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2009-04-22 -- Reply to Fred Cummins
FC: "many spurious and unhelpful distinctions have been drawn in the
literature [but] 'feeling' can[not] cover for all of them. My
phenomenological world of experience is big, rich..."
You feel a lot of different
things, but the (one and only) mind/body problem is the fact that you feel at
all. And the (one and only) explanatory gap is that there is no causal
explanation of how or why you feel, rather than just "funct." (And
I argue that there cannot be a causal explanation because there is no causal
room -- unless telekinetic dualism is true, and it isn't.)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/716
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2009-04-22 -- Reply to Arnold Trehub
AT: "a fruitful theoretical path
would be to accept (at least initially) the existence of consciousness
as an unexplained fundamental concept"
In other words, accept that we
do feel, and that we cannot explain how or why. I agree. It's true, so we
might as well accept it.
AT: "much of the content of
consciousness/feeling can be distinguished, described, compared, publically
represented, and analyzed"
What we feel can be described,
and its brain correlates (which are almost certainly also its causes) can
be found and analyzed. Reverse-engineering those will explain, functionally
and unproblematically, everything we do, and are able to do. But it will
not explain how or why any of that functing underlying our behavioral
capacities is felt. And although
we cannot do anything about that, it is definitely a (profound) explanatory
gap.
AT: "The key question [is]
"How does the brain create the gloriously varied content of
consciousness?"
That question will not be
answered either. We will find out how the brain generates adaptive
behavioral capacity, and, given that generating that capacity also happens
to feel like something, we will find out the correlates (and probable
causes) of those feelings. I don't think we'll have a substantive
explanation of how the brain generates feeling, but I think that there will
be little doubt that it does; but not being able to explain how the brain generates feeling is
the lesser problem: the fact that we cannot explain why (functionally speaking, i.e., causally speaking) the
brain generates feeling is the greater problem: all those gloriously varied
feelings, when all that was needed for adaptive purposes -- and all there
is causal room for -- is the underlying functing. The fact that (some of)
those underlying functions happen (for mysterious, unexplained reasons) to
be felt just stays the dangler it
is.
AT: "specifying putative neuronal mechanisms that can
be demonstrated to generate activities in the brain that
are analogous [to] feelings"
That is unfortunately just
correlates again.
AT: "unlike the smell of a rose, the
elementary properties and detailed spatial relationships in our
feeling of a triangle can be displayed in an external
expression which others can observe and examine"
I'm afraid I can't agree: The
geometric properties of detecting and manipulating triangles are functing,
and unproblematic. What it feels like
to see or imagine or manipulate a triangle, in contrast, is every bit
as problematic as what it feels like to see red. (Lockean primary and
secondary properties don't help here.)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/717
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2009-04-22 -- Reply to Robin Faichney
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RF: "I don't believe non-functions
necessarily need reasons to be"
You are not surprised that
organisms are not just the Darwinian adaptive machines (functors) that they
ought to be (based on everything else we know and can explain)? And you are
not bothered that this cannot be explained in the usual (functional) way
everything else in the universe can be?
RF: "Consciousness is nothing more nor
less than a point of view"
Isn't viewing a felt function? Assuming that you
would not say that a camera has a "point of view," does our
having one not deserve an explanation?
RF: "'consciousness' and 'free will' are
meaningless"
The fact that we feel (i.e.,
are conscious) is not only not
meaningless, but it is perfectly true. The fact that feeling cannot have
any independent causal power (unless telekinetic dualism is true, which it
isn't) is likewise true, and perfectly meaningful, if not especially
satisfying, if one is looking for an explanation of how and why we feel...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/718
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2009-04-22 -- Reply to Jason Streitfeld
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JS: "you can know that you have a
toothache, but not if you don't have a tooth"
No? What about referred pain,
or phantom limb pain, or hysterical pain, or hallucinated pain?
JS: "what are feelings?"
Everyone who feels knows that,
even if they effect not to.
Please see earlier in the
thread about ostensive definition and knowing what it "feels like to
feel."
JS: "How do you know they exist?"
I pinch myself occasionally:
Try it.
JS: "How do you know they don't cause
anything?"
I know they feel as if they cause things (e.g.,
when I move my finger because I feel like it). But I notice that there are
4 fundamental forces in the universe, and that they cover my brain's every
move, with no remaining degrees of freedom. There's no room for a 5th force
unless telekinetic dualism is true (and it's not).
JS: "And how do you know they correlate
with brain functions?"
Classical psychophysics: as my
anxiety level goes up, my GSR goes up, and vice versa. (That does not prove correlation, because there's
always room for skepticism as well as incommensurability arguments, but
it's good enough for a realist and a naturalist. It's not good enough to
close the explanatory gap, though because it's just correlation, not
causation.)
JS: "to the broad question, why
are some functions felt?, I would answer, what are you talking
about?"
No reply, if the difference
between what happens to you when I pinch you and what does not happen
(presumably) to a robot if I pinch it does not make it crystal clear to you
exactly what I am talking about.
JS: "I would not say that these functions are felt. That
would imply that there is something else apart from the functions which is
feeling them."
Well what would you say that
pinching you was and pinching the
robot (or you under anesthesia) wasn't?
JS: "I see nothing problematic about
regarding feelings as neurological functions interacting with other
neurological functions, just as I see nothing problematic about regarding
colors as wavelengths of light interacting with neurological
functions. The idea that these functions could occur without the
feeling of color vision implies a notion of feeling which I
do not understand."
Where you are not just seeing truths
(as I too see them), you seem to be seeing necessary truths, whereas all I see is unexplained truths --
and truths for which it seems perfectly reasonable (by analogy with
everything else) to feel as if they call for explanation...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/719
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2009-04-25 -- Reply to Arnold Trehub
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ON PSYCHOPHYSICAL INCOMMENSURABILITY AND
SENSORY-SEMANTIC DUALS
AT: "brain analogs... are much more
informative than mere correlates"
I am going to think out loud
about "duals" now, because I am not really sure yet what
implication I want to draw from it for the question of psychophysical
"analogs" vs "correlates."
The question is interesting
(and Saul Kripke gave it some thought in the '70s when he expressed some
skepticism about the coherence, hence he very possibility, of the notion of
"spectrum inversion": Could you and I really use exactly the same
language, indistinguishably, and live and interact indistinguishably in the
world, while (unbeknownst to us) green looks (i.e., feels) to me the way
red does to you, and vice versa?
Kripke thought the answer was
no, because with that simple swap would come an infinity of other
associated similarity relations, all of which would likewise have to be
systematically adjusted to preserve the coherence of what we say as well as
do in the world. ("Green" looks more like blue, "red"
looks more like purple, etc.)
At the time, I agreed, because
I had come to much the same conclusion about semantic swapping: Would a
book still be systematically interpretable if every token of
"less" were interpreted to mean "more" and vice versa?
(I don't mean just making a swap between the two arbitrary terms we use, but between their intended meanings, while preserving the usage of the terms exactly as
they are used now.)
I was pretty sure that the swap
would run into detectable trouble quickly for the simple reason that
"less" and "more" are not formal "duals" the
way some terms and operations are in mathematics and logic. My intuition --
though I could not prove it -- was that almost all seemingly local pairwise
swaps like less/more would eventually require systematic swaps of countless
other opposing or contradictory or dependent terms ("I
prefer/disprefer having less/more money..."), eventually even
true/false, and that standard English could not bear the weight of such a
pervasive semantic swap and still yield a coherent systematic interpretation
of all of our verbal discourse. And that's even before we ask whether the
semantic swap could also preserve the coherence between our verbal
discourse and our actions in the world.
But since then I've come to a
more radical view about meaning itself, according to which the only
difference between a text (a string of symbols P instantiated in a static
book or a dynamic computer) that is systematically interpretable as meaning
something, but has no "intrinsic intentionality" (in Searle's sense) and a text (say, a string of symbols P
instantiated in the brain of a conscious person thinking the thought that
P) is that it feels like something
to be the person thinking the thought that P, whereas it feels like nothing
to be the book or the computer instantiating the symbols string).
Systematic interpretability ("meaningfulness") in both cases, but
(intrinsic) meaning only in the (felt) one.
I further distinguish meaning,
in this felt sense, from mere grounding,
which is yet another property that a mere book or computer lacks: Only a
robot that could pass the robotic Turing Test (TT; the capacity to
speak and act indistinguishably from
a person to a person, for a
lifetime) would have grounded symbols. But if the robot did not feel, it still would not have symbols with
intrinsic "intentionality"; it would still be more like a book or
computer, whose sentences are systematically interpretable but mean nothing
except in the mind of a conscious (i.e., feeling) user. (It is of course an
open and completely undecidable question whether a TT-passing robot would
or would not actually feel, because of the other-minds problem. I think it
would -- but I have no idea how or why!)
But this radical equation of
intrinsic meaning (as opposed to mere systematic interpretability) with
feeling would make Kripke's observations about color-swapping (i.e.,
feeling-swapping) and my observations about meaning-swapping into one and the
same thing.
It is not only that verbal
descriptions fall short of feelings in the way that verbal descriptions
fall short of pictures, but that feelings (say, feelings of greater or
lesser intensity) and whatever the feelings are "about" (in the
sense that they are caused by them and they somehow appertain to them) are incommensurable: The relation
between an increase in a physical property and its felt quality (e.g., an
increase in physical intensity and a felt increase in intensity) is a
systematic (and potentially very elaborate and complicated) correlation
(more with more and less with less), but does it even make sense to say it
is a "resemblance"?
For this reason, brain
"analogs" too are just systematic correlates insofar as felt
quality is concerned. I may have (1) a neuron in my brain whose intensity
(or frequency) of firing is in direct proportion to (2) the intensity of an
external stimulus (say, the amplitude of a sinusoid at 440 hz). In
addition, there is the usual log-linear psychophysical relationship between
the stimulus intensity (2) and (3) my intensity ratings. The stimulus
intensity (2) and the neuronal intensity (1) are clearly in an
analog relationship. So are the stimulus intensity (2) and my intensity
ratings (3) (as rated on a 1-10 scale, say). And so are the neuronal
intensity (1) and my intensity ratings (3). But you could get all three of
those measurements, hence all three of those correlations, out of an
unfeeling robot. (I could build one already today.) How does (4) the actual
feeling of the intensity figure
in all this?
You want to say that my
intensity ratings are based upon an "analog" of that felt
intensity. Higher rated intensity is systematically correlated with higher
felt intensity, and lower rated intensity is correlated with lower felt
intensity. But in what way does a higher intensity rating RESEMBLE a
higher intensity feeling? Is the
rating not just a notational convention I use, like saying that
"higher" sound-frequencies are "higher"? (They're not
really higher, like higher in the sky, are they?) (Same thing is true if I
instead use the "analog" convention of matching the felt
frequency with how high I raise my hand. And if it's instead an involuntary
reflex rather than a voluntary convention that is causing the analog
response -- say, light pupillary dilation in response to increased light
intensity -- then the correlated feeling is even more side-lined!)
The members of our species
(almost certainly) all share roughly the same feelings. So we can agree
upon, share and understand naming conventions that correlate systematically
with those shared feelings. I use "hot" for feeling hot and
"cold" for feeling cold, because we have both felt those feelings
and we share the convention on what we jointly agree to call what.
That external corrective
constraint gets us out of another kind of incorrigibility: Wittgenstein
pointed out in his argument that there could not be a purely private language because then there could be no error-correction, hence
there would be no way for me to know whether (i) I was indeed using the
same word systematically to refer to the same feeling on every occasion or
(ii) it merely felt as if I was
doing so, whereas I was actually using the words arbitrarily, and my
memories were simply deceiving me.
So feelings are clearly
deceiving if we are trying to "name" them systematically all on
our own. But the only thing that social conventions can correct is their grounding: What we call (and do
with) what, when. I can't know for sure what you are feeling, but if you
described yourself as feeling "hot" when the temperature had gone
down, and as feeling "happy" when you had just received some bad
news, I would suspect something was amiss.
Those are clearly just
correlations, however. Words are not analogs of feelings, they are just
arbitrary labels for them. And although a verbal description of a picture
can describe the picture as minutely as we like, it is still not an analog
of the picture, just a symbolic description that can be given a systematic
and coherent interpretation, both in words and actions (if it is
TT-grounded).
Yet we all know it can't be
symbolic descriptions all the way down: Some of our words have to have been
learned from (grounded in) direct sensorimotor (i.e., robotic) experience.
"How/why did that experience have to be felt experience?" That's the question we can't answer; the
explanatory gap. And a lemma to that unanswered question is: How/why did
that felt experience have to resemble what is was about -- as opposed to
merely feeling like it resembles what
it is about? Why isn't grounding just functing (e.g., the cerebral
substrate that enables us to do and say whatever needs to be done and said
to survive, succeed and reproduce, TT-scale)? And why is there anything
more to meaning than just that?
To close with a famous example
of analogs: Roger Shepard showed psychophysically that the time it takes to detect
whether two shapes are different shapes or just the same shape, rotated, is
proportional to the degree of rotation. This suggests that the brain is
encoding the shapes in some analog form, and then doing some real-time
analog rotation to test whether they match. This is all true, but as it
happens the rotation occurs too fast for the subject to feel that it is
happening! So here we have the same three-way correlation ( internal neural
process (1) external stimulus (2), subject's outpu (3)) as in intensity
judgments), but without any
correlated feeling.
So is the neural
"analog" still to count as an analog of feeling, even when there is no feeling?
By the very same token, how is
one to determine whether psychophysical data are analogs of feeling, rather than merely systematic functional
correlates (especially when the explanation of how and why the correlated
functions are felt at all remains a complete mystery, causally, hence
functionally)? (This is the public counterpart of Wittgenstein's private
problem of error.)
All this, but I still think
that global systematic duals do not in general work, so neither sensory nor
semantic pairwise swapping is possible (except perhaps in some local
special cases) while preserving the coherence of either actions in the
world or the interpretability of verbal discourse. I don't think, however,
that the fact that coherent global duals are impossible, even if it is
true, entails that feelings are analogs
of physical properties, rather than merely systematic correlates.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/744
Reply
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2009-04-26 --
Reply to David Chalk
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CORRELATION, CORRESPONDENCE AND INCOMMENSURABILITY
DC: "One can either claim phenomenal
consciousness is epiphenomenal or not"
[I'd have said "One can either claim that feelings are
or are not causal"]
DC: "forget about why we should experience
anything at all. If p-consciousness is epiphenomenal...'Why should
the experience produced correspond to reality instead of simply... [having]
no correlation whatsoever?'"
First, a simplified gloss:
"forget about why we should feel anything at all.
If feelings are noncausal... 'Why should they correspond to reality instead
of simply... [having] no correlation whatsoever?'"
This was the subject of the
thread about correlates vs. analogs in psychophysics. "Correspondence" is a bit of a weasel word: It
could refer to a reliable but arbitrary mapping or a physical isomorphism.
I'd say (some) feelings were reliably correlated with (some) objects and
events temporally and functionally, but that they were qualitatively
incommensurable with them -- and that those were just two sides of the same
coin: the noncausal status of feeling. It is always the functing that bears
the weight, not the feeling.
DC: "I'd be very interested if you...
suggest papers or literature that might address this perspective."
(I regret I cannot help on this
score, except to add that for my part I would be grateful if pointers to
the literature were also always accompanied by a simple summary of the argument
that the cited work is making. Without wishing to offend anyone, I do think
this topic is more likely to advance if we minimize both the terminology
and the reliance on prior Writ, since too many words and too little of
substance have been written on the problem, and simplicity is so much more
likely to keep our eyes on the ball. The "arguments" referred to
below are a case in point.)
DC: "The argument that [1] nonlinear physical
systems are in some way holistic/non separable... and... [2] quantum mechanical
systems"
[1] is (in my opinion) empty
hand-waving (all the specifics of feeling slip right out of
"nonlinearity" -- ubiquitous in the world) and as for QM
[2]: the explanatory gaps of one field are not filled by the
explanatory gaps of another!
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/747
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2009-04-26 --
Reply to David Chalmers
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DC: (1) There's no explanatory gap, or one that's fairly
easily closable.
(2) There's a deep explanatory gap for now, but we
might someday close it.
(3) There's a permanent explanatory gap, but not an
ontological gap (so materialism is true).
(4) There's a permanent explanatory gap, and a corresponding
ontological gap (so materialism is false).
(3') There's a permanent
explanatory gap (because feelings are noncausal), but not an
ontological gap (because telekinetic dualism is false).
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/750
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2009-04-29 --
Reply to Derek Allan
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TELEKINETIC DUALISM: MIND OVER MATTER
DA: "For the unlettered outsider like
me, what is 'telekinetic dualism' exactly?"
"Telekinesis" (or
"psychokinesis") is often also called "mind over
matter": It's spoon-bending by Uri Geller. Not just "action at a
distance" as in electromagnetism or gravity, but action at a distance
caused by mental power alone. It's what psychics do. Spooky stuff.
I (and I assume you) don't
believe a word of it.
But even when I bend a spoon
with my hands, rather than at a distance, it feels as if it is my mind that is causing the bending, by
causing my hands to bend the spoon.
The alternative is that it is
electrochemical activities in the motor regions of my cerebral cortex that
are causing my hands to bend the spoon, and that my mentally willing it had
nothing to do with it -- except that it was quite closely correlated with
it.
(How closely correlated is
still a matter for some debate, as, for example, the work of Benjamin Libet might possibly be showing: It could be that an unfelt
cerebral event very slightly precedes
my feeling of willing my hand to move.)
So telekinetic dualism would be
true if there really existed a mental force, rather like the other 4
fundamental forces of nature -- electromagnetism, gravitation, strong
subatomic; weak subatomic (if there are indeed 4, for they may be destined
to be unified by some grand theory one day) -- and that 5th force, not the
other 4, were the cause of the movement of my arm.
But there is no 5th force. The
electrochemical/mechanical brain state preceding my movement, and
triggering it, explains the cause of my movement as fully as its trivial
counterpart does in a simple robot (except of course that the brain is much
more complicated and capable); and whether the trigger point in the causal
chain coincides with the moment I feel I am initiating the movement or
precedes it slightly does not matter a whit: Unless telekinetic dualism is
true, my feeling that I am doing it
because I feel like like it in reality plays no causal role in my
movement (even though the feeling is real enough).
And that is the mind/body
problem. Telekinetic dualism would have been the solution -- if it had been
true. But it isn't. There is no mental force, even though it feels like it:
It's all matter over matter. But we cannot explain why or how, because
there is no causal room. That's the explanatory gap.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/783
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2009-04-29 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
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ON PREDICTING WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE A BAT...
AT: "Not
all analog representations are felt, but all felt representations are
analogs of something somewhere in our egocentric space"
Arnold, I am afraid you have
given up the game here! The M/B problem and the explanatory gap are about
explaining how/why functions are felt,
rather than just functed. You work on analog functions, which is fine --
valuable, informative. But it is how/why (some) analog functions are felt that is at issue here, not
how/why they are analog, or functional.
AT: "while the existence of consciousness
(feelings) may be beyond our ability to explain, the contents of
consciousness can be explained"
What can be explained is the
functionality of analog functions; and what we have (as a gift) is their
correlation with feelings. How and why feelings are there and correlated
with functions is completely untouched. That is the explanatory gap.
AT: ÒSuppose the functing of a particular
kind of brain mechanism was theoretically specified, and on the basis of
its putative operating principles, one predicted the occurrence of a
particular kind of feeling never experienced before. Suppose the prediction
was successful and repeatable. Would you then be inclined to accept the
idea that the functing of the specified brain mechanism was the biophysical
aspect of the predicted feeling?Ó
Not inclined in the
least!
You are simply re-affirming the
feeling/functing correlation, not explaining. Sonar perception (of a bat)
feels like something. Humans don't feel sonar. If someone genetically
engineered a sonar perception mechanism that could be added to the human
brain and it produced not only bat-like functional capacities, but felt
perception, this would of course not prove anything at all (insofar as the
feeling/function problem is concerned), even if all went exactly as
"predicted." No one but a bat knows what it feels like to be a
bat today *although we do have a very rough idea from our other sense-modalities,
as all the senses resemble one another in a very general sense: guessing or
describing what it feels like to be a bat, for us, is rather like a
congenitally blind person guessing what it feels like to see.)
The very same is true of a
brand-new, artificially engineered sensory modality: Even if it works, and
produces both functioning and feeling, correlated, as predicted, it still
does not explain in the slightest how/why it is felt. It simply migrates
the mystery to a brand-new sensory modality.
And the fact that it uses
analog function does not illuminate the f/f problem by even a single
candela (or jnd), alas!
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/788
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2009-05-02 --
Reply to David Chalk
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ON MEASURING, FEELING, AND
COMMENSURABILITY: (AND MIND THE ONTIC/EPISTEMIC GAP!)
David, I think you have
misunderstood a number of things:
(1) The most important is the
ontic/epistemic distinction: Distinguish been what there really is (ontic) and what we can know about what there really is
(epistemic), e.g., what we can observe or measure. Although it was
fashionable for a while (though one wonders how and why!), it will not do
to say "I shall assume that what I can observe and measure is all
there is and can be." Not if you want to address the question of the
explanatory gap, rather than simply beg it!
(2) Observation and measurement
also have to be looked at much more rigorously. In the most natural sense
of "observe," only seeing creatures observe. A camera does not
"observe," it simply does physical transduction, producing a
physical "image" (on the film) which, again, is simply another
object that has some properties (which in turn are analogs of some of the
properties of the object from which the light entering the camera
originated). The seeing person who looks at the image on the film is the
one who observes, not the camera.
The same is true of
measurement: A thermometer does not "measure" temperature; people
measure temperature. The thermometer itself simply implements a physical
interaction, in which its mercury rises to a certain point on the
(man-made) scale, which can then be read off by a seeing, observing, measuring
human. The user is the one doing the measuring, not the thermometer.
But there is no reason to be
quite this rigid: There is not much risk in talking about instruments doing
the measurements, rather than the users of the instruments, just as long as
we do not read too much into "measuring." Ditto for
"observing." In particular, we must on no account make the
mistake of treating this instrumental sense of measuring and observing as
if it were felt measuring and
observing, because then, again, we are simply begging the question of the
explanatory gap and the feeling/functing problem.
In the instrumental sense of
"measurement," we can say, for example, that unattended
temperature sensors in the arctic transmitted their
"observations" to computers, which analyzed them and produced a
result, which (correctly) predicted global warming and the destruction of
the biosphere in N years. And that event would be the same event if humans
were already extinct and the arctic sensors and computers were running on
auto-pilot. But what would it mean?
(Remember that I have a
radically deviant view, not the standard one, on the subject of the relation between feeling and meaning: I think only felt meaning is meaning; without feeling
all one has is grounded robotic functing (and semantic interpretability).
So even if, after the extinction of humans, the arctic sensors and the
computers transmitted their data to robots that then took the requisite
steps to avert the global warming and save the biosphere, that would all
still just be physical transduction and nothing else -- except, of course, if the robots actually did feel --
but in that case it would be irrelevant that they were robots! They might
as well be us; and all the observing and measuring is again being done by
feeling creatures, and the feeling/function gap is as unbridged as ever!)
(3) Your third equivocation in
what follows below, is in the weasel-word "experience" -- which
can mean felt experience, as in
our case, or, used much more loosely and instrumentally (as with
"observing" and "measuring") it can merely mean an
event in which there was again some sort of physical interaction. Whether
the event was one billiard ball hitting another, or a camera snapping a
photo after all life is gone, or a computer receiving the bits and applying
an algorithm to them -- these are all pretty much of a muchness. There's no
"experience" going on there, because of course it's only really
an "experience" -- rather than just an event or state with
certain functional properties -- if
it is felt (by someone/something).
And that (and only that) is
what this discussion is all about, and has been, unswervingly, all along
(for those who grasp what the explanatory problem at issue is).
DC: "'telekinesis' is abhorrent because
it suggests there are nonphysical phenomena which influence the comings and
goings of material things.
Ordinary
("paranormal/psychic") telekinesis is not "abhorrent,"
it is simply false, in that all evidence contradicts it. All seemingly
telekinetic effects keep turning out to be either due to chance or to
cheating.
And as for (what I've called)
"telekinetic dualism" -- that too is not abhorrent. It is
perfectly natural, indeed universal, to believe and feel that our feelings
matter, and that most of what we do, we do because we feel like doing it,
and not just because functing is going on, of which our feelings are merely
correlates -- correlates of which we do not know the causes, and, even more
important, correlates which themselves have no effects of their own, and we
cannot explain how and why they are there at all. (That, yet again. is the
f/f problem and the explanatory gap.)
DC: "To suggest...momentum, position and
fields... might be influenced by 'feeling' seems
ludicrous."
It is not ludicrous; it is
simply false.
DC: "However, suggesting that momentum, position or
fields can create phenomena that are not measurable by measuring the
momentum, position and field is just as serious a problem as suggesting
said phenomena influences those measurements"
How did we get into
"measurability"? We can measure momentum today that was too
minute to measure yesterday. Maybe there's still momentum we can't measure,
or don't even know about. This is the ontic/epistemic error: What there is
(and isn't) in the world owes nothing, absolutely nothing, to what human
senses and instruments can or cannot "measure."
Moreover, the f/f problem and
the explanatory gap have nothing to do with the limits of human senses or
measuring instruments. They have to do with the fact that we feel, yet we
cannot explain how or why, because all evidence is that feelings, though
they are there alright, have no independent causal power. They are just
inexplicable correlates of the things that really do have causal power
(functing). Hence the mystery about why everything is not all just unfelt
functing: Why are some functions felt?
DC: "If you don't want to accept
telekinesis, then why accept the corollary which is that objectively
measureable properties produce phenomena that are not objectively
measurable?"
I have no problems whatsoever
with the very real possibility that measurable properties may also have
unmeasurable effects. The problem is that that has absolutely nothing to do
with the problem of explaining how and why some functions are felt. It is
not immeasurable effects of
functing that are the problem; it is the fact that some functing is felt.
(And although feeling is not, strictly speaking "measurable," it
is certainly observable -- indeed, it is the only thing that is
unproblematically observable! (It is no wonder that -- in struggling with
their own "explanatory gap" -- philosophers of quantum mechanics
have made something of a cult out of human observation, as being the
mysterious cause of the "collapse of the wave packet" that
separates our punctate world from the continuously superimposed smear it
would be if there were no people to read off the outcome of a
geiger-counter experiment! But, alas, this is just piling mystery atop
mystery...)
DC: "If you can't measure it, don't accept
it."
There's the barefoot
operationalism, again. This may be useful advice to an experimental
physicist -- if not to a superstring theorist -- because all they deal with
is functing anyway, whether measurable or unmeasurable. But it is just
question-begging if you are trying to explain how/why organisms feel rather
than just funct.
DC: "Earlier you suggested that experience/qualia/feeling
are measurable by the subject and reportable, but are not causal or perhaps
are epiphenomenal. Could you...clarify this?"
(First, why the needless
synonyms "experience/qualia/feeling" when feeling covers them all
and is problem enough?)
Second, I did not say feelings
are measurable. (I think physical properties and feelings are
incommensurable, and that measurement itself is physical, functional.) I
said our feelings correlate with functing. We say (and feel)
"ouch" when our skin is injured, not when it is stroked, or
randomly; we say (and feel) a sound is louder when an acoustic amplitude
increases, not when it decreases (or randomly). So the correlation is
definitely there.
But this does not help explain
why (or how) tissue damage and acoustic amplitude change is felt, rather
than functed. If our neurons simply fired faster when we were hurt, or when
a sound got louder, and caused our muscles to act accordingly, but we did
not feel, then we'd still have the psychophysical correlation
(stimulus/response) -- including, if you like, JND by JND psychophysical
scaling -- but no correlated feeling. So the question naturally arises:
what's the point of the feeling?
I also don't think I am
measuring anything when I feel, or report my feeling. I am simply feeling.
When I say "more" or "less," I am saying this feels
like more and that feels like less. The psychophysicist is doing the
measuring (not I): He is measuring what I do (R) and comparing it to the
stimulus (S) and noting that they are tightly correlated. I am just saying
how it feels. As I said in my reply to Arnold Trehub: apart from the S/R
correlation, there is not a separate "sentometer" to measure the
feeling itself; it's not even clear what "measuring a feeling"
would mean. Nor, as I said, am *I* "measuring" what I'm feeling,
in feeling it, and acting upon it. I'm just feeling it, and acting on it.
And there is a tight correlation between what happens outside me (S), what
I feel, and what I do (R). There better be, otherwise I would come from a
long line of extinct ancestors. But the co-measurement is only between S
and R, which are both functing and unproblematic. It feels as if I am
drawing on feelings in order to generate my R, but how I do that is rather
too problematic to be called "co-measurement" in any
non-question-begging sense of measurement. So although the feeling is
correlated with S and R, they are not commensurable, because the feeling is
neither being measured, nor is it itself a measure, or measurement.
You also seem to be
misunderstanding "epiphenomenal": Epiphenomenal does not just
mean "unimportant or unmeasurable side-effects." It means (1) an
effect that is uncaused, or (2) an effect that has no effects. I am a
"materialist" in that I am sure enough that feelings are caused
by the brain, somehow (i.e., they are not uncaused effects (1)); I simply
point out that we have no idea how
feelings are caused by the brain (and we never will). But the real puzzle
is not that: the real puzzle is why feelings are caused by the brain, since
feelings themselves have no effects (2). They are functional danglers,
which means that they are gaps in any causal explanation.
There is one and only one
epiphenomenon (unless QM has a few more of its own), and that is feeling: Caused (inexplicably) by
the brain, feelings themselves (even more inexplicably) cause nothing --
even though it feels as if they do.
DC: "You don't want experience to influence anything
physical. You don't want there to be an unmeasurable influence on any
material comings and goings."
First, this has nothing to do
with what I do or don't want!
Second, rather than equivocate
on "experience," can we please stick to calling it feeling!
Feelings have no independent
causal power, not because I don't want them to, but because telekinetic
dualism is false: there is no evidence for feelings having any causal
power, and endless evidence against it.
And whereas there can certainly
be unmeasurable effects, one cannot invoke them by way of an explanation of
something without evidence. Besides, the problem with feeling has nothing
to do with measurability; it's their very existence that is the problem.
And even if they were completely uncorrelated with anything else (the way
our moods sometimes are), they would still defy causal explanation.
DC: "As an example, we might consider a computer being
used to control some process such as the launching of a rocket. One
might say the computer has a causal influence over this process, albeit an
epiphenomenal one."
Why on earth would you want to
say the influence was epiphenomenal? This is a perfectly garden-variety
example of causal influence!
DC: "One might take the position that everything above
the molecular level is epiphenomenal, and certainly philosophers have
suggested exactly this."
Philosophers say the strangest
things. If everything about the molecular level is
"epiphenomenal," we have lost the meaning of
"epiphenomenon" altogether.
And that's just fine. I get not
an epsilon more leverage on the inexplicability of how and why some
functions are felt if I add that they are "epiphenomenal"!
DC: "computers, circuits or transistors are... all part
of a causal chain from atomic and molecular interactions to rocket
launch."
Indeed they are. No causal gaps
there. It's with feelings that you get the causal gap that lies at the
heart of the explanatory gap.
DC: "you're suggesting that experience is not part of
that causal chain. Experience/qualia/feeling can not play a part in
any way in this causal chain."
First, can we just stick with
the one term "feeling"? The proliferation of synonyms just
creates a distraction, and what we need is focus, and to eliminate
everything that is irrelevant.
The evidence (not I) says that
feelings have no independent power to cause anything. All the causal chains
on which they piggy-back mysteriously are carried entirely by
(unproblematic) functing.
DC: "What I don't think you're suggesting is that
feelings are epiphenomenal in the same sense as the computer's causal
influence is epiphenomenal"
(1) I don't for a minute think
a computer's causal influence is epiphenomenal. It's causal influence is
causal!
(2) I would suggest forgetting
about "epiphenomena" and just sticking with doing, causing and
feeling.
(3) All evidence is that
feelings do not cause anything, even though they feel as if they do. All
the causation is being done by the functing, on which the correlated
feeling piggy-backs inexplicably.
(4) The inability to explain
feeling causally is the explanatory gap.
DC: "let's suggest that the experience of the color
red can be reliably measured by a person."
Alas we are back into ambiguity
and equivocation.
It feels like something to see
red.
The feeling is correlated with
wave length (and brightness and luminosity), as psychophysics has
confirmed.
Persons don't measure. They
feel, and respond (R). Psychophysicists measure (S and R).
S and R are reliably
correlated, and since R is based on feelings, we can say feelings are
reliably correlated with S too (even though, strictly speaking, S and R are
commensurable, but neither is commensurable with feelings).
The human subject, however, is
not measuring, but feeling, and doing.
DC: "a digital camera can take light
and convert it to a digital pattern which can be reconverted to wavelength
using just three pixels on a computer screen. The intensity we
observe from each pixel is interpreted and converted to color inside the
brain. I doubt anyone would say that the experience of color exists
at any step of the process between recording the color red using the camera
and the reproducing of the color at a computer screen."
No, the feeling (sic) of seeing
color occurs in the brain of the feeling subject. Not before or after in
the causal (or temporal) chain.
(And why the computer? Let the
stimulus be color. No need for it to be computer-generated color. If the
digital-camera/computer is used instead as an analogy for the seeing
subject, rather than the stimulus, the answer is that there is no feeling
in the camera or the computer.)
DC: "let's say we had a device which could reliably
measure the experience of red. A human is just such a device if
experience reliably correlates to function/behavior."
David, with this
"assumption" you have effectively begged the question and given
up (or rather smuggled in) the ghost (in the machine): Until further notice,
the only devices that have experiences (feeling) to "measure" are
biological organisms. If you declare some other device to feel by fiat,
you're headed toward panpsychism (everything and every part and combination
of everything feels) which is not only arbitrary and as improbable as
telekinesis, but is probably incoherent too.
No device can measure a feeling
(sic); it can only measure a functional correlate of a feeling. And a human
subject feels the feeling;
he does not measure it.
DC: "Now, if this internal measurement
is reliable, then let's assume we can similarly produce this experience
computationally."
You've lost me. There is no
internal measurement going on, just feeling. And it is "reliable"
inasmuch as it correlates with S and R.
It is of course the easiest
thing in the world to replace a human -- feeling, say, sound intensity --
by a computer, transducing sound intensity, in such a way as to reproduce
the human S/R function.
Trouble is that in so doing you
have not solved the f/f problem but simply begged the question -- which is,
let me remind you: How and why are we not also like that unfeeling device,
transducing the input, producing a perfect S/R function, but feeling
nothing whatsoever in the process?
DC: "Let's assume our computer's transistors can produce
this reliable correlation and report dutifully the experience has been
accomplished. If this is possible, then that computer... has
physically measured the phenomenon in question and produced a physical
report."
You seem to think that the f/f
problem is getting a device to produce a reliable psychophysical detection
(S/R) function: It's not. The problem is to explain how and why we are not just devices that produce a
psychophysical detection (S/R) function: how and why we feel whilst we
funct.
(And this is not about
measurement, but about explaining the causal role of feeling in human
functing.)
DC: "If the measurement of the experience is reliable,
then that measurement can be (must be) converted to a physical signal so that
it is reportable, else it is not reliable. So if the measurement of
experience is reliably reported, then something can be done with that
signal. The signal can be interjected into a causal chain..."
I'm afraid you have left the
real problem long behind as you head off into this measurement
operationalism that begs the question at issue, which is not about reliable
"measurement" but about felt functing.
DC: "We can have an if/then statement in our computer
which says, If Xperience = RED then "SCRUB LAUNCH". In this
way, qualia/experience/feeling is interjected into the causal chain."
You really think feeling is
just a matter of an if/then statement in a computer program? Would a
problem with a solution as trivial as that really have survived this long?
If the physical substrate of feeling were (mirabile dictu) if/then
statements in a computation, there would still be (as with the perpetuum
mobile) that niggling little problem about why the if/then statements were
felt rather than just functed...
DC: "Unless I've screwed up somewhere, which is entirely
possible, the bottom line is that experience/feeling can be a part of the
causal chain if it is internally measurable (subjectively measurable) and
as long as that measurement is reliable."
I regret to say that you have
indeed screwed up at a number of points, big time! I've tried to point them
out. They begin with your operationalism about "measurability,"
they continue with the equivocation on "experience" (felt
experience? how/why felt, then, rather than just functed?), and your
(arbitrary) equation of feeling with "measuring,"
DC: "One might still claim this influence is
epiphenomenal as I've defined epiphenomenal above using the rocket launch
example."
As you've defined
epiphenomenal, epiphenomenality is so common that it casts no light at all
on the special case of the causal status of feeling.
DC: "We can explain everything a computer does by
examining the function of each transistor and circuit. The experience
for a computer therefore is merely functing.Ó
Here the equivocal word
"experience" has even led you to saying something that is
transparently false or absurd if stated in unequivocal language: "The
feeling for a computer is merely function" i.e., the computer does not
feel, it merely functs. (And our problem -- remember? -- was not computers,
but *us*, 'cause we really do feel, rather than just funct, like the
computer...
DC: "Experience can not be proven to
reliably correlate inside a computer, and in fact, experience is never
needed to explain anything a computer does."
For the simple reason that
(replacing the weasel-word "experience") the computer does not
feel. (Hence we are not just computers, or like computers in that crucial
respect.)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/800
Reply
|
2009-05-02 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
AT: 1. If we ask
how/why some functions are felt, we seem to grant that some functions are
not felt, and we can ask if there is a systematic biophysical
difference between felt functions and unfelt functions.
We had better grant that some functions are felt and some are not felt
(since it's true!): My toothache is felt; my thermoregulation is not
(although I can feel hot); a furnace's thermoregulation is unfelt, and the
furnace does not feel hot (or anything).
We can certainly look for
biophysical differences between my felt and unfelt functions; but just as
the functional correlates of my feelings will not tell you how or why I
feel, the functional correlates of felt and unfelt functions won't tell you
either. (And the reason is that there simply isn't the causal room for
feelings to have any effects at all (independent of their correlated
functions), hence there isn't any room for a causal explanation of how and
why we feel: the correlated functions tell all there is to tell.
AT: 2. We can
also ask why any felt function is felt. -- It seems to me
that question 2 is equivalent to asking why anything like feeling
(consciousness) exists at all. Would you agree, Stevan?
Yes, which is why I've
reformulated the mind/body problem as the feeling/function problem: How and why
are some functions felt?
About the "how" --
i.e., how are feelings generated? -- I don't doubt for a minute that the
cause is the brain. What I doubt is that we can explain how the brain
generates the feelings, rather than just the correlated functions. So this
is not about whether materialism is true. (Of course it is.) It is about
whether material (functional) explanation is complete: No it isn't. There's
an explanatory gap, insofar as the (fact of) feeling is concerned.
But the harder question is the
"why." The "why" is not teleological, it is functional,
and causal: In a sense, the only satisfactory answer to a functional
question -- why does this device work this way? what functional role does
property X play? -- is a functional answer. But if we ask a functional
question about feeling -- why does this device feel? what functional role
does the fact that it feels play? -- we draw a blank, because feelings have
no independent functional role. All the functionality is accounted for by
the functional correlates of feelings! That's why "Why are some
functions felt rather than just functed?" is the core question. And
since a satisfying answer could only be a causal/functional one -- and
there is simply no causal room for such an answer (given that telekinetic
dualism is false), we are stuck with an explanatory gap.
(I should have added in my earlier
reply, Arnold, that the object is not to predict what we feel,
but to explain that we feel (how, why). And that will not be
accomplished by analogs, representations, etc.)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/801
|
2009-05-02 --
Reply to Jason Streitfeld
|
UNTOWARD CONSEQUENCES OF
UNCOMPLEMENTED CATEGORIES
JS: "You may be right about the four
fundamental forces accounting for all brain activity, but I do not see why
we should think feelings can't be manifestations of these forces.
Thus, to rephrase my question, how do you know that feelings are not
as causally efficacious as anything else in nature?"
"Manifestations" is a
weasel-word!
I'm pretty sure feelings are
caused by the usual four FFs (i.e., I'm not a "dualist," for what
my beliefs are worth!).
But I am pretty sure no one has
explained how feelings are
caused by the usual four FFs. And I'm pretty sure it's impossible to
explain how they are caused. As usual, the attempted explanations will turn
out to be explanations of doings,
and doing capacity (i.e.,
functing), not feeling.
As for the fact that feelings
have no (independent) effects (i.e., apart from the unproblematic direct
effects of the same four FFs on which the feelings are piggy-backing
causally): I'm as sure of that as I am that telekinetic dualism is false.
(For that is what it would take for feelings to have effects.)
JS: "a correlation... does not answer my question. How do
you know that your anxiety level goes up when your GSR goes
up?"
I think I made it clear I was
not invoking a cartesian "know" (i.e., certainty) for the
correlations between feeling and functing, just for the fact that I feel. For the
correlations I am no surer than I am that, say, night follows day, or that
there's an external world...
JS: "why you think that you know about your
feelings in an indubitable and inexplicable way."
I am as certain I feel (when I
feel) as Descartes was of his cogito -- indeed, it is the cogito, which should have been "sentio ergo sentitur".
And I'm as sure that it's
inexplicable as I am that the 4 FFs are all there are, and all that's
needed to cause all that's caused. Thus, whereas there's room for feelings
as effects, there's no room for them as causes.
And explanation (here) means
causal explanation (of how and why feel rather than just funct).
JS: "a slightly different interpretation of
Wittgenstein... It is not only that a wholly private language lacks the
possibility of error correction; it is that the very notion
of error makes no sense here.
[so] you can... use the word "feeling" to
refer to something... private, but you cannot claim that this usage is
correct, and so it cannot indicate knowledge"
I do interpret Wittgenstein on private language much the same way you do, and that is the problem of error:
I can't nonarbitrarily name what I'm feeling, even with
public correction: I could be calling what it feels like to feel sad
"sad" one day and "happy" another day, without the
possibility of anyone -- including me -- being any the wiser, as long as my
public sayings about feelings were reliably correlated with my public
doings and sayings, and it all kept feeling fine to me.
(I could of course do the same
thing if Zombies were possible and "I" were a Zombie:
"My" sayings [including my sayings about feelings] and my doings
[of which my sayings are of course just a particular case] would be
reliably correlated in that case (i.e., if "I" were a Zombie)
too, again with the help of public corrective feedback on my doings and
sayings -- except that instead of random feelings that just fooled me each
time into feeling as if they were familiar recurrent feelings, there would
simply be no feelings at all: just
the functings that subserve the doing and the saying, which are of course
likewise functings.)
In a fundamental sense, all of
this is true about every feeling: even with public corrective feedback,
there could be a reliable correlation between whenever I'm feeling F and
what I refer to publicly as "F", but that correlation could be
just as reliable if it were just a correlation with the inclination to call
F "F" publicly, plus the feeling that I'm feeling that old
familiar F at the time, when in reality I am feeling something randomly
different every time. But that's really just about the reliability of
public naming (and the correlation plus external feedback takes care of
that); it's not about the reliability of the recurrence and identification
of the self-same feeling every time it feels as if it's recurring. (It's
not for nothing that "feeling" and "seeming" are fully
interchangeable in all of this!)
But none of that touches on the
fact of (ongoing) feeling itself, about which I have cartesian certainty
every time it happens. Not only do I know that I'm feeling, whenever I'm feeling, but even if I'm not
feeling what I called F the last time, and instead only
feeling-as-if-I'm-feeling what I called F the last time, the fact that I am
nevertheless feeling something
remains a cartesian certainty there too.
The best way to see this is to
forget about the naming of the feeling; in fact, assume we are talking
about a species that has no language. An alligator can have a headache
(that feels much like our headache feels) without knowing he has a head,
and without calling the feeling anything, nor even remembering ever having
felt that feeling before. Whatever the alligator is feeling at the time, it
is a certainty that it is
feeling, and that it is feeling that (though
that poor precartesian alligator may not be feeling that certainty!) And if
an alligator were capable of
cartesian doubt, he would be incapable of doubting he was feeling a
headache (when he was indeed feeling a headache), exactly as I would be
incapable of doubting I was feeling a headache -- i.e., doubting that I was
feeling whatever I was feeling -- when I was feeling a headache (though I
would be perfectly capable of doubting I had a head). (I repeat, the
current feeling need not be the same feeling as the feeling I had the last
time I felt I had a headache; it could just be dŽjˆ vu. This one could feel
hot and that one could have felt cold, and I could simply have forgotten
that. It doesn't matter. What matters is that I can be sure I am feeling
something (or other) now, and that whatever that something (or other) feels
like now is what it feels like (and not something else). (Again, the
synonymy of "feeling" and "seeming".)
An important further point I
made earlier in another posting: If I am to have a well-defined category, it must have both positive
and negative instances (i.e., members and nonmembers), and I must have
sampled enough of both to be able to pick out what distinguishes them,
reliably. Only then can I really "know" (this is not the cartesian know, just a
quotidian cognitive capacity to distinguish reliably) what's in the
category and what's not in it.
But the category
"feeling" is one of a family of special cases (each of them
causing conceptual and philosophical problems) because they are "uncomplemented categories" -- a kind of "poverty of the stimulus" problem arising from the fact that they are based
(and can only be based) exclusively on positive instances: In contrast, the
category "redness" is perfectly well-complemented: I can sample
what it feels like to see red things and non-red things, no problem. But
not so with the category "feeling": I can sample what it feels
like to feel: I do that every time I feel anything. And I can sample what
it feels like to feel X and to feel not-X. So through feeling X and
feeling not-X (if there's no evil demon playing random scrambling tricks of
the kind I mentioned above on the recurrence of my X and not-X feelings),
"X" and "not-X" (or, if you prefer external negation,
not-feeling X [when feeling Y instead]) are perfectly well instantiated
and complemented, hence reliably identifiable categories (insofar as
ordinary, noncartesian cognition is concerned).
But feeling itself is not; for
I can never feel what it feels like to not-feel (as opposed to merely
not-feeling X, in virtue of feeling Y instead). All I have is positive evidence for what it feels like to feel.
