Consciousness Live! with Declan Smithies (S4 E5)

0:00 yeah all right so we are live um joining me today a very special guest declan smithey's so declan i wonder if you can say a little bit about who you are and what you do for those who may not know you yeah thanks for having me richard it's good to be here so i'm a professor of philosophy at the ohio state university and um most of my work has been at the intersection between the philosophy of mind and epistemology the theory of knowledge and i'm particularly interested in consciousness and the role that

0:32 consciousness plays in giving us knowledge and rational beliefs about the external world and i just recently wrote a book on on this topic called the epistemic world of consciousness and there it is it's kind of a beautiful book they did a great job at oup with the with the cover art um it does look good actually what's the significance of the guy in the bottle yeah so um jeff and i went to an art exhibit i think it was at the whitney gallery when jeff lee and i when we were grad students

1:03 at uh nyu and we saw this sort of amazing uh piece of artwork it's actually a sculpture oh wow so i tend to think of this guy this is sort of like my opponent's view of where you end up if you endorse the epistemology that i like so it's a little bit of a joke but a little bit of the fly trapped in the fly bottle a little bit of a brain and a bottle kind of a scenario yeah okay cool yeah i got the kind of brain in the bat thing i was wondering if there was more so that's that's nice to know

1:34 about that about that well the book is wonderful and um it's very it's very um rigorous it's challenging and it argues for something that i i don't know what the general status of the view is but my sense is that maybe it's it's not the received view and epistemology although i have to warn you that in the areas of epistemology i'm sort of a novice so we're just trying to get you to anyway so i wonder could you tell us a little bit about accessibilism how you take it how it contrasts with phenomenal conservatism and what do you sort of think the field is like between these two views

2:06 yeah um it's an interesting situation because i think in some ways the view that consciousness plays an epistemic role is quite intuitive and i've occasionally had the experience where non-philosophers ask me about my views and i explained them and they don't really find it that surprising but i think you're right richard that if you look at the kind of um the tradition of epistemology um consciousness is not sort of widely regarded as playing an important role um certainly if you think about a tradition like

2:38 reliabilism on which basically knowledge is a true belief formed in a reliable way consciousness is kind of neither here nor there it might be that consciousness enables us to reliably track uh the world around us but you know you don't need consciousness to do that it's just it's just the way that we happen to do it but i do think this kind of reflects maybe two things so one thing sociologically is just how philosophy of mind and epistemology have developed on independent tracks that's less so in the kind of

3:12 contemporary scene where people are trying to find connections but but historically i think in the 70s and 80s that was very much true and maybe another thing is that something we saw in the like maybe the kind of 50s 60s and 70s was um a tendency to try to understand the mind as much as possible without appealing to consciousness so there was this sense that there was this kind of that consciousness was the hard nut of the mind body problem and because we don't know how to solve it as far as possible we should try to understand mental representation

3:45 intentionality and for that matter rational belief without bringing in this sort of supposedly mysterious phenomenon uh consciousness and i think there's been a kind of um you know at least within a sector of uh these sub-disciplines um a sense that you know maybe we should reconsider the role that consciousness plays in these phenomena and i think of myself as sort of part of that movement of trying to see how um our understanding of the mind and how our understanding knowledge changes once we put consciousness

4:18 in uh back in the center yeah that's interesting because i i would have thought that uh in a certain way the or epistemology and consciousness were joined really closely at least in the history because like the problem of other minds is an epistemological problem and maybe consciousness isn't per se the main thing but it's like probably the main thing in the problem of other minds um and so there's a lot of work you know in the 50s that was aimed primarily at that topic but i think you're right there they they especially with externalism and

4:50 reliabilism those things consciousness kind of faded out and became the oh you're a cartesian as soon as you brought up consciousness yeah there's also this um so even sort of setting aside the epistemology but thinking about the philosophy of mind um so of course if think of a kind of standard philosophy of mind intro where you might start with behaviorism and then there'll be a sense that no none of us are behaviorists anymore but it's still true i think that functionalism is really the kind of leading philosophy of mind and lewis is very explicit about the fact

5:24 that functionalism is it's neo-behaviorist it's basically behaviorism with it with bells and whistles as hell i think of it but you know nevertheless it's it's really the dominant way i think even in the contemporary discussion of thinking about belief and desire right and that certainly uh uh has influenced i think the way that many astrologers think about um and i mean that comes out in your book that there's even people like ned block who are like phenomenal realists are still someone who thinks that like

5:57 that's perfectly good for beliefs and desires right you just boxology all day long and uh some kind of functional relations gonna do well for those things that's right yeah i think the thought there was you know we can't get functionalism to work for um consciousness at least not as an analysis i mean maybe maybe it's true with some kind of a posteriori theory of the mind i suppose personally i'm agnostic about that but as a conceptual analysis i follow block in thinking that can't work but yeah block always thought that um

6:30 nevertheless functionalism was the right approach to understanding intelligence or rational cognition these sorts of other aspects of the mind so there is a sense here that we can hive off consciousness from cognition that these are these are basically separate concepts um and um yeah part of the project of the book as as you're recognizing which it is to try to yoke those things together to try to argue for a view on which consciousness is really central to our concept of cognition too

7:03 yeah and i'm i'm a big fan of that kind of view so i like cognitive phenomenology i think i want to talk to you you have all chapter on that so i want to get to that but i am curious sort of so so um the the i mean so how would you put them the main view of the book uh which is something like whenever we have justification we're in a position to know that we have that justification or is that how do you put accessibilism exactly yeah that's right that's right so um williamson has characterized this view um in terms of the notion of luminosity so it's the claim that justification is

7:36 luminous what does that mean it means you're always in a position to know what you have justification to believe and uh now that idea has come under attack under attack from a number of different angles some i would say empirical um i'm thinking here of arguments against the reliability of introspection in the work of people like eric schwitzkibble and hillary clinton and his own arguments against um luminosity have been enormously influential

8:08 in epistemology and i think that the powerful arguments to show us something i don't think they show us what williamson thinks um but um but i think also if you if you take the view of williamson and others that nothing is luminous you end up pushed into really uh counter-intuitive consequences so one thing i try to do in the book is argue that it's actually kind of counterintuitive to deny that uh justification is luminous um and try as i try to motivate the idea that we do have to think of

8:41 justification as luminous in this way but then if that view can be defended it stands in need of explanation you know why is it that you're always in a position to know what you have justification to believe the basic view of the book is it's because what you have justification to believe depends on what i call the phenomenally individuated facts about your mental state basically facts about what's conscious and what's consciously accessible because you can know those facts and you can know what their epistemic significance is you can thereby know what you have justification to believe

9:14 yeah that's an interesting um it's an interesting view so uh and there's a lot of details obviously and i want to get to get some of those details but i just sort of the one big picture kind of question that that comes to mind um and and this is really remember like for in these areas i i i'm not super in touch with the literature so that i mean on the consciousness side i feel confident but on these sides the epistemology side i was i learned a lot from reading your book obviously but a lot of it was like vaguely familiar to me but only sort of distantly

9:46 so um anyway take that with a grain of salt but one like the question about internalism and externalism uh always i always wondered if it was secretly about two different questions and and what would happen to the debate if you sort of distinguished between on the one hand the justification of belief has versus on the other hand the justification that a a person has for accepting the belief and so it sort of strikes me that internalism was a good answer to one of those questions and externalism was a good answer to the other question and so one of the central

10:18 things that i think is in the background of your book is that there's these there's really one question here um and so i wonder do not so what what do you think about this kind of distinction do you think that uh it shouldn't be made or really isn't distinguishing two separate things or yeah i'm just curious about your general take on that yeah i mean i'll mention there are certainly epistemologists who thought that distinction is really important um and in particular important for discussing certain cases like the brain and about so i think um ken bach i think clayton littlejohn um others too have wielded this

10:52 distinction i myself have never found much news for it maybe for the following reason richard i'm i'm thinking that um if a person is justified we want to know justified in doing what uh it might be in holding a belief and if we want to say that a belief is justified then presumably since a belief is a property of a person and we want to say if the belief is justified then then the person is justified in holding the belief so i have not put um any work on that distinction partly because i tend to

11:26 think that there's a certain kind of evaluation of a belief that goes with an evaluation of the person in respect if they're holding the belief so they answering one question automatically answers the other question that's right i mean tacitly when when you're evaluating people you're evaluating them in certain respects maybe in respect of some actions rather than others in respect of some beliefs rather than others so i suspect ultimately um this notion of personal justification does boil down to yeah

12:00 uh evaluation of some aspect of the person at least that's what i tended to think and i i mean i know i've read yeah our paper by kent on this i know you mentioned him he is a a a version of this um but uh i don't think it's been widely sort of so i'm not sure if maybe people have a general feeling like you do about this but it seems like when you're thinking about like the clairvoyant case so here's here's a case where um you know and i like your version of it where you sort of soup it up you implant something in the head and it makes you sensitive to the fingers behind your

12:32 behind your head but you have no visual experience of them so you say you have like this intuition that the the person is not justified to believe that but so it seems like yeah they don't have any um there's no phenomenal evidence there but uh there's a process that's i don't know so it does seem like the belief is justified in some sense and it's not like so what do you do about like we have these differing intuitions at that point about whether you have justification there at all and how do you how do you work past this agreement there yeah good i mean i do think it might be

13:05 good to talk through the blind side case because i found that one quite prohibitive like i always want to try to get away from a mere intuition clash yeah try to kind of move the dialect forward in some way and i think the the blind side cases may be better than the clairvoyance cases for this purpose but let me at least start with a concession which is that i think everyone internalists included have to recognize that there's something good about the clairvoyant beliefs okay it's part of the stipulation is that they're

13:39 reliable so we have to grant that there's there's something good there right in effect i see that the debate is stacked in favor of the internalist in the following way internalists think that for your beliefs to be knowledge they've got to have a whole bunch of properties one of which is reliability if your beliefs are not reliable all bets are off as far as knowledge is concerned so sort of if you like it's common ground in the debate the live reliability is a good making feature of a belief and that the clairvoyant has it but the internalist just has to argue as

14:10 it were there's this one good making feature of belief that's lacked in the clairvoyance case and um and some internalists want to add and that's a necessary condition for knowledge but but yeah if you if you'd like to richard we could talk about the blindside cases yeah let's do it more more compelling because i really thought it was like a super blind sight that was really where you where the action occurs for you and that is sort of more of a in like the clairvoyant case that's right that's right it ends up the super

