Category: Intentionality

Semantic Engines, Consciousness, Intentionality, and Understanding

John Haugeland:

The basic idea of cognitive science is that intelligent beings are semantic engines – in other words, automatic formal systems with interpretations under which they consistently make sense. [This puts]  psychology and artificial intelligence on a more or less equal footing: people and intelligent computers [are] different manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon. (p. 15)

“The basic idea of cognitive science” is what John Searle calls Strong Artificial Intelligence.  “On the Strong AI view, the appropriately programmed digital computer does not just simulate having a mind, it literally has a mind.” (Mind: A Brief Introduction, Oxford UP 2004, p. 66) Searle does not, however, endorse Haugeland’s view. The latter — call it H — implies that there is no good reason to think that the  (natural) intelligence in us  must be any different  in kind from the (artificial) intelligence that is now present in some computers.   My view is that there is good reason to doubt it, and what’s more, deny it.

But if I have reason to deny (H), then it is incumbent upon me to explain why. No bare assertions allowed. (Quod gratis asseritur gratis negatur.) I will defend what Hauegeland calls the Hollow Shell Strategy.  The following quotations are from an  accurate summary of Haugeland’s above-cited article, a summary  written by someone else.

Hollow Shell: however well a semantic engine acts as if it understands, it can’t really do so because it’s missing some vital ingredient “X”. A robot based on a semantic engine would be a sham no matter how good it got. Candidates for “X” are consciousness, original intentionality and caring.

I will consider in this post just consciousness and original intentionality.

X = Consciousness: however smart computers might seem, they can’t really understand anything because they aren’t conscious. It’s natural to suppose something difficult and important has been left out. Haugeland responds by saying that no one understands consciousness – it’s mysterious regardless of your viewpoint. So, how do we know (a) that understanding is impossible without consciousness or (b) that semantic engines won’t ever have consciousness?

NON-INTENTIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The first step  is to distinguish between consciousness (non-intentional consciousness) and consciousness-of. The latter is what philosophers call intentionality or object-directedness.  A conscious state need not be an intentional or object-directed state.  Felt sensations of pain and pleasure, for example, needn’t present an object: they needn’t be of or about anything in the way my noticing that the door is ajar about the door’s being ajar. I have found that it is very difficult to get this distinction across to some people. I’ll try once more.

You are pedaling your bike and you feel  something you describe as ‘pain in the right knee.’ Is that felt pain literally in your knee? No.  What is literally inside the knee is at most the cause of the felt pain:  an X-ray reveals that you are ‘bone-on-bone’: the meniscus has worn away and the femur is grinding against the tibia.  The X-ray reveals the cause. The cause is physical; the pain you feel is not physical, but mental. Follow me so far?

The felt pain — the pain as sensory quale — does not show up on the X-ray slide, nor will the felt pain be empirically detected by an orthopedic surgeon who cuts into the knee and looks around in there.  The point is this: the felt pain is a conscious state that is not an intentional state.  The conscious state has no intentional object;  it is not object-directed; it does not present an object to the person in the state; it does not ‘take an accusative.’ These are four different ways of saying the same thing.

So far I have made two simple distinctions. The first is between the physical/material cause of the felt pain and the felt pain as mental /conscious sensory quale. The second is between conscious states that are not object-directed and those that are.

What is a conscious state? A conscious state is an occurrent episode of awareness. I have just alluded to a third distinction between the occurrent and the dispositional.  Another technical term is ‘act,’ not to be confused with ‘action.’ (A fourth distinction.) An act is an occurrent episode of awareness (consciousness) that takes an object. No act without an object and no object without an act.  ‘Object’ in this context means intentional object, where such an object may or may not exist without prejudice to its being an intentional object.  So we distinguish between merely intentional objects and intentional objects that also exist in reality, i.e., extra-mentally. (I’ve just made a fifth distinction).  If I ever get a tattoo, it will read Distinguo ergo sum.

There are other points to be made but I must move on.

If we use ‘qualia’ to refer to the non-intentional conscious states one of which I  have just  described, then Daniel Dennett is a qualia-denier. His opposite number is Thomas Nagel, a qualia-affirmer. To put it bluntly and polemically: Thomas Nagel is for me the real thing as philosophers go; Daniel Dennett is a brilliant sophist. But he is indeed brilliant and creative and his work cannot be ignored. His work functions as a very useful and richly elaborated foil against which to develop saner and sounder theories, theories that have a chance of being true.

Killer Quotation from Nagel from a  NYRB review.

I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”

That’s right. When a line of reasoning issues in an absurdity such as the absurdity that consciousness and its deliverances are illusions, then what you have is a reductio ad absurdum of one or more of the premises with which the reasoning began.  Dennett assumes physicalism and that everything can be explained in physical terms.  This leads to absurdity. But Dennett, blinded by his own brilliance — don’t forget, he counts himself one of the ‘brights’ — bites the bullet. He’d rather break his teeth than examine his assumptions.

Another thing struck me. Dennett makes much of Wilfrid Sellars’ distinction between the manifest and scientific images. ‘Image’ is not quite the right word. An image is someone’s image. But whose image is the scientific image? Who is its subject? It is arguably our image no less than the manifest image.  Nagel quotes Dennett as saying of the manifest image: “It’s the world according to us.”  But the same, or something very similar, is true of the scientific image: it’s the world in itself according to us.  Talk of molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, and strings is our talk just as much as talk of colors and plants and animals and haircuts and home runs.

The world of physics is the world as it is in itself according to us.  Arguably, the ‘according to us’ gets the upper hand over the ‘in itself’ relativizing what comes within the former’s  scope much like Kant’s transcendental prefix, Ich denke.  Das ‘ich denke’ muss alle meine Vorstellungen begleiten koennen . . . .  “The ”I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations.” (KdrV, B 131-2)

Arguably, the world of physics is a mind-involving construct arrived at by excluding the mental and abstracting away from the first-person point of view and the life world (Husserl’s Lebenswelt) it reveals.  I am alluding to an idealist approach to the problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view.  It has its own problems. But why is it inferior to a view like Dennett’s which eliminates as illusory obvious data that are plainly not illusory?

Time was when absolute idealism was the default position in philosophy. Think back to the days of Bradley and Bosanquet. But reaction set in, times have changed, and the Zeitgeist is now against the privileging of Mind and for the apotheosis of Matter.  (But again, matter as construed by us. Arguably, the scientific realist reifies theoretical constructs that we create and employ to make sense of experience.)  Because idealism is out of vogue, the best and brightest are not drawn to its defense, and the brilliant few it attracts are too few to make much headway against the prevailing winds.

Now I’ll tell you what I really think. The problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view is genuine and perhaps the deepest of all philosophical problems. But it is insoluble by us.  If it does have a solution, however, it certainly won’t be anything like Dennett’s.

Although Dennett’s positive theory is worthless, his excesses are extremely useful in helping us see just how deep and many-sided and intractable the problems are.

IS CONSCIOUSNESS MYSTERIOUS?

Haugeland says it is, above.

My response is that consciousness is mysterious only if you insist on trying to understand it in materialist or  naturalist terms.  For if you try to understand it in these terms, then you are approaching it from a third-person point of view and are bound to miss it.  From the first-person point of view, it is self-evidently certain that there is consciousness.  Nagel 1; Dennett 0.

It is also self-evidently certain that there is consciousness of objects. ‘Consciousness of objects’ is a genitivus objectivus. So consciousness of objects = object-directed consciousness.  If something is appearing to you, you are conscious of it.

Is anything appearing to you right now?  How about the computer in front of you, the desk upon which it sits, and so on.  Plenty of objects are appearing. This is undeniable.  The question is not whether appearing objects exist apart from their appearing. The question is whether any objects are appearing. You will miss the simple point I am making if you think that consciousness, to be real, must itself appear as a particular object among objects.  It does not and cannot since it is what makes possible the appearing of objects in the first place.

