Author: Richard Brown

Stazicker on Attention and Mental Paint

Richard Brown 3 Comments

On Monday I attended a discussion of James Stazicker‘s paper Attention, Visual Knowledge, and Psychophysics. I have talked about Block’s argument before that recent experimental work on attention suggests that there is mental paint (i.e. that there is more to phenomenology than what’s in the world or in our representations of it). In this paper Stazicker wanted to offer an account of the representational contents of vision that denied any kind of illusion (like Block) but at the same time rejected Block’s argument for mental paint (Stazicker says that his view is compatible with mental paint but not with the argument that Block gives for it).

The basic idea that Stazicker wants to develop is that vision represents determinable properties rather than determinate properties. That is to say that our visual representations while we are looking at a line of (say) 5 centimeters will be something to the effect of a line that is, say, 4.5-5.25 centimeters long. If this is right then there are many different ways of veridically representing the line of 5 cm length. We could represent it, as above, or as 4.75-5.5 or many others. Stazicker wants to maintain that these two different representations will produce different phenomenologies but that each is perfectly veridical. If this is what happens in Carrassco type cases then we can still say that our belief are veridical even though we agree that attention changes our phenomenology. He also argues that we have independent reason to think that vision does deal in determinable representations stemming from considerations about the limited spatial resolution of our representations.

Block is aware of this kind of objection and responds to it in Attention and Mental Paint. As he says,

The problem with this proposal is that it if the phenomenology of perception flows from representational content, then indeterminacy in content would have to be reflected in an indeterminacy of look. But there need be no such indeterminacy.

If our experience represents something indeterminately as, say, 4.5-5.25 cm in length then we should expect the phenomenology to be indeterminate as well, but since our phenomenology isn’t this way we have some evidence that there is more to it than the indeterminate representation; there is also the phenomenological mode of presentation, that is what it is like for the subject to have that conscious experience.

Stazicker responds to this line of argument in the paper. He argues that there is no problem with saying that our phenomenology is indeterminate. He denies that saying that conscious experience is indeterminate is the same as saying that it is blurry (though blurriness does involve indeterminacy, it also involves something else, something like the phenomenology of blurriness), nor is it the same as representing a disjunct of possibilities. He rather appeals to notions of seeing things in the distance. When one sees something that is far away one’s representations are indeterminate but without being burry or fuzzy or disjointed.

During the discussion Dan Shargel brought up the issue of how we can tell if our normal conscious vision is blurry or not. He reported an experience of having his prescription updated on his glasses. Suddenly he realized that his vision had been blurry before but had not realized that it was that way before the update. Perhaps that is what conscious vision is like for us. Block argued that there is a phenomenological difference between seeing a clear image blurrily and seeing a blurry image clearly. In each case one would be tempted to say that a subject would draw the same ‘pixel array’ even though there is a distinct phenomenological difference (the difference between feeling like you see it clearly or blurrily). Block also argued that one could not cash this out merely in terms of determinable versus determinate contents. Chalmers suggested that you might be able to capture that difference representationally in the following way. In the case of seeing the blurry image clearly one has a visual experience which represents the various smudges in a very determinate way (so one has a determinate representation of the indeterminate thing itself), whereas when one see a clear image blurrily one has an indeterminate visual experience in that one represents the determinate thing in a smudged way. Block insisted that this did not meet his objection since one would end up drawing the same thing in both cases.

I have to admit that I lean towards Block view here. It does seem to me that conscious visual experience presents things as being some determinate way. So, when I look at the frame of a painting it seems to me that the frame has some determinate length even though I am unsure what that length is. One interpretation I have long been attracted to is to see higher-order thought-like states as (phenomenal) modes of presentations for first-order sensory qualities. The higher-order states may very well represent the indeterminate first-order states as being determinate. This would allow one to endorse Block’s view that experience doesn’t seem indeterminate while also taking the empirical evidence to suggest that first-order states are indeterminate.

Bennett on Non-Reductive Physicalism

Richard Brown 4 Comments

I just re-read Karen Bennett’s paper Exclusion, Again. In this paper she argues that causal exclusion arguments provide a nice overall argument for physicalism but do not cut against non-reductive physicalism as usually thought.

Here is how she defines non-reductive physicalism.

