The claim that there is something (the quality of phenomenal experience) that cannot be explained by physical science is strictly analogous to the 19th century “vitalist” claim that the property of being alive could not be explained by physical science (the phrase “élan vital” was actually coined later, in 1907, by Henri Bergson in his book Creative Evolution). Consider all of the physical facts about physical states and processes in the body, the vitalist argued: singularly or together none of these facts entail that the body be alive.
This “hard problem” was never “solved.” It simply faded away as organic chemistry and physiology steadily explicated the physical mechanisms and processes occurring in various parts of cells, and in the various organs of the body. This took some time, well into the 20th century, but by the 1940s, anyway, it was no longer credible to claim that “life” was something that might not be present when these mechanisms and processes of organic chemistry were present, or might be present in their absence. “Life” will always be an ambiguous concept to some extent (there is ongoing debate as to whether viruses are living, for example), because it is an emergent property, but its physical nature is no longer seriously challenged. The concept of “consciousness” is now undergoing the same evolutionary process – not a similar process, the very same process.
This analogy has been prominently rehearsed by Patricia Churchland and by John Searle, among others. I will consider Searle’s version a little more closely by way of setting up the last chapter, where I will discuss the relationship between intentionality and consciousness. Searle makes an analogy between the solidity of a table and the consciousness of a brain: the table’s solidity is a macro-property that emerges from the micro-properties of the wood molecules (which are lattice-like). Consciousness, he suggests, is a macro-property that emerges from the micro-properties of neurons (although he doesn’t claim to know which micro-properties or why).
There are two problems with Searle’s analogy. First, in the case of the wood molecule and the table, they share the same property in the first place: the lattice-like structure of the wood molecule, like a folded piece of paper, just is solid (can bear weight by virtue of its structure). So solidity is not an “emergent macro-property,” solidity is already a property of the “micro” ingredients. If the question is “How can physical objects support weight?” then appeal to the weight-bearing nature of the wood molecule only pushes this question back a step. This problem with the analogy is irremediable: if the argument is that brains are conscious because neurons are conscious we have once again committed the hard-to-avoid error of including something mental in our purported recipe for the mental. If not, then the analogy does not go through: the wood molecules and the table share a property in common, so we do not have an actual example of a macro-property emerging from a micro-property (that is not to say that we couldn’t find such an example, only that this one isn’t it).
The second problem is more serious and to the point of the present discussion. Psychological predicates, as I argued at length in Chapter Two, are not predicated of brains or nervous systems but of whole persons. This goes for consciousness every bit as much as it does for intentionality. Brains no more feel or sense things than they think about or imagine things. Persons think and feel. Asserting this does not exclude me from the club of materialists in any way.
The crucial difference between intentionality and consciousness is that while intentional states are supervenient and therefore unexplainable through reductive materialism, phenomenal states are not supervenient and so a legitimate answer to the question “Why does it feel like that?” is “Because it is that specific physical body interacting with that specific physical feature of the environment (chocolate molecule, blue-reflecting surface, soft pillow etc)” – strict reductive materialism. We can say this, I think, even if we accept the argument that the question “Why does it feel like that?” is itself in a sense illegitimate since there is no way to fill in the sense of “that,” as Hume, Wittgenstein and the Buddhists argue. The basic insight is that having these conscious experiences is indistinguishable from having this physical body in this physical world.
There is only one sense in which we can coherently say that our own phenomenal experiences are in any way similar to those of other conscious beings, such that we can grasp a link between intentionality (universal among all intelligent beings) and consciousness (unique to each conscious being). In this book I have emphasized the distinction between intentionality and consciousness. The last chapter will explore the connection between them.