Do you understand the sentences you are now reading? You do. So  the  sentences and the words  in them are  appearing.   If there were no object-directed consciousness, you would not understand anything you are reading or hearing.  Indeed, you would not be reading or hearing at all. Are the words appearing to a Cartesian res cogitans, an immaterial thinking substance? I didn’t say anything about that. I am simply pointing out the obvious phenomenological fact that objects are appearing. The words you are reading are appearing to you as objects of visual consciousness.

So the answer to (a) above in the second quotation is this:  we know that understanding without consciousness is impossible because  without consciousness nothing would appear that could be understood or not understood.  ‘Consciousness’ here is of course  consciousness-of.

As for (b) — How do we know that semantic engines (automatic formal systems) won’t ever  have consciousness?  — the question makes no sense since it contradicts the very idea of a semantic engine.  For Haugeland, a semantic engine is one in which the “semantics takes care of itself” once the proper syntactic operations are up and running. But there is no semantics in such a contraption and the semantics cannot “take care of itself” because you cannot get meaning from merely syntactic manipulations of uninterpreted symbols.   What makes a symbol a full-fledged symbol is its interpretation by an Original Intender (an Original Sinn-er, to make Fregean pun out of it).

Computers running programs are wholly meaning -free in and of themselves. All meaning originates from us.

X = Original Intentionality: a semantic engine’s tokens only have meaning because we give meaning to them; their intentionality is derivative, and they don’t mean anything by their tokens any more than books do. Genuine understanding is intentional in its own right and isn’t derived from something else. Haugeland’s response is that actions prove intentionality. Books don’t act, so their intentionality is the author’s, but this isn’t a real counter-example. Robots might be made which act in an intelligent, self-motivated and responsive manner – and seem to act on its opinions, defend them or modify them, which would suggest that they were the robot’s own opinions. So, the response is similar to the last one; original intentionality depends on whether the object has a suitable structure and / or dispositions relative to its environment, so how do we know semantic engines can’t have it?

Haugeland’s response to the objection from original intentionality gives me no good reason to change my view.  He allows that the derivative intentionality of a book comes from the original intentionality of its author but disallows books as counterexamples because they don’t act. That’s true of most books: they just ‘sit’ on the shelf and don’t do anything.  But audio books speak to us, thereby acting.  Will Haugeland say that audio books are self-motivated and act in an intelligent way?  I hope not. As for robots, all Haugeland is able to show is that robots SIMULATE human actions and SIMULATE human thought processes. Beyond that, he is simply begging the question.

I do grant, however, that it really would be wonderful if we could understand the mind-brain relation in us as just a special case of the relation of software to hardware /wetware in a machine running a program. It it easy to understand how cognitive scientists got unduly excited over the prospects of this research program.

The fundamental error of Dennett, Haugeland, et al. is the mistake of thinking that an exhaustive understanding of everything is achievable from a third-person point of view.  And so Dennett attempts the absurd task of explaining consciousness by explaining it away — which issues in the self-refuting claim that consciousness is an illusion.  I explain this in detail in my Substack article Can Consciousness be Explained? Dennett Debunked.

Original and Derived Intentionality, Circles, and Regresses 2.0

I dust off, revise, and expand this old entry in connection with discussions with Malcolm Pollack, Dmitri D. et al. about artificial intelligence. One of the questions is whether AI systems are subjects of intrinsic intentional states.  I incline to the view that they are not. Since intentional states are meaning-laden, I further incline to the view that no AI system, not even the most advanced LLMs, understand language or anything else.  They are merely syntactic engines.

………………………….

1.  Intentionality: Original and Derived

All will agree that there is a distinction to be made between original (intrinsic) and derived intentionality. Intentionality is aboutness. For example, a map is not the terrain it maps; the map is about the terrain. What makes the map about the terrain? A map is not about a chunk of terrain and its geological features just in virtue of the map’s physical and geometrical properties. Consider the contour lines on a topographical map. The closer together, the steeper the terrain. Closer together means  steeper. But surely the lines and their arrangement have no representational power in themselves. That closer together should mean steeper is a meaning assigned by map-makers and agreed to by map-users.  

The point is that a map’s meaning is not intrinsic to the map qua physical object. The meaning derives from us. There has to be one or more meaning-assigners and meaning-apprehenders external to the map to give the map a meaning and determine what that meaning is.  The map’s intentionality is derivative: it derives, or has it source in, our intentionality, which is original.   

So some things, maps for example, derive their semantic properties from other things, map-makers and map-users, for example.  Semantics has to do with sense and reference.  ‘Meaning’ covers both.  Setting sense aside for now, the reference or referent of a map is that to which it purports to refer.   

But note that a map needn’t actually refer to anything to be a map.  It need only purport to refer. This is a well-known characteristic feature of intentionality or aboutness or object-directedness: the existence in reality of the intentional object does not follow from the fact that something intends it.  Thus the existence in reality of a chunk of terrain does not follow from the existence of a map of it.   The map below purports to refer to something extra-cartographically real, but fails in its purport. It is no less a map for all that.

Suppose I draw you a map so that you can find my camp in the extra-cartographically real Superstition Wilderness. I use the Greek uppercase Φ to mark my camp and the Greek uppercase Ψ to mark the camp of a heavily-armed crazy man that you are well advised to avoid. I intend that Φ designate my camp, and Ψ his. That intending (narrow sense) is a case of intentionality (broad sense). I am the meaning-assigner.  I assign a referent to the Greek symbols, thereby making those inscriptions mean (refer to) something, symbolize something.

A symbol may be viewed for certain purposes as a purely syntactic unit. To view it this way  is to abstract  from its semantic properties. A symbol in use, however, a symbol that symbolizes, a symbol that exercises its symbolic function, is a syntactic unit that means something other than it, and is therefore more than a merely syntactic unit.  A syntactic engine is a machine that manipulates symbols qua syntactic units, ‘tokens’ is what the AI guys call them.   A computer is just a syntactic engine.  The same is true of the most advanced AI systems. The manipulation of symbols as mere syntactic units cannot confer meaning upon them.  Such ‘manipulation’  is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for meaning.

Or at least this is a question we need to consider. I incline to the view that, just as you cannot squeeze blood from a stone, you cannot squeeze semantics from syntactics.  No AI system, not even the most advanced LLM,  can by itself, mean anything or understand anything.  

It is also important to note that the very distinction between syntax and semantics presupposes languages and understanding, and thus presupposes the antecedent ‘marriage’  of  the syntactic and semantic. How then can we reduce the latter to the former?  I’ll spell this out in later posts.

I have said enough to make clear the difference between derived and original intentionality. The symbols on my map derive their intentionality or aboutness from my intentionality which, relative to theirs, is original. But if the origin of their intentionality is in me, and not in them, might it not be the case that my intentionality is itself derived? After all, it does not follow from the fact that I am the source of the intentionality of the symbols on my map that my intentionality does not itself have a source. But if so, then a regress threatens which appears to be both infinite and vicious. But before discussing this further, I need to bring in another point.

2.  Ascriptivism Versus Realism

Daniel Dennett appears to hold an ascriptivist or projectivist or imputationalist or instrumentalist theory of intentionality: nothing is an intentional system intrinsically or an sich; a system is intentional only in virtue of someone’s assigning intentional states to it. Thus there is no intrinsic intentionality in my computer (when it is running a chess program or any program).  But it may be nonetheless useful to take up the “intentional stance” vis-a-vis the computer and impute to it beliefs and desires (e.g., the desire to inflict mate) in order to explain its behavior. Given the computer’s complexity, the intentional stance promises an easier explanation than the physical and design stances do.

