Consciousness Live! with David Pitt (S3 E6)

0:00 says going live alright we are live so joining me today is the super special guest David Pitts David for those who don't know you could you say something about who you are and what you do well I'm professor at California State University Los Angeles I'm also now termed the department and I work on philosophy of mind philosophy of language and metaphysics chair of the department I know this is a pox that's going around there's several people that

0:33 I that I know yoked into being chair people people were not in academia they say congratulations my department wants to do it it's it's something you happy you have to do because it's your turn yeah yeah yeah exactly in Europe it's actually kind of an honor or something over here it just needs a lot of work yeah yeah so you've been working a lot on the cognitive phenomenology but also

1:07 you have a background in linguistics I know that you were you come from the Graduate Center at a time when they were when there was a lot of linguistic philosophers around Gary Katz and other people of that nature so I think it's really interesting the way that you're combining your work on cognitive phenomenology but also with this kind of really nice background in linguistics you also still do work in the philosophy of linguistics or is it mostly consciousness now for you ah yeah as a matter of fact I got invited to attend a conference I think it was in the summer

1:40 of 2015 in Braunschweig Germany that was kind of a conference in honor of Paul postal and he couldn't he couldn't make it he Skyped in but he suggested to the organizer that I'd be invited and it was a conference on philosophy linguistics and realism in linguistics and I thought oh well yeah I told her I got this paper that kind of half written and some ideas in philosophy linguistics and I gave

2:16 that and then it was subsequently published and and the Proceedings of that conference and it's called what kind of Sciences linguistics uh-huh what was your place the answer it depends so what I wanted to challenge was the idea that Jerry Katz had that if the objects of study of a discipline or abstract objects and the discipline is

2:50 automatically a formal discipline and I agree that that's not right and it depends on the kind of abstract objects you're setting so for example if you're a biologist what you're interested in is species types of animals and those are arguably abstract objects but your methodology is informal its empirical and your truck trying to determine the nature of the types that are accentuated in your and your environment and so for

3:25 me the question of realism conceptualism a nominal ism and the quiz six is a methodological question and not an ontological question interesting and if so the question about linguistics is well what's the nature of suppose you're studying abstract objects you know the sentence types semantic types sound types what kinds of abstract objects are they do they have concrete tokens or not and if they do you can study them by studying their tokens and if they don't then that that part of linguistics

4:00 anyway is a formal science right well what's the reason for thinking that the like species is an abstract object as opposed to just like a a concrete object that's extended consisting of its members or something like that well you could think of it that way but what my argument was is that even if you do think of them as abstract objects it doesn't follow that linguists yeah interesting so and is that do you find that that background is useful for you and your in your work on the cognitive phenomenology and making these arguments

4:34 or is it two separate well sometimes it is so for example there's a chapter in the book I'm trying to finish on in Mexico thought and so the some of the stuff I learned in linguistics is relevant there I mean I I know where to go to to get information to prevent it myself I'm thinking that linguist linguist would dismiss out of hand but more philosophy than flossing language that I studied is more relevant to the work I'm

5:08 doing right yeah there's a lot of philosophy of language and in this stuff I got a sneak peek at some of the book a notes I think it's gonna be a great book by the way the quality of thought is there is there a deadline that our due date that this should be coming out that we know yeah I was like three years ago so I've got one chapter to finish and then I'm gonna send it in okay but I work very slowly partly because the writing is really really important things sound is really important the way

5:42 things flow is really important and also it it can take me a while to figure out the answer to the questions so if I if you're going to go radically internalist about mental content and you think the glowstick content is derived from it you have to say something about well Putnam and Burge and Kaplan and and you want to you want to have to work really hard to

6:16 say something against those people yeah take a long time to come up come up with the arguments I remember once I went to Steve shiver when I was still in graduate school and said talking about externalism and and I said I just I just don't have these into witches he said well that's fine but you know what's your argument what's wrong right intuitions it took me ten years but here bird caws purchase is it's complex I figured out what I thought was wrong with the thought experiment that's

6:48 that's a that's the arthritis stuff I want to ask you about that but but but before we get into that stuff I you know it's the way you said that so the context of the book is in terms of doing what you call analytic phenomenology and so I wonder if you could just say a little bit about how you interpret what do you mean by that I mean I know I know kind of what your answer is but I won't you know have you set it up for us sure people are using the term in different ways so Phillip off uses it in his book on psychism in a different way but what

7:24 I mean is a study of experience on its own terms the way additional phenomenal and I mean you start with the in in traditional phenomenology the bracketing of the relation between experience in the world and one way to think of it I've been ever talk to my friends through personal scholars and some of them say no this wasn't its motivation and some say well I was kind of its motivation but you can look at it it's like you know we get to Conte and we're

7:57 really tired of trying to solve that problem the appearance reality problem so let's do something else let's just let's forget about that aspect or that way of trying to explain experience and just focus on experience itself and my motivation was yeah I'm really tired of my body metaphysics and reduction non reduction and I just I'm a total agnostic about all that stuff and so let's bracket the question of the relation of the

8:33 consciousness of the brain and like traditional phenomenologist did study experience on its own terms but let's use analytic techniques to do it and let's take the history of analytic philosophy of mine as our context and so it's it's analytic both because it's its base in a dissatisfaction with with the way analytic philosophy of mind is gone and also because it brings analytic values and technique to the problem and there's

9:10 you know I think this is what Charles see where does I think it's what ryuk regal does what angela minnici does no it's a phenomenal intentionality stop they're doing phenomenology but from an analytic perspective and informed by analytic work and the history of good mind yeah I really like that resource desktop Uriah's value or that is in this vein you know three categories like how many types of consciousness do we need to posit in order to account for you know their mental lives it's interesting

9:43 that you say you're agnostic about mind-body reduction or you know functionalism identity theory dualism because in the in the first chapter of your book you come off kind of as being against reductionism actually I mean is is that do you have I mean maybe I'm getting the wrong feeling from what I was reading but it sounds like to me that you're very skeptical that there could be a successful reduction and yeah I am but that doesn't mean I believe that consciousness isn't physical no I mean by successful reduction I mean

10:15 something that we would understand something I would understand so it's sort of McGinn like but I'm also not committed to mysterion is Ammar maybe he's right about that or maybe we just haven't done enough work yet or so the dissatisfaction is is mostly with what's been done so far as a memorable line where you say you wouldn't understand it even if God tweeted out the correct metaphysics yeah and maybe that's just me I don't understand either but I assume because but I don't think anybody anybody in the world understands

10:51 consciousness and how it rises from from neural my sort of pocket version of the mind-body problem is well no with a beyond any reasonable doubt that that brain activity is producing consciousness but that's yeah so sort of encapsulates bewilderment and so I just my position is I don't know I mean yeah my dualist I don't know I don't want to

11:26 play that game anymore yeah and it doesn't really it doesn't seem like it's really relevant from the kind of project that you're setting yourself because you're you're like you're saying doing phenomenology and whatever I mean I like this way that you phrasing whatever else is going on we know consciousness is real it's we have access to it so we can kind of use our first-person methodology to to talk about it and to study it and then all those other questions they'll either be sorted out so or not but in the meantime we have some some other work that we can do so I think it's a really cool way of framing the project

12:00 thanks it's awesome mostly it might well I don't I don't know and like I said it's you know God explained it to us I get it maybe I wouldn't know but I'm I don't want to play that game they put her somewhere talks about it been raining for weeks and we're all so tired to metaphysics Winnie the Pooh asked thing that's kind of the way the way I feel too and I really love the way that word put it in one of his papers he talks about the terrorizing anxieties

12:36 and ambitions of mind-body metaphysics and I don't want to you know be stuck you know trying to get the two ends of the magnets to come together to get out of the Chinese finger trap and just go around around around with those things right and I'm not satisfied with any of the reported or offered explanations that I've heard but it's not like I've got one so I think I did I'm really interested in consciousness but I'm not

13:08 I don't think that planning how it arises from the brain or reducing it to brain activity or whatever has the only you can do in flossing read for me it's its word I don't try to do that plus I don't have any ideas which makes it even more boring so and I'm suggesting okay so this is this isn't a different way to do it and of course not alone in this I'm Charles see word is very explicit about it right yeah no it's good it's a breath of fresh air and philosophy of

13:42 mine I mean I like those other kinds of traditional questions as well but if that was all there was in the philosophy of mind they would it would be a sad boring place well there's certainly a lot to learn from yeah it's important it's important to study it study that stuff and I think it's also important to do not shut out empirical investigation if you're even if your basic methodologies introspect I think you know mental psychology would be a big help in judicata disputes or Android you

14:19 know providing techniques for indirectly studying other people's right yeah some of the things there's a couple places where you kind of say maybe this is an empirical issue so I think some of that'sthat's gonna come up so comp soon I mean I so there's a couple of things I think maybe is it would it be fair to say that you're kind of at this point best known for defending cognitive phenomenology or at least that's a prominent part of your project yeah so so I actually was the person who coined

14:52 the term yeah Galen Strawson claims he used it in 1986 and he did but I'm pretty sure it's because of my 2004 paper that or else other people just thought of the same thing but well I thought you don't like thinking sorry I thought you were gonna say it was because you're a 2004 paper that Strawson said that in 88 so but I don't really like that term

15:31 anymore because I've found that a lot of people think what I meant by cognitive or what one means is anything cognitive beliefs and desires but propositional attitudes and any kind of cognitive process and that's not what I meant at all what I meant was the the phenomenology a current thought content and so in in my book I used the term conceptual phenomenology or proposition phenomenology was a cognitive

16:06 phenomenology I mean I have views about belief and whether there's a phenomenology of belief I tend to think there isn't but that's not at all what I was intending in the 2004 paper right there you're arguing for the claim that the conceptual contents of thought states are individuated by a distinctive kind of proprietary phenomenal feel and that's that's not really specific you froze for a minute there I'm just gonna