14:42 blindside case ends up being structurally analogous to the clairvoyance case but for me what's really important is a certain kind of epistemic analogy between blind sight and super blind sight so the blind side the difference is you don't actually have this reliable belief forming mechanism but you do have reliable information that's representing what's going on in the blind field i'm i'm assuming that this information is not phenomenally conscious so there's sort of an interesting empirical debate about whether that's the correct

15:13 treatment of blind site right let's assume it is right and if not we can sort of make it as a science fiction stipulation but then the thought is um people that actually suffer blind side are not in any way less than fully rational in withholding about what's going on in the body right they do withhold but that doesn't make them less than rational but if there's unconscious information supplied evidence if it gave them reasons for belief that they weren't using then they would be rationally defective in so far if they're not using these

15:45 reasons so now what we do is we we imagine a blind city who now has this tendency to not withheld right and so my intuition is this if it was reasonable of the blindsider to withhold and we just put them side by side with a blindsider who now is disposed to form beliefs about what's going on that seems irrational it seems like what you should be doing is withholding notwithstanding the fact that fortuitously if you had this seemingly irrational

16:18 disposition you would be forming reliable beliefs so i mean one of the i guess this is it's hard to get your foot into any one part of the position because it's so inter locked in in interesting ways um but i think so this might lead us into a slightly tangential discussion which would be defined about the nature of beliefs themselves because one one of the things that you might think here um is that you're assuming that beliefs are conscious or that they're always conscious and i know that belief isn't a great word

16:50 because you think they're dispositional but they they're just they're individuated in terms of their connections to the sort of um like judgments you would make which themselves are always conscious i think on your view uh whereas you know someone because someone might say about the the blindside case and i think jacob berger did say this in a rev uh thing so i was curious about how you would respond but one of the things that he said there was um there could be unconscious beliefs in those uh blind side cases so maybe they don't have any conscious beliefs about the stimuli in their blind field but they may have plenty of unconscious beliefs about it

17:22 and so i know you want to you you're going to say that no if whatever they have is not like a belief or something or judgment but um but anyway so yeah why why what what is the reason for thinking you shouldn't compartmentalize in this way um the conscious mind from the unconscious stuff yeah so jake's paper is really interesting on this i'm really grateful uh to jake because he he engages in some detail with the arguments in the book and lays out a number of strategies kind of responding to the blind side case you're right that as it were his initial

17:55 move is to question my assumption that the super blindsider is not forming beliefs and you're quite right to point out that there i'm sort of relying on my um well why do we think he's not forming beliefs well he wouldn't judge that there's an x in the blind field and if you think of beliefs as dispositions to judge then um then he doesn't believe but if you think of belief another way well he might not consciously judge right right so there might be these sort of unconscious um occurrences which guide behavior

18:27 so and so jake sort of interestingly argues maybe the blindsider actually is maybe tien as he navigates the crowded corridor really is forming beliefs about the environment and being guided by them i think the best thing for me to do at this point is not to move to the chapter on belief and try to defend that account i think it's better for me to just um concede for the sake of the argument that um let's suppose tn is forming we'll call them unconscious beliefs and come back to the question whether we should

18:58 really count on his beliefs if he's not forming what we might call conscious beliefs then that i think is itself a rational defect so the thought is that if you've got evidence that p then you sh all of your beliefs should be proportioned to the evidence and so in effect what we've got on on jake's view is a kind of semi-rationality we've got rationality in the unconscious part of the mind not in the conscious part of the mind so i think all i need for the argument we were just discussing is that

19:34 on this view there would be some kind of rational failure on the part of the blindsider and i think that's counterintuitive i think it's hard to sustain but but jake has some interesting moves to make at that point in defensive idea yeah it's interesting i mean i i guess i i was uh a couple of times wondering just as kind of like a overarching point about your position the role that rationality is playing um and judgments about you know deviants from like being less than rational or less than fully rational and those sorts

20:06 of things um so yeah i wonder can you just say a little bit about what you think think the that role that that concept is playing and why you think it's so important yeah so it is true that at various points in the book i am sort of relying on various conceptions about what it is to be rational so at this point i think the debate what i'm assuming is pretty minimal it's just that if your evidence um includes some fact then then your beliefs need to be

20:39 proportioned to the evidence and in effect what what um jake is proposing is this idea that we might weaken the evidentialist constraints on rationality so what he's thinking in effect is that um there isn't just this one body of evidence that all of your beliefs have to be proportioned to but you might have a fragmented mind where there's like evidence in segment one and the beliefs in that segment need to be proportioned to that bit of evidence there's evidence in segment two the

21:11 beliefs in that segment need to be proportioned to it but there's no sort of requirement really that you should be unified right and i think what what i object to in that idea is is the idea that rationality permits fragmentation it as it were it only requires these sort of local matches between beliefs within a fragment and evidence within a fragment i think in in the tradition where people like stonemaker and lewis are thinking about fragmentation they always think of fragmentation as a deviation from

21:44 professionality and i think that's quite important i think it's it's important that i mean maybe i can use an analogy here um there's no idea that for me to be rational richard i have to know the contents of your mind or vice versa but if there are sort of two people within me neither of which have access to the other that does seem like a defect in rationality yeah i mean i guess part of the reason why i was asking my previous question because i was wondering like what would be so bad if we turn out to be irrational a lot of the times oh right yeah yeah so so why is

22:16 rationality like this the standard here that that we're using to adjudicate here i mean i could see it you know it'd be nice to be rational but why is there an assumption that humans ought to approximate this to you know to the degree possible a fair question i guess ultimately i think we are very very far from meeting the sort of most demanding standards of rationality it's not really an assumption of mind that that we are rational at least in this most demanding sense i do think that there's a difference between what it

22:51 would be to be rational by the most demanding standards and what it is to sort of count as being a rational person by ordinary standards i think to count as irrational you've actually got to be pretty crazy pretty way off um and so most of us count as rational by this sort of relaxed standard but as i'm thinking about the requirements of rationality none of us come close to uh sort of meeting the perfect standard so going back to the um going back to the blind sightings one move that um jake makes in his paper

23:26 is to say look none of us are rational so what's the problem if we say they're not either [Music] i take the point that none of us are rational but i think what's problematic is the idea that in withholding belief about what's going on in the blind field in withholding conscious judgment about what's going on jake has to say that itself is a kind of rational failure and for me that's um that's going too far notwithstanding the fact that in other respects we're very far from fully rational

23:59 i mean it does seem like even on that kind of view it's like there's going to be a lot of cases where we fail to be rational in that sense like any time we have an unconscious thought or judgment um and our conscious states don't take it into account uh we're going to have this sort of failure so it's not going to just be these kinds of cases it's going to be more widespread than that um but it does seem like an assumption that that shows up a lot in the book that well if if this shows that we're less rational than another view then we should prefer that view so that's going to be an assumption like

24:31 we want to attribute um that we can adjudicate between views by looking at what like whether you have to attribute a uh like to this blind side well that should be a deviation from rationality so there's a reason to prefer the other sort of theory oh i see i certainly don't see myself as relying on any kind of general assumption to the effect that humans are pretty rational it i suspect what's going on is that in particular cases i've got more fine-grained intuitions about what would constitute a rational failing and what wouldn't so in

25:04 this particular case i've got this fairly fine-grained sense that um the mere fact that this blindsider doesn't make conscious judgments is not itself a rational failing and there's certainly room for disagreement about that but um but yeah and i i i don't want to make any kind of pandorian claim about human rationality okay yeah so you're not looking for a theory that preserved like cut has this coming out the most rational as possible or so it's or in other words it's not like a uh interpretivist theory where constrained by a principal charity

25:36 or something like that absolutely absolutely this is actually which is something i want to get on to in some current and future work but it turns out that if anything i'm on the opposite side of that debate so if you think about contemporary interpretivists uh interpretive is in the contemporary literature they're very much inspired by david lewis right and basically lewis's interpretation is a form of functionalism right and lewis's view is that um there really are limits to how uh irrational people can be because once

26:11 you go beyond a certain degree of irrationality you cease to be a mental subject exactly right i don't like this i think people with uh delusion have beliefs that are just rankly irrational you know the cat the patient with capgar delusion who thinks uh his wife has been replaced by an imposter this is a ranking irrational belief but it's a belief nonetheless and i think that could be in effect louisiana madmen all of whose beliefs are as ranking irrational as that what enables me to allow for this extra

26:45 rationality is the idea that there's actually a phenomenal component to the mind so so long as the patient is disposed to judge my wife has been replaced by an impostor that's sufficient for them to count as having the belief even if the belief is hopelessly out of whack with the evidence so it might even be that my view gives me an advantage in allowing for a kind of rank irrationality that standard functionalist views struggle to accommodate yeah i think that i think that's a good point um about the like uh kotar's delusion or um so do you i mean do you really think

27:21 it is an irrational belief i mean some people have argued that these people have like an anomalous experience like there there's something that looks different about their wife and so they form this weird belief but it's based on the experience that they have so it seems like in your case they would have some justification for believing it if they had an experience of something being different about their wife and their what for wouldn't literally be at least in i mean i know like epistemically or phenomenally not irrational or something like that yeah this is an interesting issue so i'm writing a paper right now with my colleague richard samuels

27:55 and a grad student preston lennon where we we take on exactly this kind of issue yeah so brendan marr has this view that sort of anomalous experiences might make rational the the delusional judgments right what i'm inclined to say is that the anomalous experience is not enough by itself to make the belief rational um so the the general thought here is that perceptual belief formation is sort of highly holistic it needs to take into account all sorts of background evidence and so really it would be more rational for the patient to think why does why does my

28:31 spouse look unfamiliar not because they've been replaced by an impostor but because something's gone wrong with me so do you see what i mean it seems and i suppose the literature on my reading has moved in this direction we really need a two-factor theory it's not enough as ma does to postulate these anomalous experiences we need something anomalous is going on with their cognition too uh right we basically agree yeah interesting i look forward to seeing that paper i haven't seen it yet so

29:03 um is you say is this coming out where you say well it's under review um right now so we'll see but um that's the sort of background comment the book as you as you've noticed is sort of obsessed with zombies and blind sightings i think it's fun to think about madman as the opposite kind of challenge for a functionalist view of mind and and some of the work i'm doing right now sort of exploring that madman angle okay very cool i mean since you brought up zombies yeah people were asking about zombies in the chat over here too but uh yeah so as far as i understand your view