A realist about intentionality, on the other hand, is someone who holds that some systems really are intrinsically intentional: their having beliefs and desires and other object-directed states is not a matter of anyone’s viewing them as having such states.  I am a realist: some systems are intrinsically intentional.  But there are two ways to be a realist.

One way  is by being a reductive realist. Such a person admits the reality of intentional states but identifies them with something believed to be more fundamental such as brain states. If you believe, with Fred Dretske, that intentionality does not need naturalizing, but already is a natural phenomenon in the natural world, then you are presumably a reductive realist about intentionality. You are saying this: there is intrinsic intentionality, but it is physical in nature.

I’m a realist too, but a nonreductive one: I hold that intentionality is irreducibly real: it cannot be reduced to, or identified with, anything else. It is what it is and not some other thing. It is what it is and it is spiritual in nature. Part of the reason I believe this is because the alternatives are quite hopeless.  But what on earth or in heaven does ‘spiritual’ mean?  This is a challenge I face.

3. The Ascriptivist Regress 

Back to Dennett. Suppose one takes the ascriptivist line. Then an infinite regress appears unavoidable. Suppose I ascribe intentionality to my chess playing computer. Quite obviously, my ascribing, projecting, imputing, is itself an intentional state or a series of such states. So if ascriptivism is true, then my acts of ascribing must themselves be ascribed — otherwise they are intrinsic and Danny’s game is over. This launches us on a regress that is obviously infinite since at each level, one can “kick it up a notch.” It is also clear that this regress (unlike the truth regress) is vicious since at no level is the explanation of intentionality complete.

One might think to avoid the regress by embracing a circle: I ascribe intentional states to the computer and it ascribes intentional states to me. But surely this is even more of an absurdity for reasons that needn’t be belabored.

The upshot is that pure ascriptivism is incoherent, an utter non-starter. Dennett’s actual view is a bit different. 

4. Adulterated Ascriptivism : Homunculism

Perhaps the solution is to mix some realism in with the ascriptivism. Maybe it goes like this. I have a head full of homunculi. These little men and women, working together, ascribe intentionality to me. But each homunculus has its intentionality ascribed to it by other, stupider, homunculi which are constituents of it. The stupider homunculi, in turn, are composed of even stupider ones, and so on until we get to the level of individual neurons which aren’t ‘about’ anything. The base level homunculi are so stupid that one could say that they don’t even rise to the level of being either stupid or intelligent.

Does this avoid the dilemma of having to choose between a vicious infinite regress and a vicious circle? What Dennett is proposing is a finite regress that terminates with something naturalistically acceptable, namely entities that lack intrinsic or original intentionality.

Admittedly, this proposal gets rid of the infinity of the regress, but not its viciousness: we still have no explanation of intentionality. Consider the base-level homunculi. They are so primitive as to lack all intentionality. How then can they ascribe intentionality to their colleagues one level up? Surely it is obvious that the ascribing of intentionality is itself an intentional act or series thereof.

The point is quite simple. If the regress terminates with base entities utterly devoid of intentionality, then no higher level entities will be intentional. For the higher-ups get their intentionality only from the ones lower down in the hierarchy. If the ones at the very bottom have no intentionality, then they can’t transmit it up. But if, on the other hand, the ones at the very bottom possess intentionality, then it is false that all intentionality is derived.

In the final analysis, Dennett is an eliminativist about intentionality. His position amounts in the end to the denial of intentionality. To see this, you just have to think clearly. Dennett is saying that all intentionality is derivative, none is intrinsic or original. But that makes sense only if one embraces an infinite regress. But in this case an infinite regress must be vicious. On the other hand, a regress that terminates either terminates with entities that are intrinsically intentional or entities that are not. If the former, the game is over. If the latter, no intentionality gets transmitted up and Dennett is an eliminativist about intentionality just as he is an eliminativist about consciousness and qualia.

Mental Change and the Potency-Act Distinction: Response to Tom Carroll

Tom Carroll comments:

Moments ago I imagined a red sailboat. Now that imagined sailboat is blue. Immaterial things change constantly, rapidly, ceaselessly. So there *must* be a principle of change operating at the immaterial level. Potency — understood as the principle of change — must apply beyond the matter/form of the mundane world.

In an earlier comment, Tom had written,

[Gavin] Kerr says, “In bringing the potentially existing essence into existence, esse is not received in some distinct pre-existing essence bringing about a change therein, but actuates the essence whole and complete… [W]hen God creates, He brings into existence the essence-esse composite all at once.”

The earlier comment got me thinking about whether it makes sense to apply the potency-act distinction, which first surfaces in Greek philosophy in an attempt to understand change in the material world, to the problem of divine creation, given that God’s creating, though it has as one of its products the material world of space, time, and change, is not a material process.   In classical theism, the main representative of which I take to be Thomas Aquinas, divine creation is creatio ex nihilo, which implies, first of all, that creating is not the forming of a pre-existent matter.  But it also implies that divine creation is not ex possibilitate.  Accordingly, God creates out of nothing, not out of mere possibles.

Although Kerr is surely right that on classical theism God does not create out of mere possibles, he seems to hold, in line with traditional doctrine, that divine creating is an actuating of potencies.  This raises the question of the difference between the actuating of mere possibles and the actuating of potencies, which in turn raises the question of the difference between mere possibles and potencies.  It occurred to me that this might involve an illicit metabasis eis allo genos, which is something like a Rylean category mistake, where a term is transferred from a sphere where it belongs to a sphere where it doesn’t belong.  Can we legitimately speak of change, i.e., the conversion of potency  into act, with respect to a spiritual (and thus immaterial) process such as divine creating?  Again, the creating of a material world is not a material process.

The problem assumes an even sharper form when we consider that God creates not only  material things, but also immaterial spirits.  He creates angels  — which in their ‘natural and proper state’ are unembodied — and he creates human beings — which in their ‘natural and proper state’ are embodied, but possibly such as to exist in a disembodied state between death and resurrection.

Angels are contingent beings, which is why they need creating.  Now if the creating of an angel is the actuating of a potency, and not the actuating of a pre-existent essence (a mere possible),  what and ‘where’ is the potency which, when actuated, becomes the angel Gabriel, say, or for that matter, the angel Lucifer, the light-bearer?  Don’t potencies need to be grounded in something actual?  And what might that be in the case of angels? Closer to the ground, what might that be in the case of material things?  If there are no ‘free-floating’ mere possibles, then how could there be ‘free-floating’ unactuated potencies?  Are we forced to say that these potencies are grounded in God? But then we are drifting toward the heretical view that divine creation is creatio ex Deo.

The orthodox — miniscule ‘o’ — position is creatio ex nihilo.  It aims to avoid three competing views: creatio ex Deo; demiurgic creation out of a pre-existent uncreated stuff; creatio ex possibilitate.

This is all  very tricky, but to a guy like me unutterably fascinating.  It lurks in the background of my conversation with Tom.  I will now address Tom’s first comment above. He is attempting to refute my suggestion — not a dogmatic pronunciamento — that the potency-act distinction is legitimately deployed only in the analysis of change in the material world and thus not in the analysis of divine creating which, again, is not a material process like the calcification of the aortic valve.

RESPONSE TO TOM CARROLL

First of all, is a boat an immaterial thing?  No, a boat, whether merely imagined or real, is a material thing.  I of course grant that there are immaterial things.  But a boat is not one of them. A merely imagined boat is not an immaterial thing, but a nonexistent material thing.  I do not grant that to exist is to be material. And so I do not grant that not to exist is to be immaterial.

Second, how does Tom know that the blue boat he imagines at time t* (t*> t) is numerically the same as the boat he imagined at t?  Suppose Tom owns a red boat, which he then paints blue.  In this case we naturally say that numerically one and the same boat that was red is now blue. A scholastic would call this a case of accidental (as opposed to substantial) change. I call it diachronic alterational change and distinguish it from diachronic existential change, as when a thing first comes into existence and then later passes out of existence. That too is change, but surely not an accidental or alterational change.  Before a thing comes to exist it is not there to undergo a change, and the same holds after it ceases to exist. On either end there is no substrate of alteration. No substrate, no alteration of a substrate. (This raises the difficult question of how to account for substantial/ existential change. I hold that the scholastic appeal to materia prima (prime matter) is unavailing.)