16:41 say that there you're not it wasn't specific to any certain kind of stage but it was a focus on the content right or the contents of her current conscious thoughts right yeah so there's I means can you say a little bit about what you mean by these contents being individuated by this kind of phenomenal consciousness well I've changed my mind since the 2004 paper about the right thing to say okay what I want to say now is that they are

17:14 identical to certain phenomenal types concepts when I wrote that paper I was you know coming out of having studied a lot with Jerry Fodor and philosophy of mine and the and sort of dress game project of explaining how it is that something in the head expresses this abstract mind the language independent proposition and you know I think there's problems with dress keys view and I think there's

17:46 problems with with conceptual role views or inferential role views I was thinking all right what so what else could we could one appeal to that's in the head by way of explaining how it is that some state of your head expresses a mind and language independent proposition and I thought well maybe it's some kind of phenomenology and when I first entertained the idea of there being of what it's like the thinking I thought it was ridiculous we're walking down a street in New York and thinking to

18:20 myself is there something else like I think that today is – no that's just dumb but then um a while later I was I was lying in my bed thinking about stuff and it occurred to me that I knew what I was thinking in his really direct way I wasn't inferring what I was thinking for my behavior from what I what I said I just knew what I was thinking or at least that sometimes that's possible and that was the basis for the argument in

18:53 that in that paper it was well unless the contents of your thoughts were readily apparent in in consciousness you wouldn't be able to identify them and individuate them in this immediate introspective sort of um and I I worked on a paper for a long time and my views were evolving as I was writing it and I got to the edge of the view that I currently have but which I didn't put together and publish work in 2009 that

19:29 actually that argument is is anarchic it supports the conclusion that what it's like of thinking is the content is the thought so instead of there being a phenomenal type that expresses a proposition or you can think of these as that think of it as a relation between abstract objects thought contents for experiential types so when we talk about the content of a sensory experience it might be painful

20:03 right we don't say that the that that phenomenology represents pain this pain right and and and the token of a certain pain pipe and so I realized that the argument supported the idea that well yeah this cognitive or conceptual phenomenology doesn't express problems it instantiates them or tokens them rather so there's phenomena just like there are sensory phenomenal types and what it is to have an experience with

20:36 that phenomenal content is to token that type the same is true with thought thoughts and thought yeah there's one thing that I mean there's a couple things that puzzled me about this I mean I'm a believer in this kind of well a version of it anyway I don't know if it's exactly the same as the kind of you're gonna defend because you I mean this is getting ahead of ourselves a little bit but you want to I think you're tempted to say that you could have these things unconsciously and yet there's still something that it's like to have them so maybe this is a kind of

21:08 kind of overflow or in the in blocks sense yeah so that's Chapter six when I started putting together an argument for this and I still didn't know that other people had the view had enough but one of the first things that really worried me was oh well okay what about unconscious boss right so we learn from Freud that you know most of the mind is unconscious we have unconscious beliefs and desires and so if I'm saying that

21:43 intentional contents are phenomenal and in order for there to be unconscious thoughts there have to be unconscious phenomenology oh but no one no one believes that well almost no one I'm Coleman says what's the problem yeah I you know I don't think it's it's conceptually incoherent but it's something that most philosophers think his is impossible I thought well I better find some way to deal with that what I what I did was I tried to come up

22:21 with some arguments or unconscious phenomenology so I started with blindsight cases but quickly discovered when I give talks that there's a very persistent objection to that sort of thing well you know you can tell what color is but you're not having conscious experience of it see must be having unconscious experience of it well not necessarily maybe you're it's you know cognitive cognitive mind there's just whispering to you it's it's green you're not having any unconscious phenomenal

22:56 experience right and then I tried another argument that's fairly complicated and well going to it now about phenomenal sorites maybe being an argument for unconscious phenomenology and I tried this other thing where I tried to develop an idea of states which are conscious in themselves but I'm not conscious of but which are nonetheless mine and some robust sense so basic idea there is just like a conscious state of yours that we

23:32 were hooked up in the right sort of way neurologically technologically conscious thoughts that you have might start to influence my behavior so that in order to explain my behavior I am doing why my body is doing what it's doing we have to refer to conscious states of yours push on my conscious so I thought well then so what if we took your brain and smashed and stopped my skull at my brain with the same kind of hookup between them well and I think there's a little bit more reason to think that those

24:07 conscious states they're not not aware of or mine the basic reason being their mind in a sort of functional sense you want to explain my behavior you have to refer to them so they're in that kind of sense mine but I'm not conscious of and I thought well if the whole brain might not why not half a brain or a part of a brain so maybe there are conscious states occurring in my brain that are influencing my behavior that I'm not aware of but are conscious in themselves

24:42 and that's pretty weird and maybe that entails that they're all these momentary cells every time there's one of these unconscious thoughts I thought yeah maybe that's not a good wait is that I couldn't find a conclusive argument for that point of view and then I in the chapter I consider views that that are all basically committed to the idea that there's derived intentionality and unconscious states have to ride

25:15 intentionality but I think if you were serious about conceptual phenomenology then you ought to think there can't be derived content because there can't be derived phenomenology right you can't say you treat it as if it had phenomenology but it doesn't well if it doesn't then it doesn't have contact so I don't think that's a good way to address the question and then finally I thought well do we really need on conscious content maybe just unconscious syntactic states that are programmed in

25:54 the right way will do so the content is only genuine intentional content mental content it's only present in the conscious moment as dealing but there's all kinds of stuff going on in the brain that's observing transitions between these states that is not itself conscious or content full and that's that's the view I've been trying to live with for a couple years but I think it's yeah this is a really I mean the

26:28 simplest solution to say yeah there's unconscious phenomenology problem I guess I'm one of these people that's kind of skeptical I mean I have my days where I'm let's get to go but I mean I I think about this more in terms of like sensory contents and perceptual phenomenology but I mean I know you have this phrasing in the book where you say well there's unconscious consciousness and that some people say well that's like on the borderline of sounding like something which is a bit strange well that was of course deliberately

27:01 chosen yeah I know that's the case where there's there states of my brain that are that are figuring in the etiology of my behavior that are conscious in themselves but that I'm not conscious of right right conscious in themselves but not for me that's the unconscious yeah I mean I don't want to go too far down this because I think there's it's really hard this ultimately empirically show it's really hard to make sense of but for someone like me it's really hard to

27:33 understand what what it would mean to say it's conscious but I'm not aware of it in some sense or I'm told I'm incomplete there's no sense in which I'm aware that it's occurring I just think about yeah in what sense is a phenomenal infinite brain cases yeah right isn't there some evidence that you have like two centers of consciousness when your brain is split right I think that's pretty debatable actually I mean

28:05 I hang out with people who tend to say that the one side the brain is an unconscious processor and the side of the brain that's conscious is the one that's talking to you so in you know there's a whole big conference on this at NYU and so there's people arguing for it against it and you are you in the middle but I think I think these kinds of cases all run up against the same problem which is that well even if we can make sense of it conceptually it's hard to know what would count actual actually as evidence for it because if you can do a certain behavior so the right side of the book of complaint aren't there there aren't there experiments that seem to show that the

28:39 left brain doesn't know what the right breakfast your left that doesn't know what the right half is doing it vice-versa right yeah and so when I was thinking about that I said okay so if we've effectively cut our consciousness in half let's say the left they're both independently conscious the left hemisphere is unaware of conscious states of the right hemisphere which are nonetheless states of me at least in the sense that they might be influencing or

29:12 causing my behavior and so it then I thought well if not if half a brain and then why not a quart or maybe maybe in a smaller piece right but that of course that argument relies on the idea that when you split a brain you split consciousness and right and that was the thing I was trying to get at was it's not clear I would count as evidence that the right part of the brain was conscious I can't say it is and it can do various things but there's also some evidence that maybe those things can be done done consciously so the fact that

29:46 it's you know pointing or answering questions isn't all by itself really I would say strong evidence that there's a center of consciousness there but I think you're right it's conceptually possible at least but I think the thing of the case where you've got to brainstuff in the same skull right right so in my thought experiment the other person is Penelope he's connected to me and then her brain is inserted in my skull and she's still having the same influence on whatever she was before and her states are conscious in themselves but I'm not directly aware of them right

30:20 so but I would say Penelope must be and in some sense what unconscious I know that she must be aware of the states oh yeah she is yeah but I don't know conscious yeah but that's why they're coming yeah yeah so yeah it wasn't clear I'm saying that here's a way to accept that if a state has phenomenology it has to be conscious right but also try to make sense of the idea that a state like that is UNK I'm not directly aware of it

30:58 but so I started out by thinking are there conscious – I was driving back for a conference when Stevens no sir shot down the whole Alliance I'd argument and I was thinking okay well what else could we do I thought well are there conscious states that I'm not directly aware of yeah there's plenty other people's right okay so is there any sense in which one of those states might be mine without my being directly aware of it and that's

31:32 when I had this sort of idea that well I mean it could be mine in the sense that we have to refer to it to explain my behavior right and oh but it's a separate person all right and I put her brain in my skull with with my separate person not a separate body and maybe that makes it easier to to to accept the idea that those states of that brain are in at least the functional sense of mine right right so they would be conscious in themselves and Penelope would be aware of them so in that sense they're hers and not mine I'm not aware of them

32:07 but in this this other more functional sense they are mine and I thought okay well if the whole brain and one in half a brain but one out half of my brain but why not a smaller part in my brain now if you need in fact have a whole brain in order to have conscious experience and yeah the thought experiment stops with Penelope's brain in my head yeah I mean I like the argument I see where you're going with it but I so I think it's the sense of mind that you're that you're trading on

32:39 here that I would be a little bit suspicious of because yeah I can see that clearly there these states are yours in the sense of functionally they're playing a role in producing your behavior but they are not yours in the sense of your conscious States because you don't have any access to them you don't know about them yeah exactly yeah so so so if you think about what you're the freighting and unconscious right so Freud says that you have all of these these nasty beliefs and desires about about your parents and you say no I don't