29:35 um i mean i guess so when it comes to consciousness you're a representationalist uh but uh you didn't really make any strong commitments about whether you were like a reductive or non-reductive physicalist or not physicalist so do you think those kinds of questions do they matter for your view ultimately or do you think you can be sort of like could the higher order thought theory be true and you would be perfectly happy and or if psychism was true would that impact so i just wonder like how neutral are you on on that stuff this is a good question um i certainly think i can be neutral on the metaphysics

30:08 of the mind body problem so on the following point i sort of feel like you don't have to make a call and i haven't really made a call personally so does the conceivability of zombies imply that they're metaphysically possible you know this is sort of one of the central questions in right debate about the zombie argument and honestly my inclinations are to say i'm a physicalist so i tend to you know hope that some kind of phenomenal concept strategy is going to work but you know in in other moods i think you know maybe

30:40 chalmers is right and metaphysical necessity has its roots in you know in epistemic notions like conceivability in which case maybe zombies are possible but it's not such a big deal it's not as if you know scientists should care or anything like that so i just am basically agnostic on those questions and it hasn't affected you see what i mean it i haven't felt like i needed to decide that question in order to make progress on thinking about the epistemic role of consciousness so some degree of neutrality is

31:12 is possible there but now if you ask could you be a um let's say a naive realist i don't know about that i suspect things are not going to work out so well could you be a higher order thought theorist that's an interesting one um i think that's a question for the higher order thought theorists i my inclination is to say yes you could be but um and actually this this is another question that jay berger touches on in in his paper so we could talk about that i think you'd have to do things in

31:45 a certain way if you wanted to be a higher order thought theorist who goes along with what i say yeah interesting i mean so is the reason just about um naive realism is the idea there that uh well if the tree over there is like a phenomenal content or has a phenomenal property even when you're not aware of it then it's not it's not going to you're not going to be in a position to know about it or sign so why how exactly would the objection from your point of views go towards name really yeah yeah so it's going to be a worry exactly about the bad case what's going on in

32:17 the bad case um it seems to me that it's basically a datum that needs to be explained that there's a certain kind of epistemic parity so even in the bad case you have justification to believe there is a tree in front of me this is like like a version of the new evil demon problem exactly exactly but i think any kind of half-decent version of naive realism is going to try to explain that what they're going to say in effect is you do have a phenomenal property in the bad case

32:49 right the standard way of explaining that is it's explained epistemically so the phenomenal and this is kind of mike martin's tragedy the phenomenality of the bad case just is it's being it's having this negative epistemic property it's being indiscriminable from the good case yeah and that maybe explains why you're justified in believing that there's a tree in front of you but notice that what we've done there is we've explained one epistemic property your justification to think there's a tree in front of you in terms of another epistemic property it's

33:21 indiscriminability from the good case and what we don't get is any explanation of that it's at this point that i want to say what explains that epistemic commonality in the two cases the phenomenal commonality and the this kind of disjunctivist can't say that so i suspect they're just only so far down the road you can go in giving phenomenal consciousness this epistemic work to play interesting okay and so even though you think consciousness is representational you don't think every representation is conscious so there could be unconscious

33:53 representations excuse me i thought this was an interesting move on your part because you don't find this combination very often to say well there's no unconscious perception or belief but there are unconscious representations um so yeah can you tell us about what what kind of distinction you're making there and why why we should uh take that yeah yeah good so there's definite among these camper people who want to put consciousness in the center of the mind right i think some people argue for very strong versions of this

34:25 view that are to my mind uh too strong so they they deny that there's wide content they deny that there's unconscious intentionality i want to grant a lot more to my opponents than that right but what's special about the kind of content that's either conscious or accessible to consciousness is that it plays a distinctive epistemic role so for example i'm happy to grant that a zombie has mental representations and that we explain the zombies behavior uh you know in the standard way by

34:58 basically appealing to belief-like and desire-like pairs why do i say belief-like and desire-like only because um in being inaccessible to consciousness they wouldn't be suited to play the kind of normative and epistemological roles that i think beliefs have to play the the last twist in the argument is is to argue that to be not just belief-like but to be a genuine belief you really have to be accessible to consciousness even if not actually accessed so and when you say accessible to consciousness uh the notion of

35:30 accessibility here is phenomenal accessibility or is it not access conscious accessibility or like so what exactly it's like that's right there's so many a words floating around here so there's um yeah there's um there's higher order access and then there's sort of first order access consciousness this is a third notion of accessibility to phenomenal consciousness so what i have in mind is this idea typically when you believe something um you can access the content of that

36:04 belief in a judgment uh and we tend to think that our judgments express what we believe that's i think that's a really important notion so it's not just think of um tacit knowledge of syntax right you could judge a content that you also tacitly know but it would just be coincidental your judgment wouldn't express what you tactically know right so the thought is well why do we think that our beliefs are expressed in our judgments and the thought is well because they're individuated by their relations to judgments it in a case where the representational state

36:38 isn't individuated in that way like tatic knowledge all we get is a coincidence not not an expression right so um i guess i got distracted by something someone was saying over here i'm sorry but i guess so what i'm what i'm wondering about is because i like the idea um but i wonder how like you're going to respond to the following kind of uh which which says that goes roughly as follows like so there are

37:12 some times that we have a state consciously and other times when we have to stay unconsciously uh like subliminal perception um and you can say you know so there's information about so you show them something subliminally subject says they don't see it you can show they're informationally responsive to it in various ways um and then we we think that's the same state which could occur consciously later like it could be that very state could be conscious and so you know there's the conscious seeing of a gorilla and then there's the unconscious seeing of the gorilla and so it looks like on your type on the way you do things you have to deny that

37:45 kind of distinction can even be made because on the one hand we'll have the conscious seeing of the gorilla but the other hand will have like something else like a unconscious information or computation about the gorilla but not a seeing of the gorilla and so you're not going to ever get this case of there being one state which is conscious at one time and conscious that enough uh unconscious at one time unconscious at another time and a lot of like the way we do science of consciousness at least assumes that there are states that you know can be conscious at one point and not at another so yeah so i just wonder like what do you think about

38:16 this kind of uh consideration for the existence of unconscious oh that's it you're right that i hadn't been thinking about it in those terms i'd like to hear more about why you think it's sort of important to the science to think about it in those terms one thing is that i've kind of changed my mind a little bit about this issue so for example when it comes to beliefs i did used to think of those as the sort of state that could be now unconscious now conscious and i've moved away from that partly because i think it's better to think of the

38:50 conscious episode as a judgment and to think of the belief for something that causally explains why you make the judgment the the old view that i had was much closer to what you're describing on which there's a certain kind of state that we might call a belief that it's the one time merely dispositional and another time occurrence but i now tend to think my beliefs are just dispositional states and then they have these conscious manifestations which are distinct from their dispositional grounds and then i the way that i've tended to think about perceptual states is there are just really the conscious

39:24 occurrences and then there are various sort of unconscious states that are distinct from those um so you're always so the judgment and the and i know it has a kind of cognitive phenomenology on your view so it's going to be another kind of phenomenally conscious state but so the the the belief is the disposition to have the judgment the judgment is the current state um but on your view you never get unconscious judgments are you you could i mean i wouldn't i used the term sort of judgment in this stipulative sense to pick out a phenomenal episode but you could certainly have these

39:56 um unconscious dispositional states having a current manifestations and you could call those judgments if if you wanted i probably want to call them something different but i certainly don't deny that there could be these sort of unconscious occurrence states that are judgement like okay um but so you would yeah interesting uh because i kind of thought i had applied to the whole across the board uh because you're not gonna allow for like unconscious pains um but even there i think that you you would want to say that there's case some

40:28 cases where well yeah i don't know so i guess it depends on how you think like the job of like the science of what the job of the consciousnesses sciences are and one way of thinking about that is the job is to explain what the difference is between a conscious state and a unconscious state um but you you have to deny that that's like even the right way to think about asking these kinds of questions well you could ask that question without thinking that any conscious state is identical to any unconscious states so suppose we contrast a yeah a conscious perception

41:03 with an unconscious it's true that i'm not going to call it a perception but a perceptual representation we we can still ask what makes the difference um so there is this feature in the book that i sort of want to reserve words like cognition and perception for mental states to play epistemic roles right you end up having to say that these things that are in some ways perception and belief like but neither conscious nor accessible to consciousness that's not real perception or cognition but i still want to grant that it's perception like or cognition like in

41:37 some sense yeah i know i guess i wonder like at what point does this become a verbal issue and that like you said you want to reserve the use of a certain term a certain way but really you have the same states i mean so on a view like yours but on a view like mine where i think yeah there's lots of these unconscious states floating around all the same physical states are going to be there and then it sounds like what the question is like what labels do we want to give them and how do we chop them up um but but do you think there's something more than that uh at stake in at that point i do i mean i do think there are some

42:09 terminological choices that need to be made so if you want to use the word belief and desire do you use it for this broad category of anything that's believe or desire like in my sense or do you use it for the narrower category that has a distinctive normative role i think really we just need enough terms to make all of the important theoretical distinctions and so maybe here's the substantive issue that isn't just viable is there any theoretically significant distinction to be drawn between the kinds of belief like and

42:43 desire like states that are accessible to consciousness and the ones that aren't yeah there's this sort of familiar line of thought that you find in chomsky and others on which look that is just there's no theoretical significance to that distinction right but if it turns out that that line marks marks a division between states that can play a certain kind of normative role than those that can't i think by anyone's life that would have to be a theoretically important distinction yeah but i do think that that is at stake you know whichever whichever side of that debate you follow

43:16 so look can i i want to ask about the zombies again um and here i'm sort of under the influence of jeff actually who mentioned earlier uh you guys went to the museum jeff and you know well but you know i i i think if someone like jeffy says there's nothing special about our states zombies have a state which is kind of special for them it's not special for us but it plays all the same roles and it's just as significant and you want to say no it's not they don't know anything they're not justified in believing anything they don't have knowledge they have all sorts of representations but none of them count as beliefs or

43:50 seeings or pains and so so how do you like what do you make of a debate between you and someone like jeff someone says that's equally significant and someone like you says no there's all the world the difference in significance so yeah how do how can we make that's kind of a meta meta question but how do you adjudicate between these overarching views on your approach jeff's challenge is it goes so deep it takes us so far away from common sense so yeah

