Containing Phenomenological Overflow

Richard Brown 1 Comment

I am going to the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness meeting in Toronto to do a poster presentation of the higher-order response to Block’s phenomenological overflow argument. This is important since it is a crucial step in the argument for the naturalization of qualia. The core argument is in this video.

This shows that phenomenological overflow is no threat to the higher-order theory. Is there any reasn to prefer it?  I was rereading Huxley’s On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and Its History and I came across this very interesting passage,

If the spinal cord is divided in the middle of the back, for example, the skin of the feet may be cut, or pinched, or burned, or wetted with vitrol, without any sensation of touch, or of pain, arising in consciousness. So far as the man is concerned, therefore, the part of the central nervous system which lies beyond the injury is cut off from consciousness. It must be admitted, that, if any one think fit to maintain that the spinal cord below the injury is conscious, but that it is cut off from any means of making its consciousness known to the other consciousness in the brain, there is no means of driving him from his position by logic. But assuredly there is no way of proving it, and in the matter of consciousness, if anything, we may hold the rule, “De non apparentibus et de non existentibus eadem est ratio.”

As far as I can tell the latin phrase there means something like “things that can’t be detected don’t exist,” though my latin is rusty. If this is roughly right then Huxley seems to be making an argument similar to the one I was pushing at the Online Consciousness Conference. If the mesh argument doesn’t decide between a Blockian or a Rosenthalian view then we should decide the issue on philosophical grounds. One way of reading the Huxley passage is as a semi-verificationalist move. Since there can be no empirical test of the matter we may treat it as a meaningless hypothesis. I would read this passage differently.

A state is phenomenologically consciousness when there is something that it is like for the creature that has the state. When there is nothing that it is like for the creature then there is no phenomenal consciousness. Thus when there is no what it is likeness around we can assume that there is no phenomenal consciousness hanging about. To imagine otherwise is to imagine that there is something that it is like for me that is not like anything for me…and that sounds like a contradiction.

Importantly, none of this is to deny that unconscious pains have qualitative properties. These qualitative characters, when unconscious, do not have any phenomenal feel but they do resemble and differ other qualitative characters in the right ways and they have causal connections as usual. It is only when we are conscious of them that they have the phenomenology we associate with pain. True, this seems to violate our common sense thinking about pains, though there are some platitudes that cit the other way which just again illustrates that folk theory is often inconsistent.

As Aristotle recommended we must try to save as many of the most basic pre-theoretical platitudes as we can but it may be the case that some will have to go; perhaps the common sense idea that there are unconscious pains that are phenomenally conscious is one of them. The claim turns out to be either paradoxical or merely terminological.

HOT Block

Richard Brown 2 Comments

In celebration of my three years in the Blogosphere I will be reposting some of my earlier posts that I am particularly fond of. This piece was originally published July 11th, 2007.
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I was recently reading Block’s forthcomming BBS paper Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Mesh between Psychology and Neuroscience. It is an interesting paper and I am looking forward to seeing the commentary. The basic puzzle is one that I have heard him talk about before; How could we tell whether the transitivity principle is right or not? What would empirically decide whether there can be a phenomonally conscious state that we are unconscious of having? So, to take Block’s example, suppose that we have a person who is subliminally percieving a face and there is activation in that person’s fusiform face area. Since the subject sincerely reports that they do not see a face it seems we can agree that this is the sensory state in the absence of the higher-order state.

How do we describe this situation? Do we say that the face expeirience is phenomonally unconscious? That there is nothing that it is like to see the face? Does it, as Rosenthal would say, have unconscious qualitative properties? Or do we say that there is something that it is like for the perseon to see the face but that they are unconscious of what it is like for them? The puzzle is that both theories make the same prediction about what the person will report (they don’t see a face) and so we need to find someother way to distinguish the two claims empirically. I don’t really want to talk about Block’s argument that phenomenology overflows our access to it (unless someone does want to talk about it), as all I could do it to repeat the Rosenthal line that the evidence that Block presents (i.e. the change blindness stuff) isn’t good evidence because the subjects can report, as Block acknowledges, that they saw some letters or ‘a rectangle’. Rosenthal can explain this on his account in the following way. In one case we are conscious of the first-order experience as just some rows of some letters or as just a rectangle while in the other we are conscious of the experience as being a row of some specific letters or shapes. So the fact that subjects report that they have some phenomenally conscious experience as Block rightly points out, needen’t be evidence for his claim that there is phenomenology without Awareness.