33:15 wouldn't I know if I wanted to do these horrible things and he said you know exist no well what makes you think I have these beliefs now you have to sort of buy into a lot of other stuff but I think as essential answer is it's the best explanation of your behavior right although why you don't really want to wash your hands every five minutes except maybe not you do kill one parent marry the other but that's unacceptable so you repress it but so for you saying

33:50 look these are your beliefs and in what sense are they the patient's believes they're driving the patient's behavior even though the patient is completely unaware of them so they are not mine in that direct sense right and that was think that was the distinction I was playing on in this order yeah no I like that but for Freud you know he denied that they were unconscious perceptions in that sense and so they're kind of staged okay so there are unconscious beliefs and desires yeah but not in the sense though that you were talking about

34:22 where they're kind of phenomena associated with a phenomenal feel right but what I was taking from Freud was the idea that of ownership is a mental state of yours even though you're not aware of it right right and it's a mental state that is a belief like right that has that kind of content even though you're not aware of it well what makes you say it's mine well it explains your behavior causing your behavior that's the part I

34:55 was taking it from Freud I see okay yeah I like that yeah and so it's not an argument that there's unconscious phenomenology Oh on this argument all phenomenology is conscious just not all of my phenomenal phenomenology conscious to me and that's where this this functional sort of weaker sense of ownership comes in to justify saying that these states are nonetheless mine yeah I think this connects in an interesting way with some other

35:29 another argument of yours which has to do with with your acquaintance not knowing argument that there's a sense in which just having the conscious experience you cut you're acquainted with it and it's not knowledge by acquaintance that and I want to ask me about that distinction in a second but the distinction between acquaintance knowing and knowing by acquaintance but it seems to me like maybe there's a bit of I don't want to say tension but maybe some something like tension here with what we're talking about right now because on the one hand by being a state

36:03 of yours you should know what it's like by being acquainted with it but clearly in this Penelope case you you aren't acquainted with those states are you or are you gonna say that you know what it's like in this case know that happening she's oh yeah but I don't okay so but I thought there was a stronger claim maybe I'm missing reading too much into this because of my own biases but I thought there was a stronger claim in the acquaintance knowing stuff but that was part of what it meant to for it to be your conscious state was that you you have it well there's like right in the

36:37 prank loop that wasn't part of that argument but in the primary sense what we might call a primary sense of its being a conscious state being a state of mine typically what we mean is that I'm conscious of it that's what makes it mine it's in my consciousness right but what I was suggesting is said that there's a sort of each elated sense of mine that we might still assign to states that I'm not aware of like we say you know there's certain states of my

37:12 brain which are not personal States not states of me that are unconscious that are doing things and what makes them mine while they're in there in my brain and they're doing things what makes it a belief or desire well they're doing the things that leaves and desires and so this is this a way of saying yeah okay let's accept that there can't be any unconscious phenomenology that any phenomenal state any state with phenomenal character must be conscious okay

37:45 so then the question is could such a state be mine if I'm not aware of it well it couldn't be it couldn't belong to anybody of no one's though I think M Coleman would disagree right and I I don't have the arguments for it but I I think you probably right about that but I didn't want to go there because I didn't really have a I thought a good way to defend it so so it's it's it's not mine in the sense that I'm not

38:22 directly aware of it but it can not make them nonetheless be truthfully attributed to me and is conscious in itself because it has to be if it's going to have phenomenology right it's not part of my conscious experience you're part of someone else's consciousness so that's what you start with right are their conscious states of them are we're unaware of directly unaware of and yeah sure yours for example okay well but they're not mine they're yours and then the question is

38:58 well is there any sense in which we would or any scenario in which we would want to say that they are in a sense yours even though you're not aware of them and that would be the Freudian their driving your behavior sense and they're coming from inside you exactly but so if you take Penelope out of it so suppose you by the line of argument to the to the conclusion that Penelope States once your brain is in yours our part are those states are counts as yours in some sense so suppose you buy

39:31 that and you say well okay so it's happening to you right now and you have a regular brain well I mean philosophers bring as much as a philosopher has a regular brain you have one of those so it's not squashed or molded or melded or anything like that so suppose there some of this phenomenology that you're not aware of or isn't phenomenal to you occurring so who's acquainted with it in that case there's multiple say well that's so so if consciousness requires a self then there are these I mean nobody

40:06 would be a lasting permit itself Lodge in your soul right well we get to the point where we're you know we want to say okay well if split brain cases well maybe half of my brain how much brain does it take to be conscious and if consciousness involves itself how much brain does it take to have self well maybe it doesn't take even half a brain maybe it takes you know just who knows these are your questions so sorry I just lost my train of thought

40:47 all right can you ask the question again no yes well I'm just gonna say in the normal case at the neurotypical case if there's things like this occurring then who's acquainted with the classics good good good thanks thanks thanks so maybe every time there's one of these things a little self pops into existence and so all my unconscious thoughts are someone else's ooh well maybe these are just temporary self if you think that consciousness requires a self you know some some self for whom it's conscious

41:23 and this view would impale ya bear abuse all these momentary may be permanent maybe there's like a you know completely isolated cordoned off part of my brain where all the nasty conscious thoughts live that I have you know pushed out of my conscious mind you know like a Freudian kid where all the nasty stuff is and is conscious in itself but not for me or maybe there's just momentary things and one of the reasons I didn't want to

41:57 one of the reasons I look for other ways to try to handle unconscious thought is that that since yeah it's pretty weird I mean it may be true but it's a bit strange yeah it's a bit strange nice look well okay I'm a philosopher allowed to be strange exactly and so so that's one of the reasons I didn't you know say this is my considered view this is this is what this is what this is the answer to the unconscious content challenge to essential knowledge but you know it

42:32 occurred to me and I thought this is worth working out it's kind of fun um who knows maybe it's true yeah it's a it's an interesting view do you think on your on your view that acquaintances knowing require itself or can I cannot occur in some non selfie way or so I'm confused about the relation with of the self today Queens yeah I would say it requires a self though I reserve my right to change my [Laughter] yeah so yeah that sorry that was the answer okay so you see would you say you

43:10 split your credence or however you want to put it between this kind of there's multiple selves with their own phenomenology versus kind of what I interpret as a pseudo dint Dannette Ian you know their content fix events of content and fixation but they're not conscious in any sense just merely syntactic things with no content or something like that under the hood yeah I don't know about contact content fixation but Oh some personal states in other words yeah that don't have content

43:43 yeah but but nonetheless result in conscious states that have content how does that work well there you go with the mind-body problem again we don't know how that happens well I have a more basic question though which is how can they have their causal effect with it without content what are they doing you said something about maybe whether physical static therefore their physical States so just like you could you could you know touring explain this to the world how you can make a machine that's gonna give you the

44:14 output you want given the input you want and it doesn't have to be thinking it just has to be producing results that we interpret but imagine something like that who's you know inputs and outputs or conscious states processing it's unconscious and purely syntactic but the machine is engineered so that you get the answer that you think logic dictates so okay who programmed the brain no evolution maybe we do it all the time when we learn yeah yeah so at the end of

44:51 the chapter I say well yeah I don't know I don't have a definitive answer maybe all of these things are true maybe there are some states that are unconscious and have phenomenology maybe there are some Penelope like states maybe there's this other stuff maybe all of this is is part of an answer to what should someone like me say about unconscious right I guess my my question is why would it be wrong to say that those turning type states have content I mean beside unless you want to just reserve the term content for phenomenal

45:25 States which I I know you have a strong tendency to want to do that but why I love Tennessee it's it's not just a tendency it's a commitment okay what would be wrong with saying that these states have content or maybe you know that's why I brought the Dennett prenup because you could kind of take like an intentional stance or say the best X it's just useful to talk about these states is carrying content like this state is carrying content about the Apple over there and it's guiding your hand even though it's like you know unconscious or something like that but but it would seem sort of like natural

45:58 to posit I don't want to use the word derive content but some other kind of sense of content that these states carry information or something like that so yeah you can do that but the question is does it actually have content right and if you think that content is an experiential thing and there can't be unconscious experiences then I think you're forced to say no they don't and there could just just like there can be derived pain there can't be derived and petrol aren't that because it's experiential that's part of the of the

46:35 commitment of the view at least the way I develop it which is kind of like let's let's see how far out on the limb we can both see what happens yeah and I think that's interesting because the kind of like cognitive phenomenology or conceptual phenomenology that I like have explored and thought about allows that these days can be unconscious and they just also occur consciously and when they're conscious they have a phenomenology but when they're unconscious they don't they have these other properties that you can call you know whatever you want but they're they're not phenomenal until they're

47:08 conscious but it's the same state that occurs both consciously and unconsciously right but if you think that content itself is phenomenological and you think that that phenomenology and consciousness are welded together right then you can't since you can't have phenomenology without consciousness you can't have content without consciousness because content it's fun right so so what would be the argument what's the argument for the claim that you can only have content or consciously because you can only have phenomenal

47:44 experience consciously so it's it's a hypothetical argument right suppose you think that suppose you believe both that phenomenal content is sorry that intentional content is is phenomenal then either you think what do you think that you believe in the phenomenal intentionality of thought thesis which acronym is nicely and it's term I owe to you we were in Las Vegas thank you

48:21 so you you buy into this well then if you either and you believe sorry if you believe that then either you have to believe that there's unconscious phenomenology because you think there are unconscious there's unconscious law or you have say there is no unconscious thought because you think that there can't be unconscious phenomenology and just thought contents are phenomenally constituted if no unconscious state have those properties though unconscious state could have intents right yeah no I

48:55 understand that part of it but I'm was asking for the the prior step of the argument for the prior step so why why why should we think that intentional contents are necessarily phenomenal as opposed to just that they're phenomenal when they're conscious oh so yeah that's that's the the original argument in my 2004 paper because we can we can tell what we're thinking we can identify an

49:30 individual thoughts by their contents honestly introspectively and non inferentially they okay we can we can non inferentially determine but that's a thought that's not a thought and this thought is different from that spot or even identifying individuated by their content then their content must be apparent thus in experience and here's an unarguable to you an experience and the only way things can be apparent to

