Consciousness Live! with Andrew Lee (S3 E18)

0:02 all right uh we are live um joining me today a very special guest andrew lee uh andrew thank you very much for joining me um for those who don't know you could you say a little bit about who you are and what you do sure uh i'm andrew lee i am a philosopher of consciousness um i guess i'm technically unemployed right now uh it's kind of an odd situation um so i i got my phd from nyu last year and i did a postdoc

0:36 at rice university this past year and originally i was supposed to be uh now in uh australia at australian national university doing a postdoc through its center for consciousness uh but because of coronavirus and because of australia uh uh restricting travel from international visitors uh i mean well i'm unable to go there right now so my postdoc has been delayed um and in the meantime i'm just uh hanging out

1:10 in france for a while until until i start hopefully in january but uh that sort of remains to be seen wow okay and then you have another postdoc lined up after that i think right a three year one yeah that's right so uh after my anu postdoc i'll be a postdoc at the university of oslo um through uh another consciousness project wow that's very cool that's the new normal right uh three three or four post docs then a faculty job yeah um i mean hopefully the new normal is

1:46 not having your postdoc delayed for uh for a long time and sort of getting in limbo but we'll see maybe that'll become the new normal too yeah well i hope that clears up and uh that works out for you because i really want to see you succeed i really enjoy your work you know i've known you for a little while since you've been at nyu and uh since i first saw you present a paper on the deep structure of of consciousness at the graduate center i think and i was really captured by careful thinking and that approach that you take so one of the things i think that you're i mean i want to get into a lot of your

2:18 stuff but one of the things i think that kind of unites the various um projects that you have is the application of formal techniques to to the study of consciousness um so how important do you think formal techniques are do you think that they're is it just your interest or do you think that there's something deeply important about these techniques that can help us yeah i mean i guess one thought uh i have first is that um i'm not sure if i am applying formal techniques to all of the work that i've done

2:50 a lot of my work i think is you know just good old-fashioned normal philosophy but one area that uh i'm i've been interested in and i'm increasingly interested in applying formal tools to is to theoretical work on the structure of experience and the way that i came about getting interested in this sort of research is my dissertation at nyu was on the structure of experience and that came about because i i thought to myself

3:23 like there's all these uh philosophical discussions of consciousness and they're all really interesting but a lot of them are focused especially on questions about the nature of consciousness on for example the mind body problem or on the problem of perception or sometimes on the relationship between consciousness and representational content and it seems to me that there are a lot of questions that we could ask about consciousness that allow us to remain neutral on these issues about the nature of consciousness and just ask how are conscious

3:55 experiences structured and that seemed to me to be something that was relatively underexplored in philosophy especially um some fairly basic foundational questions about how conscious experiences are structured like what does the state space for conscious experiences look like do experiences have parts and in what sense are do experiences have continuous or discrete structures um so i became increasingly interested in these sorts of questions and uh one thing i realized is that if you're asking about

4:27 the structure of any kind of phenomena then inevitably one of the best tools that you're going to have for thinking about structure is formal tools um and i guess something that's uh somewhat nascent but um uh a somewhat nasty interest but an interest that i think will persist for a while is i'm interested in seeing what kinds of formal structure um conscious experiences have and what kinds of formal tools we can use to understand that structure yeah interesting and one of the kind of

4:59 lessons that i think that you want to take from the this talk about the structure of experience is that there may be facts about structure that we could know for instance with respect to the experience of bats or you know other sorts of creatures without necessarily knowing um i don't know the the specific qualities i guess we might know the general structure of their experience without knowing any of the specific details can you tell us a little bit about that that's that's exactly what i think um i mean one way to uh one way in which i pitch it is that i think that

5:33 investigating the structure of experience is a way of developing what we might think of as an objective phenomenology a way of characterizing and describing and understanding experiences that doesn't require us to have the experiential capacities under question under investigation so i think that if we develop models of how bad experiences are structured we might still not be able to fully grasp what it's like to be about but we could still learn something about bad experiences if i told you that like bad experiences have um a

6:06 three-dimensional structure similar to like our color experiences then you would learn something about the phenomenology of bad experiences um even if you wouldn't be able to grasp the qualitative character of bad experiences so i think that's one way in which uh investigating the structure of experience is interesting and promising i think it's more epistemically tractable than investigating other aspects of consciousness and i think some of the philosophical puzzles that we encounter when we try to understand the qualitative character of experiences

6:41 in some cases they don't arise in quite the same way when we're investigating the structure of experience so so can you give us an example of i mean you said maybe like a three-dimensional uh structure or something like that but can you give us a little bit of idea about what sorts of things we may come to know structurally yeah um so one of my recent papers is um looking at the structure of mental qualities uh and um one of the

7:16 uh i think one of the domains of experience that we um have particularly good models for are mental qualities like the kinds of qualities that occur in color experience or sound experience or olfactory experience and so forth and the standard method for developing a model of mental qualities is to represent them as points in a multi-dimensional space where the distances between the points correspond inversely to the degrees of similarity

7:47 between the different uh mental qualities so if you've ever seen like you know the three-dimensional um representation of colors where you have this big colored block and three different dimensions of variation corresponding to hue saturation and brightness that's an example what people call a quality space and uh that kind of structure can be used both to model colors but also color experiences if you think of this as a model of color experiences we have this nice systematic representation

8:18 of the three-dimensional structure of the different color experiences that at least humans can have and one thing uh i've argued recently is that actually this kind of approach to modeling mental qualities that you might have thought is super general and will be applicable to any domain of mental qualities whatsoever is actually structurally inadequate and that in order to adequately capture the structure of mental qualities we need to uh add more structure to our models and in particular what i think is that

8:52 in order to capture what i call precision structure so if you think about like the contrast between seeing something as uh say scarlet in foveal vision versus seeing something as say just red in peripheral vision um that's a matter of what i call precision and uh i think that in order to capture imprecise mental qualities the kind of experience that you have when you just see something merely as red rather than any specific shade of red we're going to have to model mental qualities not as points in

9:25 multi-dimensional spaces but instead as regions in multi-dimensional spaces and then once you make that move there's all sorts of new interesting questions that arise about the formal structure of this framework and what we can do with this formal structure and that's that's sort of what i'm doing in that paper but the core idea is that we need to make this fundamental shift um from using one kind of formal apparatus to model mental qualities to a richer kind of formal apparatus yeah that's interesting so so um can i just ask you a little bit i mean there's a lot i want to ask you

9:58 about the mental qualities in this this model that you have which i think is really cool but the but to sort of get into it when you say that of a region so you know um in a quality space model kind of typically you would say well here's a point and this point is maybe mental red and it's more similar to mental scarlet than it is to mental green or whatever so you have this region of points excuse me this relationship of these points when you want to transition to regions are there still points within the region on your view or is this sort of like a field

10:29 model or exactly how do we understand the region talk here i think you have a region as a set of points okay yeah so in in in that sense then it's not such a radical departure from um the kind of standard model of quality spaces you're just saying that we we have to capture we have to add more that there's this area of points that's the relevant interest no it's it's not uh i i definitely wouldn't say it's a radical departure but i do think it's a fundamental departure because the uh fun the the basic uh formal structure that's being used to

11:04 model mental qualities has shifted from one kind of formal uh thing to another kind of formal thing and i think that one of the cool things that arises from this is well you might at first think yeah this is a pretty simple uh kind of shift uh points to regions that that doesn't um that doesn't seem so like striking but i think there's a lot we can do once we make this kind of shift for example one thing i talk about is how different hypotheses about the structure of imprecise experiences are going to correspond to

11:37 different formal constraints within my framework so for example if we're thinking about color experiences then we might suppose we just accept that yeah color experiences should be modeled using regions and multi-dimensional spaces rather than points in multi-dimensional spaces then we could ask well what kinds of regions actually correspond to possible mental qualities like could there be a disconnected region that uh corresponds to an experience that represents something as either aquamarine or scarlet but nothing in between it's not clear that that's like a

12:10 possible mental quality and i think it's hard to even ask these kinds of questions um before we have the relevant kind of theoretical apparatus and informal framework so i think that's one example of how um using these more sophisticated uh formal tools can really advance the philosophical inquiry yeah that's good because i mean it's not so what i mean i know it's a fundamental shift i like that idea but it's not as radical as like the switch from like saying you know quantum mechanics from point particles to fields where you know there's no such thing as

12:41 a point it's just kind of expectations in the field so yeah and in that respect i i'm thinking of this as building upon previous um uh work on mental qualities so it's not it's not uh a um uh it's uh it's augmenting the what we had before yeah so one thing i want to ask you generally about mental qualities is do you on is it part of your view or um how generally do you think about the mental equalities in terms of of consciousness so

13:13 can there be unconscious mental qualities that nonetheless are qualitative but not conscious or do you on your way of thinking associate the consciousness with the quality intrinsically or somehow yeah i mean that's an interesting question that's debated in the um uh mental qualities literature i'm largely agnostic on that question i think that it's uh it it seems to me that i feel like i can see a coherent philosophical picture either way um and uh uh i don't find any of the arguments

13:46 either way decisive i mean obviously this partly depends on what you mean by mental quality and what you mean by consciousness but it seems to me that there is a persistification of uh consciousness and mental qualities where we can make sense of unconscious mental qualities um and then it just seems to me like well that's going to depend on what the best view about uh the metaphysical nature of consciousness looks like um and uh that seems to me to be something that's still up in the air so you would be perfectly oh i mean you're that the kind of framework

14:17 that you're developing would be perfectly amenable to having um these quality spaces be unconscious and still modeled in terms of regions and so forth there's nothing hanging on yeah yeah my primary interest is in uh conscious experiences so i'm interested in mental qualities insofar as they characterize the phenom the phenomenal character of conscious experiences but i think that if you were sympathetic to a picture where there are unconscious mental qualities it's pretty easy to uh to just apply um everything i've done there to uh

14:52 to that kind of picture and to use the same kind of formal structure for thinking about the structure of uh unconscious mental qualities okay yeah because i guess the thought that i was sort of toying with was that i wonder why you wouldn't want two different frameworks for one for each so maybe unconscious qualities could be modeled in terms of points maybe conscious ones can be modeled in terms of regions of points and so what would be the argument for thinking that you would want the same model applicable to both well i guess my

