A propos of the recent discussion of this issue, I am pleased to announce that my paper has been accepted to the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology meeting to be held in New Orleans! So, let it snow ’cause in March I’ll be doing philosophy in the Big Easy!
The Spring semester is getting off to a start here in NYC. Yesterday I attended the first session of Ned Block and David Carmel’s seminar on Conceptual and Empirical Issues about Perception, Attention and Consciousness at NYU. This first session dealt with Block’s recent paper The Higher-Order Theory is Defunct.
One of the major points that Block wants to make is that there is a distinction to be made between what he calls modest and ambitious higher-order theories. Modest views aim only at explicating the notion of state consciousness. Thus the modest view can say, as Block does, that sensations that are not state conscious are none the less phenomenally conscious. The ambitious view not only tries to explain state consciousness but also aims to explain phenomenal consciousness. The problem that Block sees is for the ambitious view. Put simply the idea is that in a case of a higher-order thought without a target we have a conscious state that is not the target of a higher-order thought and so we have a counter-example to the higher-order theory. My response to this is to use the distinction between phenomenal consciousness and state consciousness to defuse the objection. For a state to be conscious is for me to be conscious of myself as being in that state. For a state to be phenomenally conscious is for there to be something that it is like for me to have the state. These two properties do not, prima facie, seem to have anything to do with each other. It is then an open question whether or not having the appropriate higher-order thought explains phenomenal consciousness. The ambitious higher-order theory need only claim that phenomenal consciousness is instantiated in the empty higher-order thought scenario. In fact, there is no reason that one might not claim that there is no state consciousness instantiated. Sure, it seems to one as though one has a conscious state, but one doesn’t. Another way to put the point; there is no state that has the property of being state conscious, though there is a state that has the property of being phenomenally conscious (the HOT itself). This is because phenomenal consciousness simply consists in having the appropriate HOT, whereas state consciousness involves being the target of the appropriate HOT. This defuses the objection since there is no non-existent phenomenology. My conscious pains matter phenomenologically because they are phenomenally conscious.
In the presentation Block seemed to offer an objection to my response. He claimed that one who took this path would in effect be adopting the same-order view and so would be giving up a higher-order view. This seemed to be the case because he thought that the claim was that the HOT itself was somehow targeted by the HOT itself in the empty case, but that is not the claim that I am making. Phenomenal consciousness –what it is like to have an experience– just is having an appropriate HOT. You do not have to be conscious of yourself as having the HOT in order to be phenomenally conscious; that is to confuse state consciousness with phenomenal consciousness.
In conversation afterwards Jake Berger pressed me a bit on my view. His worry seemed to be that there was something odd about calling the HOT phenomenally conscious. He appealed to a metaphor offered by David Rosenthal. When an umpire calls a runner out the umpire makes it the case that the runner is out and the umpire is not thereby out himself. So too the HOT makes a first-order state conscious but does not thereby become conscious itself. Of course, I absolutely agree, as long as we are talking about state consciousness. No one is claiming that the HOT is state conscious (or that the umpire is out). But this metaphor does not relate to phenomenal consciousness. When we consider which state is phenomenally conscious we ask the question “which state is there something that it is like to be in?” and the only answer to that question is “the HOT”. Of course WHAT it is like to be in that state is determined by the content of the state and so it will be like being in the first-order state but all of that is besides the point being made here.
There are other interesting things I would like to explore that came up but I have to go to the DMV : (
This summer has been semi-productive for me and I have completed drafts of three new conference length papers that I hope to be shopping around later. These are all in various stages of revision/draftyness and I would appreciate any feedback/comments.
1. Explaining Consciousness and Its Consequences
2. The Higher-Approach to Consciousness: The Hot Ticket or In Hot Water?
Yesterday I attended Miguel Angel Sebastian’s cogsci talk entitled “The Subjective Character of Experiencre: Against HOR and SOR Theories” which was very interesting. Miguel was primarily trying to show that higher-order and same-order representationist theories of consciousness cannot account for the subjective character of an experience by which he means the thing that accounts for the experience being for the subject. His main complaint seemed to be that in order to account for this we need some notion of the self and so he suggested that we need a model where we have representations of teh self interacting with representations of objects and we thus end up with a representation of the form “x for-me”. There were several interesting themes of the discussion and if I have time I will probably come back to some of them but I thought I’d start with this one.