But I do have evidence. So
although the category "feeling" is uncomplemented, hence
pathological in some ways, it is nevertheless a category. It leaves me with
some indeterminacy about what to call what I'm actually feeling, and about
whether or not I've actually felt it before (as it seems). It will also
leave me with a lot of puzzles about what "feeling" is
(including, notably, the mind/body problem!). But it will still leave no
cartesian doubt as to the fact that feeling is indeed going on, when it is:
sentitur. (Of course "sentio ergo sum" would be far
too strong a conclusion to draw from such evidence: What is this
"I" that I supposedly am? (It's almost -- but just almost -- as
uncertain as the existence of my head, when all I have to go on, by way of
evidence, is my headache.) The best we can say is that it feels as if there is an "I"
-- but that's hardly more certain or cartesian than that it feels as if
there's an outside world, or a "you". (Life could have been just
one isolated, amnesic "ouch" after another, with no
"ego" -- yet that would already be enough to create the explanatory
gap.)
So sentitur is all we can be certain about, regarding feeling; but
that's quite enough to generate the full-blown mind/body (feeling/function)
problem.
(All this is by way of my
sketching my update on Wittgenstein's private-language argument and
problem-of-error, plus a minor tweak of Descartes' cogito.)
JS: "so, when you say, "I know with absolute
certainty what red is, because it is my feeling alone and I experience it
directly"... we should conclude that you aren't saying
anything."
No, as I've just argued, I
cannot have Cartesian certainty about the coupling between my feeling and
the world, nor about the recurrent identity of my feeling (what it's
called, and whether it's the same thing I felt before under that name) but
I can have cartesian certainty about the fact that I am feeling, when I'm
feeling (and despite the fact that feeling is an uncomplemented category).
JS: "As W. says, 'a nothing would serve just as
well as a something about which nothing could be said' "
It's a subtle point, but I am
not talking here about what can be said; I
am talking about about what can be known,
with the same certainty as "if P then P" -- and even by an
alligator, who cannot think "if P then P" but is just as bound by
it...
JS: "Perhaps you only mean to say that you
can know you feel like you have a toothache without observing
your body in any way."
Yes: I am talking exclusively
about what and when one feels, not about any coupling between the feeling
and the world (of bodies, etc.). That has exactly the same scope as the
cogito -- indeed it is the
cogito, properly put (sentitur).
JS: "In your view, feelings do not inform us about
our bodies at all--for, if they so informed us, then they would play a
causal role in our ability to learn about and function within the
world. And if observations of our bodies could inform us of our
feelings, then there would be no ''hard problem'"
Correct. It is the functing (on
which feelings piggy-back, inexplicably) that takes care of our doings and
sayings about bodies, including, mysteriously, the correlation between
bodily functings and feelings. And there is no cartesian certainty about
functings (though of course they are largely reliable, adaptive and
veridical); there is certainty only about the fact of ongoing
feeling (and about "if P then P").
JS: "This is a form of dualism. Whatever
feelings are and whatever functions are, information about one cannot be
gained from the other. You prefer to call your position
"epiphenomenalism," because you wish to maintain some notion of
causal dependence between bodily states and feelings, even if that
dependence is only one-way. But such a causal dependence is
unknowable--a something about which nothing could be
said."
(1) For what it's worth, I
fully believe the brain causes
feelings (about as fully as I believe that gravity causes apples to fall);
hence I am not a "dualist."
(2) But gravity is one of the
four fundamental forces (FFs), hence it calls for no further causal
explanation. Feeling is not, hence it does.
(3) And hence I note that
although the brain causes feelings, no one has explained how the brain causes feelings.
(4) Worse, no one has explained
why the brain causes feelings,
given that the four FFs unproblematically cause and constitute all causal
function (functing).
(5) So feeling remains a
causal/functional dangler: caused (somehow) by the brain, but not itself
having any causal power of its own, over and above the functing that it is
correlated with, and that accounts causally -- and fully -- for everything
we do and say, without the need or room for any extra causal help.
(6) I don't find it
particularly useful or informative to call this
"epiphenomenalism": it is simply a failure of causal explanation,
an "explanatory gap" (one might as well call it
"exceptionalism," equally unilluminatingly) -- but I suppose one
is free to call an unsolved and insoluble explanatory problem whatever one
likes...
JS: "When you ask "why are some functions
felt?," what is it that you suppose is feeling the functions?
What sort of entity can feel? I do not see how you can answer this
question without explicitly embracing dualism; and if you do not answer it,
then your usage of the term "feel" becomes highly suspect"
The trouble with uncomplemented
categories is that they do raise a host of puzzles:
(a) I know (cartesianly) that
feeling is going on (sentitur).
(b) I have evidence
(noncartesian) that there is a world, that I have a body, that others have
bodies, and that my feelings (seemings) are very closely correlated with
what seems to be going on (doings, functing) in that outside world.
(c) It is part of the nature of
feeling that feelings are felt.
"Unfelt feelings" are self-contradictory (and meaningless), and
the notion of unfelt feelings has given rise to a lot of incoherent
hocus-pocus (such as the notion of unconscious thoughts and an unconscious
mind -- rather than the [mostly] unfelt functing plus the [minority of]
felt functing that is all there really is).
(d) It also seems to be part of
the nature of feeling that a feeler feels the feelings and that it
feels-as-if I am the feeler. Insofar as cartesian certainty is concerned,
all I can say is that it is certain that feeling is going on (when it is),
and that it feels like I am the feeler. In certain disordered states,
that's not so clear; but from a sober (but noncartesian) standpoint, it is
very likely that my brain causes my feelings, and also causes me, as a
continuous identity, feeling and remembering the feelings I've felt.
(e) No one know how or why the
brain causes feelings; the brain (like everything else, including Darwinian
evolution) is a functor. It is natural to ask how and why some brain
functions are felt, but there is no causal room for a causal answer.
I think I've answered your
question as well as one can, and without "explicitly embracing
dualism".
JS: "There is no practical difference between
epiphenomenalism and dualism that I can see."
Rather than talking ontics (on
which I am a monist), I prefer to talk epistemics (on which I prefer to
call an explanatory failure by its proper name).
JS: "Your position cannot be established a
posteriori. Appeals to common knowledge and ostensive definitions can
only beg the question. You do indicate something like Chalmers'
conceivability argument when you talk about robots, and that is an a priori
argument; however, I am not convinced"
I take the cogito (or sentitur,
rather) to be based on evidence we have from experience (hence a
posteriori) -- indeed it is the paradigmatic case of evidence from
experience (i.e., feeling). But it is experiential evidence only of the
indubitable (incorrigible) fact of experience, not more -- and it is
certainly not an explanation of the causes or effects of experience.
No, I have no use whatsoever
for "conceivability" arguments. I have no idea whether or not
there can be Zombies (i.e., unfeeling Turing-scale
robots, indistinguishable in their
doing/saying capacities from ourselves), but what I happen to believe is
that if a T-scale robot is possible, it will feel.
Nor is the argument that there
is no causal room over and above the 4 FFs an a priori argument. It's
contingent on the evidence that there are only the 4 FFs. Telekinetic
dualism seems a perfectly conceivable, indeed plausible, alternative. It
just happens to be false.
REFERENCES
Harnad, S. (1987)
Uncomplemented Categories, or, What is it Like to be a Bachelor? 1987
Presidential Address: Society for
Philosophy and Psychology. http://cogprints.org/2134/
Harnad, S. (2005) To
Cognize is to Categorize: Cognition is Categorization, in Lefebvre, C. and Cohen, H., Eds. Handbook of Categorization. Elsevier. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11725/
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/804
Reply
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2009-05-04 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
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PREDICTING WHAT WE FEEL IS NOT EXPLAINING THAT WE FEEL
AT: What, in your opinion, might count as a
causal explanation of a feeling rather than a mere correlate or an analog
of a feeling?
Since I do not believe that
feeling can be causally explained, you are actually asking me to give you a
counterfactual-conditional reply. That's a bit like asking someone who does
not believe that one can trisect an angle or build a perpetuum mobile what
would count as a trisected angle or a perpetuum mobile! But for trisection
we have a proof it's impossible and for perpetual motion we have a law of
Nature that entails that it is impossible -- whereas I have neither proof
nor law in the case of the causal explanation of feeling. So all I can do
is repeat the argument:
If telekinetic dualism were
true -- that is, if there were evidence that there could be "mind over
matter," with the mental force being a fifth addition to the existing
array of four fundamental forces of Nature (electromagentic, gravitational,
strong, weak) -- then that would be a causal explanation: Apples fall
because of gravitation, and our fingers rise because we will it (we do what
we do because we feel like it, not because we are impelled by the other
four forces to do it).
But telekinetic dualism is
false; all evidence is against it.
So whereas we certainly cannot
(thanks to Descartes) doubt that feelings exist (and whereas feelings are
themselves caused [though we have no idea how] by our brains almost as certainly as apples are
caused to fall by gravity), we can conclude from the fact that telekinetic
dualism is almost certainly false that feelings almost certainly do not
themselves have any causal consequences. So we cannot explain (causally)
why we feel. All we can explain is what our bodies can do (and how).
Feelings piggy-back (somehow) on that functing, without any causal
consequences, although they are quite tightly correlated with our functing.
Your own focus, Arnold, is on
predicting what we feel (which
can in many cases be done, thanks to the tight correlation); but predicting
what we feel, no matter how minutely, is in no way explaining that we fail, neither how, now why.
(Predicting what we feel simply
takes the fact that we feel for
granted, thereby begging the question of explaining how or why, and leaving
the explanatory gap gaping.)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/819
2009-05-04 --
Reply to Derek Allan
|
"FUNCTING" IS ALL OF
PHYSICAL, BIOLOGICAL AND ENGINEERING CAUSAL DYNAMICS
DA: Could someone define the term
'functing' for me please?
"Functing" (aka,
function) is just ordinary causal dynamics, whether in natural inanimate
physical systems, biological ones, or artificially engineered ones:
everything observed and described in the physical sciences, biological
sciences, and engineering.
Physical, biological and
engineering explanation is all causal and functional. (It's sometimes
called "functionalism."). And I coined my tongue-in-cheek term
"functing"
to remind those who are attempting to provide a functional explanation of
the causal role of consciousness (feeling) what they are really up
against.
The "mind/body"
problem is really just the "feeling/functing" problem. When you
put it like that, it becomes transparent that "explanations"
such as "the function of pain is to alert the organism to the
presence of tissue damage and the need to take evasive action" are
circular and hence empty, hence question-begging, because one can always
reply: "Yes, but how/why is the function felt, rather than just functed?"
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/827
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2009-05-05 -- Reply to David Chalk
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David, your treatment has
become a bit too complicated for something that should be kept simple if
there's to be any hope of gaining any new insight at all.
The answer to (what I think
is) your question -- "How can feelings be there, reliably correlated
with the functing, and yet not be in the 'causal chain'?" -- is
this: Both the feeling and the correlated functing have a common cause
(the functing unproblematically, the feeling inexplicably), and that
common cause is functing too. The felt effects of the functing are
correlated with the functed effects of the functing, but only the functed
effects are, in their turn, causal. The feelings just dangle --
correlated, but lacking any causal power of their own. And that's the
explanatory gap.
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/838
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2009-05-07 -- Reply to Arnold Trehub
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THE EXPLANATORY GAP IS EPISTEMIC,
NOT ONTIC
AT: "is feeling a physical brain event or
a non-physical event?"
Feeling is an (inexplicable)
effect of physical brain events. No use fussing over whether or not it's
"physical" (of course it is, somehow): the problem is with explaining its causality (how? why?). That's the mind/body
(feeling/function) problem, and it's an explanatory gap, not a pretext for ontologizing about whether
there are one or two kinds of "stuff." Even if God sent a
messenger and reassured us that everything was strictly physical, that would not answer the how/why
question about causality, hence it would not close, nor even narrow,
the explanatory gap one bit!
(By the way, I have a
response to your earlier, longer posting underway. Just need the time to
put some finishing touches on it!)
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/852
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2009-05-07 -- Reply to Arnold Trehub
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AT: "what exactly is your reason for
asserting that feeling is a causally inexplicable brain event?
(You might say unexplained, but inexplicable?!)"
Arnold, you are right that
there are two distinct things one can say here, and I am in fact saying
them both:
(1) Unexplained. That there is no explanation of how-and-why we feel is, I think,
uncontested and incontestable. The only explanation would be an account
of how feelings are caused by the brain, and what effects they have, and
there isn't one.
(2) Inexplicable. That there cannot be a causal explanation of how-and-why we feel is
just an argument: I have argued that it follows from the fact that (a)
functions and feelings are correlated but incommensurable and (b) that
there is neither need nor room for feelings to be independent causes
(except if telekinetic dualism were true, which it is not), because the
four fundamental forces cover all of causality, which is all of
functionality. Hence if brain function does somehow cause feelings in
some mysterious way (as it is virtually certain that it does, and I of
course believe it does), feelings are doomed to just dangle, functionally
superfluously, having no independent causal power of their own, all
effects we feel as being caused by feelings being in reality caused, and
hence fully explained by the brain functions (and brain I/O) that
(mysteriously) cause the feelings. This leaves the feelings dangling,
inexplicably. An explanatory gap.
Arnold, with apologies, I
hope I will be able to finish my longer response to your earlier,
unanswered pointing N - 2 this evening!
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/857
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2009-05-08 -- Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
WHY WOULD
TURING-INDISTINGUISHABLE ZOMBIES TALK ABOUT FEELINGS
(AND WHAT, IF ANYTHING, WOULD THEY
MEAN)?
AT: "you assert that feelings are caused by
the brain"
I said that (for what it's worth)
I believe that feelings
are caused by the brain almost as confidently as I believe that apples
are caused to fall by gravity. The difference in confidence is because we
can explain causally how apples
fall (we understand universal gravitation) but we cannot explain causally
how the brain causes feelings.
I also said that I do not believe it is possible to explain
causally how the brain causes feelings (but all I gave to support that
belief was negative evidence [that telekinetic dualism is false] plus a
methodological argument [incommensurability].
AT: "you assert that feelings
have no causal consequences"
I asserted that in the form
of the empirical fact that telekinetic dualism is false: All causal
consequences of brain activity are causal consequences of the four known
forces. There is no fifth force (feeling).
It is a fact -- an
unexplained fact but a fact -- that we feel, and it is almost certain
that our feelings are caused (mysteriously) by our brains. But as feeling
is not an independent fifth force, whatever feels as if it it is caused
by feelings is actually caused by the brain (which also [mysteriously]
causes feelings).
The paradigmatic example is
the feeling that my finger moved because I willed it. It does indeed feel
that way, but all evidence is that it moved because of activity in my
brain -- perhaps the same activity that (mysteriously) caused the feeling
that my finger moved because I willed it.
Feelings have no causal
consequences; it is only what (mysteriously) causes feelings that has
causal consequences. It only feels
as if the feelings are the causes.
It is for this reason that
although it is a mystery -- and I think an unresolvable mystery -- how we feel, it is an even bigger
mystery why we feel. For it
looks as if everything that we do that is accompanied by feelings --
including the feeling that the doing is happening because of those feelings -- can
be done without feelings: Indeed, the fact that the doing is accompanied
by feeling is not an explanatory aid
(apart from the fact that it squares with how we feel when we do):
Rather, it is an overwhelming explanatory burden, because we cannot explain either how feeling is
caused by the brain or what feeling itself causes that is not already
caused by whatever (mysteriously) causes feeling.
This might help set
intuitions: I don't think anyone will deny that if the human species were
able to do all it can do --
talk, learn, teach, socialize, invent, do science and engineering, write
history, biography and fiction, etc. -- but it did not feel, then there
would be no mind/body problem or explanatory gap. Things would be much
more straightforward: Cognitive neuroscience would only need to explain
the (formidable) capacity of this hypothetical insentient species to do
and to say all that our own species can do and say, but not the fact that
they feel (because they do not feel).
(I am not here suggesting
that Zombies are possible: I am just trying to highlight the extra
explanatory burden that the undeniable fact of feeling imposes on causal
explanation. It should be clear that the existence of feelings is a
liability rather than an asset for causal, functional explanation.)
Now I said things would be a
lot more straightforward, explanatorily speaking, if there were no feeling, just doing -- if all
"functing," nonbiological and biological, were just unfelt functing. There would,
however, be an unresolved puzzle even then -- though it would not be a
causal puzzle: Why would such an insentient species speak of feeling at
all? Why would they say "I am feeling tired" rather than just
"I am tired" (meaning my body is fatigued)? (I don't think
there would be any problem with the use of the indexical "I" by
such a species, by the way, despite all the fuss some make about the
concept of "self" and "self-consciousness": the
trouble, as usual, is with the felt
aspect and not the functional
aspects of "selfhood.")
Possibly the feeling
vocabulary would be useful as a shorthand for speaking of internal states
in the speaker and others. After all, internal
states are just as invisible as mental (i.e.,
felt) states. "Feeling happy" and "feeling sad"
may all have internal functional counterparts in the sort of "mind-reading" that this twin species would still have to be
able to do, if it were to have the same adaptive social and verbal
capacities as our own species. (To "feel happy" might for them
be an internal state that was relatively free of processes correlated
with actual or impending tissue damage, or free of data predictive of
other current or future untoward adaptive consequences, and/or correlated
with the attainment, or the impending attainment, of a functional goal,
perhaps related to survival, reproduction, competition, or social
success: all of these make sense as purely adaptive, functional
categories, in a Darwinian survival machine, irrespective of whether it
just functs them, or also feels them as it functs them.)
Maybe even the locution
"I am sincerely sorry," uttered in its pragmatic social
context, has a purely functional role to play, even for a Darwinianly
successful Zombie; and the only reason we find that counterintuitive is
that we do feel, and find it
difficult even to imagine what it would be like not to -- with good
reason, because "be like" means "feel like," and of
course it would feel like nothing, "feeling" being an uncomplemented category. (Thus
does the fact of feeling not only create the mind/body [feeling/function]
problem and the gap in causal explanation, but the anomalous nature of
"feeling" as a category adds a further sense of
"mystery" to the explanatory gap:
A tougher distinction in such
a Zombie species would be the distinction between Zombie psychopaths
(who, like our psychopaths, purportedly do not feel guilt or remorse) and
Zombie normals, who purportedly do. But I think that it only takes a
little reflection to see that there are behavioral and functional distinctions
between our psychopaths and normals that could, in Zombie psychopaths and
normals, be based on responsiveness to certain internal states, without
the internal states having to be felt states. (These behavioral and
strategic distinctions might even be relevant to explaining functionally
why the psychopath genotype exists at all, in our sentient species.)
(Note that, because we do
feel, we have trouble imagining a species saying and doing the same
things we say and do, but without feeling. But the real trouble is in the
other direction! It is the Zombified version of feeling-talk and
feeling-action that has the straightforward functional explanation, and
the feeling that is the a-functional dangler, not the other way round!)
So what about "the mind/body
problem" itself? Would philosophers in this hypothetical insentient
species still ponder and argue over the causal power of feeling when they in fact have no feeling,
and the only referent for "feeling" in their discourse is
"internal functional state"? Would Zombie philosophers
"know" that for them, there was no distinction between felt and
unfelt functing? Would they really have any knowledge at all, as opposed to mere know-how, given that they are
incapable of more than lip-service to the Cartesian "sentio ergo
sentitur"? The cogito does not work, after all, for inferred states: It only works for
felt states. (That's the quintessence of Descartes' method of doubt.)
Some may want to conclude that this puzzle is in fact
evidence for the causal power of feeling after all, for only a species that actually felt could engage in
discourse about the feeling/function problem coherently!
I'm inclined to conclude
otherwise. I happen to doubt that there could be a feelingless
("Zombie") species (natural or artificial) that was
nevertheless Turing-Indistinguishable from ourselves. If they were really
feelingless, there would be other differences in what they did and said.
And what squares our own species' discourse with our feelings is whatever
it is in our brains that keeps our feelings so correlated with our
functing: It is not an independent causal consequence of the fact that we
feel, but a consequence of the common (functional) cause of both our
doings/sayings and the feelings that they (mysteriously) generate as a
lockstep accompaniment.
So the question of how and
why we feel (which is exactly the same as the question of how and why we
are not just Darwinian Zombies) also leads to the question of how and why
there could not be Zombies that were Turing-Indistinguishable from us --
if there could not be. For if there could, then the mystery could be just
due to some (colossal) evolutionary quirk or coincidence in the case of
the terrestrial biosphere. If there could not be Zombies, then the
mystery could be a fundamental principle of functional organization that
we will never know or understand, because the felt component will always
be functionally superfluous under any causal explanation that does not
cheat or beg the question.
AT: "you are claiming feelings are
either (a) non-physical events caused by the brain in a dualistic
universe and naturally have no causal consequences for
subsequent brain activity, or (b) they are physical events cause by the
brain but have no causal consequences for subsequent brain
activity. Which case (a or b) do you endorse?"
I hope it is clear by now
that I endorse (b) and add only that I think that how the brain causes
feelings is also inexplicable, because of the incommensurability of
function and feeling, despite their correlation. (I invite others to
attack me on this, and force me to defend it more rigorously: Is it
coherent to say "correlated yet incommensurable"?)
AT: "[You say] that in order to
explain why we feel we would have to show that feelings have
causal consequences."
Indeed we do, otherwise
feelings remain the mysterious, unexplained dangler they are -- and the
explanatory gap gapes.
AT: "Am I correct in assuming... you
believe we can explain how the brain causes feelings, but we
are unable to explain why the brain causes feelings?
No, I don't believe we can
explain how the brain causes feelings either (but I do believe the brain causes
feelings). I do not, however, believe that feelings cause anything else:
As I said, there's no causal room. Hence here it is not a matter of an
actual causation that we cannot explain (the way we cannot explain how
the brain causes feelings, even though it undoubtedly does) but an
inexplicable lack of causation,
making it inexplicable why we
feel.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/858
Reply
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2009-05-10 -- Reply to David Chalk
|
HOW AND WHY FEELINGS ARE
INEXPLICABLE
DC: "I've read through a number of
your papers but I can't find an explanation of why feelings are
inexplicable."
They are inexplicable because
explanation is causal (functional) explanation, and we cannot explain (1)
how (functionally) the brain
causes feelings (even though it undoubtedly does), because feelings are incommensurable with function, and
we cannot explain (2) why
(functionally) the brain causes feelings, because there is no causal room
for feelings themselves to have any effects (hence any function) apart
from the effects and function of whatever (mysteriously) causes feelings.
Apart from that, all I can
give is examples of the way functional/causal explanation of both how and
why is always destined to fail:
Example 1: The reason
tissue damage is felt (as pain) rather than just processed (as stimulus
avoidance, etc.) is that the felt pain signals the organism to avoid the
stimulus. (Explanatory Gap:
Why is the signal to avoid the
stimulus (etc.) felt, rather
than just functed? And how is
it felt, rather than just functed?)
Example 2: The reason
we hear sounds rather than just process acoustic signals is that we have
to select which sounds are relevant. (Explanatory Gap: Why
is the selection felt, rather
than just functed? And how is
it felt, rather than just functed?)
Example 3: The reason
it is important that we understand what sentences mean, is that we have
to be able to act in accordance with what they mean. (Explanatory Gap: Why is the understanding felt, rather than just functed?
And how is it felt, rather than
just functed?)
Etc. You will find that if
the goal is to explain how or why a function is a felt function rather than just a "functed" function
(with exactly the same
functionality), it will always turn out that there is no independent functional role that can be
attributed to the fact that it is felt: The same thing, unfelt, would be
functionally equivalent. And it is not an explanation to insist that it
is just some sort of "brute fact" about certain functions that
they just are felt functions.
That may well be the case. But we were looking for a causal/functional
explanation of how and why, not merely a mysterious
assertion that!
That's the explanatory gap:
It's an epistemic gap, not an ontic one.
DC: "...someone in DJC's (1) category above might claim
that once science has explained how and why all the neurons and glia
cells in our brains interact... every molecular interaction... there is
nothing left to explain."
They can claim that. But it
does not answer our how/why question, hence it leaves the explanatory gap
fully agape.
There are two ways to
construe the claim than there is "nothing left to
explain."
One is that we cannot explain
any further. That, I think, is quite correct (because feeling and
function are incommensurable and because there is no room for feelings to
have causal power of their own, over and above the causal power of the
functions that [mysteriously] cause them).
The other is to say that
therefore everything has been fully explained. That, I think, is
obviously false, since we have not explained how or why some functions
are felt. Yet it is a fact that they are felt. And it is as natural as
can be to ask "how and why?". To reply that it is simply a (mysterious)
brute fact of nature is not to reply at all, hence to leave it
unexplained.
Hence the explanatory gap.
DC: "First.. feeling... is something that happens... at
a specific time...supervenient on the brain so... we... know...
where..."
I find the weasel-word
"supervenience" as vacuous and ineffectual as all the synonyms
and paranyms of "feeling" ("consciousness,"
"qualia," "mind," etc. etc.) that we love to fall
back upon when we have nothing substantive or new on offer: We feel.
That's a cartesian certainty. Hence there are feelings. Sentitur. Based on everything else
we know about the world, it's of course the brain that causes feelings.
The question is: how? and why?
Replying that feelings
"supervene" on brain function adds absolutely nothing.
DC: "I'd agree with Leibniz... [that
it is] inexplicable on mechanical grounds... in mathematical
terms..."
David, I wonder why -- if you
agree with Leibniz that feeling is inexplicable -- you are asking me to
explain how/why feeling is inexplicable! But I hope I have by now
explained it: Because we cannot say how or why we feel rather than just
funct; how/why are functional questions.
DC: "Physical phenomena in
comparison, are explicable... an easy problem. [Explaining feeling
is] a hard problem.. not a physical event, although it... supervene[s] on
physical events."
Yes, a functional/causal
explanation of everything other than feeling is (in principle) an
"easy" problem: normal science and engineering. Explaining how
and why we feel is not just "a" hard problem, but the hard problem (and, in my
opinion, insoluble).
(On the other prominent
candidate for being a "hard" problem -- "duality" in
quantum mechanics -- I can only plead nolo
contendere, for want of the technical expertise even to judge how
much of a problem it is, whether or not it is soluble, and if so, how and
why.)
But the only thing that is
being said in saying that the feeling/function problem is
"hard" is that all other scientific and engineering problems
are functional (and often also mathematical), but that those resources
are ineffectual for explaining how and why some functions are felt -- for
the (simple!) reason that "how/why" are functional, causal
questions, and (except on pain of telekinetic dualism), feeling has no causal (hence no functional) power.
DC: "[T]he TT isn't a test... in any
scientific or engineering way... [it] does not check for the motion
of parts... no mathematical treatment... a non-starter..."
I think you are profoundly
wrong about that. Candidates for passing the TT will be designed by human
beings; the candidates will have moving parts, and both dynamic and
computational processes, known to the designer.
What the TT tests is
performance capacity. It of course cannot test whether the successful
candidate feels. But that's part of the point of the TT. It is an embodiment of the explanatory gap: We will
never know whether or not a successful candidate feels (only the
candidate can know); and if it does, we will never know how or why.
DC: "I like the way
you put that: the robot has grounded symbols, but we still have a
symbol grounding problem because we haven't provided a test to see if
those symbols are in some way intrinsic and can therefore have meaning
and produce feeling."
Alas, you misunderstood me. A
TT-passing robot certainly has grounded symbols, which certainly solves
the symbol grounding problem. But grounding is not meaning, And only a
TT-passing robot that feels would have intrinsic meaning.
In other words, not only is
systematic interpretability insufficient for grounding, but robotic
grounding (even TT-scale) is not sufficient for (intrinsic) meaning,
unless it generates feeling. But we have no way of knowing -- let alone
explaining -- whether, how or why a TT-robot (or any functional system)
feels rather than just functs.
DC: "So I conclude that the TT isn't a test at
all."
Of course it's a test: a test
for having functionally explained our total performance capacity. It is
not, however, either a test or an explanation for your feeling capacity.
DC: "We're stuck with mental events
being distinct from physical events and untestable, and that is why...
the explanatory gap is so difficult and feelings are inexplicable."
You're back into the
verificationist observationalism I pointed out before: The problem is not
the untestability. (The TT robot might feel, after all.) The problem is
with inexplicability. And that
problem arises from causality and causal explanation, not from some sort
of physical/mental "dualism" (which explains nothing, but
merely gives yet another name to the explanatory gap.)
DC: "I'd be interested in understanding why you say
that feelings are inexplicable."
I hope this time I have
succeeded in conveying an understanding!
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/876
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2009-05-11 -- Reply to Arnold Trehub
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AT: "Isn't this mysterious
inexplicability of feelings a direct consequence of an incoherent
argument?"
I'm afraid not, Arnold. It's
a direct consequence of the peculiar nature of feelings. That peculiar
nature can of course be blithely disregarded, but only at the price of
begging the question, insofar as the "hard problem" is
concerned...
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/879
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2009-05-11 -- Reply to Derek Allan
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DA: Could someone remind me please what
the 'hard problem' and the 'easy problem' are?
Hard
Problem: Explaining how and why
we feel.
Easy
Problems: All the rest of the
problems of science, mathematics and engineering (except maybe quantum
duality).
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/882
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2009-05-11 -- Reply to Derek Allan
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WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO FEEL:
APPLYING OCCAM'S RAZOR TO THE
MIND/BODY (FEELING/FUNCTION) PROBLEM
DA: "But If I recall, that is not the
'hard problem' or the 'easy problem' as Chalmers defines them?"
Chalmers is talking about the
same problem, the mind/body problem. Putting it in the language of a
causal explanation of the "how/why" of feeling is my own way of putting it, but it's exactly the same
(age-old) problem. If it sounds like a different problem, that just shows
how the way we put it can fool us (including fooling us into thinking
that we have found a "solution" -- or that there is no problem,
or more than one.)
Let me do a reductive
transcription of Chalmers's way of putting it. (And let me note that his is already one of the
simpler, more economical, and direct ways of putting it, even before I
apply Occam's razor and a little anglo-saxon uniformity.)
DA: ÒThe really hard problem of CONSCIOUSNESS is the
problem of EXPERIENCE. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of
information-processing, but there is also a SUBJECTIVE aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put
it, there is something it IS like to be a CONSCIOUS organism.
This SUBJECTIVE aspect is EXPERIENCE. When we see, for example, we
EXPERIENCE visual sensations: the FELT QUALITY of redness, the
EXPERIENCE of dark and light, the QUALITY of depth in a visual field.
Other EXPERIENCES go along with perception in different modalities: the
*X* sound of a clarinet, the *X* smell of mothballs. Then there are
bodily SENSATIONS, from pains to orgasms; MENTAL images that are conjured
up internally; the FELT QUALITY of emotion, and the EXPERIENCE of a
stream of CONSCIOUS thought. What unites all of these states is that
there is something it IS like to be in them. All of them are states of
EXPERIENCE.Ó
Cutting out the redundant and
superfluous parts:
Transcription: "The really hard problem of FEELING is the
problem of FEELING. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of
information-processing, but there is also a FELT aspect. As Nagel (1974)
has put it, there is something it FEELS like to be a FEELING
organism. This FELT aspect is FEELING. When we see, for example, we
FEEL visual sensations: the FEELING of redness, the FEELING of dark
and light, the FEELING of depth in a visual field. Other FEELINGS go
along with perception in different modalities: the *FELT* sound of a
clarinet, the *FELT* smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily FEELINGS, from
pains to orgasms; FELT images that are conjured up internally; the
FEELING of emotion, and the FEELING of a stream of FELT thought. What
unites all of these states is that there is something it FEELS like to be
in them. All of them are states of FEELING."
(Note the slightly
odd-sounding special case of how we speak of some of our sensations: We
say we feel surface
textures, heat, emotions, but to distinguish the sense modalities,
we say we see (rather than
feel) colors, hear (rather than
feel) sounds, smell (rather
than feel) smells, etc. That the invariant in all of these is in reality
still feeling (and the variation is just in what it feels like, not in whether it feels like something at all), all of these
instances can be readily replaced by a still more perspicuous variant of
Tom Nagel's already more perspicuous way of putting it, which is
"what it feels like to X": what it feels like to see, hear,
smell, etc. That is, and always was, the essence of the mind/body --
feeling/function -- problem, just as "sentio ergo sentitur" ("I feel, therefore there is feeling going
on") was always the essence of Descartes' cogito.)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/887
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2009-05-12 -- Reply to Arnold Trehub
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PUTATIVE FUNCTIONAL EXPLANATIONS OF
FEELING: A CHALLENGE
AT: "Why, exactly, do you believe
that the brain states that constitute our feelings can't ever be
explained?"
Because in every attempt to
explain the functional role of feeling, feeling turns out to be
functionally superfluous (except if telekinetic dualism is true, and feelings have causal power -- but it
isn't, and they don't).
I long ago made a challenge
(the universal "translatability thesis") -- to any linguist who claimed that there was
something that could be said in language X that could not be translated
into language Y -- that they should tell me (in English) what it was, and
why it could not be translated into language Y, and I would show that it
could be translated into language Y, even if I did not know language Y.
I hereby make the same
challenge for "explanations" of the functional or causal role
of feeling: Tell me what it is, and I will show it is functionally
superfluous on its own terms.
(I gave some samples in earlier
postings. This is not unlike Dan Dennett's "demoting"
mentalistic explanations into mechanistic [usually behavioristic] ones, except
that I am not denying the reality of feeling -- just its causal role.)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/894
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2009-05-12 -- Reply to Derek Allan
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WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO FEEL SOMETHING
DA: "Chalmers relies heavily on the
Nagel idea that 'there is something that it is like to be a conscious
organism'."
He's right to rely on it:
Nagel's was an apt insight.
But, to expose the redundancy
and root out the equivocation, it's "There's
something it feels like to be a feeling organism."
DA: "there is no attempt to
distinguish between human consciousness and any kind of animal
'consciousness'."
No need to distinguish: The feeling/function problem is about the fact that
we feel (something), not about what
we feel -- whether this or that.
DA: "there is surely nothing it is
'like' to be conscious other than being conscious - which tell us
absolutely nothing."
First, to expose the
redundancy and root out the equivocation, it's: "there is surely
nothing it feels 'like' to feel other than to feel."
Yup: And your point is...?
DA: "'I know what it is like to have
a broken finger'... I would compare - in memory - my present painless
state with the sharp throb I felt at the time)."
"I
know what it feels like to feel like I have a broken finger."
But as for comparing your
present painless state with the sharp throb you felt the last time:
(Strictly [indeed, Wittgenstrictly] speaking, you are now feeling what it seems to
feel like to feel no pain and to be feeling a memory of what seems to
feel like it once felt like to feel a pain.)
Yup, and your point is...?
DA: "But suppose someone says to me. "I am
conscious", and I reply "I know what it is like to be
conscious". It's an absurd conversation, is it
not?"
A: "I am feeling
something."
B: "I know what it feels
like to feel something."
Not absurd in the least
(spoken betwixt cognoscenti --
or, rather, sentienti). (Rather
more puzzling spoken between Zombies --
however, as noted in a previous posting, it might be functionally adaptive as a way of
referring to internal states unobservable to one's interlocutor, even
when those internal states are not felt states).
DA: "And for good reason. I haven't anything to compare
(human) consciousness with - any more than the person I'm speaking to
has."
You are alluding here to the
fact that feeling is an uncomplemented category: it is both impossible and self-contradictory to feel
what it's like to not feel anything at all -- though it's perfectly
possible to feel what it's like not to feel something in particular: to
not feel this, but to feel that.
Well, yes, that -- i.e., the
"poverty of the stimulus": the fact that we can only sample
positive instances of feeling -- does make the category
"feeling" all the more problematic, puzzling and troublesome,
But it definitely does not make it empty or meaningless.
DA: "being asleep, in a coma etc, is
not that state: they are simply states in which human consciousness is
not operating"
Yes, when you are not
feeling, you are not feeling. In that sense, "you" are not
"there," you're gone. (If Descartes over-reached with his
"cogito," in concluding that he existed [sum] rather than just that feeling was going on [sentitur], we can safely, though not cartesianly, say that where
[and while] there is no feeling going on, there is nobody home.)
Fortunately, you are
reconstituted when you wake up. (A stone is not.)
DA: "I don't really think that your
change of 'consciousness' and 'experience' to 'feeling' makes any
material difference. Whatever we call it, we are still left with
essentially the same problems."
We are indeed. But calling
them by one name highlights that they are all one and the same problem...
REFERENCE
Harnad, S. (1987) Uncomplemented Categories, or, What is it
Like to be a Bachelor? 1987 Presidential Address: Society for
Philosophy and Psychology.
ABSTRACT: To learn
and to use a category one must be able to sample both what is in it and
what is not in it (i.e., what is in its complement), in order to pick out
which invariant features distinguish members from nonmembers. Categories
without complements may be responsible for certain conceptual and
philosophical problems. Examples are experiential categories such as what
it feels like to "be awake," "be alive," be
aware," and "be." Providing a complement by analogy or extrapolation
is a solution in some cases (such as what it feels like to be a
bachelor), but only because the complement can in princible be sampled in
the future, and because the analogy could in principle be correct. Where
the complement is empty in principle, the "category" is
intrinsically problematic. Other examples may include self-denial
paradoxes (such as "this sentence is false") and problems with
the predicate "exists."
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/895
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2009-05-12 -- Reply to Colin Hales
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MIND THE MIND-FIELDS
(1) There is no coherent, contentful difference between
"A-consciousness" and "P-consciousness" (that's why I insist on just talking about
feeling).
(2) If a scientist (or
anyone) learns something new (either by observation or because he's told)
then all that's happened is that his brain has new data (either
sensorimotor or linguistic), and hence new ability to act accordingly
(whether behaviorally or verbally).
(3) The problem -- a.k.a.
the feeling/function problem or the mind/body problem -- is explaining how and why
the gaining or the having of this new knowledge and ability is felt (rather than just
"functed," as it would almost certainly be in an
"artificial agent," unless it was Turing-Test scale).
(4) I think you are
deceiving yourself with your "phenomenal field P(t)": To
formalize a mystery is not to solve it.
(5) The only fields there
are are the garden-variety electromagnetic, gravitational etc. fields
resulting from the four fundamental forces of physics.
(6) There are no extra
"mind fields."
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/897
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2009-05-12 -- Reply to Derek Allan
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WHEREOF ONE CANNOT SPEAK...
DA: "Nothing in what I said alluded to what might
happen to be [THE OBJECT OF CONSCIOUSNESS]. My point is that there
seems to be an assumption... that there is no important difference
between [BEING CONSCIOUS AS] a human and [BEING "CONSCIOUS"]
(can we even use the same word?) [AS] an animal. What on earth could
justify this huge assumption? Your change of vocabulary doesn't make
any material difference so I will leave that aside."
Here is the transcription
into the vocabulary that you think makes no material difference:
Transcription: "Nothing in what I said alluded to what might
happen to be WHAT IS BEING FELT. My point is that there seems to be
an assumption... that there is no important difference between FEELING
WHAT a human FEELS and "FEELING" (can we even use the
same word?) WHAT an animal FEELS. What on earth could justify this huge
assumption? Your change of vocabulary doesn't make any material
difference so I will leave that aside."
As this transcription should
illustrate, the change of vocabulary makes it clear that you are talking
about differences in what
humans and animals may be feeling, whereas what is at issue is whether they are feeling (anything
at all).
DA: "to say that something is like
itself (which is what this effectively amounts to) is mere
verbiage."
No. Reminding ourselves that
we all (including animals) feel, and that, stones, (today's) robots --
and just about everything other than people and animals -- do not
feel is not mere verbiage. It is perfectly comprehensible and perfectly
true (except if one is determined to play the verbal game of Achilles and the Tortoise [or
one is unable to do otherwise), in which case further verbiage will
indeed make no material difference).
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/900
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2009-05-12 -- Reply to Derek Allan
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EXTRACTING CATEGORY INVARIANCE FROM
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE INSTANCES
DA: "Not sure I'm happy with you
changing everything to 'feels' etc. We are, after all, talking about
consciousness and that's the term that the mainstream of this debate
seems to use."
And your point is...?
DA: "one cannot assume that human and
animal CONSCIOUSNESS are the same... Issues about 'OBJECTS' or 'WHATS'
have nothing to do with it."
Transcription: "one cannot assume humans and animals FEEL
the same... Issues about WHAT THEY FEEL or WHAT IT FEELS LIKE have
nothing to do with it."
The problem is not the
sameness or differences in what they feel; the problem is the fact that
they (both) feel anything at all.
DA: "I'm simply suggesting that
comparing something to itself (as in the Nagel 'insight') is not likely
to prove a very informative step."
No one is comparing something
to itself.
We all feel (and we all feel
different things during every instance we are awake and compos mentis). Just as we can see
daisies, lilacs, crysanthemums, etc. and notice that they are all
instances of seeing flowers, we can feel toothaches, and see red, and
smell smoke, and notice that there is something (different) that each
feels like, but that they all feel like something or other.
There is, however, a profound
and important difference between all of our other categories (such as
flower, or red) and the special category "feeling," namely,
that with categories like red we can sample both positive and negative
instances. We can sample instances of both red and non-red things,
thereby allowing our brains to detect what the invariant features of the
members of the category "red" are: the ones that reliably
distinguish them from the non-members.
In contrast, with feeling, we
can only sample positive
instances: everything we feel (toothache, what red looks like, what smoke
smells like) is an instance of what it feels like to feel, but nothing is
an instance of what it feels like to not-feel, because that is
self-contradictory. (Note, again, that I don't mean what it feels like to
feel sad rather than feel happy, i.e. what it feels like not to feel
happy; I am talking about what it feels like not to feel at all.)
It is because of this
positive-only instantiation of feeling that the category
"feeling" is anomalous. Unlike all other categories, in which
we have sampled not just their membership, but also the membership of
their complement (i.e., their non-membership), "feeling" (and a
few other uncomplemented categories) create certain peristent conceptual problems for us.
But that does not mean that
uncomplemented categories are empty. Nor that instantiating them amounts
to "comparing something to itself": The positive instances of
feeling something (toothache, red, smoke) are all different from one
another; so we do have some idea of what is invariant under all that
variation. But not as decisive an idea as we have with normal,
complemented categories, because there we get to sample the variations
and transformations not only among the positive instances, but also the
critical transitions to the negative instances, the ones that do not
preserve the category invariance. With feeling we cannot do that. In that
sense, uncomplemented categories are conceptually incomplete.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/904
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2009-05-14 --
Reply to Colin Hales
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HOW/WHY IS OBSERVATION FELT OBSERVATION, AND KNOWLEDGE FELT KNOWLEDGE?
(NO QUANTUM-COLLAPSE REPLIES, PLEASE!)
CH: "[I (CH) am immersed] in... quantum
electrodynamics..."
I became a little apprehensive
when I read this, Colin, because I was afraid you were going to invoke the
alleged causal role of "consciousness" (human [felt] observation)
in the collapse of the quantum wave packet. (That would have been a non-starter, for one cannot
solve the unsolved puzzles of one field with the unsolved puzzles of another
field! But fortunately, I think, you are not taking quite that route here
-- though you are coming close!)"
CH: "The 'dynamics' posting was about a causal role of
'feeling' in brain adaptation (learning) dynamics, specifically in the
brain of a scientist undergoing change in "knowledge", where you
can objectively relate the result with 'feeling'... [T]he causality of
knowledge change in scientists... use[s] the 'feeling' that... is [inherent
in] scientific observation to constrain knowledge change..."
There is no doubt that science
is based on observations. There is no doubt that observations are felt.
There is also no doubt that knowing is felt. But the question was:
"How/why are observations (or anything else) felt? What is the causal
role of the feeling?"
(You have not answered that
question; you have simply noted the fact that needs to be explained: that
observations -- which play a crucial causal role in science -- also happen
to be felt observations. Well, yes. And so too are observations that play a
crucial causal role in everyday survival and reproduction. But how/why are
any of them felt observations rather than just functed observations?
A meter-reading, after all, is
a meter-reading (even if it seems to be mysteriously insufficient to collapse
a wave-packet unless the meter is read by a feeling observer!).
Observations are simply data in computational or dynamic (robotic)
processes. Why do the data need to be "felt"?
[I wonder, by the way, why you
keep putting "feeling" in scare-quotes: They're real enough, you
know! I can safely say "I feel hot." No need for me to say
"I 'feel' hot"...]
CH: "[No] empirical science [is] done without ÒfeelingÓ
(=scientific observation) supporting it... [and] abstract speculation and
philosophical muddlement [are] BTW all mediated by
"feeling"!..."
All true. Feelings are a fact.
The correlations are a fact. But now we are waiting for a causal
explanation: what causal role does the fact that observations are felt
rather than just functed play? (Ditto for knowing.) ("Mediating"
is just renaming the mystery: mediating how, why?)
CH: "[The claim of a causal role for feeling in
scientific observation and knowledge-change is] empirically cogent [and] no
less supported... than any other science claim..."
So far, the "claim"
is only about a correlation between feelings and observations
(measurements, data). We have yet to hear what causal (rather than mere --
and mysterious -- correlative) role they play.
CH: "To deny this claim [of a causal role for feeling in
observation-based knowledge-change] is to construct, using the same causal
mechanism of ÒfeelingÓ, a claim (a change in knowledge of the denier) to
the contrary... that force[s] a denier to become logically inconsistent in
an empirically testable way..."
It sounds like you may be
imagining you have some sort of a Cartesian argument there, but I am afraid
you do not.
Feelings (though they are
undeniably, cartesianly, there,
being felt) have yet to reveal their causal role. Neither correlating with functional causes,
nor feeling as if they're causal
will do. (It matters not whether their causal role is discovered, somehow,
via empirical observation and causal inference, in the usual scientific
way, or their causal role somehow turn out to be a matter of logical
necessity or cartesian certainty, via mathematics or the cogito.
What's missing, still, is a coherent, viable hypothesis as to what their
causal role is -- a hypothesis that cannot be immediately rejected by
showing that it is either functionally superfluous on its own terms or
draws on an extra telekinetic power that is contrary to all known evidence
to date.)
CH: "This... is rather odd [for] I am... claiming that
"feeling", is literally the brain's solution to the (your!) symbol grounding problem..."
I hate to seem ungrateful, but
the solution to the symbol grounding problem is sensorimotor grounding: The
symbols in a Turing-scale robot -- a robot whose symbols are not only
systematically interpretable as being about X (in the way the symbols in a
book, computer or toy robot are) but a robot that also has the sensorimotor
capacity to interact (behaviorally and verbally) with whatever the symbols
are systematically interpretable as denoting, and to discourse about
whatever the symbols are systematically interpretable as
denoting, Turing-indistinguishably from the way we do -- are grounded.
