Author: Bill Vallicella
Conscious Experience: A Hard Nut to Crack
This is an addendum to Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem. In that entry I set forth a problem in the philosophy of mind, pouring it into the mold of an aporetic triad:
1) Conscious experience is not an illusion.
2) Conscious experience has an essentially subjective character that purely physical processes do not share.
3) The only acceptable explanation of conscious experience is in terms of physical properties alone.
Note first that the three propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. Any two limbs entail the negation of the remaining one. Note second that each limb exerts a strong pull on our acceptance. But we cannot accept them all because they are logically incompatible.
This is one hard nut to crack. So hard that many, following David Chalmers, call it, or something very much like it, the Hard Problem in the philosophy of mind. It is so hard that it drives some into the loony bin. I am thinking of Daniel Dennett and those who have the chutzpah to deny (1). But eliminativism about conscious experience is not worth discussing outside of the aforementioned bin.
Sophistry aside, we either reject (2) or we reject (3). Nagel and I accept (1) and (2) and reject (3). Those of a scientistic stripe accept (1) and (3) and reject (2).
What I didn't do in my original post was to state why a Nagel-type answer is better than a scientistic one.
Why not just reject (2)? One way to reject it is by holding that some physical processes are essentially subjective. Consider any felt sensation precisely as felt, a twinge of pain, say, or a rush of euphoria. Why couldn't that felt sensation be identical to a physical process transpiring in one's brain?
Here is an argument contra. Not every brain event is identical to a conscious experience. There is a lot going on in the brain that does not manifest itself at the level of consciousness. What then distinguishes those brain events that are conscious experiences from those that are not? There will have to be a difference in properties. But if the only properties are physical properties, taking 'physical' in a broad sense to include the properties mentioned in physics, chemistry, electro-chemistry, and so on, then there will be no way to distinguish between conscious and non-conscious brain events. Since there is that distinction, conscious experiences cannot be identical to brain events. (Don't forget: eliminativism has been eliminated.)
More simply, perhaps, the claim that a particular conscious experience is numerically identical to a brain event violates the Indiscernibility of Identicals. Necessarily, if x, y are identical (one and the same), then whatever is true of x is true of y and vice versa. Equivalently, if x = y, then x, y share all properties. (After all, if two putatively distinct items are in reality one item, then it is trivially the case that 'they' share all properties.) But conscious experiences and physical states do not share all properties. It could be true of a pain that it is bearable, excruciating, throbbing, non-throbbing, etc. But these phenomenal predicates cannot be true of a physical state such as brain state. Why not? Because physical states have only physical properties, and no phenomenal properties.
"But if the pain and the brain state are identical, then they must share all properties!" True, but which properties are those? The physicalist/materialist/naturalist can admit only physical properties. His aim is to reduce the mental (or at least the qualitatively mental) to the physical, but without eliminating the mental. That I claim is impossible. For again, conscious experiences are essentially subjective, as Nagel says, but there is nothing essentially subjective about physical states as physics and the related natural sciences conceive them. The materialist reduction doesn't work. Sensory qualia have not been show to be material in nature.
Going Mysterian
Someone who thinks that qualia just have to be material in nature might at this point go mysterian along the lines of Colin McGinn. The mysterian grants that we cannot understand how that twinge of pain or that sense of euphoria could be just a complex state of the brain, a pattern of neuron firings. But he insists that it is nevertheless the case. It is just that our cognitive architecture makes it impossible for us to understand how it could be the case. After all, if x is actual, then it is possible even if we cannot understand how it is possible. It is and will remain a sort of secular mystery.
In other words, the unintelligibility of the reduction of consciousness to matter is not taken as an argument against this reduction, but as an argument against our ability to grasp certain fundamental truths. Thus (2) and (3) above are both true and hence logically consistent; it is just that insight into this consistency is beyond our ken. What is unintelligible to us is intelligible in itself. In reality, my felt pain is identical to something going on intracranially; it is just that insight into how this is possible is impossible for us given how were are constructed.
There are problems with this mysterian way out that I may discuss in a separate post.
Two Ways of Referring to the Same Thing?
Another option for the materialist is to invoke the familiar idea that linguistic and epistemic access to one and the same item can be had in different ways, and that duality of linguistic and/or epistemic access need not be taken to argue ontological duality in that to which one gains access. Reference to one and the same item can be routed through different senses or modes of presentation. Different terms, with different senses, can be used to target one and the same referent. 'Morning Star' and 'Evening Star,' though differing in sense, can be used to refer to the same celestial body, the planet Venus.
