The Function of Consciousness in Higher-Order Theories

Richard Brown 12 Comments

I was recently reading through a new paper of Uriah Kriegel’s called The Same-Order Monitoring Theory of Consciousness where he says this

If consciousness were indeed a relational property, M’s being conscious would fail to contribute anything to M’s fund of causal powers. And this would make the property of being conscious epiphenomenal (see Dretske 1995: 117 for an argument along these lines).

This is, by all appearances, a serious problem for HOMT [higher-order monitoring theory a.k.a. Higher-order thought theory]. Why have philosophers failed to press this problem more consistently? My guess is that we are tempted to slide into a causal reading of HOMT, according to which M* produces the consciousness of M, by impressing upon M a certain modification. Such a reading does make sense of the causal efficacy of consciousness: after M* modifies M, this intrinsic modification alters M’s causal powers. But of course, this is a misreading of HOMT. It is important to keep in mind that HOMT is a metaphysical, not causal, thesis. Its claim is not that the presence of an appropriate higher-order representation yields, or gives rise to, or produces, M’s being conscious. Rather, the claim is that the presence of an appropriate higher-order representation constitutes M’s being conscious. It is not that by representing M, M* modifies M in such a way as to make M conscious. Rather, M’s being conscious simply consists in its being represented by M*.

So far this is all right (notice how Uriah has Rosenthal’s account correctly formulated in such a way as to be immune from certain unicorn arguments). I have also pointed out how this implicit assumption about what the higher-order thought theory is keeps people from thinking the theory is anti-Cartesian in certain important respects.

But Uriah goes on to say that

When proponents of HOMT have taken this problem into account, they have responded by downplaying the causal efficacy of consciousness. But if the intention is to bite the bullet, downplaying the causal efficacy is insufficient – what is needed is nullifying the efficacy. The charge at hand is not that HOMT may turn out to assign consciousness too small a fund of causal powers, but that it may deny it any causal powers. To bite the bullet, proponents of HOMT must embrace epiphenomenalism. Such epiphenomenalism can be rejected, however, both on commonsense grounds and on the grounds that it violates what has come to be called Alexander’s dictum: to be is to be causally effective. Surely HOMT would be better off if it could legitimately assign some causal powers to consciousness. But its construal of consciousness as a relational property makes it unclear how it might do so.

Now Rosenthal will be speaking about this issue at the ASSC, and Uriah is right that Rosenthal does not think that there is much, if any, function to consciousness qua consciousness, so I don’t want to get into that stuff. What I want to question is whether or not anyone who agrees with Rosenthal is committed, in the way that Uriah seems to think that they are, to saying that consciousness is epiphenomenal.  

The brunt of the challenge seems to come from the claim that our being conscious of a mental state, and hence that mental state being conscious, does not change, or modify the first-order state in any way and so its causal powers are unaffected by being conscious. I think that this is right; in fact I use this as a premise in my argument that higher-order theories are committed to there being something that it is like for a creature to have a conscious thought. But does this claim entail that consciousness is epiphenomenal? I am not sure that it does.

I think that someone who like the higher-order theory could say that, while the first-order state does not come to have any new causal properties when it become conscious, the creature in which the state occurs does. So, at the very least, even by Rosenthal’s lights, we get the ability to report (as opposed to express) our mental states when they are conscious, and we get the ability to introspect our mental states and thereby come to know what it is like for us to have them.

Now whether they can say there is more to the function of consciousness than this is another question, but at the very least, one does not have to dine on the bullet that Uriah has prepared.

 

 

Meaning and Justification

Richard Brown 1 Comment

So, I am finally done working on my paper ‘Consciousness, Higher-Order Thoughts, and What It’s Like‘. It has been converted into both PowerPoint and Poster format and I am looking forward to presenting it in the upcoming Weeks…but before I do I want to start what will be a series of posts on Emotive Realism, the metaethical view that I defend.

In some earlier posts (The Meaning and Use of ‘is True’, and ‘Truth, Justification and the Quasi-Realist Way‘) I argued against Simon Blackburn’s Quasi-Realism by showing that the deflationary account of truth that he relies on is unmotivated and cannot be support a satisfying account of justification. Ultimately what I want to do is to argue for a view that is emotive but that is also a kind of realism and which does nto hide behind the smoke and mirrors of deflationsim.

In this post I want show that Emotivism, and views like it, are actually two claims that can come apart; one about the meaning of ethical terms, the other about the justification of moral judgments. Emotivism is so often thought of as an anti-realist view mostly as a matter of the historical accident that its earliest defenders happened to be irrealists. If this is true then they is no principled reason why an emotive theory could’t also be a kind of realism. Along the way I wantto say something about what moral realism is.