Let us begin with the ‘physicalism’ part. It is notoriously hard to define it adequately, but I can at least offer up the same slogans as everyone else. Physicalists not only endorse the completeness of physics, but also think that all the facts are physical facts—that there is nothing ‘over and above’ the physical. Physicalists believe that everything globally supervenes6 on the physical as a matter of metaphysical necessity (see Lewis 1983, Chalmers 1996, and Jackson 1998; see Hawthorne 2002 for interesting challenges to their definitions). That is, physicalists deny that it is merely nomologically impossible for there to be a world physically just like this one but mentally different. There are no special psychophysical laws that link or tether the mental to the physical, and that can be broken.

She is officially neutral on the issue of the a priori entailment of the mental by the physical but she clearly rejects the metaphysical possibility of zombie worlds. So, what, then, is non-reductive about her view?

Nonreductive physicalists do not think—or, at any rate, should not think—that mental events and properties really are not identical to any physical ones. All we think is that they are not identical to any standard physical ones. We have no reason to deny that they are identical to physical events and properties reachable by extension or analogy with standard ones. Let me try to put this marginally more carefully, by loosely distinguishing between a narrow and a broad sense of ‘physical’.

What she means by this seems to be the following. On the one hand we have ‘narrow’ physical properties, events, or objects, which means that they figure in the laws of a ‘clearly physical’ science. So she will count neurons as narrow physical objects because they figure in neuroscience. She will also count electrons and elements, etc. On the other hand there are what she calls ‘broad’ physical properties, events, or objects, which means that we can construct the thing in question out of the narrow properties in some ‘clearly articulated’ way. So,

Broadly physical properties are those constructed from narrowly physical ones by means of property-forming operations like disjunction, conjunction, and quantification (though presumably not negation!). Broadly physical events are those constructed from narrowly physical ones by means of various forms of spatio-temporal, mereological, and modal gerrymandering. And so on. This list is merely supposed to give the general idea, and presumably needs to be expanded and tweaked in various ways.

Given these two notions she formulates non-reductive physicalism as the view that mental states are broadly physical but not narrowly physical. She thus finds it to be a mistake on the part of the non-reductive physicalist to claim that mental properties are not physical at all. They are physical, just not in the narrow sense. There is no neurological state that she will want to say is identical to the mental state, though the mental state is constructed out of those narrow states. So on her view the functional characterization of mental states picks out some narrow physical property as its realizer. When thought of in this way, she continues, non-reductive physicalism has no worries with casual exclusion but dualists do.

The crux of the argument is that if one really wants to maintain a role for the mental in causation you must endorse some kind of over-determination and if that is the case then the following two counterfactuals must be non-vacuously true (which I take to mean; true because the antecedent is true):

(O1) if m had happened without p, e would still have happened and
(O2) if p had happened without m, e would still have happened.

These are supposed to capture our ordinary understanding of overdetermination. Had there been only one of the causes the effect would have been produced by the other cause, and vice versa. The real action is over (O2). She argues that only a physicalist can interpret it in the required way. That is, only the physicalist can say that it is either vacuous or false. A physicalist will think it is vacuously true just in case she thinks that it is impossible that p happen without m. If that is false then (O2) is vacuously true. The dualist has to deny this (zombie worlds are worlds where p happens without m and e happens) and so the dualist cannot say that (O2) can ever be vacuously true. The physicalist can also say that it is false. How? Bennett argues that (O2) is false when we have p ‘out of context’. So, if we replicate the brain state that is pain in the normal brain in some petri dish or if that state were hooked up in some strange/unusual fashion it will be false that e would still come about. The effect depends on the state being in a normally functioning brain in an environment, etc. So in those cases (O2) is false. Bennett then goes on to argue that the dualist cannot take this option. This is because,

doing so would abandoning standard ways of evaluating counterfactuals. For the dualist, the closest world in which the C-fibers fire without pain is not a world in which various surrounding physical facts go differently. It is not a world in which the C-fiber firing takes place in a petri dish, or otherwise without crucial background conditions that actually obtain. It is instead a world in which the psychophysical law linking firing C-fibers in such and such circumstances to pains is violated. It is not a full-blown zombie world, mind you—that would clearly involve the kinds of “big, widespread, diverse violations of law” that Lewis says it is of the first importance to avoid (1979, 47). It is instead simply a world in which just that particular physical occurrence fails to give rise to the sort of mental one that usually accompanies it. That is merely a “small, localized, simple violation of law,” that allows us to “maximize the spatio- temporal region throughout which perfect match of particular fact prevails” (47-48). This one tiny little violation of psychophysical law is a lot easier to accomplish—if it can be accomplished at all—than a big sweeping change in circumstances.