Their semantic interpretability (derived intentionality) is congruent with
the robot's interactions with what its symbols are about.
But grounding is not meaning! And, a fortiori, it is not felt meaning, or feeling.
So Turing-scale robotic grounding is enough to solve the (easy)
symbol-grounding problem, but not to solve the (hard) feeling/function
(mind/body) problem.
(By the way, it is not at all
evident why Turing-scale robots could not do empirical observation or
causal explanation even if they don't feel [i.e., even if their observing
is not felt observing]. Grounding sounds like all they need.)
CH: "The act of "grounding" is an act of causal
constraint on knowledge change consistent with the "feeling"
involved in the representation of the external natural world in a
scientist. It's an indirect (2nd order) causal link, but it's real
and testable..."
Sensorimotor grounding is
certainly a causal constraint on a symbol system, and if it is Turing-scale
grounding it is probably as much as cognitive science (including cognitive
neuroscience) can tell us about cognition.
But, alas, it still leaves a
gaping explanatory gap.
("Consistent with the
feeling" is not the same as "caused by the feeling," any
more than "correlated with the feeling" is. And
"representations" per se are no help; moreover, if they are felt
representations, then they are part of the problem, not the solution: How
and why are they felt representations, rather than just functed
representations? And I have no idea at all what an "indirect" or
"2nd order" causal link means...)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/915
Reply
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2009-05-14 --
Reply to Colin Hales
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GAP INTACT UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE...
CH: "Wow. I post a brief aside and I am sucked into the
explanatory gap!"
Well, "The Explanatory Gap" is
the theme of this thread...
CH: "Empirical corroboration of...
predictions [from Laws of Nature (LON)] puts a scientist in a state
of feeling that is scientific observation..."
So does empirical falsification
of predictions from LON. So does just about everything else we say and do
whilst awake and compos mentis...
CH: "LON... are (statistical) descriptions...
(predictive) of how the natural world/scientist combined system feels to
the scientist... in the act of scientific observation..."
Translation: "Making
a 'scientific observation' and making and understanding a scientific
explanation feel like something, and those feelings are tightly correlated
with the data of the observation and the explanation."
But we already knew that. We
are now talking about explaining how and why making an observation, and
making and understanding an explanation -- and just about everything else
we do whilst alive, awake, and compos
mentis -- feels like
something and correlates tightly with what is going on in the world.
You are not touching the
question of how and why at all. You are just reformulating what you take to
be the nature of scientific observation and scientific explanation (and
presupposing feeling as somehow part of the package). In other words, you
are, I'm afraid, begging the question (underlying this topic thread, which
is about the explanatory gap), completely.
CH: "There is nothing to a brain but (a) nucleons and
(b) electrons and (c) space..."
Fine. Now how and why do they
sometimes generate feeling?
CH: "Now the meat:... ALL of the descriptions of
particles and fields and forces [were] constructed by scientists inside the
described system, made of it, using ÔfeelingÕ..."
"Using" feeling, or
whilst feeling? This is where you beg the question, by presupposing
(without explanation) that feeling is causal, rather than just correlated
with brain processes that are causal (and mysteriously generate correlated
feelings too).
(Keep it simple, Colin. Your
complicated and somewhat idiosyncratic way of putting things is fooling you
into thinking you are making inroads on the explanatory gap, when you are
not.)
CH: "LON are constructed presupposing the existence of
the scientist and the ability (feeling) that is scientific observation. The
scientist is implicitly built into the LON..."
You said that already:
Now, how/why are scientists' (and laymens') observations and explanations felt rather than just brain-functed?"
CH: "NONE of the above LON predict the existence of the
feeling that is scientific observation...All presuppose both..."
Quite right. And that is the
explanatory gap: Now let's hear how you propose to bridge it...
CH: "[W]e have not
even begun to describe the universe in the fashion needed to predict a
scientific observer of the kind we are, who sees the observation mechanism
behaving [lawfully]...
Indeed; but your point is...?
CH: "The universe is NOT made of atoms or molecules or
cells or subatomic particles. These are the things we perceive it to be
made of when we look (feel it) as scientists..."
We feel when we do things;
scientists do too. But we knew that. (I'm not sure whether you are also
telling us that current scientific theory is wrong, and if so, why; but I
am pretty sure you are not making any inroads on the explanatory gap: just
re-describing it.)
Or perhaps you are alluding
here to the fact that although feelings are correlated with the way things are in the world, they are
nevertheless incommensurable with them (so it is
erroneous to think of feelings as somehow "resembling" the things
that correlate with the feelings: red with felt-red, round with felt-round,
etc.). -- That's true too, but likewise does not help to bridge the
explanatory gap; it's part of the gap.
CH: "What perspective must I adopt on the universe such
that electromagnetism behaving in certain specific ways (like a brain)
makes it acquire a 1st person perspective (from the point of view of BEING the
electromagnetic fields that ARE the brain), when elsewhere in the body
(such as in the peripheral nerves) it fails to do that?..."
Translation: "What
is the explanation of how and why (some) brain function is felt, whereas (say) kidney function
is not?"
That's the question, alright:
But what's the answer?
(The equivocation on
"perspectives" won't help; it just milks the mystery. And the
fact that you are focussing on scientific observations and scientific
explanations about what there is in the world is not relevant; the same
problem would be there if you were just focusing on a layman's
"ouch.")
CH: "This rather awkward non-explanation of ÔfeelingÕ is
as far as I need go for now. What the above tells me is that I can blather
on forever about LON_X and I will NEVER leap the explanatory gap. It is
a-priori meaningless and any expectation that it can is misguided. This
does not mean the gap cannot be leapt. It means we havenÕt leapt it
yet."
OK, I'll wait till you've leapt
it, or at least give a principled account of how it could be leapt...
CH: "To leap the explanatory gap is to construct
descriptions... in such a way as to show how an observer might function. I
know I have the right... descriptions [when they] start to produce
observations consistent with [Laws of Nature] such that it reveals itself
as the brain material of the (scientific) observer."
This unfortunately sounds as if
it is going in circles, without substantive content, just a hope.
"Consistent
with" just means "correlated with" here, and the gap is
about causation...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/920
|
2009-05-14 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
AT: "I have the feeling that the very way in which you
propose the notion of a feeling-function divide implicitly precludes any possibility
of a causal role for feeling."
Your feeling may well be right
-- but please don't blame the messenger! It's the truth (or falsity) of the
message that matters, not whether one feels it's true or false.
AT: Because of this feeling on my part, I am writing
this response to you. Would you claim that this feeling on my part plays no
causal role in my typing the post that you are now reading?
I am pretty sure that you feel
that you posted this message because you felt like it, and not because you were
impelled to by some unfelt force. I am not sure you are right about that,
though. Are you? If so, please explain how and why... That way we'll be
surer we're not just trading feelings...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/922
|
2009-05-15 --
Reply to Derek Allan
|
DETECTING CATEGORY INVARIANTS FROM
POSITIVE INSTANCES ALONE
DA: "the Nagel 'insight'...that 'There is something
that it is like to be a conscious organism'... is in effect
comparing something to itself... [This] is philosophically vacuous. If
you (or anyone) can produce an argument to show why I am wrong...
I would be very happy to consider it."
Several such arguments have
already been made, but here's another, spelled out: You know what a (ripe)
tomato looks like; you know what a (red) apple looks like; you know what
blood looks like; you know what the top of a traffic light looks like; you
know what a cardinal (bird, or prelate in robes) looks like; you know what
a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman looks like. If you showed pictures of
all those things to a child and asked what they all had in common, he would
immediately say that they were all red. That would all be possible exclusively on the basis of positive
instances of red things, by detecting the (obvious) invariant
property they all shared, even though they differed from one another in
every other respect.
This sampling of diverse
positive instances would not be "comparing something to
itself."
The same is true in the case of
sampling instances of feeling this, and that, and that.
(However, as I have also kept
stressing, the category of feeling is nevertheless abnormal and and
problematic, because negative instances are impossible, whereas negative
instances of red (e.g., green things) are possible, and every child has
sampled them too -- though you don't really need to sample them in order to
notice what all the instances of red things I listed above have in common.
It is true, however, that for more difficult (more "underdetermined") categories, those that are highly confusable with
other, very similar-looking categories, it is necessary to sample negative
instances too (i.e., members of the other categories), with
error-corrective feedback; positive instances alone are not enough for
detecting which are the invariant properties in such cases. The category
"feeling," however, is not such a case. Even though it is a
defective category, because it is uncomplemented and uncomplementable, it
is not empty, and everyone (except perhaps Lewis Carroll's Tortoise) can
easily detect the invariant underlying its many diverse instances to a good
enough approximation from the positive instances alone.)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/925
Reply
|
2009-05-15 --
Reply to Derek Allan
|
KNOWING SOMETHING WHEN YOU FEEL IT
DA: "[No] problem with your
example [of a child recognizing the category red from positive instances
alone]... [But]... how precisely does [this] refute my argument
that...Nagel['s] ''There is something that it is
like to be a conscious organism"... is comparing something
to itself?"
"Red" is a category;
"feeling" is a category. What red looks (feels) like is a
recognizable category; so what feeling feels like is likewise a
recognizable category. We know it when we see (feel) it, and we know it on
the basis of positive instances alone (which does not mean "comparing
something to itself").
And that's all Nagel meant.
That we all feel, that we all know what that is and what it means, and that
we all know it when it is happening.
(Of course, the only thing we
feel is our own feelings, so
those are the only feelings about which we have cartesian certainty, when
they are actually being felt [sentio ergo sentitur], whereas about the feelings of other creatures we can
only guess. I'd have to be the other creature -- say, Nagel's bat -- in
order to know for sure that it
[i.e., I] feels, and also to know what
it feels, i.e., what that feeling feels like. [It might feel quite
different from anything I am currently able to feel, being me.])
That, by the way, is all I want
to exegesize and defend in Tom Nagel's viewpoint. The rest of the
hermeneutics of "viewpoints" is not (in my view) all that
relevant, insofar as the explanatory gap (on which Nagel is unaccountably
an optimist!) is concerned. Viewpoint is just one of the many
manifestations of consciousness and its countless synonyms and paranyms
that one can single out and hermeneuticize without making any real inroads
on the explanatory gap itself.
And that is yet another reason
why I insist on sticking to straight talk about feeling rather than riding off in all directions with paranyms: A privileged "viewpoint" is already implicit
in feeling, since the only one that
can feel a feeling is the feeler. Anything else is just guesswork --
but guesswork "grounded" in your own feelings (if you feel at
all). Otherwise [attention Colin Hales!] it is just "functing"...
Here, to jog everyone's memory,
is a partial list of these soothingly distracting euphemisms, with the
invitation to add your own particular favorites (and then forget about
them):
consciousness, awareness, qualia, subjective states,
conscious states, mental states, phenomenal states, qualitative states,
intentional states, intentionality, subjectivity, mentality, private
states, 1st-person states, contentful states, reflexive states,
representational states, sentient states, experiential states, reflexivity,
self-awareness, self-consciousness, sentience, raw
feels, experience, soul, spirit, mind..., viewpoint, ...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/942
|
2009-05-15 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
ON UNFELT EGOCENTRISM
AT: "May I assume, Stevan, that even though you feel that
my feeling played no causal role in my posting, you also feel that your
feeling about this might be wrong?"
Sure. (I might be wrong about
anything except the cogito and 2+2=4.) Telekinetic Dualism could be true.
But I wouldn't count on it...
AT: If I were...(without feeling) I would be unable to
post!
I missed the part about how and
why there cannot be posting without feeling: Please explain (it's the
explanatory gap).
And whilst you're at it, please
also explain how and why it is that your brain generates the feeling that
you feel like posting (as well as generating the posting, for whatever
reasons you posted it), rather than your brain just generating the posting
(for whatever reasons you posted it)?
AT: "I have shown how a biologically credible system of
egocentric brain mechanisms might constitute the brain state that is the
feeling causing the selection of the unfelt biological processes which
execute the posting. Can you show the brain mechanisms that can do a
similar selection without an egocentric representation of the salient
world?"
You neglected to mention how
and why the egocentric brain mechanism was felt rather than just functed...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/945
|
2009-05-15 --
Reply to Derek Allan
|
DA: "'Feels' in this context obviously
means much the same as 'experiences' and 'be conscious of'.... It
doesn't give us any leverage on the idea of consciousness at all i.e. it's
not an explanation..."
Glad you got the point, at
last. (The "hard" problem of consciousness is to explain how and
why we feel. There is no such explanation. Unlike Tom Nagel, I also think
this explanatory gap cannot be closed, and I've stated many times why: the
incommensurability of feeling and function, despite the correlation; the
functional superfluousness of feeling in a functional explanation of the
brain's performance capacity; the exhaustiveness of the four fundamental
forces, leaving no room or evidence for a fifth force; hence the falsity of
telekinetic dualism.)
Now, what's your point, Derek? Is it just
nonspecific animus against what you keep calling "analytic
philosophy"? Or do you actually have a substantive point to make about
the explanatory gap?
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/946
|
2009-05-16 --
Reply to Robin Faichney
|
RF: "I don't believe that we feel
feeling... We think that we feel"
When I am feeling something
(which is most of the time when I am awake), I don't think I feel, I know I
feel, if I know anything at all!
I think Descartes is with me on
that one, despite his unfortunate choice of "cogito" for his cogito. (There is indeed something
it feels like to think something; there's also something it feels like to
think something is true, and even something it feels like to think you know
something for sure. But -- again thanks to Descartes -- only in two cases
are we actually justified in feeling that we know something for sure: one
is the law of noncontradiction -- and everything that follows from anything
else on pain of contradiction, hence necessity -- and the other is the fact
that we are feeling, when we feel. That is a matter of certainty, if
anything is.)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/950
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2009-05-16 --
Reply to Derek Allan
|
DA: "[I]s there an 'easy' problem, by the way?"
Sure, all of ordinary science,
including all of cognitive science, including brain science. There's only
one hard problem, and that's how and why we feel. (QM might have another
hard problem, with its own duality puzzles, but I don't think it's as hard,
or hard in the same way.)
DA: "I would have thought the 'hard problem'...
is... to explain what... feeling -is."
No, I think we all have as good
an idea of what feeling is as we are ever likely to get of what anything
is: The hard problem is explaining how and why we feel. (But if you want to
wrap the explanation of the causal origins and consequences of something
into what you mean by explaining what it is, then, yes, that is the hard
problem after all.)
DA: "[M]y point was that... one... is on the
completely wrong track... I hope all that is plain
enough?"
Only plain enough to reveal
that you are unfortunately not making any substantive point at all...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/951
|
2009-05-16 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
OF COURSE THE BRAIN'S THE CULPRIT: BUT
HOW, AND WHY?
AT: "If we can agree... that
feeling is a particular state of the brain... then... we can discuss
what... state of the brain might constitute feeling [and] make progress on
the how and why of feeling..."
"Constitutes" is a
bit of a weasel word. Is feeling a cause of, an effect of, or the same
thing as a brain state or property? Those are all the questions around
which the feeling/function problem has always revolved:
"constitutes" simply conflates these questions without answering
them. (John Searle used to try the same trick by saying "caused-by-and-realized-in," really fast.
It doesn't help. The questions are still begged.)
But I have no problem at all
with agreeing that brain states somehow "constitute" feeling. Of
course they do! I am not a spiritualist. The "hard" problem,
alas, is explaining how and why they do.
Bland (and blind) agreement on
the fact that the brain must be the culprit does not give us a clue of a
clue as to how and why it committed the crime!
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/957
|
2009-05-16 --
Reply to Derek Allan
|
DA: "Is that a common analytic
viewpoint...?"
Derek, I regret to have to say
that until and unless you can stop shadow-boxing with this
"analytic" bugaboo of your own invention and instead say
something of substance about something, there is simple nothing more that
anyone can either say about or reply to your postings (at least nothing more
that this non-analytic, non-philosopher can say).
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/961
|
2009-05-17 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
AT: "...you have claimed that explaining how and
why is not merely hard, but impossible because feelings have
no causal consequences..."
I have. And I've given my
reasons for concluding that (incommensurability, the exhaustive quota of
fundamental forces, the falsity of telekinetic dualism, and the sufficiency
of functing for causally explaining all functing, hence the superfluousness
and inexplicability of feeling).
But if you find my conclusion
wrong, I'd be happy to hear how and why.
AT: "It seems to me that you contradict your own
argument when you acknowledge that feelings are states of the
brain..."
There's no contradiction
whatsoever. My argument is epistemic rather than ontic (except for the
innocuous bit about the exhaustiveness of the four known forces). I am not
saying that feelings are and are not
caused by the brain. I am saying we cannot explain how or why. The
explanatory gap is an epistemic
gap, not an ontic gap. It's a
shortfall in causal explanation, which seems to work successfully for
everything else except feeling.
And please distinguish (1) the
problem of explaining how brain function causes feeling (the
"how" in the how/why) from (2) the even bigger problem that
feelings cannot themselves be causes (the "why" in the
how/why).
In the first case there is
(almost certainly) causation (but no causal explanation). In the second
case there is not even causation.
AT: "...if one grants that feelings are
constituted by particular brain states one is not justified in claiming
that feelings cannot have causal consequences."
It makes little difference what
I "grant" about how the brain causes feelings, if neither I nor
anyone else can explain how or why. But the question of the causal
consequences of feelings (as opposed to the causal consequences of the
functing that causes the feelings) is, in my view, the more perplexing side
of the feeling/function problem.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/973
|
2009-05-17 --
Reply to Jason Streitfeld
|
BELIEVING IS FEELING: CORRELATION,
CAUSATION AND INFORMATION
JS: "you are wrongly assuming that the
"problem" generated by uncomplemented categories... exists
outside of the grammar in which those categories are defined..."
I do not see that anything I
have said has anything to do with grammar! I am not speaking of grammatical
categories but sensorimotor and verbal categories: kinds of
things (objects, events, actions, states, properties) that we are able to
recognize, call by their names, and to an extent describe. Many of
these categories -- especially the first ones we acquire -- are not derived
from definitions or descriptions, but grounded in
sensorimotor experience (which also happens to be felt). (And those
categories that we do acquire via definition are
recombinations of categories we have acquired through sensorimotor
experience, likewise felt. It also feels like something to understand what
a word means.)
JS: "To feel is to feel some X, so that any knowledge of
feeling is knowledge of feeling some X. Knowledge of feeling cannot
be separated from knowledge of X."
To feel something is to feel
something. We all know that. The way we know is by feeling this (e.g., a headache) and by
feeling that (e.g., a toothache),
and noticing that they feel different, but that they both feel like something. We all know that too.
There is no point mystifying it. (And "something" is a
perfectly serviceable -- if rather abstract -- generic category too, though
it too might have some complementation problems of its own!)
Feeling a headache is something
we can recognize and call by its name. So is feeling a toothache. And so is
generic feeling; that means feeling something;
and feeling something is
something that all feelings of X or Y or Z have in common.
JS: "There is thus no uncomplemented (and no
"Cartesian") knowledge of feeling, just as [there] is no
uncomplemented (and no Cartesian) knowledge of thinking..."
One thing at a time. Feeling this (e.g., a headache) is a complemented category. We can all
recognize and call it by its name. Feeling that, a toothache (part of the complement of feeling a
headache), is not feeling a headache. Hence the category "what it
feels like to feel a headache" (aka "what a headache feels
like") is a perfectly well-complemented category.
In contrast, the category
"feeling something" (where "something" can be anything
at all) is likewise a category ("what it feels like to feel anything
at all, be it headache or toothache) -- a category that we can all
recognize and call by its name.
But "feeling
something" is not a complemented
category, because we do not and cannot know what it feels like to feel
nothing at all. (We can know what it feels like to feel this and not-that, but that's not the complement of feeling itself, but
only the complement of feeling this,
or that.)
So neither the recognizability
and identifiability of the category "feeling (something)" nor its
uncomplementedness is in doubt. We do have the category even though we can
only sample positive instances of it.
We have other categories based
on positive instances alone -- for example, what it feels like to be a bachelor, if one is and always has been a bachelor. There we flesh
out the complement, and the invariant features of what it feels like to be
a bachelor, from guessing what it would feel like to be married. Of course,
once one gets married, one may discover that being married does not feel
like what one had expected at all -- in which case one did not fully know
what it feels like to be a bachelor either, having only experienced
positive instances of it.
The difference in the case of
the category "feeling" itself is that its complement cannot be
filled in by proxy hypothesis or analogy, as in the case of imagining what
it would feel like to be married, because in the case of feeling, the
category "what it would feel like not to feel" is both empty and self-contradictory.
So we may be off (somewhat) about what, exactly, it feels like to feel, in
the way we could be off about what it feels like to be a bachelor; and that
may (and indeed does) create conceptual problems. But it does not mean the
category "what it feels like to feel (something)" is either empty
or incoherent; just a bit pathological, cognitively.
You also seem to be denying
that I can have cartesian certainty that I am feeling ("[t]here is
no... "Cartesian"... knowledge of feeling") when I'm feeling
(sentio ergo sentitur) -- and
that's a rather bold denial. I wonder if you have an argument to support
it? And unless I'm misunderstanding, you even seem to be tilting against
the cogito itself, in its
original formulation by Descartes, in claiming that "[there] is no...
Cartesian... knowledge of thinking.ù
I'd say your chances are better
if you just attack my notion of uncomplemented categories, rather than trying
to take on Descartes too!
JS: "Feeling is not an object of knowledge, but rather a
way of knowing..."
I would say feeling's the only way of knowing, since unfelt
"knowledge" (as in the case of an encyclopedia, computer, or one
of today's robots) is no knowledge at all. And that includes things that
Freud (no philosopher) lulled us into calling "unconscious
knowledge": In a feeling creature like me, there's knowledge, namely,
the things I know, and know that I know, and feel that I know, whilst I'm
busy feeling that I know them. All the same things. These are not cartesian
(certain) knowledge; they're just beliefs I have, some of which might even
be true. But all the beliefs are felt
(whilst they're being believed, which of course feels like something).
(The same data, including
verbal, propositional data, implemented inside a feelingless robot, would
not be beliefs or knowledge, but merely data and states, along with the
functional capacity that the data and states subserve; in other words, all
just functing. Even in a feeling, hence true-believer/knower like me, those
of my brain states that are not being felt are not beliefs but merely
functional capacity plus the [mysterious] potential to be felt, hence to
become beliefs while being felt.)
I also have know-how -- sensorimotor and even cognitive skills that I am able
to perform without knowing how I
manage to perform them. (Most of cognition and behavior is like that. You
can do it, but you have no idea how: you're waiting for cognitive science
to discover how you do it, and then tell you.) Some like to call that
"unconscious" or "implicit knowledge," but I think it's
more accurate to say that it's the functional basis of my know-how, of my
performance capacity. (It's also the explanatory target of cognitive
science in general, and the Turing Test in particular.)
Another way of thinking of the
"explanatory gap" is to ask why feelings accompany any of this --
whether my explicit knowledge or the exercise of my implicit know-how: Why
is it all not just functed? Until that question is answered, feeling cannot
be said to be a "way of knowing," but merely a passive (and
apparently superfluous) correlate of some forms of know-how. (Don't forget
that, functionally speaking, explicit, declarative knowledge is just a form
of know-how too -- let's call it "know-that" -- a form of
know-how in which we happen to be able to verbalize and describe some of
the underlying functional algorithms or dynamics.)
Harnad, S. (2007) From Knowing How To Knowing That: Acquiring Categories By Word of
Mouth. Presented at
Kaziemierz Naturalized Epistemology Workshop (KNEW), Kaziemierz,
Poland, 2 September 2007.
JS: "The problem you have been discussing is not a
"hard problem"... but a simple problem... with your categorizing
"feelings" as objects of knowledge, and not ways of knowing.Õ
I'll settle for your solution
to the simple problem of how and why
feeling (rather than just functing) is a way of knowing -- as soon as you
explain it...
JS: "This error underlies your... incoherent distinctions
between Cartesian and non-Cartesian knowing and between functing and
feeling."
You've remembered to call them
incoherent but you've forgotten to explain how and why...
JS: "It also explains the contradiction between your
allegiance to physicalism and your insistance that feelings are somehow
non-causal."
No contradiction at all (as
I've just got done explaining to Arnold Trehub). I have not said feelings
both are and are-not causal. I have said that we cannot explain how or why.
That's called the explanatory gap.
JS: "the term "physical" implies
functional/causal congruity with respect to predictive models, and... this
is a property which you deny feelings..."
I am denying nothing except
what one can only affirm if one can explain how and why (and one
hasn't).
JS: "...your argument... is motivated by the existence
of feelings [but] if feelings cannot causally influence behavior, how could
they motivate it?
Did I say anything about motivation? (What is motivation,
anyway, apart from yet another set of feelings correlated with yet another
set of functions?)
But, to answer your question:
feelings can correlate with behavior if the feelings and behavior are
caused by the same functing. The trouble is, we don't know how or why the
brain would bother to funct feelings as well as behavior, rather than just
go ahead and funct the behavior, without any sentimentaliy...
JS: "Perhaps you wish to claim that one can feel without
feeling some X, or that one could know that one was feeling without knowing
that one was feeling some X..."
No I don't wish to claim that,
since it's not true. And why would I wish or need it to be true? (Please,
before you pounce on "wish" or "need" as
selt-contradicting, read again what I said above about correlates and
common causes above.)
JS: "...the only support you have provided is... that
feeling could be separated from feeling some X and... that [to] den[y]
this... is... [to] beg... the question. These tactics are no more
persuasive than the theistic arguments they resemble..."
I think you have not understood
the argument. I said that from feeling A, feeling B and feeling Z, we could
abstract the invariant feeling X (where X is something, anything). And that
was perfectly ordinary categorization (except that "feeling" is
uncomplemented.)
And what I said was
question-begging was assigning a causal role to feeling without explaining
how and why.
(Theistic??? I have inferred
(by abstracting the common invariant across many postings) that NA has some
sort of thing about "analytic philosophers." Do you perhaps have
some sort of bugaboo too -- with "theists"?)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/975
Reply
|
2009-05-18 --
Reply to Derek Allan
|
POLTERGEIST
DA: "Is that a common viewpoint -
that if one doesn't think that the brain "constitutes"
consciousness, one is a "spiritualist'? (I thought spiritualists
were people who held seances etc)."
(1) I'm afraid I have no idea
how common the viewpoint is. What I take to be important in trying to reach
a valid conclusion is the evidence and the reasoning rather than the
vote-count.
(2) The common term for those
who don't think the brain "constitutes" consciousness is
"dualist." But I don't think "dualist" is
self-explanatory. I have also referred to the position as "telekinetic dualism." And of course telekinesis, clairvoyance,
teleportation and telepathy are what spiritualists believe in, and what
they try to do in their seances.
(3) The link is causality: If I
am ready to believe that I am using a mental force to move my arm when I
feel like it, then I have much the same belief as those who believe in
action-at-a-distance in space and time
through "mind-over-matter."
[As the quip goes:
"Madame, we have established your profession, we are merely haggling
over the price" -- or, in this case, the distance, in time and space.
(This quip is sometimes attributed to Churchill, but
who knows? Unspeakable quanities of hokum -- and often spiritualist hokum
-- have been attributed to poor Einstein, no longer here to defend himself
from his putative "sayings.")]
(4) Note that telekinetic
dualism (though not under that name) is the default belief of most people,
that it is a perfectly natural belief, congruent with all of our
experiences and intuitions; and it is of course at the root of our belief
in an immaterial, immortal soul, and thence all the rest of the
supernatural, including the the afterlife, the demiurges, and the
omnipotent deities. (It just happens to be untrue, although, again, no one
can explain how or why, other than to point out, quite sensibly, that the
brain is the only credible culprit, which it surely is.)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/977
|
2009-05-18 --
Reply to Derek Allan
|
PASCAL'S WAGER, OR "WHY I AM NOT
AN AGNOSTIC"
DA: "...for the afterlife, omnipotent deities
etc... I would have thought the default position for many people
is a modest agnosticism."
Although this is getting
distinctly silly (and drifting ever further from the "explanatory
gap"), I cannot resist replying (because the connection is not
altogether zero) that default agnosticism suffers from the same rational
(and practical) defect as Pascal's Wager:
Pascal thought that -- given
the trade-off between the grave risk of eternal damnation if Received Writ
is all true and one fails to be obey, and the mild risk of a somewhat more
constrained finite lifetime if it's false yet one obeys anyway -- the
lesser risk should be the default option.
This founders on the fact that
there are competing claims on our obedience, from the Mosaic edicts to the
Mohammedan injunctions to voodoo to the dictates of the Great Pumpkin. Is one to hew then, as in Selfridge's Pandemonium model, to whichever demon raises the ante the highest? (If so, I'll meet you and double the
eternities of agony you will suffer if you don't send my temple a $1M
pledge and make and send 100 copies of this letter to 100 other infidels.)
There are also links here with
"flat priors" in Bayesian Inference, with the Cauchy Distribution, with Zeno's Paradox (especially Lewis Carroll's version of it), and with Dawkins's "Green-Eyed Monster," but I alas haven't the time to explain them all.
DA: "The claim that 'it all depends on the brain'
etc strikes me as a kind of scientistic dogmatism... until someone can
demonstrate clearly that consciousness can be explained in purely
neuroscientific terms..."
Just a clarification, that the
predicate "all depends on the brain" referred, yet again, only to
the explanatory gap: how/why the brain causes feelings. (The eschatology
was just a bonus -- though of course the brain, indeed multiple brains, are
behind that too, if rather more circuitously!)
Derek seems to think that the explanatory
gap -- an epistemic gap -- somehow sanctions agnosticism about the brain; I
think it just sanctions scepticism about the power of causal explanation to
explain the fact of feeling. It raises no doubts whatsoever, in my mind, about the fact that feelings are caused
(somehow) by the brain.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/982
Reply
|
2009-05-18 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
MAKING COMMON CAUSE
AT: "Your conclusion is wrong because you
appear to be endorsing each of the following propositions:
-- (a) All brain states have causal consequences.
-- (b) Feelings are brain states.
-- (c) Feelings have no causal consequences.
"Given (b), proposition (c) is contradicted by
proposition (a)."
Here is a sure way to know that
one has either cheated, trivialized, or otherwise begged the question in
the way one has formulated the problem: if one's formulation would apply
unproblematically and indifferently to any old brain property at all.
"All brain states have causal consequences - X is a brain state - So X
has causal consequences - No problem" then there is a problem with
one's formulation of the problem.
The problem is that when
"X" happens to be feeling, it is not at all evident what we are
saying when we say "feeling is a brain state." Behavior, for
example, is not a brain state,
though it is caused by brain
states. ("State" is a weasel-word, covertly doing double-duty
here.)
So let as assume (since it is
surely true) that brain states cause feelings, just as they cause behavior
(even though we can explain how and why brain states cause behavior, but we
cannot explain how and why they cause feelings).
Now with behavior -- which, to
repeat, is not a brain state, but is caused by brain states, with no
problem at all about explaining why and how it is caused -- there is also
no problem with the consequences
of what the brain state causes, in causing behavior. Behavior itself has
its own consequences: My brain, with the help of a slippery pavement,
causes me to stumble; I fall on your cake; the cake is squashed; you send
me the bill.
But with feeling -- which, to
repeat, is not a brain state, but is caused
by brain states, inexplicably [that's the first part of the problem, and
hence of the explanatory gap] -- there is indeed a problem, an even greater
problem, with the consequences of
what the brain causes, in causing feeling. For feeling does not have (and
cannot have -- on pain of telekinetic dualism) any independent causal
consequences of its own: My brain, with the help of a slippery
pavement causes me to stumble (though I feel I tried everything I could to
keep my balance); I fall on your cake (I feel clumsy); the cake
is squashed (I feel embarrassed; you feel angry); you send me the bill. (I
pay it, because I feel I should) etc.
So, to reformulate your
scenario without begging the question:
-- (a)
All brain states have causal consequences.
-- (b)
Feelings are (unexplained) causal consequences of brain states.
-- (c)
Feelings have no causal consequences:
-- (d)
What we feel to be causal consequences of feelings are really the causal
consequences of the brain states that (also, inexplicably) cause the
feelings.
Given (d), proposition (c)
is perfectly consistent with propositions (a) and (b).
Common causes (functing) can
have multiple correlated effects, and in the case of behavior (functing)
and feeling, the feeling has no independent (i.e., non-telekinetic) effect,
it just dangles, inexplicably.
The explanatory gap (which
cannot be closed by a series of non-explanatory propositions presupposing
the solution of non-existence of the "hard" problem.).
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/985
|
2009-05-19
-- Reply to Derek Allan
|
'NESCIO' IS NOT A SUBSTANTIVE OPTION
The reply to Derek is exactly
the same as the reply to Arnold, but for the opposite reason:
First the reply, again: "Here is a sure way to know that
one has either cheated, trivialized, or otherwise begged the question in
the way one has formulated the ["hard"] problem: if one's
formulation would apply unproblematically and indifferently to any old
brain property at all."
Now Derek's contribution to the
discussion of the problem:
DA: "I am agnostic about explanations
of consciousness... [not] because of the so-called 'gap'... but simply
because I confess I do not know."
This casts neuroscience's
failure to explain how and why we feel with its failure to
explain schizophrenia, two (unsolved) problems of an entirely different
order (one "easy," the other "hard," for a number of
reasons that have been repeatedly made explicit in this discussion, and
that constitute the "explanatory gap.").
The trouble, again, with what
Derek seems to be saying, is that it simply has no substance, one way or
the other. Apart from inveighing repeatedly against the straw man of
"analytic philosophy," nothing whatsoever is being said other
than that consciousness has not yet been explained (and that "we need
to 'define' it").
Schizophrenia will be
"defined" when we know how and why the brain generates it; till
then, it's enough to point to it. Ditto for consciousness (feeling). But
for the latter (and not the former), principled problems of explanation
have been repeatedly pointed out, very explicitly. "I confess I do not
know" does not even begin to engage the question.
The following, says even less:
DA: "...the... explanatory 'gap' ... may in fact be an
explanatory abyss - or dead-end... [T]hat possibility has at
least to be acknowledged..."
It has been acknowledged, repeatedly, with substantive reasons.
Now it's your turn to say something of substance, rather than just
repeating that we need to "define" consciousness, because maybe
that will make the problem of explaining it go away.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/993
|
2009-05-20 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
AT: "Your endorsement of the
"explanatory gap" clearly depends on the key assumption that a
feeling is not a brain state despite the fact that a feeling is caused by a
brain state."
It doesn't really depend on
that at all:
If feeling were a "brain
state" rather than an (unexplained and inexplicable) effect of a brain
state, then instead of an effect of the brain state being a causal dangler,
the brain state itself would be a causal dangler. Either way, we are just
massaging terms, but not explaining how and why we feel. That's why all of
this explanatorily-empty ontological house-keeping does no good. It's a
substantive explanation we want (despite the obstacles that have been
itemized), not metaphysical comfort-calls without explanation.
Besides, I suggested that
feeling was no more a brain state (as opposed to the effect of a brain state) than behavior is: Both feeling and
acting are things our brain does
rather than things our brain "is."
AT: "In accordance with a non-dualistic view of the
matter, you take feelings to be physical events."
It no more helps to call
feelings "physical" (or "nonphysical") than it does to
call them "brain states." What we want to know is how and why we (or our brains --
makes no difference) feel, rather
than just "funct". Solemnly pledging ontic allegiance to
"monism" or "dualism" does not advance us by one
epistemic epsilon....
AT: "As physical events, feelings must exist somewhere
in the physical universe. A legitimate question is this: If a feeling does
not exist as a part of the brain of the individual having the feeling,
where does it exist?"
...nor does pinpointing where (or when -- or even what)
we feel help to close the how/why gap one iota...
AT: "If a feeling is a physical event (physical events
can have causal consequences without telekinetic dualism), what is your
principled explanation for the assumed inability of feelings to have causal
consequences?"
I'm not the one giving the
explanations, I'm the one asking for them! And dubbing feeling "a
physical event" does not answer the how/why question either.
Here is another way to put the
entire feeling/function problem in such a way as to bring the problem of
causality out into the open:
When I lift my finger, it feels as if I did it
because I felt like it. In reality, my brain did two things: (1) it caused
me to feel like lifting my finger and (2) it caused me to lift my finger.
The "hard" question about causality, the one that creates the
explanatory gap, is: how, and especially why, did my brain bother with (1)
at all, since it is obviously causally superfluous for (2), an effectless
(ineffectual) correlate (except if telekinetic dualism is true, which it's
not).
In other words, if telekinetic
dualism (i.e., the 5th-force causal power of feelings) is false, then the
burden for "principled explanation" is on those who wish to claim
that feelings do have causal
consequences: how? why?
AT: "In your reformulation, you speak of feelings as
being 'unexplained' rather than 'inexplicable'. I have no problem with this
change of stance."
Again, if we agree that there
is no explanation so far of how and why we feel rather than just funct, the
burden is on those who think that there ever can be an explanation, in
light of the causal obstacles (unlike anything else under the sun) that any
explanation would have to surmount. Preferring "unexplained" to
"inexplicable" does not help; it just gives the soothing feeling
(without justification) that the mind/body (feeling/function) problem is
just another problem science has not yet solved; no reason to expect it
won't get round to it eventually...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1003
|
2009-05-20 --
Reply to Luke Culpitt
|
LC: "...the explanation that would fill the explanatory
gap appears to be a non-functional, non-causal explanation to the question
of why [feeling] occurs..."
That would be a terrific way to
keep begging the question indefinitely, since the question of why we (or
our brains) feel is a functional, causal question, just as the question of
why we (or our brains) act is.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1004
|
2009-05-21 --
Reply to JWK Matthewson Matthewson
|
IMPORTED QUANTUM PUZZLES DON'T HELP,
THEY JUST DISTRACT
JWKMM: "[There] is the implicit assumption that the
'physical' is straightforward and explicable whilst the mental [feeling] is
difficult to define and currently inexplicable."
No assumptions. The problem is
explaining how and why we feel rather than just "funct." The
problem is neither solved nor dissolved by pointing to putative problems in
physical (i.e., functional) explanation.
JWKMM: "...the contributors.. all seem to agree that a
succession of brain states is something that could be easily understood,
being physical, although they disagree about how far such a succession of
states might explain experience [feeling'."
The problem is explaining how
and why people feel, not with explaining how and why apples fall.
JWKMM: "Suppose we could explain all experience [feeling[
in terms of some kind of functionalism, we would then need to understand
the nature of a 'function'."
We understand function well
enough. And to suppose that feeling can be explained functionally is to
suppose an answer to a question that some of us are arguing is unanswerable.
That is begging the question.
JWKMM: "One of the most difficult problems in the
philosophy of physics is the notion of 'change'. No-one understands
how one physical state gives rise to another."
It's understood to a good
enough approximation to make functional explanation unproblematic
(everywhere except possibly in QM). But it does not even begin to explain
how and why we feel.
JWKMM: "So, if it is conceded that conscious experience
[feeling] is purely functional then classical physicalism needs a conscious
[feeling] observer outside of this purely functional world to observe the
functional observer."
A moment ago we were to
"suppose" (against all reasons adduced) that feeling could be
explained functionally. Now we are to "concede" it, and the result
is suppose to be that we need a feeling observer of function. (This strikes
me as QM-puzzle-motivated gobbledy-gook, I'm afraid.)
JWKMM: "Quantum mechanics does not bring us any nearer to
explaining change."
So let's stay far away from
quantum mechanics and focus on the explanatory gap, which is about
explaining how and why we feel rather than just funct, like everything else
(including QM).
JWKMM: "...the problem of conscious experience [feeling] is
somehow linked to the problem of time and change in physics."
No, the problem is that feeling
is correlated with time and change in biological systems but no one can
explain how or why.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1015
Reply
|
2009-05-22 --
Reply to Luke Culpitt
|
THE (NONEXISTENT) EFFECTS OF FEELING
ARE A FAR BIGGER PROBLEM
THAN THE UNKNOWN CAUSES OF FEELING
LC: "If... 'why we (or our brains) feel is a
functional, causal question'..., is there any distinction... between
the question of how, and the question of why, we feel? You
indicated... that the explanatory gap is a question of 'especially
why' we feel,
and David Chalmers appears
to agree..."
Both questions are functional,
causal ones (but they are really flip sides of the same coin).
"How" is about the
causes of feeling and "Why" is about the effects of
feeling.
I don't know about David, but I
don't lose much sleep about whether
the brain causes feeling (of course it does); and if the only problem with
explaining how the brain causes feeling had been some uncertainty about
objective measurement of feeling, I would not give such a small explanatory
gap much thought.
No, for me the real puzzle is
the "why" aspect rather than the "how" aspect. For
whereas it is merely mysterious how the brain causes feeling (but there is
no doubt that it does), the real explanatory puzzle is why the brain causes feeling, since
there is no room for feeling to have any causal power of its own (even
though it feels as if it does), except on pain of telekinetic dualism.
That's the heart of the feeling/function problem -- and the real locus and
force of the explanatory gap.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1026
|
2009-05-22 --
Reply to JWK Matthewson Matthewson
|
(Is JWKMM perchance V. Petkov?) In
any case, I think you have answered your own question: The quantum puzzles
and their alleged implications for the causal explanation of dynamics would
be there even in a feelingless universe, so they have nothing to do with
the feeling/function problem and its
explanatory gap.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1027
|
2009-05-22 --
Reply to Victor Panzica
|
NO COMPLEXITY THRESHOLD FOR A PHASE
TRANSITION INTO FELT FUNCTION
-- AND THE WATCHMAKER IS BLIND TO
FEELING TOO
VP: "For the purpose of evolution, isn't feeling a
necessary trait for the survival of complex organisms in a complex
environment? Would a complex organism and complex brain be able to
evolve without feelings? Please correct me if I am missing your
point."
I am afraid you are missing the
point: Darwinian evolution is, unproblematically, a causal, functional process.
Survival, reproduction, behavior, behavioral skills, learning -- all of
these are unproblematically functional. So are RNA, DNA, protein synthesis,
physiological function, brain function: all functing.
But the explanatory gap is
about explaining how and why some functions are felt. That includes explaining it adaptively, evolutionarily,
in terms of mutations and selective advantages, for survival and
reproduction, of felt functions over unfelt functions.
But the minute you propose a
functional advantage that would allegedly be conferred by feeling X (e.g.,
pain), or by X's being a feltrather than jan unfelt function (seeing, vs.
optical input processing), it becomes apparent that the functional
advantages are identical (indeed Turing-indistinguishable), whether or not
they are felt. Feeling does not -- and cannot, on pain of telekinetic
dualism -- confer any functional advantages of its own. It merely dangles,
inexplicably, and ineffectually.
That is the explanatory gap.
Neither adaptive function nor brain function fills that explanatory gap.
And simply assuming that there must
be a function, even though for each candidate function the feeling can
easily be seen to be functionally superfluous, is simply begging the
question.
One thing is certain: If there
is an answer, it will not be an easy answer. And saying "feeling must
have survival value, somehow" would be an easy answer...
(Hand-waving about
"complexity" (see Churchland's argument) won't help at all either. How/why should greater
functional complexity (if such it is) become felt complexity, rather than just functed complexity, like the
rest? What's the functional complexity threshold for a "phase
transition" into felt function?)
Harnad, S. (2002) Turing
Indistinguishability and the Blind Watchmaker. In: J. Fetzer (ed.) Evolving
Consciousness Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. 3-18.
Harnad, S.&Scherzer, P.
(2008) First, Scale Up to the Robotic Turing Test,
Then Worry About Feeling.Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 44 (2): 83-89
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1031
Reply
|
2009-05-23 --
Reply to Luke Culpitt
|
FEELING WILLING
LC: "I don't believe that the explanatory gap is also a
question of free will. The putative feeling of free will is just one
feeling/sensation/perception/thought among many. The explanatory gap as I
understand it is to provide an explanation for the mere existence of any
and all feeling, in addition to the functional explanation for how the
brain causes that feeling."
I am indeed arguing that they
(the problem of explaining the causal role of willing and problem of
explaining the causal role of feeling) are exactly the same problem, because the problem of feeling
(consciousness) is the problem of the causal status of feeling.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1037
|
2009-05-23 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
HOW/WHY IS PLANNING FELT?
AT: "If feeling were a brain state, it would have all
the causal biophysical properties of a brain state and could not be
considered a 'causal dangler'."
Feeling is and remains a causal
dangler until it is explained how and why certain brain states are felt rather than just
"functed." That is precisely as true whether we assume feeling is
a "brain state" or feeling is an "effect" of a brain
state. Causality (both coming and going) is the problem, either way.
AT: "Surely, if one claims that feelings are physical
but are not located in the brain of the individual having the feelings, one
should suggest where else they might be located."
The problem is not the locus of
feelings, but their causal status.
AT: "If lifting your finger were a reflex, then
[feeling like doing it] would be superfluous. But if lifting your finger
were an intended action, then you would have to feel like lifting your
finger and [feeling like doing it] would be causal (not
superfluous)."
What on earth does
"intending" mean, other than feeling
like doing it? Your reasoning is unfortunately circular.
To break out of the circle,
explain to me how and why intentional action is felt rather than just
functed. A reflex is not only nonintentional (it feels like something, but
something passive): it is also simple and automatic. Intentional action is
often more complex than a reflex, to be sure (though intentionally lifting
a finger is not, and that's why it's better to stick to that example); but how (and even more importantly, why)
should the planning of a complex action be felt, rather than just functed,
like a reflex?
AT: "It is also possible that you lifted your
finger reflexively and then, after the fact, felt like you lifted your
finger because you felt like doing it. In this case [feeling like doing it
before the fact] would not occur and [feeling like doing it after the fact]
would be superfluous."
And your point is...?
The question was: How/why is feeling like doing it "before
the fact" not superfluous too? (By the way, the "fact" here,
as always, is the act; so the
question is, what's the point of feeling before the act? Planning before the act is of course
unproblematically functional and causal -- but, again, why felt planning, rather than just
"functed" planning (e.g., as in a computer or robot)?
AT: "A better example of the causal necessity of
feeling is planning a trip. In this case you have to imagine (feel) all
sorts of things... before you can act --- make your selection of
destination, consider possible weather conditions, when to leave, means of
travel, what to pack, etc."
How/why felt (rather than just
functed) selection of destination?
How/why felt (rather than just
functed) consideration of possible weather conditions?
How/why felt (rather than just
functed) consideration of when to leave?