Back to Tom’s two boats. In the case of the merely imagined red boat and the merely imagined blue boat, the natural thing to say is that the two boats are numerically distinct. They are numerically distinct merely intentional objects. They are numerically distinct because they differ property-wise: one is red while the other is blue (and therefore not red).  I am assuming the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a principle than which no more luminous can be conceived. Roughly formulated, it states that if x = y, then x, y share all properties.  Contrapositively, if x, y are such that x has a property that y lacks, or vice versa, then it is not the case that x = y. Call it the Discernibility of the Diverse. The two principles are logically equivalent. And note that despite the traditional terminology, with its epistemic flavor, neither are epistemological principles.  Both are ontological.

I am making the following points against Tom. First, merely imagined material things are not immaterial but nonexistent. Second, there is no reason to think that a merely imagined red boat is numerically the same as a merely imagined blue boat, even if all the non-color properties of the boats are imagined to be the same. Third, no alteration of one and the same item has taken place in his example. Fourth, the view that alterational change is the conversion of potency into act is just one theory of such change among others and cannot just be assumed but must be argued for.  Fifth, the very notion of potency is unclear especially if thought to float free of an actual item in which it is grounded.

 

The Hard Problem in the Philosophy of Mind: Comments on Vlastimil Vohanka

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COMMENTS

What is the so-called ‘hard problem’? Vlastimil thinks it is the problem of specifying which natural (physical) item a given mental item is identical to.  But this is a misuse of the term ‘hard problem.’ As  used in contemporary literature, its meaning is rather more specific.  Although the problem so-labelled has been around for a long time, the label ‘hard problem’ as used in contemporary discussions was first introduced by David Chalmers in a 1995 article and then fully explained in his 1996 book The Conscious Mind.  It is to be understood by contrast with (supposedly) ‘easy problems’ in the philosophy of mind.  So what is the hard problem?  And what is an example of a (supposedly)  easy problem?

The Hard Problem

Suppose I inadvertently touch a hot stove top, experience a pain sensation, and withdraw my hand.  My behavior (stove-touching, hand-withdrawal) is third-person accessible: I see it and others around  me see it. And if no one around me is present? They could see it if they were present.  But surely there is more to pain than pain-behavior. There is the sensation itself.  But what is the sensation itself?  There are two ways of considering it. In one way it too is third-person accessible or outwardly observable. In the other way it is not.

The first way is by taking the pain sensation to be a state or event or process literally internal to (spatially inside of) the organism. In the present example, the organism is the animal  that wears my clothes. So the sensation is a physical process occurring in BV’s brain-body composite. This physical process is then plausibly taken to be the salient cause of the aversive behavior whether physical or verbal  (the hand-withdrawal and/or various spoken obscenities.)

The second way I’ll call phenomenological. The subject of the painful experience simply attends by introspection to the felt pain precisely as it is felt while bracketing (in roughly Husserl’s sense) all such considerations as the causation of the experience and its location in the organism.  In so doing, the subject does not deny that the felt pain has a cause or that the pain has neural correlates located in the brain. He does not even doubt their existence.  He simply leaves those factors out of consideration, and makes no use of them, the better to focus on the undeniable (pace Dennett the Denier) phen0menological datum, the felt pain precisely as it is felt. The subject focuses his attention exclusively on the phenomenal or qualitative features of the experience he is enduring.

The so-called ‘hard problem’ can now be stated. It is the problem of giving an account, consistent with (metaphysical) naturalism, of these qualitative features or properties of sensations,  the so-called qualia (singular: quale), when the sensations are taken, not behavioristically, nor neuro-scientifically, but precisely as they themselves appear from the first-person point of view (POV) of  the subjects who consciously experience them. There is something it is like to experience the phenomenal pain consequent on touching a hot stove. This Nagelian ‘what it is like’ is undeniably real — is there anything more real than pain? — but it cannot be slotted into a wholly third-personal naturalistic ontology. The felt pain is ineluctably subjective: there is simply no place for it in a naturalist world-scheme.

Now suppose you are, for whatever reasons, committed to that naturalist scheme. Then you face a very hard problem indeed, so hard, I would say, as to count as insoluble.  The problem is well-formulated in the inconsistent triad  Vlastimil cites at the top of the page.  Scroll up and take another look at it.  The third proposition cannot be denied on pain of the naturalist’s ceasing to be a naturalist.  The first cannot be denied unless our naturalist is an eliminativist about consciousness, a position with absolute nothing to recommend it. The naturalist’s only hope is somehow to hold onto the second proposition  — consciousness is not physical.   But how? By going mysterian.  But first a word about easy problems, one of which is intentionality.

A (Supposedly) Easy Problem

Not every episode of consciousness is object-directed.  The felt pain I have been using as an example is not object-directed, or an instance of intentionality.  It has a cause outside the body, the hot stove, and a neural correlate inside the brain, Delta-A fiber excitation let us suppose, but the felt pain does not reveal or display or make manifest anything in the way my seeing of a glorious Arizona sunset reveals said sunset to me.  The pain is not of or about anything; the seeing is. We have to distinguish between consciousness and consciousness-of.  Of course, an episode of consciousness-of may have some associated qualia, if I am, say, watching a glorious sunset or moonrise, but there are qualia free object-directed mental states. But this is a complicated special topic we cannot now discuss.  I will just refer you to an earlier entry, Intentionality not a ‘Hard Problem’ for Physicalists?

Mysterianism

What our friend Vlastimil is calling mysterianism about consciousness I take to be the thesis that, while humans either do or can — unclear which he means — know that, in general, every mental item (whether intentional or non-intentional)  is identical to some natural item or other, what they cannot know, and what must remain a mystery to them, is whether any given mental item such as a phenomenal pain felt on a given occasion by a particular subject is both natural and mental.  They cannot know it as both mental and physical.  While experiencing headache pain, for example, I can and do know it self-evidently to be a mental datum, but  I cannot also know it to be wholly natural, even if in reality it is!  Thus our friend is advocating the mysterianism of Colin McGinn.

Vlastimil  distinguishes this mysterian form of naturalism about the mind from an old-school anti-naturalist mysterianism according to which we cannot recognize mental items to be natural items because there are no natural items to which they could be identical.

But here I must raise a question about the tenability of this distinction. If a particular felt pain cannot be identified with, and thus reduced to, a particular instance of Delta-A fiber stimulation because the former has properties the latter cannot have, and vice versa, why call this mysterianism?  Where is the mystery? What we would have  here is a straight-forward  argument which, if sound, shows that some or all mental items cannot be reduced to natural items. What we would have is an argument for dualism, whether property dualism or substance dualism.

To have a mystery in the strict sense you need propositions that appear and cannot fail to appear to intellects of our constitution as logically inconsistent, but in reality, and beyond our ken, are somehow consistent. Trinity and Incarnation are mysteries in this sense.

Similarly for McGinn: We cannot understand how qualia, which are undeniably real, are identical to natural items, and yet they are!  It is imply beyond our ken.  Our cognitive architecture is so structured as to disallow any insight on our part as to how this pain I am feeling is nothing more than a physical occurrence!

Is the World Inconceivable Apart from Consciousness? (Version 2.0)

That depends. It depends on what ‘world’ means.

Steven Nemes quotes Dermot Moran on the former’s Facebook page:

[1] In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. [2] Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. [3] For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness.  [4] The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. [5] Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. (Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, p. 144.)

This strikes me as confused. I will go through it line by line. I have added numbers in brackets for ease of reference.