44:22 and certainly i want to start by saying i mean jeff's work needs to be engaged with but it's not the kind of move that i think most of my opponents should be making if that makes sense it's not a kind of bog standard externalist maneuver because in effect what jeff is arguing for is this view on which um the very idea that there's any significant distinction to be drawn between us and the zombies is a mistake it's right um i suppose i'm operating with this background assumption that

44:58 consciousness is i hesitate to say this because i'm being drawn into the metaphysics you see but it's joint like it's like natural it's uh yeah you know there's a big difference between the conscious creatures and the unconscious creatures between the conscious states and the unconscious states and it's the kind of difference that can then make a normative difference in effect what what jeff is arguing is um if it was a big non-normative difference it could make a big normative difference but you can't accept that it makes a big difference

45:32 unless you're some kind of dualist right and then some and i must admit i have some tendency to make this move some like adam pouts respond by basically saying yeah you know dualism is true no physicalist view can account for this intuition that consciousness make makes a big difference because of my stated metaphysical neutrality i'd like to not have to make that move right i think figuring this out really depends on getting clear about the metaphysics of of naturalness we get dragged out down that garden path i mean that's part of jeff's big

46:04 challenge is that any way you try to spell it out uh you can find states that are like you know close but not exactly it and so you get this kind of well is it there or not problem and the only rational thing seems to be say well gee it's everywhere if it's anywhere it doesn't matter because there's sticks are so fine grain so i think it's like saying what is natural on your is is actually quite a big of a challenge um but anyway so i mean one thing i could maybe say here is that it's not my intuitions about the epistemic importance of consciousness

46:37 don't trade on its causal role right if you thought that was the only way to draw a distinction between a natural property and an unnatural one you know is it law like does it play a law like causal role you know you're going to get zombie-like states that are sufficiently similar in their causal roles to our conscious states and it's right look like there's a big difference so it there is this sort of intuition that um there would be a big there would be a big difference between a zombie and a conscious creature who states nevertheless played exactly the same

47:10 cause or else the intuition that's being prompted there is there's a there's a kind of naturalness that can't be explained in purely causal terms i mean one of the things that i was thinking about when i was reading this stuff about the zombies was uh i wonder what how you would respond to like a suppose you didn't know that somebody was a zombie let's just stimulate they are but that you don't know like they your zombie twin shows up here claiming to be your lost long twit long lost twin and you're talking and so you're gonna i mean

47:43 it seems reasonable to us to hold it to certain epistemic standards and say you know he's irrational if he believes a p and also not p and but on your view ultimately really all those descriptions are wrong um and that it there's no rationality or it's not being irrational or rational at all and to me that seems like the wrong intuition there i don't know so yeah what do you think about like like you would suddenly switch all of a sudden you're like oh wait i take it all back you're not irrational you're just a zombie um anyway so yeah i'm curious what you think about those kind of cases i

48:16 definitely share the intuition that it would be reasonable to to treat this person as if they were an epistemic agent and for that matter a moral agent of course similar issues right and the moral status of consciousness but yeah i do think we'd be making a mistake so a rational mistake nonetheless in treating this person as if they had the same moral status as a conscious creature this is maybe another point at which the our heritage comes in this kind of

48:49 basically the heritage of logical positivism which lies behind the behaviorism of the functionalism but you sometimes encounter this idea about the mind that we couldn't be we couldn't be mistaken about other people's mental states given full evidence so there couldn't be these cases where although it's perfectly rational to think this person has a mind they don't of course in the case of consciousness i think we're kind of used to the idea that you could be duped about whether someone has a conscious life you could have this misleading evidence they're conscious when they're

49:22 really not so in effect i'm sort of extending that to rationality you could have all this amazing evidence that someone was rational or that they had beliefs and desires when when really they don't they're just acting as if they do so so does this like raise any sort of issues when it comes to artificial systems whose status we may not know like for instance you know gpt-3 i doubt there's very many people who think gbt3 is conscious but certainly it's a lot closer to uh than than previous things and you can imagine you know gpt

49:55 105 or something is like really really sophisticated um and so we may not know you know whether we would attribute consciousness or whether we should or shouldn't um and so these questions are gonna have a practical kind of import and don't you think that you know people kind of air like they'll start talking as though these things do have these states and then so yeah i just wonder if the sort of predictions that you would make about how these cases would go in the future really line up with this way of thinking if you think that matters at all if we got to the point uh i kind of think this is

50:29 science fiction in the sense that i'd be amazed if we ever got there but if we really designed artificial systems that were so um intellectually complex that we thought actually we can't rule out the possibility that they're conscious i think it would make sense to er on the side of caution to work on the assumption that they're conscious even if we can't be sure so it's a bit like um ned block's commander data case right i think in that case you'd have to work on the assumption that someone was conscious even if epistemically it was

51:02 an open question where whether they really were i do think these these ethical questions are super fascinating yeah but it i guess i think that that idea that we should err on the side of caution doesn't necessarily settle the question whether they really are conscious or not right but so then we would err on the side of it you know attributing to them knowledge and and beliefs and stuff but that may be the case that we're like we're wrong about that but i guess i guess what was triggering these thoughts was like whether or not you can really be as

51:34 neutral metaphysically as you were saying you could be because like knowing the answers to these kinds of questions there's a lot of hinges on it i know i i get what you're saying about airing on the side of caution but you know someone you could imagine someone saying these things aren't conscious they don't have beliefs or judgments you know it's cites methods 2019 and there you go and we don't have to treat them any such way and other people say no no we so unless you could settle that debate you could never really rule out these people would say well they're they're not really having these states and it's wrong to treat them that way and so

52:06 i mean i'm not saying they'd be right but is that so on your view that would be a kind of rational failing on their part uh to not interpret them or to give them the benefit that um oh it would in that case if you're if you're really just giving them the benefit of the doubt it doesn't quite seem like you're making a mistake that's the wrong way to describe it but there there would never be this fact that you didn't know like there's the there are these two

52:38 possibilities about which you remain ignorant so on one possibility conscious and have genuine rationality and genuine moral status um the other not conscious and so all they have is something rationality like right on this view you would be sort of irredeemably ignorant about about that fact um but there might be nothing wrong rationally speaking with um being agnostic and indeed sort of operating on the assumption that they're

53:11 conscious yeah interesting okay um so now i i assume that the one thing you can't be neutral about this is something that someone is asking about on the chat uh lucas a is asking so i think this was some that i was just thinking too but i assume you can't be neutral like with respect to illusionism and and limitabilism right so though when it comes to consciousness it's got to be real in some sense because or do you think that illusionist could appeal to everything you're saying and give like an illusionist version of uh the epistemic

53:42 significance of illusionist consciousness give me that so how does illusionism differ from elimination i am assuming that there's phenomenally conscious states i think i think that's that probably is a sort of a default background assumption of the book yeah i don't know that when i talk to the illusionist what the way i interpret them and who knows because you know they it's hard but the way i interpret them is that uh there's experience it's just that we're misguided and thinking it has certain kinds of properties um and we have a bad theory of it which is summed up by the word phenomenal

54:15 consciousness uh and so there's a we're mistaken about the what its nature is but i think they grant that there is experience um but uh then go on to say well if you think it's qualia or something like that then you're loading too much into it so that it's it fail it can't be physical but so if insofar as they grant this experience it seems like they could give a version of your story as well because it's not clear what the word phenomenal is really doing except you know picking out a certain contentious idea about what the nature of consciousness is

54:48 yeah i tend to use phenomenal consciousness just as a synonym for experience yeah just redo things in terms of experience i suppose it is important for me that these experiences are representations if that turned out to be a big mistake that would throw a massive spanner into the works yeah to be unclear how these things could do the epistemic jobs that um they're being asked to do um yeah that was an interesting point you made in the book i think about you know people like davidson what they were really thinking their problem was they

55:20 didn't think consciousness was representational so of course they didn't see any way it could justify a belief but if you think that it has some representational content then it justifies in terms of the content that it has and so that's a i mean i agree that's an important point yeah and maybe i shouldn't over egg the metaphysical neutrality i suppose my thought is just that um at the very least you don't have to take a stand on the sort of vexed issue of whether conceivability entails possible whoa you might yeah johnny do you need help

56:13 well that was terrifying yeah do you need to go i mean i know things are okay okay a massive explosion sounded in my house but my wife was blowing up a basketball which first and i think she's okay i thought it was a gunshot i didn't know what it was sorry about that but we are we are good okay um i forget where we were yeah exactly but so i i guess it's a good point to move on because i want to ask you about your simple account of introspection yeah yeah um which is playing an important role

56:46 here too because i guess so i i get the general idea you say when you have a conscious state you're in a position to know you have the conscious state that's the s as far as i understood that's the simple theory um but i guess i didn't really know what it meant to be in a position to know something um so i would just wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about how you think it works yes it made just one little step back so there's this big debate in the theory of introspection about whether introspection is a kind of inference whether it's a kind of inner perception

57:17 and so the basic idea behind the simple theory is that all of that is wrong-headed because these theories what they're trying to do is assimilate introspection to some more familiar model that we understand in other cases you know perception inference what have you and the idea is no no it's its own thing if you feel pain the fact that you feel pain gives you a reason to believe that you feel pain and then the twist is these are particularly strong reasons to put you in a position to know the fact that you feel pain but then

57:49 your question's a good one what does that mean to say you're in a position to know it the way i'm thinking about it it doesn't mean that you actually uh have the capacity to know right exactly it's a it's a sort of further question whether you have the capacity to exploit your position or not so the easiest way to think about it is um counterfactually if you did exploit your epistemic position would you have knowledge uh and if the answer is yes then you're in that you're in an epistemic position i guess what i i mean i must be missing

58:22 something because what i was doing and maybe this is too i sometimes have a tendency to chase rabbits down holes that aren't there so maybe this is that but i was thinking about the zombies again so are the zombies in a position to know well in one sense no but i assume that there's something we could add to the zombie world which would result in their having conscious uh experience so counterfactually they're in a position to know if that were were in place then they could so so how do you rule out those kinds of consent

58:55 like to get the zombies not in the position but us in the position yeah that's a fair question i think um so it's going to depend on what we hold fixed as we evaluate these counter factors i mean just to give a perhaps a more mundane example um i could go to the library and look up some facts that i don't now know does that mean i'm in a position to know those facts not in the sense that i have in mind because when i go to the library and open the book i get new evidence right so think about it this way you've got to hold fix the evidence that you actually have and