50:13 you an experience is if they're phenomenal right that's the argument that's sorry that's the unarguable it's something which seems to me to be clear and distinct idea yeah I agree with that but it doesn't that argument as far as unless I misunderstand them which is possible but it doesn't seem to me to differentiate between the two kinds of theses that we're talking about here so the one claim is that there are intentional contents which are can occur unconsciously but with no phenomenology

50:46 and then when those states occur consciously there's some caught some conceptual phenomenology that's but that's a current at that point because it's a conscious state and then you can tell what you're thinking but it's really it but and so the same story could be told on the kind of view that you have so I don't really see that as differentiating or giving me a reason to prefer one over the other because both of us are gonna agree that you can tell by introspection what you're thinking when you have a conscious thought right so but you can't tell me anything when

51:19 it's unconscious if you're coming from the the place and logical space that I'm coming from say that there can be that unconscious states can have intangible content is to say that there can be unconscious qualitative experience right yeah I say it you either have to go that way you want unconscious thought or if you don't think Naaman ology can be unconscious then you have to deny that there is unconscious thought so why

51:54 can't you so you know I'm thinking of a view like similar I mean I've argued for this before but knowing no one cares about that but so this is know most more closely associated but like a type of you that David Rosenthal has the fronted not about thoughts because he's a sceptic about cognitive or conceptual phenomenology but in terms of sensory states so you can have an unconscious pain and when the pain is unconscious there's nothing that it's like for you to have the pain but it's still qualitative it still got some property which this thing misses it from sounds and from colors and plays a role but there's no no fun know what it's

52:29 like bitten told that state occurs consciously and then that's an extra property associated with the state but it's still okay to call it a qualitative state when it's unconscious it's just that you have to be careful to specify that there's nothing that it's like for you to have it okay oh yeah I did have David in the back of my mind when I was doing this stuff because I remember in the course he graduates he was talking about the headache that you have all day but yeah you don't feel and he was saying it's there you're just not feeling it I was thinking now it exists

53:03 and then it can't exist again so you know when I go back and forth from these things but I definitely had his kind of examples in mind when I was thinking about this stuff but so the distinction here is between there being it's something that it's like and there being something that is like for me right and so that sounds to me like you're making a distinction between phenomenology and consciousness of phenomenon which I think means that you are making a distinction between I'm

53:42 just phenomenology and unconscious but didn't ya repeat myself but but so if you were if you aren't making that distinction you you could be making a separate distinction which is that these states have some properties which we would call qualitative because they play certain role or have certain function and in the mind and then when when those states are conscious they come they come to have a phenomenal property or that comes idea what it's like but before that there was no Sun there was not what

54:16 it's like there was nothing that I was like except in some very very thin sense and I know the paper you're talking about that where David says that there's makes that distinction but I don't think that has stuck in his thinking and certainly not the way I'm thinking about these things but there's just a state there that has a certain content but is unconscious and every sense of the word unconscious there's nothing that it's like in any sense for that state to be present so does it does it so the unconscious aim the unconscious headache does it have pain phenomenology no then it's not a pain

54:56 yeah but why not it does it place the place I'll just say rolls you're gonna limp when it's there and you're in a favor so yeah something you said earlier about these phenomenal properties being determined by I think functional role is determined by content okay it's not the other way yeah but it's not that the nominal contents determined by the functional role it's that that when that state is conscious there's a phenomenology and when it's unconscious there isn't okay so but if you think

55:30 that content is phenomenological then you have to say when there's when they are conscious there is content and when they're not conscious there isn't content right but that's why I was asking what the reason is for thinking that the content has to be phenomenological besides the face you can tell what you think I have another argument for it as well about how conscious states are individuated from a metaphysical point of view and the argument there is that to be

56:06 consciousness to be conscious in some way or other and the ways of being conscious Serkis roughly speaking phenomenal properties and what distinguishes conscious State just what distinguishes distinct conscious States in themselves about how we identify them what makes them different is their phenomenology so there's a kind of phenomenology this characteris of conscious auditory experiences different one for visual experiences and so if there are conscious thoughts and

56:40 conscious thoughts are not reducible any these other kinds of conscious states then they ought to have their own special kind of phenomenology that makes them different from all these other pages like phenomenology of an auditory state is what makes it different one of the things that makes it different from a visual statement different kind of phenomenology so your conscious thoughts are their own kind of thing not reducible to anything else and they have to have their own kind of phenomenology right and I agree when they're conscious they have to have that but when when they're unconscious

57:13 they don't right so I would say what I'm committed to but when my view is committed to is saying that when they don't have that kind of phenomenology if we're talking about thoughts those states don't have content intentional yeah I mean yeah I have to think about it more but I it's a it's an interesting it's an interesting debate but I mean we spent already a long time on this one and I have a bunch of other stuff I want to harangue you about so maybe we'll just put a pin on this and and come back to it yeah I think we're coming from very

57:47 different places yeah and Araya Kregel once once said to me he said I think not everybody appreciates how radical this view is I said well I don't know how radical it is but it certainly goes against a lot of ways of thinking yeah I don't think of a footnote of one of my papers saying my professors will be very disappointed in me you guys are wrong yeah well I was asking for the argument because I get that we're coming from

58:21 very different places I was wondering why what's gonna convince me to go into your side but but I wanted to ask about some things about this knowing acquaintance knowing stuff and I want to get you to talk a little bit about it cuz I think it's really interesting and I like the idea but also I want to ask you about in respect to conceptual phenomenology as you understand it if it doesn't put a little bit of pressure on your view that there are people who deny that they have cognition Amidala G or a conceptual phenomenology given your views about what it is to be a conscious

58:54 de and acquaintance so I wonder if you could say something about those things right so from the very beginning that was my other big worry about about this view and and Galen talks about a lot in his mental reality right and I'm still working up working on this I don't know that I have a settled view I got a couple of ways of thinking about it it's part of the book that I'm still working on but I think yeah that's what I call the human objection right so Hume says well when I passed around in my

59:28 mind I find you know often feelings and ideas or whatever but no self so I don't encounter it so why should I believe it exists and I have friends and I've had students who were willing to take this idea very seriously that's it then they sit by I can't find it right so that um I believe that that's an honest intuition that it's aren't people arguing from their own theories that needs to be explained that's another big challenge for the view and

1:00:02 I'm still working on that but I think part of it might be that we're actually really good at talking but maybe we're not so good at thinking so maybe this cognitive phenomenology is really kind of faint so it would be like the vision of a Gila monster right that it sits there but they never really notice it yeah but what about when you try to find it well maybe it's there's some problem analogous to it you know the very thing

1:00:38 you're looking for is what you're using to look for it so you're already looking past what I'm asking you to to be aware of and you're thinking about things then you're looking so to speak in your in your mind I don't have a perceptual interpersonal you introspect but but it's like you know you're looking for your flashlight with your flashlight and you'd say there no flashlights I can't find it well your hand dude but I'm still really unsettled about that okay

1:01:12 yeah because it this is so part of the part of the commitment that would be that introspection is is itself cognitive which is why we miss it because we don't seem to miss it in the case of perceptual phenomenology right so go introspectively searching for you know deliberately searching for perceptual phenomenology with perceptual phenomenology we do it with thought and attention right right and so we're not looking for what we're looking for using

1:01:46 the thing we're looking for which might make it but might make it easy to not see what we're looking and I so think that you know along along with the idea that we're really not all that great at thinking and that there might there other possible creatures cognitive phenomenology is much more firm that Charles see were knocking him up with pugilistic right just actually in the face like pain there might be creatures for whom the you know the cognitive phenomena or the conceptual

1:02:20 phenomenology earned way up and it doesn't doesn't help that for us for many of us there are notable exceptions you know from in my own case we talk to ourselves when we think you know Joe Diaz Unni right yeah yeah Jody says he doesn't and Ruth Marcus said she didn't support what and Jodie Jodie realized one point that lack of subvocalization might have something to do with the fact

1:02:53 that people didn't think his poetry was very cool I said yeah Jodie is I'm all about the sound of the word you got to hear them that's part of my poetry it's but I know that in my own case I'm always chattering away at myself and that kind of phenomenology is much more vivid and it might be disguising but I still have to finish working this out and I it's an important challenge I wonder if you because there's a related kind of possibly oh really I want to get

1:03:27 your reaction to this and there's a related kind of thing in perceptual phenomenology known recently coming under the title of a Fantasia where there are people who deny that they are strong mental imagers like for instance I myself as a person that's not a I have auditory imagery and I can hear things in your head without this yeah in my head but I but you asked me to visualize something I can't do it like people say in fact when I got to graduate school I thought people were lying when they said they could picture the speckled ten and I was like I think Speckled Hen or something like that I can't like picture

1:03:58 it well special hands are notoriously difficult yeah well exactly but even these things isolados or red squares for me it's it's I can't do it so it turns out that we've recently sort of been finding out that this is a phenomenon that there are certain sub class of persons who aren't strong visualizers they don't have this kind of imagery and so I wonder if you think is it maybe a possibility that there could be something like a Fantasia going on with cognitive phenomenology that some people simply aren't good they don't have they don't have that ability for whatever

1:04:32 then I would say that I mean that's that's a really interesting idea and I would say well then that means they can't think yeah and that would explain you know a lot of people in positions of power right now they're talking and talking and talking but it doesn't appear that they're thinking that's that's an interesting idea but and I do think that it there's I mean to sort of

1:05:06 develop one of the responses it's it's it's too close to us right this so look if you know in this immediate on inferential way what you're thinking and this content has to be available to you in your conscious experience and it's not just words right because you can hear word in your head without thinking what they mean or knowing what they mean one of my favorite examples is a colleague mark Bala gur taught his daughter when she was four years old to say he said look if anyone ever asks you

1:05:40 where you live tell him you live in the causal Nexus we do that if you didn't know what causal Nexus was yeah was she thinking that she lived in the causal Nexus no she doesn't know what the causal Nexus is she's just running the words through her head and that that's not thinking you have to understand the words right and that's I I want to argue as a kind of experience understanding experience yeah you brought that out because I was I was