How/why felt (rather than just
functed) consideration of means of travel?
How/why felt (rather than just
functed) consideration of what to pack, etc.?
Your reasoning is completely
circular, Arnold! You simply take it for granted that certain functions are
felt, and as a result you are simply begging the question, with your
comfortable focus on brain function: Brain function will explain the causal
basis of everything we can do, such as all the things listed above (and
lifting our fingers too), but it won't explain how or why any of that
functing is felt.
And that's the "hard
problem" and the locus of the "explanatory gap". It's a
causal gap -- or rather a gap in ordinary causal explanation, which works
just fine for everything else, from neutrons to neurons.
(Please, please let not another
quantum mysterian chime in on the QM entanglements of neutrons!)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1039
Reply
|
2009-05-24 --
Reply to JWK Matthewson Matthewson
|
SH: Ò(Please, please let not another quantum mysterian chime
in on the QM entanglements of neutrons!)"
JWKMM: "I would like to defend myself against the
accusation of "mysterianism"... defined as... 1 Ontological
naturalism: the view that holds (inter alia) that [feeling] is a natural
feature of the world; 2 Epistemic irreducibility: the view that holds that
there is no explanation of [feeling] available to us".... I admit
to agreeing with (1) but not with (2). So rest assured, I will not chime in
with a mysterian point, I will just restate the fact that... Physical
theory cannot (and could never) explain why an action potential actually
moves up a membrane or why a neutron is emitted at a particular moment from
a mass of U235..."
By this definition I am more
than happy to declare myself a feeling ("qualia") mysterian; but
what I was referring to was quantum mysterians (which you assuredly are!);
and, in particular, the importation of quantum mysterianism into the
sanctum of qualia mystery: Two unrelated koans neither explain, eliminate
nor engulf one another...
-- Joshu(a)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1055
|
2009-05-24 --
Reply to Jason Streitfeld
|
COMPLEMENTING DESCARTES
JS: "Your repeated "how/why" questions
presuppose the very distinction which is in question here, namely that
between feeling and functing. Until this distinction is clarified, we
will remain at an impasse."
How about the distinction
between feeling and doing, then? Is that clear enough? (It's much the same
distinction.)
How and why the brain causes
adaptive behavior is a tractable scientific question, a functional one,
that will one day have a full, clear answer.
Not so for how (and especially
why) the brain causes feeling. (And that's the point, and the problem, and
the gap.)
JS: "if feelings have no causal efficacy, they do not make
a difference to anything, including the conclusions we draw in our
discourse on feelings. So why do we have words for them?"
(1) Feelings are there, being
felt (when they are being felt).
(2) There is an (unexplained --
and I think causally inexplicable, though undoubtedly -- if not undoubtably
-- causal) correlation between our feelings and our doings (hence between our feelings and our sayings),
probably explained by the common
functional cause that (explicably) causes the doings and (inexplicably)
also causes the feelings.
So there are feelings there, to
speak of, and we do speak of them; and speaking certainly has causal
consequences. But until and unless there can be a causal explanation of how
and why we feel, the only available explanation of why we speak of feelings
is that the same cause that
(inexplicably) makes us feel and (explicably) act also (mysteriously) makes
us speak of feeling; but the fact that we actually feel has no
independent causal role, hence no causal explanation. It just dangles on
the joint cause of the feeling (unexplained) and the speaking.
(I did speculate a bit -- on
one of the earlier threads of this discussion: "WHY WOULD TURING-INDISTINGUISHABLE ZOMBIES TALK ABOUT FEELINGS (AND
WHAT, IF ANYTHING, WOULD THEY MEAN)?" --
concerning why Turing-Test-scale robots, with behavioral capacities indistinguishable
from our own -- if they were
feelingless Zombies -- would speak of feelings at all. One possibility
might be that the words would be used as metaphors for unobservable
internal states -- unfelt states, but also states that are inaccessible to
other agents with which the TT-passing robot must interact adaptively. So
"you have hurt me" might be a short-hand for "you have
caused damage to my internal functioning." That would make
feeling-talk ("mind-reading") functional rather than a dangler,
like feelings themselves. But I have not yet carried through the exercise
so far as to try to construe what functional role "feeling" talk
could play if the exchange between us [in this very email dialogue] were
taking place between Zombies, and they were talking specifically about the
difference between the functional role of talk about feelings between
feelingless Zombies versus talk about feelings between feeling people.
Maybe that's just further evidence that there
could not be feelingless Zombies Turing-indistinguishable from us. But
unfortunately that leaves completely unanswered, yet again, the [same old]
question, this time in the form: how and why not! Same old explanatory gap... [Peter Carruthers has a recent target
article on this in BBS, but I think he gets it somewhat backwards: it is
feeling that is primary, not mind-reading, whether of the unobservable
states of others or one's own...])
JS: "Your view makes all talk of feelings superfluous,
including the claim that there is a feeling/functing distinction."
No. It just points out that how
and why we feel is unexplained (and how and why I think it is also
inexplicable: functional superfluousness; no telekinesis; causal
inexplicability).
JS: "The notion of 'what it is like to be a bachelor' does not
pick out any particular feel or category."
"What it feels like to be
a bachelor" picks out what every waking minute feels like (to a human
male) from birth to the first minute one gets married -- at which point it
is complemented (and one discovers how right or wrong one had been about
"what it feels like to be a bachelor"). No such possibility for
what it feels like to be awake, or alive...
JS: "there is nothing it is like to not have a third
arm..."
That's largely true (except in
contrast to what it feels like to have a third arm, as, say, siamese twins,
spiders, or a surgically-altered-me might experience).
But in general I do agree that
arbitrary counterfactual complementations are of no more interest than
"what it feels like to see something that is bigger than a
breadbox" (which does happen to be complemented) or "what it
feels like to have lived fewer than an infinite number of years"
(which is not).
We only single out categories in cases where the complement
is in some way salient (and where the invariant features of the category
members -- relative to the complement members -- are used to resolve uncertainty about what is a member of the category and what is a
member of its complement). It does
make sense to say "I know what it feels like to be a bachelor,"
and I can even discover that I was wrong.
In much the same way, it does
make sense to say "I know what it feels like to be alive" or
"I know what it feels like to be awake." And we probably do have
a pretty good idea from our positive-only evidence. But the difference is
that there is no way we can discover whether we were spot-on or not quite right; and perhaps we are not really justified in making all
the inferences we tend to make from our uncertain grip on these problematic
categories.
(The standard kluge we use for
"what it feels like to be alive" is to complement it with
analogies, including an imaginary afterlife or rebirth; and for "what
it feels like to be awake" we incoherently complement it with what it
feels like to be asleep and dreaming -- which is of course not exactly a
"nonawake" experience in the same way that delta [dreamless]
sleep is -- but in delta sleep you're gone, so there is no one feeling what
it's like...)
JS: "If we admitted all of these Òwhat
it is likesÓ into our experiential set, then each person would have to
ÒsampleÓ (to use your word) an infinite number of feels before they could
know what it is like to feel anything at all."
No, not only do all those
hypothetical complements never occur to us, but even when they do, they can
easily be dismissed as arbitrary, inconsequential and uninformative. Not so
for some of them, though, because we persist in thinking of and speaking of
them as if the distinction were salient: "It feels good to be
alive" or "Some of my brain functions are felt and others are
not." Nor are the intended distinctions empty in those cases. They are
merely uncomplemented, hence problematic.
(On arbitrary negative
categories and their relation to our sense of similarity, see also Watanabe's "Ugly Duckling
Theorem.")
JS: "There is no "invariant feeling" running
through all feelings."
The reason there is no
functional invariant here is that it is normally the complement that
determines what is and is not invariant in a category: The invariant is
relative, based on contrasting what all members of the category share and
what all members of its complement lack. (Please let's not get into family
resemblances: invariants can be disjunctive and conditional too.) But with
positive-only categories, we nevertheless have access to what all the
positive instances have in common. After all, we do know we are feeling
when we are feeling. We are never in doubt about that...
JS: "To complement the category of feeling something, we
donÕt need to know what it feels like to feel nothing at all. Rather,
we must simply have the category of not feeling anything. And we have
that category."
I'm afraid not. The positive
category is "what it feels like to feel something" and hence the
complement would have to be "what it feels like to feel nothing at
all." And that category is empty, hence we have no idea (or only
incoherent fantasies) of "what it feels like to feel nothing at
all."
(Your error is, I think, a bit
like mixing up the categorical distinction between (1) what is alive versus
what is non-alive with the categorical distinction between (2) "what
it feels like to be alive" versus "what it feels like to be
non-alive": We have no trouble distinguishing things that are alive
from things that are dead [or have never been alive]; but we never even
face the problem of distinguishing "what it feels like to feel
something" from "what it feels like to feel nothing at all,"
because the latter is impossible, hence empty. The only reason you have
that category in your repertoire at all is that you are going by the
positive instances plus some provisional analogy-based imaginary complement
-- as I would be doing, in imagining what it would feel like to be married,
whilst I'm still a bachelor -- except that in the case of "what it
feels like to feel something" it is certain the imaginary complement is impossible, hence empty.)
(I think you may also be
missing the essentially relational nature of feeling: the feeling is always
felt, hence it has an implicit feeler: this is taken up in the discussion
of the cogito, later below.)
JS: "I can distinguish between something which feels and
something which does not feel."
Of course you can, but that's
like distinguishing between something that's alive and dead (as in (1)
above). That's not the category we're talking about! (We are talking of
(2), above.)
JS: "We have positive and negative categories for
feelings. Some feelings are categorizable as Ònot feeling boredomÓ
and others as Ònot tasting mustard.Ó
I've mentioned these before
too. You are complementing the wrong category. What it feels like to feel this (versus that) is perfectly well-complemented. But that's no help if the
category in question is "what it feels like to feel something
(anything) at all" versus "what it feels like to feel nothing at
all."
(An analogy: If the only
sense-modality were vision, and the only experience were to see shapes, and
all shapes were colored -- counting black as a color -- then the
subordinate category "red" would be complemented by anything
non-red, but the superordinate category "colored" would be uncomplemented.)
JS: "I can thus form the categories of Ònot feeling
thisÓ and Ònot feeling that,Ó and I can further abstract and form the
category, Ònot feeling anythingÓ. This is exactly what we do when we
abstract from Òfeeling thisÓ and Òfeeling thatÓ to Òfeeling
something.Ó So why talk about uncomplemented categories here?"
You're simply repeating, I
think, your conviction that in complementing subcategories of a category
against other subcategories of a category, we are somehow also
complementing the category as a whole, against its own complement. But we
are not. You are making a category error...
JS: "Despite your assertion to the contrary, we do not
know 'what it feels like to feel anything at all, be it headache or
toothache.' ÒAnything at allÓ does not pick out any particular experience.
There is nothing it is like to feel anything at all."
The category in question is
"what it feels like to feel something," where the something is
anything that can be felt. That's no different from saying that once a
child has learnt the category "dog," he knows what a dog is, and
can now (correctly) recognize any dog
at all, not before seen, as a dog. The same is true for
"feeling": We (correctly) recognize any feeling we feel at all as
a feeling. The difference is that the child has learned the category
"dog" from having sampled both dogs and non-dogs, and abstracting
the invariants that reliably distinguish any dog at all from
non-dogs.
We have done only part of that
with feelings: We can (correctly) recognize "what it feels like to
feel something" on every occasion, but we really have no idea how to
distinguish "what it feels like to feel something" from
"what it feels like to feel nothing at all" (even though we think
we have) because it is impossible to feel "what it feels like to feel
nothing at all."
JS: "The abstract category of Òfeeling somethingÓ does
not feel like something in general; rather, it feels like a particular
concept."
The category in question is
"what it feels like to feel something" -- not "what it feels
like to have the "concept" of someone feeling something" (or
of someone being alive, or of someone being awake).
JS: "Similarly, the category of Òfeeling nothing at allÓ
does not feel like nothing at all."
It sure doesn't, for that would
be a contradiction in terms. The category is as empty as a square circle.
Only Meinong can
manage such a feat...
JS: "We feel what it feels like to think about feeling
something, of course, but we also feel what it feels like to think about
feeling nothing.
The uncomplemented category in
question is not "what it feels like to think about feeling
something," it is the category "what it feels like to feel
something."
JS: [Re: The Sentio vs. The Cogito] "Descartes' explicit
claim was that the cogito established to himself that he existed."
Actually, what was demonstrated
(via the "method of doubt") was that it was not true that the
necessary truths of mathematics were the only things one could be certain
about. There was one other thing. The Cogito, which is that when I am
thinking, I cannot doubt that there is indeed thinking going on.
A slight (strategic) mistake
was to focus on "thinking" (a rather vague category) rather than
feeling (something we all immediately know is happening, when it is
happening).
And a slightly bigger
(exegetic) mistake was to infer that the indubitable truth of the cogito
was not just that I cannot doubt that I'm feeling when I'm feeling, but
that therefore "I" exist (for if the category
"thinking" is vague, the category "I" is even vaguer:
not empty, just vague) -- rather than just that feeling exists.
Ergo Sentitur suffices, without overstating the case... It already shows
that one does not have to be uncertain about everything other than the
necessary truths of mathematics (e.g., the reality of the physical world,
the existence of other minds, the truth of scientific laws). One can also
be certain that feeling exists.
Feeling! That one certainty
among all the other undoubtedly true yet doubtably uncertain truths, such
as the physical world, scientific laws, induction, causality,
"functionalism." And that one certainty amidst all that less-than-certain
functing -- turns out to be a causal
dangler, giving rise to an unbridgeable explanatory gap!
JS: "His soul was res cogitans; his body was res
extensa. And from there, he went on to prove the goodness of God and,
only then, the trustworthiness of mathematics."
I'm neither a philosopher nor a
historian, but I'll bet Descartes did not believe most of that voodoo
(which is certainly not what he is rightly famous for). He just said it to
avoid the ire of the Inquisition. (I believe he at certain points even
stated explicitly that not every cartesian claim he was making was true,
hence we would need to read attentively between the lines.)
Certainty about the truth of
"not (p and not-p)" is based on necessity (pain of
contradiction), not on the benignity of deities; and the certainty of sentio ergo sentitur is based on the
(inexplicable, but indubitable) reality of feelings. "Dualism"
was just a sop for the metaphysical bean-counters of the day. The
force of the Cogito is epistemic, not ontic. The sceptics were not denying
the reality of the physical
world, just its certainty. By the
same token, it was not news that feelings existed; the news was that that
was a truth that -- unlike the existence of the physical world -- we could
be certain about: as certain as
of the necessary truths of mathematics.
(But a consequence of that
same, certain truth, happens to be that there is no way to account for
feeling physically [i.e., functionally].)
JS: "You claim that, because the cogito is merely a
tautology, it needs to be reformulated so that we can better understand its
significance"
The cogito has to be
reformulated in terms of feeling rather than thinking, and its conclusion
is the fact that it cannot be denied, when feeling is going on, that
feeling is going on. But that is not a tautology, even though it sounds
like one! I don't know which one of Kant's baroque categories is the right
name for it, but the cogito is either a "synthetic a-priori" or
an "analytic a-posteriori": it certainly isn't an analytic
a-priori (i.e., a tautology).
It cannot be denied that when
flying is going on, then flying is going on: That is a tautology. A universal, non-existential statement,
necessarily true "in all possible worlds."
But the fact that "it
cannot be denied, when feeling is going on, that feeling is going on, hence
it is certain that feeling exists" depends essentially on what each of
us has actually felt, namely feeling. It is an existential statement that
follows from the direct experience of each and every (sentient) one of us.
JS: "The cogito is not a tautology, but an inference
following modus ponens. (If I am thinking, then I exist. I am
thinking, therefore I exist.) You misrepresent it as 'I am thinking,
therefore I am thinking'."
I agree that the cogito is not
a tautology (I never said it was). But the right way to put it is that if I
am feeling, then feeling exists.
(The "I" is a fuzzier, theory-laden notion, not further licensed
as "certain" by the cogito. At best, we can say that "it
feels like an 'I' exists": but, by the same token, it feels like a
physical world exists too, and that's not certain either!)
I will say this much more,
though: Feeling is essentially a "two-part relation": Whenever
there are feelings, the feelings are being felt. So it is intrinsic to a
feeling that there is both feeling and "feeler." I'm not talking
about a fancy self-concept. Just the fact that although there is such a
thing as "free-floating depression" in the sense of a depression
without a perceived external cause, there is no such thing as a
free-floating depression -- or any feeling -- that is unfelt. An unfelt feeling is a contradiction in terms. To that
extent, a feeler is intrinsic to feeling, so the existence of a feeling to
that extent entails the existence of a feeler. Maybe that's what Descartes
meant by the "ego" in the "sum." But that fleeting
frame for any feeling is far from what most of us mean by an ego or self,
let alone the reality of an immaterial, immortal soul!
JS: "...your "I feel, therefore feeling is
felt" is not a valid inference, because there is no feeling of
feeling."
I would say quite the opposite:
There is no unfelt feeling. A feeler/felt relation is intrinsic to feeling.
And if that's what Descartes meant by "I exist" then he was right
again. But that "I" is simply an intrinsic part of the nature of
feeling itself. So the existential claim of the cogito (sentitur) is still
only that feeling exists. The
feeling/felt relation just comes with the territory. (One cannot be
certain, for example, that the feeler of the feeling is the same feeler as
an instant ago: that does not sound like a sound basis for an enduring ego,
let alone an eternal soul...)
JS: "I reject the claim that [the cogito] indicates or
establishes a special kind of knowledge which you call 'Cartesian
certainty'.Ó
Call it what you like; it's the
only truth other than the necessary truths of mathematics about which we
can be dead-certain.
JS: "And I reject DescartesÕ views that it establishes
mind/body dualism and provides a foundation for all our knowledge."
(1) "Mind/body
dualism" is a figure of speech; it means next to nothing. What the
certain existence of feelings establishes is the certainty of the existence
of something that cannot be explained in the same functional way that the
rest of what exists (truly, but without the added boost of certainty) can
be explained. Reformulated as the "feeling/function" problem, it
becomes obvious that the problem is one of explanation -- explaining how
and why there is feeling rather than just functing.
(2) Without feeling, there
would be no "knowledge," only functing. (I never said or invoked
a single word about "foundations of knowledge.")
"Knowledge" in books and computers and (insentient) robots is not
knowledge; it is just data and dynamical states. The only knowing is felt knowing. Ditto for meaning.
JS: "WittgensteinÕs point is that there
is no gapless foundation to be revealed."
Wittgenstein seems to have
spent half his life trying to build foundations and the other half tearing
them down. That's fine, but it has next to nothing to do with the rather
straightforward, non-foundational question at issue here: Why and how do we feel rather than just
funct? And I don't know about other explanatory gaps, but the one at
issue here is that one. Generalities about multiplicities of foundational
gaps, all over the map, don't answer the rather straightforward question of
how and why we feel rather than just funct (any more than specific
foundational quantum gaps do).
JS: "The cogito only serves as a reminder that the
sentence "I do not exist" is not a valid proposition in our
language. It is a reminder of the rules of our grammar, and not a
foundation for knowledge."
To repeat, I said nothing about
grammar, nothing about foundations of knowledge, nothing particular about
language, and nothing even about whether or not I exist. I just said
feelings exist, for sure: And then I asked "how and why?"
JS: "how could one doubt that one had a
body?"
Same way you can doubt there's
a world, causality, reliable induction, other minds. You'd be wrong to
conclude they do not exist, because they're all real enough; but there's
certainly room for doubt wherever there are no guarantors for certainty.
Descartes pointed out the two exceptions. One (necessary truth on pain of
contradiction) was no big surprise; but the certainty of feeling (surely
the nether pole of the platonic-personal or objective-subjective spectrum!)
was a bit of a jolt. And the upshot was the explanatory gap.
JS: "What could such ÒdoubtÓ consist
in...?"
I have no trouble at all
distinguishing the (foolish) sceptics who claimed that the world was an
illusion, from the wise ones who simply pointed out that there were some
truths one could know with certainty and some truths one could only know
with probability. Without Descartes, we might wrongly have thought that the
mathematical truths were the only ones we could know with certainty.
JS: "Those are empty words, no
different than, 'I donÕt have a mind . . . I am just a body'...Repeating
them does not constitute doubt, because these words have no discernible
consequences. They are insignificant. It would make as much
sense to say, Òall logic is invalid . . . there are no valid inferences,Ó
or perhaps, Òthere are no thoughts, only words; no feelings, only
functions.Ó Such mantras are not to be taken seriously."
I'm afraid it sounds to me more
as if it is you who are repeating mantras without reflecting on the meaning
or grounds for what you are saying: Doubting I feel is self-contradictory
(if/when I do feel, and I do). Doubting I have a body is not
self-contradictory, just false. Doubting things that are provably true on
pain of contradiction reduces both affirmation and denial to empty
gibberish.
JS: "...your argument resembles some
unconvincing theistic arguments [such as] GodÕs existence is
self-evident by the very fact of knowledge. Therefore, a person who
claims that God does not exist is begging the question against theism and
is denying their own knowledge... Do you find the argument compelling?
No more compelling than that
"the Great Pumpkin's existence is... etc." It's just arbitrary
gibberish. Please see the discussion of Pascal's Wager. The existence of
feelings is anchored in our undeniable experience: gods and goblins are
arbitrary inventions of feverish imaginations or charlatans.
JS: "Your argument for a functing/feeling
dichotomy is similar. You claim that the unique status of feelings
(be it epistemic or ontological or both) is self-evident, and that it is
self-evident by the very fact of feeling. You defend this notion by
accusing those who reject it of begging the question and denying their
knowledge of feelings. How is your argument different from those
theistic arguments?"
Let me ask you, instead, what
plays the demonstrative role of the cogito
in the case of hobgoblins?
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1060
Reply
|
2009-05-25 --
Reply to Victor Panzica
|
Victor, you're missing the
point. There's no problem with the reporting of inner states. The problem
is that we feel them. The same
source that generates the feeling (which, we feel, in turn generates the
report of the feeling) can just generate the report directly. If not: how
and why not?
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1063
|
2009-05-26 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
FEELING, WILLING AND DOING: WE ARE ALL
ANOSOGNOSIC CONFABULATORS
AT: "The same source that generates the
feeling cannot generate the report of feeling directly because
the brain mechanism that is able to generate the feeling is significantly
different than the brain mechanisms that are able to generate our reports
of feelings..."
I wonder why you would say
this, Arnold, since (1) we have no idea how or why brain mechanisms
generate, say, felt sensations
rather than just sensed sensations
and (2) (although it is probably flawed methodologically), the Libet premotor potential data -- which (seem to) show that an unfelt premotor potential
precedes both the moving and the feeling that one is voluntarily moving --
suggests (unproblematically) how (2a) a prior unfelt process can cause
movement as well as (mysteriously) how (2b) a prior unfelt process can
cause the feeling of willing the movement. Brain locus is certainly not a
problem in principle. (Nor is locus in itself particularly explanatory,
functionally, even for unfelt functions!)
And we all know that once a
movement is a fait accompli, the
only thing the anosognosic patient can do is confabulate and rationalize
it, as in the case of the movement of the split-brain patient's left arm in
response to a stimulus in the speaking hemisphere's unseen visual
half-field. Restore all the connections -- and hence of course all the
correlations -- and you have our ordinary intact anosognosia about the real
causes of our movements. (In other words, until and unless the causal role
of feeling can be explained, we are all anosognosic confabulators about the
causes of our doings!)
Note, by the way, the close
relation between the feeling/function problem itself, and the problem of
volition, for they are in fact the
same problem, the feeling/function problem being a problem about the causal status, hence the causal explanation of feeling: The
explanatory gap is a gap in the power of causal explanation to account for
feeling.
(Note also how ordinary
anglo-saxon gerunds like "doing," "feeling," and
"willing" can help keep us honest on these tricky questions --
with the help of the not-so-anglo-saxon gerund "functing"...)
P.S. If anyone looks up the
definition of "anosognosia" or "confabulation" on google's hero, wikipedia, instead of google
books or google scholar, please be cautious and sceptical about what you
"learn": I just checked "confabulation (neural
networks)" and found a piece of empty self-puffery. A textbook of neurology
or neuropsychology is a more reliable source.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1082
|
2009-05-27 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
PROCESSES DON'T BECOME FELT BY FIAT
AT: "...to have an idea of how/why brain
mechanisms generate felt/conscious sensations rather than unfelt/unconscious sensory
events we need to refer to a theoretical model of... the brain mechanism
for our global phenomenal content and the brain mechanisms serving our
separate sensory modalities."
My guess: The circularity comes
with the "global phenomenal content":
How/why is "global content" felt content?
AT: ['how... a prior unfelt process can cause the
feeling of willing the movement'] is not at all mysterious when you
understand that there is recurrent axonal excitation between the mechanism
that represents our global phenomenal world (including selective attention
to events in the world) and the mechanisms that serve our separate
sensory-motor modalities."
How does "recurrent axonal
excitation" explain how/why "global" content, or selective
(or unselective) attention become felt content,
and felt attention?
Neural structures and processes do not become felt by fiat. And correlation
is not, nor does it explain, causation.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1092
|
2009-05-28 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
ASK A SIMPLE QUESTION...
AT: "I've proposed that brain activity that represents
the world from a privileged egocentric perspective IS our...
(felt content)"
Well, that would be a quick
solution to the feeling/function problem: just propose that a bit of
function IS feeling. Then there's
no more hows and whys about it!
But, apart from your proposing
that it is so, how and why is it so? As far as I know, brain activity is
just brain activity, i.e., function is just function. And the question on
the table was, and continues to be: How is (some of) it felt? Why is it
felt?
"Because I have proposed
it" is alas not an answer!
(Nor, by the way, is the fact
that the brain activity "represents the world from a privileged
egocentric perspective" an explanation. Adaptively (i.e.,
functionally) speaking, there is a lot to be said
for "representing the world from a privileged egocentric
perspective" -- but how and why is that "representation from
a privileged egocentric perspective" a felt "representation from a privileged egocentric
perspective" rather than just a functed "representation from
a privileged egocentric perspective"?)
AT: "if my theoretical premise is that this particular
brain activity is the same thing as feeling, your question is
a non sequitur."
But how/why questions are not
answered by proposing theoretical premises: they are answered by explaining
how and why. You are just begging the question with a solution by fiat.
AT: "Your repetition of the how/why question with regard
to feeling suggests that there has to be something more than a
biophysical explanation of feelings"
A biophysical explanation can
answer a biophysical question. I asked how and why the biophysics is felt biophysics. It is not an answer
to say that feeling just IS
biophysics (because I propose that it is so). Even if your proposal is
somehow true, the question is how and why is it true. How, and why is that
biophysics felt biophysics, rather than just (the usual) functed
biophysics? (As far as I know, all you offer by way of an answer is
correlations. Well if your proposal is true, there will certainly have to
be those correlations; but the correlations certainly don't explain how and
why your proposal is true. They are part of what needs to be explained.
AT: "If you refuse to evaluate a biophysical explanation
of [feeling] on its own terms, then you will continue to repeat your
question."
But I did not hear a
biophysical explanation of feelings, and that is why I continue to repeat
my question. All I heard was a proposal that that biophysics just IS feeling, somehow. An explanation
is supposed to tell me how and why X just IS feelings. Neither your proposal -- nor the (familiar)
correlation itself -- is an explanation at all.
AT: "Perhaps you're a closet dualist..."
Not at all. I'm sure the brain
causes feelings, somehow. I'm just asking how (and especially why), since
felt functing -- precisely because telekinetic dualism is false -- seems
utterly superfluous, functionally (i.e., causally): Just functed functing
looks like it would do the very same job, exactly as well. (If not, then please explain how and why not: It's
the same question either way!)
It's not a trick. And I am not
just a compulsive or perverse repeater of the question "how/why".
There is really an explanatory gap here, and it is not filled by merely
proposing that functing that is correlated with feeling just IS feeling. It
is filled by explaining how and why it is feeling.
And note that my insistence on
putting and keeping the focus on feeling itself (rather than on equivocations
such as seeing, knowing, representing, perspective, or ego, all of which --
if unfelt -- have exactly the same functionality) is intentional: to keep
us honest, and to make and keep it crystal clear exactly what the real
problem is (and always has been).
And to make it harder to keep
begging the question...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1102
|
2009-05-29 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
AT: "I confess that I have no idea what functed functing
is."
Okay, here's an example
(deliberately simplified to just the core essentials):
You have tissue injury. You
have nocicepetion, which detects the injury and generates a withdrawal and
avoidance of the nociceptive stimulus that caused the tissue injury. That's
fine, and perfectly adaptive, and perfectly functional. But we all know
that's not the whole story. If it were the whole story, it would just be
functing. We also feel the
nociception, in the form of the pain; we don't just funct it, as I first
described it. That's no longer just functed functing, it's felt functing.
And that's what generates the feeling/function problem, the how/why
question, and the explanatory gap. For not only is it not at all clear how the nociception generates the
feeling of pain, rather than just generating the functional state that
leads to doing the useful things we do when we feel pain (including all the
complicated cognitive planning); but it is even less clear why this functing is felt: the
feeling itself seems to serve no additional purpose at all.
And I don't think that
declaring "it's a 'given' that certain functions are felt, just as it
is a 'given' that gravity pulls" is an answer. It simply begs the
question, a very reasonable and natural how/why question of the kind whose
answer -- in all other areas, but not in this special case -- is eventually
discovered (or there's no reason to think it can't or won't be). Here, in
contrast, there are unique reasons to believe it never will be.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1108
|
2009-06-06 --
Reply to Jason Streitfeld
|
THE CARTESIAN BOTTOM LINE ON
SCEPTICISM
JS: "Your [feeling/functing] distinction
begs the question against a functional explanation of feelings."
Actually, it just begs an answer -- but the answer is not
forthcoming. It just keeps being asserted that either there is nothing to
explain, or it has already been explained.
JS: "The
language of feeling is a way of speaking about our behavior as being a
reaction to internal states, and a way of speaking about our internal
states as reactions to external events—... the language implies
causality."
Actions and reactions are just
actions -- doings, functings -- hence unproblematic. But feelings are not
doings; they are feelings.
Nor does the locution
"internal states" help (apart from its being equivocal about
whether it means internal to the body, unproblematically, or internal to
the mind, in other words, felt, which is, again, what it is
that we are seeking an explanation for).
Speaking about
"feeling" is speaking about felt
internal states. I don't use "feeling" when I speak about my
atrial fibrillations because I don't feel my atrial fibrillations, even
though they too are "internal states."
And, yes, when I withdraw my
hand from the flame because it hurts, my language implies that the feeling
is causing the withdrawing. Moreover, it feels like I'm withdrawing my hand because of the feeling
(pain); it also feels like I'm withdrawing my hand because I felt like it -- in particular because I willed it.
But all that is begging for a
causal explanation of how and why
-- not the question-begging assertion that "the language implies
causality."
JS: "Inexplicably, you say feelings have no causal role
to play. Whatever you mean by the word Òfeelings,Ó then, it is not
what is commonly meant by the term."
(1) I mean by
"feelings" precisely what everyone means by feelings.
(2) If you disagree that there
exists no explanation of how and why we feel, then please draw my attention
to the how/why explanation I somehow seem to have missed!
(3) I not only pointed out that
no causal explanation of feeling has been provided (3a). I also went on to
say that I don't think that a causal explanation can be provided (3b), and
why: because there is no room for feelings to have any causal power (no 5th
force; telekinesis is false).
JS: "If
feelings have no consequences for anything, then any valid results of our
discourse are valid regardless of whether or not feelings exist. To
appeal to feelings—to talk of them at all—is superfluous.
So, not only do I not know what you mean by the term Òfeelings,Ó I do not
see how you could justify postulating them."
Yes, feelings are not really
causal (hence they are superfluous), even though they feel causal. However, feelings do exist. Moreover, they keep feeling causal regardless of whether
they are or are not really causal, and regardless of whether or not we can
explain how and why they are causal.
Hence our discourse about
feeling is perfectly valid regarding both their existence and what feels like their causal role. But
when we go on to say that their causal role is in reality what it feels like it is, then our
"language" is making an invalid inference.
You do, of course, know exactly
what I mean by feelings; everyone does. I need not "postulate"
them because you know as well as I know, and Descartes knew, that they
exist. We are talking here about explaining their causal function, and you
keep begging the question (even though you don't seem to feel you are begging the question!).
JS: "ThereÕs a
feeling, a feeler, and an object/event which the feeling represents.
You are treating the represented object as though it were the
feeling. Feelings do not represent themselves... The fact that
feelings represent implies that feelings perform a function. They do
work. So opposing them to ÒfunctingÓ (or ÒdoingÓ) does not make
sense."
I have not said a word about
"representation" (which I consider to be yet another weasel-word
in discourse about the feeling/function problem).
A feeling feels like whatever
it feels like. If/when I feel a toothache, and I do have a tooth, and there is
something wrong with my tooth, then my feeling is veridically correlated
with something in the world; if not, then not.
So far, that's correlation, not
causation. Correlates (feelings and functings) do not need to be causes of
one another: they can both be the effects of a third cause (functing).
If you think feelings perform a
causal function qua feelings --
rather than as the superfluous effects of the functing that is performing
the real causal function, please state clearly how and why. Otherwise what
does not make sense is to keep insisting, despite the inability to explain
how or why, that feelings really do "do work" (as opposed to just
feeling like they do).
JS: "You accused me of Òcomplementing the wrong
categoryÓ because I argued that Òfeeling somethingÓ is a
complemented category. I was responding to a post in which you
repeatedly claimed that 'feeling something' had no complement."
Yes, I'm afraid you keep
misunderstanding that point, but as it's my point, I accept full
responsibility for making it clear, so I will now have another go:
What I keep saying in my posts
is that "feeling a toothache" as complemented by "feeling a
headache" (i.e., "feeling a non-toothache," or
"not-feeling a toothache") is perfectly well-complemented, and
perfectly unproblematic. What is uncomplemented is "feeling any
feeling at all" as complemented by "not-feeling any feeling at
all" (shorthand: "feeling something" vs. "feeling
nothing").
And it is indeed feeling -- the generic category --
that covers all sense modalities, exteroceptive (like seeing, hearing) and
interoceptive (like fatigue, anxiety or grief) and all manner of feeling --
that is at issue here. If you pick a specific feeling modality, such as,
say, tasting, the complementation problem does not arise: Tasting vanilla
ice-cream is complemented by tasting chocolate ice-cream, and "tasting
any taste at all" (i.e., tasting something) is perfectly well
complemented by not tasting anything at all (i.e., tasting nothing). (It
feels like something to taste nothing at all, just like it feels like
something to be blind, i.e., to not see anything at all.)
But the analogue does not work
for feeling itself, for you are always feeling something if you are not
obtunded or dead, and it is impossible to feel nothing at all.
(A congenitally blind person is
in something like the epistemic situation regarding blindness (apart from
hearsay) as the one we are all in regarding feeling (and about what it feels like to be a bat): He has heard that people can see, and that he can't,
and he has felt what it is feels like to be unable to see. But as he has
never felt what it is like to see, "what it feels like to be
blind" is uncomplemented for him -- just as what it feels like to be a bachelor is uncomplemented for me. If an operation one day allowed
him to see, he will discover something new not only about what it feels
like to see, but about what it feels like to be blind. Only if his vision
again disappears will he be in the same sentient situation as the tasting
person who momentarily tastes nothing.)
JS: "To repeat: there is no feeling of feeling
something, because the category of Òfeeling somethingÓ does not pick out a
specific feel. It represents feelings in general; but it does not
feel like what it represents. It does not represent its own
feeling."
I am afraid that argument does
not become more persuasive with repetition. Consider:
"There
is no feeling of tasting something,
because the category of 'tasting something' does not pick out a specific taste."
I think it's pretty
self-evident that that's false, and that you would never make such an
assertion in ordinary discourse:
X:
"Do you taste something?"
Y:
"I don't understand your question."
X:
"Why not?"
Y:
"Because you haven't picked out a specific taste. You must ask, for
example, 'Do you taste vanilla ice-cream?' Then I would understand the
question."
OR
X:
"Ladies and gentlemen. I have with me today the subject of the world's
first long-term gustatory deprivation experiment. He has had his sense of
taste chemically suppressed for a month, and has just tasted something for
the first time since his taste has been restored: After all that time, what
did it feel like to taste something?"
Y:
"I don't understand your question."
X:
"Why not?"
Y:
"Because you haven't picked out a specific taste...."
And
again, we are not talking about "representing" feeling here, but
about feeling feeling.
JS: "somebody asks you, Òwhat would it feel like to be a
rock?Ó You could respond... ÒIt wouldnÕt feel like anything. Rocks
donÕt feel.Ó And wouldnÕt this... make sense?"
But what on earth would give
you the impression that I would say it doesn't make sense? I'm pretty sure
rocks don't feel. I know for sure I do feel. I said "feeling" was
an uncomplemented category, not an empty one. (What I can't make sense of
is why you would even ask me whether this would make sense!)
JS: "How
might you answer the question, 'what does it feel like to feel?'Ó
That you know perfectly well.
(And you do.) Just as you know what it feels like to taste, or what tastes
taste like.
JS: "We can use these categories, and doing so even makes
sense; but we are making a mistake if we think we are thereby referring to
anything."
These categories (plural)? I thought
we were only talking about one problem category: "feeling." And I
said that it was uncomplemented
(hence problematic) but certainly not empty.
ÒIf the only sense-modality were vision, and the only
experience were to see shapes, and all shapes were colored -- counting
black as a color -- then the subordinate category "red" would be
complemented by anything non-red, but the superordinate category
"colored" would be uncomplemented.Ó
JS: "'Colored' would also be complemented by the category
'shaped,' because the same shapes would be recognizable as such despite
having different colors."
I think you have again missed
my point here. The complement of "colored" is
"uncolored," and that category is empty in the hypothetical
visual toy-world I concocted. Particular shapes (triangular, square) would
be complemented, just as particular colors (red, green) would be; but both
uncolored and unshaped would be empty in this world. In our multimodal
world we have sounds and smells to complements colors and shapes.
JS: "You say
our concept of Òfeeling somethingÓ is established by our knowledge of an
invariant feeling present in all feelings. This requires that all of
our feelings are known as particular feelings before we can have the
category Òfeeling something.Ó Yet, there is no knowledge of
particulars without general categories. (The notion of a particular
is the notion of an instance of a universal.) The category of
Òfeeling somethingÓ cannot come later.
I am not quite sure where these
rather abstract regulations are coming from: I can taste this and I can
taste that, and I've already got some taste categories. Then I can sample
nongustatory feeling, and I've got the category "taste"
complemented. But with tasting this and tasting that (all positive
instances of "tasting") I already had a sense of what it feels
like to taste something -- though
it would be a lop-sided sense until I complemented it.
I am not doing
individual/universal ontology here. I'm just talking about the
phenomenology of feeling and the epistemology of category acquisition: from
particular instances to the categories of which they are instances, via the
invariant properties that distinguish the members of the category from the
members of its complement. (Remove the complement and you are still
sampling the members of a category, but a problematic category, because all
you have sampled are its members, not its non-members.)
(If we are talking about
universals here at all, we are talking about "uncomplemented
universals": being uncomplemented extensionally [i.e. in their set of
instances: positive only], they are also uncomplemented intensionally [in
the {here indeterminate} invariant features that normally differentiate
positive and negative instances].)
JS: "...you are wrongly inferring from the sense of
"I know what it feels like to be a bachelor" that it must refer
to something... some category which was already there ahead of time, just
waiting to be revealed... —though, if we wanted to, we could define a
referent here. But in so doing we would be drawing a definition, and
not revealing one that was already there."
I don't know about
"already there ahead of time, just waiting to be revealed." I
just know for sure that there are feelings now (and I'm pretty sure there are fermions now
too). But I have no idea whether either feelings or fermions were
"always there... waiting to be revealed"...
JS: "'Feeling' is also a family resemblance
concept. We learn the word 'feeling' based on indirect
observations—on distinguishing emotional or mental reactions as
such."
I couldn't follow that. Every
instant of our waking life we are feeling -- and feeling
"directly," not "indirectly" (whatever the latter
means; the only things I feel at all, I feel "directly"). And our
observations are all felt observations. The rest is all about
distinguishing this category from that, and that includes distinguishing
"feeling this" from "feeling that" -- but not
distinguishing "feeling something" from "feeling
nothing" (because feeling nothing is an empty category).
The notion of a "family
resemblance" category, insofar as I understand it, is the notion of a
category that does not have invariants, just lumped disjunctive subsets. I
would reply that in those cases where we are indeed capable of reliably assigning
membership or nonmembership to all candidates and there is a criterion for
correct and incorrect, then we do have a category, and that category must
have an invariant (even if it's a long disjunction) -- assuming we are not
doing the successful, confirmable category assignment via clairvoyance
(which is just as false as telekinesis).
If we are not capable of reliably assigning membership or nonmembership
to all candidates and there is no criterion for correct and incorrect then
what we have is not a "family resemblance" category: what we have
is no category at all.
(Wittgenstein's "private language" argument is valid against the possibility of
creating a private language with feeling-categories, because of the
impossibility of error, hence error-correction, hence any nonarbitrary
criterion for miscategorization: Hence there could simply not be a private
language of feeling-categories.)
JS: "We also
use the term ÒfeelingÓ to refer to observation in general, but we have no
general criterion for what that means."
We are talking about felt observation (as opposed to the
merely functed kind of "observation" that a surveillance camera
connected to an alarm does).
JS: "Why say that, when we observe, all of our
observations contain a unique quality, an invariant aspect which is common
to all observations? What would that be?"
The fact that they are felt,
rather than just functed, as by a surveillance camera. And what we hear is
felt too, rather than just functed, as by an acoustic vibration-detector.
And yes, there is something
that seeing this and seeing that and hearing this and hearing that all have
in common: they are all felt, rather than just functed.
JS: "You might be tempted to say that the self, the ego,
is the invariant entity which all of our observations contain. But
how could we observe our own ÒIÓ as an aspect of an observation of
something else?"
No, I'm not at all tempted to
invoke an ego as the invariant. I doubt that a horseshoe crab has much of
an ego, even though he sees. And for all I know, both (1) my feeling of
continuous identity across time (which, by the way, sometimes flickers and
fades a bit, even when I'm awake) and (2) my memories of "my"
past are merely instantaneous illusions, parts of what an instant happens
to feel like. (And that's without mentioning the fallibility of any
theories I may have about "selfhood" -- my own or anyone else's.
That's why I prefer "sentio ergo sentitur" to "cogito ergo
[ego] sum" -- if, that is, what is an issue is certainty, rather than just truth, or probability.)
So, no, the only invariant I
invoke is the fact that we are feeling, whenever (and whatever) we are
feeling.
JS: "Try to
observe yourself looking at something—say, a table. To do this,
you might be tempted to say something to yourself, such as, ÒI am looking
at a table.Ó But saying is not the same as observing. So donÕt
form words in your head. You might find yourself noticing your body .
. . and that helps you remember that you are in the world along with the
table. But it does not show you you-looking-at-the-table. There
is only the observation of the table and your ability to talk about yourself
as the observer. This suggests that the notion of an observer is
constructed with language; it is a grammatical convention, a way of
speaking (or, as Wittgenstein would say, a way of life.)."
I have a feeling I am being
drawn into a side issue that has nothing to do with what I proposed:
Whenever and whatever I observe -- be it a table, or me looking at a table,
or just "ouch" -- it feels
like something, and it is the how/why of that fact, and nothing else,
that is at issue here.
And the certain fact that I
feel (and the almost-certain fact that a worm does too) has nothing
whatsoever to do with language (let alone "grammar," which just
refers to the syntactic rules for well-formedness in a formal system).
Feeling is indeed a way (indeed
a fact) of life -- but alas an unexplained (and, I think, an unexplainable)
one.
JS: "All
judgments, even logical and mathematic[al] ones, were doubtable for
Descartes... He explicitly concluded that the very first certainty
was the cogito."
I confessed shame-facedly that
I am no Descartes scholar (and now I will further confess that I have read
little of chapter and verse). And yet I think I can make coherent sense of
Descartes. And on my construal, all the stuff about God is transparently
irrational nonsense (and I cheerfully accept Descartes' invitation to read
between the lines, and infer therefrom that he didn't really mean that
irrational nonsense, so opposite is it to the rigorous things he said about
certainty).
The method of doubt makes far
more sense if it is based on the usual sceptical argument about the uncertainty (not the falsity) of the
reality of the experiential (felt) world of appearances, including science,
compared to the certainty (grounded in logical necessity) that NOT
(P&NOT-P).
But what the method of doubt
further reveals is that there is, surprisingly, a second kind of certainty, over and above logical necessity: an
experiential (felt) certainty, in many ways the diametric opposite of the
first, formal certainty, and issuing from the very heart of what is most
uncertain, what is most vulnerable to sceptical doubt, namely, whether
things are really the way it feels as if they are. And that certainty is the very fact of feeling itself (if/when one
is feeling).
Since one cannot plausibly
invoke the dangers of the Inquisition to justify feigned scepticism about
formally necessary truths in the same way that one can plausibly invoke the
dangers of the Inquisition to justify feigned fideism, I can only conclude
that Descartes understated the certainty of mathematics either (1) for
strategic reasons -- to further reinforce the certainty of feeling -- or
(2) because he thought that most people could not hold a proof much longer
than NOT (P&NOT-P) in their heads long enough to be certain about
it.
(The only other construal I can
think of would be that he was simply wrong on this point, and had not fully
thought it through. But I rather doubt that, from all the other evidence of
Descrartes' rigor and rationality. But who knows? Newton had his bugaboos
too!)
Moreover, I don't think the
significance of the 2nd certainty -- that we feel -- is that it provides a
rational or methodological basis for science (apart from the fact that
every certain truth is welcome in science). I think its significance is in
having laid bare the explanatory gap: that feelings exist with certainty,
yet we cannot explain how or why.
JS: "I
think DescartesÕ decision to doubt mathematical judgments was
well-considered. You had to learn mathematics, and it is conceivable
that you learned it all incorrectly."
That's (2) above. But it
doesn't cover the face-valid necessity of NOT (P&NOT-P) -- except
perhaps for Achilles and the Tortoise.
