8.       Phenomena and Consciousness

Mental states and feels

Itches feel different from aches. But the belief that 2+2=4 doesn’t feel any different from the belief that the Earth is oblate.

We distinguish M states for which there is something it is like to be in them, from other M states.

Sensations and experiences have a phenomenal feel. Or they are ‘raw feels.’

If your intuitions don’t tell you what these words mean, then we can’t help you.

NB. desires can be associated with feels but desires themselves are feel-less. Desire for food associated with hunger is the same desire as associated with reasoning concerning health. Et sim. for many other M states.

Physicalism and phenomenal states

There are claims that physicalism cannot explain phenomenal feels. In particular Feels are said to show that no relational account – like the functionalisms – can adequately explain M states.

The Question of Qualia

Qualia (s. quale) are these phenomenal feels.

Qualia freaks think they are by definition outside the physicalist’s range. So, if they exist, Physicalism is wrong.

Others think of qualia as by def. referring to a feature intrinsic to an M state. So, if they exist, F-ism (a relational doctrine) is wrong.

Note; F-ism is accepted as an a/c of intentional states – so if phenomenal states can be understood as kinds of intentional state, then F-ism is saved.

Others make no definitional commitments. Qualia are just what make pains, aches, tickles, and other examples of qualitative states what they are.

The spectrum inversion objection to functionalism

We think of phenomenal nature as intrinsic. No relational description will capture its essence.

Colour inverts

How do you know your colour experiences are liike your neighbour’s.

We can imagine that two functionally identical creatures have spectra that are the inverses of each others. Don might experience the qualia of green/red wherever Nod experienced those of red/green.

Is Nod possible?

One could claim that there could not be functionally identical creatures like this. Red is ‘vibrant’ and green is ‘cool’ and that affects our functinal relations to them. So there is supervenience here.

Modifying functionalism

Suppose we found that humans formed two populations, A and B, distinguished by minor aesthetic preferences. Groups A and B turn out to have identical functional roles being filled but the states realising them are systematically reversed. This would make us think that the experiences of the two groups would be different. So Q is determined both by relevant role and by role player.

The plausibility of this depends on whether we’d think that if the minor aesthetic preferences were explained by major realizer differences then we’d think that there were major experiential differences.

This seems right: it explains F-ism’s failure to explain Q without invoking spooky things.

The knowledge argument challenge to physicalism

KA shows that physicalism misses out the ‘redness’ of red.

Mary

Mary in the B/W room. She learns all there is to know about the physical nature of colour but never sees colours. Does she learn something new when she leaves the room? If she does then there is more to know about colour than physical stuff, and physicalism must be wrong.

Replies to the knowledge argument

The language reply

Mary can express her knowledge of colour only in the language of physical science. When she leaves the room she learns how to use the colour vocabulary, but she doesn’t learn anything new about colour itself.

She wouldn’t think that’s what’s happened.  She’d say ‘So that’s what colour is like. Well, I never knew that!’

The opacity of knowledge reply

I can know Cicero denounced Catiline without knowing Tully denounced Catiline. But Cicero and Tully are the same person. But this is just two ways of knowing the same fact. Just so Mary knows that to see red is to be in functional state F without knowing that it is to be in phenomenal state P. But those are two ways of knowing the same fact. Mary doesn’t learn a new fact by learning what colour feels like.

Problem with this is that 'Cicero is Tully' is just another fact, and Mary is lacking in no facts of this kind. It doesn’t look like a good analogy.

Different modes of acquaintance with the same facts

Similarly, the same fact can appear differently to different persons with different relations to that fact. Consider war as seen by civilians, soldiers, press, … just so, we are acquainted with seeing red in one way, and Mary is in another way. But they are the same fact.

There is a reponse similar to the response to the opacity of knowledge reply to the idea that Mary knows ‘red’ under one description but not under another, although they are the same thing. Dual attribute theorists can believe that but physicalists can’t.

The knowing how reply

Distinguish between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’. One can know all the facts about riding a bike without knowing how to ride a bike. Perhaps what one gets from seeing red is knowledge how to do things with the colour – like identifying ripe apples.

This doesn’t feel like all that Mary learns. She learns a bit more of what the world is like – and that’s ‘knowledge that.’

The failure of integration reply

We can know A and know B without knowing the consequences of A and B.  There is too much information in all the physical facts about colour for Mary to integrate it into hre mind.

But it does seem that what she lacks is of a different ‘kind’ from what she has, and not the sort of thing that a combination of those facts will produce.

The H₂O-ism reply

Water is H₂O and all the properties of water are explicable in terms of properties of H₂O. We are H₂O-ists about water. But, although it is a metaphysical necessity that ‘water is H₂O’ is truth, it is known only a posteriori. So we may know things about one that we don’t know about the other.

                1.             But this doesn’t agree with our earlier analysis of necessary a priori.

‘Water’ and ‘H₂O’ are rigid designators whose actual referents are given as the role fillers for functional descriptions in the actual world. It is a posteriori that they have identical referents.

This is due to the finite state of our functional descriptions; but with enough info in the functional descriptions it could actually be deduced (a priori) that water is H₂O.

2.             Also, making physical stuff responsible for psychological stuff without, in principle, being able to explain how that occurs, is a bad form of emergentism.