I think that if one steps far enough back from this debate one can see that it is the distinction between analytic and psyco-functionalism that is causing a lot of the local flare-ups and that this has some bearing on the empirical testability issue and the debate with Mandik that I have been suffering through, but I will leave that for another day.

What I do want to talk about is Block’s dismissal of Rosenthal’s kind of higher-order theory. He makes it very clear that he thinks that the higher-order thought theory is not even a candidate for a serious theory of phenomenal consciousness. As I have said many times before, I do not know if the higher-order thought theory is true or not, but it is at least not obviously false. It is a well formulated theory that could turn out to be right. So what’s Block’s problem?

He makes his case at the beggining of the paper in this rather longish quote.

We may suppose that it is platitudinous that when one has a phenomenally conscious experience, one is in some way aware of having it. Let us call the fact stated by this claim – without committing ourselves on what exactly that fact is – the fact that phenomenal consciousness requires Awareness. Sometimes people say Awareness is a matter of having a state whose content is in some sense “presented” to the self or having a state that is “for me” or that comes with a sense of ownership or that has “meishness” (as I have called it; Block 1995a).

Very briefly, three classes of accounts of the relation between phenomenal consciousness and Awareness have been offered. Ernest Sosa (2002) argues that all there is to the idea that in having an experience one is necessarily aware of it is the triviality that in having an experience, one experiences one’s experience just as one smiles one’s smile or dances one’s dance. Sosa distinguishes this minimal sense in which one is automatically aware of one’s experiences from noticing one’s experiences, which is not required for phenomenally conscious experience. At the opposite extreme, David Rosenthal (2005) has pursued a cognitive account in which a phenomenally conscious state requires a higher order thought to the effect that one is in the state. That is, a token experience (one that can be located in time) is a phenomenally conscious experience only in virtue of another token state that is about the first state. (See also Armstrong 1977, 1978; Carruthers 2000; Lycan 1996) for other varieties of higher order accounts.) A third view, the “Same Order” view says that the consciousness-of relation can hold between a token experience and itself. A conscious experience is reflexive in that it consists in part in an awareness of itself. (This view is discussed in Brentano 1874/1924; Burge 2006; Byrne 2004; Caston 2002; Kriegel 2005; Kriegel & Williford 2006; Levine 2001, 2006; Metzinger 2003; Ross 1961; Smith 1986).

So he is telling us here that his target in the paper is people who think that there is no phenomenology without awareness. Now we could (and should) quibble with the way that Block cast’s Rosenthal’s theory. For instance when he says that it is the view that a token experience that is located in time is a conscious state in virtue of a higher-order thought that is about it. But that is not quite right, as I have spent a lot of time arguing (for instance, Consciousness, Relational Properties, and Higher-Order Theories, Conscioiusness is Not a Relation Property, and The Function of Consciousness in Higher-Order Theories). but waive that for the moment.

He goes on in the next paragraph to say,

The same order view fits both science and common sense better than the higher order view. As Tyler Burge (2006) notes, to say that one is necessarily aware of one’s phenomenally conscious states should not be taken to imply that every phenomenally conscious state is one that the subject notices or attends to or perceives or thinks about. Noticing, attending, perceiving, and thinking about are all cognitive relations that need not be involved when a phenomenal character is present to a subject. The mouse may be conscious of the cheese that the mouse sees, but that is not to say that the mouse is conscious of the visual sensations in the visual field that represent the cheese or that the mouse notices or attends to or thinks about any part of the visual field. The ratio of synapses in sensory areas to synapses in frontal areas peaks in early infancy, and likewise for relative glucose metabolism. (Gazzaniga et al. 2002, p. 642–43). Since frontal areas are likely to govern higher-order thought, low frontal activity in newborns may well indicate lack of higher-order thoughts about genuine sensory experiences.

The relevance of these points to the project of the paper is this: the fact of Awareness can be accommodated by either the same order view or the view in which Awareness is automatic, or so I will assume. So, there is no need to postulate that phenomenal consciousness requires cognitive accessibility of the phenomenally conscious state. Something worth calling “accessibility” may be intrinsic to any phenomenally conscious state, but it is not the cognitive accessibility that underlies reporting.

He is making it very clear that he thinks that he has given decisive reasons for dismissing the higher-order thought theory. Has he? Not suprisingly, I don’t think that he has. Instead he displays a curious prejudice against the higher-order thought theory.