15:25 thought is that if we can use a single model for a wider range of phenomena then that's generally better i mean we shouldn't multiply you know models uh beyond necessity so you know if there were some particular reason for thinking that we needed different models if we had some kind of principled argument um that the structure of conscious mental qualities was different from the structure of unconscious mental qualities then that would be you know motivation for developing different models um of those two uh phenomena but without that it seems to

15:58 me like well if we can have a single unified model that covers both domains then that's um that's all the better yeah because i mean so there's some kind of empirical work which uh you know suggests that um when you present stimuli to subjects and you ask them are they different because they say no but if you have them adjust you know wavelengths or something like that so that they can match the stimulus and they they turn out that they're different

16:30 suggesting maybe that unconsciously there's they're sensitive to the difference in the stimuli but consciously they perceive them as indistinguishable so maybe work like that might sort of be a wedge to think that there's two so so that's interesting um but i think that that kind of empirical result is fairly straightforwardly accommodatable within uh my framework that seems to me to indicate that there's a difference in precision rather than a difference in the kind of general formal framework that we need to model mental qualities

17:02 conscious or unconscious so uh it seems to me like if we take those empirical results at face value then we might think that unconscious mental qualities are generally more precise than conscious mental qualities and in virtue of being more precise enable more fine-grained discriminatory uh abilities um but then that's still going to be capturable within the kind of framework that i have and in fact it'll be more it'll be better casual if we use just a

17:36 single framework rather than multiple frameworks because then we can ask what does the degree of precision of the unconscious mental qualities look like in comparison to the degree of precision of the conscious mental qualities whereas if we had two fundamentally different types of models for the two phenomena um it's not clear we would be able to make these kinds of comparisons um yeah so i think one nice thing about having this uh unified framework that you know is neutral on a lot of different issues is that it allows for uh all sorts of comparisons that are difficult to make

18:07 otherwise yeah so i mean is is the limit case of a region a point uh yeah you could think of that i mean we could we could talk about singleton regions um that are comprised of just a single point so then the model that so instead of having two models you might just say that really what's going on is whenever you need to just talk about points it's just a kind of limit case of a region it's just a very singleton small region yeah i'm inclined to think that we would never actually have to talk about regions that are comprised of just a single point that seems to me to be an

18:39 idealization of the model um sort of like that seems to be analogous to talking about something that has uh like an infinitesimally small mass or something like that um so uh just because suppose it is the case that unconscious mental qualities are more precise than conscious mental qualities um then that seems to me to just mean that the regions that correspond to unconscious mental qualities are going to be smaller right whereas the regions that correspond to conscious mental qualities will generally be bigger but that's a matter of uh that's just a matter of degree rather than like one of

19:12 these two cases hitting up upon the the edge cases of of the model i see so uh you you you doubt that there's going to be some like maxillary specific excuse me maximally precise uh mental quality that we would need to appeal to well i think it depends on what you mean by there is there i mean if if that's a question about whether any human experiences will have structures um that are best modeled by these ultra small maximally small regions then

19:45 i doubt that um i just don't see any reason to think that uh uh you know our that humans happen to have experiences that are as precise as they could possibly be um another question is whether it's metaphysically possible for there to be experiences that um are best modeled by just a single region and i guess i'm not sure there that i'm mostly agnostic there um uh so i think that's sort of an open question but i guess it seems to me that for all practical purposes for the purposes of

20:19 like empirical inquiry and like you know thinking about the structures of uh actual organisms and stuff will never have to uh appeal to these limit cases okay interesting yeah um all right so if it happened to be the case that we we did have to then you know the structure is there so that that's one uh nice thing too um that there's flexibility yeah that is a nice thing i i mean that's one of the nice the things i really like about this model is it's flexible and like you said it opens up the possibility for asking questions that you couldn't ask on the on just a

20:52 more limited model so i like that aspect of it i wonder what you might say to someone so you know i mean you talk about this in your paper on this um the the the predecessors of quality spaces so you know austin clark dave rosenthal um i was lucky enough i studied with austin at university connecticut was there and of course i'm you know friends and have studied with uh david rosenthal so i'm so much familiar with their views um i wonder what you might say to the way i think that they might handle the precision case so as far as i understand uh of you that's kind of let's you know the more

21:26 traditional quality space model you have um points uh or something like points um and so when you're presented with the stimulus you have some maximally specific mental quality that's token in the mind but then that very same mental quality you can be aware of it in different ways so there's a maximally shade of some maximally specific shade of red the mental quality is there that shade of red you could be aware of as simply red or you could be aware of it as crimson or you could be aware of it at some maximally precise

21:58 so so then the precision claim is taken care of in terms of the way the quality presents itself to you um but the quality itself is still a point on this model so just a clarificatory question here on your uh uh suggestion on behalf of clarkin and rosenthal so is is the idea that the way the quality presents itself to you um is that something that figures into the phenomenal character of your experience or is the phenomenal character

22:30 fixed by just uh the quality that is being represented so if we mean um phenomenal character by what it's like for you to have it then yeah it's fixed by the way you're aware of it but the the qualitative aspect of it is fixed by the so it separates the phenomenal character from the quality character so uh maybe here's a more complete answer so it seems to me like there's two options here um based off the question i just asked so one option is to say the phenomenal character the one is the likeness it's just determined by the quality that you're aware of and

23:04 we're only ever aware of maximally precise or maximally specific qualities so if if one were to go that route i guess that seems just phenomenologically implausible to me i mean if you just think about the contrast between your foveal color experience and your peripheral color experience it seems obvious that you know there's a difference in phenomenology and that difference is something that any model of mental qualities ought to be able to capture uh if on the other hand we go the way that you suggested uh where uh the phenomenal character of

23:39 say your color experience is determined not just by which quality you're aware of but also by the way that you're aware of it and the way that you're aware of it comes in degrees so you might be more or less aware of different mental qualities then then i'm wondering whether this is a somewhat verbal difference because it seems to me like what i mean by mental qualities is not just the quality that you're aware of to put in in this language but also the way you're aware of that mental quality um and that both of these things are what determine what it's like for

24:11 you to you know see the color of some object so those are the things that i'm interested in modeling those are the things that i'm calling mental qualities and i think to model that stuff we need to appeal to regions um and then it might be just that i'm using the term mental quality in a somewhat different way than uh then uh you know your interpretation of clark and rosenthal is using it yeah well that's why i asked at the beginning your feelings about unconscious qualities and whether anything in your view

24:44 hung on that um so that it sounds like what you're saying now suggests that maybe something does hang on that because you're you're saying i want to model the conscious ones um but uh someone like rosenthal i take it he wants the model the conscious the unconscious and conscious ones the thing that's in common between the conscious and unconscious ones and then what varies is the way you're aware of them so you have a peripheral experience and a phobia experience of the same quality may be there it's just you're aware of it in different ways in those two cases

25:16 okay yeah that helps me understand better uh where you were coming from with that uh initial question about the conscious versus unconscious mental qualities and i can see better now why you were thinking that oh maybe we need a different model of conscious mental qualities versus on unconscious mental qualities uh but let me see a bit to push back on that i guess it seems to me that um yeah i can see that way of thinking about the difference between conscious and unconscious mental qualities and the structure of conscious mental qualities but i think another

25:49 consideration is what kinds of functional role we actually associate with precision and what i was thinking is that more precise experiences correspond to more fine-grained discriminatory capacities so if you think about like your discriminatory capacities in foveal vision versus in peripheral vision you're you're going to be able to make a lot more um discriminations in foveal vision and and they'll be more they'll be more fine-grained um can i just interrupt you and ask are you talking about conscious discrimination like verbally reportable or uh button pushing or like what kind of discriminations are

26:22 we i would i was thinking on any of these criteria um it's going to be more fine-grained in in full field vision than peripheral vision so i was thinking just pick whichever criterion you prefer um then we'll be able to you know compare full view on peripheral vision and won't get the result that there's this difference in uh discriminatory grain and if we think of discriminatory grain as uh correlated with precision then there's also going to be different levels of discriminatory grain when we're

26:55 testing the unconscious mental qualities um so i guess that what that makes me think is that okay maybe there's a sense of awareness where your uh only whenever you're aware of a mental quality you're conscious of that mental quality and unconscious mental qualities are the ones that you're not aware of but then i don't think that that sense of wor of awareness is going to be the one that uh best corresponds to precision because that sense of awareness is going to dissociate from um the sense of awareness that uh uh that we have in mind when we're talking about

27:30 fineness of grain of discriminatory capacities and um it seems to be that fineness of grain of discriminatory capacities that's a better marker of precision than um the notion of awareness that might demarcate conscious from unconscious mental qualities so okay in effect but my thought is that uh even if you made this this distinction that um you're talking about uh that separates the conscious from unconscious mental qualities there's still going to be this other dimension of variation that is going to better correspond to precision that's going to be

28:03 um uh that's going to characterize the unconscious mental qualities as as well so so the idea would be that um because i know this is something that rosenthal sort of explicitly commits himself to i don't know about austin but uh definitely david so that you could do just noticeable differences completely unconsciously and sort of map out the quality space of a creature without them being aware that they're being presented inequalities at all you could sort of like ultra blindside super blindsider in the limit and just say here two qualities are same or different and they'd be like i don't see anything it's

28:34 like just guess and they would say same or different or similar or not and then you could kind of map out the space um and what you're saying then as i hear you is that if you did that you expect that there would be precision differences at that level that uh aren't going to be captured by the way you're aware of the stimuli yeah yeah or another way of putting it is i was thinking that we can think of the fineness of the jnds to just be an indicator of precision and given that we're going to um be able to see how precise the

29:09 unconscious mental qualities are as well assuming this connection between precision and discriminatory grain or precision and j and ds so uh this doesn't seem to me to motivate thinking that we need fundamentally different kinds of frameworks for modeling conscious mental qualities versus unconscious mental qualities uh but instead uh again that they can be unified within a single framework where they are going to differ in um where one one systematic difference might just be uh conscious mental qualities tend to be

29:40 less precise and have more coarse-grained discriminatory um capacities than unconscious mental qualities right but that but how how is that not captured on this model by the way you're aware of the quality maybe i'm missing what you just said i might have missed it so i thought you were saying that the way you're aware of equality although it's something that comes in degrees it always has degree zero when we're

30:12 talking about unconscious mental qualities yeah and i was thinking that the um degreed aspect of mental qualities that corresponds to precision and that is something that we can measure through looking at fineness of discriminatory grain is also going to be something that we can measure when we're looking at unconscious mental qualities by looking at the fineness of discriminatory grain for unconscious mental qualities so there's so if the way you're aware of a mental quality is something that is just always

