I am trying to figure out what the hell is going on in pain asymbolia. I talked about this briefly a couple of time before, but I still find myself puzzled by it. Here are  a list of facts about pain asymbolia.

1. Pain asymbolics have damage to a specific area of the brain but are otherwise neurologically intact.

2. They are conscious of themselves as being in pain. Evidence for this is that they report that they are in pain, are able to identify it as burning, piecing, dull, etc, correctly locate where the pain seems to be and reliably report the intensity of the pain.

3. They are conscious of the pain as painful. Evidence for this is that they report that it is painful. They say that the pinpricks hurt. This means that there is something that it is like for these people; it is like being in pain for them.

4. But despite all of this pain asymbolics are completely unmoved by the sensation of pain. They do not pull their arms back when pricked or burned, they do not become anxious when approached with pain producing stimuli. They often smile while they report that the pain hurts. They say things like “oh that hurts” while laughing!

5. Pain asymbolics have the normal concept of pain. That is, they know that pain should cause screaming and pulling back of the arm, etc. But when they actually feel the pain they are amused. This is what everyone is so worried about!!??!? seems to be their reaction. This is plausibly why they often smile or laugh when poked or pricked or pinched or burned.

So what are we to make of these facts? One way to describe what is going on here is that the pain asymbolics have exactly the same pains as I do, and they are just as painful for them as my pains are for me, but since their pains are not ‘hooked up’ in the right way to other emotional/behaviorial responses they fail to experience the pains as unpleasant. They are conscious of the pain, conscious of it as painful, but not conscious of it as unpleasant. This is most likelly due to the lack of causal connections that the pain has to other emotional and behavorial responses.

Another way of describing what is going on here is to say that the pain asymbolic has access to information about the noxius stimulus but doesn’t actually have a pain experience, by which I mean a painful quale. The have some kind of quale but it isn’t the painful one OR they are like the superblindsight patient.

Which of these is right?

Over at Brains

I have been working on my paper, inspired by discussion on this blog, The Reverse-Zombie Argument against Dualism. I just found out that the shombie argument was anticipated by Keith Frankish (he calls them anti-zombies). Ah well; a good argument is a good argument no matter who discovers it. Frankish doesn’t appeal to zoombies and he argues that shombies are problematic for the claim that conceivability entails possibility while I use them to argue that zombies are inconceivable.

Some of you may remember the Zombie Wars from earlier in the summer, those of you who don’t can be spared the gory details. The dispute was initiated by what I called my Reverse-Zombie argument against dualism. The basic idea is simple. The dualist claims that zombies are conceivable therefore possible therefore physicalism is false. I argued that this is a question begging argument. We cannot believe that zombies are conceivable unless we have already assumed that there is more to qualitative consciousness than the physical. To put the point the other way around, if physicalism turns out to be true then zombies are not really conceivable, thoughit may seem to us that they are in our current state of ignorance. To illustrate this I asked people to imagine a zoombie (pronounced ‘ZOOM be’). A zoombie is a creature that is identical to me in every non-physical respect but which lacks qualitative consciousness.

The response I got was that zoombies were conceivable but they did not threaten the zombie argument because the zoombie argument was not truly a parody of the original zombie argument. The zombie argument tries to show us that there is no way to deduce the qualitative facts from the physical facts. This is because the dualist thinks that there are no properties which we can reduce qualitative consciousness to. Qualitative facts do not follow from physical facts on the dualist’s view because the physical facts do not explicitly mention the qualitative facts. All the zoombie argument shows is that neither can we reduce qualitative facts to non-physical facts which don’t explicitly mention qualitative facts. But, of course, no dualist has ever wanted to reduce qualitative facts to non-physical non-qualitative facts so the zoombie argument is worthless.