Ad [1]. I basically agree.  But while conscious acts cannot be properly understood from within die natürliche  Einstellung, it doesn’t follow that they cannot be understood “at all” from within the natural attitude or what Moran is calling the natural outlook. So I would strike the “at all.” I will return to this issue at the end.

Ad [2].  Here the trouble begins. I grant that conscious acts cannot be properly understood in wholly materialistic or naturalistic terms. They cannot be understood merely as events in the natural world. For example, my thinking about Boston cannot be reduced to anything going in my brain or body when I am thinking about Boston. Conscious acts are object-directed. They have the property philosophers call ‘intentionality.’  Intentionality resists naturalistic reduction.

And I grant that there is a sense in which there would not be a world for us in the first place if there were no consciousness. A world for us is a world that appears to us as conscious beings.

But note the equivocation on ‘world.’ It is first used to refer to nature itself, and then used to refer to the openness or apparentness of nature, nature as it appears to us and has meaning for us.  Obviously, without consciousness, nature would not appear, but this is not to say that consciousness is the reason why there is a natural world in the first place.  To say that would be to embrace a form of idealism.

Ad [3] We are now told that this is not “a subjective idealism.” I agree.  But note that the world that is disclosed and made meaningful is not the world that is inconceivable without consciousness.  The equivocation on ‘world’ persists.  There is world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense as the ‘space’ within which things are disclosed and become manifest, and there is world as the things disclosed.  These are plainly different even if there is no epistemic access to the latter except via the former.

Ad [4] Therefore, to be precise, we should say that the world as the ‘space of disclosure’ is inconceivable without consciousness. But this ‘space of disclosure’ is not the same as the natural world, which is not inconceivable without consciousness.  If you say that it is, then you are adopting a form of metaphysical idealism, which is what Husserl in the end does.

In the end, he reduces Being to Meaning (Sein to Seinsinn) or Being (Sein) to ontic validity (Seinsgeltung).  Accordingly, beings in the world are constituted (a piece of Husserlian jargon) as beings by transcendental consciousness.  This is the upshot of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. What we naively take in the natural attitude to exist in themselves, on their ontological own, so to speak, things like rocks and planets and galaxies, are in truth intentional objectivities constituted in transcendental consciousness.

Ad [5] In the final sentence, ‘world’ clearly refers to the physical realm, nature. I agree that it would be a mistake to reify consciousness, to identify it with any physical thing or process. Consciousness plays a disclosive role. It is pre-mundane, transcendental.  As OF the world — genitivus objectivus — consciousness is not IN the world. But the world in this sense, the world that consciousness is not IN, is conceivable apart from consciousness.  If it were not, then Roman Ingarden’s realism and Thomist realism, and other types, would not be conceivable, which they plainly are.

And so the confusion remains.  The world in the specifically phenomenological sense, the world as the ‘space’ within which things are disclosed — compare Heidegger’s Lichtung or clearing — is inconceivable without consciousness. But the world as that which is disclosed, opened up, gelichtet, made manifest and meaningful, is NOT inconceivable apart from consciousness. If you maintain otherwise, then you are embracing a form of metaphysical idealism.

So I’d say that Moran and plenty of others are doing the ‘Continental Shuffle’ as I call it: they are sliding back and forth between two senses  of ‘world.’  Equivalently, they are conflating the ontic and the broadly epistemic.  I appreciate their brave attempt at undercutting the subject-object dichotomy and the idealism-realism problematic.  But the brave attempt does not succeed.  A mental act of outer perception, say, is intrinsically intentional or object-directed: by its very sense it purports to be of or about something that exists apart from any and all mental acts to which it appears.  To speak like a Continental, the purport is ‘inscribed in the very essence of the act.’  But there remains the question whether the intentional object really does exist independently of the act. There remains the question whether the intentional object really exists or is merely intentional.  Does it enjoy esse reale, or only esse intentionale?

I recommend to my friend Nemes that he read Roman Ingarden’s critique of Husserl’s idealism.  I also recommend that he read Husserl himself (in German if possible) rather than the secondary sources he has been citing, sources some of which are not only secondary, but second-rate.

To return to what I said at the outset: Conscious acts cannot be properly understood naturalistically.  But surely a full understanding of them must explain how they relate to the goings-on in the physical organisms in nature that support them.  A satisfactory philosophy cannot ignore this. And so, to end on an autobiographical note, this was one of the motives that lead me beyond phenomenology.

Mind without Consciousness?

David Brightly in a recent comment writes,

[Laird] Addis says,

The very notion of language as a representational system presupposes the notion of mind, but not vice versa.

I can agree with that, but why should it presuppose consciousness too?

In a comment under this piece you write,

Examples like this cause trouble for those divide-and-conquerers who want to prise  intentionality apart from consciousness with its qualia, subjectivity, and what-it-is-like-ness,  and work on the problems separately, the first problem being supposedly tractable while the second is called the (intractable) Hard Problem (David Chalmers). Both are hard as hell and they cannot be separated. See Colin McGinn, Galen Strawson, et al.

Could you say a bit more on this?

I’ll try.  You grant that representation presupposes mind, but wonder why it should also presuppose consciousness.  Why can’t there be a representational system that lacks consciousness?  Why can’t there be an insentient, and thus unconscious, machine that represents objects and states of affairs external to itself? Fair question! 

Here is an example to make the problem jump out at you. Suppose you have an advanced AI-driven robot, an artificial French maid, let us assume, which is never in any sentient state, that is, it never feels anything.  You could say, but only analogically, that the robot is in various ‘sensory’ states, states  caused by the causal impacts of physical objects against its ‘sensory’ transducers whether optical, auditory, tactile, kinaesthetic . . . but these ‘sensory’ states  would have no associated qualitative or phenomenological features.  Remember Herbert Feigl? In Feiglian terms, there would be no ‘raw feels’ in the bot should her owner ‘feel her up.’  Surely you have heard of Thomas Nagel. In Nagelian terms, there would be nothing it is like for the bot to have her breasts fondled.  If her owner fondles the breasts of his robotic French maid, she feels nothing even though she is programmed to respond appropriately to the causal impacts via her linguistic and other behavior.   “What are you doing, sir? I may be a bot but I am not a sex bot! Hands off!” If the owner had to operate upon her, he would not need to put her under an anaesthetic. And this for the simple reason that she is nothing but an insensate machine.

I hope Brightly agrees with me that verbal and nonverbal behavior, whether by robots or by us, are not constitutive of  genuine sentient states. I hope he rejects analytical (as opposed to methodological) behaviorism, according to which feeling pain, for example,  is nothing more than exhibiting verbal or nonverbal pain-behavior.  I hope he agrees with me that the bot I described is a zombie (as philosophers use this term) and that we are not zombies.  

But even if he agrees with all that, there remains the question: Is the robot, although wholly insentient, the subject of mental states, where mental states are intentional (object-directed) states?  If yes, then we can have mind without consciousness, intrinsic intentionality without subjectivity, content without consciousness.

Here are some materials for an argument contra.

P1 Representation is a species of intentionality. Representational states of a system (whether an organism, a machine, a spiritual substance, whatever) are intentional or object-directed states.

P2 Such states involve contents that mediate between the subject of the state and the thing toward which the state is directed.  Contents are the cogitata in the following schema: Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum-res. Note that ‘directed toward’ and ‘object-directed’ are being used here in such a way as to allow the possibility that there is nothing in reality, no res, to which these states are directed.  Directedness is an intrinsic feature of intentional states, not a relational one.  This means that the directedness of an object-directed state is what it is whether or not there is anything in the external world to which the state is directed. See Object-Directedness and Object-Dependence for more on this.