30:44 zero when we're talking about unconscious mental qualities that it seems like we're not going to just be able to talk about precision of unconscious mental qualities at all if we're thinking of the way you're aware of them as corresponding to precision but unconscious mental qualities seem like they do have precision so that means that uh what you're calling the way you're aware of a mental quality uh must be dissociable from what i'm calling precision yeah okay good that so what's the support for the that premise that you just they seem to

31:18 have um precision in a way that uh goes beyond the way you're aware of them uh i guess i was thinking of it as sort of um uh [Music] so i i think this is a premise you can't attack but it also seems plausible to me i guess my thought is that when we think about conscious mental qualities um then it just seems extremely plausible that more precise mental qualities correspond to more fine-grained discriminatory capacities so uh i mean the way i use the term

31:50 precision is to denote a certain phenomenal property it's the kind of phenomenal contrast between like foveal and peripheral color experiences or like touching a surface with your with your hand versus with your back um yeah your your tactile experience with your hand is more precise than your tactile experience with with your back um so that's that's characterized phenomenally but then we can ask what kind of functional properties are associated with this phenomenal property what is the functional role of phenomenal precision and my thought is that it's very

32:22 plausible that the functional role of phenomenal precision is defined as a grain of discriminatory capacities i mean you can see this i mean part of part of the support is just that you know when we uh do empirical investigation it happens to be the case that the experiences that we call more uh that i'm calling more precise tend to have more fine-grained um discriminatory capacities i think also if you just like think about your experience and like you know think about like uh when you're able to make sharper discriminations amongst external objects uh it's going to be when

32:54 um you're experiencing them via the uh experiences that i'm calling precise so so that's that's the first premise that there's four conscious mental qualities precision is correlated with uh discriminatory grain and then the second step i guess is uh the hypothesis that if there are other mental qualities that exhibit discriminatory grain then we should think that that is also correlated with precision so if there are

33:26 unconscious mental qualities and those come in differing degrees of discriminatory grain then we should think that the degree of discriminatory grain is at least evidence for degree of precision of those unconscious mental qualities right but doesn't the empirical work i was sort of alluding to earlier call into question the first claim so they're the the discriminatory grain doesn't track your conscious ability to distinguish them in fact you you consciously say they look the same but uh you're able nonetheless to differentiate them um unconsciously oh okay so now now i

34:00 see more why you were asking about which kind of measures of discriminatory grain i had in mind yeah so in in that circumstance we'd have to be a bit more specific about what the measures are and in that circumstance i was i would i was thinking that on the relevant measure of discriminatory grain you're not able to um discriminate uh uh the two on the on the basis of you're you it just it seems that you're not able to discriminate the two stimuli on the basis of your conscious experience in that circumstance um and that's going to be uh what's relevant for measuring the

34:33 discriminatory grade of a conscious mental quality uh or of a set of conscious experiences right so you you can't discriminate them but some i mean it's very suggestive that there is some discriminatory capacity there but not consciously accessible so that the qualities that you're aware of are different but you're aware of them as being the same so that the two things there are are distinct and in fact you can have behavioral evidence that you treating them as distinct but nonetheless the way you're aware of them seemingly is as the same so that you

35:08 consciously experience them as being the same quality even though behaviorally they're distinguishable well so just to make sure that i'm understanding how you're thinking about this kind of case are you thinking that the mental qualities in this scenario are conscious or are unconscious they're conscious um but not in a way that distinguishes them sure so there the mental qualities are conscious

35:39 there are certain discriminatory capacities that you have in virtue of having these two different conscious experiences or these two different conscious mental qualities and uh those are not fine-grained enough to distinguish between the different stimuli in this case you have some other discriminatory capacities um that you have in virtue of some other uh you know mental mechanism um and those are more fine-grained um [Music] so that uh that also one assumes that you could

36:12 make the same discrimination even without being consciously aware of the qualities right so that so that's so this is supposed to be evidence that the qualities are distinct they're more uh they're they're the precision is there but not at the conscious level and yes you're saying go ahead so so is this so uh what is the what is the claim that your meaning to argue for in this case well the first

36:44 premise i mean i guess one of the things that you said earlier was that your discriminatory ability tracks precision and what i heard you saying was that your conscious discriminating ability tracks precision but here's a case where it doesn't consciously they seem the same but yet they are discriminable and you can discriminate them by behavioral methods but not by a report or saying you know they look the same or different i see so sorry so i was wanting to add to have two premises one is that uh

37:20 conscious mental qualities are correlated with uh that the precision of conscious mental qualities is correlated with the discriminatory grain of conscious mental qualities and then the second premise was supposed to be linking um uh precision discriminatory grain um to unconscious mental qualities where the thought was that uh given that there these two properties precision and discriminatory grain are correlated with conscious mental qualities um

37:54 we should have as the default hypothesis that they're also correlated with unconscious mental qualities so that's something that you could push back upon um but then the fact that if we grant that there are unconscious mental qualities whose degree of precision and discriminatory grain are finer than those of the associated conscious mental qualities then then that seems fine with me i mean that seems um i don't think that is incompatible with anything that that i'm wanting to say so so i i think

38:27 i got a bit confused there because uh the stuff you were saying uh it all sounded fine to me so then i got confused about whether we were disagreeing about something or not yeah yeah i see what you're saying now but so what i was trying to push towards and maybe we're not disagreeing here but i was trying to suggest that there's a two-fold a two-way uh disassociation between discrimination and mental quality so there are cases where the same mental quality appears different and cases where two different mental

39:00 qualities appear the same and so your ability to discriminate on the basis of consciousness disassociates from how precise they are um the qualities that you're aware of uh but then i think that we are somewhat speaking past each other because i think that to say it in your language what i'm calling it mental quality is not just the mental quality that you're aware of but also the way that you're aware of that mental quality and um if i'm getting your uh framework right uh i think that what i'm

39:35 calling precision just is the at least some aspect of the way that you're aware of a mental quality it's like the degree of awareness that you have of that mental quality i think that that's i think that's what i'm calling precision when we're thinking about conscious mental qualities at least um i mean i should say as a general remark this is um to some extent i i think i'm thinking about all this like uh conditionally because as i said i'm i'm agnostic as to whether there are unconscious mental qualities

40:08 or not so then i'm sort of thinking about all this like okay let's suppose there are unconscious mental qualities then then then what do what should we think in this case and what should we think in this case um but i guess my primary interest is is just to capture the structure of the conscious mental qualities so even if it turns out that uh you know we needed a different kind of framework for capturing unconscious mental qualities um i mean that's largely okay with me i think it's nice when you know a single framework can extend to more phenomena but the thing that i really want to target

40:41 uh is just the structure of well the structure of the conscious mental qualities but more generally the structure of our conscious experiences yeah i mean i guess yeah from the uh i'm kind of on the fence about this but i think if i were putting myself in the other side i would wonder why the conscious mental qualities are the ones we want to model um when when what what's what we wanted to get what we're aware of and then the way in which we're aware of it um

41:13 and so you you can capture all the precision stuff with in these two frameworks one what is it that we're aware of and how precise are the differences that we can make there distinctions that we can make and then the way in which we're aware of it um sort of tacked on on top but i wonder why there's a primacy involved with the conscious stuff because so i mean maybe this is again so you know on the rosenthal model the quality that you're aware of is conscious but there's an aspect of it which is

41:44 hidden from consciousness um like you you don't need to be aware of it in all of its glory so these two qualities which are distinct from each other you could be aware of both of them as just the same quality um so then there's an aspect of it which is unconscious there's a kind of there's a part of the state you're aware of which is excluded from consciousness and that seems like an important thing that you want to capture if that's true and you know there are other models who i know ned's view even he has it's not exactly the same model but it's a similar outcome where there's you know every

42:16 conscious experience has an unconscious aspect to it i think that's similar and you might even call that a deep structure to the conscious experience i mean so that might connect it to some of your other work that you've done so i i mean yeah i wonder why we care more about the conscious things than the uncon or the the parts that are not conscious the deeper perhaps hidden aspects well i think the question of whether we should care more about the conscious things is going to depend on uh one's background theoretical commitments

42:49 um so i'm inclined to think that there's a natural joint between the conscious and the unconscious and that there's a whole lot of reason to um focus on like uh the structure of consciousness in its own right um without uh um uh thinking of it as just as like a section of a bigger project on on the structure of the mind but that's just my own uh methodological uh background preference if you think instead that no uh we should be thinking about say

43:22 mental qualities and then some are going to be conscious some are going to be unconscious and whether they're conscious or not is going to depend on the degree to which we're aware of them or whether we have any awareness of them uh then yeah from that kind of uh framework your the distinction between the conscious mental qualities and unconscious mental qualities is going to be less important than um on the way that i'm thinking about it but then i i guess it seems to me like we should separate two questions one is just whether the kind of formal framework that

43:54 i articulate is going to capture um an important um aspect of the structure of conscious experiences on uh all these views um yeah what i want to contend there is that yeah if you're david rosenthal or if you're austin clark or if you're ned uh block or uh if you're whoever um you should uh uh find a lot of utility um in this framework um but then when i say that i want to that i'm interested in um primarily in conscious mental qualities and more

44:29 generally in the structure of conscious experiences themselves that's not uh saying something about the in the scope of the framework that i'm articulating but instead just uh my own uh i guess research ambitions yeah i guess i mean i like all that i agree with what you're saying but it does sort of put pressure on the way you argue against the standard model right so you say quality space theories like rosenthal's can't capture precision therefore we need to move on but they can in this way that we're talking about capture it

45:04 it requires a different theoretical outlook um and maybe a downplaying of the role of conscious experience and sort of focusing on the nature of the mind in general and then consciousness comes along afterwards or something like that but it does seem that the the force of the argument against the traditional view depends on this background ascension that you have that you're definitely circulating so maybe this is something uh where we are disagreeing because i wanted to say that even if you adopt the kind of background framework that you were articulating for david rosenthal uh that

45:37 there would still be problems in capturing precision and part of why i was thinking that is i was agreeing with you that okay let's let's just take for granted that the structure of conscious uh experiences and mental qualities is there's a mental quality that's maximally specific and then there's the way that we're aware of that mental quality and um that those two elements together explain the contrast between foveal color experience and peripheral color experience and all the other examples that um i have and in particular