 I responded that this issue that is being called reduction is besides the point. Some physicalists think that we will be able to deduce the qualitative facts from the physical facts others do not (like Davidson’s anomolous monism). So in one sense the claim that the qualitative facts do not follow from the physical facts is irrelevant. In the sense that it matters the argument is question begging. If I can really conceive of a creature that has all of my non-physical properties but lacks qualitative consciousness in a world that is physically just like this one then the zoombie world shows that dualism is false. But still, it is true that the zoombie argument is not an exact parody of the zombie argument.

But is easy to get one. Let us imagine what I call a ‘shombie’ world (pronounced like ‘zombie’ but with a ‘sh’). The shombie world is a completely physical world. There are no non-physical properties in this world. There are though creatures that are physically and qualitatively  identical to us. So there is a shombie Richard and a shombie Dave Chalmers, etc. These shombies are completely physical creatures who are identical to their real world twins in every mico-physical way (the only way to be identical in the shombie world). The difference between zombies and shombies is that shombies have qualitative consciousness. Shombie Richard is just like me in every qualitative respect; he feels real pain and has real itches and tickles and seeing of red, etc. Of course, in the shombie world these qualitative facts just are physical facts. There is nothing ‘missing’ in the shombie world. Things there are EXACTLY as they are here except that we stipulate that the shombie world is completely physical.

Shombies are conceivable and so possible. Dualism is therefore false. The shombie argument against dualism exactly parallels the zombie argument against physicalism and both are bad arguments for the same reason.

In Alex Burne’s paper Some like it HOT he says the following,

So I judge the higher-order thought hypothesis to be a heroic failure. That is particularly unfortunate for me, since it is one of the few reductive accounts of phenomenal consciousness that I can understand.

 Byrne is right that he understands the higher-order thought theory. In fact he is one of the very few philosophers I have read on the subject that has a decent grasp on what the theory actually says and how it works.

So, why then does he judge it a failure?

The present problem is that if the higher-order thought hypothesis is true, higher-order thoughts that one is in a sensory state, and which occur in the right way, must be alone sufficient for phenomenal consciousness. And the question is why this should be thought to represent any kind of advance. Has any of the initial puzzlement surrounding phenomenal consciousness been dispelled?

 This is a particularly dangerous line of attack as he is trying to hit the higher-order theory where it hurts most, that is, in its ability to explain consciousness. Byrne’s basic worry is that being told that there is a higher-order thought around doesn’t help to understand phenomenal consciousness any more than when we began.

He goes on to spell the problem out in more detail. He says,

Rosenthal’s official line is that having a higher-order thought that one is in a mental state is not, strictly speaking, sufficient for that state to be conscious. Visual scientists may tell me that I am having a visual experience, and I may believe them – that is, I may have a higher-order thought that I am having a visual experience. But this would not make the visual experience conscious. So Rosenthal adds in the requirement that the higher order thought arises without the benefit of inference or observation of which the thinker is transitively conscious. But surely it is completely mysterious why a state’s having (or lacking) a certain aetiology should be the extra ingredient that turns it into a state that there is something it’s like to be in. And in any case, once we are allowed to appeal to aetiology, why not do it at the level of sensory states, leaving higher-order thoughts by the wayside? It is the way that a sensory state is brought about, let us propose, that makes it phenomenally conscious. That, I take it, does not help to explain phenomenal consciousness, but it does just as well as the higher-order thought hypothesis. (emphasis added)

It is indeed mysterious why being caused in one way as opposed to another, all by itself, could result in phenomenal consciousness in one case and not the other. But this, I think, is not quite the right way of thinkig about what is going on. Accoring to the transitivity principle a mental state is conscious if I am onscious of myself as being in that state. This gives us a ready answer tothe question ‘why is there something that it is like for you to have a conscious mental state?’ The answer is that I am conscious of myself as being in that state in a subjectively unmediated way. It is not the causal history that is important. It is the way that I am conscious of myself that is doing the work.