Showing posts with label consciousness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label consciousness. Show all posts
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Turning the Inverted Spectrum on its Head
The inverted spectrum argument is first found (remarkably full-blown) in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (II, xxxii,15, “Of True and False Ideas”):
"Neither would it carry any Imputation of Falshood to our simple Ideas, if by the different Structure of our Organs, it were so ordered, That the same Object should produce in several Men's Minds different Ideas at the same time; v.g. if the Idea, that a Violet produced in one Man's Mind by his Eyes, were the same that a Marigold produces in another Man's, and vice versâ. For since this could never be known: because one Man's Mind could not pass into another Man's Body, to perceive, what Appearances were produced by those Organs; neither the Ideas hereby, nor the Names, would be at all confounded, or any Falshood be in either. For all Things, that had the Texture of a Violet, producing constantly the Idea, which he called Blue, and those that had the Texture of a Marigold, producing constantly the Idea, which he as constantly called Yellow, whatever those Appearances were in his Mind; he would be able as regularly to distinguish Things for his Use by those Appearances, and understand, and signify those distinctions, marked by the Names Blue and Yellow, as if the Appearances, or Ideas in his Mind, received from those two Flowers, were exactly the same, with the Ideas in other Men's Minds."
Locke composed this counterfactual as part of his effort to show that “tertiary” properties (the properties of mental “ideas”) were different from secondary (the causal properties of the object of perception to cause ideas) and primary (the physical properties of the objects themselves). This was the property dualism repudiated by Berkeley and Hume. In the 20th century the inverted spectrum has had a strong career as a demonstration of the failure of functionalism to handle qualitative properties and, more to the point, as a supposed demonstration that there are such properties (in substance this is very much the same as Locke’s original application).
Imagine someone whose color spectrum was inverted (the “invert”): where normal people saw red, the invert saw blue, where blue, red. Such a person, raised among normal, English-speaking people, would be functionally indistinguishable from anyone else: asked to go out to the car and get the blue bag, say, they would perform this task exactly as anyone else would. Neither they nor anyone else would have any way of knowing that the invert’s experience of seeing the blue surface of the bag was the same experience that everyone else had when they saw a red surface, since the invert, like everyone else, would refer to such a surface as "blue." Since the invert would be functionally identical to a normal person, a functionalist is committed to the position that there is nothing different about their mental state. But (the argument goes) of course there is something different about their mental state: the quale, or phenomenal quality of the experience, is different. Thus functionalism is false.
Wittgenstein argues that the absent qualia argument demonstrates just the opposite of what the friend of qualia claims: since it is not even in principle possible for public language (the only kind of language there is) to pick out private sensations, phenomenal properties are not a problem for operationalist approaches. No theory of mind (or science of mind or description of mind) will ever include any actual discussion of the specific quality of any specific private sensations, because they cannot be discussed. As for the alleged discussion of phenomenal experience we find in philosophy, this is an instance of confusing mention with use - just as one can mention “all sentences that have never been expressed,” but cannot cite one. Outside of (misguided) philosophical conversation there is no context for use of indexically subjective language such as “blue-for-me” as opposed to the intersubjective “blue” which, like all words, necessarily has public criteria for appropriate contexts of use. This is why even the very best of the phenomenologists (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty) never seem to get beyond a sort of “Prolegomena to Some Future Actual Practice of Phenomenology”: after the manifesto there is nothing more that can be said.
So far this is a version of what I am calling the soft argument: the argument is about language, not about the ontological furniture of the world. It has conclusions that perhaps all non-philosophers would find definitive. Qualia do not constitute any sort of obstacle to the naturalization of psychology from the point of view of the scientist because science never could be expected to go beyond the limits imposed on language by its public nature in the first place. Nor is there anything inadequate about our ordinary, colloquial speech about qualitative experience (about, that is, the flavor of the sauce or the hue of the sunset), notwithstanding our individuality, for the same reason. But what about that ontological furniture?
The metaphysical argument will be about the identification of consciousness with experience. The Kantian will say (confining ourselves to the terms of the present discussion) that consciousness is a necessary precondition for the possibility of experience, hence not identical to it. This argument might gain some traction if we concede to the Kantian the point that “experiencing” an object entails bringing the object under a concept (although see the discussion of Kant in Chapter Two), but that very distinction between sensation and perception in the case of objects itself entails that sensation (phenomenal experience) is something prior to the formation of a Kantian “representation.” (If the reader is thinking of Aristotle’s nous at this point I beg your indulgence until Chapter Four.)