46:09 when you're having the faux fuel color experience versus the peripheral color experience we might you might be aware of the same quality it's just that the way you're aware of it differs across two cases so then putting it in those terms my question is how do you capture the way that you're aware of aspect of conscious experiences with the standard model where we're just using points in multi-dimensional spaces to capture the structure um of uh mental qualities so what one one thing one danger here is

46:43 that you might say oh by mental quality i just i don't mean the way you're aware of the mental quality i just mean the thing that you're aware of um i don't mean the thing that differs between um foveal color experiences and peripheral color experiences um and so i mean the thing that remains constant across those two cases uh and i agree if that's what you're interested in modeling then the standard model is going to be adequate uh given this theoretical framework that we're talking about but that's just not the thing that uh i'm intending to model um instead the thing

47:18 the phenomena that i'm intending to model to translate it within this framework is the conjunction of the quality that you're aware of and the way you're aware of that quality and what i want to contend is that there's no satisfying way to capture the way you're aware of that quality aspect uh within this the standard framework right so that's why i mean to circle back around that's why i suggested maybe you need a different account that's so the way you're aware of it may be um you know i mean to take rosenthal's own model so maybe an intentional some intentional content which sort of

47:51 attributes to you a quality of a certain kind can be either described specifically or generally and so you're not going to be using quality spaces in the same way to model the way you're aware of them so it seems like there's an assumption built into what you're saying that you would expect there to be a quality space um of a similar variety at the conscious level which is which is why i said maybe your argument depends on some of the background assumptions you were making about what it is to be aware what it means to be conscious i see so some maybe that does help uh better diagnose the

48:25 the fundamental point of uh disagreement here so there's a question what are quality space models supposed to be trying to capture in the first place and it sounds like what you're saying is given a certain theoretical background um quality space models are not trying to capture what i'm calling precision at all instead they're they're just trying to capture the qualities that we're aware of forget the uh way you're aware of an aspect of yeah of consciousness uh and i've i i agree with you that i am presuming

48:59 that uh quality space models ought to capture also the way you're aware of aspect of of uh conscious experiences um to some extent i think that's you know obviously there's there's some danger of a verbal issue there but i think there's also um at least to some degree a substantive question there um i think there's a question of what the natural kinds of consciousness were of the mind more generally are

49:31 uh and i guess it seems um natural to me to think that uh if we're trying to model uh the kinds of experiences that we have in mind when we like talk about mental qualities and what we point to you know different mental qualities and so forth that we should be trying to capture the way you're aware of aspect of conscious experiences and that's part of what we ought to have in mind when we use the term mental quality

50:02 that uh that's like if if it's if the term is gonna latch onto like a natural joint then that's like a very natural um uh kind for it to latch on to but but i i think maybe that goes into like you know these fairly fundamental questions that will be difficult difficult to resolve but but yeah i i better i better see now why you were thinking that uh maybe i am sneaking in a certain theoretical assumption um into the way that i'm arguing for things and and why i think uh we were talking past each other for a bit

50:34 there yeah yeah i think that's right but and so there maybe is an argument here that you want the other thing and not your thing um you know so if you are able to discriminate in subliminal cases um so you don't you haven't you say you're not aware of the thing you're able to discriminate nonetheless you know blind site's an example of that um but in normal subjects that happens with you know masking and so forth all that stuff we know about uh so isn't there some pressure to say that it's the same thing in both cases so you have a conscious experience of red

51:06 you have a subliminal experience of red shouldn't the same mental quality be involved in both of those um given that the psychological role they play in the mind and so forth and uh doesn't that sort of push towards this idea that we want to model the mental qualities themselves as opposed to the way we're aware of them well i think i can capture this uh similarity and psychological role because it's not like um the let's just talk about the conscious mental quality or let's talk about the conscious experience and the uh sorry the conscious mental quality and the

51:38 unconscious uh mental quality um so it's not like they're just going to have no interesting relationship on the way that i'm suggesting we model them instead probably what is going to be the case is that the conscious mental quality is going to be modeled by uh a relatively large region and then the unconscious mental quality by a smaller region that is presumably contained within that larger region so i think that we can capture the similarity of psychological role um within the kind of regional framework that i'm advocating for

52:10 even if we extend it to unconscious mental qualities as well yeah although broadly um just going back to uh the question of whether this is verbal let's suppose we suppose we just um grant that we're gonna use the term mental quality in a way that in the way that you're suggesting where it factors out the way you're aware of a quality it's just the maximally specific quality that we're aware of then

52:45 if we were to assume this um i agree that the standard framework for modeling mental qualities would be representationally adequate uh given its limited scope but then my thought is that well uh then we can augment it and expand it and capture not only the qualities that we're aware of but also the way that we're aware of those mental qualities and this is another you know systemic and interesting aspect of conscious experiences and environmental life and

53:17 now we have this uh you know new framework that can do more than the old framework maybe the old framework wasn't structurally inadequate maybe it was just limited in its scope and that's fine uh but now here's a new framework that has more has wider scope yeah i guess my my worry about that move there is that there seems to be an assumption that the thing there is phenomenally conscious in both cases um because otherwise you won't be able to capture that aspect of it by just expanding the regions so in the in the subliminal case it looks like you're committed to something

53:50 like overflow right that that's uh that the quality there's something that it's like for you to have the quality you just don't you don't know what it's like or something like that otherwise when you move to the conscious case and expand to the region you're not capturing you're not adding any there's no phenomenal character that that a region provides um so the same things are there it's just a set of points uh the points are either have phenomenal character on their own or they don't so expanding to the region doesn't add that whereas on the other view the subliminal one there's nothing that

54:22 it's like for you to have it it's qualitative but you're not aware of it then the way in which you're aware of it determines what it's like for you to have it and so you need a separate apparatus to explain where the what it's like part comes from the phenomenal character uh and that does that's not included in the thing that you were just mentioning so it looks like you would be committed again to a certain theoretical framework smuggling an assumption about the nature of consciousness i'm not sure i followed uh that point so i could you say more about why you're thinking that uh yeah could

54:55 could could you re-articulate the point i i'm not sure why yeah so in in the sub in the subliminal case um you show someone read you ask them did they see it they say no um but you can show that they were aware of it in some sense because they're primed or whatever just some behavioral criteria by which you can say okay so there was a processing in the in the mind in the brain so there's a mental quality there one might say um but you're not a there's nothing that it's like for you to have that mental quality uh so that's one thing so then

55:28 you consciously see the red there is something that is like for you to have that experience um so the difference there is in terms of you know the same quality one is consciously experienced the other one is not and that distinction doesn't seem to me to be captured by expanding from a point to a region oh okay yeah no i i agree with you on that so um if in order to capture whatever the relevant differences from uh when we move from unconscious to

56:02 conscious mental qualities uh you're gonna have to go beyond the framework that are articulated um yeah i mean i think i think even if you assume that uh i think even if you just like uh exclude the possibility of unconscious mental qualities let's say you think that all mental qualities are conscious um it's still going to be the case that the framework i'm articulating doesn't tell you why like you know uh mental for either what this kind of structure should be conscious so that's just something that lies outside the scope of

56:36 uh of the framework so i yeah i i agree with with that i think that that's not just an issue if uh well sorry i don't think that that's an issue i think that's just something that is not within the ambition of of the framework um and presumably will be uh something that requires you know some other so i guess i misunderstood what you were saying then andrew because i thought you were saying that you could capture the difference between the unconscious and the conscious one by expanding from the point to a region but maybe what you're simply saying is that you could capture the precision difference or something like that

57:10 so that the conscious one is more less precise than the unconscious one that's going to be modeled by the region uh as opposed to the point that that's what uh i was intending to say okay but the actual consciousness part of it whatever renders it conscious whatever the difference is between the conscious and unconscious one in virtue of which is conscious that's not captured so you would agree with something else on this model that's right and i think that uh this relates to the things i was saying about the flexibility and neutrality of the framework because one of my goals is to

57:42 um i mean one of my goals here is to have the framework that i develop be compatible with a wide range of philosophical views so no matter what kind of i mean almost no matter what kind of like theoretical philosophical commitments you have about consciousness um you can be on board with with this framework uh and uh uh it'll have various kinds of theoretical benefits if on the other hand we were thinking about a kind of framework for understanding the divide between the conscious and the unconscious i mean

58:16 it's very hard to imagine how you could have a fairly theory neutral framework there because you know there's all sorts of different theories of consciousness and they have like radically different um extensional predictions so um yeah yeah i mean so can can i circle back around to the bat because this does make me worry a little bit about the bat and your claim about the objective phenomenology because it sounds like what you're saying is that we can't read off the phenomenal character from the quality space even once we

58:48 switch to the regions so even if we had some kind of structure of the bats quality space it wouldn't be telling us about its conscious necessarily quality space it might just be telling us about unconscious i mean so there so there'd be no real reason to think of it as an objective phenomenology as opposed to an objective uh you know quality space that's not conscious with no phenomenology sure so i i think that's what you said is right but i was thinking of the relevant structural facts in a slightly different way i was thinking that we were just

59:21 given the information that uh the relevant formal structure that we're looking at um characterizes the phenomenology of bad experiences um so if all you were if all i tell you is that hey bat uh mines have uh they instantiate this kind of structure um that wouldn't necessarily tell you anything about that phenomenology because for all you know it might be a non-phenomenal phenomenal aspect of bad minds but if instead i tell you hey the echolocation

59:55 experiences of bats which have phenomenology um can uh be characterized in this way they have this kind of formal structure then i think that would tell you something about uh bad phenomenology so i was presuming that wouldn't it tell us though i mean so i i'm sorry to interrupt you but i think i understand what you're saying is that we're sort of assuming that it's conscious phenomenology that we're modeling in the first place that's why we get some hold on the structure of it but i mean one of the puzzles for me about the back case is um you know i teach introduction to neuroscience and so i talk about this a little bit there but anyway

1:00:27 uh so it's not clear whether back echolocation should be modeled as vision or hearing so clearly the sound waves are entering you know through their ears and connected to what we would call auditory cortex in the brain but we label it auditory cortex because it's connected to the ears there's no real evidence that they that they are hearing where things are as opposed to seeing them they could be having visual experiences i mean it's kind of surprising that our visual experiences are connected to light waves you know you wouldn't have

