Category: Nagel, Thomas

A Response to my Post on Semantic Engines

Here is long-time reader TB’s e-mail response to what I said yesterday.  (TB works in AI and/or adjacent fields; I didn’t press him on his employment details.) I told TB that I need a better understanding of what goes on ‘under the hood’ of these amazing engines to be sure that I am not ‘blowing smoke’ when I assert that they are not truly intelligent but merely simulate human intelligence. I have bolded a couple of key sentences and made some minor edits. It is wonderfully clear and — as far as I can judge — accurate.

……………………………..

You are 100% correct in your post in my view. I read Nagel’s most recent defence of the reality of first person consciousness a few years ago. He could have made his argument in about half the words, but he is right. Dennett and friends claim that consciousness is an illusion; there is a theory that the mind plays this trick whereby all stimulus from without gets converted to a sort of realtime stream of imagery / impressions that we mistake for consciousness. This ‘illusion’ argument seems to forget what ‘illusion’ means – first person experience. Each person’s illusion is his own. And then we realise that calling it an ‘illusion’ is meant to make us dismiss it as not real. So I think your closing comments are exactly right – the deniers want to argue that the first person experience we really are having is a) really there (something has to be there, since something is fooling us into thinking there is something there), but it’s an illusion, so ‘not real’, while simultaneously telling us b) that it (i.e. conscious experience) is not really there at all.

A few things on AI. You have undoubtedly understood that there is something called a Large Language Model (LLM). LLMs are trained on the whole internet, and in addition vast numbers of (generally illegally obtained) PDFs of physical books that the AI companies obtain, destroy the spine, and scan. All of this is the ‘training base’. Each sentence of every document, web page etc, is ‘tokenised’ and each each token is ’embedded’ in a high dimension vector space, such that concepts that frequently co-occur or appear to be used as near synonyms in similar documents, end up as vectors that are close, i.e. whose normalised mathematical projection (cosine) is close to 1.0.

Tools like ChatGPT work as follows: they take your prompt, prepend a bunch of other info, including things it has learned about you from prior use (name=vallicella; professional philosopher; tradition = analytic / anglo / German; location = Phoenix AZ, . . . etc, plus a summarised version of prior queries), and it returns text that it scores highest as being an appropriate response (i.e. ‘prediction’ of what is likely to come next in this kind of exchange). There is other functionality wrapped around the core, that will prevent it getting into profanity, discussions of the kind that KKK or Hamas types might enjoy, and also pro-woke censorship.

If you ask it a question like ‘how many biological sexes are there in mammals’ it prevaricates, with hedged language, and very quickly gets into subjective woke BS like ‘However it is important to realise that there are many sexual experiences in reality, beyond merely male and female…’ etc – I can send you the result of having done this last year.
Nevertheless, if one stays away from radioactive subjects like trans / race +IQ / Islam etc, tools like ChatGPT are surprisingly good.
Recently, I asked it the following (see below [omitted- BV]). It produced a lot more text than I have reproduced below. But you can see that it went straight to the right place: Russell, Frege, modern set theory, etc. I followed up with more Qs, and it was able to produce very coherent output.
All of this is happening not only with no built-in reasoner, but no internal ontology of conceptual relations. What appears to be reasoning is mainly achieved by more text prediction. Remember, it has been trained on the entire visible textual output of humanity, including all the debates found in comments below articles in the NYT or somewhere on Facebook. Plus 100 books on formal logic, so it knows what (say) modus tollens and modus ponens are. You can ask it about syllogisms, subsumption, or go into Husserl, or (if you’ve been smoking something), into Derrida – anything you like. You can ask it what’s a good washing machine to buy in Brazil, to fit in a certain sized space. It can find such contemporary data using something called RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) – – what it means is that it is going to the web and tearing through online shopping sites for you, looking for data sheets for washing machines that are a depth of less than 62 cm. It has to do this extra ‘retrieval’ because its training set (from say 1y ago) doesn’t have up to date info on washing machines that you can buy in Brazil.
There’s no subjective first-person experience going on with any of this – an LLM has no body, no identity, no mind-embedded-in-a-body, no way of experiencing qualia; simply no experiential dimension at all. But it makes it look like it’s doing all of this – just by communicating in ways that another human might – except the other human has the whole of human knowledge (including tons of noise, i.e. garbage from Facebook or whatever) in its head.

 

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.

Could Qualia Terms and Neuroscience Terms have the Same Reference?

Could Frege’s sense-reference distinction be put to work? I think not.

Top o’ the Stack.

I made the point a while back that the vocabularies of phenomenology and neuroscience are radically disparate, such that nonsense arises when one says things like, ‘This burnt garlic smell is identical to a brain state of mine.’ To which a Vietnam veteran, altering the example, replied by e-mail:

. . . when a neuroscientist says your smelling this odor as napalm is nothing but a complex neural event activating several regions of the brain…, he isn’t claiming you can replace your talk about smells with talk about neural signals from the olfactory bulb. Different ways of talking have evolved for different purposes. But he is saying that beneath these different ways of talking & thinking there is just one underlying reality, namely, neural events in our brain.

The idea, then, that is that are are different ways of referring to the same underlying reality. And so if we deploy a simple distinction between sense and reference we can uphold the materialist/physicalist reduction of qualia to brain states. Well, I doubt it. In fact, I deny it.

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.

