This is a response to a recent post by Bentham’s Bulldog, which you can find here.
They think that zombies are inconceivable, for example, and that Mary learns no new facts when she sees red.
Indeed. I wholeheartedly endorse both claims, and think alternatives, in which Mary does learn something, or p-zombies are conceivable, are predicated on poor philosophical methods and conceptual confusions on the part of people convinced that such thought experiments represent anything more than a feeble and rather useless attempt at understanding reality. It would be far more productive for the people working on these thought experiments to engage with the empirical literature in e.g., cognitive neuroscience and psychology.
When I theorize about consciousness, there’s this thing that I have direct awareness of called qualia.
But that’s just it: I think you’re mistaken about this. And I think proponents of particular accounts of consciousness, such as Dennett, can explain why you’re mistaken about this, without us having to posit the existence of qualia. That you and a handful of philosophers could, as a result of the flawed methods of analytic philosophy, mistakenly think that there is some mysterious phenomena in need of explaining, is far more plausible to me than that qualia exist.
It’s synonymous with subjective experience.
No, it really isn’t, unless you’re employing a motte and bailey. Illusionists and others who endorse, are sympathetic to, or are in the philosophical vicinity of physicalism don’t have to deny that we have “subjective experience.” Of course I think subjective experience exists. I just don’t think it involves qualia.
It’s the same thing with moral realism. Queue my standard comparisons to taste. I think food can taste good or bad. I don’t think this requires me to imagine bizarre metaphysical facts, like my food having “intrinsic tastiness” properties, or to imagine that gastronomic realism is true, in order to make sense of food being good or bad. The goodness and badness of food can be fully accounted for by mundane facts about the conventional, scientifically accessible properties of food and of human brains, e.g., facts about chemistry and psychology.
I see no reason to think consciousness is any different from this. Humans are evolved organisms that arose over millions of years of natural selection. Everything that led up to humans and human consciousness was the gradual arrangement and rearrangement of organic molecules. People once thought that living things had some essence, some elan vital, some fundamental, sui generis properties that distinguished the living from the nonliving. But this turned out to be mistaken. As science advanced, we learned otherwise. We learned that living things are just nonliving stuff arranged in particular ways so as to produce life. Living organisms are no more metaphysically distinct from the mundane physical world than bicycles and waterfalls. Life is just physics arranged into a particular pattern.
Science has, over and over, shown that seeming inexplicable and fantastical things, that seem utterly incomprehensible, or ineffable, or forever beyond the reach of scientific inquiry can, once we’ve cleared way the cobwebs of conceptual confusions and learned to ask the proper questions and develop the proper tools, be addressed, and fully understood, by science. To suppose consciousness is an exception to this is, firstly, to fail to learn our lessons from history: science has always shown confident proclamations of the inexplicability of some phenomenon to be mistaken, and it’s often taken a, as Dennett puts it, “strange inversion of reasoning” to make sense of the phenomenon in question.
Before Darwin came along, and proposed natural selection, the notion that living organisms could have arisen via blind, unintelligent processes would have struck many people as preposterous, even inconceivable. Indeed, it still does, as you no doubt have encountered creationists and skeptics of evolution. How can disbelief in evolution persist? In large part, I suspect it’s because critics of evolution either do not understand natural selection, do not understand the quality and breadth of the evidence that supports it, or, and this is not mutually exclusive, are perceiving the problem through a paradigmatic lens on which evolution is so preposterous an explanation that they are incapable of appreciating its plausibility.
I suspect that you are in just the same situation as a creationist who finds evolution inconceivable, only with respect to consciousness. And I suspect you are in this position for many of the same reasons creationists are in their position: you already endorse a host of commitments, and are already habituated to a set of ways of thinking, that may inhibit your ability to appreciate the force of e.g., illusionist accounts of consciousness. It seems obvious to people who claim that they have qualia that they “have qualia.” Yet it also seems obvious to creationists that things “are designed.” From the vantage of someone who holds a given set of priors or commitments, virtually anything can seem obvious or self-evident.
Unfortunately, confidence in one’s seemings is no substitute for the quality of the arguments that accompany those seemings. And both the quality of arguments for antiphysicalist views of consciousness, and the quality of the objections against views like e.g., Dennett’s, are not great. There are only so many ways philosophers can dress up dismissiveness and incredulity in the guise of an argument, but that’s largely what objections to illusionism consist of: incredulity swimming in a bowl o philosophical jargon to give the impression of a substantive objection. And most of the thought experiments that used to prompt anti-physicalist philosophical intuitions about e.g., consciousness may draw on the same underlying, shared philosophical presuppositions, habits of thought, and poorly-understood psychological systems giving rise to those intuitions. This can create the illusion of a variety of distinct arguments, when in fact if the underlying psychological mechanisms giving rise to anti-physicalist philosophical intuitions share a common source, then the appearance of many arguments is, itself, an illusion.