I have been using the word “consciousness” as synonymous with phenomenal experience, but the word is also sometimes used in regard to intentional states. Used in its intentional sense, to be “conscious” of an object is, on the traditional view, to form a representation of it or, on the view that I advocate, to be in some sort of relationship to it. But it is incoherent to say that to be conscious of pain, say, is to form a representation of pain or to be in a relationship to pain. In its phenomenal sense the word “consciousness” just refers to the sum of phenomenal experience: pain is a constituent of consciousness, not one of its objects. I may be intentionally conscious of pain at some higher level of psychological organization (one that can be picked out with operational criteria), but it makes no sense to say that I have to form a representation of pain or be in a relationship to pain to have an experience of pain.
The same is true for color qualia or for any qualitative experience. Kripke famously pointed out that the word “pain” just refers to the sensation of pain. “Blue,” in its phenomenal sense, just refers to the sensation of blue. It is one of the components of experience, not some object of experience. Experience is qualia; qualia are experience. So (to get back to the supposed metaphysical implications of the inverted spectrum) it makes no sense to say that experience has properties. Only the objects of experience have properties.
Where this leaves us is at the point of distinction between Frank Jackson’s “What Mary Didn’t Know” essay and Thomas Nagel’s equally famous essay “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” In that article Nagel makes an argument very close to but not identical to Jackson’s. No matter how much we come to know (physiologically) about the echolocation organ of the bat, Nagel argues, we will never know “what it is like” to experience the world in the way the bat does. The difference between Nagel and Jackson is that, granting the present argument that (qualitative) experience itself has no properties, experience itself does not constitute any sort of information (experience is rather the ground of information). We can concede that different conscious beings have different experiences without conceding that this entails any ontological implications.
Some writers have argued that the invert cannot, in fact, be conceived (Douglas Hofstadter holds this view, for example). I do not take that position. Since I do not see how to refute the Wittgenstein/Buddhism non-duality version of “solipsism,” I have no motive to try to prove that we do, in fact, grasp the qualitative nature of the experiences of others. Even if we could do so we could not express this “grasp” linguistically. However there is a different application of the “absent qualia” argument, one that holds that we can conceive of beings functionally (“behaviorally” is a more appropriate word here) equivalent to humans that have no qualitative experiences: “zombies.” David Chalmers’ entire argument for qualia-matter dualism hangs on this claim. I do not believe that we can “conceive” of any such thing.
"Neither would it carry any Imputation of Falshood to our simple Ideas, if by the different Structure of our Organs, it were so ordered, That the same Object should produce in several Men's Minds different Ideas at the same time; v.g. if the Idea, that a Violet produced in one Man's Mind by his Eyes, were the same that a Marigold produces in another Man's, and vice versâ. For since this could never be known: because one Man's Mind could not pass into another Man's Body, to perceive, what Appearances were produced by those Organs; neither the Ideas hereby, nor the Names, would be at all confounded, or any Falshood be in either. For all Things, that had the Texture of a Violet, producing constantly the Idea, which he called Blue, and those that had the Texture of a Marigold, producing constantly the Idea, which he as constantly called Yellow, whatever those Appearances were in his Mind; he would be able as regularly to distinguish Things for his Use by those Appearances, and understand, and signify those distinctions, marked by the Names Blue and Yellow, as if the Appearances, or Ideas in his Mind, received from those two Flowers, were exactly the same, with the Ideas in other Men's Minds."
Locke composed this counterfactual as part of his effort to show that “tertiary” properties (the properties of mental “ideas”) were different from secondary (the causal properties of the object of perception to cause ideas) and primary (the physical properties of the objects themselves). This was the property dualism repudiated by Berkeley and Hume. In the 20th century the inverted spectrum has had a strong career as a demonstration of the failure of functionalism to handle qualitative properties and, more to the point, as a supposed demonstration that there are such properties (in substance this is very much the same as Locke’s original application).