Why not say something similar about the physical state I am in when I feel pain? Why not say that there are two ways of accessing the same physical state? The one mode of access is via neuroscience, the other is 'from the inside' via the pain's qualitative feel to the one who endures it. If so, there are not two states or events one physical and the other mental differing in mode of existence; there is exactly one state or event, and it is physical. Dualism is avoided. The upshot is that, contra Nagel, the third-person physicalistic approach to the mind does not leave anything out. One may go on to tax Nagel, Searle, and Co. with illicitly inferring a difference in mode of existence from a difference in mode of linguistic/epistemic access. Something like this objection is made by Christopher Peacocke in his review of Nagel's The View from Nowhere (Philosophical Review, January 1989.)
It's a nice try, a very nice try. And it is exactly what one would expect from someone who takes an objectifying third-person view. What's more, it would be in keeping with Occam's Razor if mind could be seamlessly integrated into nature. Unfortunately, the pain I am in is not a mode of presentation, or means of epistemic access, to the underlying brain state. Thus the Fregean analogy collapses. The sense of 'morning star' mediates my reference to Venus; but my pain quale, even if it is caused by the brain state, does not mediate my reference to it.
Let me see if I can make this clear. The suggestion is that the same physical reality appears, or can appear, in two different ways, a third-person way and a first-person way, and that this first-person way of access is no evidence of a first-person way of being. One problem is the one I just alluded to: there is no clear sense in which a pain quale is an appearance of a brain state. The former may be caused by the latter. But that is not to say that the pain quale is of the brain state. The felt pain does not present the brain state to me. It does not present anything (distinct from itself) to me. After all, the felt pain is a non-intentional state. No doubt it has a certain content, but not an intentional or representational content. One can describe it without describing what it is of, for the simple reason that there is nothing it is of. An intentional state, however, cannot be described without describing what it is of.
The Fregean sense/reference analogy therefore breaks down. The basic idea was that one and same reality can appear in different ways, and that the numerical difference of these ways is consistent with a unitary mode of existence of the reality. A felt pain, however, is not an appearance of a reality, but an appearance that is a reality. The appearing of a felt pain is its being, and its being is its appearing. And because this is so, the felt pain is a distinct reality from the brain state. Not only is it a distinct reality, it is a distinct reality with a distinct, irreducibly subjective, mode of existence.
Nagelus vindicatus est. There is something essentially incomplete about a third-person approach to reality. It leaves something out, and what it leaves out is precisely that which makes life worth living. For as Wilfrid Sellars once said to Daniel Dennett over a fine bottle of Chambertin, "But Dan, qualia are what make life worth living!" (Consciousness Explained, p. 383)
In vino veritas.
I conclude that if our aporetic triad has a solution, the solution is by rejecting (3).
It’s Enough that He’s not Hillary
So spake Schlichter.
Leftists Know How to Fight . . .
. . . and conservatives had better learn. I have been making this point for years. So I was pleased to see Jack Kerwick nail it down in Who are the Real 'Snowflakes,' Leftists or Conservatives?
Dropping Prepositions
It seems to be acceptable in British English, as witness:
Donald Trump received a glittering welcome from leaders in Saudi Arabia on the first day of his first international tour, as the two countries agreed a series of military deals worth nearly $110bn (£85bn).
That offends my linguistic sensibilities. If I were editor, I would expend some red ink. One does not agree X, one agrees to X, or upon X. If you make a proposal, I may reject it, but if I agree, I agree to it; I don't agree it.
Stateside one often hears sentences like 'She will graduate high school in June.' The meaning is clear, but the style is bad. One graduates from high school.
I am just reporting on how I prefer to write and speak. But if a competent user of English reports on how he prefers to write and speak, then the report has normative import.
The Lousy Linguist has more data on British English if this topic is of interest. And even if it isn't.
Addendum
An equal but opposite stylistic infelicity is the adding of unnecessary prepositions. For example, 'Where's your car at?' instead of 'Where's your car?'
Agenda Fetishism
You know you're list-obsessive when, having completed a task, you add an entry to your 'to do' list just so you can cross it off.
…………………
Agenda is the plural of agendum, something to be done. The infinitive form of the corresponding verb is agere, to do.
Age quod agis is a well-known saying which is a sort of Latin call to mindfulness: do what you are doing. Be here now in the activity at hand.