In response to the mis-match problem David has settled on the following view. The phenomenology goes with the HOT. The sensory qualities of the first-order state play no role –other than that of concept acquisition– in determining the phenomenal character of a conscious experience. So in the case of Dental Fear the subject has a first-order state with vibration sensory qualities and a HOT that they are in pain so their conscious phenomenology is like having pain for them. The first-order sensory qualities play a perceptual role in the mental economy of the subject so having them is important but they don’t play a role as far as consciousness is concerned. In fact even if there is no first-order state at all (as may perhaps be the case in Anton’s syndrome) the phenomenology goes with the HOT. Now in the cases where there is no first-order state one still counts as being in a conscious state. The mental state that is conscious is just the one that the HOT represents oneself as being in and so in this case the conscious mental state is a notional state, which is to say that it doesn’t exist. It follows from this that there are conscious mental states that have no neural correlates. We thus end up with a dualism about consciousness of a new variety. There are some conscious mental states that exist physically in the brain and there are other conscious mental states that exist only notionally as the content of a HOT.
What should our reaction to this be? When this first became clear at David’s Mind and Language seminar it prompt Steve Stitch to shout ‘he’s worse than a dualist!’ Miguel seemed to think that at the very least this is a cost of the theory and that if you can have a theory that explains all the data without it that is preferable. David refused to say that this was even a cost for the theory, in fact he seemed to suggest that it wasn’t even counter-intuitive. His reasons seemed to be as follows. I can have a thought about things which are not present and those notional objects can have properties. So, if I think about a squirrel I might think of it as brown, and bushy even if there is no squirrel around yet the squirrel has properties; it is brown and bushy. Thus it is simply a fact about intentional states like thoughts that their contents can be notional and that those notional objects can be said to have properties. If that is right then there is nothing fundamentally mysterious about notional mental states having properties. The second step in his defense seemed to involve an appeal to hallucinations. We hallucinate regularly enough for it to be a common-place of folk psychology. Why doesn’t it make sense to say that we can hallucinate mental states? On this line the notional state is just like my hallucination of a pink elephant: it seems like it is there from my point of view but it isn’t really there. This isn’t mysterious since that just simply means that I represent myself as being in a state that I am not in. Now given various theoretical assumptions this will indeed turn out not to be counter-intuitive and since those who do find it counter-intuitive will do so because of different theoretical assumptions I suppose I can see why David thinks that this is not a cost to the theory.
But suppose that one had different theoretical assumptions? Suppose that one wanted to avoid this kind of existence dualism and so endorsed some kind of principle like this: For every conscious mental state there is a corresponding brain state. But suppose one also wanted to remain a higher-order theorist…what are the options? The most obvious option is to identify the phenomenally conscious state with the HOT. The HOT is not introspectively conscious –for that it would need to have a third order state targeting it– but it is phenomenally conscious. It is the state in virtue of which there is something that it is like for the subject and so it seems natural to identify the property of phenomenal conscious with having the HOT. Ned Block has argued that if one does this then one has falsified the higher-order theory. Why? The transitivity principle says that a conscious mental state is one which I am conscious of myself as being in but on the previous analysis we have a phenomenally conscious mental state (the HOT itself) of which we are not conscious of ourselves as being in (there is not third-order HOT) thus adopting this view falsifies the transitivity principle. But this may be too quick. This way of formulating the transitivity principle leads us to the view that the HOT transfers or confers the property of being conscious to the first-order state but as we have seen what the transitivity principle really says is that a conscious mental state consists in my being conscious of myself as being in some first-order state. That is, the transitivity principle is a hypothesis about the nature of conscious mental states. It is a mis-reading of the transitivity principle that takes it to postulate consciousness resulting in a relation between the first-order state and the higher-order state. That this is the dominant way of interpreting the transitivity principle is not in doubt; it most certainly is. However, it is misleading and cause way too many problems. I think higher-order theorists need to be more explicit about this mis-reading of the transitivity principle.