Compare, for instance, if you had 10 sets of written testimony, all describing the same event. That might seem like strong evidence that the event occurred. But if we discovered all 10 testimonies were written by the same person, that would substantially reduce the evidential weight of the testimony. Just the same with so many philosophical intuitions.
Philosophers have, for the most part, shown a disregard for understanding the psychological provenance of their philosophical intuitions. Yet without knowing what psychological processes are producing their philosophical judgments, it is difficult to know whether judgments in any particular case are reliable.
Take, for instance, research on mind perception. Jack and Robbins (2012) propose a model of how we might come to attribute phenomenal states that would fulfill particular sociofunctional roles in human interaction (e.g., attributing moral patiency). Mechanisms that yield such judgments may produce outputs that don’t sync our perception of physical systems with the relevant cognitive systems responsible for phenomenal attributions; as a result, when we reflect on judgments of others as moral patients, or as agents with subjective experiential states, and try to rectify these judgments and intuitions with a notion of a world exclusively populated by physical objects, we may feel a sense of incompleteness, a gap, a sense that something is “missing,” even if nothing actually is.
This sense may only become apparent under certain kinds of philosophical reflection, where one attempts to understand the outputs of one psychological system (e.g., a phenomenal stance system, but this is just an example, and I am not endorsing the model proposed by Jack and Robbins), in terms of the other (a system for detecting, e.g. physical objects). In other words, if we have one system for mapping the world as a set of physical objects, and other systems that map the world in terms of e.g., intentional systems, beings with subjective experience, and so on, attempts to claim, on intellectual grounds, that the outputs of these systems are merely means of mapping the territory, and not features of the territory itself, may result in us balking: just as it seems absurd to say there could be no trees or tables or chairs, it may feel absurd to say that there are no qualia, or subjective experiential states, as things-in-themselves, that are ontologically distinct from, and fundamentally different in character, from physical things.
Such confidence persists so long as one places very high priors on their ability to determine what the fundamental nature of the world is like - e.g., to do metaphysics - via a priori reasoning. And I think this is the fundamental mistake that you, and others who reject physicalism, are subject to: you place far too much stock in conventional philosophical methods, and don’t put enough stock in the capacity for science to dissolve persistent philosophical problems as mere pseudoproblems stemming from our poor understanding of the natural world…and when it comes down to it, I am far more confident there’s nothing fundamentally mysterious and metaphysically extraordinary about consciousness as I am that there’s nothing fundamentally mysterious and metaphysically extraordinary about life, or love, or sunsets.
When you talk to type a materialists, it feels like the data they want to explain is people saying things like “I’m conscious,” and reporting on being conscious. But that’s not the relevant data! The relevant data is this experience that I’m having.
Speaking for myself and at least some physicalists who likely agree with me, I don’t want to just explain what people say. I want to explain how they think, as well. And I think physicalists do offer explanations of the experiences. We just don’t think the experiences have non-physical properties, often because e.g, that doesn’t strike us as the best explanation for the phenomena in question.
Speaking for myself, rejecting physicalism strikes me as the obvious last resort, a concession of the failure of science equivalent to conceding that life must have a designer. I see philosophers who don’t expect physicalism to win out here, and would only consider views that reject physicalism as reminiscent in some ways of theists who are quick to point to shortcomings (or alleged shortcomings) in scientific descriptions of the world to appeal to God; that is, rejecting physicalism’s potential to account for consciousness seems too hasty to me and strikes me as philosophy of mind’s equivalent of the “God of the Gaps” - the “Qualia of the Gaps,” so to speak.
I know I’m having it — I have direct awareness of it.
Sure, I know I have conscious experiences. But knowing that I have conscious experiences, and knowing what the metaphysical implications of those experiences must be, are two different things.
But this is obviously wrong!
Yes, and it’s obvious to creationists that life must have a designer. How much stock do you put into creationist denials of evolution on the grounds that it’s “obviously wrong”?
You put far, far too much stock in what you take to be "obvious."