Imagine someone whose color spectrum was inverted (the “invert”): where normal people saw red, the invert saw blue, where blue, red. Such a person, raised among normal, English-speaking people, would be functionally indistinguishable from anyone else: asked to go out to the car and get the blue bag, say, they would perform this task exactly as anyone else would. Neither they nor anyone else would have any way of knowing that the invert’s experience of seeing the blue surface of the bag was the same experience that everyone else had when they saw a red surface, since the invert, like everyone else, would refer to such a surface as "blue." Since the invert would be functionally identical to a normal person, a functionalist is committed to the position that there is nothing different about their mental state. But (the argument goes) of course there is something different about their mental state: the quale, or phenomenal quality of the experience, is different. Thus functionalism is false.
Wittgenstein argues that the absent qualia argument demonstrates just the opposite of what the friend of qualia claims: since it is not even in principle possible for public language (the only kind of language there is) to pick out private sensations, phenomenal properties are not a problem for operationalist approaches. No theory of mind (or science of mind or description of mind) will ever include any actual discussion of the specific quality of any specific private sensations, because they cannot be discussed. As for the alleged discussion of phenomenal experience we find in philosophy, this is an instance of confusing mention with use - just as one can mention “all sentences that have never been expressed,” but cannot cite one. Outside of (misguided) philosophical conversation there is no context for use of indexically subjective language such as “blue-for-me” as opposed to the intersubjective “blue” which, like all words, necessarily has public criteria for appropriate contexts of use. This is why even the very best of the phenomenologists (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty) never seem to get beyond a sort of “Prolegomena to Some Future Actual Practice of Phenomenology”: after the manifesto there is nothing more that can be said.
So far this is a version of what I am calling the soft argument: the argument is about language, not about the ontological furniture of the world. It has conclusions that perhaps all non-philosophers would find definitive. Qualia do not constitute any sort of obstacle to the naturalization of psychology from the point of view of the scientist because science never could be expected to go beyond the limits imposed on language by its public nature in the first place. Nor is there anything inadequate about our ordinary, colloquial speech about qualitative experience (about, that is, the flavor of the sauce or the hue of the sunset), notwithstanding our individuality, for the same reason. But what about that ontological furniture?
The metaphysical argument will be about the identification of consciousness with experience. The Kantian will say (confining ourselves to the terms of the present discussion) that consciousness is a necessary precondition for the possibility of experience, hence not identical to it. This argument might gain some traction if we concede to the Kantian the point that “experiencing” an object entails bringing the object under a concept (although see the discussion of Kant in Chapter Two), but that very distinction between sensation and perception in the case of objects itself entails that sensation (phenomenal experience) is something prior to the formation of a Kantian “representation.” (If the reader is thinking of Aristotle’s nous at this point I beg your indulgence until Chapter Four.)
I have been using the word “consciousness” as synonymous with phenomenal experience, but the word is also sometimes used in regard to intentional states. Used in its intentional sense, to be “conscious” of an object is, on the traditional view, to form a representation of it or, on the view that I advocate, to be in some sort of relationship to it. But it is incoherent to say that to be conscious of pain, say, is to form a representation of pain or to be in a relationship to pain. In its phenomenal sense the word “consciousness” just refers to the sum of phenomenal experience: pain is a constituent of consciousness, not one of its objects. I may be intentionally conscious of pain at some higher level of psychological organization (one that can be picked out with operational criteria), but it makes no sense to say that I have to form a representation of pain or be in a relationship to pain to have an experience of pain.
The same is true for color qualia or for any qualitative experience. Kripke famously pointed out that the word “pain” just refers to the sensation of pain. “Blue,” in its phenomenal sense, just refers to the sensation of blue. It is one of the components of experience, not some object of experience. Experience is qualia; qualia are experience. So (to get back to the supposed metaphysical implications of the inverted spectrum) it makes no sense to say that experience has properties. Only the objects of experience have properties.