1:00:59 thought that i expect from from beforehand uh so why couldn't their visual experiences be connected to what we call auditory waves and that's sort of the whole point of the bat of what it's like to be the bat and the problem there is that we can't know even those basic facts about whether they're seeing or hearing uh given all complete model of their brain so even if you did sort of give me this account and say well here's the structure of that i still wouldn't know if it's visual experience or auditory experience do you disagree with that well i agree with you i i don't think that knowing the

1:01:31 structure of an experience tells you everything about the experience i think in fact it leaves out the aspect of experience that philosophers spend all their time you know thinking about um and i think that's uh obviously a very important aspect um that you know that's one of the main things we're interested in but i do think that knowing the structure of an experience tells you some things about the phenomenology of an experience and it gives a way of characterizing um the phenomenal character of an experience um that is uh understandable no matter what kind of uh experiential system

1:02:04 the understander has um but basically i i agree with you that there's going to be limits to what can be gleaned from purely structural information about an experience okay so this doesn't so i mean because part of what nagel was doing in that article at the end where he i take it your inspiration sort of comes from that that he says if only somebody would do this and he said well i try a little bit um so part of what he was suggesting there was that we need these concepts in order to understand how physicalism could be true uh what it would mean

1:02:36 for consciousness to be physical we would need some way to connect the objective structure to the physical structures and i can see how you if you have this model you could connect the structural elements to some physical attributes in the fats brain but it wouldn't solve any of these problems um the depressing problems about consciousness being physical or not right you agree with that yeah i agree with that yeah okay and and so is it is uh do you take a kind of pessimistic view then that that's not in principle possible or um to fulfill the hope of the nagel of

1:03:12 thomas um that uh that we could give an objective phenomenology in such a way that we could understand the connection so is this the limit you think or do you think that maybe we could bridge it further and actually start to get some grasp on what it's like really to be a bad um uh as opposed to these structural features this is a speculative question i know you haven't worked on this i'm just curious what you think well i feel like there's one way of understanding the question where it's uh can this this further part of the nago article that you mentioned

1:03:45 be satisfied namely is there a way of developing an objective phenomenology such that uh doing so would solve the mind-body problem um and that i'm inclined to say no i think that uh at least if you think of the pro i mean there's a question of what objective phenomenology even means but the way i think of it is uh developing a way of characterizing phenomenal character that's understandable even by creatures that don't have um the experiences under question right um

1:04:16 and i think that that's possible i think that that's limited because i don't think that um there's a way of doing so that can capture all aspects of phenomenal character but i think that you know as we've been discussing if you describe the structure of experience then you'll be describing some aspects of an experience um but for this extended project of solving the mind-body problem i guess it doesn't seem to me that um do engaging in this kind of project will really solve that issue i agree with you that it might help us with um uh somewhat more tractable issues for

1:04:50 example if we want to understand uh what the physical correlates of consciousness are and investigate that then one of the um components of that will be to understand what uh kinds of structure uh the relevant conscious experiences have and then to look for uh physical uh phenomena with similar structures um to try to produce the links um but that still leaves open what the metaphysical relationship is between um the between consciousness and the physical world if there was i felt like another way of

1:05:24 understanding your question though where it was just more broadly do i think there's a way of resolving the mind body problem uh or yeah just like agnostic on that uh and there i i guess my answers yes i'm pretty sympathetic to reselling and monism uh and in fact part of why i started thinking about the structure of experience is when i was first getting interested in consciousness i i was very interested in uh the metaphysical nature of consciousness and in traditional issues about the mind body problem and i was really puzzled for a long time and i went through like a physicist phase

1:05:57 and i went through a duelist phase and i thought like all these all these positions are uh deeply problematic and none of them is satisfactory and it seems like the space of options is exhausted uh and then i thought about it more and i realized that i think reselling monozone actually provides a pretty plausible solution and then i thought okay well i guess that's solved what else is there to think about i should like start working on some other stuff uh so yeah that's that's sort of like the uh you know uh background story of how um i came to start thinking about the

1:06:31 issues that uh that i'm interested in cool that's interesting um i wonder so since you brought that up i wonder if there's some some way of connecting this issue up to our discussion we've been having it that maybe put pressure on some of the things that you're saying so let's so wrestling mode is first of all can you tell me what you mean by that since there are many different versions of it so which version are you most sympathetic to and uh how do you understand that claim i i'm pretty agnostic about different versions of it i mean

1:07:04 uh i guess i think of it as the thesis that uh physical sciences tell us only about structural properties of the world and that uh the uh things in the world have more than just um structure and that the uh extra structural properties of the things of the world will play a significant role in explaining consciousness um i mean i should say this isn't something that i've worked on myself and it's not really something i think of as part of

1:07:38 my research uh program but right it's more you offered as an example of a view where there would be deep structure um a micro excuse me a micro structure to experience or something like that sure yeah yeah and you're so let's suppose that we take because they're different versions of so you got pan pan proto-psychism you could have even a russellian kind of physicalism like barbara montero's view i don't know if you're familiar with her work but she thinks maybe those properties are physical but uh yeah nonetheless they go beyond the structural anyway so there's lots of different ways of fleshing it out but let's suppose that they're conscious

1:08:10 um that you know the the non-structural properties liquidities whatever you want to call them let's suppose that their consciousness phenomenal properties you can't capture their structure in the kind of model that you're presenting can you uh you mean the structure of the fundamental quantities to put it in them yeah yeah well i was thinking that the that they wouldn't have any structure that uh they would just be symbols uh but maybe

1:08:41 it was misunderstanding maybe i was misunderstanding how you were thinking about this well i'm just going off what we talked about earlier this i was using structure in a very loose sense to say that they would be similarity relations between them um oh i see it i see it okay i don't mean structural in the sense of physics like we were talking about so i'm sorry yeah i was being ambiguous but just that there are you know so so to take a version so suppose that the fundamental part of properties that we call charge et cetera mass really are phenomenal properties in their

1:09:14 um non-structural elements there still should be similarity relations maybe you know the experience of that charge is identical to is going to be dissimilar to the experience that mass is identical to and so you can kind of map out their similarities in that way but they're the kind of region quality space model we've been talking about is silent on that is that correct or but it's still a conscious experience so it's going to be missing out on a lot of part of conscious experience uh i think that's right i mean presumably if fundamental particles

1:09:48 have phenomenal properties then they'll have very simple phenomenal properties and those phenomenal the experiences associated with those entities won't have very much structure they might still have some structure maybe they have similarity structure maybe you know um we can think about the similarity relations between uh say uh mass and charge or between like photons and neutrons um but yeah presumably there won't be that much

1:10:21 um structure there if there's any so you mean when you say there's not that much structure you're saying they're not going to be similarity relations difference relations between them i mean i find so they're going to be all the same no i was thinking that there might be similarity relations um or maybe maybe they're just fundamentally different maybe there's no way of putting them all into a single quality space that um where there will be any interesting um uh relations uh maybe it'll just be you know like uh a totally disconnected

1:10:56 space that where there is no uh uh interesting distance relations at all yeah interesting okay so then to sort of round this up then the quality space model that you want to present is confined to macro phenomenal properties yeah so i'm not i'm not really thinking about um i mean i think that's all thinking about the phenomenal properties of fundamental particles is all you know obviously quite speculative and

1:11:29 i'm agnostic as on pan psychism myself um but most of what i'm thinking about are the kinds of experiences that um uh i guess my starting point is to think about the kinds of experiences that humans have and then to generalize and to think about um the space of experiences more broadly yeah so there's no hope for because i was thinking you know maybe there's a possible solution to the combination problem or something that we could milk out of this but there's there's no

1:12:01 connection that you can get between the micro and macro from this model at least you mean from the framework that i developed for mental qualities yeah i don't think there's very much connection there i mean there's a question i i see maybe maybe i'm better understanding uh where you're coming from now so there's there's a question of whether that framework has any applicability to um so there's a question of if we suppose psychism is true whether the framework has any applicability to the experiences of

1:12:33 say like neutrons and photons and stuff uh and i think it's not very obvious what to think there i mean that's not something i've thought about about very much mostly i'm thinking about um the kinds of color experiences and mental qualities that humans have and my thought is that hey there's some structural features of these experiences that aren't capturable by the standard ways that we use firm uh we use to model those experiences and um if you do uh capture them in the most natural way

1:13:06 then you also get all these theoretical benefits but then there's a question how far does this new framework actually extend does it apply to all possible mental qualities do all conscious experiences actually even instantiate mental qualities or are there non-qualitative or other conscious experiences that don't involve any uh mental qualities in the sense that we're talking about here and those are things that um uh i'm not sure what to think about that i'm mostly agnostic about okay yeah so another example that you give of

1:13:37 experience with possible deep structure is like pain a symbolia um is your is the quality space model you're talking about here going to be applicable to things like that so there's no way from yeah so there's an interesting question about what uh how we should model pain experiences and how we should model valence um and that's also something i'm not sure about um so one way you could think about it is that uh oh what we should conclude from painting symbolia

1:14:11 is that pain experience has two different dimensions the affective dimension and the sensory dimension so pain the quality space for um pain experiences is going to have a two-dimensional structure where there's like one magnitude uh sensory intensity and another magnitude like negative affect and any pain experience will be uh will will lie somewhere within that space i guess one thing i'm not sure about is whether we should think of negative affect or more generally valence experience

1:14:44 um experiencing something as good or bad or in a positive way or a negative way as just corresponding to another dimension of our quality space models or whether it should be modeled in some other way there is an interesting connection to the stuff we were talking about earlier concerning precision because one of the things that i want to argue for is that precision isn't just another you know uh random feature of conscious experiences instead it's a basic structural feature of

1:15:16 experience that requires basic structural changes to our formal frameworks in order to capture and that any domain of mental qualities is going to have precision structure if you accept the kind of approach that i'm taking so that has implications here because if we think of valence as um another dimension of mental qualities if pain experience um has that kind of two-dimensional structure we just uh talked about then presumably there should be imprecision with respect to um the affective dimension of valence experience and it's hard to imagine what

1:15:49 that would be it's not clear that that's possible at least it seems less clear that that's possible than um when we're thinking about you know more prosaic uh dimensions of mental qualities like hue or or sensory intensity and so forth um so i think that's one interesting connection that's something that leaves me uncertain um yeah yeah okay um interesting i noticed okay so where this is i could be asking a million questions but there's a whole other side of your work i want to make sure that we get to