To me the second is the best option. However, lots of people seem to think that of one adopts a same-order theory one can avoid these kinds of issues. Since one takes the conscious mental state to be a complex of a first-order content and a second-order content that represents the first-order content we don’t have to worry about notional states. Bit it is far from obvious that this theory has any advantages over the HOT theory. First it is unclear why the higher-order content cannot occur without the first-order content. This seems like an empirical issue that can’t be settled by definitional fiat (I guess I think Anton’s syndrome might be a problem here). Second, even if it turns out that you can’t have one with out the other it is still not clear why there cannot be a content mis-match. Why can’t a red first-order state be coupled with a higher-order content that represents the first as green?
In an earlier post I outlined the case for qualia realism from the higher-order perspective as I see it. Dave Chalmers worried that one of the moves was too quick. The move in question is the move from concepts making a difference to phenomenal experience to their determining phenomenal experience. Basically the line I was pushing was that if it is the case that applying concepts changes our phenomenal experience then “perhaps it is not too crazy to think that applying concepts is what results in phenomenal feel in the first place,” but Dave is right that there is a lot more that needs to be said.
As I also said, I think that a crucial step in securing this premise in the argument is showing that there can be unconscious states with qualitative character which are not like anything for the creature that has them. If we established that then we would have evidence that it is solely applying concepts that constitutes phenomenal consciousness. There is another line of argument which might show this as well which is given by David Rosenthal in a few different places (see page 155 in Consciousness and Mind for a representative example). Basically it is a subtraction argument. Take some phenomenally conscious experience, like listening to music. We already agree that applying new concepts will change the character of the experience. So, if I were to learn what a bass clarinet was then listening to Herbie Hancock’s Chameleon will sound differently to me. Now suppose that we subtract this concept. My experience will change. More specifically it will lack the bass clarinetiness that my experience had when I applied that concept. Now we can continue subtracting out concepts one by one without altering the first-order state in any way. Since subtracting the concept produces a phenomenal experience that lacks precisely the element corresponding to the concept we can conclude that subtracting these concepts will produce phenomenal consciousness that is sparser and sparser. What are we to say when we have reached teh point where there is just one concept characteriing the first-order state? Suppose that we are at the point where we are only applying the concept SOUND to the experience. Phenomenally it will be like hearing a sound for me but not any particular sounds. Now suppose we subtract that concept. What will it be like for the creature?
The higher-order theorist says that at that point it is no longer like anything for the creature. The other side says that there is still something that it is like, though it may not be like anything for the creature) but what argument could show this? What reason is there for thinking that there is anything phenomenal left over?
Tomorrow marks the third anniversary of my starting Philosophy Sucks! I started my blogging career over at Brains and had my first post on April 12, 2007. I had several posts there before I was compelled to start my own blog and as people may know I continue to contribute to Brains and am very pleased to have seen it grow in recent times. I continue to post here as well and limit my posts at Brains to ones that directly relate to philosophy of mind and consciousness.
In these three years I have had over 100,000 hits, nearly 350 posts, and almost 2,000 comments…and next week I will be hosting my third Philosopher’s Carnival (I hosted the 58th and the 50th); not bad! I have had some rough experiences adapting to online discussion (there are some crazies out there as people well know) but all in all the discussion has been extremely helpful and challenging. I have had two papers and numerous presentations (two at the apa Pacific) develop out of discussions that started here. So thanks to everyone and I hope it continues in the future!
The year is still young but here are the most viewed posts so far (see also the best of all time).
10. HOT Qualia Realism
9. Am I a Type-Q Materialist?
8. Why I am not a Type-Z Materialist
7. Consciousness, Consciousness, and More Consciousness
6. More on Identity
5. The Singularity, Again
4. HOT Damn! It’s a HO Down-Showdown
3. Attention & Mental Paint
2. Part-Time Zombies
1. The Identity Theory in 2-D
Next week I am heading up to SUNY Freedonia to give two talks as part of the Young Philosophers Lecture Series . Here is a rehearsal of the first talk which is my most recent attempt to show that Rosenthal’s HOT theory is committed to cognitive phenomenology
I have not been too good keeping up with the NYU Mind and Language Seminar like I had originally planned. Part of the problem was the Online Consciousness Conference (about which more later) the other part of the problem has been that I teach until 3:30 and the sessions start at 4:00. At any rate I managed to make it down yesterday for David Rosenthal’s session on his “Sensory Qualities, Consciousness and Perception” which was very interesting.