Let us look at what he says. In the first sentence he says that the same-order view, a view like Kriegel’s, is better suited to common sense and science. What follows that remark then looks like what he takes to be common sense evidence against the higher-order thought view and in favor of the same-order view, followed by some scientific evidence that illustrates the same point. The common sense evidence, evidently, rests on our intuition that “[t]he mouse may be conscious of the cheese that the mouse sees, but that is not to say that the mouse is conscious of the visual sensations in the visual field that represent the cheese or that the mouse notices or attends to or thinks about any part of the visual field.” But that is certainly true and neither Rosenthal, nor any other higher-order theoriest, denies it! The mouse is conscious of the cheese by having a first-order sensory state that represents the cheese, so it can be conscious of the cheese without any higher-order thoughts at all.

Presumably, though, what Block means here is that the mouse can have a phenomenally conscious experience of the cheese without having a thought about its first-order mental states. But that is to simply beg the question against Rosenthal. He has a story about why you wouldn’t notice the higher-order thought were it there, and yet how we can still have some evidence that they do occur, and also a story about how the concepts that occur in the higher-order thoughts about sensory states would be easy to come by. So easy to come by in fact, that animals could probably get them. So it is not crazy or absurd to think that the mouse might have a conscious experience of teh cheese by having a higher-order thought to the effect that it is seeing cheese. So the common sense evidence against the higher-order thought theory isn’t any good.

What about the scientific evidence? The suggestion here is that there is empirical evidence that newborns have very low frontal activity and that this would mean that they do not have higher-order thoughts and so do not have any conscious experiences at all. Therefore the higher-order thought theory is at odds with scientific evidence. But there is a suppressed premise in Block’s argument. Namely, the premise that it is obvious that new born infants do in fact have conscious experiences. Now, granted it does seem obvious, what with all the kicking and screaming and facial gesticulation and all, but that is really just more question beggining. According to Rosenthal, if it turned out that babies lack the part of the brain that we KNOW is responsible for higher-order thoughts the he would be committed to saying that newborn infants lack phenomenallt conscious states. And if we could show that that was absurd then his theory would be a bust. He would pack it in. But he challeneges the claim on both accounts.

First, there is some evidence that babies lack the right part of the brain for higher-order thoughts, but Rosenthal also claims that there is some evidnece that they do have it as well and we are not ABSOLUTELY sure about the role that the frontal cortex plays. The science is not in, or at least it is not a lock like Block thinks. Secondly, it is not an absurd claim to say that newborn infants lack phenomenally conscious experience. According to Rosenthal an unconscious pain will play all of the same roles that the conscious one does. It will cause kicking and screaming and hootin’ and a-hollerin’ and facial contoriations and the whole nine. We can even say that it is a bad thing and be motivated to stop it, all the while maintaining that there is nothing that it is like for the infant to have the pain. Of course Block finds this implausible and the point of the paper is to show that this doesn’t happen, but the point is that the baby stuff does not cut against Rosenthal in the way that Block thinks. Or at least he hasn’t made it clear here why it does. So neither the common sense nor the scientific evidence merits such a quick dismissal of Rosenthal’s view.

Finally, why does Block think that this evidence is more favorable for the same-order view? Block seems to assume that the same-order view does not posit a thought-like Awareness and so is more in line with his intuition about the mouse, but, at least for people like Kriegel and Gennaro, the higher-order content is thought-like. So if Rosenthal’s view is too cognitive, then so is the same-order view. Or at least there is no reason to think otherwise. And what about the scientific evidence? Block seems to assume that since the first-order and higher-order content are part of the same state that means that the frontal cortex will not play a role and so the same-order view would not be affected by the experimental evidence showing that infants have low activity there. But that isn’t obvious. On Kriegel’s view, for instance, the two contens are bound together by a ‘psychologically real’ process. But this does not require that the two contents be in the same part of the brain. In fact he explicity appeals to synchrony as a candidate for the psychologically real process and points out that it allows for binding of contents in segregated parts of the brain as one of its virtues.

So either Block’s list of positions to consider just got reduced to one (Sosa’s) or it is back up to three.