1:06:15 curious about your position on that because it seems like you want to focus more on like a current thoughts whereas people like Trustin and see or as far as I understand and they and Cyril – back when the days talk about this they talk about these kind of processes like coming to understand I'm actively recalling a memory and those things like kind of different to me one is an occurrence thing and the other yeah but the current thoughts occur at some point right in a process of thinking can involve a series of thoughts occurring so I don't whoops

1:06:50 so I think that the the phenomenology of of engaging in the in thinking is going to be determined a large part by the phenomenology of the thoughts you think right so that you know the Nama knology of a cognitive personal level cognitive process presupposes the existence of conceptual do you go the same route from the things like attention there a

1:07:24 phenomenology of attending or yeah I don't know I so I you know I have enormous respect for Uriah and Terry organ I think they went too fast so now it's like everything is phenomenal well let's maybe but we have to be careful and we you know my uh storable friends when I tell them to have this argument that there's something it's like I think they say Union argument for that why are you wasting your time as well it's you know where I come from you need an argument for these things

1:07:57 because it's not it's very much against the mainstream and I think that it's we shouldn't go too fast and claiming that there's a phenomenology of everything we should think about it maybe try not some arguments for it so so yeah I'm just focusing on on the phenomenology of in a current conscious thought yeah it's a good play actually it's a good cautionary principle they we don't want to serve phenomenology belief well there's certainly a phenomenology of

1:08:28 affirmation but as for like taught us you can affirm things that you don't really believe right though I'm more inclined to say that belief is a functional property being a belief is a functional property so and people have said oh yeah you believe that there's a phenomenology of believing the P and I say no no a lot of people conflate I think the word thinking with believing

1:09:01 so when you say when you're rioting at one point yeah yeah that's not not what this is about and I think entertaining is not a propositional attitude in the sense that you can entertain a thought hold it in your mind without having any take on its truth value or anything else or any something that it's like to do that yeah yes just entertaining the thought exactly sorry I think this is gonna answer my next question because I mean

1:09:35 one of the things that kennel I mean I was led to this in a different kind of way all I've got started by thinking about some of the things that schizophrenic sorts say and sometimes they say that they they have these delusional beliefs but they they don't really believe them but they do believe them but they don't like they feel different than their regular beliefs so to speak you know they don't act on them in the same way you know sometimes in in worst case you know sometimes they do but often so I was thinking about that and so it seems to be like the same sort of argument that you get can be given toward the attitudinal component not something I've always been very

1:10:07 interested in like I can tell whether I'm wondering you're doubting something I can also whether what I want I can tell whether I'm wondering or doubting something by introspectively it seems to me and they seem different experientially and also I can I think I can tell what it is that I'm wondering or doubting but you know I can wonder whether you know JFK is north of Queens I can doubt that JFK is north of Queens so if the same argument that you gave seems to me to work pretty well there as well if I can know that I'm wondering as

1:10:40 opposed to doubting some content then should not figure in the experiential part of it or nor why are we yeah yeah so but what I'm saying is specifically with respect to belief maybe you can't or can't always know what you believe in that way you can be deceived I mean if you if you write going back to Freud did you think but you don't think that you believe blah blah blah desire its things but you actually do and so the the phenomenology

1:11:18 I think and so I haven't thought about this a whole lot but insofar as I have the phenomenology that you'd want to associate leaving is its phenomenology of conscious affirmation right and that might not be sufficient for actually believing right the proof of believing is in the behavior right but if you not if you don't know I'm not committed to that it just seems to me good that's I thought about this when I was first thinking about this stuff and I said you

1:11:50 know I don't want to go there I want that's complicated already we just focus on the content dragon don't I do think there's you know there's phenomenology if you can tell whether you're wondering something or not you know there's certain way it feels to wonder but there might not be a certain way it feels believed right yeah I like that distinction by the way but so if you're if you're gonna sort of agree with that then isn't when you're gonna individuate these states doesn't it have to be in terms of the attitude and content or do you think that when i wonder that p and

1:12:24 also doubt that p the dot p part has the same phenomenology yes and it's just the doubting or wondering which is adding something extra to is that's that's the view yes I insist on that uh-huh so you don't think it's another limb to go out on but I found that you know I go out on a limb sand I jump up and down and they don't break well here maybe this'll work yeah is this the sense in which you're

1:13:02 gonna write so you're gonna offer them the compositionality so wherever wherever the that P part appears that has the same phenomenal feel whether it's in a belief I mean a thought or a judgement or entertain yeah so the but this a challenges put to me a long time ago by Adam Oh Riko at the University of Arizona and then was again this guy named Galen berry gave a talk at a NEPA it was asked to comment on about you know won't want the phenomenology of the concept change

1:13:36 depending on its context like weight visual the way the color or something appears to have and change with this context um and doesn't that wreak havoc with compositionality and I wrote a little paper on it that I'm corporated book and I think the answer is that this kind of phenomenology doesn't have that those kinds of so if you think that water is wet versus water is cold it's not a different concept of water you're

1:14:12 thinking the same concept but it is a different context so um you know word meanings don't change with their context and would change their literal meaning with context oh I would say it just just doesn't happen but you know I think it's it's some extent an open question and it would I mean there there's a sense there's a kind of compositionality that you could still have right so you could factor out the contributions things make

1:14:48 to this new thing there might be you know principles according to which that happened um and that would be a more complicated theory but I think it could be made to work I just don't think it happens with it happens with yeah I think that's an interesting idea because you you defend a really kind of straight narrow content view um I mean you know you think that for instance when I have

1:15:24 the thought you know I'm hungry and you have the thought I'm hungry we have the exact same thoughts yes phenomenally they're indistinguishable right so you couldn't tell whether you were me or not I mean I'm just by having the fun right so it's important to distinguish there that what's going on in your in your entire conscious experience could be very very different from what's going to my entire conscious experience when you think I'm hungry we just focusing on that thought yeah I mean you and I could have the same exact

1:15:58 same qualitatively identical sharp pain so we know have qualitatively identical thoughts even if they're part of a different landscape not just an escape and so right if if you have the intuition that well look I I say I'm hungry you say I'm hungry we've said different things why well because what we say can have different to that and when I say it I'm referring to me and you say you refer you and so that me

1:16:32 uses something in the content and the what is said a student wants of the University of Nebraska I was teaching direct reference and seemed to me to be totally right and she raised her hand and said oh it's immediately we're thinking exactly the same thing I thought oh she doesn't really understand saying but then I realized no I think she's right and I'm sort of you know have reasons for wanting that because if thought contents are phenomenal and I'm

1:17:07 thinking this this pen is not phenomenal so the content of my thought about this pan can't involve the pen right because only phenomenal properties of the right kind and figure in the contents thoughts and this property and it's not phenomenal and it's out there so you know I started thinking that well look there's something really basically intuitively attractive about the idea that we've said different things we've thought thought different things um but

1:17:42 I think and you know countless work is beautiful I mean just really great but I think those intuitions are resistible and given the proper motivation you know you have a good reason for resisting them I mean if the motivation is good your reason for resisting them is good and so yeah chapter the book is all about indexical thought and sort of me taking on Kaplan which was terrifying next chapters me taking on Kripke which is

1:18:16 also terrifying know what the hell mm-hmm is that my name's and yeah nominal thoughts yeah because you know there there there there those those semantics they're not motivated by externalist intuitions but the end up being service content and I want it I want to see if one can be a really sort of radical in a Cartesian internalist about and you know what what are the costs what do you have to say

1:18:50 about these various things if you want to accommodate some thoughts if your that's kind of radical internalist about them not a radical internalist about reference realm but I think that what I don't think actually there are good arguments or bifurcating mental content or linguistic content to not only sense in reference but and two kinds of content right two kinds of the thing that's expressed by that clauses I don't you're not a cleric no and the good ol

1:19:26 sense of reference that's all and so the thing to say about I'm hungry is well look we thought the same thought only I thought it about me and you thought about you and that's why they can have different truth values right my hat doesn't become a different hat if I put it on you alright so when I think that thought necessarily I refer to myself because of the way the icon that works and you think exactly the same thought it has to refer to you because that's the way the concept works so the thoughts kind of different truth values but that doesn't mean they have different meanings anymore than you know

1:20:00 if you if you think about a sentence like whales are mammals right the and you think about another possible world where you got a completely different set of whales the meaning of whales hasn't changed because tension of the term inches or you think about the talk about the President of the United State refers to one person now for you a different person eight years ago the term hasn't changed because it's changed it's referenced so it you can't I don't think you can argue from different reference or different truth value to

1:20:32 different meaning and that that the temptation to do that arises from the fact that that index all the content what Kevin calls character is so thin is one of the reasons indexical czar so useful okay you don't need to know a lot about the thing to refer to it using this or that or him or her um right and so there's a there's a temptation to sort of beef up the content of those expressions but I think that temptation can be resisted and I have my own

1:21:07 reasons for thinking it should be right yeah I mean I guess I this is another place where we possibly are just gonna come from two very different areas but but I do have the intuition that the fonts are different sonnets I am kind of an external about about content but I like pluralism or content so I guess that's the difference abundance but it seems to me that there's a phenomenal difference in the thoughts um so I wonder what you would say about about the idea that parents part of the of my thinking that I'm

1:21:42 hungry involves me intending to pick myself out not you and that's part of the content that's part of what it's like for me is that I'm I'm designating myself in a kind of intimate special way and that's right that's not that's not what you have you haven't you have yourself in the center of your experience well I think our senses of self does the bear sense of me is identical for both of us oh really yeah everyone has the same sense of self I mean it's less you know you fill in your

1:22:16 biography and all these other things but this the meanness is identical they actually think this has or ethically it's all me everyone's me is the same for everyone we're all one from the same and so I think that the error eye concept and the bear awareness of self that's sort of part of thinking about yourself it's the same for both of us what's different is that well you're

