Posts on: Consciousness
Many experiences have phenomenal properties: there is something it is like to have them. A puzzling fact about these properties is that we appear to know about them in a special, direct fashion: we are "acquainted" with the phenomenal properties of our experiences. Another, related puzzle is that we appear to know about these properties with absolute certainty: if you have an experience as of looking at a red wall, you can conclusively rule out the possibility that you have an experience as of looking at a green wall.
In Schwarz (2018), I put forward a tentative explanation of these facts. I argued that it would be useful for an agent in a world like ours to have a credence function defined over a space that includes special "imaginary" propositions that are causally tied to stimulations of their sense organs in such a way that any given stimulation makes the agent certain of a corresponding imaginary proposition. What we conceptualise as propositions about phenomenal properties (of our experience), I argued, might be such imaginary propositions.
My "Objects
of Choice" paper has now appeared in Mind.
The paper asks how we should understand an agent's decision-theoretic options.
That is, what are the things whose expected utility we are supposed to maximize?
I think the question is a lot harder than often assumed. For example, I argue
that it won't do to say that the options are certain "willings" or "intentions",
as some authors have suggested.
I wrote this short
piece for a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies on
Chalmers's "The Meta-Problem
of Consciousness" (2018). Much of my paper rehashes ideas from section 5 of
my "Imaginary
Foundations" paper, but here I try to present these ideas more simply and
directly, without the Bayesian background.
Does the conceivability of zombies threaten type-A materialism, the claim that all mental truths are a priori entailed by the physical truths?
We can imagine beings exactly like us in all physical respects, but lacking consciousness. But this doesn't threaten type-A materialism (as I mentioned here). After all, it isn't a priori that materialism is true. It could have turned out that ectoplasmic states, rather than brain states, occupy the causal roles that, by analytic necessity, belong to mental states. Suppose it turned out that way. Then duplicating only our physical constitution would result in a being that is physically just like us, but lacking consciousness. So by type-A materialist lights, it is conceivable that things are such that there are beings physically just like us without consciousness.
Panpsychism is the view that all physical things have, besides their physical properties, also psychological or phenomenal properties. The psychological properties are commonly assumed to be intrinsic. The idea is that physics only tells us about the structural and relational properties of things, but remains silent on what it is -- intrinsically -- that has all these dispositions and stands in all these relations to other things. So if we want to attach fundamental psychological properties to electrons (for example), we may well say that they are those physically unknown intrinsic properties: electrons ultimately are pain (say). But that's not essential to what I mean by "panpsychism". If you say that all physical entities have fundamental and irreducible, but extrinsic psychological properties, that's also panpsychism.
A zombie world is a world physically just like our world but in which
there is no consciousness. Must a type-A materialist deny the
conceivability of zombie worlds? No, not quite.
Compare the rather uncontroversial hypothesis that "the HI virus" denotes the (type of) virus responsible for most AIDS infections. Is it
conceivable that a world could be biologically just like ours but not
contain the HI virus? Yes, for it might turn out that scientists
have been wrong all the time and no virus is involved in most AIDS
infections. If it turned out this way, our own world would be a world
biologically just like ours but not containing the HI virus.
According to the Lewis-Nemirow ability hypothesis, knowing what it's like to see red is having a certain cluster of abilities. According to almost everybody who writes about the ability hypothesis, the hypothesis also claims that knowing what it's like neither is nor involves any kind of knowledge-that. This is indeed suggested by some of Lewis' remarks, in particular by this one on p.288 of "What Experience Teaches" (in Papers):
The Ability Hypothesis says that knowing what an experience is like just is the possession of [...] abilities to remember, imagine, and recognize. It isn't the possession of any kind of information, ordinary or peculiar.
One has to read the rest of the paper to find out that by "information", Lewis here most probably means exclusion of possible worlds. At any rate, it is clear from the rest of the paper that Lewis doesn't claim that all Mary learns are abilities.
I agree that it sounds fairly plausible to say that phenomenal states have a kind of representational content built into them. But I don't find that plausible anymore if it's combined with the assumption that being of phenomenal type Q is an intrinsic and essential property of phenomenal states. Here's an intuition pump.
Consider a world just like ours except that flying-pigs qualia have traded places with crooked-image qualia. That is, in this world, people have the kind of phenomenal experience we have when we look at flying pigs when they look at crooked images, and vice versa. But our duplicates at this world are not halluzinating flying pigs when looking at crooked images. No, they are not at all mislead by their experiences. For instance, they are not at all inclined to say that there are flying pigs, or that they are seeing flying pigs in these cases. Nor do they draw any of the inferences we would draw if we had the impression of seeing flying pigs. Instead, they typically infer that they are looking at a crooked image. And they would judge their experience to be veridical just in case there really is an image hanging crooked before them.
As promised here are some remarks on the content of phenomenal states. Or rather, on Horgan and Tienson's remarks on the content of phenomenal states in their paper "The Intentionality of Phenomenology and the Phenomenology of Intentionality". Dave Chalmers pointed me at that last week. I should say that this post is not meant to be a response to Dave's comment. I can't respond to it yet because I haven't understood it yet. I'll have to read the other papers he mentions.
Non-reductive (a posteriori, type-B) materialists say that even though phenomenal terms denote physical states or properties, the phenomenal way things are is not a priori entailed by the physical way things are. This means that no amount of physical information can tell us what our phenomenal terms denote. That is, non-reductive materialism implies that the projects of naturalising linguistic and intentional content are doomed. I would say that contraposititvely, since there are good reasons to believe in the project of naturalising linguistic and intentional content, non-reductive materialism is doomed.
Question: What exactly is wrong with something like this as a (physical-cum-indexical) conceptual analysis of "pain" (in my idiolect)?
the state I am in now
One obvious problem is that it's too unspecific: pain is not the only state I am currently in. But that's not the only problem. What else?
Is it a priori that I feel pain now? Or does my knowledge that I feel pain depend on empirical information? Could it turn out that I don't feel pain? Could it have turned out?