59:28 so here's basically the way to think about it if you formed a rational belief on the basis of your evidence would you get knowledge if so you're in a position to know and if not you're not i think that's at least a pretty good heuristic yeah so for the zombies they they're they don't count as being in that sort of position because we would we couldn't hold anything fixed uh we'd have to i mean so is that the idea that you'd have to since we have to add a law then we're not holding the thing fixed exactly the zombie doesn't have so if i'm feeling cold

1:00:00 my zombie twin doesn't actually have the same evidence they although they form the same beliefs my beliefs are formed on the basis of the evidence constituted by these phenomenal feelings whereas they in effect have have no evidence uh and so yeah how i mean not to go back to this together how do you individuate the zombie states because you can't do it in the way you do it for us because we are individually by what kind of phenomenal states they have a tendency to give rise to so what are we doing for the zombies such that we can say they have a state

1:00:32 that's similar in content i was thinking functionally so we say the zombie state is similar to my feeling of cold in that it plays the same functional role so call it you know a z feeling or something right okay but because for me our states constitute evidence in virtue of their phenomenal character rather than their functional role we can't kind of see that they have the same evidence yeah so i guess i i was interested in and you talk about this in the book but i want to get you to talk about a little bit more about how you respond to people like i don't like adam actually he's

1:01:06 made a version of this argument that once you get rid of the the consciousness then the content just too inherently vague there's no there's no real determinant answer to the question what is the content of those are those representations you know his examples it you know it could be there's all these theories of perceptual content any one of them could pick out the thing so is it the state of the retina is it you know in the case of a frog looking at a black dot is it fly is it frog food is it something further back in the causal chain so i i am curious i mean i know you mentioned this a book but how do you

1:01:39 respond to these kinds of vagueness considerations i mean i'm i'm neutral um i do think adam raises some really powerful cases where it is hard to see how you could secure determinacy without consciousness i think it makes a strong case i'm reluctant to say that we never have determined content without consciousness so in in origins of objectivity verge makes what i think is a pretty strong case for the claim that unconscious representation is needed for explanatory purposes in science and that these questions about how

1:02:12 determinate the representational contents are and what their determinant contents are should be answered by looking at the science and so he actually argues in some of these cases um in the kind of livestrong representation philosophers have said it's indeterminate between this and that but actually the science faith is one interpretation over the other so that might be right for all i'm concerned i don't want to rest the case for the importance of consciousness on the idea that it's the only thing that could supply determinate context which is the kind of thought you

1:02:44 find that people like right but if it turned out that that was true it wouldn't be a problem to me if that makes sense right but you want to resist it even so right so yeah i i don't think at least for me that isn't the relevant that's not why consciousness is epistemically significant even if it turns out there are determinant sources of intentionality without consciousness there are further reasons to think uh consciousness is special but it might turn out that consciousness is special in you know multiple different ways that that wouldn't be terrible if it turned

1:03:16 out to be true right yeah uh so back to the introspection thing i mean this is a real important part of the whole picture because this is what's going to ultimately ground the idea that there's this luminosity because it's basically the occurrence of these phenomenally conscious states putting you in a position to know about them which i mean ultimately it turns out to be basically what you mean by being luminous exactly exactly and it's what's missing in the blind side in the super blindside case so we go back to that example and we ask why why don't these guys have justification for beliefs about the

1:03:50 blind field is because something could play that outward directed epistemic role only if it plays this inward directed epistemic role so so for me consciousness has this kind of um has this dual epistemic structure you're absolutely right but that's in some ways the key idea in the book yeah and so so why do you think so i mean let me put this differently why do you think the other accounts of introspection like the um higher or perceptual views or inference views

1:04:22 where do they go wrong uh such that we need something like the simple theory yeah yeah there are all sorts of problems i think with the perceptual and inferential views which would sort of maybe take us into the details i think the best my sense is that um although of course you always find the defenders of every view in the literature my sense is that most people who want to reject what i say about the blindsider on the super flying side will just go for some form of reliability so that's i think a more common view right on this

1:04:56 view we do need introspection is diff it operates using what um nickels and stitch call learn a monitoring mechanism well you know basically what armstrong calls a self-scanning system yeah which is not inferential and it's not quite like perception either in that this at least not based on kind of inner seemings or inner acquaintance or anything like that but now the question is just um are you happy with are you happy with reliabilism in the external world case if not then you shouldn't be happy with it

1:05:29 in the internal life case so partly because i'm sort of antecedently i'm happy with the idea that the blindsider and the super blind citer can get knowledge about their environment just based on reliable processes i don't think we can get knowledge of the inner environment merely based on reliable processes either um well i want to ask someone about that but just really quickly do you think that as we don't get any kind of contradictions at the sub-personal i mean i mean it seems like you could have states that are rationally accessible like you know may there's some part of

1:06:01 the brain stem that's you know monitoring the liver content and it has representations that entail you know there's a certain level of chemical of this degree and also not that degree and so we can assess it for those sorts of consistent consistency claims but i guess it's really these you know abominable contradictions or something more higher level that you think is at these rational norms that are more important at a higher level as opposed to this low level thing yeah so i don't see that there may be all sorts of internal monitoring mechanisms in the body i don't

1:06:33 see a problem with that [Music] maybe what we don't see anywhere else is this idea that if if there are internal facts that you're ignorant of that's some kind of rational problem i mean even in the case of consciousness it it's not obvious that ignorance about your conscious life is a rational problem but it that is something that i try to argue for in the book yeah the argumentative root is a bit complicated but it would go a bit like this um so suppose it looks like something is blue and suppose the fact

1:07:08 that something looks blue is evidence that it is blue well now you're justified in bleeding that's blue but suppose at the same time you have no way of knowing how things look so you're not justified and believing it looks blue in fact you know to make it simple let's suppose you're justified in believing nothing excludes you right now you're in this kind of weird position where it looks like your evidence is supporting on the one hand the proposition that's blue and on the other hand the proposition i shouldn't believe it's blue right or i shouldn't yeah basically i shouldn't believe it's blue because

1:07:41 nothing looks blue and it is there is this kind of argument in the book that we shouldn't be a critic we shouldn't believe things that we should believe we shouldn't believe right so that's the epistemic acrasia where uh unmodeled after the you know original kind of appraiser where you do something you know you shouldn't do exactly exactly so but you so i mean what you just said was that that seems like something especially that arises in the conscious case and that we wouldn't we don't have reasons for thinking that about these subpersonal mechanisms but i mean i

1:08:13 can't you it seems like you could envision a case where you have a monitoring mechanism that also monitors itself um and so maybe it comes to form states like this like uh you know for at the first order level it might represent there's this amount of bile in the whatever pancreas and also represent that that's i'm unreliable so i have no reason to really accept this representation so but you still and so that might be happening completely unconsciously um but what yeah what are we gonna say about cases like that

1:08:46 uh you have to you have to say they can't happen or like how would you i think for me the key point is this if a monitoring mechanism breaks down in general that doesn't show that there's any irrationality going on so think of think for a moment of the vision as a monitoring mechanism yeah it's kind of like this was kind of armstrong's original idea perception monitors the external environment introspection monitors the internal environment right oh something goes wrong with your external monitors you

1:09:17 suddenly go blind or the lights turn off and so you can't see what's going on there's no tendency to think that there's any kind of rational problem there so what i think calls out for explanation is this idea that um ignorance about your own mind is a failure of rationality i mean that's an idea that's associated with sydney shoemaker that rationality requires self-knowledge but in a way it's a surprising idea right why should ignorance about anything um [Music]

1:09:50 suggest that you're less than fully rational maybe because i think this is basically how shoemaker was arguing basically because self-knowledge isn't just another form of perceptual monitoring uh it works differently yeah but i guess i i don't really understand why we would accept the shoemaker view uh so why does being fully rational require knowing your mind um at least in this in this sense well i guess it's like so i might take a

1:10:26 um disassociative identity case uh is one of the alters less rational because it doesn't know the existence of the other or you're going to say no that doesn't count as being in their mind so yeah i guess i just don't i wonder what yeah more about that this is a totally fair question it need this idea needs motivation in many ways the default view should be that there's nothing special about the mind why should ignorance about that make you less than rational but i think that the force of this idea comes from the idea that um these mauryan

1:11:00 there's something wrong with these mauryan predicaments so shoemaker put a lot of weight on the idea that it was irrational to believe something while believing that you didn't believe it um i i also put some weight on that kind of argument but i put more weight on a slightly different kind of level bridging problem there's something wrong with believing something or believing you shouldn't believe it right um i think there's no denying that these combinations have the ring of irrationality to them they feel

1:11:33 we might say inconsistent but there's no you know logical inconsistency so the thought is just as logical and inconsistent just as the sense that it's irrational to be logically inconsistent motivates the idea that there are logical constraints on rationality so the idea that there are there's something irrational about these um level mismatches motivates the idea that there are rational constraints on how your first order and higher order beliefs should hang together so and this is this is a little bit unclear which like i could be more

1:12:05 precise but impressionistic i'm trying to do for self-knowledge what others have tried to do for logic so yeah would you motivate the idea that logic is a norm of rationality by the intuition that sort of inconsistency and probabilistic incoherence is irrational i'm trying to do something similar to knowledge of the mind yeah that's interesting um and so but what what so i know what the what you're gonna say but let me get you to say it the connection between um thinking that you shouldn't believe it and believing it so in a case where you don't know something

1:12:39 about your own mind how do you get a case of this bad situation oh um so how does how does that rational tension arise yeah just to talk through an example yeah it would be like um think of that case where something perceptually seems blue to you and so i'm assuming if it looks blue no defeaters you should believe it's blue so now we've got the first object you should believe it's blue now now you are asked the question what should i believe and you reflect on that question and you ask yourself does

1:13:13 anything look blue well let's suppose yes something looks blue but you don't know that you can't know it um and let's suppose in fact after reflection you should come to the conclusion that nothing looks blue and presumably you should reason well since nothing looks blue i shouldn't think anything is so now i guess i'm confused about how i would get this case i must be missing something but so you you have an experience so something looks blue um and then what are we doing are we doing philosophy here is this like sense datum theory and we're like saying well

1:13:45 which thing is it that looks blue or or is it something no no no no it's here's the way the argument works so i claim that your experience is a luminous in effect my opponent is saying you know why should i believe that why shouldn't i just think no there are these facts about my experience that i can't know and suggestion um just because i'm in that predicament doesn't mean i'm irrational so i say well let's try it out let's see how it looks there's this phenomenal fact that things look blue and that you don't know it is everything sort of fine and