As for the contents, they present the thing to the subject of the state. We can think of contents as modes of presentation, as Darstellungsweisen in something close to Frege’s sense.     Necessarily, no state without a content, and no content without a state.  (Compare the strict correlation of noesis and noema in Husserl.) Suppose I undergo an experience which is the seeing as of  a tree.  I am the subject of the representational state of seeing and the thing to which the state is directed, if it exists, is a tree in nature.  The ‘as of‘ locution signals that the thing intended in the state may or may not exist in reality.

P3 But the tree, even if it exists in the external world, is not given, i.e., does not appear to the subject, with all its aspects, properties, and relations, but only with some of them. John Searle speaks of the “aspectual shape” of intentional states. Whenever we perceive anything or think about anything, we always do so under some aspects and not others.  These aspectual features are essential to the intentional state; they are part of what make intentional  states the states that they are. (The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press, 1992, pp. 156-157) The phrase I bolded implies that no intentional state that succeeds in targeting a thing (res) in external world is such that every aspect of  the thing is before the mind of the person in the state.

P4 Intentional states are therefore not only necessarily of something; they are necessarily of something as something.  And given the finitude of the human mind, I want to underscore the fact that  even if every F is a G, one  can be aware of x as F without being aware of  x as G.   Indeed, this is so even if necessarily (whether metaphysically or nomologically) every F is a G. Thus I can be aware of a moving object as a cat, without being aware of it as spatially extended, as an animal, as a mammal, as an animal that cools itself by panting as opposed to sweating, as my cat, as the same cat I saw an hour ago, etc.  

BRIGHTLY’S THEORY (as I understand it, in my own words.)

B1. There is a distinction between subpersonal and personal contents. Subpersonal contents exist without the benefit of consciousness and play their mediating role in representational states in wholly insentient machines such as the AI-driven robotic maid.  

B2. We attribute subpersonal contents to machines of sufficient complexity and these attributions are correct in that these machines really are intentional/representational systems.

B3. While it is true that the only intentional (object-directed) states of which we humans are aware are conscious intentional states, that they are  conscious is a merely contingent fact about them. Thus, “the conditions necessary and sufficient for content are neutral on the question whether the bearer of the content happens to be a conscious state. Indeed the very same range of contents that are possessed by conscious creatures could be possessed by creatures without a trace of consciousness.” (Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness, Blackwell 1991, p. 32.

MY THEORY

V1. There is no distinction between subpersonal and personal contents. All contents are contents of (belonging to) conscious states. Brentano taught that all consciousness is intentional, that every consciousness is a consciousness of something.  I deny that, holding as I do that some conscious states are non-intentional. But I do subscribe to the Converse Brentano Thesis, namely, that all intentionality is conscious. In a slogan adapted from McGinn though not quite endorsed by him, There is no of-ness without what-it-is-like-ness. This implies that only conscious beings can be the subjects of original or intrinsic intentionality.  And so the  robotic maid is not the subject of intentional/representational states. The same goes for the cerebral processes transpiring  in us humans when said processes are viewed as purely material: they are not about anything because there is nothing it is like to be them.  Whether one is a meat head or a silicon head, no content without consciousness! Let that be our battle cry.

And so, when the robotic maid’s voice synthesizer ‘says’ ‘This shelf is so dusty!’ it is only AS IF ‘she’ is thereby referring to a state of affairs and its constituents, the shelf and the dust.  ‘She’ is not saying anything, sensu stricto, but merely making sounds to which we original-Sinn-ers, attribute meaning and reference. Thinking reference (intentionality) enjoys primacy over linguistic reference. Cogitation trumps word-slinging. The latter is parasitic upon the former.  Language without mind is just scribbles, pixels, chalk marks, indentations in stone, ones and zeros. As Mr. Natural might have said, “It don’t mean shit.” An sich, und sensu stricto.

V2. Our attribution of intentionality to insentient systems is merely AS IF.  The robot in my example behaves as if it is really cognizant of states of affairs such as the dustiness of the book shelves and as if it really wants to please its boss while really fearing his sexual advances.  But all the real intentionality is in us who makes the attributions.  And please note that our attributing of intentionality to systems whether silicon-based or meat-based that cannot host it is itself real intentionality. It follows, pace Daniel Dennett, that intentionality cannot be ascriptive all the way down (or up). But Dennett’s ascriptivist theory of intentionality calls for a separate post.

V3. It is not merely a contingent fact about the intentional state that we our introspectively aware of that they are conscious states; it is essential to them.

NOW, have I refuted Brightly ? No! I have arranged a standoff.  I have not refuted but merely neutralized his position by showing that it is not rationally coercive.  I have done this by sketching a rationally acceptable alternative. We have made progress in that we now both better understand the problems we are discussing and our different approaches to them.

Can we break standoff? I doubt it, but we shall see.

AI and the Unity of Consciousness

Top AI researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton, the "Godfather of AI,"  hold that advanced AI systems are conscious.  That is far from obvious, and may even be demonstrably false if we consider the phenomenon of the unity of consciousness.  I will first explain the phenomenon in question, and then conclude that AI systems cannot accommodate it.

Diachronic Unity of Consciousness, Example One

Suppose my mental state passes from one that is pleasurable to one that is painful.  Observing a beautiful Arizona sunset, my reverie is suddenly broken by the piercing noise of a smoke detector.  Not only is the painful state painful, the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one is itself painful.  The fact that the transition is painful shows that it is directly perceived. It is not as if there is merely a succession of consciousnesses (conscious states), one pleasurable the other painful; there is in addition a consciousness of their succession.  For there is a consciousness of the transition from the pleasant state to the painful state, a consciousness that embraces both of the states, and so cannot be reductively analyzed into them.  But a consciousness of their succession is a consciousness of their succession in one subject, in one unity of consciousness.  It is a consciousness of the numerical identity of the self through the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one.  Passing from a pleasurable state to a painful one, there is not only an awareness of a pleasant state followed by an awareness of a painful one, but also an awareness that the one who was in a pleasurable state is strictly and numerically the same as the one who is now in a painful state.  This sameness is phenomenologically given, although our access to this phenomenon is easily blocked by inappropriate models taken from the physical world.  Without the consciousness of sameness, there would be no consciousness of transition.

What this phenomenological argument shows is that the self cannot be a mere diachronic bundle or collection of states.  The self is a transtemporal unity distinct from its states whether these states are taken distributively (one by one) or collectively (all together).

May we conclude from the phenomenology of the situation that there is a simple, immaterial, meta-physical substance that each one of us is and that is the ontological support of the phenomenologically given unity of consciousness?  May we make the old-time school-metaphysical moves from the simplicity of this soul substance to it immortality? Maybe not! This is a further step that needs to be carefully considered. I don't rule it out, but I also don't rule it in. I don't need to take the further step for my present purpose, which is merely to show that a computing machine, no matter how complex or how fast its processing, cannot be conscious.  No material system can be conscious.  For the moment I content myself with the negative claim: no material system can be conscious. It follows straightaway that no AI system can be conscious.

Diachronic Unity of Consciousness, Example Two

Another example is provided by the hearing of a melody.  To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of Mi.  For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody.  (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence.)  But now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3.  When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap.  In which act is the hearing of the melody?  A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody.

This is because the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal)  intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1.  Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody.  This implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention.  The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion.  This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them.  Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of them.  This unitary self is co-given whenever one hears a melody.  (This seems to imply that all consciousness is at least implicitly self-consciousness. This is a topic for a later post.)