The claim that these two issues (i.e. of th meaning of moral words and the justification of moral judgements) are seperate is not a popular view. In fact it is often thought that your views on one force your views on the other. In particular it is often argued that a philosopher’s theory of justification determines her theory of semantics and that this semantic theory is the only way to tell the difference between someone who is a ‘real-realist’ and quasi-realists like Simon Blackburn.  

David Copp (Copp 2001) is a nice example of this. He says that the distinctive doctrine of moral realism is that the moral realist thinks that the moral predicates refer to robust moral properties. So to say that suicide bombing is morally wrong is to assert that suicide bombing has the robust moral property of being wrong. To say that moral properties are ‘robust’ is to say that “[they] have the same basic metaphysical status as ordinary non-moral properties,” (p 4). It is of course a matter of some controversy just what the status of ordinary non-moral properties is. But in moral contexts there are, broadly speaking, two candidates and an ethical realist like Copp is committed to one of them. On the one hand we might think that there are non-natural properties and that ‘good’ and other moral words pick some of those properties out, or we might think that non-natural properties don’t exist and insist that moral properties must be natural properties and ‘good’ and other moral words pick some of those out.

The irrealist, on this view, is one who denies that the moral predicates refer to robust moral properties of either variety. It is, in fact, a huge mistake according to the irrealists to think that moral predicates act like non-moral predicates and refer to, or denote, or whatever, some kind of property. Moral predicates are in a different kind of business all-together and only look as though they stand for properties. What they really do is serve to express our moral sentiments, in much the same way that ‘ouch!’ express pain.

Notice though that even though we are told that we can differentiate these views by their semantics this is really supposed to be diagnostic of their views about the justification of moral judgments. The robust moral properties that moral predicates refer to are supposed to be the truthmakers for moral judgments in exactly the same way that non-moral properties are supposed to be the truthmakers for non-moral judgments. The irrealist denies that there are such properties and instead claims that moral judgments are justified by the emotional, conative, or motivational states of people. This leads us to the real distinction between realism and irrealism: If two people disagree over some fundamental moral claim, like whether unjustified killing is morally permissible, can, in some sense, both be right? A realist will claim that only one of them can be right, whereas an irrealist will claim that they can both be right. One way to secure this is by appealing to the kind of semantics already talked about, that is, by appealing to moral properties and claiming that the task of the moral predicates is to refer or denote those properties.

But there are really two questions that have been so far unaddressed in the meaning side of the question. Since we want to seperate meaning from use it then becomes important to assess whether the meaning claim that the emotivists made was really a claim about the meaning of the words or whether it was a claim about how the word was used independently of its meaning. It seems to me to be hostorically correct to say the latter, but even if it weren’t it is clearly possible to modernize the theory by saying that moral utterances are used to express our moral sentiments independently of their meaning, in much the same way that ‘I feel like a burrito’ (said in response to ‘what do you want for lunch? or something) expresses my desire to have a burrito for lunch independently of its meaning.

This could be the case even if the sentence that we said was literally false (as is the case when I say, of a talkitive friend, “he never shuts up”) This means that the issue of the meaning of the sentence that I say and the issue of the justification of the moral judgment I thereby express are completely seperate. There is no reason to think that in order to be a moral realist you must be committed to moral properties and to a semantics of moral words that has them referring to thos moral properties.

Gary and Jerry

Richard Brown 7 Comments

I have been working on my paper ‘Consciousness, Higher-Order Thoughts, and What It’s Like’ which I will be presenting in a couple of weeks, parts of which have appeared here and over at Brains. I was reading through it today and something interesting occurred to me. It has been a project of mine for a while now to show that all and only mental states have qualitative properties, and so that the qualitative is the mark of the mental. To that end I have been developing a model of the propositional attitudes that treats the mental attitudes as a distinctive way of feeling about some represented proposition (I give an introduction to the account in my award winning 😉 paper The Mark of the Mental).

 In this current paper I am trying to show that one prominent theory of consciousness requires that thoughts be modeled as qualitative states, and that this view that I have independantly worked out fits very nicely with the higher-order account but I am also interested in ways of trying to get people to see that they already think that the attitude of belief has a distintive qualitative feel. I point out what I think are good ways of seeing that in the paper, one of which is a intuition pump that Alvin Goldman came up with in his 1993 paper “The Psychology of Folk Psychology”. Here is what I say.

Goldman offers us a nice intuition pump. Imagine a Mary-like thought experiment with a super-scientist called Gary. Gary has never had a desire, now imagine that he suddenly does have one. Won’t he have learned something new? Namely won’t he now know what it is like for him to have a desire? It seems to me that this suggests that there is a qualitative aspect to this mental attitude. But what about beliefs?