108th Philosophers’ Carnival

Richard Brown 4 Comments

Welcome to the 108th edition of the Philosophers’ Carnival! I don’t know what is going on with the Carnival but  the last few editions have not had very many interesting submissions and I did not get a lot of acceptable submissions for this issue…but I know that there are interesting posts out there  so I scoured the internets to find the best that the philosophy blogosphere has to offer…I also checked a few other disciplines for some food for thought.
Submitted:
  1. Tuomas Tahko presents Draft: The Metaphysical Status of Modal Statements posted at ttahko.net.
  2. Andrew Bernardin presents Beneath Reason: An Iceburg of Unconscious Processes posted at 360 Degree Skeptic.
  3. Eric Michael Johnson presents Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play To Reaping An Unjust Reward posted at The Primate Diaries.
  4. Terrance Tomkow presents Means and Ends posted at Tomkow.com, saying, “If your only available means of doing something are impermissible, does it follow that it is impermissible for you to do that thing? Judith Jarvis Thomson says, “yes”. Tomkow argues, “no”.”
  5. Thom Brooks presents The Brooks Blog: Thom Brooks on “A New Problem with the Capabilities Approach” posted at The Brooks Blog.
Found:
  1. Over at Conscious Entities Peter discusses Justin Sytsma’s recent JCS paper in Skeptical Folk Theory Theory Theory
  2. Over at Alexander Pruss’s Blog said blogger discusses Video Games as Art
  3. Not to long ago we had a very interesting post over at Brains on breeding pain free livestock. Anton Alterman has a somewhat polemical but interesting response at Brain Scam in Pains in the Brain: On LIberating Animals from Feeling
  4. Over at Siris we are reminded how malleable language is and the effect it has on reading past philosophers in Every Event Has a Cause
  5. Over at Practical Ethics Toby Ord asks Is It Wrong to Vote Tactically? I don’t want to spoil it for you but he thinks the answer is ‘no’
  6. Over at Evolving Thoughts John Wilkins discusses Plantinga’s argument that naturalism is self-refuting in You and Me, Baby, Ain’t Nothing But Mammals
  7. Did you know that a Quine is a computer program that can print its own code? It’s true and over at A Piece of Our Mind John Ku discusses them in Meta Monday: Ruby Quines
  8. Over at Neuroschannells Eric sums up his current views on perception and consciousness in Consciousness (13): The Interpreter versus the Scribe
  9. Over at Specter of Reason there is a discussion of Pete Mandik’s Swamp Mary thought experiment in Swamp Deviants, Part II
  10. Over at the Arche Methodology Blog Derek Ball asks Do Philosophers Seek Knowledge? Should They?
  11. Over at Philosophy on the Mesa Nina Rosenstrand wonders if Neanderthal’s raped early Humans in They Are Us? News from the Primate Research Front
  12. Is the idea that the mind in the head an a priori prejudice? Ken Aizawa thinks not in So, why does common sense say the mind is in the head?
  13. Over at Inter Kant Gary Benham discusses Free Speech and Twitter
  14. Over at The Ethical Werewolf Neil Shinhababu discusses his recent run on Bloggingheads and Hedonism
  15. Over at Logical Matters Peter Smith talks about Squeezing Arguments and comments on Fields characterization of them in Saving Truth from Paradox
  16. Over at In Living Color Jean Kazez discusses just how outrageous espousing moral realism really is in Torturing Babies Just for Fun is Wrong
  17. Over at Philosophy Talk: The Blog Ken Taylor discusses Culture and Mental Illness
  18. Over at In the Space of Reasons Tim Thornton discusses Aesthetic Self-Knowledge
  19. Over at the Philosophy North Blog Aiden McGlyn discusses The Problem of Vanishing Warrant
  20. Finally, have you heard about this Philosopher’s Football match? Virtual Philosopher has a nice report of the madness in Philosopher’s Football -Match Report from the Ref.
That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of philosophers’ carnivalusing our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival |

3rd Birthday

Richard Brown 2 Comments

Tomorrow marks the third anniversary of my starting Philosophy Sucks! I started my blogging career over at Brains and had my first post on April 12, 2007. I had several posts there before I was compelled to start my own blog and as people may know I continue to contribute to Brains and am very pleased to have seen it grow in recent times. I continue to post here as well and limit my posts at Brains to ones that directly relate to philosophy of mind and consciousness.

In these three years I have had over 100,000 hits, nearly 350 posts, and almost 2,000 comments…and next week I will be hosting my third Philosopher’s Carnival (I hosted the 58th and the 50th); not bad! I have had some rough experiences adapting to online discussion (there are some crazies out there as people well know) but all in all the discussion has been extremely helpful and challenging. I have had two papers and numerous presentations (two at the apa Pacific) develop out of discussions that started here. So thanks to everyone and I hope it continues in the future!

