You provide a quote which speaks of a “definition” of phenomenal consciousness: what it’s like. Unfortunately this is no definition. It’s simply another set of words that seemingly appear to serve as a synonym. No substantive definition seems to have been given. It’s like defining “hello” as “bonjour” or some other cognate term in another language. It is empty and unhelpful.
Other features of the description are also obscure, e.g., “That is, consciousness is subjective in the sense that it’s present only for its subject or from a particular point of view.” Present? Is it located somewhere? What does that mean? Skeptics of phenomenal consciousness do not generally deny that people occupy points of view or have better access to certain kinds of information (about their sensory experiences, etc.) than others, they only deny there’s some special qualitative, phenomenal aspect to those states above and beyond what could be described in third personal terms. It’s not clear how accounts like these can simultaneously pick out anything distinctive about phenomenal consciousness and not do so in a way that could be construed in illusionist or eliminativist terms.
I also don’t find appeals to “obviousness” persuasive at all. You say, “It’s plain obvious that there is something about my conscious states that nobody else can know about in the same direct way that I know about them.”
Okay, but it’s obvious to me that this isn’t the case. So now what? I see no reason to privilege what’s obvious to you or anyone else over what’s obvious to me. If you feel the same, appeals to have “obvious” something is simply set dialectical boundaries, delimiting what kinds of positions you will or won’t consider. Incidentally, I am entirely open to considering that what seems obvious to me is wrong, anyway. If you aren’t, then it seems you’re simply declaring yourself incorrigible about certain claims. Nobody else can do much about it if that’s the case, but one’s personal declaration of being unable or unwilling to change consider that they could be mistaken about something doesn’t make for productive conversation with people who think you very much are mistaken.
I agree part of this: “If you can’t adequately explain the privacy of experience, then you at least have to explain why phenomenal consciousness seems private, why it gives us the impression of being private, etc.”
Note that you simply state that it “seems private,” without qualification. Seems private to who? It does not seem to me that it’s private in the way you and others appear to believe it is. There’s little empirical evidence nonphilosophers are on the same page as philosophers about this, either. I do agree that those of us who disagree with you need to explain why you and others report that it seems this way. Note, however, that this does not require us granting that it “seems” this way to us, or to people in general. The extent to which things seem a certain way to anyone is an empirical question and can vary from one individual to another.
You also say this, “It won’t suffice to simply deny privacy, burden-shift, or pretend to not understand what’s being discussed.”
Critics of people like me, who deny phenomenal consciousness, often accuse us of “pretending.” This implies we’re being dishonest. You don’t know what people’s intentions are and don’t have the ability to read minds. Presuming people who disagree are “pretending” is not a great way to engage with people who disagree with you. I could just as readily accuse you of “pretending” to have these concepts or to accurately report how things seem to you. If I were to do this, I’d probably be wrong, and you’d have every right to be dismissive towards me: you know what you think better than I do, and if I were to accuse you of “pretending” when you knew you weren’t, you’d both (a) have no reason to take me seriously and (b) at least some reason to be bothered by such accusations. Such accusations are also very destructive to honest and productive dialog. Nobody likes to be accused of dishonesty when they’re not being dishonest.
A truly excellent summary of the non-physicalist position. As a physicalist myself, I feel I can answer all of the points you raise, put that would take a reply as long as your post, so let me say state my understanding and then make a point about the zombie argument.
My understanding is that the mind is not the brain in the same sense as a car is not locomotion. Locomotion is a description of something the car does, a process in which the car can partake. Likewise, consciousness is a description of what the brain is doing. To cut to the end, what the brain is doing is pattern recognition. Qualia is the first person perspective of pattern recognition.
As for the zombie argument, let’s examine Goff and zGoff, physically identical. zGoff says he feels tired, sees beauty in spectacular sunsets, prefers the taste of certain beers over others, etc. In theory, we could examine all the physical parts zGoff and determine exactly why he says all these things. The physical aspects of zGoff would explain EVERY behavior. When we look at Goff, we find the exact same physical reasons for every behavior. To say that Goff has something else, something extra, to say that Goff REALLY tastes the beer, adds nothing we can use for anything. It doesn’t help explain anything we care about. It’s like saying God exists out there beyond the universe, but does not interact with anything in the universe in any way.
I can imagine an iron bar floating in the air but iron bars can’t float in the air. Either I can conceive of impossible things or I’m not conceiving of iron. And either way the conceivability of the situation isn’t evidence that iron bars can float in air. Tell me why the same thing isn’t happening in the zombie argument.
I don't think anything undermines the hard problem because I don't think its proponents have shown that there is such a problem in the first place. I don't like conceivability arguments, either. People can think things are conceivable merely because they're confused or don't adequately understand the subjects about which they're thinking. I don't think they are useful for demonstrating much of anything.