What occurred to me was a way to extend Goldman’s intuition pump to the case of beliefs. Given that we think that there coul be unconscious beliefs, consider the following super-scientist Jerry. Imagine that Jerry has been raised in a special room, much like Mary and Gary, but instead of never seeing red (Mary) or never having a desire (Gary), Jerry has never had a conscious belief. He has had plenty of unconscious beliefs, but none of them have been conscious. Let us imagine that we have finally discovered the difference between conscious and unconscious beliefs and that we have fitted Jerry with a special implant that keeps all of his beliefs unconscious, no matter how much he introspects. Let us also imagine that this device is selective enough so that it wipes out only the beliefs and so Jerry has plenty of other conscious experiences. He consciously sees red, has pain, wants food, fears that he will be let out of his room one day, wonders what the molecular structure of Einsteinium is, etc.

Now imagine that one of Jerry’s occurrent, unconscious, beliefs suddenly becomes a conscious belief. For the first time in Jerry’s life he has a conscious belief. Won’t he learn something new? Won’t he learn what it is like for him to have the belief that he has always had? Doesn’t this suggest that it is part of what we ordinarily think about beliefs that they are qualitative states? Consider a Jerry-like Mary experiment. Let us suppose that Mary has never had a conscious experience of red, though she has had all kinds of unconscious red experiences and all kinds of other conscious experiences (perhaps, though, no conscious color experiences?). Now imagine that an unconscious, occurrent, experience of red suddenly becomes conscious…it seems to me that these two cases are identical.

HOT Fun in the Summertime 2

Richard Brown 3 Comments

Given that higher-order theories of consciousness are committed to the claim that there are unconscious sensory states (like pains, and seeings of red, etc) and that such unconscious states are not like anything for the creature that has them, they need a way to identify the sensory qualitative properties independently of our access to those properties (i.e. independent of their being conscious). This is where homomorphism theory comes in.

Rosenthal begins by noting that we characterize our sensory qualities in terms of their resemblances and differences within families of properties. These families of properties are in turn specified by reference to the perceptible properties of things in the world. For example we can characterize red as more similar to pink than to brown and so on and these resembelances and differences are homomorphic to the family of perceptible properties (presuambly wavelength reflective properties) that give rise to the mental qualities. What we get from doing this systematically is a ‘quality space’ which is homomorphic to the quality space of the perceptible properties. Our being aware of the qualitative properties of sensory states explains how it is that we have mental access to the perceptible properties. An unconscious pain state, then, will be one that resembles and differs other pain states in ways that are homomorphic to a family of perceptible properties, and via which we gain mental access to those properties. Though there may be other ways to independently specify the qualitative properties all higher-order theories need some way to do it and homomorphism theory looks promising. It is, at the very least, an illustration that it can be done. How can we extend this to cover the requirement that there is something that it is like for a creature to have a conscious thought?

I have elsewhere argued (The Qualitative Character of Conscious Thoughts) that the propositional attitudes can be modeled as taking some specific mental attitude towards some represented proposition and that the mental attitude just is some particular way of feeling about the represented proposition. So, for instance having a belief consists in feeling convinced, that is, it is the subjective feeling of certainty that one has with respect to the truth of the represented propositon. This model of the propositional attitudes actually fits very nicely with homomorphism theory. In the sensory case we become aware of the sensory qualities, which are the properties that mental states have in virtue of which they resemble and differ each other, and which resemblances and differences are homomorphic to the resemblances and differences that hold between the family of perceptible worldly properties. Our being conscious of these properties explains how it is that we have mental access to colors. So too in thought we become conscious of the cognitive qualities and this gives us access to our thoughts. To have a conscious belief is to be conscious of oneself as having a certain cognitive quality with respect to some content. And, these cognitive qualities (that is the mental attitudes themselves) will stand in various patterns of resemblances and differences from each other in just the same way that the sensory qualities do.

What are we to say about the actual homomorphism to perceptible properties? Is there any set of properties that the mental attitudes are homomorphic to? That is, is there a set of properties that have similarities and differences which resemble and differ in a way that preserves the similarities and differences between the mental attitudes? This is important since we need a way to specify the attitudes apart from their qualitative component. Yes; we can hypothesize that the homomorphic properties are the illocutionary forces of utterances. So the differences between beliefs that p and desires that p are homomorphic to the differences between the illocutionary force of the utterance of some linguistic item in the process of expressing the belief or desire.