Where this leaves us is at the point of distinction between Frank Jackson’s “What Mary Didn’t Know” essay and Thomas Nagel’s equally famous essay “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” In that article Nagel makes an argument very close to but not identical to Jackson’s. No matter how much we come to know (physiologically) about the echolocation organ of the bat, Nagel argues, we will never know “what it is like” to experience the world in the way the bat does. The difference between Nagel and Jackson is that, granting the present argument that (qualitative) experience itself has no properties, experience itself does not constitute any sort of information (experience is rather the ground of information). We can concede that different conscious beings have different experiences without conceding that this entails any ontological implications.
Some writers have argued that the invert cannot, in fact, be conceived (Douglas Hofstadter holds this view, for example). I do not take that position. Since I do not see how to refute the Wittgenstein/Buddhism non-duality version of “solipsism,” I have no motive to try to prove that we do, in fact, grasp the qualitative nature of the experiences of others. Even if we could do so we could not express this “grasp” linguistically. However there is a different application of the “absent qualia” argument, one that holds that we can conceive of beings functionally (“behaviorally” is a more appropriate word here) equivalent to humans that have no qualitative experiences: “zombies.” David Chalmers’ entire argument for qualia-matter dualism hangs on this claim. I do not believe that we can “conceive” of any such thing.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Buddhism and Qualia
“Buddhism” is the name of an ancient tradition (with roots in the older Hindu tradition) that includes both philosophical and spiritual ideas and practices. After 2,500 years it is no surprise to find that classical Indian and Chinese philosophy, including Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, encompass a gamut of positions at least as diverse as those found in the European philosophical tradition. There are, in the philosophical senses of the terms, materialist Buddhists and idealist Buddhists, foundationalist Buddhists and relativist Buddhists. By titling this section “Buddhism” I do not mean to suggest that the arguments discussed here are characteristic of all of Buddhist thought. However these particular arguments do constitute a persistent and venerable thread and I will discuss several different sources. These arguments have roots in some of the most basic elements of Buddhist teaching. While I have chosen to concentrate on the Mahayana tradition that is not meant to suggest that other traditions and schools may not include similar arguments.
There is a complex mix of philosophical, psychological, spiritual and social motivations informing the life of Siddhartha Guatama and his ultimate focus on the nature of the self. The severe caste structure of Indian Hindu society was tightly tied to traditional Hindu concepts of karma and reincarnation. Souls rose and fell over the course of thousands of lifetimes, and humans were low on the scale of karmic life: overall the effect was fatalistic and conservative. At the same time the sixth century BC in India was a period of transformation when a vernacular Sanskrit brought cultural upheavals that included the beginnings of the Epic Hindu literature and the flowering of diverse Hindu sects, Jainism and other movements besides Buddhism.
The basic Buddha Dharma is the most well-known piece of Buddhist philosophy. These are the “Four Noble Truths”: All life is suffering (“duhkha”), says the Buddha; we suffer because we are caught in a cycle of sensual satisfaction and craving; this suffering can be alleviated and even brought to an end altogether; and the “Eightfold Path” of right attitudes and practices will lead to the cessation of suffering. From this starting point Buddhism developed, among other things, a philosophical tradition with a sustained interest in the nature of consciousness, experience and the relationship between the self and the world. The idea that the “ego”-self, the self that arises through the cycle of duhkha, is the encumbrance that the “bodhisattva,” or enlightened self, needs to lose in order to achieve nirvana is prominent in the earliest teachings attributed to Siddhartha.
It is a somewhat dangerous business bringing a discussion of Buddhism into a book focused on contemporary philosophy of mind. I want to stick closely to the line of argument that has brought us to this relatively exotic territory. The overall claim is that the metaphysical problem of the alleged existence of phenomenal properties as distinct from physical properties is a pseudoproblem. I have presented arguments of Hume and Wittgenstein that I think are persuasive versions of this claim. In the case of Wittgenstein I argue that the “solipsism” argument common to the early and late works entails that phenomenal properties do not exist (are not part of this world). The view that the self is “emptiness,” and that the overcoming of the duality between the self and the world constitutes nirvana (enlightenment) is extremely similar, if not identical, to Wittgenstein’s solipsism argument. I will describe the Mahayana version of the argument and then present some textual evidence for my interpretation from classical sources.