The fact that we’re sometimes wrong about what we’re aware of doesn’t show that we’re not actually conscious.
But that’s not the illusionist’s argument. It’s incomplete. We don’t think that the fact that we’re sometimes wrong about our introspections, by itself, shows that we’re not actually conscious. In other words, illusionists don’t *just* claim that we are sometimes wrong about introspection, so *therefore* we’re not actually conscious…yet this is precisely the impression you give of what illusionists think. But this isn’t true. Pointing to failures of introspection is just one part of a larger argument that appeals to a variety of other lines of empirical evidence and philosophical considerations. It would be a comical mischaracterization of the case made in Consciousness Explained to describe it as “introspection is sometimes wrong, and this shows consciousness doesn’t exist.”
In fact, to call what you’ve outlined here as the physicalist’s arguments a “strawman” would understate just how inadequate your characterization of the illusionist’s case is. Respectfully, it does not even appear to me that you are making an effort to seriously engage with the illusionist’s case.
They’ll claim they don’t deny consciousness.
Like many things, it depends what you mean by consciousness. I’m happy to say that I deny phenomenal consciousness. But people who reject physicalism don’t own words and don’t get to define those words in such a way so as to imbue them with their particular philosophical positions.
It’s like you go into a doctor’s office and ask them why your head hurts, and then they deny that your head hurts. They say “oh sure, there is a tumor in your head, but there’s no hurting over and above there being a tumor and you reacting to it.” But that’s obviously crazy! I feel the headache.
No. It’s not like that at all. I don’t even know what this analogy is supposed to illustrate. If someone told me their head hurts, I would not deny that their head hurts. But suppose that this person was convinced that all suffering and pain was caused by demons, and that this was a non-negotiable feature of what they take the term “hurt” to refer to. In that case, we could then distinguish between what I take “hurt” to mean, hurt_L (Lance’s definition of hurt), and what they take hurt to mean, hurt_D (The notion that hurting is caused by demons). In that case, I’d say hurt_D does not exist, but hurt_L does. A doctor who believes in hurt_L would still want to treat the patient, because they would correctly judge that hurt_L is occurring, but not hurt_D.
Just the same, we can designate consciousness_P (a physicalist account of consciousness), and consciousness_Q (qualia-based conceptions of consciousness). We deny consciousness_Q, but not consciousness_P.
On considering your example, it genuinely looks to me like you’re conflating terms and the phenomena those terms refer to, and are mistakenly thinking that those of us who deny consciousness exists are denying the phenomena in question rather than what we’re actually denying - the explanations you have for what that phenomena is. And the mistake here is one you are making, not us: you are treating your conception of the phenomena as a feature of the phenomena, such that to deny your conception of it is to deny the phenomena itself.
Now, you could say that what you’re referring to, that which is to be explained, just is the qualia, but this strikes me as an unwitting instance of question-begging: I believe proponents of qualia are baking in their metaphysical theses and substantive philosophical views into your accounts.
In short, I think you may be conflating the explanandum with the explanans, treating the former as the latter, and helping yourself to the very claims we are challenging in a way that strikes me as very close to question-begging, if it doesn’t involve begging the question outright. So I can put it bluntly this way: I deny there is any such thing as “qualia” in need of explaining. Unless you or others can present some good reason for me to think there are qualia (and I don’t think you can), I think it’s more likely you’re making a mistake somewhere than that we are. Indeed, like stance-independent moral facts, I think you and others cannot even explain what “qualia,” are, and I suspect it’s not simply that qualia don’t exist, but that the very notion of qualia is meaningless. In this respect, my views are actually more extreme than illusionists. I endorse Mandik’s positions, meta-illusionism and qualia quietism.
It seems to me like the type a physicalists are as badly confused as those who deny thought experiments on the grounds that they’re unrealistic, if not more so. And yet, many of them are very smart and philosophically trained? So what’s going on?
I think what’s going on is that you are studying and thinking within the strictures of contemporary analytic philosophy, which has a variety of methodological shortcomings due to standing on rocky metaphilosophical foundations. I’m not sure how much you’ve looked into e.g., Wittgenstein’s later work, or pragmatism, or to critiques of contemporary analytic philosophy, but much of the reason I suspect I’m not moved by the concerns you raise is because I reject the metaphilosophical foundations they stem from.
References
Jack, A. I., & Robbins, P. (2012). The phenomenal stance revisited. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 3(3), 383-403.
Mandik, P. (2016). Meta-illusionism and qualia quietism. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11-12), 140-148.