This even may even turn out to be an explanation of why it is that having language allows us to have more fine-grained thoughts, if we could defend the claim that being conscious of our thoughts in respect of their qualitative attitude towards some represented content gives us mental access to the properties of the language that we would use to express that thought. If this were the case then the cognitive qualities would be exactly like the sensory qualities and our theory of one could be used to explain the other. Obviously more work needs to be done to flesh this out completely, but this line of thought seems to be a promising way of extending homomorphism theory to cover propositional attitudes and so this account of the propositional attitudes should be very attractive to anyone who accepts a higher-order theory of consciousness.

HOT Fun in the Summertime 1

Richard Brown 7 Comments

I have been working on my paper ‘Consciousness, Higher-Order Thoughts, and What It’s Like’ which I will present as a poster at the SPP and as a talk at the ASSC in June. This paper is basically the first half of a longer paper of mine Consciousness on my Mind: Implementing the Higher-Order Strategy for Explaining What It’s Like, which I wrote in my spare time and while trying to avoid working on my dissertation 🙂 parts of this paper are adapted in various posts around here…e.g. Explaining What It’s Like, Two Concepts of Transitive Consciousness, Kripke, Consciousness, and the ‘Corn, and As ‘Corny as I Want to Be. At any rate, I thought it might be helpful/interesting to post the basics of the paper.

The paper has two parts. In the first part I give the argument that all higher-order theories of consciousness are committed to the claim that there is something that it is like for an organism to have conscious propositional attitudes (like beliefs, desires, etc).  In the second part of the paper I suggest a model of the propositional attitudes that treats them as qualitative states and show that it actually fits nicely with Rosenthal’s homomorphism theory of sensory qualities.

Given that the transitivity principle says that a conscious mental state is a mental state that I am conscious of myself as being in the argument for the commiotment to the qualitative nature of conscious beliefs is pretty simple and straight-forward.

  1. The transitivity principle commits you to the claim that any mental state can occur unconsciously and so to the claim that pains can occur unconsciously
  2. An unconscious pain is a pain that is in no way painful for the creature that has it (the transitivity principle commits you to this as well, on pain of failing to be able to give an account, as promised, of the nature of conscious qualitative states)
  3. It is the higher-order state, and solely the higher-order state, that is responsible for there being something that it is like to have a conscious pain.
  4. So, when a higher-order state of the appropriate kind is directed at a beleif it should make it the case that there is something that it is like for the creature that has the belief, otherwise there is more to conscious mental states than just higher-order representation.

I will post on the second part of the paper a little later.

Truth, Justification, and the Quasi-realist Way

Richard Brown 3 Comments

In an earlier post (The Meaning and Use of ‘is True’) I argued that when discussing minimalism about truth we need to distinguish between redundancy theories (claims about the meaning is ‘is true’) and deflationism (claims about the nature of the property that the predicate is supposed to pick out). Once we see that redundancy theories conflate meaning and use we need an independant reason to accept deflationsim about truth. In this post I will argue against deflationism by arguing that it cannot account for our common sense feelings about justification in moral judgements by looking at the way that Simon Blackburn has appealed to minimalism in formulating his quasi-realist form of expressivism.

The basic problem for the deflationsist is that whatever account of moral contradiction they give will also be the correct account of contradiction in matters of taste. So ‘broccoli is disgusting’ will be true if and only if broccoli is disgusting and someone who said that it was not would really be contradicting me. From within the ‘taste framework’ broccoli is disgusting and I can just see that the Broccoli-ban and their feelings about the taste of broccoli are just objectively wrong. Of course all that any of this means is that I accept or agree with the sentiment that I expressed when I said that broccoli was disgusting. The story we tell here exactly parallels the story that is told in the case of moral judgments about cruelty, the Taliban, or whatever.

But clearly there could not be more of a difference between these two kinds of judgments. In particular, it seems obvious that this story about broccoli is just wrong. Common sense tells us that our feelings about broccoli may depend on two things. One, we may think that broccoli has a certain specific kind of taste and some people like that taste and others dislike it, which one it is may depend on what the person can taste, or it may depend on how they were raised, or just simply that they are disposed to like it or not and all of these vary from person to person. So there is nothing wrong with a person who thinks that broccoli tastes good, they simply have different tastes than ours and which you have doesn’t really matter. On the other hand we might say that broccoli has no determinate taste, it all depends on the person who does the tasting and the way that their taste buds are constituted.  Taste is a secondary property whose reality is totally mind dependant. So whether it is disgusting or not is relative to a person’s make up. Either of these common sense explanations of what is going on in the broccoli case differs dramatically from the common sense view of moral discourse. Only a madman would claim that our feelings about Saddam Hussein, the slaughter of children, truth telling, or promise keeping depended on us in either of the two ways mentioned above. Even Blackburn is not that reckless! He explicitly denies that anything like this is the right way to characterize moral disagreement. But the problem is that there is no way to distinguish these kinds of claims from the theoretical stand point of quasi-realism.