The earlier Abhidharma School taught that “dharmas” were individual, autonomous atoms of experience; something akin to Leibniz’s infinity of monads. This is idealist ontology: primary being was dharma which was understood as consciousness (more or less: the bulk of Abhidharma metaphysics consists of discussions of just what “dharma” is after all). Although the arising ego-self, on this view, dissolves into infinitude of discrete dharmas, these dharmas are constitutive of the world. Mahayana Buddhism attempted to go further and collapse the duality between the mental and the non-mental: a kind of ultimate erasure of the self from the world that resulted in freedom from the bonds of the karmic cycle, the traditional goal of both Hinduism and Buddhism. Their formula was
MIND = EXPERIENCE = WORLD
One must resist the Cartesian instinct to interpret this formula as stating that the world collapses into the mind (as it does on the idealist view). The idea is that each consciousness is a universe. That universe at the middle of which you are sitting is you: it/you came into existence when it/you became conscious. When you pass away the universe you inhabit will pass away: for that universe is you. This is a line that could be defended by Hume: he might point out, for example, that if all any talk about “the world” could possibly be referring to is experience, then it makes no sense to refer to “a world” beyond experience, and thus it is incoherent to speak of a common world for all of the “microcosms” – a pseudoproblem.
An account of nirvana as the realization of the non-duality of mind and world can be found in Mahayana Buddhism and its descendents. The Prajna-paramita, or Wisdom Sutra, was traditionally taken to be the word of the Buddha, but scholars trace its origins to the first century AD and it appears that it was composed over the next several centuries. In a chapter titled “Mara” (a malevolent deity who lays traps for spiritual seekers), we find:
Subhuti: Is it then possible to write down the perfection of wisdom?
The Lord: No, Subhuti. And why? Because the own-being of the perfection of wisdom does not exist, nor that of the other perfections, the emptinesses, the Buddhadharmas or all-knowledge. That of which the own-being does not exist, that is nonexistence; what is nonexistence cannot be written down by the nonexistent.
The spiritual goal here is to free the self from the cycle of satisfaction and craving, and that is accomplished by showing that the self is not part of the world (I am not claiming that our present question about phenomenal properties is what Mahayana Buddhism is all about!). The Wisdom Sutra emphasizes the nonexistence of “own-being,” the being of oneself in one’s world. I chose this passage because the topic is language, and the message conforms to Wittgenstein’s treatment of the alleged problem that arises when we think of phenomenal language, say the word “blue,” as referring to something internal (mental) versus external (physical). Here the predicate “exists” is understood as meaning “exists in this world,” the world of experience: but the experiencing subject is not in this world. This also conforms to Hume’s argument that it makes as little sense to speak of the physical as distinct from the mental as it does to speak of the mental as distinct from the physical. Both sides of the distinction drop away simultaneously.
In the chapter titled “The Exposition of the Nonexistence of Own-Being” the point is more explicit that karma (one’s involvement with duhkha, the cycle of satisfaction and craving) is based on “own-being” and “own-marks,” worldly characteristics of persons. “Dharma” means something in the area of “consciousness,” “self” or “view.”
Subhuti: If, however, these dharmas are empty of own-marks, how can with regard to dharmas which are empty of own-marks a difference or distinction be apprehended (to the effect that one says) “this one is a being of the hells, this one an animal,…this one a god, this one a human….” And as these persons cannot be apprehended, so likewise their karma or its karma result.
The Lord: So it is, Subhuti, so it is, as you say. In respect of dharmas which are empty of own-marks no karma or karma result can be apprehended....But when those too ignorant to cognize dharmas as empty of own-marks manufacture a karma…then, through badly done karma they are hurled into the three states of woe, through what is well done they are reborn among gods and men….Here the Bodhisattva, who courses in perfect wisdom, does not see those dharmas in such a way that, when seeing them, he apprehends any dharma whatever. Not apprehending them he sees that “all dharmas are empty.”