Diachronic -Synchronic Unity of Consciousness

Now consider a more complicated example in which I hear two chords, one after the other, the first major, the second minor.   I hear the major chord C-E-G, and then I hear the minor chord C-E flat-G.  But I also hear the difference between them.   How is the awareness of the major-minor difference possible? One condition of this possibility is the diachronic unity of consciousness. But there is also a second condition. The hearing of the major chord as major cannot be analyzed without remainder into an act of hearing C, an act of hearing E, and an act of hearing G, even when all occur simultaneously.  For to hear the three notes as a major chord, I must apprehend the 1-3-5 musical interval that they instantiate.  But this is possible only because the whole of my present consciousness is more than the sum of its parts.  This whole is no doubt made up of the part-consciousnesses, but it is not exhausted by them.  For it is also a consciousness of the relatedness of the notes.  But this consciousness of relatedness is not something in addition to the other acts of consciousness: it includes them and embraces them without being reducible to them.  So here we have an example of the diachronic-synchronic unity of consciousness.

These considerations appear to put paid to the conceit that AI systems can be conscious.

Or have I gone too far? You've heard me say that in philosophy there are few if any rationally compelling,  ineluctably decisive, arguments for substantive theses.  Are the above arguments among the few? Further questions obtrude themselves, for example, "What do you mean by 'material system'?"  "Could a panpsychist uphold the consciousness of advanced AI systems?"

Vita brevis, philosophia longa.

A Design Argument from the Cognitive Reliability of Our Senses: A Proof of Classical Theism?

Substack latest.

I present an argument that many will take as supporting classical theism. But I point out that, so taken, the argument is not rationally inescapable or philosophically dispositive since it may also be construed along Nagelian lines to support an inherent immanent teleology in nature.
 
Topics include rationality, intentionality, both intrinsic and derivative, and the fascinating structural similarity of dispositionality to (conscious) intentionality.

Jeffrey Long, M. D. on Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)

Here (under 5 minutes).

'Coded' as used by Dr. Long in this video clip is medical jargon. For a patient to 'code' is for the patient to suffer cardiac arrest. 

It is a mistake to think that if an episode of experiencing is real, then  the intentional object of that episode of experiencing is also real. The question I want to pose is whether Dr. Long is making that mistake. But first I must explain the mistake and why it really is a mistake.

Consider a perceptual illusion.  I am returning from a long hike at twilight. I am tired and the light is bad. Suddenly I 'see' a rattlesnake.  I shout out to my partner and I stop marching forward. But it turns out that what I saw was a twisted tree root. This is a typical case of a visual perceptual illusion.  (There are also auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory illusions.)

What I initially 'saw' is what I am calling the intentional object. The intentional object, the object intended, is distinct from the act  (occurrent episode) of consciousness directed upon the intentional object. Act and intentional object are obviously distinct; but that is not to say that the one can exist without the other: they are, necessarily, correlates of one another.  No act without an intentional object, no intentional object without an act. 

Now not all episodes of consciousness are object-directed, or consciousnesses of something (the 'of' to be read as an objective genitive). But some conscious states of a person are object-directed. These mental states exhibit what philosophers call 'intentionality.'  (Bear in mind that 'intentionality' as here used  is a term of art, a terminus technicus, not to be confused with more specific ordinary-language uses of 'intend' and 'intentionality.') Intentionality, then,  is object-directedness.  One must not assume, however, that every object of an intentional mental state  exists. Some intentional objects exist and some do not. 

Philosophers before and after Franz Brentano have repeatedly pointed out that the intentional object of  (subjective genitive) an object-directed state of consciousness  may or may not exist.  Intentionality, we may say, has the 'non-inference property.'  From 'S is conscious of  an F,' one cannot validly infer, 'there exists an x such that x is an F.' For example, if I am imagining, or hallucinating, or dreaming, or simply thinking about a centaur, it does not follow that there exists a centaur that I am imagining, or hallucinating, or dreaming, or simply thinking about.

In my hiking example, the snake I 'saw' did not exist. But there is no denying that (i) something  appeared to me, something that caused me to shout out and stop hiking, and that (ii) what  appeared to me did not have the properties of a tree root — else I would not have shouted out and stopped moving.  I have no fear of tree roots. The intentional object had, or rather appeared to have, the properties of a rattlesnake. So in this case, the correlate of the act, the intentional object, did not exist. And this without prejudice to the reality of the act. 

If we agree that to be real = to exist extra-mentally ('outside' the mind), then in my example, the visual experience was real but its intentional object was not.

Suppose now that a person 'codes.' He suffers cardiac arrest. Oxygenated blood does not reach his brain,  and in consequence his EEG flatlines, which indicates that brain activity has ceased  and that the patient is 'brain dead.'  Suppose that at that very moment he has an NDE. An NDE is an occurrent episode of experiencing which is, moreover, intentional or object-directed.  The typical intentional object or objects of NDEs include such items as a tunnel, lights, angels, dead ancestors, and the the heavenly realm as described in Long's video, and as described in innumerable similar accounts of NDEs.  But from the occurrence and thus the reality of the near-death experiencing it does not follow that the heavenly realm and its contents are also real.  Their status might be merely intentional, and thus not real,  and this despite their being extremely vivid. 

Yes or no? This is the question I am raising.

Is it logically consistent with the patient's having of that near-death experience that he not survive his bodily death as an individual person who 'goes to heaven'?  Yes it is.   That he had a real experience is not in question. The patient was near death, but he was alive when he had the experience.  He is here to answer our questions. The patient is honest, and if anyone knows  whether he had an NDE, he does. He is the authority; he enjoys 'privileged access' to his mental states. 

But unless one confuses intentio and intentum, act and object, experiencing and the experienced-qua-experienced, one has to admit that the reality of the experiencing does not guarantee the reality of heaven or of angels or of dead/disembodied souls or one's  survival of  one's bodily death.

For it could be — it is epistemically possible that — it is like this. When a patient's EEG flatlines, and he does not recover, but actually dies, then his NDE, if he had one, is his last  experience, even if  it turns out to be an experience as of  heaven. Perhaps at the moment of dying, but while still alive, he 'sees' his beloved dead wife approach him, and he 'sees' her reach out to him, and he 'sees' himself reach out to her, but he does not see her or himself, where 'see' is being used as a 'verb of success.'  ('See' is being used as a verb of success if and only if 'S sees x' is so used as to entail 'X exists.' When 'S sees x' is used without this entailment, what we have is a phenomenological use of 'see.'  Note that both uses are literal. The phenomenological use is not figurative. Admittedly, the point being made in this parenthesis needs defense in  a separate post.)

If this epistemic possibility cannot  be ruled out, then there is no proof of an afterlife from NDEs. In that case we cannot be objectively certain that our man 'went to heaven'; we must countenance the possibility that he simply ceased to exist as an individual person.

Finally, can Dr. Long be taxed with having committed the mistake of confusing the reality of the experiencing with the reality of the experienced-qua-experienced? I think he can. The video shows that he is  certain that there is a heaven to which we go after death, and that the existence of this heaven  is proven by the very large number of NDEs that have been reported by honest people. But he is not entitled to this certainty, and he hasn't proven anything.

Am I denying that we survive our bodily deaths as individual persons? No! My point is merely that we cannot prove that we do on the basis of NDEs.  There is no rationally coercive argument from the reality of NDEs to the reality of an afterlife in which we continue to exist as individual persons.  

On Perceptual ‘Taking’

Ed writes,

Something to think about. “I take an X to be a Y”.

This can be true when there is no Y. For example, I take a tree root to be a snake. There is a tree root, but no snake.

But what about the other way round? I take a mirror image to be a person occupying the space behind the mirror, thinking it to be a window. In that case there is also no Y (because no such person) but is there an X? That is, does “I take a mirror image to be a person” imply that there is some X such that X is a mirror image and I take X to be a person?

It is the ‘ontological’ (=referential) questions that interest me. I have never had any interest in epistemology. Is a mirror image a τόδε τι, a hoc aliquid, a this-something?

Over to you.

BV:  I don't believe anyone who knows English would ever say, 'I take a tree root to be a snake' as opposed to 'I took a tree root to be a snake.'  If you see something that you believe to be a tree root, then you cannot at the same time take it to be a snake.  If, on the other hand, if you take something to be a snake, and further perception convinces you that it is a tree root, then you can say, 'I took a tree root to be a snake.'