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

You are out hiking and the trail becomes faint and hard to follow. You peer into the distance and see what appear to be three stacked rocks. Looking a bit farther, you see another such stack. Now you are confident which way the trail goes.

Your confidence is based on your taking the rock piles as more than merely natural formations. You take them as providing information about the trail's direction, which is to say that you take them as trail markers, as meaning something, as about something distinct from themselves, as exhibiting intentionality, to use a philosopher's term of art. The intentionality, of course, is derivative rather than intrinsic. It is not part of the presupposition on which your confidence rests that the cairns of themselves mean anything. Obviously they don't. But it is part of your presupposition that the cairns are physical embodiments of the intrinsic intentionality of a trail-blazer or trail-maintainer. Thus the presupposition is that an intelligent being designed the objects in question with a definite purpose, namely, to indicate the trail's direction.

Must God Become Man to Know the Human Lot?

Vito Caiati, commenting on Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron:

In yesterday’s Good Friday post, you write, “The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated experience the worst of embodiment and be tortured to death.  For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he must experience the highest exaltation and the lowest degradation possible to a human. These extreme possibilities, though not actual in all, define being human.”

Why is the full scope and content of the human experience, including the most extreme pain and death itself, not known by God, who is omniscient, without the Incarnation? Why should the flesh, enmeshed in and limited by human sensory perception, be a necessary, supplementary mode by which such experience is conveyed to and hence shared by the Deity?

The question is why an omniscient God would have to enter the material world to know the full scope and content of human experience. If God is omniscient, then he knows everything. And if he knows everything, then he knows what it is like  to be a man undergoing torture and bodily death.  Why then must God compromise his purely spiritual status by Incarnation? Why can't God know what it is like to be a man without becoming a man?

To answer directly, one could know everything it is possible to know about a sentient organism without knowing what it is like to be that organism.  And so God, who knows everything it is possible to know about every type of sentient organism, and is therefore objectively omniscient with respect to every type of organism, is nonetheless subjectively nescient in that he does not and cannot know what it is like to be an organism of any type.  This is because he is not an organism of any type; he is a pure spirit.

Consider an ethologist who studies bats. Suppose he comes to know every objective fact about bats including exactly how they locate and perceive objects in their environment using echolocation, or 'bat sonar.'  Knowing all these objective facts, our scientist would still not know what it is like to be a bat. He would not know the subjective experiences that bats have when they detect, pursue, etc. objects in their environment.  He could know everything about the objective correlates in the bat's brain of the bat's experience, but he would not be able to know the subjective character of those experiences.  To know bat qualia, our scientist would have to be a bat.

Same with God: he would have to be a man to know what it is like to be a man, that is, to know 'from the inside'  the subjective character of human experience, its highs, lows, and doldrums.

These ruminations give rise to a number of further questions. But it is Saturday night, time to punch the clock, pour myself a drink, and rustle up some grub.

Aficionados will know that I am borrowing from Thomas Nagel, What is like to be a bat?  Here is a short video that treats of some of his ideas.

From the Archives: Eight Years Ago Today

David Gordon Reviews Thomas Nagel's New Book and Criticizes Brian Leiter's Puerile Fulminations

David Gordon reviews Thomas Nagel's Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002–2008.  The following is a particularly interesting portion of the review in which Gordon comments on a certain status-obsessed careerist's puerile fulminations against a real philosopher:

Read it all.

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). 

Related articles
Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem
David Chalmers and the Purely Theoretical Conception of Philosophy

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:

Thomas Nagel, Heretic

Should Nagel's Book be on the Philosophical Index Librorum Prohibitorum?

Kimball on the Philistinism of the Nagel Bashers

Keith Burgess-Jackson on Thomas Nagel 

Nagel on Dennett: Is Consciousness an Illusion?

A NYRB review. (HT: the enormously helpful Dave Lull)

To put it bluntly and polemically: Thomas Nagel is the real thing as philosophers go; Daniel Dennett is a sophist.

My Nagel category; my Dennett category.

Killer Quote:

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 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 problem is.  

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Could There Have Been Nothing at All?

Keith Burgess-Jackson on Thomas Nagel

This is worth reproducing; I came to  essentially  the same conclusion (emphasis added):

The viciousness with which this book [Mind and Cosmos] was received is, quite frankly, astonishing. I can understand why scientists don't like it; they're wary of philosophers trespassing on their terrain. But philosophers? What is philosophy except (1) the careful analysis of alternatives (i.e., logical possibilities), (2) the questioning of dogma, and (3) the patient distinguishing between what is known and what is not known (or known not to be) in a given area of human inquiry? Nagel's book is smack dab in the Socratic tradition. Socrates himself would admire it. That Nagel, a distinguished philosopher who has made important contributions to many branches of the discipline,  is vilified by his fellow philosophers (I use the term loosely for what are little more than academic thugs) shows how thoroughly politicized philosophy has become. I find it difficult to read any philosophy after, say, 1980, when political correctness, scientism, and dogmatic atheism took hold in academia. Philosophy has become a handmaiden to political progressivism, science, and atheism. Nagel's "mistake" is to think that philosophy is an autonomous discipline. I fully expect that, 100 years from now, philosophers will look back on this era as the era of hacks, charlatans, and thugs. Philosophy is too important to be given over to such creeps.

One such creepy thug is this corpulent apparatchik of political correctness:

Brian leiterFor more on this theme, see my Should Nagel's Book be on the Philosophical Index Librorum Prohibitorum?

My Nagel posts are collected here.