Hundreds of years later and thousands of miles away Eihei Dogen (1200-1253), the classic avatar of Japanese Zen Buddhism, had refined the teaching of the non-duality of mind and world into a meditation practice (“zazen”) and a literary genre (“koan”) that were more minimalist and practice-oriented than the ritual-encrusted, syncretic and generally more baroque Sanskrit and Tibetan traditions, although like Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, Zen and Chinese/Japanese Buddhism in general are descendants of the Mahayana tradition. In his Shobogenzo (“Treasury of the True Dharma Eye”) the solipsistic view has crystallized considerably. Here are quotations from the section “Actualizing the Fundamental Point” (written around 1230):
As all things are buddha-dharma, there is delusion and realization, practice, and birth and death, and there are buddhas and sentient beings.
As the myriad things are without an abiding self, there is no delusion, no realization, no buddha, no sentient being, no birth and death.
The buddha way is, basically, leaping clear of the many and the one.
To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.
When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body-and-mind, you grasp things directly.
To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the body and mind of others drop away.
Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.
When the fundamental truth of mind=experience=world is realized things are grasped directly. The idea that there are qualitative experiences that are distinct from the objects of experience reflects the same Cartesian duality of mind and world that underlies representational theories of mind; the Buddhist aim in criticizing this duality as a misconception is essentially spiritual. The Wittgensteinian position is clearly echoed in the Zenrin kushu, a 15th century Zen text, which describes consciousness as “Like a sword that cuts, but cannot cut itself; Like an eye that sees, but cannot see itself”: what is constitutive of the experienced world cannot be considered as part of, or as in, that world.
There is a complex mix of philosophical, psychological, spiritual and social motivations informing the life of Siddhartha Guatama and his ultimate focus on the nature of the self. The severe caste structure of Indian Hindu society was tightly tied to traditional Hindu concepts of karma and reincarnation. Souls rose and fell over the course of thousands of lifetimes, and humans were low on the scale of karmic life: overall the effect was fatalistic and conservative. At the same time the sixth century BC in India was a period of transformation when a vernacular Sanskrit brought cultural upheavals that included the beginnings of the Epic Hindu literature and the flowering of diverse Hindu sects, Jainism and other movements besides Buddhism.
The basic Buddha Dharma is the most well-known piece of Buddhist philosophy. These are the “Four Noble Truths”: All life is suffering (“duhkha”), says the Buddha; we suffer because we are caught in a cycle of sensual satisfaction and craving; this suffering can be alleviated and even brought to an end altogether; and the “Eightfold Path” of right attitudes and practices will lead to the cessation of suffering. From this starting point Buddhism developed, among other things, a philosophical tradition with a sustained interest in the nature of consciousness, experience and the relationship between the self and the world. The idea that the “ego”-self, the self that arises through the cycle of duhkha, is the encumbrance that the “bodhisattva,” or enlightened self, needs to lose in order to achieve nirvana is prominent in the earliest teachings attributed to Siddhartha.
It is a somewhat dangerous business bringing a discussion of Buddhism into a book focused on contemporary philosophy of mind. I want to stick closely to the line of argument that has brought us to this relatively exotic territory. The overall claim is that the metaphysical problem of the alleged existence of phenomenal properties as distinct from physical properties is a pseudoproblem. I have presented arguments of Hume and Wittgenstein that I think are persuasive versions of this claim. In the case of Wittgenstein I argue that the “solipsism” argument common to the early and late works entails that phenomenal properties do not exist (are not part of this world). The view that the self is “emptiness,” and that the overcoming of the duality between the self and the world constitutes nirvana (enlightenment) is extremely similar, if not identical, to Wittgenstein’s solipsism argument. I will describe the Mahayana version of the argument and then present some textual evidence for my interpretation from classical sources.
