Consciousness Live! with Jacob Berger (S4 E6)

0:00 Kind of I kind of have monitor it. Oh, anyway, we're going. All right, we are live. Um joining me today, a very very very special guest, Jacob Berger. Um Jake, for for those that don't know you, can you say a little bit about who you are and what you do? Sure. Um well, first off, thanks a lot, Richard, for having me on the show. Um I'm a big fan. I think you've been doing an amazing job with it. Um So, yeah. Um I'm an assistant professor uh in the Department of Philosophy at Lycoming College, which is a small liberal arts

0:32 college in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, which is a um basically in the center of Pennsylvania. And I've been here for about 2 years. Um and primarily I've been teaching here mostly um classes in philosophy of science, but um but my actual my research areas of interest are in more in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, more specifically. Um and within that I have like a a bunch of interests. I guess I would say my central interest or the thing I've been mostly working on the last couple of years, which was my dissertation work, is about the nature of perceptual representation. Um and in particular, I'm interested in

1:05 the grounds of perceptual representation. So, what explains why perceptual states are about what they're about. Um and so, I have a kind of an account of that that I've been that I've been developing. Um but I'm also interested in consciousness, um as you well know. And in particular, I'm I've been in some of my work I've I've uh defended the higher-order thought theory of consciousness. So, that's something that I that I think about quite a bit. Um and I guess sort of as a counterpoint to my interest in consciousness, I'm also in some of my work and has always been interested in my interest what kinds of mentality can occur

1:37 unconsciously. Um so, in some stuff recently I've been trying to defend the idea that there is unconscious perception, um and just like what the extent and nature of unconscious mentality is more generally. So, those are things that I guess those are sort of the broad things I think about in my research. Yeah, well, I guess um a corollary to all that is also you've recently been thinking about just the nature of the colors themselves, so the perceptible properties. That's right. Yeah. Um I mean I got thinking about the colors or perceptible properties more generally um primarily because of my interest in the

2:09 nature of perceptual representation. Um but I think that like a lot of accounts of perceptual representation if they're going to be complete or um workable at all need a corresponding theory of what it is that we perceive, the perceptible properties. And so um yeah, in developing kind of the story about um perceptual or visual representation that I want to develop, I thought it you know, it naturally suggests a view about how colors work um or what colors are. And so I yeah, have a recent paper where I'm trying to kind of articulate that view of what colors are pretty clearly and just set it

2:42 against other major theories of color. Yeah, I want to get to that cuz that's is a pretty interesting. I just recently read it cuz uh I think it's coming in J Phil or Journal of Philosophy, so that's That's a good That's a good journal. Not too shabby. Um so I want to but I think you really can't understand I mean it helps to understand the view that you're arguing there if you go through the other stuff first. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Um but but even more generally I guess what I want to ask you. So when you're thinking about just perceptual representations

3:14 like it seems like that's where you want to start is with like yeah, there are perceptual representations. Um so so what do you think is wrong with like the kind of relationalism or naive realism? It is that a still a viable account in cuz I sometimes wonder like in philosophy of perception, I know there are people that defend it, but like what what is the like lay of the land like about these differing views? Do you have any sense of that? Um a little bit. Yeah, um I mean I I I have to say that like you know, throughout most of graduate school I sort of

3:45 I was just kind of assuming a representational account of perception um um, like not necessarily really even seriously considering the arguments for relationalism. Um, I do I have one paper that's an analysis that I wrote with um, uh, Benson and A, who's who was my post-doc supervisor. Um, where we where I offer what I at the time took to be sort of like my main reason to not want to go in a relationalist direction. Um, I mean I think that and and I can, you know, talk about that a little bit. I mean I'm but some relationalists had responses to that which I

4:18 kind of feel were somewhat compelling. And so I don't I don't it's I don't really feel like there's like a knockdown argument against relationalism in for as it, you know, as opposed to a representationalist kind of um, framework except for the kinds of major main considerations which relationalists often say are not even they're not even problems but rather just features of the view. So for example, like I think relationalism, you know, typically commits you to either disjunctivism or something, you know, kind of like it like that, you know, since since what they say a perceptual state is is standing in a relation to a particular, you know,

4:50 object, Yeah. you know, indiscernible objects, those are different perceptual states even though um, the person couldn't tell their perception apart from and I just feel like, you know, that seems to me sort of an unworkable starting point. Um, you know, like I I I would like those perceptual states to be the same, you know. Um, but of course relationalists say, "Why? That's question begging, you know." Right. a coherent story. And so I yeah, I don't have um, like I I think that they're really just starting with different starting points and then kind of working out the details of how those starting

5:23 points would go. And my starting point was just, you know, that um, if you've got if you can't tell the objects apart, then you've got the same perceptual state. Like something kind of rough like that. And I've just been rolling with that, you know, for my career. I mean I I I do think that there are problems for various different specific versions of relationalism when you look down at their details. Um, and maybe there are sort of other big picture problems that aren't just being kind of turned off by some of the major commitments. Like for example in this paper with with Bensa, we argue that it's not clear how a relationist should account for unconscious perception.

5:55 Yeah. And that seems it it's it's still unclear to me exactly what they what they should or want to say. And what we argue in the paper is just like they have a couple of options and none of the options look that great. So one option is to say that in unconscious perception, you know, like in blindsight or something, you're standing in an unconscious perceptual relation to you know, items in your environment. Maybe that's a workable way to go. I think maybe the the thing that You could have a like a higher order version of naive realism. You could have a higher order version of

6:28 naive realism. Yeah, exactly. We're like what it is to be in a conscious perceptual relation is to have a higher order thought about the perceptual relation you're in. Right. So another kind of thing that we flag in the paper that we like like mention in the paper but don't really explore and I was thinking that another paper might be good is to is to argue actually that if that's the route you want to go to say that you have an unconscious perceptual relation that becomes conscious because of some mechanism like higher order representation, it's not really clear what theory of consciousness would fit with that. Like you know, for example, suppose you're thinking in a global workspace

7:01 kind of way. What would it be for a perceptual relation to become globally available to cognition? Like could a relation be available to cognition in that way? That doesn't seem like it really makes sense. Right. Uh But it would make sense on a higher order view though, right? You would just like attribute to yourself some kind of relational state. Yeah, so I think that higher order thought unsurprisingly I'm not I'm I think that higher order theory is probably the best option for a relationist, but I don't know anybody who's defended something like that in the literature. Seems to me more like

7:32 the direction they want to go is to just deny there's unconscious perception. Right. Just say that there's you know, subpersonal registration of stuff in the environment, but that's not actually perception. I mean, a a large part of this I wonder how much of it is like ultimately verbal and that you may have um like underdetermination of theory by like mental goings-ons. Uh and so that the relationals on the one hand, I mean, they it's not as

8:05 though they they're going to say, well, again, I'm really the outsider on perception stuff. That's That's where your expertise is. So, I'm asking you is like and what I'm saying like totally off base. But it's not as though the relationals are going to deny anything from vision science. Um it's not as though they're going to say, no, you know, this the the hierarchy of processing is not that way. It's just that they don't interpret all of that stuff in terms of like representations and contents and um and and so one starts to wonder, well, how how do you choose between these these

8:39 two kind of positions? And what you were saying earlier was like, well, you you know, you go to you have a starting point, you flesh it out, but then once you have it all fleshed out, how do you adjudicate between the like that and like a relationalism or something? Well, I mean, I do think that they make Yeah, I mean, are you saying like what's an empirical prediction like what's an experimental prediction that relationalism makes that a representationalist theory doesn't make? Or do you even think there could be something like that? Because you might think that they make all the same empirical predictions. That's a really good question which I

9:13 haven't really thought about whether or not they make different experimental predictions. Although, I think again, the devil might be in the details of like the particular relationalist views. But they do describe the phenomena very differently and in ways that do seem to be really at odds with one another. So, for example, um you know, like on a the sort of standard or typical version of, you know, naive realism or relationalism, they think like if you're having a total hallucination, like if you're brain in a vat, since you're in no relation to any objects, there's nothing that it's like for you to be a brain in a vat. Um

9:45 and so then they have to explain like what's going on in those kinds of cases and they say things like, you know, the brain in the vat, there's nothing that's like to be the brain in the vat, but it's confused. It it thinks that there's something that it's like for it to be, you know, um and does that make a different empirical prediction? I'm not so sure what to say about that. Um actually I just saw a talk by a person defending naive realism. I don't know if I should like cuz the talk was, you know, not something published, but basically arguing that there aren't that total hallucinations are impossible that that you couldn't the brain in the vat

10:18 scenarios are just you know, have to be denied for because it's in conflict with naive realism. So that seems like a a way that you could maybe start to argue, you know, if you had good independent reasons for thinking that in total hallucination you'd have qualitative experience, you know, or phenomenal experience, then that would be an argument against relationalism. Um that would be empirical. But what this talk was arguing is that there isn't any good reason to think that. And I'm not sure what to say about that. I, you know, So then is the is the basic ideas like you

10:50 cuz that was one of the questions I I sort of was had when I was reading your work, which is a lot about representationalism and can you interpret, you know, this as a representational view or not. So why why start with representations? Um and it sounds like what you were saying is that's intuitively the way you think about things and you can flesh it out and then it's a complicated question how you're going to pick between, but maybe there are some empirical considerations, maybe there's not, but you're more interested in just kind of developing an idea um and seeing like how it fits with like what we already know or something.

11:23 Yeah, I mean I guess in terms of if you're asking about the dialectic in one of my papers, yeah, I do kind of in a way. Like sometimes I'll have a footnote where I'm like, you know, you might be thinking about things in a relationalist way. Actually, I do think I even have some papers relationalist You read my work a little bit more, but I I feel like I have some papers where I say things like, "You could even put what I'm saying, if you prefer relationalism, like maybe recast what I'm doing in a relationalist framework." Right. And so, I'm not sure that a lot of what I do really actually does hinge on using the representational idioms. Although, I think that yeah, for me it's most natural. So, I do but it's so

11:56 instead I see the sort of dialectically what I'm doing in a lot of my papers is kind of like diving into debates among representationalists and trying to develop a particular form of representationalism, which I think it has advantages over the major competitive versions of representationalism, rather than diving into like the more kind of basic metaphysical debate between representationalism versus relationalism. That's that's kind of how I cast what I'm doing. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, the my my my opponents in a lot of my papers are the people that I'm thinking of as being the people that I'm disagreeing with are other representationalists, not naïve realists. I know.

12:28 And I you know, I agree like you know, you kind of have to narrow your scope when you're writing papers, but it's but I should have something more definitive to say. I thought that that analysis paper with Ben So was like a pretty good attack, but then I don't know, couple of smart you know, there's always interesting things that you can say in philosophy. It's philosophy after all. What was the response that you sort of found semi-compelling? Do you remember? Um I I I feel reluctant to try to like to Yeah, yeah, no, that's fine. Uh but like Ori Beck has a really cool paper that I think is forthcoming in Erkenntnis, um where he has a view where

13:03 So, relationalists often exploit um they say that they're the perceptual relation is not just a relation between a perceiver and the perceived object, but there's usually some like sort of like third relatum, right? You know, there's like a the sort of standpoint, I think is what Bill Brewer calls it, but you know, it's it's it's a relation that involves you, the object, and like the circumstances of of um perception. And I think Beck basically says that you can explain I can't remember if he says that as part of the standpoint or if he says actually the features of the of the perceiver can explain why in unconscious perception

13:37 you just don't have any phenomenal character. Um, so it kind of like blocks the relation basically. Uh-huh. But I feel like that's probably not doing justice to his complicated paper. So I recommend everybody read that paper. Yeah. I will put a link to it, too. But I mean, I guess part of the reason why I'm wondering about this is because a lot of like yeah, stuff you want to start with is like folk psychological in nature. Um, and so I mean, I I would have thought that like naive realism or something like it was in the folk uh, conception of these things. But it sounds like you don't think that. Or or

14:11 what what do you think the status of that in that or do you think it matters for your work or not? Um, Um, that's that's a that's a good question. Yeah, I mean, I I probably I I think probably the folk don't have a view about um, uh, whether perception should be understood I mean, I certainly don't have a view about whether perception should be understood in terms of content or or representations. Like I don't think that's an that's a folk notion. So those are theoretical notions that I'm trying to use to unpack or explain what the folk say. Right? So I think the folk have a a

14:43 notion of seeing, right? And they have a notion of like telling apart stuff in their environment. Um, but I think they don't get much more beyond that. And so I I I I yeah, I probably took a stand and say, you know, even to naive realists, I think frequently they like that term because it makes it sound like it's the common sense default position. But I actually think it's it's fairly theoretically loaded. And so I would doubt that it's the common sense that that that common sense like cuts that finely. It's true that I do appeal to common sense a lot in my papers. Um, but I don't actually think it goes very far. Like I feel like it's fairly thin.