The year is still young but here are the most viewed posts so far (see also the best of all time).

10. HOT Qualia Realism
9. Am I a Type-Q Materialist?
8. Why I am not a Type-Z Materialist
7. Consciousness, Consciousness, and More Consciousness
6. More on Identity
5. The Singularity, Again
4. HOT Damn! It’s a HO Down-Showdown
3. Attention & Mental Paint
2. Part-Time Zombies
1. The Identity Theory in 2-D

Pain Asymbolia and A Priori Defeasibility

Richard Brown 1 Comment

I listened to the first lecture in David Chalmers’ Locke Lectures currently taking place at Oxford and I was intrigued by the argument he gave in defense of the claim that we can have a priori knowledge and do conceptual analysis even if we cannot give definitions of the concepts that we are analyzing. The argument appealed to the claim that any counter-example to a definition involved reasoning about possible cases and so we could give an account of the a priori in terms of our capacity to think about possible scenarios and our judgments about whether certain sentences are true in those scenarios.

I wanted to find the text of the talk to check on the details of the argument and in the lecure Dave mentioend that he was putting manuscripts up online and I went to his website to see if I could find them…sadly I couldn’t. But I did find this paper which if I am right is probably the text that the fourth lecture will center on. Anyways, I read the paper and now want to say something about it. As I read it the central point is very simple: one can accept Quinian arguments about conceptual revisibility and still have a robust a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic distinction.  One does this by simply stipulating that something is a priori if it is knowable independently of experience without conceptual change. That is given that we hold the conceptual meanings fixed is the statement knowable a priori? Much of the paper is spent fleshing out a suggestion made by Carnap updated with 2-d semantics and Bayesian probability theory aimed at giving an account of conceptual change.

So to put it overly simply one can say to Quine “sure, my concept may change and if so this wouldn’t be true but given that my concepts don’t change we can see that this would be the case.” So to take pain as an example. When we are reasoning a priori about what we would say about pain (can there be pain/pleasure inversion for instance) we can admit that if we change what we mean by pain this or that will be different. But as long as our concept of pain doesn’t change we can say this or that would be true in this or that scenario and therefore bypass the entire Quinian argument altogether. This would seem to give Dave a response to the type-q materialist who has been getting so much attention around here lately. This is because they seem to be saying that since our concept of pain might change we cannot know a priori whether zombies are conscious or not. Dave responds by saying that as long as we do not have to change our concept of pain we can see that zombies are not conscious. I think that this response to the Quinian argument is quite good but I would respond to it differently. I would argue that as of right now we do not know which scenarios are ideally conceivable because we have cases of disagreement about decisive scenarios.

To fill this in with a particular example that I have talked about before let us focus on the notion of pain and Pain Asymbolia. Now many philosophers hold that it is a priori that if something is a pain then it will be painful (and that conversely if something is painful then it will be a pain). Now suppose that one of these philosophers finds out about pain asymbolia and denies that these people are in pain. Now suppose that this person comes to change their mind and instead thinks that they are in pain but that pain and painfulness are (contrary to appearances) only contingently related. What are we to say? In the paper Dave says,

A fifth issue is the worry that subjects might change their mind about a possible case without a change of meaning. Here, one can respond by requiring, as above, that the specifications of a scenario are rich enough that judgments about the scenario are determined by its specification and by ideal reasoning. If so, then if the subject is given such a specification and is reasoning ideally throughout, then there will not be room for them to change their mind in this way. Changes of mind about a fully specified scenario will always involve either a failure of ideal reasoning or a change in meaning.

I can agree with this in principle but since I can clearly conceive pain and painfulness being only contingently related it cannot be the case that we are in a position to determine which concept of pain is the one which will be employed in ideal reasoning. We may have our favorite but there are arguments on both sides and it is not clear where the truth lies. So though we can know a priori that either pain is necessarily painful or that it is contingently painful but we cannot know which is true now. To know that we would have to settle the pain asymbolia case; but that case it hotly contested (pun sadly intended :()

The upshot then is whether or not Dave has a response to Quinian worries about the a priori in principle he has not done enough to show that we are currently in a position to make use of this apparatus and so we are forbidden any of its fruits.