(But no one as obtuse as the
Tortoise would be able to apprehend the certainty of the sentio either, though that would not
make its truth any less certain, if the Tortoise was indeed feeling. Nor
would the tortoise's abtuseness make NOT (P&NOT-P) any less certain. I
rather think that at the tortoise's level of abtuseness, it is not just
certainty that gets mooted, but truth/falsity, affirmation/denial, and
belief/disbelief too! What's certain is that the Tortoise could not even
earn his daily lettuce if he were that incoherent (and insouciant). I do
sense, though, some conflation or breakdown of the distinction between
subjective [i.e., felt] certainty and formal [hence objective] necessity
here. Maybe this is what Descartes meant by "conceiving clearly and
distinctly"...)
JS: "Even if
[the sentio] were true (and I doubt it is), it would not demonstrate that
feelings lacked causal efficacy."
That's right. The sentio just
establishes the certainty of the existence of feelings. It is the empirical
falsity of telekinetic dualism and the empirical nonexistence of a 5th
force that seem to entail that feelings are doomed to be noncausal (unless
you have an explanation of how and why -- or you have evidence of a
telekinetic 5th force)...
JS: "If you
say ÒI think, therefore I amÓ to yourself, you are no more convinced of
your existence than you had been previously."
No. But it is drawn to my
(momentary) attention, clearly and distinctly, that I cannot doubt the
existence of feeling (the way I can doubt so much else that I feel).
JS: "...the
I exists only in so far as there is... the kind of thinking which utilizes
certain grammatical forms. The mistake is in thinking that
grammatical forms always refer to specific things."
It is not about the existence
of the "I" and it is not about grammatical forms. It's about the
existence of feelings, irrespective of syntax (be it "sentio ergo
sentitur" or "I am doubting I am thinking, but doubting is
thinking, hence I cannot doubt that thinking is going on, after all; hence
there is thinking.")
JS: "Descartes
noticed that the act of thinking ÒI am not thinkingÓ implied that he was
thinking. And he concluded that only via such action did he exist as
such. Yet, he misinterpreted the nature of the action. He
believed the word ÒIÓ had to refer to something, and since everything
outside of the act of thinking was dubitable, he postulated himself as
Òpure consciousness.Ó If we wanted to interpret Òpure consciousnessÓ
here, we might regard it as Òthing which uses grammar.Ó Any other
interpretation could seem extravagant."
I have no idea what "pure
consciousness" means, nor what "grammar" has to do with it.
The only truth that is free of mystification here is that if you feel
something (and we do) then that's one less thing you can be sceptical
about. That's all. The rest is about explaining how and why we feel.
JS: "my
question remains: How is your argument for a feeling/functing
distinction different from the theistic arguments I mentioned?"
It differs in that the only
thing the sentitur entails is
that feelings exist (not that whatever you feel exists -- e.g. grass,
people, your body, gods, hobgoblins, heaven -- exists). It is a bottom
limit on incredulous scepticism, rather than yet another form of fideism.
(But apart from that, it just points out a problem -- the unexplained
existence of feeling -- not the solution.)
JS: "Descartes
believed that the act of thinking ÒI am not thinkingÓ produces an awareness
of a contradiction..."
So far, this construal
presupposes that a contradiction does
have certifying force after all (necessary truth on pain of contradiction).
[This reinforces my hunch that Descartes did consider NOT (P & NOT-P) certain too.]
JS: "But
this is only to say that the utterance of the sentence ÒI am not thinkingÓ
feels contradictory. And how is the correct interpretation of that
feeling established?"
Let me restate it in the form
that makes the contradiction more obvious: "Thinking (and feeling) 'I
am not feeling' feels
contradictory -- and it sure is, if anything is. No interpretational issues
at all. Just an understanding of what it means to feel, and what it means
to affirm (and deny). (And, of course, being compos mentis.)
The sentitur version is much simpler than that: Because we feel
(when we feel), we can be certain feeling exists. Not just certain that
"I am feeling now and I am not feeling now" is
self-contradictory, but that there is one fact -- and one fact alone -- of
felt experience that is not open to sceptical doubt: that it is felt. Sentitur.
JS: "CouldnÕt
one doubt the feeling of a contradiction? CouldnÕt one doubt oneÕs
grammar?"
One cannot doubt a statement
that is necessarily true on pain of contradiction. One can only fail to
understand it. But the cogito/sentio is not just a tautology like "If
I'm feeling then I'm feeling" which has no more synthetic force than
"If I'm flying then I'm flying" -- for there is no way I can know
with certainty that I am flying. But I can
know with certainty that I am feeling. (That's why I said "I don't know which one
of Kant's baroque categories is the right name for it, but the cogito is
either a "synthetic a-priori" or an "analytic
a-posteriori": it certainly isn't an analytic a-priori (i.e., a
tautology)."
JS: "...if
you really doubted that you felt anything, a pinch on the cheek wouldnÕt
prove anything to you."
If you really doubted that you
felt anything at all then all that would prove was that, like the tortoise,
you had not understood the question (or that you were not compos mentis).
JS: "You
think you can doubt that you have a body, but not that you have a
mind. This, I maintain, is impossible."
Jason, I don't think you have
quite understood scepticism. The sceptic does not say it is true that you
have no body, just that it is not impossible. Hence you cannot be certain you have no body. (You
cannot be certain there are no gods either, or that there is gravity!) But
you can be certain that (1) NOT (P & NOT-P) -- and (2) that you are
feeling (when you feel). And hence you can be certain that feeling exists
(though not how or why!).
JS: "the
statement Òyou do not existÓ invites just as much contradiction as ÒI do
not exist,Ó and saying Òyou do not have a mindÓ is just as meaningful as
saying ÒI do not have a mind.Ó
To repeat: This is not about
truth but about certainty. And it is not about the existence of an
"I" but about the existence of a feeling, which, be it ever so
fleeting, also entails a "feeler," whatever that means...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1203
Reply
|
2009-06-06 --
Reply to Robin Faichney
|
WHAT MAKES "ABOUTNESS"
MENTAL
RF: "Some philosophers [say] messages and such have
merely derived intentionality, while mental states are intrinsically
intentional, but I've yet to see a convincing explanation of the difference
between intrinsic and derived intentionality"
How about this one:
There is no difference between
the string of symbols "the cat is on the mat" when it is instantiated
in a static book, in a dynamic computer program or in a dynamic (toy)
robot.
In the book and the program,
all the meaning ("intentionality," "aboutness")
is in the mind of the interpreter (reader, author, programmer, user),
not in the book or the program. (I.e., the meaning of all the symbols and
symbol strings is derived, not intrinsic to the book or program.) Indeed,
not only is the meaning not intrinsic, it is not even grounded, in the sense that neither the book nor the computer
program has the sensorimotor capacity to interact with the things that its
symbols are systematically interpretable as being about in a way that is
(likewise systematically) congruent with what the symbols are systematically
interpretable as being about.
Ditto for a toy robot. In the
case of a Turing-Test (TT) scale robot, whose performance capacity in the
world of objects and discourse is indistinguishable from that of any of the
rest of us (for a lifetime, if need be), the internal symbol strings are
indeed grounded in the TT robot's capacity for sensorimotor interaction
with what they are systematically interpretable as being about. That takes
the external interpreter out of the loop; but that's still just sensorimotor grounding, not intrinsic meaning.
The only way meaning becomes
intrinsic is if there is something
it feels like to be the TT robot, instantiating the symbol string in
question.
It is not at all clear how and
why there is (or need be) felt
meaning rather than just sensorimotor (robotic) grounding (i.e., just
functing). That's another variant of the explanatory gap.
RF: "a clear and concise explanation of what
consciousness is, is impossible."
No need. It's just feeling, and
we all know what that is. What needs explanation is not what feeling is,
but how and why it exists. That too is the explanatory gap.
Harnad,
S. (1990) The Symbol Grounding Problem. Physica D 42: 335-346.
Harnad,
S. (1992) There is only one mind body problem. International Journal of Psychology 27(3-4) p. 521
Harnad,
S. (2001) Harnad on Dennett on Chalmers on
Consciousness: The Mind/Body Problem is the Feeling/Function Problem. (Unpublished Preprint)
Harnad,
S. (2001) Minds, Machines and Searle II: What's Wrong
and Right About Searle's Chinese Room Argument? In: M. Bishop&J. Preston (eds.) Essays on Searle's
Chinese Room Argument. Oxford University Press.
Harnad,
S. (2007) From Knowing How To Knowing That: Acquiring
Categories By Word of Mouth. Presented
at Kaziemierz Naturalized Epistemology Workshop (KNEW), Kaziemierz, Poland,
2 September 2007.
Harnad,
S. and Scherzer, P. (2007) First, Scale Up to the Robotic Turing Test, Then Worry About Feeling. In Proceedings of 2007 Fall Symposium on AI and Consciousness,
Washington DC.
Harnad,
S. (2008) The Annotation Game: On Turing (1950) on Computing, Machinery and Intelligence.
In: Epstein, Robert&Peters, Grace (Eds.) Parsing the Turing Test:
Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking
Computer. Springer
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1204
Reply
|
2009-06-08 --
Reply to Jason Streitfeld
|
CORTICAL COUNTERFACTUALS
JS: "WouldnÕt we say that the brain (or
whatever feels feelings) would not be the same had feelings not existed?"
As I am just about as sure
(modulo scepticism) that the brain causes feeling (somehow) as I am of any
other apparent empirical fact, I of course agree that a brain that could
not cause feeling would be a different brain!
But seconding this relatively
anodyne assertion does not alter by one synapse the real problem, which is
that there is no explanation of how the brain causes feeling, and even more
problematically, there is no explanation of why. For whereas the brain-cause of feeling (whatever that is,
and whatever way it manages to cause feeling) certainly has causal power,
the feelings themselves do not, even though it feels like they do. Indeed,
they cannot have causal power except if telekinetic dualism is true, and
feeling constitutes a 5th fundamental force in the universe...
So the brain causes both doing
(explicably) and feeling (inexplicably), but the feeling causes nothing,
and what it feels like feeling causes is really just caused by the causes
of feeling, with the feeling just dangling there, ineffectually (and
inexplicably).
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1212
|
2009-06-08 --
Reply to Robin Faichney
|
HERMENEUTICS DOES NOT CLOSE THE
EXPLANATORY GAP, IT JUST OBFUSCATES IT
RF: "A proper explanation of the difference between intrinsic
and derived intentionality would close the explanatory gap..."
It sure would! (And your point
is?...)
RF: "...feelings are reasons for action, not causes of
it..."
X: Why did you do that?
Y: Because I felt like it.
X: That's a reason?
(And, while you're at it, why
are reasons felt, rather than
just acted upon [i.e., functed]?)
RF: "...and the types of discourse in which these
concepts [reasons and causes] occur are different..."
Discourse? Concepts? I was just
asking how organisms feel, and why organisms feel...
RF: "...'why' questions are answered by giving reasons,
while 'how' questions are answered in terms of causes..."
X: I wonder why the apple fell?
Y: Because of gravitational
attraction.
X: So that's the reason!
And "why" is a causal,
functional question too:
"Why do arch bridges have
to have an abutment at either end? To restrain the horizontal
thrust."
"How do arch bridges
restrain the horizontal thrust? By having abutments at either end."
And if feeling is indeed
noncausal, then substituting "reasons" for causes hangs from a
skyhook rather like the Cheshire Cat's smile, by way of explanation.
(Explanations, incidentally,
unlike interpretations, are not immune to objective refutation. And what is
at issue in the case of the explanatory gap is a causal explanation of
feeling, not a social or linguistic interpretation.)
RF: "Reasons are appropriate in social, intersubjective
contexts, while causes occur in mechanistic, technical or scientific
narratives..."
So why do worms feel? For
social, intersubjective reasons? What's their "narrative"?
RF: "That's why we have the social sciences, and the arts
and humanities..."
But without the brain (and its
causal powers) the social sciences, arts and humanities would not have us...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1213
Reply
|
2009-06-10 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
AT: "it appears to me that you are a mind-brain dualist
in denial. If the brain causes feelings, then feelings must be a
particular kind of biophysical process that has causal powers like all
biophysical processes. When you claim that feelings have no causal power,
you clearly have the burden of explaining how feelings can be physically
caused yet play no causal role in the physical universe."
Well that was easy! Here we
were, thinking there might be a special problem about explaining how and
why we feel. And it turns out that all you need to do is say "they're
a biophysical process" and the problem's solved: We can go back to
describing the brain correlates of feeling and that's all there is and ever
was to it. Just as if we had said "the brain causes moving."
Interesting that no one ever thought there was a special problem about
explaining how and why we move...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1232
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2009-06-11 --
Reply to JWK Matthewson Matthewson
|
QUANTUM MECHANICAL VOODOO
JWKMM: "Something that is puzzling me about this
discussion is the absence of any treatment of how anything causes
anything."
No, the explanatory gap is not
in the explanation of causation; it is in the explanation of how and why we
feel rather than just funct.
(This discussion thread is
predictably resurrecting and recycling the usual rationalizations
and red herrings that keep papering over the explanatory gap.
Perhaps it will help to name and identify them. This one is QM voodoo...)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1237
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2009-06-11 --
Reply to Jason Streitfeld
|
ON NOT COUNTING ONE'S EXPLANATORY CHICKENS
BEFORE THEIR EGGS ARE LAID
JS: "Wouldn't whatever feels feelings (in some
particular instance) be different if feelings had not been felt (in that
particular instance)?'
This is putting the analytical
cart before the explanatory horse. No one has a clue of a clue as to how or
why the brain causes feelings. So it does not advance our
(non)understanding and our (non)explanation of that fact in any way to
start doing an a-priori partition of the nonexistent "components"
of that nonexistent explanation.
Keep it simple: We don't know
how or why the brain causes feelings. We (rightly) assume it does, somehow. Your
a-priori partition does not dispel or lighten the mystery of how or why the
brain does that; nor does it carry understanding forward by one nanometer.
(It probably spuriously multiplies
the mystery, by implying that there is both a feeler and a feeling to account for.)
The question is how and why. Don't count (as John Searle used to
say): Explain (as I would
add).
Nor does it help to try to squeeze
extra causality out of an unexplicated causal assumption -- the assumption that surely the brain causes
feeling, somehow or other (as
we all agree, whether we admit it or not). There is nevertheless a gap
there that only a genuine causal explanation (or even a coherent causal
hypothesis) can fill.
When I say that feelings have
no causal power, all I mean is that the telekinetic power we all quite
naturally feel they have --
"I did it because I felt like it" -- is just felt causality, and cannot be true, because telekinesis is not
true. Hence what got done was not caused to get done by my feeling. It was
caused by whatever in my brain (somehow) also caused my feeling. That
leaves the fact of my feeling the unexplained causal dangler it has been all
along.
If it is the notion of a brain
structure or process causing
feeling rather than (somehow) just "being" feeling (as Arnold
Trehub would prefer it) that bothers you, let it be "being" then:
How and why is it that some brain structures or processes are felt structures or processed rather
than just functed structures or
processes (like the rest)? Yes, they are felt. The question is (and
remains) how and why.
JS: "[If] you distinguish between event X (which
causes a particular feeling) and event Y (in which that particular feeling
is felt)... 'feelings' are events which are not simply causes of feelings;
and whatever feels feelings (in some particular case) would be different
had these events not occurred. If not, then the term 'feelings' refers
to the causes of feelings, and those are what you term 'functing'."
Jason, you may feel you are
making some explanatory headway from such vague hypothetical conditionals:
I feel they are just juggling the non-contents of a completely empty
explanatory box, insofar as the question of how and why we feel is
concerned...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1238
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2009-06-11 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
ON THE FUNCTIONAL INDISTINGUISHABILITY
OF FUNCTIONAL INDISTINGUISHABLES
AT: "The solution [to the] special problem in
explaining how and why we feel... is provided by detailing the
structure and dynamics of the brain mechanisms that generate
a transparent representation of the world from a privileged egocentric
perspective."
I hope that when you disclose
the solution, Arnold, you will also disclose how and why a
"transparent representation of the world from a privileged egocentric
perspective" is a felt
"transparent representation of the world from a privileged egocentric
perspective" rather than just a functed "transparent representation of the world from
a privileged egocentric perspective"...
That, alas, is the real
explanatory gap, which is not just a matter of explaining how and why the
neural correlates of a "transparent representation of the world
from a privileged egocentric perspective" are indeed generating
a "transparent representation of the world from a privileged
egocentric perspective." That's not where the problem lies.
For, on the face of it, such a
"representation" would appear to be precisely as functional and
adaptive for a feelingless
Darwinian survival machine that is otherwise much like (indeed, Turing-Indistinguishable from) ourselves.
Or at least explain how and why there could not
be a Darwinian survival machine with
a "transparent representation of the world from a privileged
egocentric perspective" unless the "transparent
representation of the world from a privileged egocentric perspective"
was felt.
In other words, (just as in all
perpetual motion machine candidates to date!) something still seems to be
missing here: why and how is your "transparent representation"
felt rather than just functed?
And while you're at it, I hope
you'll also explain how and why worms and slugs feel "ouch" too,
if you pinch them... (If you deny that they feel, my prediction is that you
will be denying many of the neural correlates of feeling in us too.) Ditto
for profoundly demented and near-comatose Alzheimer's patients who no longer
have much of a "transparent representation of the world
from a privileged egocentric perspective" but still hurt if you pinch
them.)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1240
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2009-06-12 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
SH: "Or
at least explain how and why there could not be a
Darwinian survival machine with a 'transparent representation of the world
from a privileged egocentric perspective' unless the 'transparent
representation of the world from a privileged egocentric perspective' was
felt."
AT: "My answer is that since its ['transparent
representation of the world from a privileged egocentric
perspective'] is its feeling..., it already has feeling and
has no need to feel its feeling... [I]f it didn't have feeling...
it wouldn't have ['transparent representation of the world from a
privileged egocentric perspective']... [and] I do deny that
worms and slugs feel... The reason is that worms and slugs don't
have ['transparent representation of the world from a privileged
egocentric perspective']."
I guess that settles it then...
Your theory is right by definition. No need to explain any further...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1245
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2009-06-13 -- Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
AT: "If you disagree with my definition of... feeling,
please provide us with your preferred definition."
(1) Everyone knows what feeling
is, as they have all felt. They no more need a definition of feeling than
they need a definition of green.
(2) The problem is not defining
feeling but explaining it: How and why are some functions felt rather than
just functed?
(3) Your "theory"
would simply make that into a nonproblem -- by definition.
(4) That's not problem-solving;
it is question-begging.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1252
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2009-06-13 --
Reply to Derek Allan
|
ON FEELING, FALLING,
"DEFINING" AND EXPLAINING
DA: "If that approach were really valid, why not go the
whole hog and say: 'We are all conscious, therefore we must know what
consciousness is'. There would be no further need for philosophical
discussion of the matter. Case closed."
Because what is needed is an explanation (e.g., gravity) of the
datum, not a "definition."
(In mathematics, you first
prove your theorem, and then you formulate a definition. In science you
first explain your datum, and then you formulate a definition. Definitions
don't explain. An ostensive "definition" of the datum is more
than enough to get you started on an explanation -- if, that is, you have
an explanation...)
Derek, please do not expect a
further response from me if your only rejoinder is the one you keep
repeating -- about first needing to "define" the datum (consciousness).
We've closed the circle on that one enough times already. No new
information is being transmitted in either direction.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1255
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2009-06-14 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
AT: "Gravity... is a fundamental force that has not
been explained, just as... feeling... has not been explained"
But feeling is not a fundamental force, otherwise
that would be telekinesis, and telekinesis is false, because contradicted
by all evidence. Hence we are entitled to expect an explanation -- and
obligated to admit we haven't one: The explanatory gap.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1262
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2009-06-15 --
Reply to Arnold Trehub
|
HOW AND WHY DO APPLES FALL -- AND
PEOPLE FEEL?
AT: "Gravity per se is a fundamental
force that has not been explained, just as consciousness/feeling per
se (its sheer existence) has not been explained and probably cannot be
explained, as I have stated earlier in this thread."
SH: -- "AT: 'Gravity... is a fundamental
force that has not been explained, just as... feeling... has not been
explained' "
SH: "But feeling
is not a fundamental force ... Hence we are entitled to expect an
explanation -- and obligated to admit we haven't one: The explanatory
gap."
AT: "What I said, as you can see above, is that
the sheer existence of consciousness/feeling, like gravity,
has not been explained and probably cannot be
explained. Why do you insist that I admit what I have admitted from the
very beginning of this thread?"
My elisions were intentional
(replacing "consciousness/feeling" with "feeling" and
leaving out the rest).
My point was that we are not
entitled to say that "How and why do people feel?" is inexplicable
in the same sense that "How and why is there gravity?" is
inexplicable.
Feeling, unlike gravity, is not
a fundamental force, a primitive explanatory "given" that can
then be used in explaining other things caused by it. Feeling is more
like falling. The answer to "How and why do apples fall?" is
"because of gravity (etc.)," but the answer to "How and why
do people feel?" is... an explanatory gap.
AT: Having said this, my claim is that what we might call
the content of consciousness, namely phenomena, can be
explained, and I have proposed an explanatory theory (the retinoid model).
Again, the deconstruction is
instructive: "...my claim is
that what we [feel], namely [feelings], can be explained, and I
have proposed an explanatory theory..."
Your theory explains the
functional correlates of feeling. We already know what we feel. What we had wanted to know was how and why...
AT: Question: Are we justified in saying that consciousness
exists without content? In other words, if a person has no phenomenal
content, can we say that that person is conscious? Or is
"consciousness" just a word that points to any and all instances
of phenomenal content?
Deconstruction: "...if a person has no [felt
feeling], can we say that that person [feels]?..."
Please see earlier threads on
"uncomplemented categories" and what it feels like to feel nothing.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1270
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2009-06-17 --
Reply to JWK Matthewson Matthewson
|
WHEN AND WHERE DOES NOT EXPLAIN HOW OR
WHY
JWKMM: "...functions are successions of instantaneous
forms, each having gone before the next appears whereas [feeling] is a time
extended entity."
I can't comment on your
description of gravity and space-time -- that is for physicists to discuss
-- except to say that it has no connection with the question of how and why
we feel. Yes, when and where we are feeling is somewhere in space and time
(though there are some methodological problems with pinpointing exactly
when and where the feeling is occurring). But when and where does not
explain how or why. Yes, feelings have a felt duration and location. But
felt duration and location are not the same as location and duration;
indeed, function and feeling are correlated (mysteriously), but
incommensurable, one being functed and measurable by anyone/anything, the
other being felt and only palpable to the feeler.
("Psychophysics," by
the way, only measures the relation between inputs and outputs, both of
which are merely functional. Not a single datum of psychophysics would
change if we were just feelingless sensorimotor survival machines,
functing.)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1289
|
2009-06-18 --
Reply to JWK Matthewson Matthewson
|
GETTING BY WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM
WIGNER'S FRIEND...
JWKMM: "[W]e know that a blow on the head ruins most
psychophysical measurements... [T]he widespread belief that nothing would
change if [feeling] were removed... is obviously empirically false."
A blow on the head of a
feelingless toy robot ruins most input/output measurements too, so what is
your point? A blow perturbs both functing and any (mysteriously) correlated
feeling.
The problem (and the
explanatory gap) is not the belief that nothing would change if feeling
were "removed" (and functing were preserved intact), but
explaining how and why it would
change (or be impossible).
JWKMM: "Functions... are an excellent formalised way of
designing and predicting the operation of material systems but they do not
actually tell us what makes the system operate or what it [feels] like to
be the system."
You are repeating the question
("how and why do organisms feel rather than just funct?"), not
answering it.
JWKMM: "If there were no time dilation and the
position of the apple were represented by a succession of 3D forms then the
apple would not fall to earth. Successions of 3D forms... do not even
explain how an apple falls to the ground so it is hardly surprising that
they do not explain feelings."
Your quarrel is with
physicists, and how they explain how and why an apple falls. Settle it with
them, please. It casts no light (only gratuitous, imported darkness) on the
already sufficiently daunting problem of how and why organisms feel. I am
happy with how and why apples fall; I am asking about how and why people
feel. (The explanatory gap is wide enough on its own.)
JWKMM: "Given that [feeling]... is essential for the
smooth running of our brains... We are... not justified in...
assuming... machines... [can] continue operating for any length of
time in the total absence of direct or indirect interaction with a
[feeling] observer."
Please take that up with Schroedinger's Cat and Wigner's Friend. It says
nothing whatsoever about how and why we feel; it simply presupposes it, and
imports QM's koans, yet again.
(By this token, not only would
the proverbial tree falling in the forest make no sound in a feelingless
world -- that much is true, sound being a feeling, acoustic vibrations
being merely functing -- but it would not even fall...)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1307
Reply
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2009-06-22 --
Reply to Jason Streitfeld
|
"FEELING-BEHAVIOR"
JS: "Complex patterns of neural activity result in
external behavior which is classifiable as "pain behavior" and
'love behavior'...Ó
Pain behavior? Love behavior? I
don't know about you, Jason, but when I say ouch, I'm not just exhibiting
"pain behavior": it feels like something: It hurts!
I can exhibit "pain
behavior" without its hurting, and it can hurt without my exhibiting
pain behavior. Same thing for my dog. And half-same for my robot: It can
exhibit pain behavior without feeling anything. What it can't do is feel
anything, with or without pain behavior. Same for a rock, except it can't
even exhibit pain behavior.
Neural activity? Yes, only I
and my dog have it, not the robot or the rock. And I don't doubt that if
you analyzed it carefully, you would find which neural activity pattern was
correlated with my feeling pain (whether or not I exhibit pain behavior),
so that you can fairly safely say that that neural activity causes or
constitutes the pain, somehow.
The question is how? -- and, even more important, why? That's the explanatory gap. In contrast, there's no gap
whatsoever for causing "pain behavior." Explaining how and
why the brain causes behavior is not in the least problematic. It's the
neural causes of feeling that are
the problem -- and especially explaining (causally, functionally) why there
should be any feeling at all, rather than just pain behavior, since that
does perfectly well for all functional (including Darwinian) purposes.
Behavior -- doing -- and
processes that generate doing, are all unproblematic functing, insofar as
causal explanation is concerned. It is with feeling that the explanatory
problem arises.
JS: "People come to use terms like "pain" and
"love" to refer to the causes of this behavior, what we call
emotions and other mental events, which are the complex patterns of neural
activity...Ó
Nothing of the sort, Jason.
When I am talking about my pain I am talking about a feeling, not a complex pattern of neural activity. My referent
is the feeling. If it happens that a complex pattern of neural activity in
fact causes or "constitutes" that feeling, somehow, then I am, unbeknownst to me, also referring to that
complex pattern of neural activity whenever I refer to that feeling.
But the explanatory gap is to
explain how and why that complex pattern of neural activity causes or
constitutes that feeling, and your behavioral, linguistic and neural
elaborations do not help in the least. They just paper over the gaping
gap.
JS: "I think we would benefit from replacing this 'why'
question with another one: why do some brain functions produce pain
behavior, and others love behavior, and so on? This question has the
advantage of not presupposing an explanatory gap.Ó
Begging a question always has
advantages over trying to answer it, if one cannot; supposing that there is
nothing to explain is even more advantageous.
If you can't explain to me how
and why brain functions produce "feeling" at all, it certainly
won't help to change the question to why they (inexplicably) produce this
feeling rather than that one.
And forget about behavior: Explaining
how they produce behavior -- or this behavior rather than that one -- is a
snap. It's how and why that behavior is accompanied or preceded (let alone
caused) by feeling that
constitutes the gap.
JS: "The [neural] properties are not the objects being felt, but
the process of feeling itself.Ó
That does not help: To see
exactly why it doesn't help, just go a head and try to answer, instead, the
question "how and why are certain neural properties the process of
feeling" (rather than just whatever else they are -- secreting,
firing, or what have you: functing). There is no way that one can wiggle
out of an explanation that we are certainly entitled to ask for, and that
we are certainly owed, if certain neural processes that occur before or
during feeling are simply dubbed "the process of feeling itself":
Until further (explanatory) notice, the neural processes are exactly what
they are observable to be, namely, neural processes (and possibly also the
causes of certain behaviors); functing. That they also somehow happen to be
"the process of feeling" remains to be explained.
JS: "(This is why I keep stressing to Stevan that there
is no feeling of feeling. The concept of "what it is like to
feel" is meaningful, but without referent.)Ó
Too many words: The expression
"what it feels like to feel" was only used to try to communicate
with those commentators in this thread who wanted to argue that they do not
feel, or don't know whether they feel, or don't know what it means to
feel.
If you do not resort to any of
these rhetorical routes to evading the question, then there is no need for
me to resort to any complex locutions like "what it feels like to
feel": you know what we're talking about, and we can take it from
there: How? Why?
JS: "I'm not going to address the stuff about Descartes,
certainty, and skepticism, because it would make this post too long.
I think you have profoundly misunderstood my response to Descartes...Ó
I'll wait to hear the reasons
why you think so...
JS: "I am not convinced by your claim that there are two
kinds of certainty.Ó
We can take a rain check on
that too, till you're ready...
JS: "I asked if you distinguished between the event in
which a feeling is caused and the event in which it is felt. You
replied by saying that making such a distinction would "place the
analytic cart before the explanatory horse." So you do not
regard Òfeeling a feelingÓ and Òcausing a feeling to existÓ as distinct
events.Ó
I think that
"feeling," simpliciter,
is problem enough; no need to talk about what it feels like to feel if I am
not arguing with someone who claims he doesn't know what I mean by
"feeling" or who claims he doesn't feel or doesn't know whether
he feels.
As to "causing a feeling
to exist" -- well that's the question, isn't it? How and why does the
brain cause a feeling to exist? (And the "why" is the hardest
part, because "pain behavior" and "love behaviorÓ would seem
to be all that an organism (and its brain, and its genes) really ever need,
functionally and causally. Why are some functions felt rather than just
functed? Why is pain not just
"pain [actually, nociceptive and nocifugal] behavior": unfelt,
just functed?
JS: "[Y]ou cannot claim that an explanation of Òcausing a
feeling to existÓ is not an explanation of Òfeeling a feeling," or
that there is a feeling/functing distinction at all.Ó
You're absolutely right, Jason.
If ever I hear a coherent, credible explanation of how the brain
"causes a feeling -- not "feeling behavior" but feeling -- to exist, I will happily
relent, and move on to ask why:
But I have yet to hear such a
causal explanation. And since the brain mostly just functs, this particular
challenge specifically concerns the special cases when the brain
(mysteriously) causes feeling -- or, if you like, felt functing rather than the usual unfelt functing (and adaptive behavior).
If you feel it represents some
sort of progress, please replace the feeling/functing problem with the
felt-functing/unfelt-functing problem. (I don't see much explanatory
headway there, just verbal massage.)
JS: "You can, at best, claim that there might be such a
distinction to be made at some future point; but it remains to be seen what
such a distinction could amount to.Ó
Not at all. The
felt-functing/unfelt-functing distinction can and must be made right now
(unless we wish to set the question aside for some future point). And it is
not "what the distinction amounts to" that remains to be seen,
but the explanation of how and why the brain produces felt functing rather
than just unfelt functing that remains to be heard.
JS: "You say "don't count," but you play the
counting game when you say that feeling implies a feeler.Ó
The counting was about kinds of
"stuff," but never mind. I'm content with an explanation of
feeling simpliciter. No need to
fuss about explaining a feeler too.
JS: "The issue is not whether or not feelings... exist,
but... whether or not feelings are causal. As you have acknowledged,
this issue is not decided by the sentitur.Ó
I agree here on all counts: It
is whether feelings exist that is
decided by the sentitur. Its
causal explanation is another matter.
And since you (unlike some of
my other interlocutors) are not denying that feelings exist, what's left is
indeed to explain (1) how the brain causes feelings and (2) why -- which is the same as asking
whether felt functing has causal powers -- powers lacked by unfelt functing
-- in virtue of the fact that it is felt
functing (rather than other functional properties in which it might differ
from unfelt functing in the same way that one form of unfelt functing might
differ from another).
JS: "When people normally think of feelings as being
causal... they are [not] thinking about telekinesis... [but] about the
functionality of the brain...Ó
When I say I lifted my finger
because I felt like it, I am not talking about the functionality of my
brain but about the causal power of my mind. Unpacked, that amounts to
telekinesis. I may believe my
brain is somehow behind it all (and of course I do, and it is), but I certainly
cannot say how or why. And that's the gap.
JS: "For the rest, I am not sure they are talking
coherently about anything at allÓ
I am not sure what you mean by
"the rest," but if you are rescinding the existence of feelings
-- or that they feel causal -- then we are back to square one.
Otherwise, it remains to
explain how feelings are caused and what, if anything, they in turn cause, qua feelings
JS: "[W]e can talk about feelings as being causal without
invoking telekinesis or new forces of natureÓ
We can talk, to be sure, and
do, but can we explain how and why?
JS: "I think your feeling/functing distinction is
partially shaped by your view that there are uncomplemented categories, and
your claim that the category of "feeling" is doomed to be philosophically
problematic because it is uncomplemented.Ó
Agreed so far (though I don't
think the uncomplementedness of the the category "feeling" casts
much light on the mystery of the causal status of feeling).
JS: " 'what it is like to be a bachelor' does not refer
to every felt experience from birth to the time a male person gets married'
Ó
In a sense it certainly does,
just as "what if feels like to be happy" refers to every happy
experience from birth.
But nothing much rides on that.
Let us say it is based on some particularly salient instances -- the ones
involving the variables that are most likely to change if one married. It
is also based on salient extrapolations and analogies, trying to fill in
the missing complementary experience. I don't think tasting an apple would
change much if I were married, but going to bed might; and it might be like going to bed with
someone to whom one is not married, but then again it might not, etc.
These putatively salient
positive instances, plus analogies and extrapolations, may or may not give
me a veridical sense of what it would feel like to be married, and hence
what the relevant features are that distinguish that from what it feels
like to be a bachelor. In principle I could be far wrong (though not quite at
the scale of color-blind super-neuroscientist Mary when her color-vision is first implanted); but in
practice I am probably very near right. Hence I probably do already know perfectly well what
it feels like to be a bachelor, thanks to my analogies and extrapolations.
Not so, though, for what it feels like to be awake, to be alive -- or, for
that matter, to feel. For negative instances are impossible in all three
cases (which are all variants of the same case, really), and hence any
analogies or extrapolations are moot.
JS: "you confuse sense with reference, and wrongly think
that all of our categories (such as Òfeeling somethingÓ or Òwhat it is like
to be a bachelorÓ) must refer to something specific.Ó
I don't think I am confusing
sense with reference at all, regarding the sense and reference of feeling.
The referent is the feeling, and the sense is the means or rule for
identifying the referent.
To compare: The referent of
"apple" is those round, red fruits we've all seen and eaten. And
it is their roundness and redness that I use to pick them out (and
distinguish them from their complement, say, bananas). The referent of
"prime number" is those numbers that are indivisible by anything
but 1 and themselves, and trying to divide them by other numbers is what I
use to pick them out (and distinguish them from their complement, say, even
numbers, or composite numbers).
The referent of
"migraine" is that unpleasant feeling in my head, and feeling
something in my head that is unpleasant in that way is what I use to detect
migraines (and distinguish them from, say, vertigo).
Yes, an apple may also have
biological properties that I don't perceive, and that I might need an
expert and instruments to detect; that too would be part of its sense.
Ditto for prime numbers, and properties of theirs that you must be a number
theorist to know about.
For migraines too, there's my
head out there, and nociceptive centers in my brain, that help me pick out
the referent. And let's say that the usual cause of a migraine is
vasoconstriction. Migraines differ from apples and prime numbers, however,
because if something felt like a migraine even if I had no vasoconstriction,
and even when my brain was misbehaving, and generating a feeling of
migraine when the part that's really amiss is the projection area for my
lower back. Either way, if it feels like a migraine, it's a migraine,
because what a migraine feels like is what a migraine is, qua feeling (as
opposed to a symptom that may or may not reliably signal that there is
something amiss with my cranial blood vessels).
The migraine sense/reference
story is hence profoundly (perhaps Lockeanly, though I'm not sure he quite
got it) different from the apple sense/reference story, in that what looks red and round, as if it were
an apple, is not necessarily an apple -- though it is undeniable that it looks like an apple (which is, of
course, to speak, again, of the feeling
as the referent, rather than the apple). An even better example of an
incorrigible referent is feeling happy, which has no other object but
itself. Even if it is a "mistakenly referred happiness," insofar
as its neural substrate is concerned, activity in the pain center
mistakenly mimicking activity in the pleasure center, or what have you:
That changes nothing. If you feel happy, the feeling is a feeling of
happiness, not a feeling of unhappiness (unless you happen to be feeling
both).
So, no, I am not confusing
sense with reference. When I refer to something, there is that something,
whether it is an apple or an agony. And I pick out apple on the basis of
its sensed or otherwise detectable properties; and I may be right or wrong.
But with agony, even if it is (usually or always) correlated with activity
in the agony center of my brain, the referent is the feeling of agony (even
if, for reasons unknown to me or anyone, the activity in the agony center
of my brain may cause or constitute my feeling of agony, somehow).
It could be (as Wittgenstein
would point out), that this feeling I am (undeniably) feeling right now --
which feels to me like agony, and exactly like the agony I have felt before
-- is not in fact the agony I felt before; indeed, perhaps I've never felt
agony before; it only feels as if
I've felt it before. So there's a problem with calling it
"agony," because I speak in order to share categories with
others, and not only can others not feel what I feel
("privately"), nor can I feel what they feel, but I can't even be
sure whether what I am feeling now is what I myself have felt before (and
called "agony," then); I can't be sure they are in fact the same
feeling.
All of this incorrigible
Wittgensteinian uncertainty is there, to be sure, and I in no way contest
it. It is just another one of the many things sceptics are right to remind
us that we cannot be certain about (including the continuity of personal
identity and even the instant to instant continuity of feeling). But of
course uncertainty and unverifiability do not mean necessary falsity
either. This could be exactly the
same agony I felt and called agony yesterday; and even the same agony you
feel and call agony. I just can't be sure.
But the aspect of feeling that
is at issue here is not the Wittgensteinian uncertainty about which feeling it is but the
cartesian certainty that it is indeed being felt. That is the referent in question in these discussions.
JS: "[F]amily resemblance categories do not pick out
anything specific. (And I do not see the sense in saying, as you do,
that Òa long disjunctionÓ can be the invariant of a category. A long
disjunction is no invariant at all.)Ó
(1) If you can categorize X's
at all, you are picking out something specific, something of which there are
positive instances (the members of the category X) and negative instances
(the nonmembers of the category X; the members of its complement, not-X).
(2) If you can categorize X's
at all, you have to be able to detect whether an instance is or is not a member
of the category X.
(3) Those instances that you
are unable to categorize correctly, you are simply unable to categorize.
(If someone else can categorize them correctly, then they can categorize
them, but you cannot.)
(4) It matters not a bit whether
you can categorize X's correctly by detecting that all X's are P and all
non-X's are not-P or you can categorize X's correctly by detecting that all
X's are "L or M or not-N or (more Q than R) or (if S then
not-T)", otherwise they are not-X's. Just let P = "L or M or
not-N or (more Q than R) or (if S then not-T)".
(5) But don't conflate that
perfectly viable disjunctive invariant P in the case where you are indeed
able to correctly categorize on the basis of P with the entirely different
case where there are some instances you cannot categorize at all. For there
the problem is not that the invariant is disjunctive but that you cannot
categorize.
(6) If there is correct
categorization there is (at least) one invariant, P, on which the
successful categorization is based. If there is no invariant, there is no category at all, not a
"family resemblance" category.
JS: "We can more or less agree on how to apply family
resemblance categories, but we do not always agree, especially when
confronted with new cases.Ó
Where I and others agree in our
categorizations, it is because there are detectable invariants, and we
share them (or their equivalents). Where we disagree in our
categorizations, we are either using different invariants (hence making
somewhat different categorizations), or there is no category, or we have
not yet fully mastered it and -- like dubbing whatever happens to feel like
agony -- and as if it always was "agony" -- today as
"agony," even though it isn't and never was -- we are
simply sorting mistakenly or arbitrarily.
In brief, if we can categorize
correctly, there are invariants, and we have them; if we cannot categorize
correctly then either there are no invariants or we do not yet have them.
JS: "To show that Òwhat it feels like to feel somethingÓ
is complemented, I provided an example of how Òwhat it feels like to feel
nothingÓ makes sense. I noted that it makes sense to answer the
question Òwhat does it feel like to be a rock?Ó by saying 'nothing'.Ó
There is no problem at all
(modulo the other-minds problem, of course) with categorizing "things
that can feel" and "things that can't feel": animals fall in
the former category, rocks are in the latter; and for one-celled organisms
and plants we are not sure (but probably they can't). That's like
categorizing apples.
But that's not the
uncomplemented category at issue here. The category at issue is the
superordinate category for what migraines, pain, loudness, love, euphoria,
agony, bachelorhood feel like -- all particular feelings, with their own
perfectly adequate complements (what vasodilation, painlessness, quiet,
hatred, depression, ecstasy, and connubiality feel like). These are the
pears, bananas and strawberries that complement apples.
What is uncomplemented is
feeling itself, because there is nothing that non-feeling feels like; it is
a contradiction in terms -- unlike apple's superordinate category,
"fruit," which is perfectly well-complemented.
JS: "When we ask what it feels like to be a rock, we are
asking what it feels like to feel nothing.Ó
No, that's word-play. When we
ask what it feels like to be a rock, we are asking whether or not a rock
can feel, because there is nothing it feels like to feel nothing.
(Otherwise the question falls in the category of questions like "When
did you stop beating your wife?" or "What color is Bb?" or
"Do rocks vote republican?")
JS: "The category "what it feels like to feel
nothing" thus makes sense. It is empty, but not
meaningless.Ó
The category "what does it
feel like to feel nothing"
is either empty, meaningless, or, most likely, a nonsequitur (with the
reply based on what it feels like to feel next to nothing, or not to feel this in particular, but
something else). It has also engendered a good deal of nonsense about the
"unconscious mind" (as opposed to what is really at issue, which
is unfelt functing: functing is only mental if it is felt).
What does make sense is
"What kinds of entities can and cannot feel?"
JS: "Ergo, Òwhat it feels like to feel somethingÓ is
complemented by its negation. And both it and the negation are
empty. They are family resemblance concepts, not grounded by an
invariant.Ó
Well, we continue to disagree
on every one of these points:
There is nothing it feels like
to feel nothing, hence "what it feels like to feel something" is
uncomplemented, but certainly not empty; only its complement is empty.
I don't know what
"concepts" are, but if you mean categories (i.e., things we can
correctly categorize), then what is meant by family-resemblance-based categories
is categories with a disjunctive invariant. Where there is no invariant at
all, there is no category.
In the special case of feeling,
the category is problematic, because only its extension is non-empty; the
extension of its complement is empty. We do not notice this "poverty
of the stimulus" problem, because all instances of feeling are
positive instances, hence we never have to worry about distinguishing them
from their complements: our categorization is error-free. We do try,
though, occasionally, using extrapolation and analogy -- but it is always
doomed to fail, because the complement is not merely unsampled, but empty,
hence all of our extrapolations and analogies are ineffectual.
JS: "There is no feeling of tasting something; however, I
would not thereby conclude that there is no category of Òtasting
something"... your mistake is in thinking the sense of a statement
indicates that it refers to something.Ó
Again, straight disagreement:
There are plenty of instances of what it feels like to taste something,
just as there are plenty of instances of eating something. For anything to
be a category, it has to have members and non-members, and there has to be
a fact of the matter about which is which, as well as a means of sorting
them. To "have" the category (i.e., to be able to distinguish the
members of the category from the members of its complement), one must have
-- either explicitly and verbalizably, or implicitly and executably -- the
"sense" of the category, i.e., what rule will sort the members
from the nonmembers. The rule can be inborn or acquired, but it needs to
detect the category's invariant features -- for those invariants are the
ones that reliably distinguish the members from the nonmembers. (And, of
course, every category that you can correctly sort has a referent, whether
an individual or a kind).
So the issue here is definitely
not sense vs reference. Nor are any of the positive categories under
discussion here empty; but in some cases their complements are empty. In
such cases, since the positive category itself is not empty, one is able
(trivially) to do "error-free" sorting, since there is nothing
but positive (or irrelevant) instances to sort. (Rocks would be irrelevant
in the sorting of males from females, though they would be relevant in
sorting animate things from inanimate things; taste would be irrelevant in
sorting colors, though it would be relevant in sorting sense-modalities.)
I think your mistake is not
distinguishing the category (1a) "entities that are able to taste"
vs.(1b) "entities that are unable to taste" from the category
(2a) "what it feels like to taste this" vs. (2b) "what it
feels like to taste that" as well as from the superordinate category
(3a) "what it feels like to taste something" vs. (3b) "what
it feels like to hear
something." And what you are overlooking or misunderstanding
altogether is the still higher-order category: (4a) "what it feels
like to feel something" vs. (4b) "what it feels like to feel
nothing." It is the latter (4b) that is empty, not the former (4a).
Neither extrapolations (from what it feels like to feel less and less, and
more and more faintly) nor analogies (vision vs. touch) can remedy that.
JS: "You still claim a person with only the sense
modality of vision would not have a complement for the category of
'colored'.Ó
I think you misunderstood my
hypothetical example. I didn't just say the person only had vision; I also
said the only two properties in his visual world (let's say it's 2-D) were
shape and color, all objects had both shape (spatial extension: no punctate
objects) and color, and both black and white count as colors. Hence there
are no shapeless objects or colorless objects.
I suggested that for such a
person in such a world, particular shapes (round, square, symmetric,
equilateral) and particular colors (red, green, black, white, multicolored)
would be perfectly well complemented, but neither superordinate category --
color or shape -- would be. If we added a further sensory capacity to the
person, and a further sensory dimension to the world -- say, sound, and all
the shapes could talk to you, so that you recognized them as individuals,
and there were also some disembodied voices among them, having neither
shape nor color, and yet recognizable as individuals just from their
sounds, then both shape and color would be complemented, because the
shapeless, colorless individuals would serve as the complement.
Upon further reflection,
though, I notice that even for us, within the visual modality itself, there
is something incoherent about the notion of a colorless shape or a
shapeless color. So perhaps there are some interesting within-modality
complementation issues too; but I think they would take us too far afield.