1:16:21 and i can't keep you forever obviously you have better things to do like watering that cool plant in the background um but i want to ask you about your work on value and life and consciousness which i think is really interesting and cool um so you have a couple of papers on this where you argue basically for what i consider to be like twin theses they're not the same obviously but they're related in a way so one is that life in general life itself is neutral it's not good to be alive it's not bad to be alive depends on what happens in your life and so respect so to speak and the same

1:16:53 thesis sort of you argue with respect to consciousness consciousness doesn't have intrinsic value it's kind of neutral um it's the conscious experiences that are good or bad but consciousness all by itself is is neutral so i i mean before i get into the arguments like your argument zero and all the all the interesting things that you bring up here do you think these two theses are related are they distinct do you see an interesting connection between life and consciousness or do you think that these are orthogonal i i think these are basically the same thesis so okay i mean what i mean by life is um the kind of thing that people have in

1:17:27 mind when they talk about welfare or well-being so when we talk about things going good or bad for some entity or somebody something having a life worth living then that's the notion i have in mind when i talk about life and one hypothesis which i accept is that what it is to have a life in other words what it is to be a welfare subject what it is to uh be the kind of thing for which things can go better or worse for you is to be conscious um so i think that

1:17:58 uh those are equivalent theses i mean that's a substantive position but that's one that i in fact endorse um so in that respect i think that those two papers that you mentioned are both arguing for the same thesis though in different ways right so so a human and a chicken they have a life but a plant doesn't yeah yeah i mean a plant obviously a plant has a life in the biological sense um but i don't in my view plants are not the kinds of things um that

1:18:30 have welfare values where uh a plant is not the kind of thing that has a life that can be worth living or not worth living right and so the same would be true about like philosophical zombies yeah uh okay okay good so that's what i was sort of sorry go ahead yeah yeah so i was just gonna say that's that's another aspect of my view uh my overall view on consciousness and value because as i as you said uh i think that consciousness itself is neutral meaning that i don't think in virtue of being conscious um one is better off or worse off uh

1:19:05 but i also think that consciousness is what makes an entity a welfare subject so i think it's in virtue of being conscious that entity um is the kind of thing that uh can be doing better or worse and just so we're clear here we mean phenomenal consciousness so suppose that you you could distinguish phenomenal consciousness from creature consciousness like some people do uh so that you could be creature conscious but not phenomenal conscious um then you would say only the phenomenally conscious one has uh a life but not the creature conscious

1:19:37 one so by phenomenal consciousness here you mean what people call state consciousness uh like does did you mean something that it's like for you generally at that time yeah uh whereas you're thinking of creature consciousness as uh being dispositionally characterized where even if you're asleep you're still creature conscious but you're not you're not uh phenomenally conscious at that time just to make sure i'm understanding yeah i was i wasn't quite thinking of it that well that's a good way of thinking about it but what i was thinking was that

1:20:08 it's possible that uh you could have creature consciousness without any phenomenal consciousness even when you're awake because creature consciousness may be characterized in terms of just being informationally sensitive to the environment i mean you know so so for the way i think about it a plan is creature conscious it's sensitive to the environment but it's not phenomenally conscious uh a roomba is creature conscious they can navigate the environment the robotic vacuum money um it can navigate the environment and so forth so it's aware in some sense of its environment but not phenomenally so um so not everyone wants to separate

1:20:42 those two notions but some people do so i'm just wondering what uh what you would say about the roomba okay i see i'm glad i asked because i i was using the term creature conscious in a different way um yeah so that they have a nominal conscious the discipline right right so is the way you're thinking of creature consciousness basically the same as access consciousness uh is what it is to be creature conscious to be access conscious in your terminology um close enough yeah um yeah so i in that case uh i'm thinking of

1:21:15 everything i was saying before is meant to apply to phenomenal consciousness not uh access or creature consciousness yeah well right maybe could we use access consciousness because i'm a bit more comfortable with that kind of terminology because i think of creature consciousness as meaning something um else from both of these things okay yeah absolutely i mean that was the way it was introduced by i think rosenthal is the one who introduced that term and that's the way he introduced it but it's come to me i understand people use it in different ways now so that's fine so we could use access conscious

1:21:47 um in that way so so a creature that was just as access conscious wouldn't be subject of a life or have welfare or anything like that on your view yeah and in that respect the super blindsider is out well the super blindsider i thought that as it was originally introduced the the super blindsider is conscious they just don't have visual experiences um all right they might have cognitive states that are conscious yeah yeah or or you know like super duper blindsider

1:22:19 well so basically a zombie right so so on my so one of the consequences of my view is that zombies are not welfare subjects uh they're not the kinds of things that uh have lives uh or have lives that are can be worth living or not uh where it can be so just to connect this up because i know so for dave chalmers's view about vulcans you know the vulcans have conscious experiences but they uh lack affects and stuff like that they are subjects of life on your view they matter well vulcans i think are

1:22:52 defined as being conscious right so yeah yeah so that so vulcans would count as welfare subjects on my view okay okay good i just want to be clear about what the what the thesis was okay so um can you give us a little what so can you tell us about argument zero um why should we think that it's neutral i mean you know so first of all you rule out anti-natalism i think right so the idea that it's overall bad to be born uh you sort of dismiss that as that's not the thing you wanna you don't even consider that right

1:23:25 well uh well anti-natalism is a little bit different from what i was calling the negative view so if anti-natalism is the thesis that it's bad to be born uh that's related to but distinct from the thesis that consciousness itself is bad um uh but one thing i i am just presuming is false is that consciousness itself is bad uh i'm not sure if anything so that's the negative view i see yeah okay um so if you think that consciousness itself is bad you could think that some lives are still

1:23:56 worth living because maybe consciousness itself is bad but you have like all these good experiences and other good things in your life and that makes your life overall are uh overall worth living you just i think that um but that's a very bizarre view i'm not sure if like anybody has actually endorsed it yeah exactly consciousness sucks but uh pleasure's okay yeah yeah um all right so i was i was confused about the relation to anti-nihilism uh before we get started do you have a view

1:24:28 about uh about whether it's better to have not existed generally or this does something about that fall out of your view do you think are you neutral enough um puzzles about existence are i think very difficult and i'm mostly neutral on this uh i do think that so one of the things that i'm arguing for is that life itself is neutral uh which on my view is the same as saying consciousness itself is neutral one thing i think is that that doesn't have direct implications for debates in

1:25:02 normative ethics about um what is called the value of existence so this is kind of confusing terminology because uh the sense the the issue that people are talking about when they talk about the value of existence um is different from the issue that i'm talking about here the issue there is not whether existence itself is good but instead whether we can make comparisons between situations where a person exists versus situations where they don't exist um so that's sort of an issue i'm i don't have any stance on and i don't think that

1:25:34 anything i've argued for has direct implications for okay good i'm glad i asked that to clarify okay so i mean part of the argument for argument zero is that you contrast these various kinds of cases so what you call paradise swift hell can you tell us a little bit about these cases and uh how you use them yeah i mean the general idea is that uh this the argument for xero is the name i use for the general argument that i have against the view that life

1:26:05 itself is valuable uh and for the view that life itself is neutral and the basic idea behind the argument is that if you think that life itself is valuable then uh well let's put it in terms of consciousness uh since this is uh you know a consciousness podcast so if you think that consciousness itself is is valuable then um there's a question how does the value do to consciousness itself scale with the amount of consciousness which presumably is just a function of how

1:26:37 long somebody is conscious um so for example one view you could have is that the more consciousness there is the more value so somebody who lives like a hundred years gets a lot more value just in virtue of being conscious than somebody who just lives one year another view you could have is that it's just constant that as long as you're conscious for even a second then you get all the value associated with consciousness itself and it doesn't matter how long you live and what i want to argue is that no matter how you think about the function

1:27:09 from the quantity of consciousness to the amount of value generated by consciousness you're going to be faced with some implausible results and the the simple way of seeing it um the simple version of the argument is let's suppose you think that the relationship is linear so the more consciousness you have the more value generated by consciousness well then imagine uh a creature that is conscious and that lives forever but that has no good experiences and no bad experiences and that has nothing

1:27:41 good or bad in its life it doesn't have any like knowledge or achievements or anything like that it's just it's just like this um uh very neutral creature that say just has experiences of gray uh now if you think that the more consciousness the more value and that this is a linear relationship then you're gonna have to think that this creature who just lives forever has an overall better life than even the best lives of uh that humans have ever lived and that just seems super implausible to me it seems to me that well clearly um you know a good human life is better

1:28:14 than uh this neutral but really long life um then on the other hand if you you might have to say they have infinite value right if they live forever yeah the usual thing the infinite thing is not really um if they live forever then you you'd have to say they have infinite value uh i mean we could also just consider a really long life if if somebody is uncomfortable with thinking about infinitary values so just imagine that the creature lives for like uh 10 trillion years or something um however long it is uh that's needed to

1:28:46 uh outweigh the value generated by a good human life so that's one horn of the dilemma the other horn is if let's say you instead think that um [Music] the value of consciousness itself is constant and that as long as you are conscious at all uh then you get all the value associated with consciousness and the value associated with consciousness is finite so then you can't run this first scenario that i just articulated to um to argue against the view well then there's another scenario

1:29:18 um it's this is the scenario that i call swift hell where imagine a creature that lives for just a few seconds uh or let's say a few minutes and it is just tortured that entire time so it has a horrible horrible life during its entire existence if the value of consciousness is constant and if we suppose that it's large enough that it makes a difference to our lives then what

1:29:49 we're going to have to do is we're going to have to take all the value um that is associated with that's generated by consciousness and uh weigh that against the value the all the dis value that comes from the torturous experiences that this uh creature in swift hill experiences and unless the value associated with consciousness is just really small so small that it presumably can't make any significant impact on you know lives of human length uh then

1:30:22 you're going to get the results that a creature that just lives for a few minutes and just undergoes torturous pain has a life worth living because even though it has all this dis value associated with these naked experiences well it was still conscious and it gets all the value from consciousness at once so it you know is above um zero on on the scale of uh the value of life and then the general idea is that these are just two extreme versions of uh uh of the argument of the dilemma but i think that no matter what you think

1:30:54 the function from the quantity of consciousness to the value generated by consciousness looks like you're going to be faced with some version of this dilemma and some result that is implausible so the basic idea is if consciousness itself is invaluable then one of these two things you have to endorse as being valuable as well but it's just wildly implausible that these things should be endorsed therefore modus tollens is not valuable yeah exactly okay yeah and depending on how you do it you can make one result