Legend has it that Johnny Ringo was an educated man. (Not so: a story for later.) But so he is depicted over and over. In this scene from Tombstone, the best of the movies about Doc Holliday and the shoot-out at the O. K. Corral, Ringo trades Latinisms with the gun-totin' dentist, who was indeed an educated man and a fearless and deadly gunslinger to boot, his fearlessness a function of his 'consumption.' I don't mean his consumption of spirits, but his tuberculosis. His was the courage of an embittered man, close to death.
The translations in the video clip leave something to be desired. Age quod agis gets translated as 'do what you do best'; the literal meaning, however, is do what you are doing. Age is in the imperative mood; quod is 'what'; agis is the second person singular present tense of agere and means: 'you do' or 'you are doing.'
Word of the Day: ‘Eructation’
Eructation is simply a fancier, and some might argue a more decorous, word for "belch." "Eructation" was borrowed from Latin in the 15th century; the verb eruct, meaning "to belch," followed in the late 16th century. Both have their source in the Latin verb eructare, which is the frequentative form of erugere, meaning "to belch or disgorge." (A frequentative form is one that denotes a repeated or recurrent action or state.) "Eructare" shares an ancestor with Greek word ereugesthai as well as Old English "rocettan," both of which also mean "to belch."
The poverty of most people's vocabularies these days is enough to make one belch in disgust.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘Strange’ Songs
In three categories: Rock, Religion, Romanticism.
Cream, Strange Brew
Doors, People are Strange
Doors, Strange Days
Mickey and Sylvia, Love is Strange, 1956
Stanley Bros., Rank Strangers. Utterly deplorable.
Eva Cassidy, Wayfaring Stranger
Johnny Cash, Wayfaring Stranger
Frank Sinatra, Strangers in the Night To be is to do (Socrates). To do is to be (Sartre). Do be do be do (Sinatra).
Barbara Lewis, Hello Stranger, 1963. 1963 was arguably the best of the '60s years for pop compositions.
Emmylou Harris, Hello Stranger. Same title, different song. This one goes out to Mary Kay F-D. Remember the Fall of 1980, Mary Kay?
Get up, rounder/Let a working girl lie down/ You are rounder/And you are all out and down.
Carter Family version from 1939.
Acker Bilk, Stranger on the Shore. A memorable '60s instrumental. More here.
The Rise of Political Correctness
Angelo M. Codevilla's essay is essential reading. Restraining myself, I will quote only the opening paragraph:
“Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.”
“Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.”
he notion of political correctness came into use among Communists in the 1930s as a semi-humorous reminder that the Party’s interest is to be treated as a reality that ranks above reality itself. Because all progressives, Communists included, claim to be about creating new human realities, they are perpetually at war against nature’s laws and limits. But since reality does not yield, progressives end up pretending that they themselves embody those new realities. Hence, any progressive movement’s nominal goal eventually ends up being subordinated to the urgent, all-important question of the movement’s own power. Because that power is insecure as long as others are able to question the truth of what the progressives say about themselves and the world, progressive movements end up struggling not so much to create the promised new realities as to force people to speak and act as if these were real: as if what is correct politically—i.e., what thoughts serve the party’s interest—were correct factually.
Related: A Mistaken Definition of 'Political Correctness' and a 'Correct' One
The Stalinization of Trump Derangement Syndrome: “Show Me the Man, and I’ll Find You the Crime”
From a Cato Policy Report:
. . . Alan Dershowitz discusses his time litigating cases in the old Soviet Union. He was always taken by the fact that they could prosecute anybody they wanted because some of the statutes were so vague. Dershowitz points out that this was a technique developed by Beria, the infamous sidekick of Stalin, who said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” That really is something that has survived the Soviet Union and has arrived in the good old USA. “Show me the man,” says any federal prosecutor, “and I can show you the crime.” This is not an exaggeration.
And now Donald J. Trump, the legally elected president of the United States, is the man. To prosecute someone for a crime, some crime has to be alleged. But in this case what is the crime? Alan Dershowitz raises the question and answers it: there is no crime.
There is no evidence that Trump or his team colluded with the Kremlin to swing the election in Trump's favor. But even if there were, such collusion would be at worst political wrong doing, not a crime. This is not my opinion but the opinion of a distinguished Harvard law professor who is not a Trump supporter. As Dershowitz told Tucker Carlson last night, "I voted for Hillary Clinton very proudly."
Around 3:10 Dershowitz speaks of "hacking the DNA" several times. He means: hacking the DNC, the Democrat National Committee. Carlson failed to catch the mistake.