(So too would the issue of whether I am cheating to count white and
especially black as a color: black should be the absence of color -- but in
fact it doesn't feel that way; black just looks like yet another color, but
a very dark one!) (It is also an interesting but peripheral question
whether analogy and especially extrapolation might not serve us better here
than it does with the superordinate category of feeling itself: There are
analogies between sense-modalities, and just as "degree of
darkness" can be extrapolated to black even if we've never seen anything
pitch-black, so size can be extrapolated to a shapeless point...)
JS: "You say the complement is Òuncolored,Ó and not
Òshaped.Ó This is a false distinction. When an observed
difference is not one of color, but one of shape, then the category
ÒuncoloredÓ can appear via the category 'an uncolored difference'.Ó
But the category in question is
color, not difference in color or shape. Yes, there are instances that are
same-color/different-shape and same-shape/different-color. (There would
have to be, otherwise in principle we could not even extract the invariants
of shape and color. A simpler example would be a world of monochromatic
green circles that varied only in brightness and size -- but the brightness
and size were perfectly correlated. There would be no way to distinguish
brightness and size independently along the hybrid continuum from
big-bright to small-dim.)
But that still gives no hint of
no-color or no-shape, in a purely visual world in which every object has
both a shape and a color but no other sensory properties.
JS: "And, thus, ÒuncoloredÓ could mean
Òmonochromatic.Ó It makes sense to talk about black-and-white movies
as Òuncolored,Ó and this is not dependent upon us having multiple sense
modalities.Ó
Except white is a color (and,
for all phenomenal intents and purposes, so is black), so the category
black/white vs. R/G/B/B/W is no more the colored/uncolored distinction than
red/green vs blue/yellow, or, for that matter, red vs. black is. It's just
this or these colors vs those.
But this (interesting)
excursion into the minutiae of category complementation, and whether or not
there really is a complementation problem with feeling, and whether that in
turn has anything to do with what makes the feeling/function problem a
problem has left the problem itself rather far behind. The problem is not
whether the category "feeling" is complemented or uncomplemented,
but how and why we feel rather than just funct.
("Functing," by the
way, is complemented by "feeling," even in the verbose compromise
I mooted earlier: felt functing vs. unfelt functing.)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/1336
Reply
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2010-02-01 --
Reply to Jason Streitfeld
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The claim is not particularly
that feeling is epiphenomenal but that it's causally inexplicable (because
causality would require telekinesis, which is false).
If the claim is false, it might
be better to explain and why, rather than just to say that the distinction
between a feeling's being felt and a feeling's being a cause is incoherent!
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/2880
Reply
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2010-02-01 --
Reply to David Longinotti
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ON "INDICATORS": FELT VS. FUNCTED
DL: "I don't think it's correct to assume
that feelings can only be causal if there is telekinesis. Feelings
can serve as indicators that influence the behavior of an organism, without
directly causing or inhibiting neural firing."
"Indicators" that
"influence" without "causing"?
DL: "An analogy
can be made with a mechanism that automatically steers a ship using the
stars..."
The causality in your example
is ordinary, unproblematic causation (including the "detection").
It is precisely the profound way that this analogy fails to fit the case of
feeling that makes the mind/body (feeling/functing) problem the special
(and apparently intractable) case that it is.
DL: "whereas the ship's mechanism is
designed to have the proper motor response to a detected pattern of stars,
an organism's movements in response to a feeling may be somewhat random
until it learns a behavioral routine that effectively controls the
feeling. In any event, all that's required in both
cases is that the entity with the detector have control over
motor mechanisms that, when engaged, can influence the output of the
detector."
Right. And the only part you
left out was how and why the thing "detected" in the second case
is felt, rather than just functed, as in the first. That, after all, is the
underlying question here -- the one that is begged by the unproblematic
naval analogy.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/2884
Reply
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2010-02-02 --
Reply to David Longinotti
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Actually, what I asked
was how and why felt functions are felt
functions rather than just functed functions. That covers both our explanatory bankruptcy
on how feelings are caused, and, more important, on how feelings cause
(which is what is meant by "why felt rather than just functed?").
And that second causal question is the real heart of the m/b problem. It's
why feeling can never play any causal role in any AI, robotic or neural
model, nor in any evolutionary/adaptive explanation (without the help of
telekinesis). That about exhausts the causal/explanatory options...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/2886
2010-02-06 -- Reply to Jason Streitfeld
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CALLING A SPADE A SPADE: EXPLANATORY FAILURE, NOT
"CATEGORY ERROR"
Yes, "functing" and
causing are more or less co-extensive. The only difference is that the
functing usually includes some (innocent) interpretation of the
"purpose" of the causal dynamics. (It's just as innocent as a
careful Darwinian explanation -- in terms of gene distribution, traits,
environment, and causal consequences for survival and reproduction -- is
innocent of teleology even though it is framed in teleological terms, for
the sake of understanding. Same is true of intentional explanation.)
Nothing incoherent there.
Apart from that,
"functing" is a quip, meant as a reminder not to cheat and
smuggle more into a causal explanation than is needed to explain the objective
dynamics. Feeling is always smuggled in; the functing can do it all fine,
without needing -- indeed without the capacity of sustaining -- any
recourse to feeling, real though feeling is. Hence the explanatory gap.
Nothing incoherent there either.
And, yes, I use
"feeling" to refer to anything that is felt, regardless of
which sense it is felt with, and that includes what it feels like to
think. As with sensorimotor activity, which has a causal component
("functing") as well as a felt component (what if feels like to
see, hear, taste, smell, move, desire), "cognitive" activity
(to think, to believe, to intend, to mean) has a causal component
(information-processing, computation, cerebral dynamics, input/output
performance, even sensorimotor activity itself) as well as a felt
component (the feeling that is going on when we think, what it feels like
to think this rather than that). Nothing incoherent there either.
Nor is there any Rylean
category error being committed in any of this. Feeling really is different
from functing, and not explained causally (except if we give it
telekinetic causal power, counterfactually) no matter how loudly Ryle may
protest that this is some sort of a category error we're committing
rather than the explanatory failure it clearly is.
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/2897
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2010-02-06 -- Reply to Jonathan C.W. Edwards
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"VIEWPOINT" DUALISM
JCWE: "there is a much easier way out of all
this if we accept that feelings and causal dynamic events are just two
sorts of description from different viewpoints"
That certainly is an easier
way, namely, begging the question instead of answering it.
Sometimes naivete is a
virtue. We all know what people can do: behave, locomote, detect objects
and events acoustically, optically, mechanically, respond adaptively,
both in terms of surviving and reproducing. We also know that if that
were all there were to it, there would be no "hard problem" and
no "explanatory gap" because there would not be two
"viewpoints" on all this. ("View" itself is
equivocal, which is why I said "optically" and not
"visually" earlier.) There would only be functing.
But in fact each of us knows
this is not true. There are indeed two viewpoints on all the above, for
we don't just funct. There's something it feels like to funct. But
there's no use saying that it's somehow a natural counterpart of functing
(say, of optical processing) that there should be something it feels like
to funct (seeing). There is. But the question is how? why? And the
"dual viewpoint" hermeneutics is true enough, soothing, but
totally non-explanatory. It is not an answer to the question asked.
Hence the gap.
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/2898
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2010-02-08 -- Reply to Arnold Trehub
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Predicting feelings is not
explaining feelings (any more than a weather forecast explains
meteorology -- but please don't hasten to pursue this analogy, because
feeling is not like raining, which is a perfectly ordinary physical
phenomenon like the rest, and has no attendant problems of causality...)
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/2916
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2010-02-08 -- Reply to Jonathan C.W. Edwards
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ROCK KICKS ROCK
Yes, functing, and the
feeling/functing problem, are primarily a problem of causality and causal
explanation (failure). Willing is a form of feeling, and it's the one that
matters most, when we try to explain how and why we feel.
JCWE: "'why should there be experiences
associated with instances of operation of laws that predict experiences?'
we have already answered the question."
Really? I missed the part
about why something is felt when I kick a rock, but not when a robot or
another wind-swept rock kicks a rock.
JCWE: "Twenty-first century instantiated
dynamics... determining the relation between experiences"
More like another century of
question-begging and self-deception...
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/2917
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2010-02-08 -- Reply to Brent Allsop
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INEFFABLE ILLUMINATION
I got the
"observational" part (i.e., that we can feel); that, after all,
is the (redundant) explanandum.
But what I missed was the
explanatory part (the explanans):
How and why do we feel?
The fact that we feel is an indisputable cartesian fact, and in
that sense (doubly redundantly) "experienceable." It is also
perfectly "effable" (to others who likewise feel).
But
"understandable"? Apart from the fact that understanding, too,
is a feeling (and hence, as Achilles told the Tortoise, all bets are off,
because feeling's ultimately just a matter of taste), my own pedestrian
tastes in understanding run more toward causal (or mathematical)
explanation, rather than ineffable illumination...
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/2919
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2010-02-08 -- Reply to Jason Streitfeld
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GERUNDS FOR A GERIATRIC CONUNDRUM
JS: "'functing' does not specify anything at
all. Anything at all might be regarded as functing."
Except, notably, feeling.
JS: "But then, how could we distinguish
functing from feeling?"
Pinch yourself, with and
without anesthesia.
JS: "you say that feelings themselves can
be functed as well as felt."
No, I never say anything even
remotely like that (unless I have somewhere inadvertently misspoken)! I
say that some (not all) functing is accompanied by feeling. (That is, if
you like, "felt functing" but certainly not "functed
feeling"! To be able to say that feelings are indeed functed, we
would first have to say how and why.)
The mind/body
(feeling/functing) problem is to explain how and why some functings are
felt functings rather than just functed functings like all the rest.
JS: "There is no way to distinguish what
you call "the functing of a feeling" from 'the feeling of a
feeling'"
Vide supre. I never
said (nor would say) "the functing of a feeling," only the feeling
of a functing, i.e., the feeling that inexplicably accompanies some (not
all) functings. (The "lifting of a dropping" is not the same as
the "dropping of a lifting.)
JS: "there is no referent to go along with
your use of the term "feeling"... I presume that anything
which exists can be felt--at least, I have no reason to think otherwise."
For what it feels like to
feel X, try pain.
For a sample of things that
exist but cannot be felt, trying feeling what it feels like to be an
electron, or to be under total anesthesia...
JS: "since anything at all can be regarded
as functing, what could we feel, if not functing?"
All causal dynamics are
indeed "functing." And there does not, indeed, seem to be room
for anything more. So the only part left (and then you've convinced me!)
is to explain how and why some functing is felt functing...
JS: "when we talk about what it is like to
X, we are not talking about some causally mysterious aspect of X-ing; we
are rather making explanatory-cum-predictive statements about behaviors
and experiences related to X-ing."
That's a bit too fancy for
me. Run it by me using ordinary language: "When we talk about what
it feels like to walk, we are not talking about some causally mysterious
aspect of walking, we are rather explaining and predicting behaviors and
experiences related to walking."
Fine: Please explain how and
why it feels like something to walk. (I already know the rest of the
functional story, about bipedal locomotion, its neurology, and how and
why it gets you somewhere...)
JS: "Claiming that 'what it is like' is
some causally inert, or causally inexplicable, aspect of events really is
a category error."
Jason, you can echo poor old
Gilbert Ryle till doomsday: it won't solve the explanatory problem
("how and why do we feel?"), nor make it go away.
JS: "there is no particular 'what it is
like to be a bachelor' that all bachelors experience."
If that way of putting it
feels too vague, fine, forget about what being a bachelor (or blind, or
sighted) feels like, and consider instead what walking feels like. You
know what it feels like. I know what it feels like. Now explain how and
why it feels like anything at all.
(I am quite happy to discuss
the rather subtler problem of "uncomplemented categories" with
you too, but we won't get anywhere if you keep trying to dismiss even the
less subtle case of complemented categories too: what it feels like to be
walking feels different from its (various) complements, e.g., what it
feels like to be stationary. But what it feels like to be awake -- note,
not wide-wake, necessarily, just awake, simpliciter -- does not have any
complement, because there is nothing it feels like to be asleep (or
comatose, or dead)...)
Harnad, S. (1987) Uncomplemented Categories, or, What is it
Like to be a Bachelor? 1987 Presidential Address: Society for
Philosophy and Psychology.
JS: "Of course, we should not confuse the
verb 'to feel' with the noun, 'feelings.'
One cannot skirt the problem
via syntax or morphology, any more than one can do so by crying
"category error!"...
Be it feeling, feelings,
feels, feel, felt, feelingly or feelingfulness, the problem is to explain
how and why there's any of it, rather than just the functing that it
(sometimes) accompanies.
JS: "Dennett, for example, does not make
recourse to subjective experience"
Quite. And that's one of the
effective ways of begging the question: Don't talk about feeling at all!
JS: "I am not attracted to the introduction
of new terms unless they help us solve our problems, at the very least by
helping us better recognize a problem or its solution. I do not
think the term "functing" achieves either end."
I don't like neologisms
either. I could have called it the feeling/function problem instead of
the feeling/functing problem, and I could have written out, longhand,
"How and why are some functional dynamics accompanied by feeling?).
I just think gerunds are shorter, hence handier.
(What gets lexicalized in a
language, and then canonized with a lexical entry of its own, is partly
arbitrary, but partly dictated by whether a circuitous description is
said often enough, and long enough, to warrant baptizing and replacing
with a new name of its own.)
I like "funct"
because it punctuates the question-begging that normally perpetuates the
fog around feeling: "How and why do we feel rather than just
funct?"
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/2921
Reply
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2010-02-10 -- Reply to David Longinotti
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I don't see any resemblance
whatsoever between photons and feelings. Photons are unproblematic
physical phenomena, suffering from no explanatory gap. They cannot plug
the gaping gap for feelings. (The problem is not with where or when the feeling is going on, but how, and why. That
is a problem for causal explanation, not for localization, in either time
or space.)
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/2939
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2010-02-10 -- Reply to David Longinotti
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Why does an apple fall? It is
caused by gravitational attraction between two masses of unequal size.
Why are humans bipedal? It was caused by the survival/reproductive
advantages of certain genes in our ancestors. Why do we feel? No one can
explain it because the foregoing kind of explanations -- being
causal/functional -- do not work (and because there is no telekinetic
force, although if there were, there would be no problem).
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/2941
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2010-02-11 -- Reply to David Longinotti
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NO EASY WAY OUT
If feeling had indeed turned
out to be a fundamental force, like gravity, then the explanatory buck
would indeed have stopped there, as with everything else, and there would
have been nothing special about feeling compared to other phenomena.
But there is no fundamental
telekinetic force. Feeling just dangles (sometimes) on top of
functionality for which feeling is completely superfluous, functionally
(i.e., causally): All of organisms' capacity for surviving, reproducing,
moving, avoiding injury, learning, manipulating, adapting, talking,
reasoning, etc. can and will be fully explained, dynamically,
computationally and neurally (those are the "easy" problems,
normal science, or, rather, reverse bioengineering: all just functing,
like everything else).
But the part that cannot and
hence will not be explained is how and why any of that functing is felt functing. It certainly is,
but how? why?
And the reason it will remain
unexplained is that the only way to give feeling any real causal power of
its own would be if telekinesis had turned out to be true (as we all
intuitively expected, and most of us still do). But it's not true.
So feeling is functionally
superfluous (even though it is undeniably there) and hence not explicable
in the way that all other phenomena (down to basic laws, like gravity)
are explicable.
(Quantum mysteries have
nothing to do with it: They are neither part of the problem, nor part of
the solution; nor do they, by analogy, exempt feelings even to the extent
that QM is exempt, because of its vast predictive and explanatory power.
Feelings have no explanatory power (except subjectively); and the
predictivity, such as it is, is merely about the functional correlates of
feeling: the subset of functing that happens to be felt functing (but
without a clue as to how, or why). That's not scientific prediction. It's
just weather-forecasting.)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/2946
Reply
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2010-02-11 -- Reply to Brent Allsop
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(1) No, the brain correlate
of feeling red does not have to be red. In fact it would be no sense if
it were. It would multiply the number of explananda, without
necessity.
(2) Correlation (and
prediction) are not causation, nor do they explain causation. (All that's
meant by how/why is what is the causal mechanism?)
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/2948
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2010-02-11 -- Reply to Jonathan C.W. Edwards
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COMPLEXITY PHASE TRANSITION?
How complex does something
have to be to make it felt? Why?
If the robot feels (and it
might -- I believe a Turing Test-passing robot would be almost as likely
to feel as any of the rest of us) then you simply have the same problem
explaining how and why the robot feels that you already have explaining
how and why the rest of us feel.
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/2949
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2010-02-11 -- Reply to Jason Streitfeld
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SYNTACTIC ACHES
(1) Distinguishing what it
feels like to have your hand anesthetized versus not involves local
anesthesia. It still feels like something to see your hand being touched
without feeling it. (If you're under general anesthesia, all bets are
off. Uncomplemented categories again... Feeling what something feels like
always involves feeling that it feels like this and not like that.)
The rest is just correlation (aka "association"), not
causation. (Or if it's causation, that causation is unexplained, hence
functionally superfluous.)
(2) It's not that in one case
a feeling is functed and in the other it is not. It is that in one case
the (local) functing is felt ("associated/correlated"
with feeling) and in the other it is not. (With your reversal of feeling
and functing, you've "solved" the problem trivially: feeling
becomes functed, and correlation becomes causation, by fiat!
(3) The correct (i.e.,
Occamian) causal/functional story is that with anesthesia the brain can
detect and respond to a pinch, and without it cannot. Yes, the detection
is accompanied by (associated with, correlated with) a feeling; that's
uncontested. But it's also unexplanatory. It's the explanandum.
(4) What we distinguish is
not so much feeling vs functing, but felt functing vs. unfelt functing.
(But to do it, you have to be awake, hence still feeling something, at the time, so it's
always feeling this vs. feeling
that.)
(5) "I feel because my
syntax dictates it"? I have a certain amount of sympathy for the
Whorf Hypothesis, but this is taking it a bit too far. (Does a dog feel
pain because of syntax too?)
(6) Sure what it feels like
to walk varies on every occasion. All feeling varies with the occasion.
The only thing that's invariant is that you always feel something (whilst your awake).
That's the explanandum. I'm still waiting for the (causal) explanans...
Stevan Harnad
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/2951
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2010-02-12 -- Reply to Jonathan C.W. Edwards
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I am afraid I find these
complexity-based calculations completely arbitrary, and in no way
implying or explaining how or why feeling should kick in at some point
along the complexity continuum. Moreover, the complexity calculations are
along a functional continuum,
based on input data, output (action) capacity and potential, and internal
processing and storage. These too have nothing whatsoever to do with
feeling -- except the (undeniable but unexplained) phenomenal fact that
they (or rather some of them) also happen to be correlated with feelings.
No causal explanation. Just the gaping explanatory gap, together with
a a (familiar) "complexity"-based ad-hoc posit (e.g.,
see here and here).
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/2968
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2010-02-12 -- Reply to Penelope Rowlatt
2010-02-12 -- Reply to Jason Streitfeld
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ON THE ROMANCE OF WAIT-AND-SEE
(1) It's fine to wait for
"scientific" answers to questions, but some questions (e.g.,
how to trisect an angle with compass and straight-edge) have some
a-priori reasons (in this case mathematical) suggesting why it is
unlikely that they will ever get an answer from "science." (The
usual rationale for the "wait-and-see" stance on the
explanatory gap regarding consciousness has been an analogy with the
alleged explanatory gap regarding life ("vitalism"), but
unfortunately this optimism is based on overlooking a profound disanalogy between the two
phenomena (probably arising from the animism that was always inherent
in vitalism!).
(2) If reasons not to expect
scientific (or mathematical) answers are not philosophical matters for
you, Jason, that's fine. I think that, on the contrary, such cases
virtually define philosophical matters. (It also seems to me that it is
not I who am waiting for an explanation of feeling! Rather, I have tried
to give reasons to expect an explanation will never be forthcoming,
because of the nature of feeling and causality -- and, most important,
the nonexistence of telekinesis (though I expect one can take a
wait-and-see attitude on that too!).
(3) My feeling/function
distinction is co-extensive with the mind/body problem, so if you are
saying that you find the one incoherent and incomprehensible, then you
are saying the same of the other. That is a possible stance, but hardly a
solution.
(4) I am not sure what you
have in mind when you suggest that the reason we can't close the
explanatory gap may be grammatical, but it does seem to be hedging bets
to say it is both grammatical and
contingent on future science!
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/2971
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2010-02-12 -- Reply to Roger Lindsay
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OUR ANOSOGNOSIA FOR THE FUNCTIONAL SUPERFLUOUSNESS
OF FEELING
Because they are ubiquitous
and inescapable in our waking lives, and because they feel as if they are playing a
causal role, it is very difficult for us to see that in reality our
feelings are functionally superfluous (unless telekinesis is true --
which it is not).
(We have a similar difficulty
reasoning about the origins and adaptive function of language, because our brains are so deeply
"language-prepared" that it is almost impossible for us to
think of an object or state of affairs without "sub-titling" it
with a verbal narrative.)
I think that your tentative
attempts, Roger, to close the explanatory gap, below, are based on
inadvertently begging the question, by endowing feeling with a
(telekinetic) causal power (unexplained) a priori. (The same mistake is
made if it is "reasons" to which you give the causal power. For
reasons -- though they too are felt -- need not be felt: they can be
functed, as computations or even dynamics. That reasons are felt rather
than just functed is just another example of the problem.) I think you
are also underestimating the nature and causal power of computation, and
probably of dynamics too.
RL: "your
claims about the causal sufficiency of functs are certainly true of
neonates [but this] decreases with age [and is] less obviously true of
adults."
I am afraid you may have
missed my point, which was definitely about adults! The point is that the
full causal/functional explanation is always sufficient to explain our
performance and our performance capacity. The only thing it does not
explain is how and why any of that functionality is felt.
RL: "I
have just touched my nose... It is not likely that my action resulted...
from some coincidentally pre-existing causal state... [i.e.] not from
Humean causes but from voluntary performance on the basis of reasons...
[e.g.] love, or hate, or anger or jealousy?"
Yes, the feeling that I do
what I do because I "feel like" doing it -- rather than because
I am being buffeted about by underlying neurological causes -- is the
heart of the mind/body problem (hence also of the feeling/function
problem, which is the very same problem, more transparently stated). And
the lack of a causal explanation for feeling (given that telekinesis is
false) is the basis of the explanatory gap.
Feelings themselves feel
causal, but hardly rational, except in the sense that "My reason for
doing it was that I felt like it!" If I say "I withdrew my hand
from the fire because it hurt" I am not explaining why I removed my
hand: the explanation of our nociceptive performance and capacity is
based on the properties of fire and tissue, the evolutionary history of
our species, the neurology of our sensorimotor systems, and our history
of experience (including what we have seen and been told about the
effects of fire). That's all functing. The unexplained part is how and
why pain feels like something.
By the way, a functional
story similar to the one I told about why I withdrew my hand from the
fire can also be told about why I pay my debts. I have reasons, of
course, some historical some verbal. But the explanatory gap is
explaining how and why that reasoning is felt rather than just functed.
RL: "Why
are we aware of feelings?"
Here's a good example of why
it is much more revealing to re-cast the problem of
"consciousness" ("awareness," etc. etc.), i.e., the
"mind/body" problem as the "feeling/function" problem:
That way it becomes obvious
how your statement "Why are we aware of feelings?" is
redundant: "Why do we feel feelings?" Isn't that the same as
"Why do we feel?" ("Unfelt feelings" are not
only self-contradictory, but they reveal the redundancy and
question-begging inherent in the usual way of putting it.)
RL: "so
that we can move beyond funct determination"
It's not about
"determinacy" vs. "free will." (In my opinion, that
is a rather sterile question, especially when it turns out that the only
way to flesh out "freedom" is by invoking randomness!)
The real issue is about the
causal status of feeling: Except if telekinesis is true (which it isn't).
feelings have no independent causal power. They are merely (unexplained)
correlates of the functing, which is the real causal power.
RL: "If I
am aware of my anger, then it can be included in a calculus (letÕs call
it a rational calculation) that takes other factors into account,
low-level functs can be over-ridden by more humane or longer-term
considerations."
"If I feel, then my
feeling can be over-ridden." Sure, and if you don't feel, but rather
just do the functing that needs to be done, then there's neither feeling
nor the need to "over-ride" it. If feeling angry means feeling
inclined to hit someone, and you over-ride it, so you don't hit, why not
just over-ride the inclination to hit (functing), without bothering with
the feeling either way?
In a nut-shell, this is how
every attempt to assign an independent causal power to feeling (other
than telekinesis, which is false) fares, when looked at carefully, and
functionally. The feeling always turns out to be redundant, superfluous,
and hence unexplained (though it is definitely there, correlated with the
functing).
RL: "I
guess you will respond that I am just proposing a higher-level funct
scenario, and the rational calculation process could all be carried out
just as well using a variable list with associated numerical
indices."
Yes, except you seem to be
over-simplifying functing, reducing it to trivial digital computations:
Functing can be computational as well as dynamic.
RL: "But
the calculation involves the evaluation of motives, and whilst you can
simulate my desire for sex, for example, by using a number, the size of a
number wonÕt make the real me sign up for a dating agency."
As I said, reducing it to
numbers is a caricature but, yes, the functional basis of anger as well
as desire is as insentient as digital computation. Yet that's all there
is to functing, and the accompanying feeling remains inexplicable.
RL: "Take
pain as another example. A nuclear plant supervisor might ignore a
symbolic hazard signal for all sorts of reasons, but if the hazard signal
caused her pain that was proportional to the risk, she would need pretty
good reasons not to take action."
This is again just the
anosognosia about the causal status of feelings: To increase the
likelihood that the supervisor detects and responds to the hazard signal,
increase the likelihood that the supervisor detects and responds to the
hazard signal. Interposing another "signal" (pain), is just
multiplying entities, with no explanatory gain. (The story is the same
for pain itself, as a "signal.)
RL:
"Feelings can be intrinsically motivating, awareness of feelings
allows an agent to evaluate and sometimes to over-ride them."
Translation: "Feelings
can make you feel like doing something. Feeling that you feel like doing
something can be over-ridden by feeling that you feel like not-doing
something."
Remove the redundant feeling
of feelings, and also the superfluous feeling itself, and the functing of
the doing or not-dping can do it all. Meanwhile, the accompanying feeling
remains as mysterious and inexplicable as ever.
RL:
"Might this provide a (non-humean) causal role for feeling?"
Only at the cost of
pretending that telekinesis is true after all...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/2974
Reply
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2010-02-12 -- Reply to Jim Stone
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JS: "What
is 'telekinesis'...? simply feelings or qualia having causal powers
to affect the mind/body? [and] 'functing' is the realm of
functional states?"
Yes, and yes. (But it's
certainly not "simply"!)
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/2980
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2010-02-12 -- Reply to David Longinotti
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All the evidence that you
cite is evidence that the functions with which feelings are
(inexplicably) correlated are causal, not that feelings themselves are
causal. Hence the explanatory gap remains unclosed.
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/2983
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2010-02-13 -- Reply to Roger Lindsay
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FEELING BY FIAT, YET AGAIN
I am afraid that you have
simply taken a straightforward dynamical/computational system (such as we
no doubt are) and, by fiat, decreed that some of its functions (the
earlier, "basic" ones) will be unfelt whereas others (the later
"symbolic" ones) will be felt. What you have not explained is
how and why the one will be felt and the other not. You reply only:
RL: "the answer
seems to me to be that if we didnÕt apprehend perceptual and other bodily
events in some way, we couldnÕt reason in a manner that allowed actions
to be based on the results of the reasoning process. Feeling just happens
to be the mode that this apprehension process takes. Why shouldnÕt it? It
seems to work OK?"
I think this is no answer at
all, but simply begs the question (underlying the "explanatory
gap"). Of course our brains need the sensorimotor and somatic data
and interactions, and they need to process those data, both dynamically
and computationally, but you haven't given a hint of why any of that should
be felt, rather than just
functed. Today's (primitive, rudimentary) robots do all the kinds of
things you describe above (both sensorimotor and symbolic), but they do
it without feeling a thing. No doubt somewhere along the Turing scale
that ends with us, feelings have somehow kicked in, but the question
remains: how, and why?
(Neonates, by the way, and
even foetuses, feel; so do simple animals. So you are over-reaching if
you look to close the explanatory gap with some putative service that
feeling performs for reasoning: both sensorimotor transduction and
computation are perfectly feasible without feelings. The trick is to
explain why any of it is ever felt at all.)
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/2987
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2010-02-13 -- Reply to David Longinotti
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ON TALKING AT (EXPLANATORY) CROSS-PURPOSES
DL:
"Nowhere do I claim [to] close... the explanatory gap."
But isn't closing the gap
what we are discussing?
DL: "What
I do claim [is that] feelings can occur when no
cognition is possible at all..."
Who disputes that (whatever
"cognition" may mean)?
DL: "if
feelings were epiphenomenal byproducts of cognitive functions, there is
no reason whatsoever for a pain to be painful."
That's the gap. Now I'm
waiting to hear the reason...
[I never bother talking about
"epiphenomena,' (any more than I bother chasing after the many
variants of "consciousness," "awareness,"
"qualia," "subjectivity," "intentionality,"
"1st personhood," etc. etc.) since "epiphenomenalism"
(like it's ontic opposite, monist materialism) has no substance (whereas
its rival, telekinetic dualism, is simply false).
"Epiphenomenalism" is merely a restatement of the fact that
there is an explanatory gap: we cannot explain why and how some functions
are felt. (The "phenomenon" is feeling.) That's an epistemic
problem, not an ontic one. I am as confident as I am of anything that the
brain causes feelings. The problem is that we cannot explain how, and,
even more important, functionally speaking, we cannot explain why, since
it looks for all the world as if we could be exactly the same clever,
adaptive Darwinian survival machines that we are without ever feeling a
thing.]
DL: "The
best explanation of this correlation [of feeling and function] is that
feelings themselves influence organisms to act in ways that increase
fitness."
Indubitably. The trick is
just explaining, causally, how and why...
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/2988
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2010-02-13 -- Reply to Jim Stone
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TRUE OR FALSE, "EPIPHENOMENALISM" IS
EMPTY:
THE EXPLANATORY GAP IS EPISTEMIC, NOT ONTIC
JS: "Epiphenomenalism
about mental properties isnÕt necessarily false but I think the case
against it is virtually overwhelming"
The only way to make a case
against epiphenomenalism (construed as the innocent plaint that we do not
seem to be able to give a causal explanation of how or why we feel) is to
give a causal explanation of how and why we feel (without resorting to
telekinesis, which is false).
JS: "I
focus on qualia."
I agree with you that
"itÕs silly to argue about words," so allow me, for heuristic
reasons, to substitute in all my quotes from you, below, my preferred,
straightforward anglo-saxon term, "feelings," understood by
all, for the quaint neologism "qualia" favored by some
philosophers. I think it helps forestall certain common forms of question-begging:
JS: "If
[feelings] were black holes in causal space... we wouldnÕt know they
existed."
Translation: If we didn't
feel, we wouldn't feel. Agreed.
(Ontic variant: If there were
no feelings, there would be no feelings. Agreed.)
JS: "Of course we do know [feelings]
exist and it isnÕt a matter of abductive reasoning or inference. We know
that [feelings] exist because we are directly acquainted with
them."
I feel (when I'm feeling)
therefore I feel (when I'm feeling). Agreed. We owe as much to Descartes
("sentio ergo sentitur").
JS:
"Direct acquaintance, on any plausible account, involves causal
powers to affect the mind by the object with which we are so
acquainted"
Agreed. I'm just waiting for
the "plausible account" of how and why.
(I will let the more
equivocal phrase "affect the mind" slip by, though it really
just means that gazing at things makes me feel something, namely, what it
feels like to see them. In other words, it is just the restatement of the
unexplained correlation between functing and feeling. I have no problem
with accepting the fact -- since it's obviously true -- that the cause of
my feeling is something that happens to, and happens in, my brain. But
the explanatory gap is in explaining how
and why that something that happens is a felt something, rather than
just a functed something. The
fact that the felt something does happen is not in dispute. Nor is it
really in doubt that it is the brain that causes what would otherwise
just be optical transduction to become, instead, or in addition, felt
seeing, somehow. The part that
is not only in doubt but certain is that no one explained that
"somehow" -- i.e., how or why the optical transduction is
caused to become felt seeing. Moreover, perhaps going a bit beyond what
is certain, I add that there are good reasons to believe that it is not
even possible to explain it, in the usual causal/functional way that
everything else is explained, without resorting to telekinetic causation, which does not exist. The problem is already
there in trying to explain how the brain causes feeling, and even more
pressingly there in trying to explain how feeling causes doing. There
would be no problem at all if all doing and doing-power remained exactly
what they are, functionally, but there were no feeling, just unfelt
functing.)
JS: "It
seems perfectly evident that [feelings] play a substantial causal role in
our lives."
Feelings certainly play a
substantial felt causal role in
our lives. But I hope you will agree that a felt cause is not necessarily
the same as a real cause.
It is also true that the
(unproblematic) external objects and internal functional states that
appear to be the (unexplained) causes of our feelings (via the brain)
play a substantial causal role in our lives (felt and unfelt).
But it is the causal status
and role of feelings qua feelings -- rather than just as the side-effects
and correlates of unproblematic external objects and internal functional
states -- that is under scrutiny here: How and why are they felt? Not
whether they are felt to be causal (they are). Not even whether they are
caused (they no doubt are, somehow). But how and why they are felt rather
than just functed (to the same functional
effect)?
JS: "on
the face of things the causal role of [feelings] in our lives is is one
of the phenomena an account of the mind ought to preserve."
Indisputably.
But alas, this welcome
account is faced with an awkward explanatory gap..
JS: "If
[feelings] have no causal powers, they couldnÕt have been selected for by
evolution".
So one would think.
So explain to me how the
Blind Watchmaker (a pure functionalist, if there ever was one!) was able
to select the Darwinian survival machines that felt, and reject the ones
that only functed: Was he reading their minds? How? Why? (Evolution is
surely as non-telepahic as it is non-telekinetic...)
Harnad, S. (2002) Turing Indistinguishability and the Blind Watchmaker. In: J. Fetzer (ed.) Evolving Consciousness Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp 3-18.
JS:
"Still [feelings] couldÕve been produced by evolution as a side
effect of physical features that were selected for. But if that were
so... we should expect [feelings] to be a hodgepodge..."
Feelings are reliably and
systematically correlated with some adaptive functions. But it is not
this correlation that is missing; it is its causal explanation.
Apples fall down, not up,
reliably and systematically. Gravitation explains the correlation,
causally. No such luck with feelings (without telekinesis).
JS:
"Obviously what we get instead is... enormously informative about
whatÕs going on in the world."
Data are informative. But the
burden is to explain why and how data should need to be felt, rather than
just functed, in order to be informative. (Information is not a mental
phenomenon; it is just data that reduce uncertainty, as in the input and
processing of an adaptive robot that needs to do things in order to
survive and reproduce. Hence in calling felt data "informative"
we are usually just unwittingly smuggling in, unexplained, the felt
component that we were supposed to be explaining!)
JS: "As
this is what you would expect if [feelings] were selected for, and what
you would not expect if they were not selected for, itÕs probable that
[feelings] were selected for. So they probably have causal powers."
Probably indeed. (But we are
not talking about their probability of being causal, but the probability
of explaining their causality!)
So the only thing that's left
to do is to explain how and why feelings were selected for (and
distinguished from unfelt functings): What was the functional advantage
of felt functing over unfelt functing?
(You will notice that every
functional advantage you name will come in two varieties, one felt and
one unfelt. And you will never be able to say why the felt one was more
adaptive than the unfelt one. And the reason you will be unable to do it
is also clear. Because, without telekinesis, there is no purely
functional advantage of a felt function over the very same function,
minus the feeling.)
JS: "This
isnÕt meant to be a mathematical proof, but I take the causal efficacy of
[feelings] to be as certain as anything there is in the philosophy of
mind."
The felt (i.e., subjective) causal efficacy of feelings, and
their close correlation with objective functional efficacy is undisputed
within and without philosophy of mind. What is in dispute is the efficacy
of attempts to explain how and why we feel rather than just funct.
JS:
"Certainly if an account of the mind entails epiphenomenalism,
that is a pretty good reason to reject it."
True or false,
"epiphenomenalism" is empty, explanatorily. The
"explanatory gap" is epistemic, not ontic: How and why do we
feel rather than just funct?
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/2989
Reply
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2010-02-13 -- Reply
to Jim Stone
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PROPERTY DUALISM FOR RENT:
VACANCY IS IN CAUSAL EXPLANATION, NOT IN ONTIC
SPECULATION OR BELIEF
I've eschewed the various
ontic isms on offer
(physicalism, mentalism, dualism, eliminativism, monism, materialism,
aspectism etc. etc.) for the very same reason I've eschewed all the
variants of the consciousness on offer (awareness, subjectivity, qualia,
1st-personhood, intentionality, mentality etc. etc.).
In pointing out that there is
indeed an explanatory gap, I am referring to one (missing) thing only,
but I think that one missing thing is what underlies all that other
stuff. What is missing is not metaphysical conjectures or beliefs about
how one might square the "mental" with the
"physical." What is missing is a causal explanation of how and
why we feel.
For all I know (or care),
there may indeed only be the "physical" (I rather think that's
quite true, actually) and the brain causes feelings (I rather think
that's quite true too), somehow,
but what I want to know is how and
why. For on the face of it, there's neither the causal need nor the
causal room for feelings. In the organic subset of the world, all we need
is intelligent, Darwin/Turing-scale -- but feelingless -- function, in
order to generate all Darwin/Turing doings (all functional). The
candidates for that are dynamics and computation (including semantically
interpretable computation, such as natural language).
So the feelings remain
unexplained (and apparently unnecessary) danglers. That's the explanatory
gap.
Jim Stone points out that
feelings probably appeared at some point in cosmological time, probably
somewhere at or near the beginning of biological time. No doubt. He also
suggests that feelings must somehow be caused by brain function. No
doubt.
Jim also suggests that
feelings are "emergent," in the way liquidity is emergent. But
there is a perfectly satisfying account of phase transitions
(solid/liquid/gas) and no one had ever suggested there was some sort of
liquid/solid problem or explanatory gap in explaining liquidity.
But we do not have an
explanation of how or why some biological functions are felt functions.
And Jim's analogy with phase transitions (along a "complexity"
continuum?) is not such an explanation either.
Nor was there anything about
liquidity that suggested it would turn out to be special, among physical
properties, and hence harder or impossible to explain. Some did
suggest that sort of thing about the property of being alive, but they
turned out to be wrong. The property of being alive is now well
explained, and, in retrospect, there was never any real reason to have
expected that it would turn out to be something incommensurable with
other physical properties.
With feeling, unlike with
liquidity and life, there is no explanation. And, worse, there are strong
reasons to think that not only is feeling causally superfluous for
organisms' cognitive and behavioral function, but that feeling could not
play an independent causal role unless there existed an extra elementary
force, rather like gravitation or electromagnetism, to allow doings to be
caused by feelings, rather than just by the functions correlated with (and
perhaps mysteriously causing) feelings -- because there is no elementary
"telekinetic" force.
So I'm perfectly willing to believe in the kind of
"causal closure" Jim describes. But I'd sure rather hear it
explained how and why it works...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/2991
Reply
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2010-02-14 -- Reply to Jim Stone
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"QUALIA" = FEELINGS;
"EPIPHENOMENAL" = CAUSALLY INEXPLICABLE
Three misunderstandings
(which may also be disagreements) underlie the exchange with Jim Stone.
The most important one concerns the concept and term "qualia,"
which I would reject as vague and equivocal, replacing it by
"feelings." Jim thinks it is "feelings" that are
equivocal:
JS: "The
word Ôfeeling Ôis ambiguous. It can denote a feel, a pain, a tickle, a
taste, but it can also denote the awareness of a feel."
That is precisely the virtue
of using "feeling" to talk about what we are talking about,
namely, "feeling." It is both redundant and misleading to
distinguish feeling something, say, an itch, from "being aware"
that you feel something, say, an itch. It is for the very same reason
that I jettison talk of "awareness": it is all covered by
"feeling".
If I feel an itch, I feel an
itch. (I only have an itch if I feel an itch. I may have a mosquito bite,
but if I don't feel an itch, I don't have an itch. And even if I feel
something vague on my arm, and then
feel that I have an itch, it does not mean I was feeling an itch when I
was feeling nothing, or when I was only feeling something vague on my
arm; I felt an itch when I felt an itch.
There may well be a feeling
difference between the feeling I am feeling when I am feeling an itch and
the feeling I am feeling when I am feeling an itch and I am thinking about or focusing attention on the fact
that I am feeling an itch: It feels different to be just feeling an itch
and to be feeling and to be thinking of feeling the itch.
Some people seem to think
profound differences ride on this 2nd-order feeling, and they may or may
not be right. But for my purposes -- and for the purposes of specifying
exactly what explanation-failure it is that constitutes the
"explanatory gap," the distinction between 1st-order and
2nd-order feeling is irrelevant. The explanatory gap is our inability to
explain how and why we feel anything
at all -- regardless of whether the feeling is "1st-order"
or "2nd-order."
Not only does this block
divide-and-conquer fantasies that some have had (thinking they can make
some inroads on explaining "consciousness" by addressing
free-floating 2nd-orderhood without first accounting for feeling), but,
most important, it points out the absurdity of the notion of having
"unfelt feelings" (in any other than the trivial sense that I
have an unfelt feeling of X if I do not feel X!).
Jim, unfortunately, seems to
welcome the notion of having an "unfelt feeling" in the sense
of actually feeling X but being "unaware" that you are feeling
X. Other than in the trivial sense of the extra attentional focus of
2nd-orderhood, it makes no sense that I am feeling X but not feeling that
I am feeling X. That is simply a contradiction.
JS:
"sometimes Ôfeeling Ôdenotes what we feel, sometimes it denotes the
feeling of it. In fact, there are unfelt feels– as in the case of
the driver in a reverie who has all sorts of color sensations at red and
green lights that she isnÕt aware of."
If the driver is not feeling
what it feels like to be seeing red, than the driver is simply not
feeling it. It is an error to imagine that because the driver stops at
the red light, it means that the driver is feeling what it feels like to
be seeing red. The driver's brain may be merely responding to the red
optic input, without generating the feeling of seeing red. Either the driver
is feeling that feeling, or not feeling it. One or the other.
[It is, by the way, the
problem of explaining how and why the brain generates the feeling of
(say) seeing red that is at the root of the mind/body -- feeling/function
-- problem and the explanatory gap. The "how" pertains to how
the brain causes feeling, when there is indeed feeling (being felt!), and
the "why" pertains to what independent causal power feeling
itself might have, qua feeling, for example, to cause doing -- as opposed
to doing's being caused by the unfelt causes
of the feeling, rather than by the feeling qua feeling. (This is where
telekinesis would have come in handy, to confirm our feelings about
volition, i.e., the feeling I have that some of the things I do I do
because I feel like it, and not because of some unfelt cerebral cause
that is making me do it, or making me feel like doing it -- if only
telekinesis were true.]
JS:
"ÔQualiaÕ has the advantage that it doesnÕt invite a fallacy of
equivocation, namely, there canÕt be unfelt feels (thatÕs a semantic
contradiction!), so all there is to knowing that we feel is having a
feeling. Best not to commit that fallacy."
We do indeed have a
contradiction here (though I'm not sure it's just a semantic one!) for I
am arguing the precise opposite. It is "qualia" and the notion
that "feels" (what are those?) can be "had" without
being felt -- that constitute the equivocation, and indeed (by my lights)
one of the obfuscations that keep us thinking so extraordinarily fuzzily
about the true nature of the explanatory gap that underlies the mind/body
problem.
It is not a problem that is
solved by metaphysical speculation. The problem is one of garden-variety
causal explanation, which does not seem to be forthcoming in the very
special -- indeed unique -- case of explaining how and why organisms feel
rather than just funct.
JS: "I
use the word ÔepiphenomenalismÕ to denote the claim that Qualia have no
causal powers. They are a mere side effect of what makes the body
move."
And -- apart from rejecting
the unnecessary and misleading term-of-art "qualia" -- I simply
point out that it is our inability to explain how and why we feel that
impels others (not me!) to conclude (emptily, by my lights) that feelings
are therefore "epiphenomenal."
I think what can be and needs
to be said about feelings is already said in our admitting that we cannot
explain causally how and why we feel, rather than just funct (i.e.,
admitting that there exists an explanatory gap specific to the causal
explanation of feeling). That already makes it clear that the causal
status of feeling is moot.
I further argue -- though
this is a separate matter, I admit -- that the explanatory gap not only
exists, but that it cannot be closed (i.e., we wait in vain for closure
along the lines we have had it for the causal explanation of liquidity or
of life). The basis of this argument is the fact that a functional
explanation is always sufficient to explain what we can do (it just can't
explain the fact that we feel); hence every attempt to assign a
causal/functional role to feeling is doomed to fail for the very reason
that it is causal/functional, hence can be used to "demote" its
own explanation of the putative functional role of feeling, reducing it
to the very same functional role, but unfelt.
And of course underlying all
this is the fact that what we would really want, in order to explain
feelings in a way that squares with our intuitions (i.e., 2nd order
feelings!) about feelings, namely, telekinetic power, is simply false,
hence a nonstarter.
JS: "If I
understand you, you are using the word [epiphenomenalism] to denote the
position that we cannot give a causal mechanistic explanation of how
Qualia arise in the first place. ThatÕs a different position than the one
that is usually denoted by the word Ôepiphenomenalism.Õ As I pointed out
in my second post, the explanatory gap simply does not entail
epiphenomenalism, as the term is usually used."
It is quite likely that I do
not understand or use either "qualia" or "epiphenomenalism"
in the standard way -- which is why I do not use them at all: It was you
who introduced both terms into our discussion. I was just talking about
feelings and the explanatory gap in explaining feelings causally. I
substituted "feelings" for "qualia" in everything you
said, because that is the only coherent gloss I can find for the word,
unless I resign myself to inheriting its equivocation (on such things as
"unfelt feels" and 2nd-orderisms).
For
"epiphenomenalism," a metaphysical position on which I have no
opinion, I prefer to substitute the acknowledgement of the explanatory
gap, which is merely an epistemological position, about the (absence of)
power of ordinary causal/functional explanation to explain how and why we
feel rather than just funct.