1:22:49 over there on home over here audience but it's it's actually speaking the thoughts are identical and oh this is not part of that but I also think that the purely non conceptual sense of self is the same so how do I end up thinking about me that if the thoughts are the same and the self is the same what is it that so you're gonna deny the essential a DEXA color or not I guess I haven't seen that appear anywhere in your words so now I'm curious about right so

1:23:22 Freitas says something like probably get the quotation wrong but think about someone else in the same way that I think about myself right I can't think about you or I can't have the kind of awareness I have of myself of you right but that's different thesis from saying that we can't have the same concept right directed towards ourselves so what it's like I can't think of you the way I think of myself but you can think of

1:23:56 yourself in exactly the same way that I think of myself all right so I think frege's point was was the was the former and that some people conflated with the latter which I think is I think they're different so the way I'm thinking about myself is just air you know self-awareness and application of the AI concept exactly the same I can't think about you that way but you can think about you that way it's the exact same way I'm thinking about myself yeah I mean even if you bought that Dell why would you not think

1:24:31 there's a phenomenal difference in doing it with respect to you versus me doing it with rejected me well to find someone near me sorry why wouldn't there be a different than what is like for me to think about myself in this way which is different from the way it is from you to think about yourself in that way depends on how much you're including in the what it's like certainly it's it's different to be me than it is to be you in important senses like you know think

1:25:05 about our lives and our different tastes and whatever the different than what makes us different personalities but I'm what I'm saying is that just the just sheared self-awareness is the same we're talking about you know knowing yourself I'm talking about just your conscious awareness of yourself yeah no they have an argument for it just seems that that's gonna be the same for everybody I think that's an interesting idea and I definitely have to go

1:25:39 implications it's just I can't it's hard for me to understand why why there wouldn't be something phenomenal difference when I think of myself as being hungry well because maybe I think it was like I'm thinking about me not you I mean when you think about it you feels like you're thinking about you not me that's right and that's that's a difference in the phenomenology no I don't think that it tells the difference in the phenomenology of the thought itself yeah so I can't think about you that way but you can think about you that very same way yeah it's it's a

1:26:19 challenging views for me to wrap my head around but I like it but it's uh it's hard for me I have I guess I'm too mired and maybe some kind of external ism son but I yeah it just feels like it's that's a Rabb that seemed to me like more one of the most radical things in this view is that these thoughts are literally the same oh yeah so so when someone who's a monolingual speaker of Farsi thanks you know democracy or the form of government the phenomenology is the same well we have to be careful the

1:26:53 mono linguistic speaker RC is probably talking Farsi to herself I'm not so our overall experiences are different right but the experience of thinking democracy as a form of government is the same it's not it's not linguistic experience it's for Thought experience right the content is like the Farsi monolingual Farsi speaker and I could have exactly the same headache despite of the fact that what's going on in her mind is completely different what else is going on in her mind is completely different

1:27:26 from what else is going on in mine to say that we have the same headache is to say that we are having the exact qualitatively identical experience regardless of whether we ever tell and I mean there's a fact of the matter I think whether we were experiencing the same thing or not I guess they almost want to resist that – yeah a lot of people my headache will seem like it's mine and yours will seem like it's yours and that's a phenomenal difference I would hope no my headache will feel like it's mine yeah and your headache will feel like it's mine like

1:28:00 you're mine yeah I know I know i yeah it's hard for me and this is a conceptual challenge for me but I like these sorts of challenges so I'm not complaining I'm sorry about that um so I noticed we're we're getting on in time here did you lose can I still hear you so here okay there's glitches because everyone's on zoom' I wanted to ask about the direct reference or the causal reference stuff so it's a part of your

1:28:36 view that we don't have singular thoughts or how do you account for things like yeah it is in the in the sense in which that term is used now where singular thoughts are somehow object involving yeah or at least I mean if you go sort of the Bevins MacDowell way not object involving but object differentiating right I deny that there are I'm not doing that I can think about you I'm just annoying that the content of my thought is determined by you right person sitting it's determined by the

1:29:11 phenomenal content mm-hmm so that the last chapter don't think is on reference and I'm working part on that and it's hard to um or to figure out what exactly I want to say but yeah I mean you can have thoughts that refer to one and only one person but I don't think I don't think that's well maybe I'll change my mind so about this I don't know but I don't think that's because of the concepts I think that's gonna be because of the

1:29:49 relations that you and I stand in so I think if I think he's wearing glasses about you and I think he's wearing glasses about someone else they're the same thought thought about different people what makes us about you but I can see you when I'm pointing ie R basically but the concepts are the same the concept he doesn't determine obviously you know which male I'm referring to but what determines that is from looking at of them pointing out or you know the

1:30:21 usual sorts of stores so yeah I think conceptual content is always general and that thoughts is afraid inna tuition thoughts can only be made of conceptual contents so Freitas says look Mont Blanc can't be part of the proposition because propositions are Census and census can't have mountains as parts they can only have census as parts right right so being a hard-ass about that too and seeing well okay is that is that actually workable and I think it is and

1:30:57 I think it's a buddy handle how do you handle names on this video and mental names like that inbox yeah mental names are a challenge and I only realised early late in the game oh yeah I can't say that oh not this thing that I called the principle of phenomenal in this ability and the idea behind that is that phenomenological types ant mix right so you can have a state a total state that's got lots of different kinds

1:31:30 of phenomenology as components but you can for example have a sound part of which oh that's not as now sounds can't have smells as parts right so so thoughts can't have things that are not concepts as before and that includes both objects out there in the world and non-cognitive experiences so a big section of one of

1:32:06 the chapters which is an adaptation of something that I published on phenomenal concepts I think there can't be such things and have a concept well the most extreme version of lists and of a concept part of which is a percept you might have some kind of hybrid state that's parked concept and but you can't have a concept whose content isn't conceptual right and I also think for other reasons you can have concepts that

1:32:40 are individual contents or individuated by relations to things and so you know when I got to the chapter on names I I'm pretty convinced by metalinguistic krypton theory of name I'm the kind of was developed by Gerry Cass and Kent Bock and now has become pretty popular again then names as predicates let burgeoning literate turnout unfortunately one of the main contributes to it Julia Graf died so you'll be having her

1:33:15 input anymore just really awful but I think something like that is right I mean I have my own version of it that differs from other people first so but then what do you say and this is something I wish Jerry Kessler alive so I could argue with him about as he had a meta linguistic theory of senses right so but sense can't contain a name either as a written token or a spoken token or it imagined because they aren't

1:33:51 senses their sounds or ink marks right so going of this this Frady and purism is senses can't be composed of things that aren't senses that seems correct to me and the analogous principle for conceptual estates also sounds right to me and so if you want to have a a metalinguistic theory of nominal concepts well and you believe in the principle of

1:34:24 phenomenal immiscibility you can't have sounds as parts of thoughts everything you know you're using that you're saying the name to yourself you're having an auditory image of the name that can't be part of the thought because it's not conceptual it's a sound it's not the right kind of phenomenology so it's fairly late in the game oh yeah hmm okay some things should have been obvious from the beginning but it wasn't so I sort of changed the view to what I call

1:34:57 paratactic theory of normal concepts and the thoughts the thoughts that we express by uttering proper names or actually about proper names so what but you have the thought content is so what I think the meaning of of a proper name like Richard is is a bearer of Richard right a bearer as Richard has many bearers and so given this other principle that I like that I'm committed

1:35:31 to what I need to say is well the nominal concept there's only one nominal concept and it is a bearer of this name where the mental demonstrative picks out a token of the day so it's you talk about people using their name or think about people using their names in part by thinking about their names and we're thinking about their names involves having a thought about a token some kind of mental or physical inscription of the

1:36:06 name and I think you know Jerry cats should have said that linguistic sense maybe you did somewhere but I don't I've spent a lot of time talking that's really interesting I mean I like them at a linguistic theory of names too but I think of it as a as an account of the semantics or said linguistic meaning of a name not part of the thought of content well so I think it's interesting to see how you're working out in terms of thought because that's right because I think linguistic content is this thought and it's you know fairly

1:36:39 traditional you and not the other way around and that you know it's not that thought is language like it's languages that's where the starters come from so so yeah this is the this is the conceptual analog of that that theory yeah it's really interesting that so it does I mean how did the truth conditions for these thoughts get worked out so when you think when you say Richards wearing glasses so when you have that thought according to the it's not as far

1:37:12 as I understand the view you're having I thought about some linguistic token or something yeah some item like the name Richard like maybe the one in the email one more wrong or whatever but you're not having a thought about me or how does it get attached to me or how do you how do you how do the truth conditions Center on me eventually so there's other thoughts by which I can triangulate you and I think ultimately it comes down to acquaintance with you but so if I say you know Richards wearing glasses the content of that thought is a bearer of this name Richard is wearing glasses

1:37:46 okay which one well let me tell you which one him or Richard Brown who hosts consciousness live or I find some other way of zeroing in on you and I have to have that for myself if I want to be thinking about something in particular so I said well Richard wearing glasses and someone said who you talking about I and I say I don't know okay something's gone wrong here you have to have someone in mind you don't have them in mind by having their name in mind but she also have some other way of triangulating I get to identify for

1:38:22 yourself the person you mean to be talking others yeah it's interesting view it doesn't feel that way when we think about people so it's is there it seems like the phenomenology of having a thought like right you know David's wearing glasses or Richards wearing glasses do you think respectively that it feels like you're having that thought virtue of there be a token of a linguistic I don't I don't I don't see well it's kind of it's kind of hard to

1:38:55 tell because you'll especially for someone like me who's asked to talk to think or at least to think you know anything beyond the cat is a format for very simple thoughts I mean I think I think we probably are dependent on language and there's some thoughts that we can't think without help of language because we needed an enduring scaffold hang the concepts keep them together we can't keep them in our mind so you know again really not so it's it's hard to tell but if you if you adopt the

1:39:36 mystic theory of the meaning linguistic meaning of names and I think they're very good reasons to do that yeah me too and you think that linguistic meaning is derived from conceptual content and this is what you need to say about now is it possible that in the empirical psychologists come along and say yeah that's really not what's going on in people's minds sure and then I'd say okay I'll try something else that didn't work yeah but I like the spirit of seeing how far you can get on the branch

