itself: on that, Chalmers tentatively offers the idea that it might be a second aspect of information (in roughly the sense defined by Claude Shannon). I’m a little wary of information in this sense having a big metaphysical role – for what it’s worth I believe Shannon himself didn’t like his work being built on in this direction.

The next few chapters, following up on the project of investigating ineffable consciousness through its effable counterparts, deal with the much-discussed search for the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). It’s a careful and not excessively over-optimistic account. While some simple correspondences between neural activity and specific one-off experiences have long been well evidenced, I’m pessimistic myself about the possibility of NCCs in any general, useful form. I doubt whether we would get all that much out of a search for the alphabetic correlates of narrative, though we know that the alphabet is in some sense all you need, and the case of neurons and consciousness is surely no easier. Chalmers rightly suggests we need principles of interpretation: but once we’ve stopped talking about a decoding and are talking about an interpretation instead, mightn’t the essential point have slipped through our fingers?

The next step takes us on to ontology. In Chalmers’ view, the epistemic gap, the fact that knowledge about the physics does not entail knowledge of the phenomenal, is a sign that that there is a real, ontological gap, too. Materialism is not enough: phenomenal experience shows that there’s more. He now gives us a fuller account of the arguments in favour of qualia, the items of phenomenal experience, being a real problem for materialism, and categorises the positions typically taken (other views are of course possible).

Type A Materialism denies the epistemic gap: all this stuff about phenomenal experience is so much nonsense.
Type B Materialism accepts the epistemic gap, but thinks it can be dealt with within a materialist framework.
Type C Materialism sees the epistemic gap as a grave problem, but holds that in the limit, when we understand things better, we’ll understand how it can be reconciled with materialism.

In the other camp we have non-materialist views.

Type D dualism puts phenomenal experience outside the physical world, but gives it the power to influence material things,
Type E Dualism, epiphenomenalism, also puts phenomenal experience outside the physical world, but denies that it can affect material things: it is a kind of passenger.

Finally we have the option that Chalmers appears to prefer:

Type F monism (not labelled as a materialism, you notice, though arguably it is). This is the view that consciousness is constituted by the intrinsic properties of physical entities: Chalmers suggests it might be called Russellian monism.

The point, as I understand it, is that we normally only deal with the external, ‘visible’ aspects of physical things: perhaps phenomenal experience is what they are intrinsically like in themselves – inside, as it were. I like this idea, though I suspect I come at it from the opposite direction: to Chalmers, it seems to mean something like those experiences you’re having – well, they’re the kind of thing that constitutes reality whereas to me it’s more you know reality – well that’s what you’re actually experiencing. Chalmers’ way of looking at it has the advantage of leaving him positioned to investigate consciousness by proxy, whereas I must admit that my point of view tends to leave me with no way into the question of what intrinsic reality is and makes mysterian scepticism (which I don’t like any more than Chalmers) look regrettably plausible.

Now Chalmers expounds the two-dimensional argument by which he sets considerable store. This is an argument intended to help us get from an epistemic gap to an ontological one by invoking two-dimensional semantics and more sophisticated conceptions of possibility and conceivability. It is as technical as that last sentence may have suggested. To illustrate its effects, Chalmers concentrates on the conceivability argument: this is basically the point often dramatised with zombies, namely that we can conceive of a world, or people, identical to the ones we’re used to in all physical respects but completely without phenomenal experience. This shows that there is something over and above the physical account, so materialism is false. One rejoinder to this argument might be that the world is under no obligations to conform with our notions of what is conceivable; Chalmers, by distinguishing forms of conceivability and of possibility, and drawing out the relations between them, wants to say that in certain respects it is so obliged, so that either materialism is false or Russellian monism is true. (Lack of space – and let’s be honest, brains – prevents me from giving a better account of the argument at the moment.)

Up to this point the book maintains a pretty good overall coherence, although Chalmers explicitly suggests that reading it straight through is only one approach and unlikely to be the best for most readers; from here on in it becomes more clearly an anthology of related pieces.

Chalmers gives us a new version of Mary the Colour Scientist (no constraint about the old favourites in this part of the book) in Inverted Mary. When original Mary sees a tomato for the first time she discovers that it causes the phenomenal experience of redness: when inverted Mary sees a tomato (we must assume that it is the same one, not a less ripe version) she discovers that it causes the phenomenal experience of greenness. This and similar arguments have the alarming implication that the ineffability of qualia, of phenomenal experience, cannot be ring-fenced: it spills over at least into the intentionality of Mary’s knowledge and beliefs, and in fact evidently into a great deal of what we think, say and believe. This looks worrying, but on reflection I’m not sure it’s such big news as it seems; it’s inherent in the whole problem of qualia that when we both look at a tomato I have no way of being sure that what you experience – and refer to – as red is the same as the thing I’m talking about. More comfortingly Chalmers goes on to defend a certain variety of infallibility for direct phenomenal beliefs.