15:16 Um, and so I don't think that it's going to like it I I don't think it make or breaks a theory um, in either way. But I do think that one kind of like desiderata or whatever you want to call it, like one constraint on a good theory is that it doesn't do too much violence to common sense. You know, so I have this kind of like broad solipsism in my thinking, which is you know, we've talked about, and you know, so I have this idea that like you know, roughly what we're trying to do in philosophy is to like show how our scientific conception of the world fits with our sort of common sense conception of the world. And when you're seeing how those two things kind of jiggle

15:48 together, um you're almost inevitably going to have to give up little pieces of common sense, but I don't you don't want to give up too much, cuz if you give up too much, then it's not clear that you're actually giving an account of the thing you were aiming to give account an account of in the first place. Um so that's why I appeal to common sense, cuz I'm just trying to remember that we're trying to stick to the stick to the subject matter, but I don't think that it's like sacrosanct. Um like it doesn't you know, it shouldn't it doesn't immediately tell us what theory you should hold. Yeah, no I yeah, that's good. Um I do wonder if the folk have a view on

16:23 this or not. Um I guess that's a job for experimental psychol- uh philosophy. Uh anyway, so now I mean, I want to talk to you about the quality space uh stuff and the quality space semantics and all of that stuff, cuz that's where a lot of the the focus of your work has been at least um recently. So can because I mean, my my I'm somewhat agnostic on the whole quality space stuff. Uh I I think that once I was talking with David, and he was saying how he can't even like picture how it could be wrong.

16:56 Um like he said, he really didn't even understand like in a way like how it could be wrong, and I was like, "Wow." I I guess it cuz I I think like any some other kind of representationalism for first-order states is perfectly conceivable. Um so can you give us a little yeah, give us a little introduction about what do you think is the most appealing or attractive thing about quality space? Give us a little bit of sense of what they are and take us into that. Sure. Yeah, I mean I definitely don't think that it Well, you know, I don't I don't I don't know what David was saying

17:27 there, but I misrepresented him, but that's all right. But I, you know, that it's not my view that it's like the only I could, you know, I can't think of how else it could be because I mean one thing that I want to do in my work is to say that we should consider as being like a rival with other standard theories of um sensory or perceptual representation. And given that like we should Yeah, compare their compare and contrast their, you know, attractiveness, relative attractiveness. And so I don't think it's like obvious that one is right or one is wrong. But I do think it's a kind of It is It is like a sort of easy to understand view once you're sort

17:59 of like walked into it. And so that that makes it attractive. There's no like mysterious elements to it really. And so whereas I think that the the alternatives often do invoke notions that they then kind of don't explain as much. And so that's kind of like a prima facie consideration in favor of it. And then I do think there's some arguments for it. So What's the basic idea? Um Well, so the basic idea is that like our sensory systems, our sensory modalities give us access to like families of properties. So like vision enables us to discriminate among colors, right? Um actually that's even starting sort of

18:32 too internally. Again, because I'm so kind of have this background structuralism, like I'm really like a methodological behaviorist. So what I want to really do is start with like a certain kind of behavior that organisms engage in. And so even more like even less like mentally, um there's this fact about people which is that we engage in a kind of distinctive behavior which is discriminatory behavior among families of properties. So like um when our eyeballs are presented with color chips, we discriminate the color chips as discriminate the color stimuli as having

19:04 um a particular kind of relationship to one another that can be represented in what's what what we call a quality space. Um so what a quality space is is a representation of a creature's capacity to make discriminations among stimuli of a presented to a particular modality. So, um, if we're talking about vision, vision can discriminate shapes and colors. There's a question about how you tell the difference between shapes and colors, but like supposing we have that distinction. Like if you present color stimuli, not shape stimuli, then creatures by their eyes make a distinctive set of discriminations among

19:36 colored stimuli that you can represent, um, using this structure. So, for example, I mean just to make it simple, like you know, uh, vision makes it makes us discriminate, uh, red stimuli as being more similar to orange stimuli than it is to green stimuli. Right. And there's a question about how exactly you test or measure these dis- these discriminatory behaviors, but once you do that, you can see that creatures kind of make distinctive discriminations among the colors that are only among the colors, right? So, it's like this discrete family of properties that we make discriminations among.

20:08 And the same is true for the other sensory modalities. So, like hearing gives us access to, you know, audition gives us access to to sounds, and we tell sounds sounds have different similarities and differences that we can discriminate as being more, you know, more or less similar to one another. And you can also structure up the sounds into an auditory space that represents how the relationships between the sounds. And this and I uh David Rosenthal, who's obviously a mentor of both of ours and and a huge influence on my thinking along a lot of ventures, you know, has argued that this extends to

20:40 not just all the other standard sensory modalities like olfaction. He's got a paper with Ben Young, who's another friend of ours from graduate school, um, where where they argue very persuasively that you can do this for smell, you know, for odors. Um, but even extends arguably to pains, you know, so that pains can fit in a can be organized into a a space that shows how they're more similar or less different. Um, uh, and and also for what are sometimes called the the common sensibles, so shape and um size uh and location. Um and so

21:13 for each of these uh sets of properties by each modality, right? So, color as distinguished by vision or shape as distinguished by vision or um ol- olfaction, you know, smells as distinguished by olfaction, generates a a particular distinctive space, um which are multi-dimensional spaces. Um So, for example, it was spo- focusing on the case of color where I think the case is the most straightforward, right? I actually I I think the case kind of extends to all I'm with Rosenthal that I think that it extends to all the other

21:45 kinds of sensible properties. The reason why in this recent paper I focused on color was kind of a mercenary reason. It was just that I thought that the case is clearest and I didn't want to spend a tremendous amount of paper being like, "Here's how it might go to other things." cuz it just already was you know what I mean? Too much. And also I didn't really feel like I had novel things to say about it beyond what other people had said. Um Yeah, cuz by the way, this view, you know, this view about quality space semantics and this view about color, I don't regard them as like novel to me. I I see them as being just me kind of pulling out and articulating different aspects of some of things that have been sort of said by

22:18 people in this tradition. So, people like David Rosenthal and Austin Clark and arguably Sellers and maybe Sydney Shoemaker kind of-ish and yeah, so there are other folks who have views that are like this. Um But each of these sensory modality, you know, for color, you've got you get you generate a a multi-dimensional space which is typically thought to be ordered against along the dimensions of um hue, saturation, and brightness. So, it's a three-dimensional space. I'm actually neutral about whether or not those are the right dimensions. Like, I think that how you construct the space and like how you test whether or not creatures are able to discriminate things and how you construct the space is really an issue

22:50 for perceptual psychology. And however that ends up going, that will determine what the best way of structuring the stimuli are and so what the best what the dimensions actually are. Um so, I kind of think it's in a way an open experimental question, although I think it's likely to go the way we standardly think it goes, that it's three dimensions. Um so what one question, this may be maybe too far afield. Um, if so, tell me and then we'll just move on. But what one question that I have is like uh just when you look at the what the brain

23:23 is doing and you wonder about how this is going to be implemented at the neurological level. Yeah. So, you know, take Hubel and Wiesel, they're looking at these cat neurons. The cat neurons um are firing when the bar is oriented in one orientation, not the other orientation. Is that it discriminating bars? If so, is it is it doing the sort of thing that you could build like a quality space for um or is that too low of a level and so yeah, I guess I just

23:55 I wonder what what we mean I like packed into the idea of like a normal observer or like so there's some antecedents starting position where what's but once you look at the way the brain is organized, it looks like well, this kind of discrimination stuff is happening all over the place. So, where where do you draw the line? Yeah, no, those are not far afield. Those are great questions that are kind of like, I don't know, like really foundational and so in a way I'm afraid I'm going to great things to say about them. But um I mean, for one thing, I mean, I guess I I want to distinguish like detection, merely detecting a stimulus from um

24:29 discriminating it. So, I take discrimination to involve not simply being able to like tell that a stimulus is present or not, but being able being able in some sense to tell the stimulus apart from other stimuli. Uh-huh. So, um the way that I'm understanding discrimination just roughly, I mean, let me tell you one experimental technique which um you're doubtless familiar with um that I think is just a way of getting into the notion of discrimination, but I don't want to commit myself to this being the only method or the the method for determining quality is just this method of what, you know, so-called just noticeable differences. So, Rosenthal talks a lot about this in his

25:02 work, but um you know, there's this experimental technique where you give people, you know, color chips for example that are very physically similar in terms of like the way that they reflect light, and you keep giving them successive color chips such they become more and more physically similar until you basically get to a pair of uh um color chips where the person would cease to be able to, you know, if you made it if you made one of the color chips any more physically similar to the other, the person would cease to be able to tell them apart, right? And so, that those two color chips are then so-called just noticeably different or JND from

25:34 one another. Um and so, that's a way of of uh measuring that the creature is able to distinguish those two stimuli or discriminate those two stimuli. Um and so, on my view would become would be different colors. Um but if the two color chips, despite being physically different, right? I mean, I haven't told you at all what my view is yet. Um but roughly my view is that colors are functional properties determined by how they're discriminated, right? That's the basic idea. And how you figure out how they're discriminated is what their location is in the quality space. So, if there are two color chips on my view that, however

26:07 physically different they may end up being, in fact, you know, there are obviously famous cases of metamers where which are two very physically different stimuli that under ordinary viewing conditions look to be, you know, can't be discriminated. Um are, you know, so those would be considered the same color on my view. Um Even though they're physically different, they're the same color because they can't they're they occupy the same location in the discriminability of the animal. Exactly, yeah. But so, but can't I mean, I I just noticeable differences are are wonderful, but why can't the little

26:43 neurons in um the V1 do those things as well? So, there's you know, one orientation at which it's going to be sort of uh not optimal. And so you can get like the one that it is and just noticeable detectable or whatever. But so it looks like what kind of qualities you're going to construct depend on like how you probe the system. In other words, so if you probe with these single neurons, you'll get one quality space. In fact, we sort of have it and that's what they show you in like

27:15 an intro textbook in neuroscience is like, "Oh, here's the columns and their orientations about their in in V1." Um and so Anyway, so yeah, it seems like are you okay with a result like that that there's going to be different qualities depending on how you probe the system or do you want there to be something more objective there? I think I want there to be something more objective there and so let me try this as a response, but maybe this is maybe I'm now going off to left field and so you tell me if I come back to your question. Um but uh I yeah, um so I I don't necessarily think that uh neurons lighting up

27:49 because you're presenting it with a stimulus yet qualifies as discrimination. So I take discrimination to be understood as a behavioral It's a behavioral category. Um so the neuron better be hooked up to like an arm, to be able to um distinguish cuz otherwise I'd be afraid that you that really what you're we're talking about arguably is just something that's sub-personal. And so I want to distinguish like discriminatory behavior and the mental representations that drive those from anything that might look like just sub-personal information registration or something like that.