1:40:09 before before breaks and hasn't broken yet yeah burden me I haven't noticed that I'm lying on the ground with broken legs exactly I mean I guess part of what I was asking your bat for Oh is because it just seems to me introspectively that there's something correct about thinking via a name which I feel like it's probably the source of a lot of million and cookie ideas or equipped in that campus is that it doesn't seem like we we have to think about these people through a description but we are it's a

1:40:44 metalinguistic description you're thinking of them so I would be happy to say that's what you say about the sentence in English Richards wearing glasses but I'm not happy to say that about the thought richard is wearing glasses to me it just seems that they're different in exactly this way that one you can make sense of as a predicate and the other one is has this more direct relationship like the phenomenology is some these dog sorry oh no that was so I think what I want to say about that is that there is a tendency especially with

1:41:19 term concepts and firms like names and indexical because they're there their conceptual content is so thin there's a tendency to try to load a bunch of stuff into those concepts so they'll pick out the right person um and I think you don't have to do that you can have all of that a sort of background information and that that Argos your thought right but so you know you someone's got a target that none but it's the gun that's shooting it's not the surrounding the surrounds of it so

1:41:54 here's an example I like suppose you get get kidnapped and you're taken to a place right in a car with a hood over your head you can't see anything you get get into the room and it's taken off and you open your eyes and it's pitch-black you really have no idea where you are you think you're inside but maybe you're not even inside and you think to yourself I don't like it here okay now let's say your eyes start to adjust to the dark and you start to sort of make

1:42:27 out some shapes no okay I'm inside and this is a concrete floor you think again yeah I still don't like it here are you thinking a different thought I say no and they'll say then you know they come in and turn on the light now you can see it's a torture chamber or someone's living room or whatever yeah well I really don't like it here has your thought I don't like it here change this content I don't see why we have to say that your take on what here is like you pick on what the place you are at is is

1:43:04 different all right you've got a lot more information about the place but you don't have to sense that into the concept here it's it's part of other thoughts that you're having about the place that you are and so Jerry Cass you said plain about what he called Freund intentional ISM where it the determination of a reference is built in is the defining characteristic of a sense he said no no since determines sense properties in relation something else determines reference um I really

1:43:38 agreed with him on that and this is sort of the conceptual version of that way of thinking about you know internal to expression or a thought and and reference it doesn't have to be that the sense of the term determines all by itself it's referenced right maybe every term is to some extent indexical in that way you need you need some kind of context maybe not every term but you need context in order to determine which

1:44:11 one of those things that meets the description talking there you know how to put that thing in the thought in order to be thinking about that visual so I mean it's kind of interesting I mean I like I like the view and I think it's good that you're developing it because it's having these kinds of careful worked out versions of this review I think is going to help us we whether you're good at watching it I think it's really useful exercise but I do worry a little bit about the

1:44:44 interesting useful exercise Richard it's my life exactly but I do worry about the introspective or the first-person methodology a little bit here and this touches back on something we were talking about before with the cognitive phenomena or conceptual phenomenology because people get come to different views like my interpretation of the phenomenal what I'm acquainted with is

1:45:18 slightly different than what you're saying and then you're you have an argument saying well maybe you're confusing this part of it the background with the thing but that's actually just the concepts and so I think well GMI so I have to think about that but well how do we go past these sorts of methodological you know stalemates when we were both appealing to introspection and yet we're coming up with different accounts so two two ways one you you can expect introspection will reveal everything

1:45:51 just like that sometimes it does but sometimes it doesn't mean have to clear a way that you're talking to yourself and make distinctions and think about it and I was talking to Eric Schmidt's cable about this and he suggested that you know the original introspection of psychologists would do it in a bar those are not controlled conditions yeah that's bad we shouldn't do it that way but there's also so take for example the experience of shape constancy right so the the frisbees flying through the air

1:46:27 does it really look round the whole time you phenomenally manifests and other people say no it's that's a matter of your what you believe about it right and then you know you get people shouting at each other and you don't get anywhere okay well let's call a psychologist if there are some clever psych made David Eagleman write some really clever psychologists could design an experiment to determine which of you is right so for example if it is just a matter of

1:47:01 belief and that and that belief is that things don't change their shape with just because they're moving okay now to introduce a scenario you say all bets are off we're not this might be a world in which things do change their shape now what do you experience and if the object the shape constancy goes away well that's evidence that it was a matter matter it wasn't something that you was phenomenally manifest visually it only manifest cognitive inception right but my completely amateur or back

1:47:40 of a napkin suggestion but it seems to me that yeah look psychologists rely on introspection all the time all right so you okay press the button when you see this how do I know when I see this oh no you know experience it that's that's introspection and but they're disciplined about it and when they're when there's disagreement or unclarity say okay well let's design a new experiment to try to tease those things apart and maybe they can and they cancel you can't they can't answer the question

1:48:12 and maybe they can't write at whatever maybe never so we say yeah we don't know the answer to that question right so I'm not saying that interest I wouldn't want to say that introspection is always infallible that we're omniscient about ourselves none of those traditional things about introspection but if we if we couldn't do it at all then psychology Experimental Psychology and we can enlist you know really clever psychologists if we have so this was a

1:48:45 debate actually that Siward pony mounted one of the spawn conferences I think thousand five about you know shape constancy weathers phenomenally manifest at a psychologist it's not an experiment we ought to be able to tell from people's reactions which are introspectively in a controlled situation and we might get an empirical help in getting an answer yeah yeah I think one of the cool things about this your work is that if you take

1:49:21 it seriously then you know the way we do linguistics and the way we do psychology what's gonna have to take account of this and start investigating it so I would like to see some there's some kinds of experiments in this in this vein come come out I don't think I mean honestly partly I think you made this point in somewhere in your pointing of your papers that when women start asking people to make these judgments about what's grammatical they're already relying on the phenomenology or conceptual phenomenology that those are conscious experiences and they're not really taken as such there's you know

1:49:53 there's this I the view that these things are just you know box ology things and is widespread but it's nice to see that kind of changing and it's nice to see serious people like you taking these ideas and seeing how far you can get with them so I think that's really cool um we're running out of time here and I don't keep you forever and and already helped I kept you too long waiting for you to yeah but I did I mean maybe I mean maybe I'm not asking you come back at some other point we could

1:50:26 talk about this more fully because I talked about my soft Richard for as long as you can stand it I do want to ask you about introspection because you were bringing about it so introspection on your view is the same as it knowing acquaintances knowing or is that is that knowing by acquaintance is that where the introspection part comes in or well my view about introspection is that I'm very influenced by dress key here though I differ from him that simply

1:51:02 having conscious experience is a form of introspection because you're aware of your experience when you're having in right so that's what dress key would call a non epidemic where I would call following dress keen on epistemic respect and understand perspective that about thinking about your experience or maybe attending to various aspects of your experience or in various different parts of the visual field and forming beliefs about it right so that's epistemic introspection oh the

1:51:37 way this release acquaintance is that I think knowing what it's like knowledge is experiential knowledge so to know what something is like is to experience it and know concepts and he'd need a B apply this Oh when when Mary leaves the black and white room suppose she answered enters that so Martina Neeta room Lynne has this from Mariana and she walks into this room with all these colored brightly painted things but no

1:52:10 recognizable objects right I call that the Technicolor best of you all so on her way out she walks through the technical or vestibule and she knows what revokes like and what blue looks like and what yellow looks like she doesn't know that it's red that looks like but she knows what the colors look why because she's experiencing them she's experienced what's experiencing what they look and that counts as a kind of knowledge and so so I wanted to sink which three things and I'm not

1:52:41 completely clear about how this maps onto Russell's terminology but there's what I call acquaintance knowledge which which girl Kony and a really wonderful and I think under red paper from 94 across phenomenal knowledge of simply having the experience is knowing what it's like all right so do you know what pineapple tastes like well have you tasted it and can you remember what it tastes like or you don't okay I'm going to now going to give you the knowledge of what pineapple tastes like and I put a piece of your mouth now

1:53:15 you know my dogs what pineapple taste there they're smart but they're not terribly concept investigated no no if they have thoughts so and then there's what I would call knowledge by acquaintance where you think about your experience and apply concepts right and what I want to say and this is also what Earl pony's says is that when when Mary leaves the room she may gain knowledge by acquaintance if she can play concept church but she

1:53:48 also just gains phenomenal knowledge knowledge of what it's like and knowing what it's like is simply experiencing it whatever ever it is like to blank just experiencing and insofar as you can remember it or recreate it you will continue to know it's long and I you know here's another limb I've gone out on this one's a little when she's not experiencing her imagining it she doesn't know what it's like not wonderful it's not amazing what a sense

1:54:24 he knows but she knows what it's like in the other sense though right I would say in the sense that that we want for knowing what it's like knowing what it's like is experiencing so we could say well if she's capable of imagine again she's not right now I think we should well right now she doesn't know what it's like but she can know if she imagines it just like you can know what it's like if you gotten what pineapple tastes like it but put it round so I think knowing what it's like is non conceptual non propositional

1:55:01 acquaintance what what Coney calls phenomenal knowledge it's not conceptual and so yeah baby this connecting back to the phenomenal concepts then we're talking about earlier I know your the argument that you have that you know these things can't combine in this way but what is what is the reason for thinking that the the experience itself can't acquire a functional role which we would associate with with something like thinking so that you know say you bring the experience that me say pineapple

1:55:37 tastes like and there's the experience right so you yeah you can absolutely do that but what you're doing is you're you're not thinking with the experiences you're thinking about them right that experience is that real distinction I mean what's the dis yeah what's the what's the distinction because it's a part I mean why not say that that has acquired it is a concept now it's a concept because it's playing this role I suppose you can say that what but I'm committed to not saying it