1:14:18 dandy with respect to rationality and then i'm going to try to argue actually no i see there are these rational incoherences there and that puts pressure on the idea that you could really be in this predicament of being ignorant about your own experiences and still be fully rashed so i that's interesting because do you think that this kind of argument can be leveraged against like phenomenal overflow that claims that there are some phenomenally conscious experiences that we can't access or reports and so that this would be a case of that kind of irrationality or do you think it wouldn't be that's

1:14:51 interesting i'm inclined to think something different going on in that case so i might be more um sympathetic to phenomenal overflow than you are richard i don't i don't know but um i do think of attention as something that just helps you to exploit your epistemic position it doesn't necessarily put you in an epistemic position in the first place so to go with a simpler example so suppose you're playing soccer and you get a pain in your achilles yes you don't notice the pain

1:15:24 are you in a position to to know that there's that you feel pain i want to say yes because all you'd have to do is pay attention and you'd be able to exploit the evidence that you have um and so if you're if you're happy with that treatment of that case you could try something similar for phenomenal overflow it might be more tricky in that case because um it might be harder to exploit your epistemic position right it might be harder to exploit but so then i guess i'm losing my sense in the other

1:15:55 case what's supposed to be different so there it so i i guess maybe i'm misunderstanding what the what the claim was because i again it's probably my fault because i don't think about the stuff that didn't epistology side of it too much but i thought the idea was that you have a phenomenally conscious experience and you don't know that you have it yeah and it wasn't that it was like it's not possible that you can know you could have it it's just that here's a case you have the state and you don't know it um and you and you say no no no but then you just tell me the story

1:16:29 about overflow and i think well the same thing is true for the other case so now i'm not sure what the the difference is but why once you want to rule out the other one you won't good yeah so what i'm trying to do is bring out um employs abilities in denying the luminosity of experience so i think what we'd have to do is deny that this experience is luminous even in the sense that you're in a position to know it um what i see as being the difference with these cases of overflow or inattention is that you're in a position to know that you have the relevant experiences

1:17:01 there's just a problem with exploiting it because of limitations on attention i mean so ned does he does say like i'm talking about unaccessed conscious not unaccessible consciousness but he also says like i think this is like the small end of the wedge that gets you to an access conscious that you could have like you know strong overflow in the sense that there is no way to access the um phenomenally excess the the experience there and you so you have to rule out that kind of strong overflow uh that you could have completely unaccessed in any sense

1:17:33 versions of consciousness it's not even clear to me that i need to rule that out suppose think about a case of unilateral neglect suppose you have experiences of the whole visual field but there's some kind of architectural reason why you can only allocate attention to one half of the visual field i would say you're still in the relevant sense in a position to know what's going on in in the other half because if we kind of removed this psychological screw-up you would be able to get knowledge

1:18:06 in fact you've got all the evidence you need you just can't use your evidence yeah i need to in a in effect i'm treating the absence of consciousness different from unaccessed or even psychologically inaccessible consciousness yeah but i still i guess i i still don't see how you get to say both these things a what you just said about you know well you could fiddle with it and then it would be accessible versus this the the the person you're arguing against who says

1:18:38 accessibilism is is not true um because i mean so you can't access it right now but if you fiddled with it you could access it and there what they're saying the other side is well here's some consciousness experience and you can't you don't know that you have it it sounds like you agreed but said well you could come to know that you have it and that's close enough and i don't see why they can't say the same thing or why they have to deny that sort of thing your opponent has to deny that strong of a claim i think i can i think i can see the

1:19:10 worry you're pointing to it's a a little bit complicated because it depends on the sort of details of the dialectical strategy but i wonder if it would help to bring out this feature of my argumentative strategy so so what i do is i say um suppose for the sake of argument that experience is not luminous now let's see if um your predictions about what's rational are plausible or not you see what i mean so yeah collections are um about what would be sort of

1:19:41 absolutely rational whether or not you could do the rational thing or not so supposing i have um this experience of blue but there's um but i'm not in a position to know that i have that experience we can ask in effect what does my evidence support with with respect to the question whether there's something blue answer it supports belief what does my evidence support with respect to the question whether something looks blue it supports uh the conclusion that nothing looks blue

1:20:13 and so whatever you would do given your limitations it looks like the theory is predicting that here's the most rational thing to do yeah while believing you shouldn't believe and then i make the sort of claim that no theory of rationality should ever say being a critic is the most rational thing i get it now but it still seems like a lot hangs on this position to know business yeah um and if you're allowed to say well even in the unaccessed version of the strong overflow if you're

1:20:47 allowed to say oh well you know you could remove that block and then you could access it um then i wonder why you can't say the same thing about the person who denies luminosity and they would say well if you remove if you change certain things then you would be in a position to know but you just aren't right now um so that's why i saw a kind of parody between what you were trying to do and what i would see the other side do that's right because there's no reason why this particular distinction between being in an epistemic position and being able to exploit it that's a distinction everyone can draw right i think what's tricky is that once

1:21:20 you've denied that experience is luminous we can stipulate that you're actually not in a position to know how things look to you there could be these phenomenal facts that even if you were ideally rational you wouldn't know right you see what i mean in a way that's what we're testing we're like is it plausible that you could be a fully rational agent yeah i see you not knowing what your experiences are and in effect the argument is only if you think a fully rational agent could be a creative right if you're willing to to at least sign up for the idea that a fully

1:21:52 rational agent couldn't be a creative it puts some pressure on on that idea yeah no i think i i see it better now um [Music] yeah anyway so let me let me drop that yeah just to put a put a little kind of is the details are really complicated there richard but the structure of it is could there be a rational person who's self-blind this is the way that shoemaker puts it right and the challenge for someone like me or shoemaker is to try to bring out the idea that once you're self-blind other kind of uh

1:22:24 irrationalities following the mix but yeah the details are that complicated yeah no i understand what you're saying yeah and that's it's an interesting picture because it's interesting how far you can get with it so um i i'm now noticing that i've kept you here for a long time and so i'm you know i gotta let you go at some point but i i am curious about um sort of creeping up so what we've been talking about mostly so far is the argument from below um as you call it right we've been looking at cases and saying you know what what do we think about

1:22:58 these particular cases and in general it seems like you know you're making the argument that these cases support the idea of behind accessibility but there's also the argument from above and we haven't really talked about that very much at all so i wonder if you could give us some sense about the argument from above and how you think it converges yeah maybe we're just touching it on on it there richard so that really the way the argument from above goes is let me start with an intuition about the structure of ideal rationality you can't be ideally rational and bureaucratic

1:23:31 right razia doing things and believing things that you think you shouldn't do or that you think you shouldn't believe it this is just irrational and any theory that predicts that can be rational uh is wrong that's a that's the starting point and there's lots of work to be done defending that idea right some are going to deny it but um but if you're on board with that then the question is well why shouldn't uh rationality permit a crazier

1:24:04 we've got to sort of explain why it could never be around never be rational to be in this aquatic predicament and the way the argument from above works is to say that um these claims about the epistemic goal of consciousness provide the best explanation for why you shouldn't be a karate so roughly speaking the idea is if you had um some evidence that made it rational to believe p you could know you had that evidence at least you'd be in a position to know it whether you might whether you could really know it or not and so you'd be in a position to know that you should

1:24:35 uh believe that proposition so in effect we've been touching on that because now if you deny luminosity how do you explain the um irrationality of epistemic across it it doesn't seem like you can because your evidence might rationalize believing p without rationalizing the higher order belief that you should leave me right yeah interesting um and there's so much i mean there's so much that goes on the whole second half of the book i we don't really have time to die i'm gonna have to

1:25:07 drag you back here one of these times uh to go into the details but it's such an interesting such an interesting thing um and it really hangs on the what we were just talking about um so i like the way the whole picture fits together and it's very nice um i found myself like somewhat almost convinced there was there were points where i was like okay because i have very strong externalist leanings um just so you know and i found myself sort of being drawn in by the picture that you were presenting it was very inviting and it was nice but but then i also

1:25:40 found myself wondering like what difference does this really make overall because as you already were saying like this isn't a causal thing there's no causal difference like you that's why the zombies are conceivable you could have all the same cause and effects without this stuff and so and i guess what i was left wondering is like yeah so we can say we're more or less rational and rational ideal rationalities are constrained but what good is it really doing us if all of the same causes and effects are present so so yeah i wonder what you yeah how what what good is it doing that's ultimately to

1:26:13 yeah that's a fair question i think there might be multiple ways we can press the question about the goodness of consciousness what does it do for us so i am because i'm focused on the normative powers of consciousness um i want to argue that it's phenomenal character has this normative significance which doesn't depend on its causal role but there's another question we can ask which is what does consciousness do for us causally i think that's a super pressing basically empirical question

1:26:46 that isn't touched on in the book but that doesn't mean it's not an important question to be asked so i mean i take it that that's the kind of question that milner a good daler i do yeah but i wasn't really trying to ask that question i was like asking what good is the normative stuff given that it doesn't it's not like part of the causal picture of the world like why is it good to have all of these like you know we're susceptible to these rational norms and we can be rational and zombies can't and but we all do the same stuff so like how is this a good thing for us to be able to be thought of in these terms well suppose

1:27:20 that consciousness is not completely happy phenomenal but so that does some causal work and suppose that the cause of work that it does is at least sometimes more or less in line with what it should be doing then we can have then then these goodies are goodies that we can actually have we can actually have knowledge um the thought is that the zombies uh they don't have any knowledge maybe the question is this um who cares if they don't have knowledge if they've got something that enables them to get around the world

1:27:51 yeah that's the basic idea yeah so it's like a kind of a like swamping swamp revenge like the swamping problem as i understand and epistemology is like what good is knowledge is true belief that gets you around the world so this is kind of what i thought of as like a parallel press question for your way of doing things is like yeah it's the zombie states whatever we share and come with them that's what gets us around the world so what is this what's the benefit of being to say oh yeah and also we have knowledge i got you i got you yeah so um if we grant let's grant the zombies have reliability

1:28:24 here's one way i think that knowledge is better than me reliable belief you can know that you're in a position to know that your belief is justified so it has this kind of reflective stability mere reliable belief doesn't have that kind of reflective stability so you can bring that out with the super blind side case in which now admittedly the super blindsider is not a full-fledged zombie but in this case you've got these reliable beliefs but if the super blindsider reflects you know why do i believe there's an x in my blind field they're actually not in a position to