1:31:27 more mild but for example one of the views i consider is an asymptotic view where the value of consciousness itself is an asymptote it starts off increasing a lot but then it levels off but i think even then you're going to be faced with um with some milder version of one of these two uh horns of the dilemma so so i wonder what you were gonna say if we change comparison classes slightly so so take the really boring life of uh

1:31:59 you know infinite gray um and they don't even like gray they they don't like it they don't dislike it they just gray and they're blah about it the entire time if we compare that with um infinite zombie hood then isn't the boring life better and does that not put some pressure on on in the opposite direction um yeah i guess i want to say that they're the same i mean i'm uh i i think for one thing we should be kind of uh uh i mean i i guess

1:32:36 speaking for myself i i'm generally wary of putting too much weight on intuitions about cases um um but in this case uh i guess i'm inclined to think that um yeah there's uh this there's there's certainly it's certainly not obvious that the zombie life would be better than the uh the eternity life that i articulated right but sorry sorry that the eternity

1:33:09 life would be better than the zombie life yeah i think that's very interesting um because well by definition the boring life the eternity life is that that person is is subject to welfare um their wealth are subject but the zombie is not and yet you're suggesting that they're equivalent with respect to their value i don't know i find that i find that puzzling i guess my intuition just goes in the other way it seems like the

1:33:40 eternity is is better i'd rather be in that scenario than the zombie because with respect to the zombie uh you lose everything uh but with respect to the eternity you you have something i mean it's not the most so maybe it's just because gray is non-neutral i mean yeah it's positive i don't know maybe i'm conflating because it's really hard as you say in your paper to isolate just consciousness there's always some experience and so there's always going to be maybe some value associated with the experience so maybe i'm getting hung up on that in my in my thinking right now but

1:34:12 i mean also with that comparison that you just made different people are going to go different ways so you just articulated a preference for uh having the life of uh the eternity creature but other people are going to articulate a preference for having this zombie life if you think that for example things like achievements and knowledge are valuable for the person that has them and that uh it's possible to achieve things or to know things even in the absence of consciousness um then you might be a person who thinks that oh of course i'd rather be a zombie than to be this like simple creature that just has experiences of grey

1:34:46 so i guess it seems to me like this thought experiment um is uh i i i don't think there's going to be like clear-cut intuitions either way in this case yeah i mean eternity guy person they have achievements and they achieved experience some great for a long time well it depends on what you mean by achievement um but i think in the sense of achievement where some people think that achievements are valuable uh i think people yeah so so it's part of the stipulation for eternity that

1:35:18 they have no other states so they don't have any beliefs desires or it's just experience of grave for eternity they have no welfare goods or bads so how you flesh it out will depend on how you want to think about what the welfare goods and bads are but if we just appeal to the common the most common views about welfare then um we can take for granted that the creature in an eternity does not have any desires satisfied or frustrated does not have any knowledge or friends or achievements um and does not have any

1:35:54 pleasures or pains right um and so there are really people who are going to prefer the zombie life night zombie hood just seems like the absence of everything that's important i mean so you so you there's i mean i guess it's part of you you're arguing against i'm just i i don't have an argument against it i just felt very impossible but so there are some people say consciousness is what makes life worth living and you're suggesting no there could be other things that make life worth living uh or not even life just uh i mean the zombies don't have a life on your view

1:36:28 but then unless it's better to be them than the really boring life so i want to be careful here so when you say consciousness or when somebody says consciousness is what makes life worth living i think there's a number of things that they might mean so one way of interpreting that is that consciousness itself is valuable that's what i'm arguing against another way of interpreting this or another way of uh understanding what they might have in mind is that consciousness is what makes an entity a welfare subject that's something i endorse so yeah i think consciousness itself is neutral but i think

1:37:00 consciousness is what you can think of it as consciousness is what gives something the status of being the kind of thing that can be better or worse off in the first place um and then another thing that people might mean is that consciousness is what is a precondition for something to be a welfare good or a welfare bad uh that's a thesis that is sometimes called experientialism in yeah uh the welfare literature uh that's the view that only conscious experiences can be good or bad for uh uh the possessor of them

1:37:34 and that's something that's independent from both of these theses that we were just talking about it's independent from the welfare subjects thesis and it's independent from the thesis that consciousness is intrinsically valuable uh but this third thesis experientialism is also something that i endorse so i think that um only conscious experiences um make one better or worse off uh and this this is something that you could agree with me that consciousness is what makes something a welfare subject uh while rejecting experientialism

1:38:06 for example you might think that it's only conscious subjects that can be better or worse off but there are some things that have nothing to do with consciousness that can make you better or worse off maybe like um you know i mean maybe like uh knowledge you know it's externally individuated and whether you know something is not it's going to depend on more than just like your internal states and you might think that knowledge is something that makes you better or worse off and it matters whether you have knowledge or merely justified belief um so that's one way in which

1:38:39 you might accept the role of consciousness in a theory of welfare subjects but deny it in a theory of welfare goods um but i want to say that consciousness lies at the center of both of those things that it's the precondition for both welfare subject hood and for welfare goods yeah so can i ask about particular experiences so with respect to pain do you do is it on your view pain uh obviously pain is bad but is it intrinsically bad uh or is it only instrumentally bad

1:39:11 and if it's intrinsically bad in virtue of what if the affect uh is that the thing that qualifies it it's not no it's intrinsically bad in virtue of how it feels it's not intrinsically bad simply a virtue of being conscious but it's intrinsically bad in virtue it's phenomenal character um so when i say that consciousness itself is neutral that just means that consciousness itself independent of the specific character of experience adds no value or just value but i think that all sorts of experiences are in fact valuable or just valuable

1:39:42 i think that pleasures are good and pains are bad pleasures are intrinsically good and pains are intrinsically bad and that this is because of the way pleasures feel and the way pains feel so conscious pains are intrinsically bad yeah so if there were unconscious pains they wouldn't be bad or good yeah i think they would be neutral really okay interesting um i mean they would probably be instrumentally bad um but uh i think that if they made no difference to

1:40:15 um your uh total set of conscious experiences over the course of your whole life then they would make no difference to your welfare yeah so you wouldn't be worse off for having an unconscious pain yeah so you know the old thought experiment would you have surgery by taking the memory drug which you had all the pains but just forgot about it versus um having the pain eradicated completely uh the first so having just unconscious pains versus having conscious pains but

1:40:48 forgetting about them you're going to say in the in the in the latter case uh something bad has happened to you but in the former case nothing bad has happened wait sorry the former case is where you forget no you have unconscious pains oh okay yeah yeah that's right that's right yeah yeah so i think that makes a big difference whether you had them uh consciously and forgot about them or whether uh they were just unconscious okay i mean it's hard it seems to me that like you're gonna hit

1:41:21 some kind of fundamental wall here with respect to intuition so how how how do we give an argument that's gonna get around like for instance i think it's intrinsically bad to have the unconscious pains uh and then probably it's just as bad um but but what argument could you give that would convince someone like me or me convince someone like you i said so it sounds you said you don't like to appeal to cases or intuitions too much but at this level what else is there yeah so i mean this gets into my uh broader views on consciousness and value

1:41:56 i'm inclined to think that the meta ethics of consciousness is special in that we have special justification for our value beliefs about experiences that does not apply to other kinds of um evaluative or normative beliefs more specifically i think that beliefs like the belief in the proposition that pain is bad are more justified than the other kinds of beliefs about how we

1:42:31 ought to act or whether some non-conscious thing is bad and i think the reason for this uh is that the belief that pain is bad or that pleasure is good or take any other kind of experience that you think is bad or good um comes not just from our intuitions but also from our grasp of the phenomenal character of the relevant experiences so i think that it's in virtue of knowing how pain feels that we're justified in believing that pain

1:43:03 is bad and that anybody who knows how pain feels uh has full justification has um is rationally compelled to think uh is in a position to know um can opry deduce that pain is bad and that this doesn't apply to other kinds of uh ethical facts that are not value facts about experiences i i have a number of arguments for for why this is the case i think it's also useful here to compare this meta-ethical view i just

1:43:37 articulated to some neighboring views for example phenomenal intentionality phenomenal conservativism um in the phenomenal powers view these are all views that take there to be intentional or epistemic or causal powers facts that are justified that we are in a position to know on the basis of knowing um what the relevant experiences feel like so i think similarly in virtue of knowing what it feels like to have certain experiences or in a position to know certain value facts about those experiences

1:44:10 and uh i mean this is sort of the matter ethical background but i think this is one way in which we can develop the foundations for a realist that ethical view that doesn't uh that uh that doesn't appeal to intuitions and that makes our knowledge of ethical facts non-mysterious uh at least insofar as you know knowledge of uh uh intentional or epistemic or causal powers facts are non-mysterious under

1:44:46 under analogous views i mean you still might have deontological facts that are mysterious like why is it good to keep a problem yes yeah so i think that the same kinds of matter ethical prompt uh puzzles still remain for these other kinds of ethical facts but i think there's and and i'm not saying anything about whether we should you know be anti-realist or realist in these other domains but i think that if we're concerned with value facts about experiences there's a special source of justification for our value beliefs in those facts and this source does not

1:45:19 come from intuition and this is a way of uh justifying certain beliefs certain kinds of ethical beliefs without merely appeal to intuitions about cases yeah i mean i like all that now i'm a value realist myself um i wrote my dissertation on this actually but anyway no one cares uh but yeah i wrote my meta ethics is how i started and then i switched consciousness um but anyway uh so what's puzzling me about what you're saying is why can't you

1:45:52 run the same kind of argument for the zombie so the zombie doesn't have consciousness but they have some kind of relation to their states which is i mean to take jeff lee's frame you know consciousness like or some acquaintance-like property that they have they're going to have beliefs that are justified in just the same way that their pain is bad and it's in virtue of having the zombie pain state so it's not the same as ours but why why isn't this smuggling in intuitions under another guys basically because you're saying that for them nothing's bad but they're why aren't they justified in the roughly the same way uh

1:46:25 in in on this way of thinking well first let me make uh a uh like meta theoretical remark so one thing i'm not saying is not one thing i'm not saying um sorry i i am not saying that uh intuitions play no role in the justification of any of the um ethical or meta-ethical claims that i want to endorse i think that uh yeah ultimately things will to some extent come down to intuitions