I take it that I understand what the hard problem is, for now I take it seriously. I find Dennett's response almost convincing, namely, if you remove all of the proposed components of a phenomenon in arguing successfully against its components, that just means there isn't a phenomenon; and his other argument, where he says things like elan vital etc. are similar to this hard problem, and so we ought to chalk it up as just what happens when you get various brain states, the same way life is just the right organization of chemicals. I still need to read his book, and I'm confusing some concepts here, but from the lectures I've listened to I think what I said is close enough. I all for quining qualia, I just think the fact that we have an experience, while it doesn't seem logically necessary that we ought to by light of physics, is a bit confusing, and interesting, and may be evidence that there is something we're missing in the purely quantitative. Anyway, I've read some what you wrote, and am still pretty early in what I expect to read on this topic.
I think I am your radical type of physicalist. My response to the Mary thought experiment, for example, is roughly: "What staggering hubris to think you can intuit that something about color would surprise someone who knew *every physical fact* about color! Every physical fact is a lot of facts!" Sure, I can't claim to be able to intuit such a huge amount of information as the basis for my contrary view, but my defense will be that I'm giving due respect to the meaning of "every". ;-)
I think it would be interesting to compare the entity of a 2,000 year old redwood instead of a house plant to see where that goes. Or perhaps one of those collections of cloned trees such as Pando the Aspen Tree in Utah, which has an estimated 47,000 tree like stems that appear as individual trees, with a single root system that covers106 acres.
We have decided that we know consciousness requires a certain amount of brain/mind power which is a higher-order phenomenon, restricted only to organisms with sufficiently complex nervous systems. Perhaps there are much more complex nervous systems in the universe that make our level of "thinking" comparable to idle chatter. In that case would we still think that our level of consciousness includes us in this high flying club?
What if consciousness was like gravity, the more mass there is, the stronger the gravity is. Gravity acts universally as a single system over a wide area. What if consciousness was a group effort where we all draw from power from a single collective source, then even insignificant sources could be significant in the existence of shared consciousness.
Not knowing what the other entity was thinking would be the default option, used as a protective device. It might even help keep the individual identity a unique feature. We could be basing our idea of complexity on the basis of how many different existences we can imagine to exist. If the type of existence imagined was based on neuron activity, then plants and insects might have only have one existence but would still experience consciousness, though it would be in a very narrow bandwidth compared to ours.
Looking forward to seeing the argument from conceivability to possibility. Maybe it can help cure my modal skepticism
That actually reminds me that I wanted to revisit Felipe Leon’s work on mitigated modal skepticism. Thanks!
You provide a quote which speaks of a “definition” of phenomenal consciousness: what it’s like. Unfortunately this is no definition. It’s simply another set of words that seemingly appear to serve as a synonym. No substantive definition seems to have been given. It’s like defining “hello” as “bonjour” or some other cognate term in another language. It is empty and unhelpful.
Other features of the description are also obscure, e.g., “That is, consciousness is subjective in the sense that it’s present only for its subject or from a particular point of view.” Present? Is it located somewhere? What does that mean? Skeptics of phenomenal consciousness do not generally deny that people occupy points of view or have better access to certain kinds of information (about their sensory experiences, etc.) than others, they only deny there’s some special qualitative, phenomenal aspect to those states above and beyond what could be described in third personal terms. It’s not clear how accounts like these can simultaneously pick out anything distinctive about phenomenal consciousness and not do so in a way that could be construed in illusionist or eliminativist terms.
I also don’t find appeals to “obviousness” persuasive at all. You say, “It’s plain obvious that there is something about my conscious states that nobody else can know about in the same direct way that I know about them.”
Okay, but it’s obvious to me that this isn’t the case. So now what? I see no reason to privilege what’s obvious to you or anyone else over what’s obvious to me. If you feel the same, appeals to have “obvious” something is simply set dialectical boundaries, delimiting what kinds of positions you will or won’t consider. Incidentally, I am entirely open to considering that what seems obvious to me is wrong, anyway. If you aren’t, then it seems you’re simply declaring yourself incorrigible about certain claims. Nobody else can do much about it if that’s the case, but one’s personal declaration of being unable or unwilling to change consider that they could be mistaken about something doesn’t make for productive conversation with people who think you very much are mistaken.
I agree part of this: “If you can’t adequately explain the privacy of experience, then you at least have to explain why phenomenal consciousness seems private, why it gives us the impression of being private, etc.”
Note that you simply state that it “seems private,” without qualification. Seems private to who? It does not seem to me that it’s private in the way you and others appear to believe it is. There’s little empirical evidence nonphilosophers are on the same page as philosophers about this, either. I do agree that those of us who disagree with you need to explain why you and others report that it seems this way. Note, however, that this does not require us granting that it “seems” this way to us, or to people in general. The extent to which things seem a certain way to anyone is an empirical question and can vary from one individual to another.
You also say this, “It won’t suffice to simply deny privacy, burden-shift, or pretend to not understand what’s being discussed.”