28:24 So like for example, I don't think discrimination takes place in your retina, even though your retina does carry information about edges and so forth. I think this discrimination Well, first off, discrimination's a behavior, right? And um it's a behavior that's caused by mental representations, but the mental representations um have to be um they have to meet various conditions. And so it's not simply that the mental representation like gets keyed up, you know, by a stimulus. Um that yet doesn't determine So, it's got to be that the creature is able to make distinctions between stimuli that it's

28:56 presented with. I mean, basically, what you need to be able to do is start to construct on the basis of those things quality spaces. Um and once you can do that, then you're closer to having then you're I'm closer to feeling like comfortable saying that you've got mental represent you have visual representations. I'm still not yet 100% comfortable with it though, because I do think that like it's open to like a thermometer objection, you know, like Yeah. kind of standard objections to functionalism, like, you know, you can imagine that there's just some sort of camera that constructs a quality space of the stimuli that you present to it. And so, I do think it's a condition on

29:28 um something counting as discriminatory behavior that the behavior is closely linked to other complex behaviors. Um I'm putting it in terms of behavior and not in terms of the mental, you know, causes of the behavior, because again, I want to maintain this methodological behavior this kind of view about, you know, why I want to say that, you know, so I don't want to say like it counts as a mental representation if it's connected to other mental states in the right way. That's ultimately what I do think, but I think that you can do the connections to to just to distinguish discrimination from mere detection or, you know, mere

30:00 whatever a thermometer does, um uh in terms of connections to other behaviors. So, it sounds like you do So, in the in the background of all of this is a kind of um like you said, a broadly Sellarsian picture, where these are theoretical constructs of what we're dealing with here. So, we have behaviors, that's the sort of thing that we observe, and then we posit the existence of these various things. Yeah. In this case, we'll call them mental qualities, because they represent qualitative aspects of objects or something like that. So, but they're

30:33 they're the theoretical entities, not something we discover by introspection. Correct. Now, I do think we can introspect them. Um but they are, I think fundamentally uh theoretical entities, yeah. So, that's the kind of background solipsism. I mean, I don't in I don't think I in any of my papers I say this cuz I, you know, who who on earth other than, you know, me and maybe a couple of other people like you would believe this. Um, you know, uh but but yeah, that is in the background of my thinking about these things and one of the reasons why I'm motivated to find it very attractive. Yeah.

31:05 Is that objectionable somehow? Um, no. I mean, this is I it's one of just kind of on a personal note, it's one of those things that I have always thought is interesting because like I you know, we were saying we both studied at the graduate center with David Rosenthal and you know, I I like higher order theories. We've written on them together actually and we'll maybe talk about some of that stuff in a in a little bit. But, um, you know, I'm I'm an uh I'm an ally. But, yeah, we we come from very different background pictures of like how philosophy works, how how the mind is put together.

31:38 And uh part of it is this solipsism stuff in the background for you and which I've always found um, a somewhat uneasy with. But, that that's one of the things I've always been interested in is like how much of the higher order theory depends on this kind of background view. And I I don't think a lot does. Um And I don't think that the the view I'm articulating requires it either. Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, for sure. Yeah, so I don't want to hang anything on it. I'm just telling you that it's that if you are drawn to that kind of picture, it's one of the advantages of this view is that it fits nicely with it. But, I agree

32:10 with you, it's not required. Um So, so you think you could have a a version of this kind of quality space view even if you thought the first-person access was somehow distinctive and um, because it seems like well, the whole the whole way you individuate those is behaviorally. So, if someone came along and said, well, I want to individuate them sort of in terms of how it seems to me or like how I'm conscious of them, you'd have to object to that. That's right. I do think that, you know, that constructing the spaces So, sometimes

32:43 and I've even myself made this mistake a little, you know, here and there in my thinking, but that that the way the space is constructed is based on how they're the perceived similarities and differences. Right. And yeah, so I do think that that would generate difference maybe different spaces. Um but I think but I think there are advantages that are independent of like the kind of background of our system for thinking that the better way of thinking about the spaces is in terms of how they're discriminated, not in terms of how they're their perceived similarities and differences. And roughly the idea there

33:14 is just that what counts as a perceived similarity or difference is like a lot more wishy-washy. Mhm. Um and open to kind of interpretation. It's not so clear, you know, what what the circumstances are where we want to say that a person's got, you know, making there are two things are perceived as being the same or not. Yeah. But there whereas discrimination, because it's something that can be sort of experimentally kind of operationalized and um and tested measured, right? Kind of takes the subjectivity out of the and thus the wishy-washiness out of um

33:47 trying to think of constructing the spaces in terms of like how they seem to me or something like that. Um where you can, you know, maybe not trust people's reports or have doubt about how their reports are matching on to what the actual perceived similarities and differences are. This just takes all of that out of the out of the equation and so you have like a formal mathematically representable, you know, measure of what are the Now, that's going to I I don't think that this view about these perceptual representations like it doesn't tell you it's not a story about what it's like

34:19 because as you know, we're both, you know, uh fond of needing an an additional account of how you get conscious perceptual representations. Yeah. And so um so I think that this story is just about how perceptual representations works for independently of whether they're conscious. Um and then you need another story about what makes them conscious. Um which is going to bring in who knows what. Now, because I'm sympathetic with a higher order story, I think that you know that higher order thought account fits nicely with this kind of quality space theoretic account of um perceptual

34:52 representation. And helps explain why there might be times where how you're discriminating comes apart from how it's how it seems to you. Um maybe other theories of how things get made conscious don't have the have as clear resources for doing that. Um so, for example, if you're a global workspace theorist, it's not so clear that there's a way of giving an account of why um when the representations are unconscious, you're discriminating one way and when they're conscious, it seems that you're discriminating them in a different way, right? Um and so, that's maybe a disadvantage of a global workspace view, but I don't

35:25 think that there's any reason why you couldn't pair a global workspace view with this view of perceptual representation. You see what I'm saying? So, I think it's independent um topics. One topic is what explains why perceptual states have the content that they do, and I think it's this quality space thing. Then there's a question, what makes a perceptual representation conscious? And that's just a different issue, and I think any theory of consciousness conceivably could be paired with this theory. Interesting. Yeah, I like that. But I mean, a lot of people are going to resist at this point, and so if I was going to, you know, play devil's advocate,

35:57 um many people just to start get your take on it. The many people are going to say, "Look, you know, these things you're calling mental qualities, they that they're just conscious. Um that that's what it means to call it a mental quality. It's just to say that it's like the configures like what it's like for you bit of of it. Um it's the way the conscious experience of red differs from the conscious experience of green. So, you want to use it in a way that that attributes real like qualitativeness to it. Um even when it's unconscious.

36:30 And so many people are and I'm not one of them, but I mean, you know, so I'm like I said playing devil's advocate, but in the role of devil's advocate like how how do you think you respond to that objection? Well, so actually in my work I I don't Well, I guess I mean maybe it's in our most recent in our recent paper about um about about Rosenthal and and about whether or not he's should be considered representationalist. Yeah, it's a good paper. And it is a good paper. Everyone read it. Yeah. Um yeah, I think that we that we talk about um about whether we should regard,

37:04 you know, qualitative states that occur occur unconsciously, whether we should say that they have mental qualities. And I think Rosenthal has very compellingly argued that um there's no good reason not to. Like once you, you know, separate the notion of that you that there's a reasonable way to distinguish the notion of a state being conscious and a state being qualitative. But actually the way that I I I think I have in a way like a even more neutral way of doing things, um which which is that I'm not sure that I need to call them mental qualities. That's why like when I started my spiel at the very beginning, um I'm always talking about like visual representations, right?

37:37 Rather than saying like mental red. Um because I actually think that the quality space story and part of the reason why I call the account call the account that I've given my paper quality space semantics and not quality space theory. So quality space theory is David's is Rosenthal's name for the view that we can explain the qualitative aspect of mental states uh in terms of the matching of those states' locations in in a quality space to the space of the perceptible properties that they give access to. Right. My sort of terminological variant of that and I and I often wonder if it's a

38:10 terminological variant and it's something that Rosenthal and I have like talked about for many years is um that you've got an account of visual of you know, sensory representations in terms of the matching of those the sensory representations in their space to the space of the personal properties that they give access to. And I'm in a way kind of neutral about whether it makes sense to call those sensory representations qualitative. Right? Um and I don't think anybody finds it well, naive realist maybe, but I don't think I'm not even sure naive realists are bothered by it to think that they're unconscious sensory representations. Right.

38:42 Right. Um and then there's a question about why uh those unconscious sensory representations why they become conscious and why there's something that it's like for you, why there's you know, qualitative experience, why there are mental qualities. And so all I would call a mental quality is a conscious sensory representation, right? Yeah. Um what's that? It depends on your view. Um so on my on my view you know, you have mental if you want to put it this way, you could say you have a mental quality or quality you have qualitative experience or phenomenal experience when you're aware of yourself as being in a sense a certain kind of sensory representation. And I feel like

39:15 that's much less um terminologically kind of against the grain, right? Of what people how people use this terminology lately. Um but but again but I am as I said, you know, sympathetic with David's arguments for thinking that we should separate qualitative from conscious. And if you do that, then there's I think there's no good reason to say um that the sensory representations are themselves qualitative. One reason why why I think that that's true is that they fit in spaces that have similarity and difference relations that are a lot like the mirror of the similarity and

39:47 difference relations of the true of the of the sensible qualities of the properties, you know, but but in a way I'm kind of like a standard representationalist and I think the real qualitative properties are the ones out there, like colors. Red is totally is a real is a quality. And what it is to have a reddish experience is to be representing that reddish quality in the right kind of way. What's the right kind of way? It's to be aware of yourself as being in a sensory representation of it. Right. I think that's one of the things that unites our work in this area at least is that we think of the higher order theory as a kind of representationalism, a true version of representationalism, which even though it's often categorized

40:21 that way, David Rosenthal doesn't really think of it that way. Um, I think we both know from personal experience that when we put things this way, he says, "No, that's not what I say at all." I was surprised by that for like many years. I was like, "Dude, but this is what you're saying." He's like, "No, nah-uh." I was like, "But But it's got what Nope." So, I would do wonder like how much of it is terminological. Yeah. Um, and I think that's it's not clear, but I think a lot of it has to do with this, um, whether it's terminological or has to do with these background issues

40:52 that we were talking about before. So, that, you know, like my background picture of the mind involves like, you know, causal historical theories of reference and Griceanism about meaning and speech acts and um, these are just different commitments than like you or David uh have. But yet, I think you you know, so at that level maybe then there'll get There's going to be some differences is what I'm trying to say. I've kind of just a long-winded way of saying, um, where the matters get non-terminological is when you start arguing for these like is it holism versus atomism and these

41:24 sorts of things in the background. Yeah, I agree. So, I think So, I I agree that a lot of these issues are in a way like I don't want to say terminological, um, but maybe like not as substantive, you know, whether we call the view uh whether you call the view representationalism or not because you think, you know, if you assume if you build into the notion of representationalism that it has to be uh proceed via the same kind of content that thoughts have, you know, if you think that all all, you know, all contents are conceptual contents, then then I'm not a representationalist in that sense, but since I I think a lot of representationalists these days think

41:56 that you know, sensory representation proceeds by a non-conceptual content, then maybe there's room to say that it that Rosenthal Wait, so hold on. Wait a second. So, uh is what you're saying here that you're not a conceptualist? I'm not a conceptualist, no. Yeah. You know, this always confuses the heck out of me. So, can we take a detour here? So, why are you not a conceptualist? Here here's what what I don't understand is the issue about the content of the first-order states or your the consciousness of those first-order states.

42:28 So, how do you interpret that issue? Yeah, okay. So, I guess maybe if we're So, that's good. Um I'm not a conceptualist about perception because I think that perception involves at at least involves, maybe it's exhausted by I'm a little on the fence about that, about it involves the sensory representations that are nonconceptual, right? Which David calls mental qualities, and so if you're okay with calling these unconscious, you know, properties that can occur unconsciously mental qualities, then I'm fine with that, but if you're not, just call them nonconceptual sensory representations, okay?