1:46:57 um but what i'm saying is that we can develop a meta ethical theory where the justification for first order ethical beliefs does not rely upon intuitions even if the justification for that meta ethical theory itself um ultimately does come down to certain like more basic philosophical intuitions so i just wanted to clarify that first so yeah then for the for the um stuff you're saying about acquaintance yeah i mean there i'm not sure what to say i i feel like i have to just like point and say like uh well that's not real acquaintance like

1:47:30 you just like introspect your experience and you can see that there's like a special relation that uh occurs there and i i i mean just to be clear i i'm i'm generally skeptical of um what falls under the heading of like uh acquaintance theories in the epistemology of experience so i think that there's all sorts of ways in which uh people overrate our epistemic relationship to our own experiences and that we should be very careful in um diagnosing uh you know just what we're in a

1:48:04 position to know about our own experiences um but that's compatible with thinking that there is a fundamentally different epistemic relationship between ourselves and our own experiences versus the zombie and uh the you know um the quasi experiences that the zombie has i i think this kind of relates to uh you know recent discussions of illusionism about consciousness like so you're not an illusionist and suppose that uh somebody makes the analogous

1:48:39 point to you about illusionism i feel like uh it's hard to know what to say you sort of have to just point to your to consciousness and be like well you know there is consciousness it exists and um uh there's there's it's there's not much to say by way of argument here but that's sort of just um a fact that we're in a position to know yeah no i agree about the illusionist point i definitely am no fan of illusionism but i still think that i mean i think the illusionism theory is a theory of zombie consciousness or

1:49:13 zombie states or whatever so if illusionism is true then we're zombies and if there are zombies then they then the illusionism is true of them but still there's some thing there what's there justified in saying that pain is bad for them seems like they're justified in saying that uh wait so you're talking about you're talking about the zombies or the illusionists i think they're the same [Laughter] uh so the zombies is who i'm talking about uh

1:49:44 they they say pain is bad um they say it's because they have some relationship to some thing of theirs so that seems to me to be it's not the same as ours because we do have consciousness obviously i agree with you on that and that's different between us and them but nonetheless why aren't they justified in thinking that pain is bad for them whatever they have is seemingly bad for them and if i knew a zombie let's suppose that we lived in a sort of world not like ours i think where the laws dictate that everyone is conscious but

1:50:18 let's suppose you could have zombies amongst us you know i don't know maybe dennis a zombie let's just pretend um so so then it's a zombie uh or some dennit s quick creature is a zombie they have no conscious dates but they go around saying pain is bad i think that gives me a reason not to hurt them i don't i don't think that it would i'd be justified in saying but you're a zombie so i'ma chop you up they say pain is bad and they prefer not to have it happen to them then whether they really have what i call pain seems sort of irrelevant to the way uh whether they're justified or not and thinking that's bad so let me say a couple things here one

1:50:50 is that in the scenario you're just articulated i think i'm inclined to agree with you that in that scenario if you hear uh you know dan did it saying pain is bad and don't hurt me then you would have reason to not hurt him um and that's because it's very hard to imagine a scenario where you know for sure that uh dan didn't it is a zombie and you're also just so confident in you know your um well let's say that i it's me i'm so confident in my philosophical beliefs that like uh i'm gonna discount you know pure

1:51:24 disagreement and and and all that and i'm i'm just certain that one then it is a zombie and two that um that uh i'm right that uh uh only conscious experiences uh or only conscious entities are welfare subjects um so i i think that you have to sort of imagine something kind of far-fetched in order to make that actually work in any like actual circumstance where these kinds of things might happen then because of like just uncertainty

1:51:57 because of like the limits of our epidemic abilities then yeah we should exercise caution um i was also going to say on the more general point i think that the relevant issues here about the justification for um our belief that pain is bad versus how we should think about the zombie case i don't think there's anything special about value beliefs here i i mean i think that the very same kinds of issues arise or think thinking about just regular old phenomenal beliefs if you know we

1:52:30 think about just my belief that um i'm in pain or that i'm seeing i'm having a red experience um versus when the zombie you know makes reports uh uh uttering the same sentences then there's a question oh why shouldn't we accept what the zombie is saying there and uh or how or more generally how should we think about what's going on in the zombie case i i guess in regards to how i'm inclined to think about what's going on in the zombie case though it seems to me that the zombie um this is only a partial diagnosis but

1:53:03 it seems to me that the zombie isn't even thinking a thought with the same content uh and that's because in order to i think there are certain conditions on being able to think about phenomenology that the zombie doesn't satisfy um uh there's a question of how exactly to characterize those conditions but you know sometimes people talk about an experience requirement on phenomenal concepts or you might think there's an imagination requirement um and uh assuming that the zombie doesn't satisfy these requirements

1:53:36 um it's a bit hard to know how to like even make sense of the situation because when the zombie says i'm in pain or maybe when the zombie says pain my pain is bad uh they're not even saying the same thing that we're saying uh i mean they're saying the same sentence but they're not uh they're not expressing the same proposition but so i agree with all that i agree they don't have the same phenomenal concepts they couldn't because you have to have experience acquire those concepts so i agree with all that sort of stuff but my point was sort of more on the jeff maybe i've been too convinced by

1:54:08 jeff i've been talking to jeff too much i read his book and it was i wasn't wholly convinced but at least got me thinking that they have something it's you know not consciousness but there's some state that they're thinking about and expressing that it's bad for them and it just seems kind of arbitrary to say but it's not really bad for them it's only bad if it's conscious and it's not our consciousness so there's there's no other state that's not that's not phenomenally conscious which would be bad for them to have

1:54:40 and it just seems that's like an unargued part of this framework and that the yeah so i don't know matt i don't really have a clear objection i just sort of the round i know that's that's an interesting thought so let me let me ask you this then um so you're wanting to say that the zombie they don't have uh phenomenal consciousness but they have something they have something else that's analogous in various ways and when are you also wanting to say that when

1:55:12 the zombie says i'm in pain yeah they're not expressing the proposition that they're in pain but they're expressing a nearby proposition that's analogous to various ways uh yes so so then i'm not saying i believe that i'm saying that i i'm kind of open to that idea sure sure and yeah and jeff thinks something like this right so that so so then i guess what i'm wondering here then is why not also extend the same line of reasoning um to the value belief where when the zombie says

1:55:47 pain my pain is bad they're not expressing the claim that their pain is bad because they can't even uh think about pain and maybe they don't have a concept of badness that is latching onto the same uh notion that our concept of madness is so they're saying something about themselves maybe under the right kind of meta-semantic story uh they're even making a true utterance but the content of their utterance is going to be different they're not talking about pain um and what i want to suggest is maybe they're not even talking about badness they're saying

1:56:18 they're talking about sh madness and yeah they're they're saying my spain is spread and then and then my thought is okay sure that's that seems fine like i bet i don't care about spain i don't care about bad things i uh but why not they schmear about schmae isn't schmearing close enough to carrying and isn't germaine close enough to paint i mean what i don't see i mean what the principal reason for drawing the line right there is

1:56:50 yeah so that's a good question i feel like that gets into some very deep metaphilosophical meta-semantic questions about um you know uh for any uh domain of philosophy where there's always going to be nearby concepts that latch on to different things um but that plays similar roles and we should ask we can ask why should we be caring about like you know truth or knowledge or consciousness or uh or value or whatever rather than uh you know the sch analogy

1:57:26 um so here's the first thought i guess it seems to me that i i'm i'm in agreement with you that this is a puzzle and i think that this is something that um uh is a legitimate question to ask and i'm not really sure what i want to say here but i also think it's a puzzle for everyone it doesn't seem to me that it's a puzzle that is particular to this domain instead it seems to me that um it's something that's extremely general i guess i'm also kind of attracted to a picture where

1:57:58 there's natural joints in reality um not just in like concrete reality but also in like you know when we're thinking about abstract things or normative things and so forth and that uh there's um there's uh the right kind of meta-semantic story will make it so that um there's certain that our terms uh tend to latch on to the joints of those realities um so then that makes me think that either um maybe the the zombie is saying

1:58:32 something false because uh the zombie analog of consciousness is just not very it's not picking out a natural kind um or maybe there it is picking out something different but it's not it's just not very important because that different thing is not a natural kind um i'm not really sure what to think there but i guess that's the sort of move that seems attractive to me in this case uh for breaking that parallel and that requires you know uh being on board with this idea of there

1:59:06 being certain joints to reality and uh our terms tending to latch onto those joints um but i guess that seems to me antecedentally plausible and it also seems to me like uh you just need to make this kind of assumption in order to do uh philosophy in all sorts of circumstances right um so that's kind of the direction i'm inclined to go yeah i mean that's interesting i i mean i could i have a million things i could talk to you about it's very interesting but i got to let you go at some points and i know i hear rumblings of kids downstairs so

1:59:39 in conclusion i wonder just quickly if there's anything that you were hoping was going to come up in this discussion that didn't and the answer can't be no but i would just i'm curious uh no i mean you covered my the two main research projects that i have i mean i'm interested in basically all things consciousness so uh yeah i'm interested in all sorts of stuff but we had a pretty wide ranging um discussion there's yeah of course a lot of other things that we could talk about but uh there's not anything that stands out in my mind that i really wanted to get to that that we didn't get to uh

2:00:12 okay it seemed like you really did a good job of like doing your homework and uh and uh well thank you yeah now i really i'm not i'm seriously interested in your work i think your work is interesting and important i want people to be aware of it because i think that your approach the way you think about these questions is very cool so thank you so much i really appreciate that yeah my pleasure well and you're welcome back anytime you know and what what was the topic of your meta-ethical dissertation uh well i tried to combine um a kind of so a an emotivism about

2:00:48 a normative judgments such that when you say x is wrong you're expressing a kind of attitude um an affective attitude but also the belief that the attitude is the correct one to hold so that it can be justified um so that you could have a kind of moral realism and also capture what i thought was psychologically important about emotivism which is that um the emotional states are important in our moral judgments but not a pure emotivism that's just like yay boo but like uh you know a yay but there's reasons for yay sort of view so that ultimately you could have

2:01:20 any sort of first sort of normative view attaching to the justification of the belief aspect of it a large part of it just philosophy of language trying to nail out what speech act is involved and how you express both the attitudes at the same time the emotion and the belief and how the beliefs can justify emotional responses and things of that nature cool yeah i mean there's a there's another things i could ask you there too but yeah but i'll let you go too well it was my pleasure talking with you uh hang out for just a second and i'll say buy off air real fast but otherwise thanks again very much all right great talking to you

2:01:54 all right we're clear