We think that we can explain everything about a bacterium from physical items, and now we claim that that’s not true for humans; so where, evolutionarily, does this emergentism emerge?

*Mary learns hidden intrinsic properties

Intrinsic features of the world are known only through their causal profiles: it is possible that some intrinsic features cannot be known. This is the position of epistemic humility.

Suppose, nevertheless, that it is also the case we can know about the intrinsic natures of experiences, which are reveled to us in having them. This is called revelation.

It may then be that although Mary knows everything physical about colours, she only becomes informed of the intrinsic nature of experience by seeing it. But:

1.                    This is verging on the dualistic.

2.                    How are the properties to be revealed? If cognitively, then their causal effects will not include the traces of the special (scientifically unknowable) properties; so Mary can’t retain what she ‘learns.’

The ‘There must be a reply’ reply

If qualia are outside the physicalist’s ambit, then they must be epiphenomenal. But then we can’t learn anything by experiencing them since they con’t affect us physically, and thus not cognitively. But something does happen.

This argument only idicates that there’s something wrong with the KA, but it doesn’t say what.

Consciousness

Consciousness (C-ness) is always C-ness of something. It’s essential to our intentional M states.

Modest views

Our intentional M states lack inherent qualia. When a quale is associated with one such, that is a contingent fact about that particular occurrence of the M state. This is a modest view. A popular modest view is that having states with qualia is necessary for C-ness.

Attitudes towards states with qualia

Some also hold that having states with qualia is sufficient for C-ness. More think that intentional states are also required – especially, states about their sensational states.

Another modest view is that only sensations and perceptions have qualia, but they aren’t important for C-ness: that’s related more to the possibility of intentionality of M states.

Best modest view requires we distinguish between phenomenal C-ness (being in a state with qualia) and access C-ness (being able to report on your M states.)

Qualia for belief and desire

A 2^nd class of views about C-ness acepts that intentional states do have inherent qualia: whether necessarily occurrent or only possibly. This may mean:

1.             Each B or D comes with the possibility of a distinctive feel.

2.             Contingently, B and D are associated with distinctive feels.

Modesty about consciousness

On the modest view C-ness is just qualia + propositional attitudes.

In its defence, we know that there is a difference between occurrent and non-occurrent B and D. If there is a qualia aspect to B and D it is only to the occurrent forms.

Most of our B and D are non-occurrent and we don’t feel them.

For occurrent B, the modest view holds that nothing special is happening. B and D may be the subjects of B and D themselves (I, for ex., desire to not desire to smoke.) Or there my be special kinds of B and D required for C-ness (e.g. a desire to believe truly.) These claims are analyses of C-ness, not empirical discoveries. To be C is to have these special kinds of B and D.

The immodest view about consciousness

The immodest view is that B and D have feels beyond any sensational qualia that might accompany them.

But what about non-occurrent B? They can have no present feels, so are they not really Bs?

Searle thinks that non-occurrent B are really B only in so far as they can become occurrent.

But this strains our strong beliefs about B to accommodate a theory about feels. What are the feels doing in this case that is so important?

And suppose Arthur has a non-occurrent B that never becomes occurrent but could become so. Whereas his twin has a state just like Arthur’s B except that it could never become occurrent. Why would we think that Arthur’s was a B, but his twin’s not?

Perhaps the connection between B nd C-ness is not like Searle says. Perhaps for a B to be real it has to be connected to a C state.

But then you have to specify what sort of connection. It’s not easy.

Perhaps it has to be caused by a C state of perception.

                So that subliminal advertising affecting B by non-C perceptions is impossible? Unlikely.

We think all of this is most unlikley, and B and D don’t have feels in themselves.

Consciousness and physicalism

For the modest view, C adds no problems not already made by phenomenal experience.

For your physicalistic theory to a/c for C-ness you just need to know what B or D or Q have to be combined to produce C-ness.

Not so for the immodest view.

One immodest view is that B and D have a conscious aspect. They can have a feel, but you can have them w/o that feel too. For this we need to have a story about feels for intentional states as well as perceptual states. But we can have a story about B and D independently of that.

Other views that require feels for B and D are harder. For them we need to have a story that tells why a feel is necessarily associated with a real B or D.

There are lots of ways to try to do this. One might take C-ness to be the result of being organized so as to have B and D. Or being made of the right stuff is what matters (Searle.)

A priori versus a posteriori physicalist approaches

Physicalists must identify C-ness with some part of the physicalistic a/c of us. These a/cs vary in  2 ways:

1.                    in identifying C-ness with different combinations of physicalistically acceptable things, and

2.                    in providing different arguments for the identification.

Some make a priori claims about what C-ness means + empirical info

For ex., we may find C-ness just means having certain B and D. These can then be defined functionally, and we empirically identify the role-players

This is Common-Sense F-ism

Some think it is a metaphysical question to identify a posteriori a necessary identity.

                                                This is just like the water/H₂O business.

                                                This is Empirical F-ism

We prefer CSF. The water/H₂O analogy notwithstanding.

We have a priori knowledge of water as being the chemical with the watery properties. Then we use these to identify its chemistry. Thus we get the necessary a priori connection.

In this process, we needed the a priori knowledge to get started.

Trouble is, we don’t have anything like this for C-ness.

So that’s what we should be trying to get at to start with.