I now want to make a point that Dershowitz did not make last night, namely, that phrases like 'hacking the election' have no definite meaning. You can literally hack into John Podesta's e-mail account, but you can't literally hack an election. (It has been claimed that the password he employed was 'password.' Could Podesta be that stupid or careless? I am skeptical.) Of course, you could use 'hack an election' to mean 'influence an election,' but then you will have changed the subject. Almost all of us, from low-level bloggers to the most august pundits, were trying to 'hack the election' in the sense of 'influence the election.'
What we have here with the appointment of special prosecutor Robert Mueller is not an inquiry into whether a crime has been committed, but a witch hunt: a search for a nonexistent crime to pin on a much-hated man.
But didn't Trump obstruct justice by firing Comey? Is that not what is maintained by such powerful intellects as Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi? Of course not, as Dershowitz points out at 3:38 ff. Trump's firing of Comey was well within the president's constitutional rights. "Under the unitary theory of the executive, the president has the right to direct the justice department." I would add that the president fired Comey for good reason.
No doubt the 'optics' were bad: the firing looked self-serving. So the haters pounced suggesting that the only reason Trump fired Comey was because Comey was about to expose criminal acts by Trump. But that is just nonsense. Again: which criminal acts?
Even if Trump was sick of Comey and wanted him out for personal motives, he had solid impersonal legal reasons for firing him. They were set forth in the Rosenstein memorandum.
The Trump haters appear to be committing a version of the genetic fallacy. The psychological motivation of a claim or action is irrelevant to the question of the truth of the claim or the justifiability of the action. Had Hillary or Bernie or Jill or Jeb! been president, each would have been justified in firing Comey. Again, this is because of the availability of solid impersonal legal reasons for his firing. And you can bet all of Hillary's ugly pant-suits that she would have fired him had she won as she was 'supposed to.'
Heather Mac
Heather Mac Donald is a profile in civil courage in stark contrast to the cowardice of the university administrators who, in abdication of authority, allow leftist thugs to prevent her and other sensible people from speaking. As I have lately observed, the university is pretty much dead, not everywhere of course, and naturally I except the STEM disciplines.
When the authorities will not maintain order, then eventually others will, and things can turn very ugly very quickly.
Related: Civil Courage
National Security Agency
I was joking with somebody recently about blog backup.
"Why do I need to back up my blog?" said I. "The NSA has every word."
Joking aside, the underlying issue is a vexing one. There is no true liberty without security, but a security worth wanting must make allowance for a large measure of liberty.
It is a case of competing values. One of my early posts (13 May 2004) explores the dialectic. I gave it the catchy title, Liberty and Security. Damn, if it's not good! By the way, one of the many pleasures of blogging is re-reading and re-enjoying one's old writings.
Power Tools
Serendipitous! I spent the morning out in the desert practicing with my handguns. When I logged on afterward I found that Bill Keezer had referred me to an entry entitled Power Tools by Malcolm Pollack in which the latter quotes Col. Jeff Cooper. I want the quotation for my files:
Weapons are the tools of power. In the hands of the state, they can be the tools of decency or the tools of oppression, depending on the righteousness that state. In the hands of criminals, they are the tools of evil. In the hands of the free and decent citizen, they should be the tools of liberty. Weapons compound man’s power to achieve whatever purpose he may have. They amplify the capabilities of both the good man and the bad, and to exactly the same degree, having no will of their own. Thus, we must regard them as servants, not masters–and good servants of good men. Without them, man is diminished, and his opportunities to fulfill his destiny are lessened. An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it.
I haven't been able to find a source. As you know, I do not like unsourced quotations. It's the scholar in me. Paging Dave Lull! If cyberspace has a Head Librarian, Dave is the man.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it."
You are free to live unarmed, and for some this will be a wise course. A gun is not a talisman. Its mere presence won't protect you. To paraphrase Col. Jeff Cooper, owning a gun no more makes you armed than owning a guitar makes you a musician. You will need to get training, and you will need to throw thousands of (aimed!) rounds down range before you can consider yourself competent.
These are trying times. The thuggish elements among us are on the rise, and they are enabled by those in positions of authority. The wise hope for the best, and work for the best, but prepare for the worst. You might want to think about that as well as ask yourself: Which side am I on, and who is on my side?
Related: Colonel Jeff Cooper's Situational Awareness Color Codes. Very useful information along with commentary by me that is sure to cause snowflake melt-down.