If all of this is right, she concludes, then only the non-reductive physicalist (or the reductive physicist) can avoid the exclusion problem.

But this doesn’t seem right to me. It is wrong to say that the closest possible world where we have p without m is one where there is a small violation of the bridging laws. At least not if one is thinking in terms of the kind of dualism that Dave Chalmers advocates. Since he thinks that consciousness and mental activity are functionally invariant, under normal conditions, he can happily accept that in the cases that Bennett cites (O2) will be false. Sure they do in fact think that there are worlds like the ones that Bennett talks about where the is a local violation of a law and sure Bennett does not really think that there are any such worlds (I tend to agree) but the point is that the worlds that Bennett thinks falsify (O2) are closer to the actual world on both accounts. In those worlds no laws are violated. So the property dualist can say that (O2) is false when you have p without m in the way that Bennett talks about (i.e. p without the general background conditions that let p function normally) but that it is true when you have p without m in the law-violating way. Thus the property dualist can think that (O2) is false in the usual cases, just like the non-reductive physicalist.

Thus if the causal exclusion argument is an argument for physicalism it is an argument for reductive physicalism.

[cross posted at Brains]

cfp: SSPP

Richard Brown Leave a comment

Pete Mandik is the program chair for the 104th annual meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, to be held March 22-24, 2012 in Savannah, GA. SSPP meetings feature concurrent programs in philosophy and psychology, as well as plenary sessions jointly sponsored by the philosophy and psychology program committees. The deadline for all submissions is November 1, 2011.

Invited Speakers:

David Rosenthal (CUNY Graduate Center)

William Bechtel (UC San Diego)

Jesse Prinz (CUNY Graduate Center)

Invited Symposia:

Cognition and the Social: Carrie Figdor, Bryce Huebner, Anthony Chemero

Perplexities of Perception: Brian Keeley, Robert Briscoe, Berit Brogaard

Fictionalism, Falsehood and the Epistemic Value of Truth: Anthony Dardis, Chase Wrenn, Tad Zawidzki

Explaining Consciousness: Richard Brown, Josh Weisberg, Kenneth Williford

The Philosophy Program Committee encourages the submission of papers and symposium proposals. Their selection will be based on quality and relevance to philosophy, psychology, and other sciences of the mind. The aim of the committee is to present as balanced a program as the quality of submissions in each area permits.

Papers: Submissions exceeding 3,000 words will not be considered. Submissions should include a word count and an abstract of no more than 150 words. Self-reference should be deleted to permit blind reviewing; authors should indicate their identity only on the cover letter that accompanies their submission. All papers submitted and presented should employ gender-neutral language. Please submit file as lastname.firstname.doc or lastname.firstname.rtf or lastname.firstname.pdf.

Papers, along with the Abstract Submission Form on the website, should be submitted electronically to:

Dr. Pete Mandik petemandik@gmail.com

Certain papers may be selected for commentary depending on overall programmatic considerations. People who wish to comment on a paper or to chair a session may volunteer by sending a short version of their curriculum vitae directly to the program chairperson at the above address.

Please specify ‘SSPP Submission’ in the subject line. If the paper is being submitted in consideration of a Graduate Student Travel Award, please specify ‘SSPP Submisson– GSTA.’ If the paper should be considered for the Griffith prize, please specify ‘SSPP submission – Griffith.’

Further info can be found at the SSPP website and especially in the SSPP August Newsletter.

Cohen & Dennett’s Perfect Experiment

Richard Brown 7 Comments

I was re-reading Dennett and Cohen’s recent paper in Trends in Cognitive Science, “Consciousness Cannot be Separated from Function” and I am now puzzled by their view (before I go on, I would like to note that this issue of TICS also has Joe LeDoux’s paper where he mentions the Qualia Fest, and Lau & Rosenthal’s paper…all in all a great issue!).