43:02 Now, I I I I I'm very sympathetic with I'm not sure where exactly where I stand with like a so-called dual component theory, which says that like perceptual states have both these nonconceptual sensory aspects and also a conceptual representation. So, for example, what it is to see like a brown dog is to have a conceptual representation, you know, something like there's a brown dog, but then also have sensory representations of all of its sensible properties like its color and shape its colors and shape. Yeah. And my work in most is almost exclusively focused on the sensory side of perception. Now, I I I'm in a way I

43:34 don't I I it almost strikes me as verbal often to think, you know, do you want to say actually all we perceive is the dog's colors and shapes and then we like have a downstream cognitive state that represents it as a dog, you know? This is why I find the debate about higher, you know, whether or not perception represents high-level properties not like terribly substantive typically. Um I know there are arguments against this dual component view that that folks in that literature like, you know, trot out, but I I have I feel like I have responses to them. But anyway, that's kind of a long-winded way of saying that I'm not a conceptualist about perception. Right. That much I could I understand. You think there's there's mental I

44:06 although I'll ask why those aren't concepts, especially once you get down to the bottom of it and it's like, well, it's an attitude towards the content and you're like, wait a minute. Um Yeah. In other words, there's supposed to be any content here. Well, I I I I can we could so I could come back to that about why I don't think that mental qualities are these sensory representations are conceptual, but in terms of the question about then whether or not I'm conceptualist about perceptual experience. So, perceptual experience in my view is and in your view, I take it is exhausted by HOTs, you know, exactly repeatable higher-order thoughts.

44:37 So, your conceptualist there. So, I guess I would say so, I mean, this is how we put it in the paper, which I think is is nice that what perceptual experience consists in is conceptualized non-conceptual contents. Right? Or partially consistent conceptualized non-conceptual So, the HOT the higher-order thought is a conceptual state and it represents you as being in states that have non-conceptual content. Right? Right. So, should we should I say we're conceptualists? Kind of? I mean, I think this is one of the reasons why the higher-order view

45:10 kind of throws a lot of the um terminology that's kind of standard in um philosophy of perception and even in consciousness studies for that matter a little bit off because that terminology is often kind of builds in first-order assumptions that like what what consciousness consists in is like the first-order perceptual state kind of like I don't know having a qualia or something, right? And And we have a we have another paper, right? Um where we argue that that's just not a good way of thinking about consciousness cuz it kind of in a way covertly begs the question against the

45:41 right account of HOT theory. Right. Um and so, once you reject that assumption and have the right view of HOT theory, I think that these notions like conceptualism kind of don't they're misleading, right? To Yeah, I mean, I think that's interesting cuz I think this is maybe a place where you and I go slightly different ways, although it's they're very slight in their differences. Um but so the way I've always thought about it was similar to you that um there's there's this kind of disconnect because there's a sort of assumption

46:13 about first-order views in a lot of people's thinking or at least theorists thinking. Uh uh And so my my reaction to that was, "Okay, let's try to take everything that the first-order theorist says and translate it into the way the higher-order theorist would would talk." And then you see you get a version of what they say, but it's just like the way we would put things is like this, but that's really what you took yourself to be talking about, but you assumed the first-order theory. So here's what it would look like if you assumed a higher-order theory but accounted for the same phenomena. So that's the way I I always took things. And in fact,

46:48 that's how I got started on on my view of the higher-order theory. I was like, "Well, you know, Block talks about phenomenal consciousness. I think that's a real thing, but where is it in this higher-order theory stuff? It's not there. So where would you put it? Ah, you would identify it. Um it's really this." So I I get the feeling like that's not really what you're what you take what you take the lesson to be from that though. Um you take the lesson not that um we can explain the same thing that we're talking about the same thing. It's just they're giving an explanation of this way and we're giving an explanation of

47:19 that way. But it it sounds like what you're saying is that you want to explain away the thing that they were talking about because they were really assuming a certain theory of consciousness. Well, no, I mean I I I like the project that you're describing where we where a higher-order kind of account we accommodate what seem to be the good aspects of or the things that the first-order theories are trying to explain to the extent that we can. But I guess I am a little bit more inclined to think if there are aspects of the first that there there are things that first-order theories kind of like assume have to be the case because there's

47:51 because you have a first-order theory, then I would see that see them as just begging the question against higher-order theories. and happy to kind of excise them and say and argue that if higher-order is a good view, we don't need But I wasn't really I don't I don't Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but I wasn't trying to say that about conceptualism. I was just saying the category of conceptualism um it doesn't it it it it makes more sense within a first-order framework. And so that's what that's sort of what I was trying to say in a long-winded and dis- incoherent way was that uh So, it depends on So, what is

48:24 conceptualism? Is it that um every conscious experience um is so because of the concepts that you apply in experience or something like that? Well, then the higher the higher-order theory is straightforwardly one of those. Um So, it really depends on like do you have or different way to put it, do you have a concept for everything that you can discriminate? I think I know why you say no to that cuz discrimination's a first-order thing and the other things are but But anyway, so if you put conceptualism like that, then it's not it's not the higher-order theory is not side-stepping

48:55 in between. It's really just a kind of account of how conceptualism's true. Okay. I mean, yeah, if you're using the terminology that way I'm okay with it. Yeah. Uh okay. Yeah, cuz I I mean, it's funny because you know, there are people like Rocco Gennaro who just explicitly connect higher-order theory to conceptualism. But then I But then I saw that people like you don't who want to set sort of separate themselves from it or at least say that it's a that it's um a middle ground or something like that. So, yeah, I was just curious about that. Well, it's I mean, it's mainly because I

49:28 want to emphasize that there is an aspect of our minds um which is non-conceptual, right? Um the crucial the sensory features of perceptual states and of you know, of pure sensory states and you know, emotional states and so forth. Now, but because I think those states can occur unconsciously and because I think what it is to be for them to be conscious is just for you to be aware of being of being in them. Um uh it's true that that the experience is exhausted by the concepts that you bring to bear, but it's kind of leaving out that in order to describe I mean, in

50:00 order to describe the concepts that you're using the concepts that you're using for example are not concepts of um of uh worldly things, but of of your mentality. And so, they're conceptualizing non-conceptual things. Yeah. In order to give the full account of like what concepts we're bringing to bear, you need to bring bring to bear concepts of non of non-conceptual things. Like you're like, "I'm in a I'm in mental red." Right? So, you need an account of mental red. I think even if you're a first-order view, you got to have that. Like it's an account of like perceptual red. Um so. Fair enough, but perceptual red's not a

50:35 mental property. Yeah, exactly. So, you need something non-mental. I mean, so I mean, it's like cuz I was thinking like um I mean, I just had Declan Smithies on recently like I last on Tuesday actually. And so, part of it comes from Okay, good. Part of it comes from thinking about that sort of stuff, but then it juxtaposed with like reading a bunch of stuff from you and for our discussion today. Obviously, I know a lot of your work anyway cuz we've co-authored and friends or whatever. But anyway, so You wrote it. Yeah. Yeah, well, I was rereading a lot of it. Um

51:09 but a part of me was like, "Look, you could have a version of everything that those guys say from our from your point of view if you just call these things sensory representations. And then but the the qualitative content comes from the higher-order state. It represents you as being in these things. That's what the mental qualities are. So, but then you want to say, "No, here's another way of looking at the describing all the same stuff, but it's all the same stuff. It's just described differently." So, that's why I wonder if it if how Yeah, like between a view like you and Declan it's like, "Yo, you think

51:43 there's all this world of difference, but really is it a terminological difference?" Or do you think it's more than that? Uh is I guess one way of putting my question. I mean I get I don't know. I I I think maybe I'm um If we really agree to all the same stuff and we're just relabeling them as how they fit together, then I guess yeah that I mean that's that seems like a textbook case of um of a verbal difference. I would suspect however that I mean I think that so I'm a huge fan of Declan's work um and you know he has

52:15 Yeah, we talked about your paper a little bit. Oh cool. I should watch that video. Yeah, I've been so busy for the last couple of days and Yeah, totally know. We both have two small little kids and so yeah so watching a video um but I'm going to so you should tell me when that happens on that. Definitely make sure to watch the part but um yes I have a paper that where I'm talking about Declan's stuff and I do think we have a sub I think we have a substantive disagreement there. I mean it's in a way a substantive disagreement about issues in epistemology and about whether or not um perceptual states that are unconsciousness like can give you evidence or you know

52:49 justify beliefs that you have. Um So to to to to the extent that that's that's not disagreeing about what the pieces are but it's disagreeing about how the pieces work or you know work in terms of rationality. And there I think you know we do have a substantive disagreement um and so I would wonder I I suspect it's because we have disagreements about how the pieces what the pieces actually are. Uh-huh. But so what's that cuz even there I was wondering like cuz I read your paper and I talked to him, I read his book and a bunch of stuff on this. And then but at the end I was like okay so and then I reread your paper cuz I'd

53:21 seen it before you sent it to me and like we talked about it. And there is one part I think we have a little disagreement about that we mentioned I think we talked about it on Facebook briefly but we can bring up some point if anyone cares. But anyway, the point though is that um I was thinking to myself like all right, so he wants to call beliefs the things which are subject to these kinds of norms. And then you say, "Yeah, but there could be like kind of this compartmentalized view of things, the subconscious and the conscious. Maybe they have different norms applied to them." And then I was like, "But that's basically what he's saying though." He's

53:54 saying it's like they have different norms of if any, they're not going to be these ones, which he thinks So, yeah, anyway, so why are we going to call these things that occur unconsciously? Why Why do you want to connect them with epistemology in the way that uh yeah, so maybe that's that's again I just a spontaneous thing that popped in my head, so don't you know, you don't have to feel feel free to ignore it. So, it's a Um I mean I I think a lot of uh sort of my again sort of big picture background reason

54:26 why I want to say that it's room there for example that there's room to say that unconscious states like are subject to mirror norms or something like that like in a compartmentalized view um to the norms that apply to conscious beliefs, but they're a different set of norms is because I really do want to emphasize that I don't think that the unconscious mind is really just like the subpersonal mind. I mean, and this connects to us sort of like a big picture um kind of project that I would like to kind of work on more, but it's kind of a it's a theme in a lot of my work. And actually, I think a central theme of the higher order perspective. And maybe this is I think also something we maybe disagree about cuz you've had you you

55:00 put footnotes in papers or maybe I think it was a footnote in one of our papers and maybe I deleted it. We were said something like, "We're neutral about whether or not there's even unconscious perception, right? You know, so far as we're concerned, we're really just concerned with conscious perception. And conscious perception occurs when you've got suitable higher order thoughts. Who knows if there's if we talk if we if there actually is unconscious perception." Yeah. And I think that that's too um yeah, I I think that that's too dismissive of the unconscious mind, right? I want to think that I want I think that that that um I mean, spoiler alert, like my actual view

55:33 is that basically anything that it can occur unconsciously can occur unconsciously. And that's just because of it doesn't follow from the higher order view, but it's like pretty kind of in the neighborhood in the sense that I think that, you know, what your mind is what what consciousness is just what aspects of your mind you happen to be aware of to some extent. And but the the the real mind, is the unconscious mind. That's what it is doing the most. It's kind of, you know, it's it's my it's really my Freudian mechanism. Maybe I should not have just said that on, you know, on on recording. But, you know, it's because I I believe that, you know, the majority of what we actually

56:05 are doing and thinking and feeling is roiling about unconsciously and the conscious mind is just sort of like our impression of how that's going, which is like often accurate, but some but usually loses a lot of information about what's happening and sometimes is very distorted, I think. Yeah. It distorts a lot of what's going on. I mean, I remember having a bit long conversation with you in Taiwan about your latent Freudianism. Yeah, it's not latent. It's it's it's pretty It's pretty aggressive, actually. It's aggressive, yeah. Which again, you know, if anybody was watching this they're they've already shut it off. Um, so But, uh

56:38 Absolutely. Um But, I have a lot of like, you know, commitments that are not ones that people like. But, that's kind of like the big picture thing is that is that that I want to kind of emphasize that it's not just subpersonal. So, I think that that's first order views I think invite the alternative. I think that even though first order theorists say, "Okay, we're fine with there being unconscious stuff." Either they really are just thinking it's all really subpersonal. Um, but at least they think it's very degraded, you know. I mean, think about a global workspace kind of a picture. They think, you know, the conscious stuff is the stuff that's really driving all your action and it's like it's in the global workspace. It's, you know, driving the whole thing.