I agree that there are two
distinguishable components of the explanatory gap: (1) explaining how and
why the brain generates feelings and (2) explaining whether, how, and why
feelings, in turn, have causal power, apart from their unfelt brain
causes. But, frankly, I rather suspect that these two components are
pretty much of a muchness (i.e., two sides of the same bankrupt
explanatory coin!).
JS: "The
way one argues against epiphenomenalism is by giving arguments that
Qualia do indeed have causal powers. I gave three arguments..."
But as I replied (translating
into the language of feelings), you have simply noted that the (unknown)
causes of feeling are correlated with functings. (An apple, gazed at by
me, somehow causes me not only to recognize it as an apple, reach for it,
eat it -- all just functing -- but all that is also accompanied by the
feeling that I am seeing red (etc.). That's dead-right, but it does not
explain how or why the apple causes (my brain, which causes) me not only
to recognize, reach for and eat the apple (all causally unproblematic and
fully explicable) but also to feel that I am seeing red (etc.).
The tight correlation between
gazing at the apple and my feeling is just that, a mysterious tight
correlation (absent a causal explanation) -- and that is all there is to
"epiphenomenalism," as far as I can make out.
JS: "IÕm
saying something else. ItÕs this argument:"1. If Qualia had no
causal powers, we wouldnÕt know they exist."2. We do know Qualia
exist, indeed, we are directly acquainted with them."Therefore 3.
Qualia have causal powers."
I think this can be well
summarized by saying that if we didn't feel, we wouldn't feel (and there
would be no explanatory gap). But we do feel, and the feeling is tightly
correlated with certain functions. How and why that correlation is causal
is not only unknown, but there are reasons to believe it is unknowable.
(Hence the explanatory gap is epistemic.)
JS: "1.
We know we have Qualia by being directly acquainted with them..."2.
Direct acquaintance... requires that the object with which we are
acquainted is not wholly devoid of causal powers. "Therefore 3.
Qualia have causal powers."
This sounds like a rather
more hirsute version of the first argument (since I am not, of course,
denying that we feel!):
We feel because we feel.
Feeling must be caused. So feelings are caused. (Trouble is, we have no
idea how or why.)
(There is a bit of a
conflation here, between the distal "object" (e.g., an apple)
that (mysteriously) causes (the brain to cause) the feeling and the
feeling itself (i.e., the proximal "object"), in which it is
cartesianly transparent that I am feeling that I'm feeling. The
conflation is made more evident if the example is not an apple
"causing" me to feel that I am seeing red, but simply my
feeling melancholy: what is the "object" with which I am
directly acquainted when I am feeling melancholy, that must therefore
have "causal power"?)
JS:
"If... you want me to agree to...the possibility that
Epiphenomenalism is true.. I do agree. [It] is extraordinarily
implausible for the reasons IÕm giving [but not] inconceivable."
I'll settle for your agreeing
that how and why we feel may not only be unexplained, but it may be
inexplicable (for the reasons I am giving)...
JS:
"Evolution can select only for what affects behavior. What has no
causal powers cannot affect behavior."
Correct. But what is
(inexplicably) correlated with (adaptive) behavior can be selected for.
JS: "If
Qualia have no causal power to effect behavior, they couldnÕt have been
selected for by evolution. They are a mere side effect of other states
that have been so selected."
Correct.
JS: "If
Qualia are a mere side effect of other advantageous states that do not
owe their advantages in anyway to the associated Qualia, then any Qualia
would do, and one would expect a hodgepodge of Qualia, gaping holes, vast
and sudden jumps, an irrational and inconsistent system."
No, this does not follow, if
the (mysterious) correlation of feelings with function was tight (and it
is).
[By the way, there is a
"qualitative" sense in which the feelings systematically
correlated with function are indeed arbitrary (philosophers have
sometimes called this "incommensurability"): Feelings do not
really "resemble" their objects, even though they (of course)
feel-like they do. It feels like something to hear a tone get louder, and
it feels like something else to hear a tone get softer. The
psychophysical correlation is tight -- right down to a JND-sized
increment in intensity, as experiments show. But does what
"louder" feels-like really "resemble" an increase in
acoustic intensity? or would any felt correlate do just as well, as long
as the correlation was systematic, functionally? After all, the feeling
need not really resemble intensity; it need merely feel-like intensity,
and be systematically correlated with the right doings. -- This is all just another aspect of the explanatory
gap.]
JS: "We
instead have a graded, consistent, fine-grained etc. system of
Qualia. "ItÕs improbable that Qualia are a mere side effect of
other advantageous states. "Probably they were selected for by
evolution. "Therefore...Qualia probably have causal powers to
affect behavior."
If only we could explain how
and why...
JS: "there
are some non-silly arguments on the table that [feelings] do have causal
powers"
So far I've only seen
non-silly arguments for the tight correlation between feeling and
function, but not even a silly scenario for a causal explanation (which
is what the gap is about) -- apart from telekinesis (which is false) and
"reasons" as causes, which is question-begging -- about how/why
the reasons are themselves felt rather than just functed.
JS: "once
we take seriously the possibility that Qualia make a causal difference,
your hard distinction between functing and feeling becomes question
begging too, because nothing prevents Qualia from being causal inputs to
functional states which, individuated in part by their inputs, would
require Qualia."
To repeat, all we have is a
mysterious correlation between functing and feeling, and that is the
explanandum. Slipping feeling into the explanans on the grounds of the
mysterious correlation alone is indeed question-begging.
JS: "you
seem to be running together the explanatory gap and epiphenomenalism. This
is bound to confuse."
The explanatory gap is the
epistemic problem. "Epiphenomenalism" is one of the (several)
vacuous metaphysical speculations that is offered in place of a
solution.
JS:
"Whether Qualia have causal powers is the question at issue in the
post to which you are responding."
And the answer has to be to
explain those causal powers, not just to point out the (uncontested)
correlations.
JS: "My
whole point is that epiphenomenalism is almost certainly mistaken, so
that a reasonable constraint on theories of the mind is that they do not
entail it."
But you're the one who
brought up epiphenomenalism. I was just pointing out that we cannot
explain how or why feelings are caused, nor how or why they in turn have
any independent causal power (if they do). That's the explanatory gap.
Epiphenomenalism is just one of several metaphysical speculations that do
not add anything of substance either way.
JS: "if
Qualia do have causal powers, as I think is highly plausible, I expect
the way is open to assign Qualia a role in our functional economy, both
as inputs and outputs of functional states."
All that's needed is to close
the explanatory gap...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3002
Reply
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2010-02-14 -- Reply to Jason Streitfeld
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JS: "If
you pinch me under local anesthetic and I tell you it does not hurt,
would you say that in fact there was a pain there, but that I just could
not perceive it?"
Of course not. I would say
that (1) you felt no pain. (I've been struggling with others who seem
inclined to countenance "unfelt feeling" in this Forum!)
But (2) perhaps there was
some unfelt nociceptive function going on anyway, not affected by the
pain suppression, so some part of your somatosensory system may still
have had some response to the pinch. (The big question is why all
biobehavioral function is not unfelt function, like that.)
And in addition, of course,
since you were awake and saw the pinching, (3) you did feel something when you were pinched:
it just wasn't somatosensory and it wasn't pain.
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3004
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2010-02-14 -- Reply to Arnold Trehub
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If someone figured out a way
to decode brain imagery so they could read my mind and predict my behavior,
even if the decoding was based on theory, I would not say he had given a
causal explanation of how and why my brain causes feelings. Ditto if he
did it biomolecularly. There's still the explanatory gap there.
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3005
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2010-02-14 -- Reply to Jonathan C.W. Edwards
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JCWE:
"If there is correlation then one can reasonably expect
correspondence in degrees of freedom."
There is a systematic
correlation between feeling and functing. The gap is in giving a causal
explanation of that correlation.
JCWE: "you
want to explain some 'sudden emergence of feeling'"
Yes, feeling is either all or
none. You may feel this or that. You may feel it faintly or
intermittently. But you are either feeling or not feeling (at time T).
JCWE: "no
complexity based ad hoc posit."
I thought you had invoked the
complexity continuum (as some do) to explain the onset of feeling. I now
understand that you are making the other (in my view) mistake, which is
to invoke the complexity continuum as being in some way commensurate with
a feeling continuum. There may be a complexity continuum correlated with what you feel (more or less), but
not with whether you feel,
which is all or none. (Sorry for the misinterpretation.)
JCWE: "the
idea of dynamics without feelings"
The universe is full of
dynamics without feelings. The sentience in the biosphere is the
anomalous special case.
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3006
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2010-02-14 -- Reply to Luke Culpitt
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The "how" question
refers to both how the brain generated feeling and how feeling generates
doing. The "why" question is a functional/adaptive question
(not a teleological one): What is the adaptive function of felt function,
over and above the adaptive function of the function itself, minus the
feeling. You are right that this is another form of "how"
question, but that doesn't help...
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3007
Reply
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2010-02-15 -- Reply to Luke Culpitt
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The "how" question
refers to both how the brain generates feeling and how feeling generates
doing. The "why" question is a functional/adaptive question
(not a teleological one): What is the adaptive function of felt function,
over and above the adaptive function of the function itself, minus the
feeling? You are right that this is another form of "how"
question, but that doesn't help. Feeling seems doomed to be functionally
superfluous -- supererogatory -- in a non-telekinetic world...
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3014
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2010-02-15 -- Reply to David Longinotti
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DL: "By
functionally superfluous, I presume you mean that feelings have no
influence on behavior."
No, I mean we cannot explain
their influence, if any, on behavior. All we have is the correlation, not
the causal explanation. And our functional explanation of all doings is
not only complete without feelings, but there is no room for feelings in
it, and every attempt to include feelings in it is either
question-begging or supererogatory.
DL: "But
if this is so, what is the biological function of the analgesics
that the body generally releases when a human is seriously injured in an
emergency situation, if it is not to suppress what would otherwise
be a distraction, namely, the pain of the injury? Do you
think that a distraction is functionally superfluous, or that pains
are not distracting?"
But David, you are now asking
me to provide that very causal explanation that I am claiming no one has
given (and no one can give)! All we have is the inexplicable correlation
between the feeling and the functing, not the causal account of the role
of the feeling.
DL: "You
apparently draw a difference between "functionally
superfluous" and "epiphenomenal." What is that
difference?"
"Functionally
superfluous" means you can can give a full functional account of all
the doing (and doing power) without the feeling. So the feeling is
functionally superfluous (though it is undeniably there, and closely
correlated with the doing and the doing-power).
"Epiphenomenalism"
is a label for an ontic state of affairs in which feelings are acausal
because of the kind of thing they are (rather than, say, because of the
nature and limitations of causal/functional explanation), just as
"physicalism" is a label for an ontic state of affairs in which
feelings are causal because of the kind of thing they are.
I don't think I take any particular
ontic position. I think the explanatory gap is an epistemic one, and
reflects a limitation of causal/functional explanation in the special,
indeed unique, case of feeling.
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3016
Reply
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2010-02-15 -- Reply to Jim Stone
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JS: "we
don't have enough in common methodologically to talk fruitfully about
this. Too bad. I think there are some very interesting issues
here. Such are message boards."
I'm sorry to hear that --
especially because whereas I have little hope for the power of causal
explanation to explain how or why we feel, I do have high hopes for the power of message boards (and of quote/commentary in particular!) to explain and clarify...
JS: "I
prefer that you not rewrite my quotations."
Where I did compress them, I
thought I was doing so without distorting their meaning. If I did distort
their meaning, I apologize (but that too can be remedied by
quote/commentary!).
Thanks for the skywriting exchange,
Stevan
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3017
Reply
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2010-02-15 -- Reply to David Longinotti
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CORRELATION, CAUSATION AND CONFABULATION
DL: "you
say you take no 'ontic' position... But... an explanation is, presumably,
ontic...[so] the assertion that one can provide a complete account of doings
without including feelings amounts to epiphenomenalism..."
Perhaps an example will make
it clearer what I am and am not asserting. Let's use the old chesnut,
pain:
Yes, I am asserting that one
can (in principle) give a full causal explanation of how and why an
organism (or robot) responds to injury, how it learns to avoid it, etc.,
without making any reference to (or use of) the fact that it is
systematically correlated with feeling something (i.e., it hurts).
Indeed, that's the only kind of
explanation one can give. (That's the explanatory gap.)
The "nociceptive"
mechanism that this explanation (whether neural or robotic) provides, and
fully explains, functionally, is certainly "ontic," in the
sense that the theorist asserts that it exists and is sufficient to
generate the function (and, if the theorist is right, then it really does
exist and really is sufficient to generate the function).
But it is not
"ontic" on the subject of feeling, because feeling does not
enter into or play any causal role in the mechanism (except if it is
projected onto it, hermeneutically, by the (over)-interpreter of the
theory).
The only ontic thing I say
about feelings is that they exist, that they are closely correlated with
some functions, and that they feel
causal.
(1) Physicalism would further
say that feelings are physical, (2) Dualism that they are not, (3)
Telekinesis that feelings have independent causal power, and (4)
Epiphenomenalism that they do not. (The various other aspectual/property
speculations are just massaging more of the same.)
I find none of these ontic
isms helpful or relevant. All I want to say is that functional
explanation not only does not need feelings, but it does not even have
room for them (except if telekinesis is true, but it is not).
DL: "you
[also say] there is no telekinesis... [b]ut this is an 'ontic'
argument for epiphenomenalism..."
I prefer to say the
nonexistence of telekinesis is a trivial empirical conclusion from the
fact that there exists absolutely no evidence for the existence of
telekinesis and overwhelming evidence that it does not. (It is equally
"ontic" to say there is no tooth fairy, and an infinity of
other denials of arbitrary ontic affirmations.)
But you are quite right: in
this very banal sense, to reject telekinesis is indeed ontic.
DL: "one
can have evidence THAT something is causal (ontic aspect), without
being able to explain HOW something is causal (epistemological
aspect)..."
But do we really have
evidence that feelings, qua
feelings, are causal, rather than merely that they are systematically correlated (inexplicably) with
functing, which is indeed causal (and self-sufficiently causal)? (This is
the one practical place where a little Humean scepticism about causality,
as opposed to mere correlation, may be in order!)
Moreover, the functing with
which feelings are (inexplicably) correlated seems to do just as well,
causally, without being felt. Indeed explaining why and how the
correlated functing is also felt is the problem we're calling the
explanatory gap.
So, no, I would say that
granting feelings causality on the evidence available, without being able
to characterize that causality more deeply than mere feeling/functing
correlation (and with prima facie reasons to believe that the causality
cannot be characterized more deeply), would be to beg the question, and
to substitute nondemonstrative faith for explanation, just as it is when
we embrace one of the ontic isms on offer as if it settled anything one
way or the other.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3030
Reply
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2010-02-16 -- Reply to Roger Lindsay
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TELEPATHY: GOOD ENOUGH FOR GOVERNMENT WORK
(BUT TELEKINESIS IS A NONSTARTER)
RL: "Presumably
whatever methodology provides the basis for your pronouncement
[that ÒNeonates, by the way, and even foetuses, feel; so do simple
animals"] can also be used to finally lay to rest the tiresome
issue of whether Other Minds exist..."
I know you meant this
ironically, but it does raise some interesting questions:
First of all, of course, in
stating the obvious, I did not mean that I'd solved the
"other-minds" problem (of determining whether anyone or
anything other than myself feels -- the flip side of the mind/body
problem, with its explanatory gap). For present purposes (neurobiologists
confidently guesstimating which mammals feel) there's no need (it's a
safe bet that all mammals feel).
(Over and above behavior and
physiology itself, a "sentiometer" -- had such a thing been
possible, which of course it is not -- would come in handy when it comes
to lower invertebrates and even simpler organisms, but there I plead nolo
contendere. And of course sentiometry would be essential with robots --
but I won't start worrying
about whether it's alright to kick or eat robots
till they're a lot closer to Turing-scale functional capacity.)
The other-minds problem is
important for two kinds of thinker. (1) The kind who (like Descartes and
Hume) is concerned with rigorously distinguishing what we can know for
sure from what we can only know with probability. (About mathematical
knowledge and the cogito [sentio ergo sentitur] we can be sure; about scientific knowledge and
other minds we can only settle for probability.) (2) The cognitive
scientists and neuroscientists who are trying to discover the correlates
and mechanisms of feelings are of course not in the "sure" camp
but the "probable" camp (i.e., they have not solved the
other-minds problem and are incapable of telepathy); for them it is
already probable enough that others -- including children, foetuses as of
a certain embryological stage, and animals -- do feel.
But the interesting problem
you hint at is whether the insolubility of the other-minds problem is of
the same "order" as the insolubility of the mind/body
problem:
Could the fact that we cannot
explain how or why organisms feel (the explanatory gap) be no more nor
less of a problem than the fact that we cannot tell whether or not
organisms (other than oneself) can feel (the other-minds problem) --
especially since I have been insisting that the explanatory gap is epistemic
rather than ontic?
I would reply no, for two
reasons: first, because, logic, evidence, sense, common sense and
probability are all with us with mammalian mind-reading (and
Turing-testing), whereas we draw a complete logical, empirical and
conceptual blank when it comes to inferring a non-telekinetic function
for feeling.
But, more important, the two
problems (the other-minds problem and the explanatory gap) are connected.
It is precisely because telekinesis is false that the causal status of
the mental (i.e., feeling) is the conundrum that it is. Given our
cartesian certainty that feeling does indeed exist (in at least one's own
case), it's then just ordinary empirical risk to infer that it's there in
others that are exactly, or almost exactly like us. Telepathy is not
infallible, but it's "good enough for government work."
Telekinesis, in contrast, is a nonstarter, DOA...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3036
Reply
|
2010-02-18 -- Reply to Roger Lindsay
|
GROUNDED PHILOSOPHICAL SCEPTICISM
OR
HOW AND WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?
RL: "Suppose
you refute idealism by kicking a rock."
There is ontic idealism ("there is no outside world"), which
is of course bonkers and needs no "refutation." And there is epistemic idealism ("you
cannot be sure in the case of science and the outside world, in the way
you can be sure about maths and the cogito") and the latter is
sound, and not refuted by kicking rocks. (You could also call this Òweak
skepticism.Ó)
RL: "The
pain in your toe... results from a neural transmission
sequence"
That's almost certainly true,
like all scientific facts. But the causal mechanism seems straightforward
for the transmission of the data about the distal injury, yet a bit bleary about how and why that feels like something. It does. And
no doubt the nerves must be doing it. But how, and especially why
(functionally speaking, since the transmission of the injury, and the
resulting cortical processing, to compensate and try to avoid in future,
seems all that's needed, functionally)?
RL: "I take...
a look, and explain that... we are arriving at a T-junction"
Your words transmit
information too. No problem, functionally. But why/how does it feel like something to hear and
understand them?
RL: "IÕm
not trying to explain why we feel feelings, IÕm trying to explain why
someone might think that feelings donÕt have causal consequences when
they (clearly) do."
Oh, but I think the tendency
is more to think feelings do
have causal consequences (we are all closet telekineticists, of course),
whereas the problem is explaining
how and why they do. The gap is not a phenomenological one (nor,
particularly, an ontic one) but an epistemic, i.e. an explanatory one.
RL: "In
reducing all mental events to ÒfeelingsÓ you restrict analysis to an
ontological monoculture... But they arenÕt – people experience and
report wants, and needs, and goals, and plans, and choices..."
You are recommending that we
continue to be distracted with what
we feel, whereas I am quite deliberately insisting on the need to explain
that we feel: How and why are
all those wants, needs, goals, plans
and choices felt wants,
needs (etc.), rather than just functed
wants (etc.), which is all that seem to be called for, functionally, and
all that we seem to be able to account for, functionally? It's not about
any particular feeling; it's about the fact that any of it is felt at
all.
RL:
"Once some of these mental events and operations are acknowledged,
then I can say for example that I choose to carry out the actions
required to illegally download music from file-sharing sites because I
like listening to music but I donÕt like buying CDs because most of my
money goes to media moguls."
You sure can. And you always
could. But explaining it
functionally -- rather than folk-lorically -- is the challenge for
cognitive science.
RL: "You
seem to say that think in saying this IÕve shifted from acceptable
science to fairy stories. But this is wrong. Anything that provides
explanatory leverage in explaining the experienced world is a legitimate
part of science. A science that is restricted to functs, such as
neurochemical events or behavioural contingencies, gets nowhere in
explaining why people touch their noses or download
music."
I am not particularly
scientistic and don't invoke "science" as if it were some sort
of mystical, esoteric practice. I think science is just systematic common sense, answerable to evidence.
But I think evidence-based
common sense agrees that answering the question "Why did the chicken
cross the road?" with anything like "Because she felt like
it," though it is quite true, and quite comprehensible, is not very
explanatory. Not even if you say "because she was hungry and wanted
to eat and did a calculation according to which the highest probability
of encountering food was on the other side of the road -- and the
calculation was true, and the chicken believed it, and so she acted upon
it."
I want to know, functionally,
what it takes to design a chicken that is functionally capable of all
that -- and how and why she needs to feel any of it, rather than just
functing it.
RL:
"such behaviour can be readily understood and even predicted if you
ask people about their plans and the reasons they make the choices they
do..."
It sure can. But prediction
isn't explanation.
RL: "By
the time youÕve explained my behaviour by mapping chemical gradients and
states of individual neurones, I will have been dead for
centuries."
Perhaps, but what you
describe (by way of quotidial interpersonal prediction and explanation)
we could have been (and have been) doing ever since the advent of
language. It's certainly adaptive to be able to do that, but not much
more explanatory than predicting that apples will fall. (I say "not
much," rather than "not at all" because the verbal
mind-reading that language allows is of course highly adaptive,
predictive and functional. What's a mystery is how and why any of that
verbalization is felt rather
than just verbalized (i.e., functed).
RL:
"Evolution no doubt came up with symbolic control, because humean
causality is just too fine-grain and slow for complex
systems."
(I don't understand your
oft-repeated "humean causality": I only know of one kind of
causality...)
And I'm all for the
functional advantages of "symbolic control." My question is about why that very useful
symbolicity is felt. (And I am
quite relaxed about inferring that our pre-symbolic infants and foetuses
-- and our non-symbolic cousins -- feel too.)
RL: "IÕm
not offering an explanation of consciousness, but I think that much of
our conscious experience is a consequence of awareness not just of
feelings, goals and actions, but also of symbolic representations of
feelings, goals and actions etc."
Whereas the explanatory gap
is precisely about explaining all that -- and that's what I've been
talking about all along, simple substituting "feeling: "and
"felt" for every mention of its polymorphically promiscuous
(and often redundant) synonyms. Here's a transcription of what you just
said:
"IÕm not offering an explanation of
feeling, but I think that much of our felt feeling is a consequence of
feeling not just of feelings, felt goals and felt actions, but also of
felt symbolic representations of feelings, goals and actions etc."
Well, yes, and I just thought
it would be quite nice if we could explain how and why they are felt...
RL: "You
say, robots can do this kind of representation&so they can to some
extent, but robots are inorganic, and maybe feelings are, as John Searle
would say, just basic properties of irritable organic
materials."
Maybe, but (as I've had
occasion to say to John Searle too!) it would be nice to know how and why irritable organic
materials feel, rather than just funct.
RL:
"Then again, robots work with externally assigned symbol
interpretations – maybe self-programming automata like humans need
a few extra loops in the mechanism."
As I hinted earlier, I've
given a bit of thought to this problem of grounding symbols myself, but it's just a functional problem, not one
afflicted by any explanatory gap.
And although I think the
solution is in sensorimotor categorization capacity rather than in
internal "loops, "I would be quite keen to find out how and why
those inner loops, if any, would be felt loops, rather than just functed
loops... (Grounded symbols, by the way, do not thereby become felt
symbols: that's another step -- but mind the gap!)
RL:
"havenÕt you been all along using ÒfeelingsÓ to include awareness of
feelings?"
Yes, proudly I have, since
"awareness of feelings "is merely a polymorphic way of saying
the (equally redundant) "feeling of feelings."
Let me say it in the most
direct way I can: Consciousness is
feeling. (The rest is just about the particular content of consciousness
-- feeling this vs. feeling that.) And the explanatory gap occurs in
trying to explain how and why we are conscious -- i.e., how and why we
feel, rather than just do.
RL:
"where has your hitherto rigorous scepticism gone?"
My scepticism is only about
explaining feeling, not about the fact that we feel. And about babies and
animals, ditto. I am no more sceptical about them feeling than I am about
apples falling. There's the Humean uncertainty, but that's just the
"gap" between necessary truth, provably true on pain of
contradiction, and contingent truth, probably true on the basis of the
evidence. All evidence suggests that, like me (and you), babies (and
other mammals) feel pain if you pinch them.
RL:
"There is no deductive proof, and at most zero evidence that
neonates and non-human animals feel."
I'm afraid have to disagree,
quite strongly. There is an abundance of evidence that babies and animals
feel. Similarity of behavior, similarity of nervous function, etc. They
don't talk, but, frankly, if you can't see the obvious in the behavior
then I don't see why you take their word for it either, when people say
something hurts! After all, the only case you know for sure is your
own...
RL: "Of
course [human babies and other mammals] react to stimuli, but so do
earthworms and bacteria."
I suspect that earthworms
might feel too; on bacteria I have no intuition at all.
But please remember that the
explanatory gap is about explaining how and why all organisms don't just funct, rather than feel. You seem to
glimpse the light of an answer in the fact that it has something to do
with talking and reasoning, but you certainly don't say how or why. And
feeling would be a lonely function in the world if it were true that the
only ones that feel are the ones that can talk! (On the face of it, the
only thing that distinguishes the ones that can talk from the ones that
can't is the fact that they can talk! Lots of functional advantages come with that territory
(language), but feeling is not one of them, at least not on the basis of
anything that you have said so far.)
RL: "IÕm
not just offering straight-bat philosophical scepticism here."
I think most people, rightly
sceptical about the possibility of zombies, would resist the idea that
they are in fact quite surrounded by zombies, starting with their own
babies. (I doubt, too, that this is what philosophical scepticism means,
or entails.)
RL: "you
often seem to optimistically point in the direction of Turing tests as a
criterion for demonstrating that machines have feelings. But can a Turing
Test demonstrate anything more than Philosophical Zombiehood?"
I would find it just as
difficult (and almost as silly) to believe that a Turing-scale robot --
indistinguishable from any of the rest of us in everything it is able to do (lifelong) -- does not
also (inexplicably) feel as I would find it difficult to believe that any
of the rest of us (apart from me) -- who are likewise able to do
everything that we are able to do (lifelong) -- do not
(inexplicably) feel (though of course I would know that I could be wrong
in both cases, and that in the case of humans, biology makes it a bit
more improbable -- but just a bit, really).
Now that's what I would call grounded philosophical
scepticism...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3046
Reply
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2010-02-19 -- Reply to Roger Lindsay
|
ANIMALS AND BABIES ARE NOT ZOMBIES
(NOR, PROBABLY, ARE TURING-SCALE ROBOTS)
BUT HOW, AND WHY?
RL: "I
would have made a very poor missionary."
But, Roger, surely all we're
trying to do is inform (one another, and ourselves) rather than to
persuade, particularly!
(And although I'm already
persuaded that the causal status of feeling is inexplicable, I'm always
willing to listen carefully, in case I am wrong, and, after all, I hear, mirabile dictu, an explanation, or
even just a potential route to an explanation.)
But I've enjoyed the exchange
too.
RL: "It
seems to me no less bonkers to deny the causal efficacy of mental events
such as choosing what to do and acting upon oneÕs intentions."
I'm not denying their causal
efficacy, I'm denying their causal explicability.
(Their apparent causal efficacy is not in dispute either, nor the
causal efficacy of the unproblematic functing with which they are
closely -- but inexplicably -- correlated.)
RL: "You
depict yourself as some kind of film critic, endlessly watching a movie
no-one else can see; choosing nothing, responsible for
nothing."
Not in the least. I depict
myself as experiencing much the same thing everyone else does. I just
seem to be somewhat more up-front and in touch with the fact that there
is a gaping explanatory gap behind it! (But no better at closing the
gap.)
RL:
"Donald Davidson is generally credited with the idea that reasons
function as causes."
I have no problem with that.
My question was about why the reasoning is felt rather than just functed...
RL:
"touching my nose [was] meant to illustrate the difficulties a
Humean account must have with voluntary actions... It would... seem
impossible in principle for my action to be predicted or explained on the
basis of observation of my lifetime behaviours and the context within
which they occurred."
I wasn't talking about
whether and how well your actions could be predicted. I was talking about how the causal role of
feelings in your actions could not be explained
functionally. (And I still think Hume has next to nothing to do with
it!)
RL:
"Adding in brain state data wouldnÕt help. Nor would anything else
that doesnÕt incorporate an account of how I understand and interpret the
world."
Quite: Dynamics and
computation. But the part I'm missing is why and how any of that needs to
be felt rather than just
functed...
RL: "I
completely agree with you that all mental events must be realized as
funct-level processes, but that doesnÕt mean that funct-level processes
can be used to explain feeling-level events."
"Level"? I know
only one relevant level, and that's the explanatory level...
RL: "what
would the world have to be like to explain our mental experience that
feelings are inexplicable?"
Explanation is not mental
(though understanding -- i.e., felt
explanation -- is mental). The gap is explanatory, not just mental;
I do not hold the view (e.g., McGinn's) that there is an explanation, but
our brains just can't "grasp" it. (At least, let me hear this
putative explanation, and then I'll draw my conclusions on whether and
why I can't understand it.)
Certainly one explanation
would have been perfectly strightforward and understandable -- had it
only been true! Telekinesis.
So, to answer your question,
the way the world would have to be in order to make feelings real, but in
explicable, is exactly the way it is. But that's no explanation!
RL: "We
seem to agree that sensations begin as physical events"
No, "begin" is
equivocal: If there is to be an explanation of how and why we feel, it
begins with the fact that some functions are felt -- i.e., correlated
with feelings. What causes those feels, and what their respective causal
function (if any) is, is so far opaque. (They're not miracles, so they
must be caused somehow; but what looks like it will take a miracle is to
explain how, and why.)
RL: "We
seem to agree that at some later point [sensations] are represented as
feelings in a mental/symbolic system (m-events)."
Lots of the usual polymorphic
baggage here!
Some functions are felt. The
"representation" is homuncular and question-begging. (What is
"represented" to whom?) Among the felt functions are more
sensorimotor ones (what it feels like to see or to move) and more
cognitive ones (what it feels like to reason, understand, and mean).
RL: "Now,
consider the point of transition between the two. M-events cannot be
explained in Humean terms because they donÕt exist within the (Humean)
p-system. But nor can they be explained within the m-system, because
their (physical) source lies outside it."
I'm lost! I asked how/why we
feel, and I am hearing instead about mysterious "m-systems" and
"p-systems," and "events" existing in the one and not
the other.
For me, all this (ostensibly
dualistic) proliferation of entities is only increasing my mystification,
since all I had asked was: how and why do we feel?
RL:
"Interface events will thus have the property of being (literally)
inexplicable, because they cross the boundary between domains in which
different modes of explanation obtain."
Well there we are then. I'm
out of luck! There are all these domains, with interfaces, over which
"events" don't "cross"...
(I take this to be
symptomatic of the fact that we are all, understandably, frustrated with
the inexplicable, and so we are ready to go to rather extravagant lengths
to persuade ourselves that they are explicable, or at least inevitable,
after all -- including "explanations" that explain their
inexplicability.)
I'm not persuaded. But I am
informed...
RL: "What
I am trying to do here... [is] to consider what might account for their
inexplicability."
I can see that. (But alas I
don't find your explanation of their inexplicability explanatory but
rather ad hoc, more or less saving the appearances: We feel. It feels as
if our feelings are causal. They are closely correlated with
unproblematic functions that are indeed causal. The world is closed under
causality. So that's it: parallel "systems." Why am I still
left with the nagging feeling that the "m" system is utterly
superfluous [though real enough], on this account, which just puts as
back where we started...)
RL: "Humean
causation is actually just another mystery."
I agree. So is quantum
mechanics. But they are not particularly relevant to the mystery we are
discussing (how/why we feel). How/why does an apple fall is afflicted
with the mystery of Humean causation. But I'd be quite happy to see
how/why we feel turn out no more or less mysterious than just that...
RL: "Another
point of difference between us seems refreshingly, to have empirical
implications. You think humans have feelings from birth... Awareness
develops in my view only when the meaning/symbol system can begin to
assume functional control..."
Yes, I know you think babies
and animals are Zombies and only those who have language feel. But alas
that "empirical" disagreement, even if it were testable (it's
not) would not close the explanatory gap. It would just restrict those
afflicted with it to those who can speak!)
(My old teacher, Julian Jaynes, thought even language
wasn't enough, and we were all still Zombies in biblical and early Hellenic
times.)
But I'm just waiting to hear
why and how language (or post-bicameral language) is felt rather than
just functed.
RL: "As
(I think) we both believe that language processes are central to
feelings..."
I'm afraid we do not share
that belief. I think that the mind/body (feeling/function) problem (and
its explanatory gap) is already there, in its full glory, with amphioxus...
RL: "I
would predict that there is a sizeable lag, certainly of months, maybe of
a year or more..."
Even if it were true (which
it isn't!) that the only non-Zombies in the world are human toddlers and
beyond, all you are doing is deferring an explanatory debt, not paying
it...
RL:
"Presumably by [Turing-Test-passing robot] we both mean a device
programmed by persons... If... feelings have... no function, why...
programme them [in]..."
("Design" sounds a
better descriptor than "programme," but never mind.)
If the "designer"
has a way to "programme" in feelings, I'd like to hear what
that way is, and how and why it generates feelings!
RL: "I am
left believing that your account of feelings implies that a [Turing-Test
passing robot] would be a philosophical zombie.
There are no
"philosophical zombies," just insentient things, like rocks,
galaxies and (by your lights) all animals and babies!
The methodological question
(though it's not just philosophical -- both roboticists and comparative
psychologists and neurologists need to ask address it) is: what are the
reliable behavioral and neural correlates of feeling?
One conjecture -- and this is
what is usually meant by the "Zombie Hunch" -- is that there
could be systems with all of our human behavioral capabilities (i.e.,
Turing-Test-passers) that did not feel.
I happen to think that that
Hunch is wrong
(and that a TT-passer is just about as likely to feel as the rest of us). But
it will remain an untestable hunch, either way -- until and unless
someone can explain how and why we feel.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3051
Reply
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2010-02-21 -- Reply to Jonathan C.W. Edwards
|
THE HARD PROBLEM IS NOT WHETHER, WHEN OR WHERE WE FEEL
BUT WHY
AND HOW
JE: "We
are agreed that feels, at least other than our own, are superfluous to a
causal account."
Our own feelings are just as
superfluous. (It's just that, unlike the feelings of others, they don't
just exist with high probability, but with cartesian certainty.)
JE: "So we
can have no empirical evidence for the above, one way or the
other."
There's plenty of empirical
evidence for feeling, both my own and others'. What's missing is a causal
explanation.
JE: "If we
want indirect evidence, such that we might infer where there are feelings
we need to have at least a provisional idea of the rules of
correspondence of causality and feelings."
The explanatory gap is not
about the other-minds problem (how to know whether or not others feel)
but the mind/body (feeling/function) problem: how to explain why and how
we feel.
JE: "you
above all people should be agnostic about where feels are in the
universe"
I have next to no doubts
about where feelings are. My problem is explaining how and why they're
there...
JE: "my
comment does not invoke any continuum of partial feelingness. It is as
you say, a matter of whether you feel more or less... [but] should you
not be agnostic on this too?"
No. I'm not particularly
sceptical about the reliable correlation between feeling and functing.
It's the causal explanation of that correlation that I keep pointing out
is missing. (The explanatory gap is not a sceptical stance. It is a
garden-variety call for a causal explanation.)
JE: "the
'explanatory gap' of why causality is associated with feeling is a pretty
shaky concept if the ultimate definition of causality is that which
determines our own feels"
But my "ultimate
definition" of causality has next to nothing to do with me (or
anyone), feeling: it has to do with apples, falling.
JE: "it is
parsimonious to suggest that our feels are only special in that they have
evolved such that they correlate usefully and in detail with distant
environmental events."
It may be parsimonious; it
may even be true. But it is not explanatory. I want to know how and why feelings evolved,
rather than just the functings they are reliably, indeed predicably,
correlated with (functings that look for all the world as if they would
have been just fine, to do the job for the Darwinian survival machines we
are): The explanatory gap is about the causal status of feelings, for
which their unexplained correlation with adaptive functings is not an
explanation.
JE: "What
seems to be a real gap is our lack of knowledge of the rules of
correspondence between causal interactions and feels. In addition to the
rules of traditional physics defined in terms of comparisons of outside
events we need to discover other internal rules of correspondence, as
Newton pointed out. This is difficult but not 'hard' in the fashionable
sense."
I am not sure what you might
mean by "rules of correspondence," but I hope it's not just
more about feeling/function correlations.
"Outside events"?
Outside what?
"Internal rules"?
Inside what?
The functional explanation of
behavioral capacity and brain function is the usual kind of scientific
problem, no harder nor less hard than other areas of reverse
bioengineering.
But explaining how and why
feelings get into that functional story is a problem of a rather
different order of duress (and, by my lights, insoluble).
JE: "perhaps
there is a hard component to the problem, raised by speculation about how
widespread feels are."
The problem is neither about whether nor about where (or when) there are
feelings, but about how and why.
JE: "How
to develop a theory of the extent of the causal goings on that are
associated with one 'feel packet' or subject."
You've lost me. I have no
idea what a "feel packet" is, nor do I yet have a clue of a
clue about causality (other than telekinesis, which, as already noted
nauseatingly often, is a nonstarter)...
JE: "Systems
theory is fashionable but systems are defined arbitrarily and by
definition are aggregates of many discrete interactions at many discrete
junctures."
Not just fashionable, but
vacuous. (But we're agreed it doesn't help...)
JE: "We
seem to need an indivisible packet of interaction - one juncture... This
seems to me to be the truly tricky gap in our theoretical
structure."
I'm lost again. I'm not
looking for a packet or interaction or juncture, just a unified causal
account of why and how there is feeling correlated with functing. That's
the trick. And its absence (and the reason for its absence) is the gap.
(Before mapping out a
particular theory, please give a short pre-indication of how it will
solve the problem of causality; otherwise there is no point going into
the details, if the causal strategy turns out -- as always -- to be a
nonstarter.)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3058
Reply
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2010-02-21 -- Reply to Luke Culpitt
|
ANOSOGNOSIA FOR THE EXPLANATORY GAP
LC: "To
rephrase: 'What is the adaptive function of feelings, over and above the
adaptive function of physical brain functions?'"
More perspicuously (and so as
to make it less easy to beg the question): Why and how are some brain
functions felt rather than just functed?
We already know there are
feelings, and that they are reliably correlated with brain function, and
that brain function is adaptive. It is the causal role of feelings qua
feelings -- not just as something that happens to be mysteriously
"piggy-backing" on (some) brain function -- that is at issue.
LC "But
haven't you answered your own "why" question here? The reason
why we have feelings in addition to brain functions is because, as you
say, they play an "adaptive function", or they help us to
survive."
No, you've just begged the
question! Brain function helps us
to survive. That's already known. Some
brain function is reliably correlated with feeling. That too, we
know.
What needs to be explained
(rather than taken for granted) is how and why some brain function is
reliably correlated with feeling, and, in particular, what the causal
role of that feeling is.
LC:
"Perhaps this is unsatisfactory. So the question then becomes: Why
are we geared for survival?"
No, the question is no more
about why organisms are geared to survive than it is about why brain
function is adaptive. If all that were at issue were insentient Darwinian
survival machines, with brains, functioning, geared for survival (just
like us, if you like, but adaptive Zombies), there would be no problem at
all.
The problem is precisely with
what you are leaving out (or simply taking for granted).
LC: "This
is why I consider your request for a causal explanation to the
"why" question as, for lack of a better term, invalid"
My question is perfectly
valid, and not in the least teleological or mystical: The "why"
is as functional as can be. It simply asks what the functional role of
feeling is in a system that not only looks for all the world as if it can
do the functional job -- the complete, Darwinian, adaptive,
biobehavioral, survival-reproductve, functional job -- without the help
of feelings (thank you very much), but, worse: does not look as if it
leaves any room for feelings as any kind of independent causal force or
functional factor at all (except if telekinesis were valid, which it is
not).
So there's nothing invalid at
all about my persistent functional "why?": What is invalid, I
think, is to beg the question, in the multiple ways it keeps getting
begged (not only by you, of course)...
LC: "In
light of this, I don't see that the explanatory gap carries much weight -
unless you have some argument that a causal explanation of how (not why)
the brain causes feelings is impossible."
"Impossible" would
call for a formal proof of necessity, on pain of contradiction, and this
is not mathematics but the empirical world.
So all I can say is that on
the current understanding of causality and functionality, a world in
which there were organisms that survived, reproduced, competed, learned,
talked, etc., would be no problem at all to explain in the usual, causal,
functional way -- as long as they were insentient, like all other
dynamical systems. But we are not such organisms. We feel. We nevertheless
have (or will eventually have) functional explanations (neural and
computational) for all of our functions -- surviving, reproducing,
competing, learning, talking, etc. -- except feeling.
It would be nice if we could
just say that feelings are sui generis,
like gravity, a force that's just there,
and calls for no further explanation. But there is no telekinetic force.
So feelings are piggy-backing, somehow, and for some (presumably
functional) reason, on other, nontelekinetic, i.e., ordinary functions.
But how and why do these
functionally superfluous and causally impotent feelings piggy-back on
garden-variety, insentient functions that can do (and explain) everything
except the mysterious fact of feeling itself?
I'd say that the functional
superfluousness of feelings in functional explanations of adaptive
behavior -- and indeed the fact that there is not even any room for them
in such explanations, on pain of telekinesis -- makes closing the
explanatory gap look well nigh impossible.
But I remain open-minded and
I'm all ears. Unfortunately, all I keep hearing, though, is
question-begging -- and rather obvious, easily-exposed
question-begging.
So I provisionally conclude
that most thinkers on this question (today and yesteryear) seem to find
this fundamental explanatory problem so unacceptable that they either
lapse into agnosia (nb, not the same as agnosticism! more like anosognosia, q.v.)
about it or into provisionally soothing question-begging of the kind for
which we now have a fairly representative sample in the 440+ posts in
this PhilPapers thread so far!
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3059
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2010-02-21 -- Reply to Victor Panzica
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SEEING (AND BELIEVING) IS FEELING
VP: "When
we go to a restaurant, we don't "feel" what we are going to eat
by going in the kitchen and tasting all of the food. Instead we
"funct" what we are going to eat by reading the
menu."
No, actually, we feel what it
feels like to read and understand the menu and then we order what we feel
like eating -- and we do it because we feel like it.
Reading a menu is exclusively
functing when done by an insentient robot or a Zombie. All of our (felt)
functing (including reading) feels like something to do, and we do it (if
it's voluntary) because we feel like it.
VP: "The
gap occurs naturally because we evolved a visual and cognitive
system which translates nature from feelings into a system of
patterns, symbols and language. Hence a[n] "explanatory
problem" appears."
No, the problem appears
because seeing and reading is felt, and the gap is explaining how and why
they are felt rather than just functed.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3060
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2010-02-24 -- Reply to Luke Culpitt
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YES, THE "WHY" QUESTION IS JUST A FORM
OF "HOW" QUESTION, BUT...
Let me first agree straight
away that the question "Why are some functions felt?" is just a
subset or variant of the question "How are some functions
felt?"
The reason I insist on asking
them separately is simple:
Functional explanations of
human capacities inevitably (though usually inadvertently) tend to
smuggle in feelings at some juncture without any functional
justification. They will interpret a "widget" within a perfectly
unobjectionable (and feelingless) injury-detection, avoidance and
learning mechanism as a (felt) "pain signal" or a "pain
response," when, functionally, all it is and needs to be, in order
to deliver all of the capacity in question, is an (unfelt) injury signal
or an injury response.
The only way to expose this
inadvertent smuggling is to ask "Why
is this widget felt rather than just functed?" The answer would of
course have to be functional (i.e., how the fact that it is felt plays
some sort of causal role in what the widget can do, functionally). But if
the question is simply posed as "How is this widget felt rather than
just functed?" the reply will predictably be hermeneutic again,
simply smuggling in the fact that it is felt as a given, rather than as
an explanandum, still waiting for an explanation.
Asking "Why?"
rather than just "How?" is also tantamount to asking what work
the fact that the widget is felt rather than just functed is actually
doing. For inevitably it turns out that the widget can do precisely the
same functional work whether or not it is assumed to be (i.e.,
interpreted as being) felt.
LC: "I
remain sceptical of the possibility of answering a "why"
question with a causal explanation, and am unclear on what you are asking
for when requesting the "causal role" of feelings".
If there's a felt widget in
the functional mechanism, I want to know why the very same
functional mechanism would not work just as well if it were unfelt.
I want to know the causal role (if any) played by the fact that it is
felt, without conflating it with its (uncontested) functional role (as it
would be if it were unfelt).
LC: "[O]nce
the "why" question is removed, there seems to be much less of a
gap, or the gap becomes somewhat more managable to consider. The
question is then how the irritation of physical nerve endings causes us
to have feelings and consciousness. I would guess that there already
exist causal (how) explanations for some aspects of consciousness, like
vision, hearing, etc."
Hardly. "Visual
processing" models and mechanisms simply take the fact that it
happens to feel like something to see things for granted (whereas it is
the heart of the mystery). Otherwise these models and mechnisms would be
seen (sic) for being the merely optical processing models and mechanisms
that they really are. It's precisely the right critique to say, once the
functional mechanism (whether biological or robotic) is laid out,
explained and demonstrated: "I understand perfectly well how this functional mechanism does
everything it does, but why is any of it felt? What functional role does that play?"
LC: "What
I am questioning is whether a "why" question can be given a
causal explanation, or whether "why" questions are demanding a
causal explanation.
Why does this widget in your
mechanism need to be felt, rather than just functed?
LC: "I'm
unsure how you determine that the system looks like it "can do the
functional job [...] without the help of feelings". To whom does it
look like it can? A conscious feeler, perhaps."
Quite the opposite. In the
causal dynamics of the universe, the proportion of feeling systems is
minuscule. (Confined to one planet's biosphere, until further notice.)
That means the overwhelming majority of function in the universe is
unfelt function. (I ignore panpsychism as not only far-fetched but mereologically
incoherent.)