Critics of people like me, who deny phenomenal consciousness, often accuse us of “pretending.” This implies we’re being dishonest. You don’t know what people’s intentions are and don’t have the ability to read minds. Presuming people who disagree are “pretending” is not a great way to engage with people who disagree with you. I could just as readily accuse you of “pretending” to have these concepts or to accurately report how things seem to you. If I were to do this, I’d probably be wrong, and you’d have every right to be dismissive towards me: you know what you think better than I do, and if I were to accuse you of “pretending” when you knew you weren’t, you’d both (a) have no reason to take me seriously and (b) at least some reason to be bothered by such accusations. Such accusations are also very destructive to honest and productive dialog. Nobody likes to be accused of dishonesty when they’re not being dishonest.
A truly excellent summary of the non-physicalist position. As a physicalist myself, I feel I can answer all of the points you raise, put that would take a reply as long as your post, so let me say state my understanding and then make a point about the zombie argument.
My understanding is that the mind is not the brain in the same sense as a car is not locomotion. Locomotion is a description of something the car does, a process in which the car can partake. Likewise, consciousness is a description of what the brain is doing. To cut to the end, what the brain is doing is pattern recognition. Qualia is the first person perspective of pattern recognition.
As for the zombie argument, let’s examine Goff and zGoff, physically identical. zGoff says he feels tired, sees beauty in spectacular sunsets, prefers the taste of certain beers over others, etc. In theory, we could examine all the physical parts zGoff and determine exactly why he says all these things. The physical aspects of zGoff would explain EVERY behavior. When we look at Goff, we find the exact same physical reasons for every behavior. To say that Goff has something else, something extra, to say that Goff REALLY tastes the beer, adds nothing we can use for anything. It doesn’t help explain anything we care about. It’s like saying God exists out there beyond the universe, but does not interact with anything in the universe in any way.
*
[whew]
I can imagine an iron bar floating in the air but iron bars can’t float in the air. Either I can conceive of impossible things or I’m not conceiving of iron. And either way the conceivability of the situation isn’t evidence that iron bars can float in air. Tell me why the same thing isn’t happening in the zombie argument.
Love the Parfit reference.
Also I used to like conceivability arguments, but after reading some papers against the form of the argument etc., I'm less than convinced. Especially this one: https://academic.oup.com/pq/article-abstract/67/267/223/2408851?redirectedFrom=fulltext
I don't think it undermines the hard problem though.
I don't think anything undermines the hard problem because I don't think its proponents have shown that there is such a problem in the first place. I don't like conceivability arguments, either. People can think things are conceivable merely because they're confused or don't adequately understand the subjects about which they're thinking. I don't think they are useful for demonstrating much of anything.
I take it that I understand what the hard problem is, for now I take it seriously. I find Dennett's response almost convincing, namely, if you remove all of the proposed components of a phenomenon in arguing successfully against its components, that just means there isn't a phenomenon; and his other argument, where he says things like elan vital etc. are similar to this hard problem, and so we ought to chalk it up as just what happens when you get various brain states, the same way life is just the right organization of chemicals. I still need to read his book, and I'm confusing some concepts here, but from the lectures I've listened to I think what I said is close enough. I all for quining qualia, I just think the fact that we have an experience, while it doesn't seem logically necessary that we ought to by light of physics, is a bit confusing, and interesting, and may be evidence that there is something we're missing in the purely quantitative. Anyway, I've read some what you wrote, and am still pretty early in what I expect to read on this topic.
Okay, fair enough!
I think I am your radical type of physicalist. My response to the Mary thought experiment, for example, is roughly: "What staggering hubris to think you can intuit that something about color would surprise someone who knew *every physical fact* about color! Every physical fact is a lot of facts!" Sure, I can't claim to be able to intuit such a huge amount of information as the basis for my contrary view, but my defense will be that I'm giving due respect to the meaning of "every". ;-)
I think it would be interesting to compare the entity of a 2,000 year old redwood instead of a house plant to see where that goes. Or perhaps one of those collections of cloned trees such as Pando the Aspen Tree in Utah, which has an estimated 47,000 tree like stems that appear as individual trees, with a single root system that covers106 acres.
We have decided that we know consciousness requires a certain amount of brain/mind power which is a higher-order phenomenon, restricted only to organisms with sufficiently complex nervous systems. Perhaps there are much more complex nervous systems in the universe that make our level of "thinking" comparable to idle chatter. In that case would we still think that our level of consciousness includes us in this high flying club?
What if consciousness was like gravity, the more mass there is, the stronger the gravity is. Gravity acts universally as a single system over a wide area. What if consciousness was a group effort where we all draw from power from a single collective source, then even insignificant sources could be significant in the existence of shared consciousness.
Not knowing what the other entity was thinking would be the default option, used as a protective device. It might even help keep the individual identity a unique feature. We could be basing our idea of complexity on the basis of how many different existences we can imagine to exist. If the type of existence imagined was based on neuron activity, then plants and insects might have only have one existence but would still experience consciousness, though it would be in a very narrow bandwidth compared to ours.