57:11 I don't know. I'm dancing while I'm doing this. It's the thought in the global workspace is the I think that has a lot of thinking That's the personal part of your mind. Whereas the unconscious stuff is weak and doesn't do anything, can't be reported, you know, it doesn't mean anything. Yeah. And I think that's the exact opposite of, you know, that's my This is a hypothesis. I mean, like I don't think that we have a tremendous amount of excellent experimental data to necessarily push for this, but I think that but my Freudianism gives me good reason to suspect that that's how things are going to turn out. That actually the majority of stuff is the stuff that's whirling about unconsciously and the

57:42 consciousness is just a weak kind of like few the rough awareness of the few pit bits that you're lucky enough to become aware of. Right? Yeah. I mean Yeah. And so I think that I would that would suck that would suck if that was true, but uh I guess Well, I mean what why? Well, you know, it's just it's not you know, it's not it's not a I'm not making a value judgment about it. It's just I'm trying to describe the phenomena. No, totally, but it still would suck because the it would be like yeah, one of those

58:16 cases where like girdle comes along and says, "Oh, you want this whole unified picture can't have it." There's this hidden aspect or something that's not computable. It's like it's like that level of frustration. I think if if what you're saying is is true. That uh May cuz I I mean yeah, I know I believe in unconscious representations. Even unconscious perceptions. I'm happy with that, but this to think that you know, consciousness is just a sliver and you know, it's just this post hoc thing that comes along for the ride after the fact. That I I do think is is like what Dennis says it would be one of those

58:50 like great inversions. Um where you're just like holy Yeah, it would be it would that's a little bit Yeah, it would be like I I I don't know. I I almost I almost see the opposite. Like I almost think that it would be somewhat freeing and it would enable us to get to know ourselves better in a way that we I think we have an illusion about how much we know about ourselves. I mean you know, what am I channeling? Know thyself or something like that, but like you know, I I do think it would be in many ways

59:23 freeing and make us have a more realistic view about why we do what we do. We wouldn't have the fantasy that like, you know, the mere impression of like what my what I think is my desire right now um is what I'm actually desiring. Like you'd get to you'd you'd get down to business about what you actually think and feel. Um but anyway, if you have I haven't anyway argued for that. I'm just telling you Yeah. No, I I I wasn't looking for an argument. I was just sort of saying But but yeah, but that's that's I think I I think that Decklin and I like we're really come we're we're he he's much more on your side in this, you know, or I think like he thinks that the conscious mind is the

59:54 real that's the place where rationality takes place. Yeah. Um and the unconscious mind is like, you know, pushes you about in some funny ways so that you get blind-sided, but it doesn't actually it couldn't possibly be guiding you in a in any way that's reasonable to call rational. I'm not even sure if he thinks it's reasonable to call it mental. Um like if, you know, ultimately he thinks Yeah, he he calls them representations, but they're not they're they're computations really is what he ultimately thinks they are. Exactly. So it's it's just all subpersonal stuff. It's like your retina. Whereas I think that it's really more like your perceptions and your emotions and your desires and your hopes

1:00:27 and your fears um of which some of them But you But you guys both agree that these are like um theoretical postulates. So it's it's a little bit like, you know, the ether versus empty space. It's like you're positing these things um and then who knows how theories get selected or whatever, but that's that's sort of the level the fight is at. Do you agree with that way of putting it? Sure, although just I'm laying all my cards on the table, I'll also lay on the table that I also have a lot of Quineanism here. And so I I think everything's a theoretical

1:00:59 posit. Yeah. Yeah, so I don't I don't find that to be like a big insight cuz I think tables are theoretical posits to explain how we get around, you know, putting our drinks down. Or tables. Um but even like red sensations of red, I don't know. I always have It's always I mean, yeah, yeah, I guess we we we know we disagree on this, but I always have I have much more direct intuitions about like apprehending experience and Well, I find that I mean I so I I totally get that and and let me say that like, you know, I I have had many I

1:01:31 guess maybe even every other Tuesday, but definitely in the past like felt that way, too. But I think that it was my getting kind of worked into the higher-order framework that actually kind of dislodged me from it, um which is, you know, thinking like if you're if you're if you are committed to the higher-order framework, why think that you have like anything like direct access to I mean, we don't have direct access to our sensations. We have what appears to be direct access, but it's Right. very likely and probably by all, you know, by any reasonable lights highly mediated by

1:02:05 many, you know, many factors, inference, and so forth. It just it's all stuff that happens outside of our awareness, so we have this appearance of of directness, but no no actual directness. Um that's the point that, you know, Rosenthal makes I think very powerfully in the first the couple of first pages of Consciousness and Mind. And I don't know the people haven't really reckoned with that point. I mean, like I very rarely hear people say, "Well, okay, you know, you feel like you've got an acquaintance with what's going on in your mind, but how do you know that's not just an apparent acquaintance? It feels like you're acquainted, but maybe that's just an illusion." Yeah.

1:02:36 That I would that point I want to have out there a little, you know, in the in the discussion a lot more um because it would dislodge people from this feeling like we've got to start with the first-person perspective and give it privilege, you know, privilege it over third-person theoretical considerations. I mean, I I Yeah, so I feel like we do have that kind of uh first-person direct access. It's just that what it is is having the right kind of higher-order thoughts. That's like a theory. So, the way So, the way that I want to think about this stuff is that we're given a theory of this stuff that's kind of

1:03:09 um requires a theory of it. And one of them is this this So access that we have to conscious experience um and so we postulate that there maybe is this kind of cognitive access and so we you know that it maybe it's got a certain representational structure or content maybe in how it picks out the first order states or whatever that's a question that we have to answer and all that but what what what's what's what's different between the way you're approaching things and the way I'm approaching things is that I start with with experience being a given

1:03:43 like this it's this way and we want to theory that explains it whereas what it sounds like what you're doing is starting from the outside and saying look there's these behaviors and some of them are about what they see and stuff and so but but you're not really doesn't sound like you want to explain the same thing that I'm trying to explain um and and that to me seems like a dangerous move because you open the door for the anti-physicalist to be like aha you're an illusionist. Yeah. So I mean I mean I want to be clear and I that I don't think that we should

1:04:17 ignore like first person data and that that we don't need to give an account of why things you know consciously seem the way that they do like that we we don't need to give an account of experience right? Right. I just don't think that the experiential condition considerations like are the only consideration or that they're they're the trump card they're the they're the measure by which we then judge theories like if a if a theory kind of diverges from how things seem a little bit then that theory is just a no-go. Because I think one of the things that one of the pieces of wiggle room on

1:04:49 the first person side that I'm that I want to open up is that the first first person access can give gives you how how things appear to you how how your mind appears in a certain way like it appears as though we have direct access. So that direct that appearance of direct access needs to be explained. But we don't have to explain why you in fact have direct access. Right. Right. Yeah but so but that but that was kind of my point though and this is I say where maybe where we disagree is that so some suppose you're someone like me who thinks, "Look, for consciousness maybe the appearance is the reality." So then if you have the appearance of

1:05:21 direct access, you have direct access. It just so happens it turns out to be like having the right kind of higher order thought represent you as having this sort of relation. And it's not a matter of first order states or something. So, you know, it's it's but what you're given is an account of how we it is we really do have that kind of direct like acquaintance access. It's by representing ourselves as standing in it basically. Um whereas it sounds like you don't want to you don't you want to say, "No, it's an illusion that we have." And I want to say, "No, it's a thing we have. Here's how we explain what we have." Um and I think that's a real difference

1:05:53 in the way that we approach thinking theoretically about these issues. Yeah, yeah, maybe. I I guess I have I mean, you're the one interviewing, so I don't know. But um but yeah, but I have questions about yeah, like how you're thinking about these things. B- because like for example in in one of our recent papers, I can't remember if it's the one for the Rosenthal volume or if it's the one that's coming out in Phil Psych, but um we even quote the Nagel quote that Rosenthal quotes often, you know, from what it's like to be a bat where he's like there it makes no sense to say that there's an appearance-reality gap when it comes to one's mind. And then we

1:06:26 approvingly quote, you know, we approvingly say or we say, you know, this quote is there's no reason to think it. Like of course there's an appearance-reality gap when it comes to one's mind. You can be wrong about, you know, uh what's going on in your mind. And so it I mean, we don't I don't think we in that passage talk about direct the directness point. But I mean, I think we're saying that in the in the point to be talking about how uh about, you know, standard um misrepresentational hot objections to hot theory that, you know, how could you be in a higher order thought that represents you as being in a state of, you know, seeing red even if you're not seeing red at all. And that's often

1:06:59 cited as being like a, you know, big boo-boo. Like hot theory can't explain that. A big boo-boo? Is that a technical term? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's a big no-no. You don't do that. Um, but you know, as I think we argued persuasively, I'd like to think, I don't know if we argued that here, but many people in, you know, in our many higher-order thought theorists or or people who are explaining higher-order thought theory, I think responded to this objection reasonably well, saying, "Well, look, what consciousness is is the appearance of a

1:07:31 mental state, so you it appears to you that you're seeing red, but your appearance doesn't have to be accurate, and so you don't actually be seeing red." Yeah. Um, and so the the notion of mental appearance is perfectly coherent, um, and in a higher-order framework is nicely explained. So, what's the thing that you're thinking is, you know, mentally real that we are that we have So, cuz So, for example, if you think what's mentally real is our awareness of the fact that we can be aware of states, um, in this way, that even seems to me to be open to misre- That seems like a third-order

1:08:05 higher-order thought about a second That seems like introspection, right? Like an a higher-order thought about a higher-order thought, and that seems like obviously could go awry as well. Um, so I don't know what Well, so to rebut your excellent observations, oh, taker over of the narrative. Just kidding. Um, so I agree that when it comes to the mind, you can make the appearance-reality distinction. So, I didn't say that, I said about when it comes to the consciousness. Okay.

1:08:37 Um, one doesn't make that distinction. Um, and so usually for people who assume that consciousness equals mind, then you get a certain implication from from those things. But for someone like me who's happy to say, "No, consciousness doesn't equal mind," um, mind equals things that could occur unconsciously. And and oh, by the way, so now that I mentioned you're besmirching my name all over town, earlier when you were talking about the footnote, which you definitely did delete uh multiple times uh despite my putting it back in several

1:09:10 times. Uh so, there I was saying, "Yeah, I think it's you could have a version of a higher-order theory where the states are always conscious. It would just mean they always, for whatever reason, are wired up to trigger these higher-order thoughts." Um and then, you know, they could be like dimly conscious, so that, you know, you represent them as like, you know, in the background or so. But anyway, so, I don't think that the theory entails logically that the states occur unconsciously. Although it's often set up as a theory of the difference between conscious and unconscious occurrences of states, which sort of maybe begs the question, no offense, but uh to to these

1:09:45 other ways of thinking about things. But anyway, so so that's what I would say about what you were saying there. Um but now now uh-oh, so I lost the whole I got too lost in the whole narrative. you too many times, and so you can't uh Um You're saying um about Shoot, now I forgot I lost it. about whether we're explaining can't be wrong about that's left out of the explanation or whatever.

1:10:17 What you were just saying how we can't be wrong about consciousness. We can be wrong about Yeah, so I think we can be wrong about the mind. But that's a separate question. So, I can be wrong about what first-order states are. So, I have a representation of my mind as like a having a scene of a blue present, and it might not be there. So, I can be wrong about what first-order stuff is going on. But when it comes to This is something we've argued about, you know, I remember in the old days hanging out with Pete, and we'd argue about this forever, and I never understood like what like people were resisting here. But on the higher-order theory, there's a certain kind of infallibility in the following sense. Like if you represent

1:10:49 yourself as seeing red, then it appears to you as though you're seeing red. It's like So, you can't be wrong at at at a certain level about like how things appear to you. Now, you can make introspective errors if you try to, you know, um access that thought or have a conscious thought about what state. So, I agree there's that, but at the at the sort of conscious experience level, there's a weak kind of um you know, what state you're in is what state you represent yourself as appearing to be in. So, it's like that's how it appears to you. It's like almost tautological.