Cohen and Dennett want to argue against phenomenological overflow, which is a debate I am currently in the middle of myself, by showing that it is essentially an unscientific view. To do this they introduce what they call the ‘perfect experiment’. They imagine that the area of the brain that is responsible for processing color is somehow allowed to function but is isolated in such a way that it cannot be accessed. The subject in this experiment is shown a blue cup, say, and will deny that they see the color even though the isolated brain area is doing what it normally does. They say,

In spite of this frank denial by subjects, theories that posit dissociation between consciousness and function would necessarily assume that participants of the ‘perfect experiment’ are conscious of the apple’s color but simply cannot access that experience. After all, the conditions these theories stipulate for phenomenal consciousness of color are all met, so this experiment does not disprove the existence of isolated consciousness; it merely provides another particularly crisp example of consciousness with- out access.

However, there is a crucial problem with this logic. If this ‘perfect experiment’ could not definitively disprove [overflow theories] theories, then what could? The subject man- ifests all the functional criteria for not being conscious of color so what would ground the claim that the subject nevertheless enjoys a special kind of consciousness: phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness

I think it is interesting to note that this kind of argument against overflow has been around for a long time. Here is a passage from Huxley’s On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and Its History (from 1874),

If the spinal cord is divided in the middle of the back, for example, the skin of the feet may be cut, or pinched, or burned, or wetted with vitrol, without any sensation of touch, or of pain, arising in consciousness. So far as the man is concerned, therefore, the part of the central nervous system which lies beyond the injury is cut off from consciousness. It must be admitted, that, if any one think fit to maintain that the spinal cord below the injury is conscious, but that it is cut off from any means of making its consciousness known to the other consciousness in the brain, there is no means of driving him from his position by logic. But assuredly there is no way of proving it, and in the matter of consciousness, if anything, we may hold the rule, “De non apparentibus et de non existentibus eadem est ratio.”

The latin phrase there means something like “things that can’t be detected don’t exist.” As Huxley himself points out in the matter of consciousness, if anything, this seems correct. What sense can we make of a phenomenally conscious state that one is in no way aware of?

But it seems to me that these kinds of arguments need to deal with the mesh argument that Block defends. If the mesh argument works (I don’t think it does, at least not in favor of overflow), then we have an answer to the perfect experiment. We say that there is unaccessed consciousness in the isolated brain region because that is the (allegedly) the best over-all interpretation of the data coming in from neuroscience and psychology. Just to repeat, I DO NOT think that there is overflow but I do think that the above kinds of arguments need to deal with the mesh argument directly so I don’t find Cohen and Dnnett’s paper to advance the debate.

The Problem of Zombie Minds

Richard Brown 1 Comment

So I am finally done teaching summer school and am ready to settle in to my two weeks of ‘vacation’ before the Fall semester begins. Just as I am about to switch on the PS3 I am struck by the following line of argument…let me know what you think of it…

Those who know me know that I am fond of an argumentative strategy that I call ‘deprioritizing’ when it comes to a priori arguments against (or for) materialism. The idea is taken from the police. When something is deprioritized we still recognize it is a legitimate thing but also recognize that it is not a high priority. So if we are deprioritize the a priori arguments we can still acknowledge that in principle we can tell a priori what is what but for us it will be an empirical discovery. By the time a priori methods will be useful it will be too late. I do this by introducing shombies and zoombies. A shombie is a physical duplicate of me that has consciousness in the absence of any non-material properties. I have claimed that when we are conceiving of a shombie world we are NOT conceiving a a zombie world. But how do we know that it is not? I tend to think of the shombie world as the close possible world where some kind of higher-order theory is true and we have consciousness just like we do in the actual worlds.

This got me to thinking. How does the other side know that consciousness is absent at the zombie world? According to them to know that one is consciously seeing red is to be acquainted with a red quale in such a way as to have it partly constituting my belief or judgment. So to know that we have consciousness, or to know that it isn’t lacking at the actual world, requires being acquainted with it. So how do we know that it is lacking at the zombie world? Sure can conceive of a word with our physics at some future date but all we can ‘see’ is that there are beings there who look like us, talk like us, etc. It would seem that we have no way to tell from the third-person whether these ‘zombies’ really do lack consciousness and since that is the only way for us to know about zombies we are led to a contradiction. In order to conceive of zombies we must know that they lack consciousness, but it is impossible for us to know that they lack consciousness, thus zombies are inconceivable. We can sum this up in the following argument.