That means the default
hypothesis for the causal dynamics of function is that function is unfelt. The burden of proof, for
anyone who wants to ascribe a causal function to feeling, is to show how and why unfelt function cannot do
exactly the same job (i.e., generate exactly the same I/O, exactly the
same performance capacity) without invoking feeling at all.
The "why?" is just
a perspicuous variant on the "how?"
LC: "I
take your argument to be that the mental (feelings) cannot be translated
into physical terms because (i) it looks as though the functioning of
matter can be fully explained without any reference to feelings, and
because (ii) the mental has no functional/causal power of its own (the
telekinesis argument)."
Almost spot-on, except it's
not about "translating feelings into physical terms" (I'm sure
one can do an all too satisfying "translation," given the close
correlations!). It's just about the causal role of feeling in that
correlated functioning.
LC: "I
take (i) to be purely a "how"-related issue. This leaves (ii)
as the only prospect of contributing the "why" factor. I guess
you're asking for an (causal?) explanation of why feelings exist given
that they have no functional/causal power, or given that telekinesis is
false."
I think this may be just
semiological rather than substantive. Where I say "Why does this
widget have to be felt in order to do its job?", please substitute
the (to my ears a bit more awkward) "How does this widget have
to be felt in order to do its job?".
LC: "We
might not be able to move matter just by thinking it, but we can move matter
by both thinking it and doing it."
Yes, but why (how) does the
thinking have to be felt in
order to do that job?" (It is
felt, that we know, all to well: but how and why?)
LC: "I
would speculate that the function played by the mental is largely to do
with the "adaptive functions" of future planning and past
remembering, and the pre-action consideration of possible
alternatives."
Yes, that all sounds like
good stuff, but why (how) does any of it have to
be felt in order to do its job?" (Planning, yes, but why
(sic) felt planning? Remembering, yes, but why felt remembering?)
LC: "[T]his
type of detection or causal explanation seems possible, through improved
brain scanning technologies and the development of better theories
regarding the mind/brain relationship. However, this causal explanation
would only account for the "how" and not the "why".
You're talking about
detecting (and predicting) function/feeling correlations, not
explaining why (how) any of that functing has to be felt in order to do its
job...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3097
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2010-02-24 -- Reply to Benedek Horvath
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BH: "[1] could
anyone use the explanatory gap for proving the emergence of qualia? [2]
Is it a sensible question at all?"
(1) A failure to explain
something proves nothing (except that you have failed to explain
something).
"Emergence" means
nothing (except unexplained presence).
"Qualia" add
nothing to the discussion: "Feeling" says it all.
We have already
"proved" there is feeling when we feel (cogito/sentio).
(2) It is a sensible question
to ask for an explanation of how and why we feel.
Our inability to explain how
and why we feel proves nothing at all (except the existence of the
explanatory gap).
(A proof that it is
inexplicable in principle might be useful, but I'm not sure we can quite
manage that. Just heuristic arguments, such as "Why can't your
mechanism work just as well without feeling?")
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3098
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2010-02-26 -- Reply to Luke Culpitt
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IF YOU DON'T LIKE "WHY?", SUBSTITUTE
"WHAT FOR?"...
LC: "I'm
not sure what a signal could possibly signify to a feelingless material
object, or how an unconscious (unfelt) signal can still be a
signal."
A signal just has to signal.
Bracket the fact that signifying is felt (it is, but that fact's the
explanandum) and all you have left is signaling (dynamics and
data-processing).
LC: "How
does the fact that "the widget" is felt play some sort of
causal role in what the widget can do, functionally? I thought I'd
already offered a provisional answer to this with my speculations about
future planning and the pre-action consideration of possible
alternatives."
But I then asked you why
planning had to be felt, rather than just planned...
LC:
"Isn't "the fact that it is felt" a given? Do you need an
explanation of feelings to convince you that you're not a P-zombie?"
The fact that it (e.g.,
planning) is felt is given, all right. But I was asking for an
explanation: How and why felt
planning rather than just planning? (I know I'm not a Zombie: I'm asking
what functional role the fact that I am not a Zombie is playing in my
functioning.)
LC: "Of
course they do. There would be no need for any explanations of visual
processing if it didn't already ''feel like something to see
things'."
Oh, I think there would still
be a lot of functional explaining left to do if seeing were not felt, but
were instead just photic processing that was just as adept, functionally,
as our felt seeing. There would be a lot of explaining left to do -- but
there would be no explanatory gap.
So my question continues to
be: How and why is it felt
seeing rather than just equally proficient but insentient photic
processing?
LC: "So
you agree that there is no explanatory gap regarding the "how"
question, and that only an answer to the "why" question could
close the gap?"
No, I said the quibbling
about words is missing the point: I can avoid either interrogative (how
or why), if you find them objectionable: "What is the functional role of the fact that seeing is felt
seeing rather than unfelt photic processing?"
LC: "I'm
not sure if it needs to be [felt], but it certainly is. Right?"
It certainly is. But I wasn't
contesting that fact, just asking for a functional explanation of it. You
reply that it's just so...
LC: "To
be conscious is to have a viewpoint on the world."
A felt viewpoint? What is the functional role played by the
fact that it is felt? A robot has an optical field too. Scanning here
covers a different field from scanning there, functionally. But none of
it is felt. What is the functional role of the fact that it is felt, in
our case?
(I like Tom Nagel on what it
feels like to be a bat; and "point of view" is soothing. But
it's not explanatory. It's just one of the countless euphemisms for
feeling itself -- if it's a felt
point of view... Hence it's just begging the question, again, insofar as
explanation is concerned.)
LC: "I
think that a plan for the future is something that is necessarily felt,
since if it were purely "functed" without being felt, then it
wouldn't be a plan at all - it would just be the mindless motion of
physical matter."
Earlier you said "I'm not sure if it needs to be [felt],
but it certainly is," but now you seem to think it's necessarily felt. So may I ask why
and how planning is necessarily felt, rather than just planned?
(Yes, yes, "without being felt... [planning,
seeing] would just be the mindless motion of physical matter," yet
we all know they're not unfelt, so I ask again, what is the functional
role played by the fact that they're not all just "mindless motion of physical matter"?)
LC: "I
presume that the (how) explanations are required in order to detect and
predict successfully."
But, as we see, the
"how" explanations detect and predict successfully without
being able to explain what functional role is played by the fact that any
of the howing is being felt rather than howed -- which means that the
"how" explanations work just as well whether or not any of it
is felt (apart from predicting the mysterious feeling/function
correlations -- without explaining them)...
LC: "Your
attempt to turn a "why" question into a "how"
question was also "more awkward"..."
Fine, I change the
explanatory pleas from "how and why is function X felt?" to
"what functional role does it play in function X that it is felt rather
than unfelt?" You can start with X = planning, if you like (or
seeing, or signifying). I'm all ears...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3112
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2010-03-02 -- Reply to Luke Culpitt
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Luke, I think we've probably
both said our substantive bits, and all that's left now would be
repetition. I think our differences are pretty well illustrated, not by
the semiological coyness about the lexeme "why?" but by this
sentence from you (whereby I leave you with the last word), indicating
what you see as closing the gap (or as no gap at all), whereas I see as a
gap gapingly open, and a question blatantly begged:
LC: "You [SH] asked "Why does this
widget have to be felt in order to do its job [of planning]?" and
I'm trying to fill the gap by saying that if it were not felt, then it
wouldn't be able to do its job of planning."
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3135
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2010-03-04 -- Reply to Peter Jones
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Why does the suggestion that
we need a "third term" receive so little attention? Because it
is so vague.
There are the usual physical
dynamics. And some of them are felt. That's physics and feeling. What's
#3? and how would it help?
It's not about counting or
coining "terms." It's about explaining how and why some
dynamics are felt
dynamics.
(John Searle used to quip
that one solution to the mind/body problem is "Don't count!" --
One might add that it hardly helps to multiply entities except if necessity
is making an offer you cannot refuse...)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3145
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2010-03-04 -- Reply to Peter Jones
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PJ: "Bradley and
Hegel show that given the right extra ingredient
the mind-matter problem does not arise, or at any rate is
not intractable. Can we refuse the offer of their extra entity
under the circumstances?"
Sure can, whilst we haven't
even closed the gap between the first and second
"entity"!
Rather like saying we can
close the gap by assuming there's telekinesis: Well, sure, but alas telekinesis
is pure fiction.
But perhaps you could walk us
through the argument?
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3150
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2010-03-06 -- Reply to Luke Culpitt
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Luke, it's a lot simpler than
all that. I've (repeatedly) given you a perfectly "how"-based
version of the question you keep begging (on the grounds that it's
"why"-based): "What causal role does the fact that
planning (or nociception) is felt
play in planning (or nociceptive) performance (or competence)?" What
is the functional loss if it is not felt? That's the explanatory gap.
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3165
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2010-03-07 -- Reply to Jonathan C.W. Edwards
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EXPLANATORY GAPS ARE NOT CLOSED BY TAKING
"METAPHYSICAL POSITIONS"
JCWE:
"[Here's] a perfectly reasonable working model of the relation of
experience to physical dynamics...[:] Experience is just what it is like
to be a physical dynamic entity in interaction with others."
Here's the same passage as
above, paraphrased to expose the redundancies, circularity and
question-begging:
"Here's a perfectly
reasonable working model of the relation of feeling to dynamics: Feeling
is just what it feels like to be a feeling dynamical entity interacting
with other feeling dynamical entities"
Quite. And the "working
model"? And the explanation of the functional role of the fact that
the dynamics is felt?
"Interaction with
others"? Feelings are only felt when feelers interact with other
feelers? (I feel them if I stub my toe, or just muse, solo.)
Most of the dynamics of the
universe, after all, are not going on in feeling dynamical entities
(unless one believes -- extravagantly, with no justification, and
probably incoherently -- in panpsychism). The earth's biosphere is an
infinitesimal subset of the dynamical universe, and the fact that some of
the biopshere's dynamical entities (sometimes) feel is an unexplained and
mysterious (but undeniable) fact.
So the question remains:
"What is the causal role of the fact that some dynamics is
felt?"
(What's needed to close this
explanatory gap is not a "metaphysical position," let alone
extra "enitities" or "terms": what's needed is a
causal explanation.)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3169
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2010-03-08 -- Reply to Peter Jones
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FELT DOINGS VS DONE DOINGS
Adopting a metaphysical
position will not close the explanatory gap. I am interested only in the
closing of the explanatory gap (which I happen to think is not possible,
but I'm still listening), not in adopting metaphysical positions. They're
welcome, but only if they come along with the causal explanation that
continues to elude us. And the question, to remind you, is simple, and
requires no metaphysics: How and why are some functions (dynamics,
doings) felt functions rather
than just "functed" functions (done doings)...? Simple functional question. No need for
ontic speculations; just an answer...
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3181
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2010-03-08 -- Reply to Robert E. Haraldsen
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HOMMAGE
TO GEORGE SANTAYANA
Let's circumnavigate the traps
Not just plop in as e'er before:
No metaphysic can stop gaps
Nor prayer, rhyme nor metaphor
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3183
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2010-03-08 -- Reply to Roger Lindsay
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NOTES FROM NEVERLAND
Before I respond to Jamie
Wallace's good-natured posting, let me point out the (I should have
thought obvious) fact that no matter how busy I've been on this thread, I
do not, cannot, should not, and have no wish to prevent anyone from
posting anything they like! My speciality is simply in pointing out
where, how and why it doesn't work (whether the objective is to solve the
problem or merely to "demystify" it). Does my debunking sound like
legislation? It's not. It's just debunking!
Now to the substance of
Jamie's posting:
RL: "The explanatory gap appears to be a
unique problem. It doesnÕt seem terribly radical to contemplate the
possibility that mind and matter may be different ontological domains and
funny things might happen at the boundary"
I suppose any funny things
can be "explained" if we are allowed to help ourselves to a few
extra "ontological domains" (including that other celebratedly
unique problem, QM...) If we are prepared to be radical enough
ontologically, not only can we demystify the possibility of archangels,
but also squared circles.
RL: "nor the possibility that there may be
forms of mental causation that are different from physical
causation".
Well once we have admitted an
extra parallel "world" of feeling, it seems a small step to
endow it with causal power within its own jurisdiction...
RL: "It seems to me to be as evident as
anything can be, that mind does not consist solely of feelings, but
feelings and beliefs and preferences and choices and intentions and
actions"
But the problem, remember, is
to explain how and why beliefs, preferences, choices, intentions and
actions are felt beliefs,
preferences, choices, intentions and actions, rather than just functed
beliefs, preferences, choices, intentions and actions...
That's why I just collapse it
all into feelings, which stand in for any of those felt states.
(Please, please let's not go
back into unfelt beliefs! I can't stop anyone, of course, but can we bear in
mind that if all "beliefs," etc., were unfelt, there would be
no mind/body problem? Hence it is only the fact that beliefs are going on
in a feeling head, feelingly believing them -- and, I would add, they are
really only beliefs while they
are being believed, hence felt, otherwise they are merely behavioral
dispositions -- that makes beliefs "mental" at all.)
RL: "all in all, a pretty good
approximation to an apparatus for decision and control."
How and why is the decision
and control felt decision and
control rather than just "functed" (i.e. done) decision and control? (If you don't like the term
"functing," replace it with "doing," i.e. dynamics:
How and why are some doings (dynamics) felt rather than just done, like all other doings?)
RL: "Stevan dismisses all this as
ÒfolkloricÓ, blithely ignoring the fact that the evidence that we can
voluntarily control our actions is at least as good as that for the
existence of the external world"
Remember that I started with
saying that the heart of the problem is the fact that feeling is tightly
correlated with functing. (If it weren't -- if we just had random bursts
of feeling, uncorrelated with anything -- I suppose there'd still be a
mind/body problem of sorts, but a rather less pressing one.)
So the correlation between
lifting my finger and feeling that I lifted my finger because I willed it
(i.e., lifting it because I felt like it) is part of the explanandum, not the explanans.
The correlation is not
folklore. But taking telekinesis (as opposed to the feeling of telekinesis) for granted is indeed folkish...
(The epsilon of uncertainty
about the existence of the external world, or the reliability of
empirical regularities and causality are of an entirely different order
from the feeling/function problem. They're just ordinary explanatory
risk, whereas the explanatory gap is a region of explanatory bankruptcy.)
RL: "and not even pausing to marvel how
folkloric accounts of what goes on in the mental worlds of other people
might come to be constructed."
I marvel at folkloric
accounts when I'm wearing my anthropologist's or social psychologist's
hat, but not when we're talking about the explanatory gap.
RL: "Surely it is least a possibility that
the explanatory gap is not be a problem within the physical world, and if
it isnÕt, maybe an explication of it will necessarily be
metaphysical."
If there are other worlds,
all bets (and problems) are off...
RL: "If a causal explanation of conscious
experiences isnÕt possible, and there is no proof that conscious
experiences are inexplicable, then perhaps we should be having a go at
other types of explanation. Why not?"
If no explanation of the fact
and functional role of feeling is possible, and there is no proof of
this, then what we are having a go at is unscrewing the inscrutable. I
for one do not get much satisfaction, understanding, or
"demystification" from anything like that. It's just "Just
So" stories...
Peter Panache
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3189
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2010-03-09 -- Reply to Roger Lindsay
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NOT GUILTY BY REASON OF EXPLANATORY GAP?
No, it does not follow from
the fact that we cannot give a causal explanation of why and how we
(sometimes) do things feelingly rather than just "doingly" that
our courts and laws are therefore all moot and liberty and democracy are
down the drain!
It was never the court's
mandate to explain how and why we feel. That would be the mandate of
cognitive science -- but (as it happens) all cognitive science turns out
to be able explain is how and why we do what we do, not how and why it feels like something
the while.
Organisms would be no more
nor less answerable for their misbehavior if they did not feel at all;
laws legislate what we may do,
not what we may feel. Laws, after all, are functional, not sentimental.
Moreover,
"intentionality" has a perfectly functional counterpart in our
comportment (and cognition). Even lie-detectors (if they were reliable,
but they're not) would be valid and useful in a Zombie world, to
distinguish the true accidents from the intentional acts, the true
ignorance from dissembling.
Functional (utilitarian?)
ethics (and, a fortiori, functional aesthetics) would of course be in for
a rather rough ride in an insentient world, but it's hardly clear sailing
for them in our feeling world either (because it's rather hard to explain
why anything would matter if all matter were insensate -- and because
there's no accounting for feelings!).
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3202
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2010-03-09 -- Reply to Peter Jones
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WE ARE NOT ZOMBIES: BUT WHY, AND HOW?
PJ: "If
zombies can commit intentional acts, and if their
physiology changes when they are lying even thought they don't
know they're lying, then I am hopelessly confused as to what a
zombie is supposed to be."
Zombies are (hypothetical,
probably impossible) creatures that are behaviorally (and if you wish,
physiologically) indistinguishable, in their functional capacities, from ourselves, but do
not feel.
Bearing in mind that we may
be talking about as fictional an entity as an archangel here, the
"fact" that Zombies do not feel does not mean they do not sense, in the sense of detecting
and responding to sensory input (indistinguishably from ourselves). They
would also, like us, sleep and wake (but with the difference being only
one of activation and responsiveness, not feeling). And they would have
both voluntary and involuntary movement (why not?), except none of it
would be felt -- just done. No
reason they shouldn't have cortical evoked potentials too (why
not?), and any other physiology you like. The only stipulation (and it is
a stipulation, because no one but the "Zombie" could ever know
whether or not it had been met) is that a Zombie, to be a Zombie, does
not feel, it just does.
Now I have no strong views on
whether or not there can be Zombies (nor much more interest in the
question than I have in metaphysical "solutions" to the
mind/body problem). (I rather suspect there cannot be Zombies.) But I
hasten to point out that the explanatory gap can be formulated, completely equivalently, as the
question of Why and How We are Not Zombies!
Same question, same gap, same
reason. Hence, to have a nonarbitrary view on the Zombie matter, I would
first have to have a clue of a clue as to how the gap might be closed.
And I don't. (And neither does anyone else.)
(For what it's worth, I would
find it as unlikely as the possibility that apples could begin falling up
instead of down, that there could be a physiologically indistinguishable
Zombie -- and almost as unlikely that there could be a behaviorally
indistinguishable robot-Zombie, capable of passing the Turing Test. I think both of these
pseudo-Zombies would feel. But I haven't a clue of a clue why, or how...)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3206
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2010-03-10 -- Reply to Roger Lindsay
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DETERMINING CAUSATION (AND CONUNDRUMS OF
CONATION)
RL: "I get the
feeling that you are operating outside your comfort zone on these
[free will/determinism] issues"
Not uncomfortable in the
least! Quite content to note that since the explanatory gap is a gap in the power of causal
explanation, it of course also bears on the question of how and why
we feel we do things because we feel like it (i.e., what is the causal
role of feeling?).
Indeed, the feeling of voluntary action is probably the heart of the
mind/body problem. Without that, feelings would just feel like
passive fellow-travellers. (I like your metaphor of an "in-flight
movie" -- one in which I rightly feel I am just a passive viewer,
not an actor!} To that extent, the feeling/doing problem is indeed
related to the question of freedom/determinism.
But freedom/determinism
(apart from silly, irrelevant forays into unavailing randomness) really
has only two substantive stances: either (1) all dynamics, voluntary and
involuntary, are causally determined by the usual four dynamical forces
(electricity/magnetism, gravitation, strong atomic, weak atomic), with
"freedom" being just an epistemic matter, concerning unpredictability
in advance, or (2) there exists a fifth independent dynamic force,
telekinesis (but all evidence suggests that (2) is false).
What's left, apart from the
metaphysics of causal determinism in general, is the fact that we have
two kinds of actions, those that feel voluntary and those that feel
involuntary. And the same old question arises about how and why either of them feels like anything
at all...
[Please, please let us not
multiply problems -- and compound our question-begging -- by taking this
as our cue to invoke QM, importing quantal mysteries as our nostrum for
qualia mysteries!]
RL: "[Isn't] holding
people (legally) responsible for their conduct... a charade [if] every action is part of a specifiable
causal chain?"
Not in the least. As I said, there
are (1) voluntary and (2) involuntary actions. Not only do they have a
different physiology, but they are differentially influenceable by, for
example, reward/punishment. (Voluntary actions are more Skinnerian and
involuntary actions more Pavlovan.) Teaching, learning, laws and
reflection can to a certain extent shape voluntary actions, but not
involuntary ones. (This could be just as true in an insentient robot
community as it is in ours. And it leaves the question of the causal
status of feeling completely untouched.)
RL: "Can it mean
anything to say [to] a person
be ÒgoodÓ if nothing they did resulted from a choice?"
It certainly can, and does,
as we all know. But how and why does it feel like something to be taught to be good? How and why is
instruction (whether ethical or economic) felt rather than just functed?
RL: "[Isn't] every
election... a fix if... rather than seeking to influence voter choices,
candidates were directly causing electors to vote in a certain way?"
All interactions between
organisms are a "fix," causally speaking, whether the
interaction is voluntary or involuntary. Electoral promises are just a
subtler fix, involving more internal processes, such as reasoning,
statistics, track-record. Robot communities and even "Zombie"
communities could have unrigged and unpredictable elections, just as we
can, including reliable and unreliable promises, aligned and conflicting
beliefs and desires. The only question is why and how any of it should be
felt rather than just
functed...
RL: "If I have
no pre-existing knowledge or experience concerning planning, preferring,
choosing and doing, and somebody tells me a bunch of made up stuff about
free will and voluntary action, why would I believe them? Why would I
just swallow wholesale stories about what goes on in my own head (when I
know that I know what goes on better than they do)?"
I am not telling you stories;
I am pointing out the glaring absence
of any causal story (other than the telekinetic one that we all quite
naturally feel and believe, but which happens to be false). That's the
explanatory gap.
PS David Longinotti is quite
right that the problem of the causal role of feeling is largely
orthogonal to the question of determinism. We could have a deterministic
or an "indeterministic" world, and each could in turn be a
world with or without feelings. And neither of the sentient worlds --
deterministic or indeterministic -- would have an explanation of the
causal role of feelings.
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3219
Reply
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2010-03-10 -- Reply to Peter Jones
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THE ZOMBIE CONJECTURE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
PJ:
"Would a zombie yelp if he stubbed his toe on the
bedpost?"
Of course. The premise of the zombie conjecture
is that (if there can be zombies) they are indistinguishable from us
except they don't feel.
PJ: "Why
would a zombie procreate?"
Till further notice: for the
same reason we do (selfish genes).
Until and unless someone
explains the causal role of the
fact that we feel that we procreate because we feel like it, we're on
a par with zombies, causally.
PJ: "Why
would it eat?"
Ditto.
PJ: "the
whole point of a zombie, as a hypothesis, is to reduce to
absurdity the notion that human beings are zombies"
No, the zombie conjecture is
just that: a conjecture (like the conjecture that there might be fairies,
or an afterlife). We already know for sure (as Descartes reminded us)
that we're not zombies; we
don't need any further evidence of that. What we need is a causal
explanation of how and why we are
not zombies.
PJ: "and
thus to clarify that consciousness is a real phenomenon in need of an
explanation."
We already know that feelings
are real, because we really feel. We also know they need an explanation.
But unfortunately, there's this explanatory gap...
PJ: "If
[zombies] are possible then the reductio argument fails and the
hypothesis is pointless"
There is no "reductio
argument" and a conjecture's just a conjecture.
PJ: "We'd
be better off discussing the other minds problem,
since a proposition stating that zombies are possible
is no improvement on one stating that there may be no
other minds than our own."
Anything that is not provably
impossible may be possible, but it also may not, for reasons of which we
may be ignorant. In the case of zombies, they're' probably not possible:
trouble is, we can't explain how or why not.
The problem under discussion
is not the other-minds problem (of determining for sure whether others
than oneself feel: one can't, but they almost certainly do).
The problem is explaining how and why they (i.e., we) feel
-- which is identical to the problem of explaining how and why we are not zombies (regardless of whether zombies are indeed
possible, as they seem).
PJ: "Is
the zombie issue really more complicated than this, or are we
just importing complications from the other minds
problem?"
The zombie issue is not
complicated, but it isn't what you seem to think it is.
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3221
Reply
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2010-03-12 -- Reply to Peter Jones
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OTHER MINDS, OTHER PROBLEMS
PJ: "So
the zombie would not yelp. Ergo it is an incoherent
concept."
Yes, the zombie would yelp!
Zombies (ex hypothesi) are
behaviorally indistinguishable from us, they just don't feel. So it would
yelp under the same conditions we would, but it would feel nothing when
it yelped.
PJ: "Genes are conscious?"
No. But zombies' behavior
(e.g., disposition to procreate) could be driven by its (unconscious)
selfish genes, just as ours is.
PJ: "The
causal role of feelings is blindingly obvious to me."
Please share (and thereby
close the explanatory gap for all of us)...
PJ: "I
would rather say that we need an explanation for how you
know that you're not a zombie, not why, since there may be no
why about it, or, more generally, an explanation of the causal role
of knowledge. But this has nothing to do with zombies."
(1) We know we are not
zombies (as Descartes noted) because we feel, and, ex hypothesi, zombies don't.
(2) "Why" we feel
is just the question of the causal
role of feeling in our doings and our doing capacity: What causal
role does the fact we feel play in us (and not in robots, or in zombies)?
(3) "Knowledge"?
Felt or unfelt? No problem with the causal role of information, data. But
what is the causal role of the fact that having and processing the
information feels like something?
PJ: "I
find it quite easy to establish that zombies are impossible."
I'm listening...
PJ: "If
[zombies] are not impossible then the conjecture simply states
that other people may not be conscious."
(...if other people are real.
But other people are indeed real, and do indeed feel, beyond a reasonable
doubt, so let's drop that. It's not at issue.)
Yes, if zombies were provably
impossible, and other people were provably real, then other people would
provably feel. But we're missing all those proofs (and you're missing the
point!)
The point is that there is no
explanation of the causal role of feelings in our functioning (hence no
explanation of how or why zombies are impossible).
PJ: "No
need for zombies."
You can say that again. But
there is a need for a causal explanation of the fact of feeling.
PJ:
"Okay. But we're discussing the usefulness of the zombie
hypothesis, not the problem of consciousness."
No, we're discussing the
problem of explaining consciousness (feeling) causally.
PJ: "I
find the zombie conjecture useful, but only if they are impossible
objects. If they are possible then my wife might be one..."
She's not, rest easy. But
that's not what this is about...
PJ:
"[Zombies] are impossible, however, as I can know because
I know I am not a zombie..."
You are definitely not a
zombie (thanks, for example, to the cogito/sentio), but that does not
prove that zombies are impossible (nor that your wife is not a zombie --
but she's not).
Now, can we get back to the
problem under discussion here, which is not the other-minds problem but
the explanatory gap? The only role of zombies in it is that a successful
explanation of how and why we are not zombies would also close the
explanatory gap. (Unfortunately, no such explanation is forthcoming.)
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3244
Reply
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2010-03-12 -- Reply to Jonathan C.W. Edwards
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JCWE: "We
would of course expect our experiences to differ in character from those
that may accompany inanimate interactions."
Well, if every billiard-ball
collision is indeed felt [by something(s) or other], then all bets are
off and all problems are solved (but at quite a price, in extravagant,
arbitrary, unverifiable -- and probably mereologically incoherent --
metaphysical conjectures)...
JCWE:
"'Dynamic interaction' is only our way of saying
'what determines experiences' "
No: dynamic interaction is
just dynamic interaction. That we feel something when we see or conceive
of a dynamical interaction is true enough, but that the interagent(s)
themselves feel something (except if they are organisms like us) is quite
another matter...
The explanatory gap is a gap
in explaining causally how and why some
dynamic interactions are felt. (Just stipulating
that they are all felt, every single one [and every part of every part]
of them -- if it makes any sense at all -- is giving away the explanatory
store altogether.)
JCWE: "No
two things can 'have physical properties' (which would only be aspects of
our conceptions of the anyway) simultaneously in a universe that obeys
relativity."
No, until further notice,
physical properties are physical properties, not necessarily felt or
feeling physical properties. The latter are a surprise, a mystery, and an
explanatory burden, in the relatively few cases in the universe where they
do occur (in organisms in Earth's biosphere, until further notice from
exobiologists).
Our "concepts" of
properties -- physical or mathematical -- are certainly all felt, but
that doesn't make the properties they are concepts of felt. (Nor does it explain how and why they are felt,
rather than just functed.)
And relativity has absolutely
nothing to do with any of this.
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3245
Reply
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2010-03-13 -- Reply to Roger Lindsay
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FLIGHTS OF HERMENEUTIC FANCY SOOTHE BUT DO NOT
EXPLAIN
RL: "You
say that free will is an illusion"
No, I said it feels as if we
do things because we feel like it, but we cannot give a causal
explanation of how or why.
(The only sure illusion is
telekinesis.)
RL: "What
could it mean to say that an appearance is not as it seems?"
No idea: I never said it.
Things feel like whatever they feel like, undeniably, cartesianly. We
just can't explain how or why they feel like anything at all.
RL: "Not knowing how something might work doesnÕt strike me
as being a good reason... [not to] accept that things are what they
seem..."
Things feel the way they
feel; no one's denying that. But how they work -- and in particular, what
causal role feeling plays in how they work, is what this discussion is
all about.
RL:
"freewill exists for an agent because an agent's actions cannot be
determined within the ontological domain in which that agent
conceptualises them as occuring [sic]"
!!
RL:
"dualism is both empirically true and functionally inevitable."
!!
RL:
"intelligent systems need a Central Executive (CE)"
Fine. But how and why does
that CE need to feel (or be felt)?
RL: "The
CE MUST (no qualifications, no quibbles) always simultaneously operate in
(at least) two ontological domains [ODs]."
!!
RL: "OD1:
perceptual information... sensory evidence... OD2: control operations...
preferences... beliefs... decision procedures"
And how and why do either
"OD1" or "OD2" need to be felt, rather than just
functed?
RL: "CE
ÒnoticesÓ ... fibre located... is active"
Fine. Now what is the causal
role of the fact that the CE's "noticing" is felt rather than
just functed?
RL: "any
sensory signal that becomes conscious needs to be detected at two
ontological levels, once by a sensory receptor... and again by the
CE..."
How/why does the detecting
need to be felt?
RL: "CE
is a decision making system operating with purely symbolic information...
sensory input will be realized as activity in a cortical cell being
triggered by a sensory fibre. Getting ÒnoticedÓ will be realised by a
cell within the complex of cells constituting the CE being fired by the
cell activated by the sensory input."
And the causal role of feeling in all this otherwise
perfectly unexceptionable functioning?
(Your dualism is not just
extravagant and ad hoc and unexplanatory, but circular!)
RL:
"every perceptual event that becomes conscious is as it were,
Òtwice-bakedÓ, once when the receptor is fired and again when the
corresponding cortical event is acknowledged by CE"
As long as we're so free with
the ad hoc cookery, why not thrice-baked? What's special about two, if we
can posit as many "ontologies" as we like?
RL:
"there is plenty of empirical justification for the idea of
Òinternal observationÓ within the literature on vigilance/signal
detection)."
Uncontested. But why and how
is it felt observation...?
RL: "It
seems no great leap to suppose that CE acknowledgement corresponds to
ÒawarenessÓ and receptor stimulation plus CE acknowledgement corresponds
to ÒsensationÓ (or ÒperceptionÓ when complex models are drawn from memory
and matched to stimulus arrays)."
But it will take more than a
"leap" to explain (rather than just "acknowledge")
how and why any of it is felt.
RL: "how
could events within CEÕs symbolic model of Objective Reality... physically
determine CEÕs Flight Deck decisions? This is merely an ontological
paradox generated by the fact that CE needs to operate in more than one
ontological domain, each with different existence criteria (and modes of
causality and explanation)."
An "ontological
paradox" is the excuse for the explanatory void?
RL:
"Harnadian ÒfunctsÓ, of course are all operations within CEÕs model
of Objective Reality, so obviously they canÕt explain what happens on the
Flight Deck."
think you have gotten
somewhat lost in your own hermeneutics. Try it again without recourse to
extra "ontologies"... They don't help: they just soothe...
RL:
"assign[ing] some empirical interpretation to the notion of
dualism... does enable us to distinguish the question of why we are
aware (because CE acknowledgment has been achieved)"
Hermeneutics is not
empiricism, it's hermeneutics. And it gives no answer whatsoever to the
question of why we feel, it simply begs it and returns to hermeneutics,
which is "assigning interpretations" (in this case helping
oneself to a second "world" to escape the problems of the first
one...) instead of causally explaining empirical regularities (in this
case, the undeniable fact of feeling, and its close correlation with
functing).
RL:
"....from the question of why our feelings have the qualitative
character that they do (why not? And who cares, so long as they do their
job)."
The question is not why
feelings feel like what they feel like but why they feel like anything at
all. And you are certainly free not to care about this question, but then
why participate in this discussion at all? It's about this question!
Ontological Scrooge
(bah, humbug)
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3258
Reply
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2010-03-13 -- Reply to Peter Jones
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HOW/WHY WOULD FEELINGLESS ZOMBIES DISCUSS FEELINGS
AS WE DO?
PJ: "I'd
like to see a causal explanation for why a zombie might yelp
when it stubs its toe. It's hard enough to find one for a human
being."
Soliciting help/compassion
from kin or conspecific, or relieving physical stress of injury? I'm not
a specialist in nociception, but it does not take much to come up with an
adaptive Just-So Story for injury vocalization.
PJ: "If we think that a zombie would react as if
it is in pain when it stubs its toe then a zombie
is a coherent concept."
Much easier to explain why
injury causes vocalization than why it hurts...
PJ: "It's
difficult to know what to say to someone who thinks that
a entity that is not aware of anything at all, and which for
philosophy of mind might as well be piano with arms and
legs, would be capable of thinking 'cogito.'"
All dynamical systems are
responsive. (A piano's pretty static.) And remember I have replaced
"aware" (which is ambiguous between "reactive" and
"feels") with feels
(which is not).
The cogito is really the sentio
(because it there were nothing it feels like to cogitate, there would be
no mind/body problem or explanatory gap).
What would a zombie have to
say about feelings (since it doesn't have any)? It would have to talk
about them exactly as if it did. Maybe there is a version of the adaptive
yelp-vocalization story that can be stretched to cover this too -- or
maybe this is a symptom of the fact that there can't be zombies. But that
certainly does not translate into the answer to the question of how and
why there can't be zombies: It's certainly not just so that we can talk
about feelings and really mean it!
Bodhidharma
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3259
Reply
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2010-03-16 -- Reply to Peter Jones
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Peter, we're beginning to
repeat ourselves now, so there's not much to learn any more.
The exchange did highlight
one substantive point: whereas it is trivial to give an adaptive account
of how and why social organisms vocalize (e.g. "yelp") when
they are in pain (and also an adaptive account of how and why they are
social) -- namely, the adaptive advantages of "mind-reading" --
it is not nearly so easy to give an adaptive account of how and why
zombies (or Turing-scale robots) would vocalize verbally about what they
feel -- indistinguishably from the way we do -- without, in reality,
feeling a thing. An extension of the adaptive advantages of social
mind-reading is the obvious hypothesis (and philosophers have been making
a lot of hay about that in the last decade!), but I am not yet sure how
convincing it is.
(It seems to me that it would
be almost as hard to explain how/why unfeeling zombies could or would
talk coherently about feeling -- indistinguishably from the way we do
--as it would be to close the explanatory gap [by explaining how/why we
feel rather than just do]: But I don't think this thereby constitutes a
clue as to how to go about closing the gap -- nor does it provide
evidence that there is no gap! It just compounds the mystery -- or makes
it more palpable.)
See: WHY WOULD TURING-INDISTINGUISHABLE ZOMBIES TALK
ABOUT FEELINGS (AND WHAT, IF ANYTHING, WOULD THEY MEAN)?
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3295
Reply
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2010-03-16 -- Reply to David Longinotti
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DIALOGUE DES SOURDS
DL: "For
reasons previously given, I believe that there is substantial
evidence that feelings are causal."
I think the evidence is only
that feelings are closely
correlated with effects (and feelings themselves are no
doubt caused, somehow).
But no one has adduced the slightest shred of evidence that feelings, qua feelings, are themselves
causal; they have not even made sense of it: Feelings are caused
(somehow); their causes no doubt have further effects. But and why any of
that is felt is entirely
unexplained. The correlations are evidence of correlation: the causation
has yet to be explained.
DL:
"Exactly how [feelings] are causal is a more difficult issue.
But I think it's possible to draw a distinction between the
questions of why we vocalize in general, and why we talk about feelings
in particular."
Why we vocalize -- indeed why
we verbalize -- is a piece of cake. How/why it feels like something to vocalize and verbalize (and to
perceive what we are verbalizing about) is not.
It's also easy to explain why
we vocalize about what we vocalize about -- except the fact that what we
vocalize about feels like something to perceive and know.
DL: "So
the mystery for a functionalist is not why there is vocalization,
but why it is accompanied by any sort of phenomenology."
You can say that again. (And
it's a mystery for everyone else too -- until/unless the explanatory gap
is closed. Indeed, it is the
explanatory gap.)
DL: "Talk
*about* feelings presents a different sort of problem...
representational... theories maintain that a symbol gets its meaning by
having a causal relationship to its referent. But such a causal
relationship is denied by functionalism."
I never know quite what a
"functionalist" is, but I guess I am one. And what is
undeniable is that the grounding of a symbol comes either from direct
sensorimotor interactions with its referent (category learning, to be
exact), or by word of mouth, through grounded category-names combined in
truth-value-bearing subject/predicate propositions that define and
describe.
That's all very handy for an
adaptive Darwinian survival machine (with human, i.e. Turing-scale
performance capacity) -- but it does not yield a clue of a clue of how
and why any of it should be felt.
DL:
""if such theories of representation are correct, there is
no apparent basis in functionalism to explain why we should
talk about, say, a pleasant harmony of tones, rather
than speaking of a particular mathematical relationship between
two frequencies of air modulation (assuming that our brains
contain such mathematical information in some form when
detecting a harmony)."
No need for all those
complications: It is not at all clear why, when I say I saw something
red, I would do anything but point to red things (and non-red things),
tell you what is and isn't red, and, if you are of a physical bent (and I
know about it -- as most speakers and feelers of red certainly do not!),
we could chat also about electromagnetic radiation frequencies and even,
if you like, about Locke on primary and secondary qualities.
The mystery in all that
functionality and verbiage, of course, is the undeniable fact that it
really does feel like something
to see red. No use discussing it with someone who can't see, but there
may be ways to get around that, by analogy, if he can feel anything at
all.
But what we are contemplating
here is something rather more radical: It is about whether there could be
a zombie -- hence something that does not feel anything at all -- who
could also discuss red, wave lengths and Locke with us. Here's a sample
of a dialogue between a Zombie (Z) and a Sentient (S). For simplicity, I
will make the Zombie a Turing-Test-passing robot, to liven the
conversation (otherwise it would be a dialogue of the absurd, with both S
and Z saying, identically, "Of course I know what it feels like to
see red!").
S: You know about the "explanatory gap"
don't you? It's the problem we have explaining the causal role of feeling.
Z: Yes, it's
a tough one, isn't it!
S: Maybe you can help me, since you are a zombie.
Z: Excuse me,
I am a Turing-scale robot, I admit, but I am certainly not a zombie.
Zombies (if they are possible at all) do not feel, but I do.
S: How do you know that you feel? (And, even
worse, how can I know that you feel?)
Z: You can't
know it about me any more than I can know it about you. That's just the
other-minds problem (so let's agree not to ask for the impossible and go
instead by common sense and probability on that one). As to how I know I feel: same way you do --
via introspection and the cogito (sentio). We all know it about
ourselves.
S: I agree not to pursue the other-minds problem
in general, but don't I have slightly better grounds for being sceptical
about you than you do about me? After all, I am a biological organism and
you are a robot.
Z: Yes,
there's that, but be honest: if we can go on discussing this and all
other mental subtleties, indistinguishably, till doomsday, are you just
as sure that, because I am a robot, you can kick me with impunity -- the
way you would kick an automobile -- as you are sure that neither of us
can kick another biological human with impunity?
S: No, you are right; I am very far from being as
sure that you really don't feel as I am that other people really do. I
guess there's no way out of this.
Z: For either
of us -- until and unless someone came up with a causal explanation of
the difference between you and me (if I were indeed a zombie) -- or if
telekinesis turned out to be true (and it could be confirmed empirically
that I lack it and you have it). I am profoundly skeptical about both
these options.
S: Are you as troubled as I am, then, about the
fact that, if you are indeed a zombie, then you are talking about nothing
-- just behavioral dispositions -- when you are talking about what it
feels like to see red?
Z: If I were
indeed a zombie, I would of course not feel what it feels like to see
red, nor what it feels like to feel troubled, I'd just act and talk as if
I did. But I assure you, I, like you, know exactly what it feels like to
see red and I do indeed feel troubled about the fact that there seems to
be no accounting for feelings. (But then I would say that, wouldn't I? Let's go have a beer -- an oiler
for me...)
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3300
Reply
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2010-04-14 -- Reply to David Nyman
|
HOW/WHY ON EARTH DO "RELATIONAL" OR
"CAUSAL" IMPLY "FELT"?
DN: "A
modest proposal from a zombie (i.e. my brain)"
No, your brain is an organ,
like your liver. And you are (presumably) not a zombie.
DN: "if
we are committed to the belief that feelings are not causal"
We are not committed to the
belief. It seems thrust upon us by the fact that (1) telekinesis is false
and hence (2) there does not seem to be enough functional room for
feelings, qua feelings, as causes, rather than just (unexplained and
inexplicable) effects of brain function.
DN: "an
intrinsic, or non-formal, feature of their situation not capturable by
purely relational means... Call it a feeling."
No, I'd call it a theory (and
on the face of it, just another ad-hoc hermeneutic one: "We can
interpret feelings as just this [insert
your favorite candidate]" -- or "We can interpret this as being felt")...
DN: "such
a carrier is necessarily self-acquainting: i.e. it feels."
Sounds like an arbitrary
posit (and a non-sequitur) to me. How and why does "relational"
imply "felt"? (Let's not get carried away...)
Permanent link:
http://philpapers.org/post/3573
2010-04-19 -- Reply to David Nyman
|
Rosenberg's theory
sounds far too complicated to actually be an explanation, rather than
just ad-hoc hermeneutics. And the feeling/function problem is certainly
no grounds for trying to reconstruct the notion of causation.
Causation's fine: feeling's not. But I don't want to overstate my case
either: I don't think we can say something as strong as that feelings
are noncausal: just that if they are causal, we cannot explain how/why,
in the usual way (and there is no "other way" to explain
them). And the problem is unique (to feeling -- and causal
explanation).
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3632
Reply
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2010-04-26 -- Reply to David Nyman
|
LOST IN
THE HERMENEUTIC HALL OF MIRRORS
DN:
"[feeling is the intrinsic carrier of physical relation - i.e. the
locus of 'what it's like to be'"
That's just renaming
the problem, not solving it: Why and how does it feel like something to
be some (not all) things in some (not all) states. (It presumably
feels like nothing to be a rock, laying on the ground. And most things
and states in the universe are presumably like that. Why and how does
it feel like something to be one of those rarer things, in those rarer
states -- presumably, until further notice, only in (some parts) of our
tiny terrestrial biosphere, sometimes?)
"Feeling is
simply what it's like to be" won't cut it...
DN:
"Maybe you will object that in any case there is no reason for us
to think that "intrinsic" qualities must be felt ones."
My objection is
mainly to the treble (and unavailing) redundancy: "intrinsic
qualities are felt" = "felt feelings are
felt"...
And,
"intrinsic," "extrinsic," and least of all
"relational" won't help.
DN:
"what we call "feeling" may be at root
nothing other than existence itself, and its absence oblivion."
Fine. Now explain,
please, how and why we happen to be among the minority of things that
are and that also happen to (sometimes) feel (some) things (including
what it feels like to be) -- the rest of the things and states being
"mere oblivion"...
Saying that
"feeling is simply what it feels like to be" simply begs the
question.
DN:
"the brain as a formal system mustÉ be capable of generating and
tracking formal analogues of the feelings we refer to, and also of
perceiving an explanatory - or if you like "qualitative" -
gap between references to such analogues and the analogues
themselves."
You lost me. We feel.
We have brains. (Our brains presumably somehow cause and/or constitute
feeling, but alas no one can say how or why.) "Analogues" of
feeling? What on earth are those?
I have enough trouble
with the notion that feelings are internal analogues of external
physical states (e.g., that what it feels like to hear an oboe play
A-flat is somehow an analogue of the dynamic acoustic state of an oboe
playing an A-flat). I'm inclined to say they feel correlated but are in
reality incommensurable).
You seem to be
suggesting more, and worse: Not just that feelings are internal
"analogues" of external physical states, but that they are
also internal "analogues" of internal physical states (brain
states), or vice versa.
Not wishing "To
wield Occam's blade too stringently," but this not only seems to
be multiplying entities, but multiplying incommensurable entities,
several times overÉ
(By the way, the
brain is not a formal system. It is a dynamical system, parts of which
may be the dynamical implementations of certain formal systems. None of
that helps. And solving the symbol grounding problem would help pass
the robotic Turing Test, but it would not help explain how and why the
brain "implements" feeling.)
DN:
"This "gap", though recognisable to the functing system,
would itself be formally inexpressible; in other words, the
ineffability of feeling."
If I can't express
something in words, I want to know how and why. It seems a perfectly
reasonable question to ask how and why we feel. If the reply is
ineffable, I need an explanation of why and how it's ineffable. No use
saying it's like the ineffability of "an oboe playing an
A-flat" to someone who's deaf, or tone deaf. That's just the
point. I'm asking why and how we are neither deaf nor tone-deaf. And to
reply that the reply cannot be put into words seems tantamount to
admitting that one has no reply. ("Ineffability" can
cover no end of sins of omission.)
DN: "Of
course, inasmuch as this account is considered purely formally, there
is no reason to regard it as anything but more - and mere -
functing. But in the grounded account - as feeling itself becomes
trapped in the net of functing - the feeler is acquainted with the
inescapable price of existence."
"Trapped in the
net of functing?" "Inescapable price of existence?"
Sounds more like
"Lost in the hermeneutic hall of mirrors"!
Stevan Harnad
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/3734
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