Do You See What I See?

Twitter Tuesday #45

Said the night wind to the little lamb
Do you see what I see?
Way up in the sky, little lamb
Do you see what I see?
A star, a star, dancing in the night
With a tail as big as a kite
With a tail as big as a kite

— “Do You Hear What I Hear?” Noël Regney & Gloria Shayne

1.0 Speak for Yourself

Over on Twitter, JPA quotes Chalmers:

Note what Chalmers says: “It seems to me that we…”

Who is “we”?

Philosophers should internalize the norm “Speak for yourself.” It is all too common for philosophers to simply declare that “we” (who?) think a certain way or experience the world a certain way.

I am not only not sure of the existence of phenomenal consciousness, which is presumably what Chalmers is referring to since that’s the kind of consciousness illusionists deny, I don’t recall ever having believed in it or even found the notion plausible. There is, at present, little empirical evidence supporting the notion that nonphilosophers are drawn to the hard problem or even think of consciousness in the way philosophers do, but there is some evidence that suggests that they may not think in line with the way JPA, Chalmers, and other philosophers seem to think.

Some of my critics will acknowledge that people may not flit about with explicit views about whether they are phenomenally conscious or not, but nevertheless believe that a sense that we have qualia/phenomenal states lurks just outside of awareness. It’s the sort of thing you could cause someone to recognize as a natural consideration that emerges from the way they were already disposed to think by directing their attention to it.

At least one reason to think this is the case is that if you present people with work from Chalmers, or toss them into a philosophy class, or otherwise expose them to the hard problem, people seem to “notice” the problem and go along with it. I grant that you very likely can get lots of people to report having qualia intuitions and to sincerely believe they have qualia.

Only, there’s a problem here. I don’t believe we are phenomenally conscious. And it does not seem to me that we are. I also don’t think that most people even think they are phenomenally conscious. Yet I agree that people could probably be readily induced to think that they are. One explanation for the fact that people can be readily induced to have qualia intuitions is that this is a compelling way people are naturally disposed to think.

2.0 A Grand Mistake

But there’s another possibility. If, as I believe, belief in qualia is the result of a grand mistake rooted in the linguistic, conceptual, and other methodological foibles of human thinking cultivated and promulgated by academic philosophy, then I’d also predict that this outcome would be readily achieved: if you induce people into the terms, ways of thinking, and general framing of consciousness common among analytic philosophers, they will naturally be drawn towards thinking about the issues in a similar way. I think this may very well be what is going on.

In short, I worry that it is very difficult to distinguish:

• Discovering a shared predisposition to be drawn towards the view that we are phenomenally conscious

• Creating a disposition to be drawn towards the view that we are phenomenally conscious

At least part of the reason so many philosophers are so convinced that they are phenomenally conscious and that it’s obvious we are phenomenally conscious may be the result of manufactured convergence: If the way philosophy is taught and framed causes people to form philosophical perspectives they wouldn’t endorse under counterfactual conditions in which they were taught to approach philosophical matters differently, this can create the misleading illusion that beliefs widely held among analytic philosophers are also widely held among nonphilosophers.

If so, this can make the current situation far harder to resolve. It would mean that philosophers are artificially reinforcing confidence in their own errors by convincing others to share in their mistakes, much as someone who is convinced they can speak to God will be reassured if they convert others to their faith, who likewise come to believe they can speak to God.

I believe the severity of this problem has been underappreciated by academic philosophers. Here are a few considerations that could bias philosophers against this possibility and that may serve to reinforce and sustain the problem, if it is as I suspect:

1. Analytic philosophers come from a self-selected group of people that have opted to study philosophy and pursue a career in it. They may be highly unrepresentative of the way people in general think.

2. Analytic philosophers are trained on a highly constrained, homogenous, mostly English body of canonical philosophical texts that reinforces a distinctive way of thinking about, describing, and framing philosophical issues. This can further exacerbate the convergence in thinking among academic philosophers and the divergence in their way of thinking from everyone else.

3. Analytic philosophers are often highly invested, in terms of their careers, interests, and emotions in the legitimacy and universality of the philosophical problems they work on. The notion that those problems may be contingent and parochial is a very hard pill to swallow. Philosophers are also very smart: this is just the first step down a path that could lead to regarding such problems as pseudoproblems. This may prompt very strong motivated reasoning to resist this possibility.

4. The methods of mainstream analytic philosophy, insofar as they routinely center on the armchair analysis of, and one’s intuitive reaction to, English sentences, may further exacerbate the problem, in that philosophers may be convinced that their approaches, even when they strike an outsider as consisting of clear and contestable claims about human psychology, aren’t empirical claims at all, or, if they are, can be readily resolved via the methods of philosophy itself. What are the consequences of this? A profound failure to appreciate that their methods may be inappropriate for addressing certain questions.

For instance, with respect to the last of these, metaethicists will say that they have various linguistic “tests” that can let us know whether noncognitivism is true or not. Yet none of these tests are empirical tests that involve studying how nonphilosophers use moral language. Instead, they prompt philosophers themselves to think about certain English sentences appearing in various contrived contexts and draw conclusions entirely on the basis of their own intuitions. This is then supposed to inform us about how nonphilosophers think and speak. Or maybe it isn’t. It’s not always clear. If it isn’t, they may be operating on questionable views about how language and meaning work. If it is, trying to address facts about how nonphilosophers speak and think by thinking about how you think they think when you’re not even part of the population in question makes very little sense.

I worry that analytic philosophers are operating with a tangled knot of questionable presuppositions and methods, and that they have very strong incentives not to appreciate how flawed their overall approach to at least certain questions may be. But shaking philosophers out of this dogmatic slumber is a task that I suspect is, sadly, beyond my capabilities.