1. If zombies are ideally conceivable then we can know that they (the zombies) lack consciousness
2. We cannot know that they lack consciousness
3. Therefore zombies are not ideally conceivable

An opponent might respond that it is just stipulated that there is no consciousness at the zombie world but this is exactly the reason why physicalist claim that the zombie argument is question begging or that it builds into the very concept of consciousness that it is non-physical.

Some Thoughts About Color

Richard Brown 1 Comment

I just returned from an interdisciplinary workshop on color (More or Less: Varieties of Human Cortical Color Vision). Unfortunately I was not able to attend the conference that followed. Below are a few scattered (jet-lagged) thoughts in reflection of what happened.

The workshop began with presentations by Michael Tye and Alex Bryne on the philosophy of color. Tye went over the basic positions in the metaphysics of color, viz. realism (colors exist on the surfaces of objects), irrealism (colors exist in the mind of the perceiver), and super-duper irrealism (colors do not exist anywhere). The talks were uninteresting if you, like I, were already aware of this stuff and the arguments on each side but it would have been useful (if that is the right word) for, say, a scientist who wasn’t.

During the discussion Tye and various commenters, were arguing about the relative costs and benefits of the various theories. Tye seemed to think that we should opt for the theory with the most benefits and the least costs. Byrne objected and memorably said “the truth has no costs”. If, for instance, color physicalism is true (colors just are physical properties of the surfaces of objects) then there are no costs in accepting that theory. As a group we may not know which theory is true but, he went on, this is compatible with some particular philosopher, or even a scientist I suppose, knowing the truth. I am pretty sure that it was this line of argument which prompted some unnamed scientist to quip that “the philosophers here are arrogant” later that day. But at any rate what are to make of this debacle?

It has always seemed to me to be obvious that realism and irrealism are true in this case. We use color words interchangeably for both properties of surfaces and also for the conscious color experiences we enjoy. So, when someone asks the question ‘what is red, really?’ they are asking a question which is ambiguous. ‘Red’ really is some physical property of a surface if what you are asking is ‘what is the perceptible property red?’ and it really is a property of some conscious experience if we are asking the question ‘what is the perceived property red?’ Each of these deserves to be called ‘the color red’. But, as between the various ways of spelling out the former or latter who knows? Is perceptible red a complex or primitive property? If primitive is it metaphysically primitive or only nomologically? My money is on complex non-primitive because of considerations about science but this is an open question for me.

It seems to me that the main reason for objecting to this common sense way of thinking about the color red is because of theoretical concerns about transparency. If one is convinced that one can *never* become aware of properties of our conscious experience but, instead, are only able to become aware of the properties ‘out there’. I thought that some of the interesting empirical results about synesthesia presented by Noam Sagiv called this into question. Some synesthetes see the color of a given number, say, as being ‘on the number’ (associators) whereas others see the color not on the number but rather as a property of their experience of the number (projectors). Of course, to get subjects to make this distinction took training, and so no one should deny that in teh first instance what we are usually aware of are the properties of objects but with training we can become aware of properties of our experiences. This distinction also nicely illustrates the way that we use color words to apply to both kinds of things (objects and experiences).

Charles Hayward and Robert Kentridge presented interesting data on cerebral achromatopsia, which is color blindness due to cortical damage rather than any deficiency in the eyes or LGN. One of their main points seemed to be to distinguish CA from blindsight for color. So, cerebral achromatopsics are unable to access or use any information about the color of objects. It is not, like blindsight, that they (seem) to lack phenomenology but are able to use the information to make judgements that are mostly accurate. These subjects lack any ability to access color information. Most interestingly there was one patient who had CA but who did not notice the deficit at first. Presumably this person had all of the color phenomenology just vanish and yet he did not seem to notice. Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that it was not until there color vision had been restored that they noticed that it had been gone in the first place!

There is a lot more that happened (like Mel Goodale’s talk which was excellent) but I’ll have to think about that later!