The commentary by Ned Block focused on the usual issues that he has with HOTheads (i.e. eitology ad hoc, the mismatch problem, etc) though there was an interesting new objection (at least I hadn’t heard Ned give it before). The mismatch problem (red first-order state/green HOT) presents the HOThead with a dilemma. Either what it is like for the person is like seeing red in which case HOT is false or it is like seeing green in which case there is no difference between having an experience and thinking that one has the experience. It is not clear why the second horn of the dilemma is supposed to be bad. If HOT theory is right then having the conscious experience os seeing blue will consist in having the appropriate HOT so the horn just restates the theory.
But building on this Block quotes this passage from pages 185 in Consciousness and Mind:
HOTs do no transfer the property of being conscious from themselves to their targets; indeed, they don’t induce any change whatever in those targets. Rather, they make their targets conscious because a state’s being conscious consists simply in one’s being conscious of oneself as being in that state, and having a HOT is the right way of being conscious of oneself as being in a state.
Block then argued that in the case of the empty HOT –that is where one has a HOT that one is seeing green but has no first-order state at all– there is a conscious mental state that one is not conscious of and so we have a counter-example to the transitivity principle. Block seemed to be suggesting that if we take the above quote seriously then the HOT itself is the conscious mental state and since there is no 3rd-order thought about the HOT it is itself is a counter-example to the transitivity principle or he would need to adopt the same-order view. Rosenthal replied that the HOT was not the conscious state; it was the seeing of blue that was the conscious mental state even though it was a notional state (a lot of this came up at the online conference in Pete’s excellent session). Jesse asked what the NCC of the conscious state would be in this case. It surely doesn’t seem like one can have a NCC for a notional state! This prompted Stephen Stich to exclaim that David was “worse than a dualist”. Uriah interjected that it was a commonplace of predicate calculus that if A is F then it follows that there is a x such that x is F and this entails that if one has a conscious mental state then there is a state that has that property. David objected to this because he thinks that the conscious mental states are states of the person not individual metal states. During the discussion I asked David to return to Ned’s objection because I wasn’t sure what his answer to it was. If the quoted passage is correct then a conscious mental state is identical to having the suitable HOT. What reason does David have to deny that the HOT is thereby the conscious mental state? His answer was that he did not stand by the quoted passage, which seemed really odd to me. I hope to follow up with him about this…
Another very interesting theme of the discussion of how repression works. Someone in teh audience (a nyu student named Lisa, I think) pointed to cases of repression as a possible counter-example to the transitivity principle. When one represses some thought one has to have (unconscious) knowledge of the thought that one is suppressing, which sounds like a HOT, yet the repressed thought is not thereby made conscious. David objected that this was not the way he understood repression to work. Rather than having a HOT usually what happens is that one has unconscious guilt about the repressed thought that leads to repressing it. Ned and David argued a bit about the right way that actual Fruedians talk about repression…no consensus was reached except in so far as David acknowledge that if repression worked in the way that Ned and Lisa suggested then that would be a counter-example to the transitivity principle.
Another audience member (Eric) tried to press this line of attack using the implicit racism test. The idea was supposed to be that after one has taken this test and discovered that one has unconscious racist attitudes one can have the thought that one is having a racist thought with the thought not thereby becoming conscious. David at first denied this and maintained that the thought would be conscious but then he reconsidered and said that attitudes were dispositions and those aren’t mental states.
The session ended with a discussion of the relation between Jesse’s AIR theory and HOT theory (it was pointed out that Dave Chalmers is now calling CUNY the HOT AIR department). David gave his signature argument against attention being necessary for consciousness. in parafoveal vision the percepts at the periphery are conscious even if one is fixating and attending to some central point. This is a case of conscious experience without attention. Jesse’s trademarked response is that attention can be spread over the entire scene to which David responds that at that point he doesn’t know what attention is anymore. At that point the session ended.
Afterwards I asked Jesse if he thought that when we attended to something we became conscious of that thing. He said that he did. I then said that if that was the case AIR theory is an implementation of the transitivity principle and so is not really in competition with David’s view. Jesse agreed that this was the case. I then suggested that we could think of the situation like this: David has argued that there are only two ways that we can become conscious of something: we either sense it or we think about it in the right way. He therefore sees only HOT and HOP. We can then see a lot of Jesse’s work as arguing that there is a third way that we become conscious of something; by attending to it. He agreed…I knew it!
Richard Brown 