1:28:56 know that they have these unconscious representations right and so it sort of looks like they should come to the conclusion that they shouldn't form these beliefs and then either they should abandon them or they're going to be a critic so that's that would be part of the answer but i think if you really push back um you could say well what if we think not about the super blind cycle but the zombie right [Music] we're now getting into kind of jeff we like territory exactly um

1:29:30 because what we're asking in effect is why is it good for us to have norms right that are grounded in consciousness rather than norms that are grounded in something consciousness like and vertigo begins to uh exactly because what are what are the normative concepts that we're using to even answer that question uh do you see what i mean it might be that we just kind of work with the normative concepts we've got and those are like an external question and current absence or something yeah yeah so once we go external i sort of

1:30:04 begin to lose my moorings i'm not sure that i understand the question being posed but if if it's an internal question why why should we then i'm inclined to say well those concepts are anchored to the phenomenon as we'll see by kind of reflecting on various uh thought experiments but you're getting at a super deep question here you know which it makes me feel dizzy yeah i agree with you okay good so and i didn't want i wanted to make sure because i just was reading this morning actually i saw you share it on facebook a paper on uh on in in ethics which i i guess you're foraging into and i only

1:30:38 skimmed it so i didn't give it a careful read but as far as i understood what you're arguing there is that we can have deductive knowledge of morality in a way that circumvents hume um and his art distinction basically so yeah can you give us a brief preview of that uh yeah that's right so uh yes the big question is if you see these teenagers torturing a cat just for fun but harman's example how do you know that what they're doing is wrong um and it looks like it the moral conclusion can't be inferred from a moral premise unless you already know that moral

1:31:10 premise in some other way the regress has to stop somewhere most people have thought look the regress comes to an end in something perception-like the trouble is just um it's not clear that we can perceive moral facts right it's not clear that any other perception like states moral emotions or moral intuitions are really suited to play the foundational epistemic role of perception um so um so the view i'm defending is that yeah you can know

1:31:42 the moral conclusion by deduction from a solely uh non-moral premise and if you can make that work the advantage is you don't have to appeal to these extravagant sources of moral evidence whether it be moral perception or moral intuition or more of the motion so how does the deduction go on your view like what what non-moral facts yeah so in that common example it's this sort of simple one-premise deduction so the premise is the teenagers are torturing a cat just for fun the conclusion is

1:32:15 they're doing something wrong now the logical form of that inference is of course p therefore q which is not a not a valid so so it has to be the idea that um that sometimes we can know q by deduction from p when it doesn't instantiate a logical form but i think there's plenty of examples of that so you might know that something is colored by deduction from the premise that it's read right i think it's the wrong model to think we need to sort of add a conditional premise but the idea isn't like

1:32:47 um so like i would be tempted by the view that words like murder are sort of analytically that murder is wrong as an analytic truth because murder by definition means like unjustified killing so it's in the definition of the word that it's unjustified so hence trivially analytic but are you're not making appeal to something like that about torture are you it's a different kind of claim or i don't but aaron zimmerman makes basically exactly the move you propose and i see him as endorsed you know he he i think should take a lot of credit really for

1:33:19 putting this view back on the table and he does defend it by being into a notion of analytic entailment i'm skeptical for a couple of reasons um one is that i'm not ultimately convinced that there are any analytic inferences and actually richard are you you seem like too quiet in a person to to believe in analytics am i wrong about that you're wrong about that yeah okay all right enough or uh influenced not by debit to i think that yeah yeah all right um yeah i suppose i've got two qualms one is about whether there really

1:33:53 is uh ultimately a principal distinction to be drawn between the analytic and the synthetic um maybe in the case of morality this is particularly challenging because of basically moore's open question argument it looks like given any set of non-moral premises it's always going to be an open question whether what's being done is right or wrong and it seems like we could we could sort of disagree about that without losing our moral competence but ultimately the worry that i have is that we can't

1:34:25 explain epistemological notions in semantic terms that's really the the rock-bottom worry that i have so for example the idea that we give an analytic explanation of induction has no plausibility at all i think right yeah and it's not clear why deduction should should ultimately be any any different and that's very quick yeah no interesting and then so just to double check it so this is also going to be the case that whatever morality is grounded in zombies lack that right so that they they don't have um because even if

1:34:57 like you're like someone like me you thought well look if zombies could have intentional states then whether they have conscience or not they can still make promises and break promises and so be held accounts you know as i'd say being moral immoral but you're going to say no zombies can't make promises they can't break promises there's nothing moral about zombies in any way at all as far as i understand your view right yeah i would say so because they don't have this as it were the intentional um act to be morally wrong it would have to be performed with the right intention and they can't perform the requisite

1:35:30 intentions um so yeah they wouldn't get in at the ground level but one thing that's interesting about this project excuse me is that consciousness won't be actually figuring that that prominently in the account if it's figuring at all it's figuring in the account of how you get to know the premise that the teenagers are torturing a cat for fun but if if you like once you've reached that point it's then the structure of epidemic rationality that gets you support for the conclusion that they're doing something wrong um so you don't need to bring in the

1:36:02 fact that they're like causing suffering to the animal or so the consciousness doesn't get in to sort of say what's wrong about the torturing bit oh i mean it is true that it is true in the metaphysical sense that what makes the action wrong is that they're inflicting uh suffering on on the cat um but why should that sort of metaphysical effect why should the fact that there's as it were a metaphysical entailment from the non-moral fact of the moral fact have any kind of epistemic consequence

1:36:38 i guess my answer is that um the epidemic support relations are tracking the metaphysical support relations in this case so so what i end up arguing in the paper is that there's actually an evidential entailment from the non-moral fact to the moral factor rather than it being um merely metaphysical or logical or analytic the the claim at the end of the day is that there's an uh an epistemic entailment which can't be reduced to logical metaphysical or analytic content so how do you explain disagreement on

1:37:11 this kind of view about the basic moral facts yeah so in a hard case we are going to get disagreements so um two parties might know all the relevant non-moral facts but they wouldn't actually be able to know the moral facts and it looks like my view has the consequence they can just resolve their disagreement by a simple deduction that looks completely hopeless yeah the way i would defend against that objection is is to invoke a distinction that we've already discussed a fair bit region

1:37:44 which this distinction between being in a position to know something and having a capacity to know it right so in the hard cases the idea is um we are in a position to resolve these hard moral questions once we know all the relevant non-moral facts but we're not capable of competently making the deductions so we can't change we can only do it in the easy cases like carmen's cactus so you have to sort of deny then the sort of founding idea of like motivist theories at least that you could have complete knowledge of the non-moral

1:38:16 facts and yet still disagree about what the moral case is and some people have thought that's kind of a bedrock intuition that yeah that's just clear you know we can know everything about the welfare that there is and you could still be against it and i could be for it simply for moral reasons and that's not a you can't allow that on your view i can get a version of that so i can get that we can agree i guess the worry would be my account makes it look like we can't rationally disagree right right um but i think i can even get that because neither of us have to be irrational um so long as it's a hard

1:38:51 case the thought is to fail to meet the standards of perfect rationality in a hard case doesn't make you irrational and indeed you can even be rational by ordinary standards so at least i can get the following there can be disagreement in hard cases that's rational by ordinary standards you're right that i can't get the idea that that can be perfectly rational disagreement in hard cases but i'm not persuaded that that that's really a dating to be explained and so this is a version of realism

1:39:24 yeah i basically assume a minimal form of realism from the outset that there are moral facts now the question is how could we know them but you can i think you can be as deflationary as you like about those moral facts so you could have a kind of creeping version of um you know this issue of creeping realism in progressivism so you could have these kind of quasi-realist uh moral facts if you like yeah i mean one thing that's always kind of bothered me as like um really entrenched worldview so like considered

1:39:56 like a samurai um you know they have a very developed code of honor and certain things are you know very cut and dry in that code um so it seems like you could give a version of an argument from their point of view right well this this is a dishonorable act and you infer directly from it this is the right you gotta kill yourself or you gotta kill that person or whatever but you know they they may be wrong about that um about like what the so they're they're not irrational though under your view because they they're in a position to know what the correct like true moral things are they just don't have the

1:40:28 capacity because of the way the position that they're in i mean so yeah i guess it starts to seem like i i i worry that either you're going to get something that's like relativistic in a sense to these different like frameworks or you're not going to be able to make sense of them as we normally would um if you so for me it matters whether you're going wrong in the easy cases or the hard cases partly because our ordinary assessments of rationality are sensitive to difficulty yeah you imagine the samurai saying it's okay to like slash someone

1:41:02 you know in a diagonal what's that example from mary midgley's paper yeah the new sword um then we sort of start to think that's crazy um i don't know if we go so far as to say irrational but yeah i think we start to use different kinds of evaluations from the ones we'd use in in hard cases so although disagreement in hard cases see we're perfectly happy with saying everyone can be rational by ordinary standards once we get disagreement in what we think of as the easy cases if someone's telling you that it's permissible to talk to the cats or even

1:41:36 required now we start to think yeah this person i mean it does seem like you have versions of that though like uh you know there are cases of people really committed to like divine command theory for example and say look if god commands the torture of the cat then it's moral that's all there is to it and you know that end of story like you know blah blah blah one hopes he won't command that of me but so in that case it does look like if you have someone that has a real hard line there about what like morality is ultimately that you're going to have to say certain

1:42:08 things like that maybe that's an irrational view because that's an easy case um but uh so yeah i mean i guess you want to rule with this would you think that the case is strong enough that you could use these considerations as an argument against like that strong version of a divine command theory or something like that i've always got a bit of wiggle room when it comes to these ordinary assessments of rationality because in effect um there's two parts to my theory so one is what does your evidence support and so what would it take to be ideally

1:42:40 rational and then there's this sort of ordinary evaluation of rationality which is sensitive to people's capacities and in the kind of case you're describing it's quite complicated because we're dealing with people that have a whole kind of background theory we need to ask you know how did they come by this theory was it their fault you know how egregious is it and i said i suspect that our evaluations are going to be quite complex in ways that reflect that complexity i think we're going to think it's something badly has gone wrong here but maybe if you tell the background

1:43:12 story right blameworthiness is going to be mitigated right so it depends on the details matter i mean because yeah you know you you know you read about isis or whatever and it's like you want you want to say obviously what they're doing is immoral um but it's i guess another thing to say also is irrational in some sense uh because they have these really strong background commitments to like certain things being true yeah they you know it's not what i think i mean not to drag this down into the whole rabbit hole that but you know it's like osama bin laden wrote like detailed justification stories about why he was allowed to do what he did he didn't think he was