Suppose we try to describe such a situation phenomenologically. I am hiking in twilight through rattlesnake country. I suddenly stop, and shout to my partner, "I see a snake!" People say things like this. What we have here is a legitimate ordinary language use of 'see.'  Sometimes, when people say 'I see a snake,' there is/exists a snake that they see.  Other times, when people say, 'I see a snake,' it is not the case that there is/exists a snake that they see.  In both cases they see something. This use of 'see' is neutral on the question whether the seen exists or does not exist. Call this use the phenomenological use. It contrasts with the 'verb of success use' which is also a legitimate ordinary language use. On the success use, if subject S sees X, it follows that X exists.  On this use of 'see,' one cannot see what does not exist. On the phenomenological use, if S sees X, it does not follow that X exists. Mark the two senses as sees  and seep respectively.

I seep a snake. But as I look more closely the initial episode of seeing is not corroborated by further such episodes. The snake appearance of the first episode is cancelled. By 'appearance' I mean the intentional object of the mental act of seeingp. This appearance (apparent item)  is shown to be a merely intentional object. How? By the ongoing process of visual experiencing. The initial snake appearance (apparent item) is cancelled because of its non-coherence with the intentional objects of the subsequent perceptual acts. The subsequent mental acts present  intentional objects  that have some of the properties of a tree root. As the perceptual process continues through a series of  visual acts the intentional objects of which cohere, the perceiver comes to believe that he is veridically perceiving a tree root. He then says, "It wasn't a snake I saw after all; I took a tree root to be a snake!"

Clearly, I saw something, something that caused me to halt. If I had seen nothing, then I would not have halted. But the something I saw turned out not to exist.

So my answer to your concluding question is in the affirmative.

Finally, if you have no interest in epistemology, then you have no interest in the above question since it is an epistemological question concerning veridical and non-veridical knowledge of the external world via outer perception.

You are some kind of radical externalist.  But how justify such an extreme position? 

The Problem of Consciousness and Galen Strawson’s Non-Solution

Hi Dr. Vallicella,

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, if it interests you to write about it on your blog, on Strawson's intriguing 2021 paper "Oh you materialist!", in which he argues for a materialistic monism and a deflation of the hard problem. 
 
Here is a link to the paper: https://philarchive.org/archive/STROYM
 
Best,
Chandler
 
What follows is a warm-up for a discussion of the paper to which Chandler directs us. Galen Strawson is a brilliant philosopher with very interesting ideas.   I am not sure I quite understand him. The entry below is a slightly emended version of a post from 2018. It is based on a much earlier paper by Strawson.
 
………………………

The problem can be set forth in a nice neat way as an aporetic triad:

1) Consciousness is real; it is not an illusion.

2) Consciousness is wholly natural, a material process in the brain.

3) It is impossible that conscious states, whether object-directed or merely qualitative, be material in nature.

It is easy to see that the members of this triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  Any two of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining proposition.  

And yet each limb of the triad has brilliant defenders and brilliant opponents. So not only is consciousness itself a mighty goad to inquiry; the wild diversity of opinions about it is as well.  (The second goad is an instance of what I call the Moorean motive for doing philosophy: G. E. Moore did not get his problems from the world, but from the strange and mutually contradictory things philosophers said about the world, e.g., that time is unreal (McTaggart) or that nothing is really related (Bradley).)

The above problem is soluble if a compelling case can be made for the rejection of one of the limbs.  But which one? Eliminativists and illusionists reject (1); dualists of all types, and not just substance dualists, reject (2); materialists reject (3).  Three prominent rejectors, respectively: Dennett, Swinburne. Strawson.

I agree with Strawson that eliminativism has zero credibility.  (1) is self-evident and the attempts to deny it are easily convicted of incoherence.  So no solution is to be had by rejecting (1).

As for (2), it is overwhelmingly credible to most at the present time.  We live in a secular age.  'Surely' — the secularist will assure us — there is nothing concrete that is supernatural.  God and the soul are just comforting fictions from a bygone era. The natural exhausts the real.  Materialism about the mind is just logical fallout from naturalism.  If all that (concretely) exists is space-time and its contents, then the same goes for minds and their states.

Strawson, accepting both (1) and (2) must reject (3).  But the arguments against (3), one of which I will sketch below, are formidable. The upshot of these arguments is that it is unintelligible how either qualia or intentional states of consciousness could be wholly material in nature.  Suppose I told you that there is a man who is both fully human and fully divine. You would say that that makes no sense, is unintelligible, and is impossible for that very reason. Well, it is no less unintelligible that a felt sensation such as my present blogger's euphoria be identical to a state of my brain.  

What could a materialist such as Strawson say in response? He has to make a mysterian move. 

He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, but that it is nevertheless wholly material in nature! Some matter is sentient and some matter thinks. My euphoria is literally inside my skull and so are my thoughts about Boston. These 'mental' items are made of the same stuff as what we are wont to call 'material' items. 

(Compare the orthodox Chalcedonian Incarnationalist who says that the man Jesus of Nazareth is identical to the Second Person of the Trinity despite the violation of the Indiscernibility of Identicals. Put the Incarnationalist under dialectical pressure and he might say, "Look it is true! We know it by divine revelation. And what is true is true whether or not we can understand how it is possible that it be true. It must remain a mystery to us here below.)

Or a materialist mysterian  can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature.  Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.

If I understand Galen Strawson's mysterianism, it is of the first type.  Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible for qualia and thoughts to be wholly material.   Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson: 

Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them.  As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case).  But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists.  Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is.  ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, eds. The Mind-Body Problem, Blackwell, 1994, p. 77)

Strawson and I agree on two important points.  One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential. Dennett denied! The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.

I disagree on whether his mysterian solution is a genuine solution to the problem. What he is saying is that, given the obvious reality of conscious states, and given the truth of naturalism, experiential phenomena must be material in nature, and that this is so whether or not we are able to understand how it could be so.  At present we cannot understand how it could be so. It is at present a mystery. But the mystery will dissipate when we have a better understanding of matter.

This strikes me as (metaphysical) bluster.

An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality.  For qualia, esse = percipi.  If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means.  The very notion strikes me as absurd.  We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective.  And that makes no sense. If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.

As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness  of the experience.  And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the mental.  But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning.  His materialism is a vacuous materialism. We no longer have any idea of what 'physical' means if it no longer contrasts with 'mental.'

If we are told that sensations and thoughts are wholly material, we have a definite proposition only if 'material' contrasts with 'mental.' But if we are told that sensations and thoughts are material, but that matter in reality has mental properties and powers, then I say we are being fed  nonsense.  We are being served grammatically correct sentences that do not express a coherent thought.

Besides, if some matter in reality senses and thinks, surely some matter doesn't; hence we are back to dualism.

Why is Strawson's  mysterianism any better than Dennett's eliminativism?  Both are materialists. And both are keenly aware of the problem that qualia pose.  This is known in the trade as the 'hard problem.' (What? The other problems in the vicinity are easy?) The eliminativist simply denies the troublesome data. Qualia don't exist! They are illusory!  The mysterian materialist cannot bring himself to say something so manifestly silly. But, unwilling to question his materialism, he says something that is not much better. He tells us that qualia are real, and wholly material, but we don't understand how because we don't know enough about matter.  But this 'theological' solution is also worthless because no definite proposition is being advanced.

Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69)  Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature.  This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret.  Strawson must pin his hopes on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.

But what do the theological virtues of faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry?  It doesn't strike me as particularly  intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is mental.  It would be more honest just to admit that the problem of consciousness is insoluble.

And that is my 'solution.' The problem is real, but insoluble.  

Strawson's latest banging on his mysterian materialist drum is to be found in The Consciousness Deniers in The New York Review of Books.