UPDATE (5/20): Dave Lull sends us here, where you can find more Jeff Cooper quotations (unsourced) as well as a daughter's tribute to her father.
UPDATE 2 (5/20): Malcolm Pollack's follow-up post.
Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem
Nagel replies in the pages of NYRB (8 June 2017; HT: Dave Lull) to one Roy Black, a professor of bioengineering:
The mind-body problem that exercises both Daniel Dennett and me is a problem about what experience is, not how it is caused. The difficulty is that conscious experience has an essentially subjective character—what it is like for its subject, from the inside—that purely physical processes do not share. Physical concepts describe the world as it is in itself, and not for any conscious subject. That includes dark energy, the strong force, and the development of an organism from the egg, to cite Black’s examples. But if subjective experience is not an illusion, the real world includes more than can be described in this way.
I agree with Black that “we need to determine what ‘thing,’ what activity of neurons beyond activating other neurons, was amplified to the point that consciousness arose.” But I believe this will require that we attribute to neurons, and perhaps to still more basic physical things and processes, some properties that in the right combination are capable of constituting subjects of experience like ourselves, to whom sunsets and chocolate and violins look and taste and sound as they do. These, if they are ever discovered, will not be physical properties, because physical properties, however sophisticated and complex, characterize only the order of the world extended in space and time, not how things appear from any particular point of view.
The problem might be condensed into an aporetic triad:
1) Conscious experience is not an illusion.
2) Conscious experience has an essentially subjective character that purely physical processes do not share.
3) The only acceptable explanation of conscious experience is in terms of physical properties alone.
Take a little time to savor this problem. Note first that the three propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. Any two limbs entail the negation of the remaining one. Note second that each limb exerts a strong pull on our acceptance. But we cannot accept them all because they are logically incompatible.
Which proposition should we reject? Dennett, I take it, would reject (1). But that's a lunatic solution as Professor Black seems to appreciate, though he puts the point more politely. When I call Dennett a sophist, as I have on several occasions, I am not abusing him; I am underscoring what is obvious, namely, that the smell of cooked onions, for example, is a genuine datum of experience, and that such phenomenological data trump scientistic theories.
Sophistry aside, we either reject (2) or we reject (3). Nagel and I accept (1) and (2) and reject (3). Black, and others of the scientistic stripe, accept (1) and (3) and reject (2).
I appreciate the appeal of the naturalistic-scientistic worldview and I don't dismiss it in the way I dismiss eliminativism about the mental:
Look, there is just one world, this physical world, and we are physical parts of it including all your precious thoughts, moods, and sensations. If you are serious about explaining consciousness, then you have to explain it the way you explain everything else: in terms of our best natural science. With the progress of science over the centuries, more and more of what hitherto was thought inexplicable scientifically has been explained. The trend is clear: science is increasingly de-mystifying the world, and it is a good induction that one day it will have wholly de-mystified it and will have cut off every obscurantist escape route into the Cloud Cuckoo Land of religion/superstition.
It is essential to see, however, that this worldview is precisely that, a worldview, and therefore just another philosophy. This is what makes it scientistic as opposed to scientific. Scientism is not science, but philosophy. Scientism is the epistemology of naturalism, where naturalism is not science but ontology. No natural science can prove that reality is exhausted by the physical, and no natural science can prove that all and only the scientifically knowable is knowable.
But it is not irrational to be a naturalist and a scientisticist — an ugly word for an ugly thing — in the way that it is irrational to be an eliminativist. But is also not irrational to reject naturalism and scientism.
And so the strife of systems will continue. People like me will continue to insist that qualia, intentionality, conscience, normativity, reason, truth and other things cannot be explained naturalistically. Those on the other side will keep trying. Let them continue, with vigor. The more they fail, the better we look.
Do those on our side have a hidden religious agenda? Some do. But Nagel doesn't. He is just convinced that the naturalist project doesn't work. Nagel rejects theism, and I believe he says somewhere that he very much does not want it to be the case that religion is true.
Nagel, then, has no religious agenda. But this did not stop numerous prominent, but viciously leftist, academics from attacking him after he published Mind and Cosmos. See the following articles of mine:
Should Nagel's Book be on the Philosophical Index Librorum Prohibitorum?
Political ‘Circularity’
Democrats know how to circle the wagons, stand together, and refrain from attacking their own. Republicans seem to prefer the circular firing squad. And the Libertarians? Theirs is the self-indulgent circle jerk of those who will never have power.