1:43:45 acting immorally i mean i think he was wrong about that but i'm just saying from his own point of view he certainly felt like he had justification for for doing what he was doing and you know are those the easy cases i don't know whether killing civilians and doing all i mean those might you might think are the easy cases and yet there's even disagreement at that fundamental level i mean we disagree about between him and i about who's innocent and what that count with means but um yeah it just looks like when in the real hard cases life is full of more hard cases than the easy cases uh when you get down to these real

1:44:16 right that's right i mean here's maybe a way to put what what i'm getting at um one thing that's hard in in those real-life cases are assessments of blameworthiness right is the person excusable there's some inclination to say no you know there's just no excuse for this kind of thing there's another tendency to say well wait we really have to look at the gory details what kind of communities have these people growing up here and how have they been brainwashed and educated and so on but at least i can say this the views

1:44:50 are not justified right yeah that's good the worry is that some of my opponents some of the moral foundationalists it's harder to to defend this line so suppose you're a moral intuitionist i suppose you think there are these siemens and you've worked with a perceptual model on which these seemings could be non-veritable it's not clear why you can't have these as it were wacky seemings these seemings that heinous acts are permissible or even required and it's not clear why you might why you couldn't lack defeaters for those scenes now it looks like we're getting the

1:45:23 really uh reverberative sort of conclusion that that these intuitions might justify immoral beliefs right and then you know presumably could justify acting on the basis of these justified beliefs so my position would be those beliefs can never be justified so actions based on them can never be justified are they always blameless or excusable that that's a more complicated uh question but at least at least they're never going to be justified yeah interesting okay um i i did i guess

1:45:56 i know i'm really pushing it but i did also kind of wanted to touch on i i forgot it went out of order a little bit i want to touch on the the case for cognitive phenomenology oh yeah um and this is something that i think an area where we agree about a lot of the background stuff but so so one of the questions that i have is like i i know people who say like cognitive phenomenology like what do you even mean by that we know what you mean when we talk about perceptual phenomenology but aren't you abusing the term like when you apply it to a cognitive state so so

1:46:29 what do you say to like to just drop dead skeptics about the existence of phenom something that's phenomenally conscious that we know by introspection there shouldn't be this level of disagreement some people might say um if it's really accessible in the way that you think that it is so yeah what do you what do you think about why more people don't accept cognitive phenomenology yeah i've got a hypothesis about this which is that there might be i mean one is terminological if the opponent is just using the word for sensory phenomenology and we just need a word for the

1:47:01 determinable of which that is a determinant but i suspect it isn't i suspect it can't be so easily boiled down to terminology here's another hypothesis about what might be going on i mean perhaps there's just a lot of interpersonal variation in how much imagery people have um i i'm thinking about you know the phenomenon of a fantasia here right it might be fantasia yeah um i've got my student preston london is writing what i hope is going to turn out to be an interesting paper on this but um there are definitely people on the

1:47:35 internet reporting that not only can they not visualize anything but they don't have any in a monologue or any in a speech but there's still an experience of thinking um and that's a phenomenon that i think i have a lot of the time i mean if i'm not a fantasic i can conjure up visual imagery when i need to and when i'm thinking hard about something complicated i need language to help me so if i'm working through a philosophy paper then i'll be thinking in words

1:48:08 but if i'm thinking about something easy i don't need to think about it using sentences the unsymbolic thoughts exactly exactly i just think i have that an awful lot of the time now you might wonder what's really going on in my brain can i really think these complex thoughts without in some sense using my capacity for linguist linguistic understanding probably not but that doesn't mean that insofar as my linguistic capacity is going to work it's registering phenomenologically so

1:48:41 the the view that i tend to like is that my capacity for thought does depend on my capacity for language but that doesn't necessarily require that there's linguistic phenomenology whenever i think or any other right i mean yeah so what one of the hypotheses i have is that so that the the attitude that you take is really important for the phenomenology so believing is different than desiring yeah that probably all beliefs are roughly similar to each other in the way that you're experiencing them maybe you could have levels of credence and degrees of like you know like conviction or whatever but

1:49:13 for the most part it's the same so we just kind of don't notice it because it's there all the time um where it's like we get a lot more variation in our in our perceptual phenomenology um but yeah believing that two plus two is four and believing that you know pennsylvania pennsylvania's in the united states are roughly they feel the same but not the content but the way it feels to believe them or to be to to judge that they're true um so i think that's part of it uh but i mean so a large part of establishing this do you think it's just like showing contrast cases getting

1:49:46 people to sort of direct their attention their own experience is that the way so i do and i think historically because remember you know it wasn't that long ago when the idea that consciousness was representational was also regarded as sort of completely alien right you have non-intentional sensations and then you have non-sensational and intentional states you've got these sort of two parts to the mind that are sometimes contingently yolked together and i think it was partly reflecting on you know wittgenstein's duck rabbit case

1:50:19 the way that as the phenomenal character of the experience changes when you see the thing as a dark and now as a rabbit there's this correlation between the phenomenal character of the experience and what's being represented right i really think um the dialectic is very similar for um for thought and part of the battle is sort of just getting people to recognize those similar similarities i also think this is sort of connected but if you look at a lot of the objections to cognitive phenomenology there's a parallel objection to

1:50:51 representations very often you can rebut objections to cognitive phenomenology by recycling moves that have been made in their representationalism literature yeah that's interesting i always think that i always like when people say they don't they don't find it i always wonder like so you know it's very strange you think of a zombie that's never had a conscious thought and then suddenly comes out of a conscious thought and the claim is that there's no change in like what it's like for them at all it's the same before and after they were a zombie before there's i just find that view very counterintuitive

1:51:24 and and i don't really think you know that a lot of people have really realized what they're committing themselves to when they when they deny this so and but one of the things i thought was really cool and the reason why i want to bring this up before we're finished is because you're going to ground a lot in these these cognitive phenomenologies and it's one of the ways in which like you're i think interesting differently than from someone like adam who has a similar kind of foundationalist move but it's about perceptual phenomenology so yeah i wonder if you could tell us like what role ultimately do these things play and how you make that distinction between you and of you like adam yeah that's right so

1:51:57 on my view all of your evidence has to be in some sense phenomenal and i think it's hopeless to think of your evidence as restricted to the perceptual right your evidence has to include cognitive stuff beliefs judgments but perceptions as well right just not only perceptions uh that's right exactly right exactly right and so um if you don't think of um belief in judgment as yoke to the phenomena in the way that i do phenomenal consciousness already starts

1:52:30 to seem peripheral it's like a curiosity of the perceptual case so in that way it turns out to be really important that i can tell a story about how consciousness is figuring in in beliefs and judgments too um but yeah it makes all sorts of difference elsewhere so although adam and i are in in many ways extremely close in the way we think about epistemology in the mind we're both representationalists we both think consciousness plays an important epistemic role we're going to say completely different things about belief so for me the way you get to know belief is the same way you get to know

1:53:03 perceptual states it's by virtue of the phenomenal character of judgments or other phenomenal dispositions of your beliefs whereas for adam i don't know what the story is but it might end up being something that looks more reliable right which is which would be interesting given that i i doubt that adam would want a reliable epistemology for perceptual judgment another difference is that we disagree about the madness so adam does think that there are limits to how much irrationality your sort of uh your beliefs can countenance whereas

1:53:37 i can allow for much more rampant irrationality so yeah that that disagreement goes quite deeply yeah that's that's very interesting so the the idea is that you have these judgments they count as part of your evidence because they're phenomenally conscious um so this is why really where you disagree with like even phenomenal conservatism which it really is just the view that i mean that's basically just the view that it's only the the perceptual stuff that matters the seemings but but can you be a phenomenal conservative and also say there's cognitive seemings like so yeah yeah you could definitely enrich it in that way that's right so i suspect

1:54:12 that i have other disagreements with phenomenal conservatism deeper yeah there is that worry that you've got to include more than just your current seemings you've got to have your beliefs too another worry about phenomenal conservatism is that it tries to basically reduce all the epistemology to a perceptual model and i think that's going to have all sorts of distortion the stuff we were discussing about moral epistemology is a good case in point actually yeah that's interesting um all right well i really do got to let you go i apologize i could talk to you all day but i i want to thank you

1:54:45 so much for joining me it's a great conversation um and i just wanted some one final question which i wonder if there was anything you were expecting would come up that hasn't come up so far that you would like to oh you know we didn't talk as much as we might have about the ha i didn't answer your question well enough about the higher order thought theory i think you raised a fascinating question about how might um acceptance of the higher order thought theory affect your inclination to accept or reject my claims about the epidemic role of consciousness so that's something we

1:55:17 could discuss more in in jake burger's paper he argues for a view on which given the background to higher order thought theory you should reject the epistemic role of consciousness i'm curious about a position that tries to to marry the two uh yeah i know i think jake and i disagree i'm actually going to have him on this suite later this week talk about some of these issues but um i i cuz i know he said in that paper like if you had a bad higher order case we have the higher state but that without the first day he said you wouldn't be justified in believing there was

1:55:49 something blue i i we talked about this a bit by email but i really disagree with that i think you do have justification just simply because that's part of your conscious experience like you're having a conscious experience that justifies you um so yeah i i found myself thinking that you could have a version of your view with the higher order view so i was wondering i was curious about your claim that you'd have to do it in a certain way so i wonder what you meant like yeah so i that this is exactly the point that i had in mind i would agree with what you just said i think

1:56:21 what jake is thinking is that when you're in these sort of strange kind of bad cases where your higher order thought misrepresents the perceptual state right so so it would be a case you actually you see blue but it introspectively seems that you uh see green yeah what do you have justification to believe that it's blue or that it's green jake's idea is blue because that's what you're actually seeing to be so whereas my thought would be that isn't and this might be going further than you'd want to go

1:56:53 i don't really think of that as a perceptual state at all it's some kind of unconscious blind sight-like perceptual representation but i would say in any case it it would on the higher order thought theory seem as if you're seeing green right and so justify believing greek right and that's the picture that i would take um yeah interesting so um maybe now i have a new paper to write so you combine it okay there we go but i want to thank you again declan this has been a great conversation

1:57:25 and i really would like to have you back sometime because there's so much we haven't even scratched the surface i think there's a lot more to talk about so if you're open i love that richard this is really good fun thanks so much thanks uh just hang out for a second i'll say bye off air otherwise thanks again yeah all right we're off we're done that was fun so there were actually people kind of