1:11:21 Um And and that's a matter of like the how the higher thought represents you, like the way it presents your mental life. And so, what I was saying was that it seems like part of the phenomenological datum that needs to be explained that we have this kind of contact or close acquaintance or something like relationship to our conscious experience. And then that can be captured by the content of the higher order thought. It says, "Well, you're you're having this kind of relationship, this direct one or something." But what I heard you as saying was that um Well, no, I want to explain that away,

1:11:57 why we erroneously think that we have that kind of direct access, but not that we not that that's part of our experience. Um it only seems that it's part of our experience or something. So, that that's what I thought the difference was that I was trying to get at. Uh was in whether you think that we need to explain this kind of phenomenology that we have a kind of direct And and this whole like theoretical posits story doesn't really make it seem like you're going to get anything like that. Um But anyway, so yeah, maybe we're too far off the trail right now to

1:12:31 I mean So, I think I see what you're saying. I mean, I think that what I what I disagree with is that is is the substantive point that you're making about that there's a sense in which one has any infallibility that that is a datum that I'm either willing or not willing to accommodate. I just don't think So, I don't I'm I I don't know how much you want to argue, but like I don't know how much I'm not sure that I understood the account about what's the sense in which I'm infallible about what, you know, how things appear to me. Um Well, I mean, this is why I was thinking about Declan's view cuz I was thinking,

1:13:02 well, look, you could have a version of the higher-order theory. Like, what's his So, you you have a particular view of introspection. I'm actually writing a paper with Adriana Rinarò on introspection higher-order theories right now, and we have a different take on it. But, anyway, um and you know partially about this cuz I've talked to you a hundred million years about this stuff, but but I was thinking, look, you could have a version of Declan's um view, like his simple theory of introspection. What is it? It says, when you're in a conscious state, you're in a position to know that you're in a conscious state. And then he gives some account of what that means, but it's like, so you could say the same thing

1:13:35 here. When you're in a conscious state equals have the higher-order thought, then you're in a position to know that you are. Um and if so, then there's a kind of infallibility that comes with that. It's like you you you you when you're consciously seeing red, you're going to know that you're consciously seeing red because that's your eviden- evidentiary base. So, what I mean, what's so wrong with that picture? Um seems like a nice picture, actually. Uh and and yet it's sort of going completely opposite to the to the thing. Anyway, so yeah, that's

1:14:08 Yeah, I mean, I think that So, if you if you have a theory of introspection that delivers that we have a direct kind of access to our mentality, then I better then we need a theory of consciousness to our conscious mentality, not to our unconscious mentality. conscious mentality, yeah. I guess I don't see any reason to think that that kind of so-called simple view is right. I mean, um if I see red, am I in a position to know that I see red? I I wouldn't Why would I think that? Um I mean, especially considering there's a

1:14:41 tremendous amount of evidence that I can unconsciously perceive red and not be in a position to know that I see red. And so, what is the motivation for thinking that if I'm consciously seeing red, I'm in a position to know? I mean, I agree that it's not uncommon that when I consciously see red, I do then come to believe, you know, and maybe in some cases I'm justified to know, but it doesn't seem to me there's any good there's any independent reason to think that my introspection have to be accurate that way. And there's, you know, oodles of evidence like Eric Schwitzgebel type stuff about why introspection goes wrong why you

1:15:15 constantly um and so it seems to me that a a you know, a more promising story about what introspection is is the kind of stand I mean, I'm interested I I I don't know I I I I want to talk more about it and maybe like you know, when I interview you in 2 minutes you can tell me more about your um your theory your your theory with Adriana cuz I'm I'm I'm intrigued to hear about how exactly it differs, but I I am, you know, pretty much more sort of core standard version of hot theory where the higher order the what introspection involves is a third order higher order thought and I think that that's that's

1:15:48 fits nicely both with the sort of core structure of the theory Yeah. and also so I think it it you know, it it's more it kind of just follows from some of the commitments of the theory, but also fits nicely with the experimental evidence about how introspection just sucks. Um and so um so yeah, so I so I have no reason to think that we are aware of that we're aware of our conscious mentality in any way that would make us think that it's any more than just seeming direct. I agree that it seems direct because you're not aware of any inferences or the evidence base that you're using to

1:16:20 come to be aware of those mental states that you've on which you formed the third order thoughts. Like I don't you don't know Yeah, so I mean, this is another area where I think it's interesting because and this is like an area where someone like Block has criticized higher theories in in a certain way and you know, I'm not saying he's accurate, but I am curious as you're someone defends more of the like orthodox line. I'm curious and I'm a bit of a heretic. I'm a higher order heretic. But anyway, what? Hot. A lack of heretic actually but not you. So but so I'm curious about what you're

1:16:54 going to say but um One of the things that Block has said over over the years is well there's this kind of constraint on how the higher order thought gets caused which seems unmotivated. And so he uses this you know Freudian repression case that you have a you have some therapist who helps you come to recognize that you have an unconscious state. And then you forget later that the therapist helped you realize it and so now you have a higher order thought that you're in the state but it's arrived at

1:17:27 in this you know inferential way. You just forgot about it and so now the state should be conscious, right? But doesn't seem like it would be conscious merely by having that thought. And so this is supposed to kind of bring out and this is something that I've always been sympathetic with so that's why I'm asking you because it's supposed to bring out the way I read it it's supposed to bring out the idea that according to higher order theory it's the content of the higher order thought that's supposed to do all the explanatory work for like what it's like for you than saying oh it's got to be caused in a certain way or arrived at in a certain way seems like you're importing things

1:18:01 to do work which are extra to the theory extraneous. Okay, so yeah that Block example is really interesting and I actually think I've written about it. Yeah, you but I I didn't ask you about your paper. I just asked you about your thoughts. Yeah, but I can't remember what I said. Yeah, I know that's why I didn't ask about the paper. It's like yeah you're man it's like a test on my own work which I don't know very well. Um It's all right. It's okay. Um so I don't remember what I said about it but I I mean but I but I but the big picture point I have I do feel like I have something to say about so the big picture point is yeah I I mean I see it's it's

1:18:34 you know how can there be conditions on the hot or that make it like a suitable hot that such that it engenders consciousness or such that makes you suitably aware of being in a mental state so that you have that you're conscious. Um, versus just any other kind of thought about what what's going on in your head so that that might not result in consciousness, you know? Right. Um, and so um, I agree that like the history of the stage doesn't seem like something that could be relevant. Um, you know, it's kind of like a the analogy I'm thinking of right now is like, you know, swamp man objections to

1:19:07 teleosemantics. order swamp man what's the Yeah, it's like a higher order swamp man. Like how could the history of the of the of the hot be relevant? It seems like if you were in the right hot then you should have the consciousness even if it was formed in the wrong way or something. So really so in the higher order swamp man case you would say he still has content and represents his states as being like red or whatever. Yeah, I would say that the higher order swamp man has consciousness, yeah. Uh-huh. And then I think that's a benefit of like my theory of sensory content is that it's not based on history or anything like that. So it's like an advantage over teleosemantic views which I think give the wrong account on in

1:19:39 that. Interesting. But yeah, so but so what what are the other things? It's not just the content of the hot though. It might also be like the presence of other states, right? That But they're a current a current other states that have that can or can't be present might play a role in determining whether that hot can be suitable. So which isn't past stuff. It's like what's going on in your mind currently. Yeah. You can kind of think of it in terms of like dispositions. Like it's like the hot could be blocked by there being another state around. And um, and so what would be the other states? It's the awareness of the inference

1:20:13 that you're doing. That blocks that hot from doing the hot stuff. Uh-huh. But if you're not aware of the inference, so you've got then it would be conscious. And I think that you know, I think that Block cuz he's amazing and you know, very clever. Um, that example is set up in such a way to like kind of invite the into into intuition that you wouldn't have I can't I can't remember exactly how the case goes, but I I feel like it invites the intuition that you wouldn't have a conscious state. But I would I would say that if you if you had you didn't have any of the blocking states present, the history is irrelevant and there'd be no non-question-begging

1:20:45 reason to think that you would have a conscious state. I think that's what I say in the paper. So then you would say that in the case that Block uh uh brings up, that the person does come to have a conscious let's you know desire or whatever, when they have the spontaneous higher thought. You I I I'd have to I don't want to say absolutely yes cuz I don't remember the You'd have to walk me through the case one more time. So Yeah, well so they have a like a unconscious desire to drink, let's say. Um and the the therapist convince them that this is the case, but it's not

1:21:18 conscious thereby because the uh therapist helps them get at it by inference from their own behaviors. Um but then later the person forgets how he learned this and then has the thought, but it's still arrived at by inference. Um and uh so but the previous case was arrived at by inference and it wasn't conscious. Now it's You have a state that was arrived at by inference, but you forgot that it was arrived at by inference and now it it does make the state conscious, but it just seems um That case is a little bit funny. I mean

1:21:51 one thing that's funny about it is that um in that case the state that's making you aware of being in the desire would be conscious throughout that whole process. Yeah. I actually don't think that that would matter. So yeah, I guess I would say like if you genuinely forgot and so there's no other You're not aware that you're doing it by inference and so you're So there's no other state that would be doing the blocking and you've definitely and you have an assertoric thought like I am currently in a desire for such and such. Yeah, I just you know question-begging reason to say at that point be you know the forgetting would happen and then you'd be like, "Whoa, I desire to blah blah blah." Yeah, I don't

1:22:23 see I don't see a non-question-begging reason to say other to say otherwise. Interesting. Okay. Um yeah, so I I see or I mean, I can't believe I'm talking for this long. So, uh I I know you have real life things to get to. Um but but I did want to ask about the um about the way you extend the quality space semantics. So, this is going back to the way you were saying you were somewhat different from the way David does things. Um so so you have this this this quality space for the colors, let's say. Um and then you have when it's conscious, you

1:22:57 have the higher order state that represents that you're in in that sort of state. And so you get the the the the the the mental qualities are giving you the content of the higher order states. Which is interesting. But then also, because you might think that you could have weird concepts and not represent them in terms of quality space location, even if that's what they were. Which I wonder about sometimes. But then also, you want to use this as a way to fix the content of the perceptible property. So, really, this is doing double duty, right? It's fixing the contents of the right kinds of higher thoughts, so therefore the contents of

1:23:30 consciousness, and also the contents of the external world. Um is that too broad of a way of putting what what the way you're thinking about this or What I mean, maybe I need to clarify, but I'm a little reluctant to say yes because I don't think that the contents of the higher order thoughts are fixed, if you mean by that determined or like the grounds of those contents is the quality is anything about the quality spaces. So, Okay. those are thoughts, and so their contents are fixed by whatever theory fixes you know, whatever theory is the theory of content

1:24:03 determination for thoughts. Now, you know, uh you know, I like Sellers and and and Fodorian kind of views. I'm I'm sympathetic with a kind of like inferentialist or conceptual role theory about how thought content gets determined. But I would say that the reason why the thought has the content that it does is that it has a certain inferential role. Um roughly. Um but doesn't the I mean maybe this is where I've been confused, but I thought that once you got that far

1:24:36 you have to also say that the inferential role somehow captures or mirrors the relations between the quality space. Uh so that you're in disposed to infer that pink is more like red than it is like purple or whatever in in such a way that you get this you get a kind of conceptual structure that maps onto the quality space structure. Maybe. I mean, I don't so maybe, but I'm not sure that it necessarily follow like so Uh Um so the mental qualities sit in a structure, right?