Sellars on Mind and Language

Richard Brown Leave a comment

I found this very interesting lecture by Sellars where he talks about dot quotes and its relation to ontology and the mind-body problem…all good stuff and worth a listen. But what really caught my interest was his comments at the beginning of part F where he seems to admit that some kind of causal theory has to be right for the way thoughts work but not for the linguistic meaning…is there any other way to interpret these remarks? Also, does anyone else feel like they are listening to Jimmy Stewart talk about philosophy??

Update:

On my way home from class today I realized that what Sellars says in these lectures vindicates something I thought of after someone objected that on my view names would fail the Church translation test. t thought you could just dot quite your way out of it so it is nice to hear Sellars talking about dot quoting ‘Socrates’.

Reduction v. Elimination

Richard Brown 2 Comments

In the video of Quine I posted yesterday he says that it is only a terminological difference whether the physicalist says that they are identifying the mental with the physical or that they are eliminating the physical (“disavowing the mental”). This has never seemed right to me but it is hard to say what is wrong with  It seems to me that in one obvious sense of the word ‘reduction’ the identity theory cannot be reductive. The identity theorist holds that there is not the mind and the brain but that there is just the brain. This sounds like it is getting rid of the mind (“there is just the brain”) but it is not. One does not get rid of A# when one finds out that it is just Bb. One does not eliminate water when one discovers that it is H2O. Identity theorists have always been resentful of the talk of ‘reduction’, ‘elimination’, and ‘correlation’. Smart puts it well in his classic paper; “you can not correlate something with itself.” Water is not correlated with H2O it just is H2O.  Only if one is already assuming that ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ have different referents will one see the identity as eliminative. Surely there is all the difference in the world between saying that the true nature of the mental is that it does not exist and saying that the true nature of the mental is that it is neural! I mean, right?

On the other hand, Quine is right that at the semantic level the identification of mental and physical would allow us to “disavow” the mental terms in our ultimate theory since wherever we saw one we could replace it with the thing it was identical to (compare: we could eliminate the word “bachelor” from our language if we wanted to since it is really identical to “unmarried male”). In that sense eliminating the mental predicates from our completed theory wouldn’t affect any truth values of statements in the physical theory. This is surely right but the elimination/identification that is going on here is at the level of semantics (or concepts if one likes) not ontology. Now if one adds to this the Quinian thesis that one is ontologically committed to what one’s variables range over one will not be committed to mental entities at the level of particle physics. But this is not an embarrassment for the physicalist! The physicalist denies that the completed micro-physics will have to appeal to mental properties as basic constituents of reality and that is all that Quine has said here. It may still be the case that one is ontologically committed to mental items at a different theoretical level.

Now this way of talking is at odds with John Searle and Ned Block. According to Searle we cannot get an ontological reduction because consciousness essentially has a first-person ontology whereas brains have a third-person ontology but even so we can get what he calls a causal reduction. Now this sounds a lot like property dualism but Searle denies that it is. Block on the other hand argues that we can have a scientific reduction of consciousness (that is, we can find out that its essential property is being physical) but we cannot have an explanatory reduction of consciousness (that is an a priori conceptual reduction of consciousness). For Block identities are at bottom unexplainable which translates into the claim that they cannot be deduced from a completed micro-physics. They have to be postulated on the basis of additional explanatory power.

Glossing over some obvious differences Quine, Searle, Block, and even Chalmers seem to think that if we have an explanatory reduction of consciousness then we have really eliminated consciousness and so they think that (at best) we can give a causal/scientific reduction but that we cannot deduce the qualitative properties from the physical properties. But if we combine the Lewisian-Armstrong style of argument with 2-d semantics we can see how it would be possible to give this kind of explanatory reduction. We start with the correlations between qualitative states and physical states. As Dave noted there are several options at this point one of which is postulating an identity between the qualitative properties and the physical properties but instead of postulating this identity we should be able to deduce that it is true. Real identities are earned not postulated. I think we can do this, or at least see that it is in principle possible.

So the upshot is that on this view there is a difference between reduction and elimination that is more than terminological. When we reduce something we discover what the primary intension picks out in the actual world whereas when we eliminate something we discover that the primary intension doesn’t pick anything out in the actual world. Hence we reduce water to H2O and eliminate phlogiston. The physicalist can be reductive (claiming the the primary intensions pick out brain states at the actual world) but not eliminative (by denying that the primary intensions fail to pick anything out at the actual world) in this sense. But even so this is not reductive in the first sense: everything that was there before we started theorizing is still there after the explanatory reduction.