1:56:11 and so I mean I also think there's some really good intuitive reasons for thinking it can't become a concept but the theoretical reason is you know as I've said that this is a particular kind of phenomenology and they don't mix in the relevant sense I mean they mix in the way that oil and water do you put them in a jar and shake them up but you're not having oil molecules or whatever become part of water molecules or so Raisa they're immiscible even though you can sort of mix them and but anyway so what I think the the intuitive reason is that

1:56:50 concepts have to be thinkable and colors and shapes and sounds aren't sick can't think them you think well it's the element that you can think then the argument is that that just it's it's linguistically out I mean so look some content of lost first talk about thinking sexuality but III think that's the if they if they really mean that literally they're saying somebody

1:57:22 doesn't make any sense at all you can't think you can't think it why because it's not hot it's like saying you know saying you can you can think a sound it's like saying you could smell us no you can't these are completely different kinds of things and their mode of their experiential modes are completely different and incompatible but yeah it doesn't mean that you can't like eat have an image before your mind while you can't but one can have an

1:57:54 image before their mind and think about it right and it might that image might play some functional role but that doesn't make it a concept why well in my view it's because concepts are a very specific dietary kind of X so think of this way yeah you can think about these things in other ways but one of the things I want to do I mean besides trying to convince people that this is the right look at things okay I want to be really strict about this I want to go all-out uncompromising and phenomenal

1:58:31 intentionality with compromises coming ok let's see we we do that what follows from that what do we have to say what do we need to give up what what side do we have to take with various debates um and so you might say well look I could have a theory on which a percept or an image and it plays the role of a concept and I would say yeah but that's not a theory on which concepts are what I said all right so yeah there are other ways to to

1:59:06 understand these things but I feel like the this this view the conceptual phenomenology of you forces you to think of a different way about them right insistent with it with the basic premise this is the way you have to treat these things and then you know you hope it's not too outlandish yeah you have to accept this completely ridiculous thing yeah that would that would be a reason to give up the theory I think yeah don't think that's the case I've certainly

1:59:38 encountered things that kind of worry me as a dhimmi no really so call him again once said of a news he was writing his mysterious in paper no second class with him at uni and I asking about he said yeah sometimes I wake in the middle of night sweating and I kind of feel that way sometimes too I wake up as it really and then I convinced myself again yeah but so yeah it's the the the way I'm

2:00:11 thinking of the project is just drawing out the consequences if we accept this and I think you should hear the reasons to accept it don't change a lot of the way we things think about right and some of those ways might be just undigestible to something I say yeah I'll take this over your theory sorry I said it's good to have it worked out for exactly those kinds of purposes yeah I mean I wouldn't be working out of working it out if I didn't you know really think it's right right you know I have those moments of doubt dark nights of the soul and then I

2:00:45 go through my arguments again I think no this I can't see anything wrong with this argument you know I entertained a lot of objections since I've talked a lot of people and now no one has convinced me that that's wrong so what's the what's the whole picture that emerges from this way of thinking about thought and thought contents and it's very very different from what I was taught in school absolutely yeah so not only are you gonna go against like phenomenal

2:01:19 concepts but also like what Chalmers Dave traumas caused direct so nominal concepts right where you can just grab the experience itself and be read like this yeah you can do that but I would say that's not a concept yeah I mean it doesn't matter that maybe Dave would say fine okay whatever well you can do this I say yeah just don't call the concept as it isn't and Dave might say okay whatever I don't care oh yeah but I think that's important for him yeah I certainly think you couldn't you can experience things and you can

2:01:53 think about them and you can hold them in your attention I will one is an i any of that and if my my view implied they got to get that up I think yeah sounds kinda bad wrong here but what what I want to challenge is and the phenomenal concept strategy against against Armstrong I don't think there can be such and I think that all of the concepts that marry and entertain after she leaves the room she already had when she was in the room doesn't get any new

2:02:27 concepts she gains new experiences doesn't gain new concepts so she could think this is what red looks like have that thought in the black and white room maybe not truly free cuz there isn't anything red in the room but she can certainly think the thought she doesn't became become capable of thinking things when she's out of the room that she that she wasn't capable even like oh that's such a pretty color you might say that when she leaves her room she thought that in the room give him the concept

2:03:00 since you why when she this is new experiences that's another part of the view that I was troubled by because you went I think you say even at some point that even a blind person has the same concept of red as I do or you do even if they've never seen any colors at all they still have the same concept of red I found that very counterintuitive I'm gonna have to think about it for a long time first of all I think you use puce a lot which I died Google pews to find out what it was it's horrible surprising that you so far as to say that we have

2:03:46 the same concepts you know it's a basic going back to you and empiricism for a long time that there the meaning for the fullness of the concept that comes from the experiential and you and you're just straight-up denying that so here's the story can you hold on a minute I need to get a little water because I'm drying oh yeah sorry show everyone my t-shirt and the genius

2:04:34 Roz Chast so when I was a sophomore I had a home eight women who lived on the same Hall who was born without a sense of smell when I found this out I was really I mean I wasn't really into philosophy you know as a career yet I wanted to be a musician but I was absolutely fascinated by Anna she put up with me for a while asking her questions and here's what she knew she knew that smell was a kind of there was a sensory

2:05:09 modality I know there was a kind of experience associated with small and that she had learned that had a lot to do with why people are it's so much more enthusiastic about food than she is and I thought to myself later I wasn't thinking back on this example I said well what would someone ask me i sorry what would I tell someone who asked me what it was like to smell something or what the smell of pineapple is or if someone asked me well what is a

2:05:42 olfactory experience like I tell them the same thing that she told me and I can smell thick so my understanding conceptual understanding what smell is is the same as hers and maybe some you know made a little star in that but it's it's it's centrally in the same it's hurt she knows when I know and she knows is that smell is a sensory modality there's a particular kind of experience associated with it it has to do with you know the enjoyment of food blah blah blah she

2:06:16 knew all those things so conceptually she she knows what smell is what she doesn't know is what it's like to smell but I want to argue that's not conceptual knowledge yeah I would give the same explanation if you ask me what's know is if I couldn't you know put something under your nose and say that's what it is if she if she asked me okay well you tell me what smell is I said well I can't really tell you any more than you've already told me I have the same intellectual grasp on smell as you do the same conceptual grasp on cell as

2:06:51 you do but I also have the experience but having the experience this doesn't change what concepts I have so why why I mean cuz my intuition would be like that her plugin of smell is more like that person from before the child talking about the causal Nexus um she's saying she's not not really thinking that same thoughts as you because she lacks the experience so so why is she I mean is it she knows what experiences he has that concept and

2:07:25 maybe she has it from her own experience and she knows that you know smell that something what's a note she might be a super scientist right she might become a world expert on olfactory experience right in the Newton Nordby of the nose but still not know what it is like right to smell something but she has acquired all of the scientific understanding while the conceptual understanding that she could acquire

2:07:58 and I would think that yeah and I couldn't do any better than that by way of telling someone what it's like communicating the concept of smell I mean I can communicate the concept to smell as as sensory modalities involving the nose and blah blah blah all that stuff um but none of that just like with Mary and none of that is gonna get her understand what it's like to smell something right and so I would say if she one day woke up and oh I can smell

2:08:34 this is weird never experienced anything like this before she doesn't gain any new cut she wouldn't gain any new concepts and that her understanding for conceptual understanding of what smell is wouldn't change and it's the same as mine because I couldn't say any more than she could about what smell is do you think that maybe there's room here to say that even if even if you allow that she wouldn't gain any new concepts that the concepts would change you know sort of like if you don't know that water is h2o and

2:09:06 then you come to find out that and then if you took go to chemistry and become a chemist then your understanding of what h2o would deepens isn't there a sense in which the concept is undergoing some undergone some change it's been enriched in a way it wasn't before so I want to say no I want to say her if you might know sorry I'm not remembering for some reason the exact details of what it said but her she might learn things right her range of

2:09:42 experiences might increase but it's like being kidnapped and being in the room your concept of fear doesn't change your knowledge of its referent changes but the concept itself doesn't change right now I have reason I have tendentious reasons for wanting to say that but I also think it intuitively makes all that sense to me why you have a different concept of here because I not can now see things now have a different experience of here I have more knowledge about what here is like but I don't have an enriched your

2:10:17 concept it's the same one I always had and so I would say that the that you know I'm thinking well I can't I got the same concept of smells this person who can't smell at all and my concept the smell look I can already smell and I think I have obtained concept that she thought so I don't think her concept would change if she was suddenly able to smell because the concept of what what do you what sort of cognitive conceptual knowledge

2:10:52 do you have about about smell and I think and I'd say pretty much what she said and when I could when I if I suddenly start having olfactory experiences that I didn't have before when I turn my attention to my olfactory experiences I'm not turning my attention to different concepts my appreciation of smell changes right oh so this is what it's like to smell I always knew what smell was but I didn't know what it was like to experience it and that's definitely an enrichment of your mind and your

2:11:26 knowledge and it's not a conceptual enrichment on my yeah that's I like I mean it's interesting okay I mean I could talk with you all night but we got our I guess I got to wrap this up at this point with regret but Richard this is really great and I really appreciate the work you've done reading my stuff it I've really had a wonderful time I really appreciate it well thank you and I want to say I appreciate you writing it because I had a great time reading it and honestly I want to say that your work is in my opinion represents the best of

2:11:58 philosophy it's challenging its technical it's well thought out it's thought-provoking and interesting and that's a rare combination so thank you very much thank you very much I try to be interesting and clear and thought-provoking so that's really it wonderful to hear thank you very much yeah it's great to see you it's been too long I know exactly one of these days we'll be allowed outside again exactly my final question usually is if there's anything that hasn't come

2:12:31 that you wished had come up and the answer can be no but just in case well there are some things I would afraid but was afraid would come up that didn't and I'm happy about that because there are thorny questions the answers to which I have but can't remember so I started going through my book last night maybe I was gonna ask this question I didn't ask any of those so yeah no I'm great cool well once again another thing some of them may be those thorny ones but for

2:13:05 now let's say I do and just hang out for a second I'll say bye off the air but thanks again okay I really appreciate it thank you richard has a great conversate