1:25:09 Which is defined by the quality space. Um which is the or what the quality space reflects is the structure that those stand in to each other. Right. Um and that just mirrors the structure of the the quality space that the actual colors sit in, right? But the the structure that thoughts sit in is whatever you know, is what is the web of belief. It's the conceptual structure that reveals all the inferential relations between all of the um all thoughts, right? Now, it's to set so so suppose set aside what mental qualities for a second. I

1:25:40 mean, what is it to have a thought about, you know, like a dog or a shoe, right? It's to be in a bunch of be in a state that stands in appropriate inferential relations that capture all the right stuff about shoes or whatever we think about shoes, right? So yeah, I I have hard trouble with these kinds of theories, but yeah, I I got I know the picture that you're going for. Okay, so that's the picture. But then so then one thing that's a fact not shoes, but a fact about mental red is that it sits in this quality space. And so my inferential structure better capture all the inferences that

1:26:14 have it be about, you know, that have it be about the thing that sits in this quality space structure. Yeah, like you better think that red fire trucks are more similar to pink fire trucks than they are to green fire trucks. Yeah, you have to But that doesn't necessarily that doesn't necessarily mean that if you look at the web of belief, you're going to have in it like a quality space of thoughts. Um But it'd be nice if you did. I sort of think that you do actually. I sort of try to write on that. But anyway, Okay. So but but I don't understand why you wouldn't expect that sort of as a as a um

1:26:48 because well, I mean yeah, I guess no, I do sort of admit that I do understand it. Okay, never mind. But because I mean what I was thinking was that uh one of the issues that I have with this kind of holistic picture is that it's about infants. Um during a period of time they're not going to have any kind of real inferential relation, so therefore no concepts at all. So therefore no conscious experience. And okay, so that may be that's not too serious of a thing to deny, but it's a little bit to me it's like a eesh uh sort of thing. Um but but it but it

1:27:23 does but but this this always bothered me though because on the theory, so this is the whole like our quaint our Sellarsian ancestors. We So we picture this group of people, they have all these you know, this language for describing other people's mental states, but not their own. And then um Oh, you look surprised already. So I thought the whole idea was that they don't describe that and then they come to apply that automatically to themselves, at which point they

1:27:56 they get to the point where they can automatically sort of say things like I think that it's I'm seeing blue or something like that, at which point consciousness shows up. That's the kind of the picture that you know, Rosenthal has presented about perceptual experiences anyway. And it always has depended on this um what we notice a mismatch between our perceptual representations in the world. Like we we represented it as green when really it was blue. And then we come to acquire the concept of mental blue as opposed to mental green. And then we can form thoughts like I am seeing blue because

1:28:30 you have the concept of mental green. Um so how So don't you Do you think that that's a problem or not a problem, but something that higher-order theories need to say something about? Like how you get those concepts. Uh uh and in a way that doesn't sort of, you know, that tells it how it's about that state. Which doesn't make appeal to like its structural properties, which is what I was trying to do. And you said no. Well, I mean kind of. I mean, so I take the this the the Solarsian story about O'Riley's ancestors. And

1:29:04 So, by the way, I'm now telling my version of all this. So I I don't want to speak for like how Rosenthal said Yeah, no, I'm here talking to you. You can defend So I just yeah. But But my my version of it is I think of that kind of that story as being like it's like a just-so story sort of in the same way that like Hobbes's state of nature is like It's that bad. Jeez. Okay. But you know, Hobbes was thinking like I mean, as far as I understand, like Hobbes was thinking like it he he wasn't committed to there actually have ever been like a a scenario like that. It could have been that people were always sort of embedded in social structures. But he was like, what would it be, you

1:29:37 know, how could it have been that we would have ever had developed Yeah, but he has those whole passages where he says, "Oh, it's like that in the Americas right now." So Okay, but fair enough. But I mean, you know, it would it it And I think similarly, so that maybe like aspects of it were realized in the Americas, but it's not as though there was ever a period of time where it was truly a state of nature. Or did it He's not committed to the Maybe there was, but it doesn't it's not required to see what you're saying. Yeah. It's a story that could tell you It's a It's a how could it have happened story, not a here's what actually happened. And I think similar That's the same thing about the Ryan Lee ancestor story. I don't know that there was ever a

1:30:09 period of time in human history where people like didn't you know, weren't embedded in societies where they were using mental vocabulary from like birth. Um, and that is definitely the case for little kids. I mean, little kids are constantly being like, you know, what do you see? What do you you know, you're constantly embedding them in in um, a linguistic framework that already involves a tremendous amount of mental vocabulary. And so it doesn't surprise me. And and actually, you know, that you were saying one way the hot response could be is that little you know, babies don't have concepts and so they don't um, have consciousness. But I mean, babies are hearing mental vocabulary in

1:30:41 utero, you know, in droves. And so I'm not so sure that babies don't get born with concepts and like already being able to do inferences. Sure, they're very rudimentary inferences. They can't verbalize their inferences yet, but um, but I don't think that that's the necessarily required way the hot theory hot theory can go. And so I'm just kind of I'm open to it, but it's because they're already embedded in our post-Rylean or in our post-Jonesian world, you know. Um, do we need to sell tell a just-so story? Are you Is that the right term? Like I don't even like if we need to tell like

1:31:12 a kind of a fable that could explain how it is that we could have derived generate these concepts if we didn't know them from the get-go like we all do. I think it's useful to do that and I think that, you know, for example, Rosenthal has told compelling story about sensory just thing, you know, no no noticing mismatches. What he calls the facilitation story, I think. Yeah. I would have thought that was like a story that was a developmental story, not like an evolutionary story. It's like there's got to be a stage at which that's the way it works. Um, especially if what the theory and then I mean, yeah, because what the theory says is

1:31:45 you have to automatically apply these like theoretical concepts about mind. Um, so first you got to sort of learn about what minds are, then you have to apply it to yourself. Um, and what you're saying is like, well, you might sort of be already doing that in utero learning what minds are or something like that. And then but there's still going to be a point at which you start applying it to yourself, just sort of logically. Or you think they both they come at the same time? Yeah, I mean, or even if they don't come exactly at the same time, I wouldn't be shocked if they come, you know, one and then the other, like very

1:32:17 quickly. I mean, and also these sensory differences are happening, you know, these mismatch kinds of cases are happening instantaneously. The minute, you know, the baby, I mean, probably in utero, but even but definitely the moment coming out, you know. And the sensory information that it's getting is a whole whirlwind and, you know, mommy's like, "Come over here, look over here." And you're matching your, you know, auditory to um visual cues. I mean, there's just so much happening kind of as a mush. And it's all embedded with mental vocabulary. Wouldn't shock me if um consciousness came online fairly quickly um in children, even though uh

1:32:51 you're right, it does I am, you know, as a higher-order thought theorist, committed to the idea that it requires conceptual capacities. I think these conceptual capacities are actually pretty low-level. Like they're not, you know, this is one of the reasons why I'm not uh ashamed to say that animals can have conscious perceptual experience. Don't be ashamed. You know, but because I don't think these are not particularly sophisticated concepts. Yeah. I mean, that gets me back to my earlier question about why the mental qualities aren't kind of concept. Yeah. Um because I mean, one tradition in psychology is that the concept is just tracks your ability to discriminate. If

1:33:24 you can tell the difference between A's and B's, you have concepts of A's and better than B's or something like that. So, these but you don't want to think of So, I mean, is that traditional way of using the word concept misguided or just a terminological issue or Well, it's not how I would characterize concepts. And people have, you know, obviously there's like a humongous philosophical literature about what what concepts are. And I'm not sure that I have like a strong feeling about them, although I think it's at least a constraint or like an it's at least a necessary thing about concepts, but I'm not sure that I maybe I think it's the whole whole shebang that um that they combine into full thoughts

1:33:59 and that full thoughts stand in inferential relation to one another. Uh-huh. And so I don't think that And And that is one way that's that some folks have characterized concepts. Like I think that's Christopher Peacock. Like that's how he Yeah, but I mean just to sort of I I grant you that point, but you know, like there's the Austen Clark way of thinking about um mental qualities as opposed to the Rosenthal way of thinking. And for him, like the mental quality is like right there. It's like a little It's actually like a little full sentence. And And if you're thinking about it that way, then Well, so this gets into some very

1:34:32 delicate issues about how to how to characterize non-conceptual content or what the difference between a non-conceptual representation and a conceptual representation is. And there's like even distinctions when people talk about non-conceptual content, sometimes they talk about so-called state non-conceptual content versus content non-conceptual content. These are like even finer distinctions. At the very least, here's what I want to say. The theory that grounds the the theory of content determination that explains why sensory representations work is what I call quality space semantics or quality space theory for Rosenthal, right? So it's a

1:35:05 theory about how those states fit into a quality space. Uh-huh. And so the relationships between those states is one of resemblance and difference. Or if you don't think that the sensory representations are qualitative, then you can call it like quasi resemblance and quasi difference. You know what I mean? Right? That Those are the relationships between those states. They're not relationships of inference. Whereas whatever story accounts for conceptual content or like the other kind of content, thought content, it's I I My view is that it's inference, you know, that it's inferential role, but maybe it's something else. Maybe it's

1:35:37 asymmetric dependence theory or something. Uh-huh. But at the very least, I think you've got these two There's not a good term in the literature, but like these two different psychosemantic theories or sometimes people call them like It's not metasemantic, like it's a metapsychosemantic theory. You've got two different meta-psycho-semantics for these kinds of contents. Is that enough to say that one's conceptual and one's non-conceptual? There I start to think it's verbal. Like I don't care. Um How do I want to characterize the content? Like should I Should it be characterized as red there or there's some red?

1:36:11 I want to describe it in whatever way doesn't invite you thinking that you can make inference inferences from it. But I don't care if you describe it sententially. So, I kind of think I'm I'm kind of with Clark to say maybe it is something like red red's there. Okay. But I don't want But I want to be clear to emphasize that having mental red or having a visual representation of red does not entail does not enable you to thereby infer that there's something that's not green. Right? Or Or there Or that there's a object that bears the property of red or something. It doesn't let you infer anything from it because the relate cuz

1:36:43 the content isn't one that stands in inferential relations to other contents. It stands in resemblance and difference relations to So, that's why I can justify inferences. I mean, cuz you still want it to be kind of sort of thing that can justify an inference. Yeah, so I I I do think that. Um and then there's a really great book by um Eva Schmidt. I think that's how you pronounce her name. I reviewed it for for a journal. Um and um she defends a theory of non-conceptual content where she also says that even though there are these non-conceptual contents in perception, um it can stand like she

1:37:16 doesn't I don't remember if she said this, but you might think of it as a quasi-justificatory relationship or it's a justificatory relationship, but it's one that's kind of different than the way that in that, you know, conceptual states stand in each other. Yeah. And, you know, so so call it grounding or something else like that, you know. And And so, yeah, I want to say that. So, I think that having a visual representation of red does justify star, right? Justify belief that there's red, but you can't infer from it Uh-huh. anything. And so, that's kind of special as well.

1:37:48 So what's the what's the justice So that's why the star there, but what's the Uh You have evidence. You have evidence that there's red there. Yeah, so you're justified. Yeah. Um but so it's interesting cuz that's is one of the places where I think you and Declan really disagree cuz you want to say there's unconscious The unconscious qual- quality justifies or whatever Classifies. the belief that red. So in the blindsight case the they have a justified belief. Whereas he thinks, "No, the conscious stuff justifies your belief." So in that case they don't have a conscious belief.