I was reading this interesing report on some of Frank Tong’s recent work here. Tong’s work is regularly presented at the consciousness conferences I frequent and I have briefly mentioned it before. This recent study asked participants to imagine a certain image. Then these subjects were subjected to a binocular rivarly set up, which is where researchers present a different picture to each eye at the same time. What usually happens is that the person sees the two images switching back and forth. Some of Tong’s other works has focused on showing that we correlate the subject’s report of whcih they are seeing with their neural activity and thus learn to predict from looking at their brain what they are seeig. This is very exciting!

Anyway, in this research Tong shows that imagining one of the two simuli before having them presented influences which of the two you end up consciously seeing. In fact he is able to show that it has the same effect as being presented with a ‘dim’ image of the stimuli. The article points out that this might lead to an empirical way to quantify how strong an individual’s mental imagery is. Super interesting!! But I am interested in this as data for a theory of consciousness.

How do we explain this? Well, from the higher-order perspective it is easy to explain. A conscious mental state is, on this kind of view, consists in my being conscious of myself as bing in some first-order state. Presumably imagining is a conscious mental experience, and so would have to consist in my being conscious of myself as being in the first-order state that I am imagining. Presumably the disparity in first-person reports as to the presence of mental imagery is due to the varrying ability of persons to token this higher-order state in the absence of the firsrt-order sensory state. This also explain why it would be the case that presenting the subject with a dimly lit actual image works just as good as the subjects own imagined experience.

For some people it is easy to token the relevant higher-order state and they have very vivid mental imagery experience. Others have difficulty tokening these higher-order states and manage only to have ‘fleeting’ mental images. There is even a small group that denies to have this ability. I must confess to be one of these people. I have never been able to have vivid mental imagery. When I imagine a situation I usally find myself describing it like you might find in a book. Sometime I can manage vauge mental images, especially when laying down on the verge of sleeping, but when I am alert and awake it is very hard for me to do. Interestingly, I have good auditory ‘imagery’ experieince. I think that this may be due to me being a musician but that is just anecdotal evidence.

The preceeding discussion is all based on the assumption that imagining cannot happen unconsciously. The way I have explained it above has it as only being conscious. Is this a mistake? Rosenthal does not anywhere explicitly talk abou tthe imagination. I wonder if he thinks that we could imagine something unconsciously?

Here

The amazing thing about this story is that the computer was able to correctly tell when a person was thinking about a novel word (i.e. one that it had not been trained to recognize…wow!

Colin Caret over at Inconsistent Thoughts has some interesting reflections on the recent zombie wars and the influence of philosophical trends here. In the comments Richard Chappell displays his usual strident lack of understanding, myopic focus on minutia, and veiled ‘threats’ not to engage in dialogue (ohh! I feel so punished!).

At any rate, he claims that the debate between us was

over higher order issues such as alleged misunderstandings of a proffered argument, whether an alleged parody was really analogous to the proffered argument, etc. In other words, it was a matter of basic philosophical understanding, concerning the state of the dialectic (in abstraction from whether one actually accepts any given premise or argument), rather than a first-order dispute in which people might reasonably disagree.

When I countered that the debate was in fact a first-order dispute about whether or not zombies were conceivable RC accuses me of further showing my misunderstanding of what he has been arguing and claims that that was not a debate in which he was an active participant. Oh, my bad, I guess I really did miss the point of all those posts, like The Inconceivability of Zombies, where I was arguing that the first premise of the zombie argument was false; I guess RC wasn’t an active participant in that debate…To show how silly RC’s assertion-without-argument that he could REALLY conceive of the zombie world was, I introduced the non-physical zombies (here, here and here). Of course RC disagreed that the reverse-zombie argument worked, but he was wrong about that. So, the issue here, as I have said all along, was whether or not the zombie argument was a good argument against materialism; um, it isn’t. The accusations of misunderstanding against me are just more of the usual argument dodging from a fanatical property dualist. Sad, really.