Consciousness Studies in 1000 words (more) or less

Richard Brown 12 Comments

The head of the philosophy program at LaGuardia, John Chaffee, is the author of an introductory text book The Philosopher’s Way. The book is entering its fourth edition and John is updating the chapter on the self and consciousness. In particular he is updating the section on Paul Churchland’s eliminative materialism to include a discussion of functionalism. I have been asked to write something that could possibly be included after this discussion and which sums up the the current state of the field, provides a kind of “star map”, and might intrigue an undergraduate to learn more. Tall order! Here is a first draft of what I came up with. Comments and suggestions welcome!
—————————-

Contemporary Philosophy of Mind

The philosophical study of the mind in alive and well in the 21st Century. Broadly speaking one might say that there are three over arching concerns in this debate. The first concerns whether consciousness ultimately depends on something computational/functional or whether it depends on something biological. The second concerns whether consciousness is ultimately physical or non-physical, and the third concerns what role empirical results play in philosophical theories of consciousness.

Consider the first question. Some philosophers, like John Searle at U.C. Berkeley and Ned Block at New York University, think that consciousness is distinctly biological. To see what is at issue here we can employ a commonly used thought experiment. Neurons no doubt perform functions. Ask any psychologist or neuroscientist and they will tell you about sodium ions and potassium ions and cell membranes and neurotransmitters, action potentials and the rest. That is, we can think of a neuron as something that takes a certain kind of input (the neurotransmitters from other neurons, ions) and delivers a certain kind of output (an action potential or a graded potential. In principle it seems possible that we could use a nano-machine to mimic a neurons functional profile. This nano-machine would be able to take all of the same input and deliver all of the same output. One might think of it as an artificial neuron in the sense that we have artificial hearts. It is a bit of metal and plastic but it is designed to do the exact same job that the original was meant to do. Suppose now that this nano-machine zaps the neuron and quickly takes its place. Now you have all of your regular neurons and one artificial neuron. But it does everything the original neuron did, so we have no reason to think that this should change you conscious experience overly much. But now we do it with another neuron, and another, and another. The question then, is what happens to consciousness when we replace all of the neurons?

David Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University and New York University, has argued that as a person moves through this process of having their neurons replaced with artificial ones we have a few options. We might say that as their neurons are being replaced their conscious experience is slowly fading like a light on a dimmer switch or we might say that conscious experience was just cut off at some point when some number of neurons were replaced, maybe even the first one! But each of these has a very strange consequence. Suppose that I am having a headache during the hour that my brain is being “fitted” with nanobots. Now suppose that my conscious experience is fading as the process progresses with it being absent at the end. Well, ok, but the first thing to notice is that there can be no difference in your behavior as we go through the process. Each nanobot performs exactly the same function as the neuron, and we can think of the nanobot as instantaneously zapping and replacing the neuron so that you could being driving a car or reading a book while this was happening. But then we end up with the very strange result that we cannot really know that we have conscious experience right now! How do I know that I have a conscious pain? Well, I feel it! But if we were right that it can fade out, or even pop into and out of existence, without me noticing then how do I know it is there in the first place? Chalmers concludes that it is safer to think that the conscious experience would be the same at the end of the process. But if this is right then consciousness depends of functional organization and not on the biology, or non-biology, of the hardware. Those like Searle and Block hold that real neurons with their biological properties are needed in order to have consciousness and that the neural net at the end of the process would no longer be you or have thoughts or pains, but would only simulate those things. Whatever your intuitions are this may not be science fiction for long. Neuroscience is already well along in its investigation of ways to design brain-machine interfaces (for instance as a way of helping amputees with prosthetic limbs that are controlled just like one’s own limbs) and enhancement of the human mind by prosthetic neurology is perhaps not far off.