1:38:21 I mean they don't have justification. Yeah. Um and that's just like a kind of fundamental issue about like the difference about what justification is. Yeah. Um so yeah, it's a I mean it's another one of those points where you're just like once you get this far what do you do? Yeah. Um and in in the paper that you're refer- referring to that I recently talked about Declan, but I don't really have like I All I'm trying to do is anyway put the view put the possibility on the table. I'm trying to in a way rebut his arguments against the idea that it could that unconscious

1:38:53 perception could justify rather than giving like excellent positive arguments for the view that they do. Yeah. Um I guess my kind of like positive argument is just that once you got no good reason to think not and you see that they function very very very similarly to the states that you do think provide justification, there's no good reason to think that they don't. But like the to put it more in the context of which we can champ our teeth into it. Like in the case of the higher-order misrepresentation so I have a higher-order state that says I am seeing a blue dog or whatever. I have no first-order representation of a

1:39:26 blue dog and you say you're not justified in believing that there's a blue dog present. Yeah. Uh whereas I want to say what do you mean? You're You have the conscious experience of seeing a blue dog that it that is justification for seeing So can you I mean So there's a a case where that's that's more like concrete so we can say like what the what the pieces are but so why do you think that you're not you're not justified in that case? That doesn't simply amount to saying oh there's no first order state. Well, I mean you'd bump into the blue dog if there was one in front of you. Right, but so you can be justified in

1:39:59 believing things that are false and that don't work out but what this is about what you're I mean cuz this is part of what the I've been been brainwashed by Declan but part of the whole idea is that you know, the brain in the vat has justification for believing it's just you know wrong but it's still justified because it has a certain kind of experience and experience justifies having certain kinds of beliefs. Sure, okay. So yeah, I mean I'm happy to say that that empty states or misrepresentational states can provide justifications. So like for example, if you hallucinate if you have a first order perceptual state as of a blue dog but there's no blue dog. I think you

1:40:31 have evidence of a blue dog. So I'm willing to so I'm happy to grant that the brain in the vat has um has justification. Um I guess what I'm the I mean the reason why I want to deny that the um uh conscious experience that's empty the empty hot case is has justification is is really for theoretical reasons. It falls out of my thinking about what higher order theories say is a conscious perception. So and this is like you know this is something we corresponded about over email but you're like look I have a conscious perception of red so why isn't that evidence of red? And it's because

1:41:05 here's what I think a conscious perception of red like here's what that translates to. It's the appearance of a perception of red. And I don't see why the appearance of a perception of red it certainly doesn't provide if you want to say it isn't provide anything like direct evidence of red. It provides at best something like a kind of oblique evidence because you know, like if I uh uh uh because it could be that my perceptual state's not connected to the red in the right way, right? So I have evidence I in In I have evidence that I have evidence of red. And so, there's a

1:41:38 question, should we regard So, there's this principle, you know, I have evidence that I have evidence That's like the veil of perception though is what you're Sounds like you're what you're endorsing. Well, here's the question though, is evidence of evidence evidence, right? And this is well beyond my pay grade in epistemology. But, I like Evidence of evidence evidence. I mean, that's the question. There's like there's papers I've read on this. Is the evidence evidence of the evidence evidence? Yeah, and there's there's a paper in News that I cite that has fairly sophisticated methods for trying to

1:42:11 argue that No, I I think But, but this is where I I mean, this is I know where now I'm getting to the point where I'm going to have to let you go here. I I mean, we know we could do this all day long and Yeah, I get my kids. well past all day long since often half the times our working calls are just just this basically. I mean, me annoying you in other words what I'm saying. But, uh Delighting me. But, yeah, so this is where I think this is something we came across a couple times when we were writing, I know I could say where like how we put things

1:42:43 where we're coming we had to be sort of delicate. Um because I I think that what I want to do is I want to distinguish like two levels. I want to distinguish the level at which you describe the content of the higher order state and the level at which you describe like what it's like for you, like the way it appears to you as a result of that content. Um but I but I mean, I still think that I agree like with people like Chalmers that the naive view of conscious perception is that there are these qualities out there. Red is on the table. Red is on the apple. Um and I'm in some kind of like special

1:43:17 relationship with it where I'm like directly open to it or have it like in a special like there it isness. Uh I I think that's the way things seem from a from a naive point of view. And so, what I want to do is give an account of that. Like this is something that I think up earlier. I want to give a theory of about how that sort of thing resolves. Um like what explains it. Um So I want it to be part of the phenomenology uh Whereas yeah, so I anyway, I sort of

1:43:51 lost my got all worked up. Sorry But anyways, I think that's where where where we really just disagree here because like there So yeah, that's what I was yeah, duh. Okay, yeah. So because it comes down to issues like transparency issues. Like so I think that you know, experience seems transparent. Um so what I'm aware of when I'm consciously aware of this table is like the table. I'm consciously aware of the table. But you want to say no, you're not because if you don't have the first-order state which counts as the awareness of the table but only the higher-order state then you

1:44:25 don't have an awareness of the table. Um whereas I want to say you you do. That's what the conscious experience is and that's you know, what's presented to you is like the table. It's done so by virtue of you representing yourself as being in a first-order state, but that's the level of the content. But that the level of what it seems like from your point of view, it doesn't seem like you're in a mental state. It seems like you're looking at a table. Well, okay. I mean so So one thing that I think is good about what you said is you're distinguishing being aware of from being consciously

1:44:57 aware of. Right. So you were saying in the case where you you're hallucinating a table at the first-order level. Uh so is it it's an empty hot? So you're there's a table, you're not seeing the table. There's no first-order representation but you have a higher-order thought about it. So in that case, you're consciously aware of seeing a table of consciously aware of the table but not aware of the table. That's I think the way the higher-order thought theorists ought to describe what's going on. So then the question is But right, so you're consciously aware of the table though. Consciously aware of the table. And

1:45:28 here's what being consciously aware of the table is. It's to be It's for it to seem to you that you're seeing a table. Right. So, it seems to you that you're seeing a table. That is not an awareness of the table. It's an awareness of yourself as being in a certain relation to the table, right? But, that could be illusory. Now, it is So, now it is evidence of evidence, right? Or it's evidence as of evidence because you don't actually Here's cuz you don't actually have the evidence. But, you have evidence as of there being evidence. And so, is that evidence of you know, is that evidence

1:46:01 That's what counts as the That is the evidence. Well, that's That's what I'm going to deny. And I And I think that the reason why, you know, to Again, this all comes back to I think I again in our difference in orientation why you're okay with saying like hi, you know, you could have a view where you have only HOTs and like no first-order state is that again, I'm trying to like beef up the role of the first-order state. So, the first-order states are the are are the thing, right? Um they're the evidence. And so, like to I mean, I I It's hard for you to say like I'm I'm uh I have evidence of the table, but I'm not aware of the table. Like that sounds wrong. And And it's easy to say it's the conscious

1:46:35 state that makes me aware of the table when you're not a higher-order theorist. Cuz then you're a first-order theorist. And so, the the you know, the awareness of the table is the conscious state. Yeah. But, when you have a higher-order framework, then you start to think, "Hmm, the unconscious states are the things that are making me aware of things. It's the higher-order states that are just making me making it seem to me that I'm in those states." And I can't see why those states I mean, maybe certain views of epistemology would you know, if you think evidence of evidence of evidence, then may maybe I'd be willing to grant that you've got a perceptual evidence there. But, it's a kind of oblique evidence, whereas the the thing that gives you the real

1:47:08 evidence is the unconscious state. So, I I think that the All of these concerns, yeah, you're right, are like about our kind of like deep difference um about really whether unconscious mentality is real mentality. I think it's almost like a that's a way of framing the difference. Yeah, I know. Whereas I I still can't help but figure that it's a largely semantic dispute about whether accounts is real or not. And I haven't really seen anything that really hangs on it. Um Well, if you It's that that if you answer it one way you can't like explain it. So I haven't Yeah, so to me as so far as I can tell

1:47:42 like that I I'm you know, cuz I work with Joe and we've argued about it. So anyway, there's places where this has come up and it's like the systems are equivalent in their There's nothing in there what that makes you quantify one over one said over versus another. So I'm not sure really that there's something independent here that's really trying to be glommed onto. Well, I do have to say I often feel this way about epistemologies in general that I'm not sure what hangs on whether we call a belief justified or whether you

1:48:13 call this a case of knowledge. Like I often also myself feel like I I'm not sure what hangs on a lot of these issues. I was try I I tried to wade into some of these debates for um to try to like make room for the unconscious cuz it seems to get short shrift shrift so much. Uh-huh. And I frequently feel like I'm kind of moving pieces around but not sure what hangs on on labeling things one way or the other. Um you're obviously making the kind of the point back back at the philosophy of the psych philosophy of psychology or the philosophy of mind, you know, where you're not sure why our views are not terminologically distinct. And I feel you know, like in our

1:48:46 I think in one of our papers we end the paper that way. We're like, well, you could talk the way that Burger does or you could talk the way that Brown does when we're talking about what you want to call the conscious the phenomenally conscious state. Do you want to call it the hot or do you want to call it the individual or do you want to call it the notional state? And we're kind of like, mhm, it doesn't really matter what hangs on on those. I I suspect that something does. Yeah. Um But it's in this background stuff that we're really Yeah, it's I think it's subtle and it's in the background. And um again, it's because of my holism that and my Quineanism that I'm reluctant to say it's a verbal disagreement because I don't think it's a you know, I I don't think there are such things as verbal

1:49:19 disagreements. So I do think that it's in the conceptual framework and something is off and I'm not sure where it is but but it's true. It's hard to kind of put your finger exactly where Yeah, cuz we agree on all the like, you know, the the C problem and all so so all that stuff we we agree on. Uh but um I mean when I first started doing this, you know, I was like okay, let me find the first order people and then let me tell them in their language like what it is we're trying to say and that this would be like how you would communicate to them so they understood finally like what it

1:49:52 it was we were trying to say. And then I started saying that sort of stuff and David was like, well, that's not nope, you're doing it wrong. We don't talk that we don't mean that. And I was like, but yeah, that's what if we were talking to them what we would be mean. So so at first I sort of thought it was in my mind like just a way of putting things that makes that's more that's to the benefit of explaining it to someone who doesn't accept your theory already. But then over time I started thinking, well, maybe there's more to it than that because every time I try to say it David says I'm dead wrong about everything. I'm like, what's So yeah, but then ultimately I was like, I don't really care. Like this is the

1:50:25 way I think you should put things and the way that makes it the the clearest um about what the issues are and how to look for them. So anyway, so I so yeah, I I think that I kind of stopped caring about whether it's but I'm happy to admit yeah, it does seem like terminological. Maybe there's more to it than that. I don't think it's clear at this point. I I mean I I also frame a lot of my life's work so far as being sort of a similar kind of a thing. Less about higher order theory though I've written a little bit about that but more about quality space theory and trying to say here's how we can talk about it in the terms that people who talk about mental representation and theories of content

1:50:57 determination how they can see what we're we're up to, right? And try to put it in contact with views like that. Um so I also I you know, so I I kind of see a similar kind of project and I I also have to you know, Rosenthal in some papers and over emails and stuff like that has also pushed back against what I've said and you know writes like Burge calls these calls this representationalism but it's not representationalism and I think that that's an ongoing debate about exactly where what is the real substantive difference and I I I trust since since I trust that he's got something in mind but I agree with you that frequently I'm not

1:51:30 Yeah, I don't know exactly what the issue what what what the real Yeah, part of me feels like well, he'll never be happy until we're all holists and Quineans but then I'm like wait, but he's still arguing with Jake and Jake is a holist and a Quinean. So yeah, that can't be what the issue is. But philosophy, does anybody actually agree with anybody else in philosophy? Yeah, yeah, I agree I take you know I think philosophers who agree about pretty much everything and it's like impossible to think of somebody some cases. Yeah, I guess you're right. I would disagree with that. But anyway Jake, I do have to let you go. I see it's getting pushing on the

1:52:03 2:00 hour and you have real life duties. I have other things to get to as well. Um but let me just say thank you for taking this time. It's a great discussion. I just wondered if there's anything that you were like expecting to come up which hasn't come up that you maybe wanted to bring up. The answer can be no but I I like check at the end. I feel like we covered a lot of ground. So I feel like we still didn't get to the colors as mind-independent odd properties uh that that that your uh functionalism about color categories. So you have to come back at some point and we could go talk about that stuff cuz all the everything we talked about was

1:52:35 mental and we didn't really get to like so how do these pick out some category of objects in the world? Especially I wanted to ask you about like Pautz style arguments that you know the the quality space doesn't really map onto um the physical property space. Um So you have to come back. Sorry. back. Okay, yeah. Yeah, those are deep important issues and love to talk about them. All right, well hang out for a sec. I'll say bye after here. But thanks again Jake, I really appreciate it. Thank you Richard, I really appreciate it. All right, we're free. We're clear.