Since the theory is unable to distinguish these obviously distinguishable kinds of judgments, there must be something seriously wrong with deflationism about truth as it relates to a theory of justification. In fact, it seems obvious what is wrong with it. It very obviously and flagrantly turns moral matters into matters of personal taste. It does this by invoking redundancy and claiming that all there is to truth is its function in natural language of voicing agreement. To say that something is true is simply to repeat what we have said. If we happen to have said something about rape or the taste of broccoli makes no difference. Once we take the deflationary account of truth seriously we are no longer able to take moral discourse seriously.

Blackburn cannot respond that we can distinguish talk about broccoli and talk about genocide by the level of emotional commitment that we have to claims in one area as opposed to claims in the other because it is not inconsistent, on his view, that there be people who take broccoli as seriously as we take suffering. Thus the Broccoli-ban are every bit as serious about people who disagree with their feelings about the taste of broccoli, even to the point of putting dissenters to death. It may be the case that Simon Blackburn does not take talk about broccoli that seriously, but so what? If this is to be anything more than a mere autobiographical report what we need is a way to say that someone who did take talk about broccoli as serious as the Broccoli-ban is mistaken and further that their being mistaken is not simply an opinion of mine. Something, in short, that allows us to distinguish our talk about what depends solely on us and what does not. The deflationary theory of truth fares very badly here. It will only seem plausible if one thinks that that is all there is to truth, but this belief is not forced on us.

Not only does quasi-realism have no way to distinguish between the Taliban and the Broccoli-ban that is not mere autobiography we can see that the very same problem arises for other moral claims. Suppose someone from the Taliban were to respond to Blackburn that their views on women were the correct ones to have and that
Blackburn was wrong when he says that they (the Taliban) are objectively wrong. Let us suppose that they laugh at the idea that women are equal to men in any serious way. Then, according to the analysis that is on offer we are to conclude that what they have said is true just in case they really hold the attitudes that they say they do.
Blackburn then points out that they are ‘blind to the nature of women and the possibilities open to them’ and so on, but the important question of WHY it is that the Taliban have to agree with him on this point is left begging to be addressed. Of course by this I do not merely mean that the Taliban may irrationally refuse to admit that the evidence against them is compelling but rather the stronger claim that in some deep sense there is no way to really say which is right here. Each is saying something true when they express their moral sentiments about women. This is, of course, nothing more than relativism.

Do Thoughts Make Us Conscious of Things?

Richard Brown 4 Comments

The Transitivity principle says that a conscious state is a mental state that we are conscious of ourselves as being in, thus an account of transitive consciousness is key for implementing a higher-order theory. Rosenthal is clear that he thinks that thoughts can sometimes make us conscious of things. Here is what he says in the introduction to Consciousness and Mind

We are conscious of things when we are in mental states that represent those things in some suitable way. We might be conscious of something by seeing it or sensing it in some other way, or by having an appropriate thought about it (p 4)

 In particluar Rosenthal argues that when we think of some object as present we become conscious of that object. This claim is crucial for anyone that wants to hold a higher-order thought version of higher-order theory. 

 In some recent arguing with Pete over at the Brain Hammer, he has denied that thoughts can make us conscious of things. Here is the example that I gave

You get up in the middle of the night to take a leak, it is pitch dark in your room, you can’t see a thing, you think to yourself “there’s a table in this room by the door, I better be careful not to stub my toe”.

I claim that I am conscious of the table. Or consider another case. Suppose that for some reason you think ‘John is here, in this room’ with your eyes closed and where John is in fact in the room. I claim that I would be conscious of John.

Now Pete seems to think that it is obvious that I am NOT conscious of the table or of John in these cases, whereas I seem to think that it is equaly obvious that I am. Does anyone have an argument/intuitions either way?

UPDATE: I think I have actually found an argument for the claim that thoughts makes us conscious, other than the claim that it is intuitive in the above examples that I am. Rosenthal argues that we can be conscious of one and the same experience in various ways and these ways can be more or less exact. So, I could be conscious of an experience of red as a particular shade of red or juast as a generic shade of red, but preseumably the first-order state is in fact a determinate shade. This means that there is more to my conscious experience than the first-order expereinces that I have. We need a higher-order state that is able to capture these kinds of differences and the intentional/conceptual content of thought is arguably the only way to do this. I rather like this arguement…