Notice that in thinking about the question of whether the mind ultimately depends on biological or a functional properties we appealed to a thought experiment. We did not go out and do an actual experiment. We consulted what we intuitively thought about a piece of science fiction. In contemporary philosophy of mind there are those who think that these kinds of intuitions carry great weight and then there are those who think that they do not. Those who think that they carry water think that we can know some deep fact about the nature of consciousness on the basis of reason alone For instance, take Frank Jackson’s Mary thought experiment (Jackson is also a philosopher at the Australian National University). Imagine a brilliant scientist who is locked in a black and white room but who is able to communicate with the outside world via a black and white television screen. Mary is able to learn all of the science that we will ever be able to know. So imagine that she knows the TRUTH about physics, whatever it is. Now suppose that she is released from her room and shown a red ripe tomato. It seems natural to think that she would learn something that she might express by ‘oh, THAT’s what it is like to see red! Everyone out here kept talking about red, but now that I have seen it I know what they mean’. But since she knew all of the physical facts, and yet did not know at least one fact, what it is like for her to see red, it seems like that fact must not be a physical fact. If this and related thought experiments are right then it seems that we do not need empirical evidence of any kind to know that consciousness cannot be physical (note, that David Chalmers talked about above, has advocated this line against physicalism as well. He has introduced philosophical zombies, creatures that are physical duplicates of us but which lack consciousness. If these are possible then consciousness is not a consequence of physics alone).

These arguments, and the knowledge argument of Jackson in particular, have spawned a huge amount of responses. One very natural response is to question the inattention to scientific discoveries. Dan Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University, argues that this whole strategy is thoroughly misguided. We seem to think that there are these magical conscious properties –the experience of having a pain– that just aren’t there. What is there is the seeming that it is so. Dennett often makes a comparison to magic. Take some professional magician, say David Copperfield. What David Copperfield does is to make it seem as though he has done something else. If you wanted to know how Copperfield performed some trick you would need to explain how he made it the case that it seemed that the statue was gone, or how he made it seem that the person was levitating. You don’t try to show that he really did it but how he made it seem as though he really did. Now is what he does real magic? There is some temptation to say no. Real magic is not just a trick. But sadly, the only magic that is in fact real is the kind that is fake. Dennett thinks the same is true of consciousness. When the functionalist explains what a pain is and someone says that this is not magic enough (Mary wouldn’t know it, or a zombie would lack it), the functionalist should respond that there is no such thing as that kind of magic. What is in fact true is that the brain makes it seem to us as though we have all of this magical stuff going on, but it only seems to be going on. Why think this? Dennett’s main argument is that this has been shown to us by the empirical sciences. Take just one example, the case of so-called change blindness (go online and search for ‘the amazing color changing card trick’ to see a cool example). In these kinds of cases people are presented with a scene where there is a very large central thing that changes. People are usually very bad at spotting the change. Yet when they see the difference they cannot believe that they did not notice it before. That is, from the first-person point of view it really seems as though one has access to a very rich and detailed scene, but actually one is mostly unaware of very large and salient changes in one’s environment. If this is right then our intuitions about science fiction cases may not be that reliable. And this is what Dennett and those like him think.

(cross posted at Brains)

The Myth of Phenomenological Overflow

Richard Brown 4 Comments

Update 7/27/11
The paper is now available on Consciousness and Cognition’s website: The Myth Of Phenomenological Overflow
————

I have just finished my contribution to the Special Issue of Consciousness and Cognition that I am editing featuring descendants of papers from the second online consciousness conference and made the pre-print available at my PhilPapers profile. Discussion and comments are welcome.

The Myth of Phenomenological Overflow

Abstract:
In this paper I examine the dispute between Hakwan Lau, Ned Block, and David Rosenthal over the extent to which empirical results can help us decide between first-order and higher-order theories of consciousness. What emerges from this is an overall argument to the best explanation against the first-order view of consciousness and the dispelling of the mythological notion of phenomenological overflow that comes with it.

Call for Proposals: CO4

Richard Brown Leave a comment

It is time to start pre-planning for CO4! There are exciting things in the works for the invited portion of the conference but since they are not finalized I cannot announce them yet. I will make an announcement when I can.

Last year I started a test program of having people organize special sessions, with the result being Jacob Berger’s excellent session featuring Benj Hellie with commentary by Susanna Schellenberg, Jeff Speaks, Jacob Berger, and Heather Logue. I would like to do more like this for CO4. To that end I have already accepted a proposal from James Dow to organize a special session on “The Social Conditions of Self-Consciousness,” and I would like to take this opportunity to announce a general call for proposals to organize special sessions. If you have a proposal please email me at onemorebrown@gmail.com with the theme and possible participants.