HOT Qualia Realism

Richard Brown 6 Comments

A lot of philosophers seem to take the higher-order thought theory of consciousness to be eliminative or deflationary about consciousness; of course, it doesn’t help that people go around saying that we need to get rid of qualia or even that we should endorse the claim that we ourselves are zombies! But aside from this misguided rhetoric I just don’t see any argument which shows that the higher-order theory is eliminative or deflationary. Of course I do not deny that it is counter-intuitive but so is any cutting edge theory. Let us rehearse what I take to be the basic argument for the higher-order theory.

1. A mental state that I am in no way aware of myself as being in is not a conscious mental state

This seems to me to be a common sense platitude and maybe even an analytic truth. If one accepts this then some kind of higher-order theory of consciousness is true: (1) is the converse of the transitivity principle.

2. Certain kinds of thoughts can make us aware of things.

Thoughts that are seemingly unmediated by inference and represent the target as present make us aware of the target. if this isn’t true then higher-order thought theory is false, though some other kind of higher-order theory may still be true.

3. Phenomenal feel is a matter of what it is like for one to have conscious mental states

This also seems like a common sense platitude. If one accepts this then explaining phenomenal consciousness is just explaining what it is like for one to have conscious mental states.

4. What it is like for one to have a conscious mental state is determined by a higher-order thought

This is supported or at least made plausible by considerations about wine tasting and the like. In the wine tasting case one’s experience changes as one learns a new concept. It is consistent with this that applying a concept to one’s first-order states results in a change in phenomenal experience with no change in the first-order state’s properties (this is not the only thing this is consistent with of course). If this is right (and it is presumably empirically testable) then applying new concepts results in a change in what it is like for one to have the experience. If this is right then perhaps it is not too crazy to think that applying concepts is what results in phenomenal feel in the first place.

5. Only conscious mental states exhibit phenomenal feel

This is where the higher-order theory stands or falls. If it really is the case that there are no phenomenal feels when a state is unconscious then we really would have evidence that higher-order thoughts result in or produce phenomenal consciousness. It is not clear that this is true but it can be supported by philosophical analysis. For instance it is not at all clear that anything substantive hangs on whether we call qualitative properties  of which we are in no way aware phenomenally conscious or not. if all one means is that unconscious pains have some property in virtue of which they are pains and that when we are aware of ourselves as being in feels a certain way then there is no disagreement. if on the other hand, one means that the unconscious pain feel painful for the person that has it then it is not clear what that would even mean. Besides this there are no telling empirical reasons to think that it is wrong.

Now each one of these claims is more or less controversial but if one accepts them then one accepts the higher-order thought theory and it seems to me that nothing in these four claims rules out qualia realism. In fact it seems that if these five claims are true then we have succeeded in explaining what phenomenal consciousness is and if we ultimately identify the neural means by which all of this is implemented then we will have discovered that consciousness is physical.

As of right now it seems like we can conceive of creatures that have HOTs but which lack phenomenal feels but further empirical results may yet show that the HOT theory is the best theory of consciousness available (or if you prefer: it may show that it is true). The acknowledgement that it seems conceivable to have HOTs without phenomenal feel is enough to get qualia realism but not enough to show that higher-order thought theory is false. Is it really so strange that we should find out that qualia just are higher-order thoughts and that higher-order thoughts just are brain states? Sure, it is surprising; but is it more surprising than relativity theory, quantum mechanics,  or string theory? I should think that the discovery of the relativity of simultaneity, Bose-Einstein condensates, dimensionless point-particles, and 11 dimensional space-time are quite a bit surprising indeed!

Am I a Type-Q Physicalist?

Richard Brown 3 Comments

In the previous post I tried to differentiate my view from type-z materialism. In this post I will address type-q materialism. Dave says, in Consciousness and its Place in Nature

Are there any other options for the materialist? One further option is to reject the distinctions on which this taxonomy rests. For example, some philosophers, especially followers of Quine (1951), reject any distinction between conceptual truth and empirical truth, or between the a priori and the a posteriori, or between the contingent and the necessary. One who is sufficiently Quinean might therefore reject the distinction between type-A and type-B materialism, holding that talk of epistemic implication and/or modal entailment is ungrounded, but that materialism is true nevertheless. We might call such a view type-Q materialism. Still, even on this view, similar issues arise. Some Quineans hold that explaining the functions explain everything (Dennett may be an example); if so, all the problems of type-A materialism arise. Others hold that we can postulate identities between physical states and conscious states in virtue of the strong isomorphic connections between them in nature (Paul Churchland may be an example); if so, the problems of type-B materialism arise. Others may appeal to novel future sorts of explanation; if so, the problems of type-C materialism arise. So the Quinean approach cannot avoid the relevant problems.