Further chapters provide more evidence of Chalmers’ greater interest in intentionality: he reviews several forms of representationalism, the view that phenomenal experience has some intentional character (that is, it’s about or indicates something) and defends a narrow variety. He offers us a new version of the Garden of Eden, here pressed into service as a place where our experiences are direct and perfectly veridical. Chalmers uses the notion of Edenic content as a tool to break apart the constituents of experience; in fact, he seems eventually to convince himself that Edenic content is not only possible but fundamental, possibly the basis of perceptual experience. It’s an interesting idea.

Included here too is a nice piece on the metaphysics of the Matrix (the film, that is). Chalmers entertainingly (and surely rightly) argues that the proposition that we are living in a matrix, a virtual reality world, is not sceptical, but metaphysical. It’s not, in fact, that we disbelieve in the world of the matrix, rather that we entertain some hypotheses about its ontological underpinnings. Even bits are things.

The book rounds things off with an attempt (co-authored with Tim Bayne) to sort out some of the issues surrounding the unity of consciousness, distinguishing access and phenomenal unity along the lines of Ned Block’s distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness, and upholding the necessity of phenomenal unity at least.

It’s a good, helpful book; what the content lacks in novelty it makes up in clarity. Chalmers has a persuasive style, and his expositions come across as moderate and sensible (perhaps the reduced epiphenomenalism helps a bit). It’s surprising that the denial of materialism (surely the dominant view of our time) can seem so common sense.

More mereology

Posted on October 31, 2010 by Peter

Picture: Peter Hacker. Peter Hacker made a surprising impact with his recent interview in the TPM, which was reported and discussed in a number of other places. Not that his views aren’t of interest; and the trenchant terms in which he expressed them probably did no harm: but he seemed mainly to be recapitulating the views he and Max Bennett set out in 2003; notably the accusation that the study of consciousness is plagued by the ‘mereological fallacy’ of taking a part for the whole and ascribing to the brain alone the powers of thought, belief, etc, which are properly ascribed only to whole people.

There’s certainly something in Hacker’s criticism, at least so far as popular science reporting goes. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read newspaper articles that explain in breathless tones the latest discovery: that learning, or perception, or thought are really changes in the brain! Let’s be fair: the relationship between physical brain and abstract mind has not exactly been free of deep philosophical problems over the centuries. But the point that the mind is what the brain does, that the relationship is roughly akin to the relationship between digestion and gut, or between website and screen, surely ought not to trouble anyone too much?

You could say that in a way Bennett and Hacker have been vindicated since 2003 by the growth of the ‘extended mind’ school of thought. Although it isn’t exactly what they were talking about, it does suggest a growing acknowledgement that too narrow a focus on the brain is unhelpful. I think some of the same counter-arguments also apply. If we have a brain in a VAT, functioning as normally as possible in such strange circumstances, are we going to say it isn’t thinking? If we take the case of Jean-Dominique Bauby, trapped in a non-functioning body, but still able to painstakingly dictate a book about his experience, can’t we properly claim that his brain was doing the writing? No doubt Hacker would respond by asking whether we are saying that Bauby had become a mere brain? That he wasn’t a person any more? Although his body might have ceased to function fully he still surely had the history and capacities of a person rather than simply those of a brain.

The other leading point which emerges in the interview is a robust scepticism about qualia. Nagel in particular comes in for some stick, and the phrase ‘there is something it is like’ often invoked in support of qualia, is given a bit of a drubbing. If you interpret the phrase as literally invoking a comparison, it is indeed profoundly obscure; on the other hand we are dealing with the ineffable here, so some inscrutability is to be expected. Perhaps we ought to concede that most people readily understand what it is that Nagel and others are getting at. I quite enjoyed the drubbing, but the issue can’t be dismissed quite as easily as that.

From the account given in the interview (and I have the impression that this is typical of the way he portrays it) you would think that Hacker was alone in his views, but of course he isn’t. On the substance of his views, you might expect him to weigh in with some strong support for Dennett; but this is far from the case. Dennett is too much of a brainsian in Hacker’s view for his ideas to be anything other than incoherent. It’s well worth reading Dennett’s own exasperated response (pdf), where he sets out the areas of agreement before wearily explaining that he knows, and has always said, that care needs to be taken in attributing mental states to the brain; but given due care it’s a useful and harmless way of speaking.

John Searle also responded to Bennett and Hacker’s book and, restrained by no ties of underlying sympathy, dismissed their claims completely. Conscious states exist in the brain, he asserted: Hacker got this stuff from misunderstanding Wittgenstein, who says that observable behaviour (which only a whole person can provide) is a criterion for playing the language game, but never said that observable behaviour was a criterion for conscious experience. Bennett and Hacker confuse the criterial basis for the application of mental concepts with the mental states themselves. Not only that, they haven’t even got their mereology right: they’re talking about mistaking the part for the whole, but the brain isn’t a part of a person, it’s a part of a body.

Hacker clearly hasn’t given up, and it will be interesting to see the results of his current ‘huge project, this time on human nature’.

Conscious Entities

If the conscious self is an illusion – who is it that's being fooled?

Tag Archives: qualia

Do zombies have rights?

War on Consciousness?

Now That’s What I Call Dennett

…but something is necessary

Smelling secret harmonies

When incredulities meet

Closing the Gap

Simples Consciousness

The Character of Consciousness

More mereology

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