As I found out last Friday we can add David Rosenthal to the list of type-q materialists ion addition to Mandik and Weisberg. I agree with Mandik and Weisberg when they complain that it is not obvious how these problems arise for the Quinean. Take for example the type-b Quinian. She will hold that there are mind/brain identities but will go on to deny that these identities are necessary (nothing is necessary). This immediately defuses Dave’s objections to type-b materialism. There are no strong identities for the type-q position (a strong identity is a necessary truth that cannot be known a priori and is just brute). Nor are zombies an issue since the type-q will grant that they are conceivable (while muttering “whatever that means”) but so what? The identities are not necessary (nothing is, remember since modal cannot be given coherent truth-conditions) so the conceivability of zombies is irrelevant to the truth of materialism at the actual world. Zombie sonly get their bite from the necessity of identity. So problems of type-b materialism do not arise for the Quinian.

But I grant that modal talk is meaningful even though ultimately dependent on empirical justification. True empiricists wait until there is empirical evidence that merits the revision of intuitions. They do not consider every alternative as relevant; rather they make decisions about about what is most likely the case based on parsimony, simplicity, and elegance as well as explanatory power and congruency with known empirical data. Until we have some very good reason to reject [](x=x) I take the proof of it to be convincing and to justify believing that identities are necessary. Modal theory is a theory and so should be held to those standards. I claim that according to those standards basic modal intuitions should be trusted. Things get complicated quick but the necessity of identity is surely safe!

But even so there is much in the type-q position that I agree with and re-reading Pete and Josh’s paper I can see why people would say I was a type-q materialist. Their basic argument, as I see it, is that if Quine is right then every concept is open to revision in the face of empirical discoveries. Thus conceptual analysis of the concept of consciousness a priori will do us no good because Quinians cannot rule out that the concept will not need to be revised in the light of future empirical evidence. I agree in principle with this. For instance I have argued that empirical evidence suggests that it is possible that pain and painfulness come apart contrary to our initial a priori intuitions about pain. This is a key part of my counter  to the zombie argument. But notice that my argument is intrinsically modal in nature. I claim that pain asymbolia shows that it is conceptually coherent that painfulness is a contingent property of pain and so our a priori intuitions about pain are suspect until the empirical issue is settled. Discovering what actually is the case has the effect of ruling our some a priori conditionals. Ao, we can know a priori that if painfulness is an intrinsic feature of pains then various things follow and we can know that if painfulness is not an intrinsic feature of pains then various other things follow. We then need to know which is actually the case. I even agree that this might count as revising our concept of pain to include painfulness as a contingent property.

And I certainly agree with the characterization of the a priori physicalist deduction,

Consider the following scenario. I am angry, but not consciously so. I storm around the house bashing into things and grumbling, but when asked, I snarl, “I’m not mad!”  Later, my anger becomes conscious, and I see that my interlocutor was correct. I was angry, but the anger was nonconscious. Then I became conscious of the anger, and there was something it was like for me to be angry. Most folk will find this a plausible story, and certainly not one that is confused or contradictory. Thus, a reasonable clarification of “there’s something it’s like for the subject” is “the subject is conscious of being in a state.” But being conscious of something can plausibly be cashed out in functional terms. Thus, if we find the physical conditions that realize this state, we can reason, a priori, from the physical facts to the phenomenal facts.

I can even agree in principle with their expression scientism,

But more to the point for current research, the industry of modal intuition-mongering loses its reason for being. It is of little interest if zombies are conceivable. They are, in that nothing can be ruled out from the armchair. We cannot tell today where empirical results will drive us tomorrow. And whether zombies are possible or not depends strictly upon what our best theory says. And that is a matter for science to determine. Maybe qualia can be captured in a functional theory of the mind; maybe they cannot. That is for science to decide, not a priori philosophizing.

So maybe I am a type-q physicalist but one who thinks that even there is some use for a priori reasoning. Also, one who thinks that if Quine is wrong the view is still at least conceivably right and this shows that we do not have enough empirical evidence for a priori arguments to do more than reveal which side of the debate we are on. This suggests that even those who do not accept the Quinian views about empiricism should be hesitant to conclude that their a priori intuitions are correct in this case.