The earlier Abhidharma School taught that “dharmas” were individual, autonomous atoms of experience; something akin to Leibniz’s infinity of monads. This is idealist ontology: primary being was dharma which was understood as consciousness (more or less: the bulk of Abhidharma metaphysics consists of discussions of just what “dharma” is after all). Although the arising ego-self, on this view, dissolves into infinitude of discrete dharmas, these dharmas are constitutive of the world. Mahayana Buddhism attempted to go further and collapse the duality between the mental and the non-mental: a kind of ultimate erasure of the self from the world that resulted in freedom from the bonds of the karmic cycle, the traditional goal of both Hinduism and Buddhism. Their formula was
MIND = EXPERIENCE = WORLD
One must resist the Cartesian instinct to interpret this formula as stating that the world collapses into the mind (as it does on the idealist view). The idea is that each consciousness is a universe. That universe at the middle of which you are sitting is you: it/you came into existence when it/you became conscious. When you pass away the universe you inhabit will pass away: for that universe is you. This is a line that could be defended by Hume: he might point out, for example, that if all any talk about “the world” could possibly be referring to is experience, then it makes no sense to refer to “a world” beyond experience, and thus it is incoherent to speak of a common world for all of the “microcosms” – a pseudoproblem.
An account of nirvana as the realization of the non-duality of mind and world can be found in Mahayana Buddhism and its descendents. The Prajna-paramita, or Wisdom Sutra, was traditionally taken to be the word of the Buddha, but scholars trace its origins to the first century AD and it appears that it was composed over the next several centuries. In a chapter titled “Mara” (a malevolent deity who lays traps for spiritual seekers), we find:
Subhuti: Is it then possible to write down the perfection of wisdom?
The Lord: No, Subhuti. And why? Because the own-being of the perfection of wisdom does not exist, nor that of the other perfections, the emptinesses, the Buddhadharmas or all-knowledge. That of which the own-being does not exist, that is nonexistence; what is nonexistence cannot be written down by the nonexistent.
The spiritual goal here is to free the self from the cycle of satisfaction and craving, and that is accomplished by showing that the self is not part of the world (I am not claiming that our present question about phenomenal properties is what Mahayana Buddhism is all about!). The Wisdom Sutra emphasizes the nonexistence of “own-being,” the being of oneself in one’s world. I chose this passage because the topic is language, and the message conforms to Wittgenstein’s treatment of the alleged problem that arises when we think of phenomenal language, say the word “blue,” as referring to something internal (mental) versus external (physical). Here the predicate “exists” is understood as meaning “exists in this world,” the world of experience: but the experiencing subject is not in this world. This also conforms to Hume’s argument that it makes as little sense to speak of the physical as distinct from the mental as it does to speak of the mental as distinct from the physical. Both sides of the distinction drop away simultaneously.
In the chapter titled “The Exposition of the Nonexistence of Own-Being” the point is more explicit that karma (one’s involvement with duhkha, the cycle of satisfaction and craving) is based on “own-being” and “own-marks,” worldly characteristics of persons. “Dharma” means something in the area of “consciousness,” “self” or “view.”
Subhuti: If, however, these dharmas are empty of own-marks, how can with regard to dharmas which are empty of own-marks a difference or distinction be apprehended (to the effect that one says) “this one is a being of the hells, this one an animal,…this one a god, this one a human….” And as these persons cannot be apprehended, so likewise their karma or its karma result.
The Lord: So it is, Subhuti, so it is, as you say. In respect of dharmas which are empty of own-marks no karma or karma result can be apprehended....But when those too ignorant to cognize dharmas as empty of own-marks manufacture a karma…then, through badly done karma they are hurled into the three states of woe, through what is well done they are reborn among gods and men….Here the Bodhisattva, who courses in perfect wisdom, does not see those dharmas in such a way that, when seeing them, he apprehends any dharma whatever. Not apprehending them he sees that “all dharmas are empty.”
Hundreds of years later and thousands of miles away Eihei Dogen (1200-1253), the classic avatar of Japanese Zen Buddhism, had refined the teaching of the non-duality of mind and world into a meditation practice (“zazen”) and a literary genre (“koan”) that were more minimalist and practice-oriented than the ritual-encrusted, syncretic and generally more baroque Sanskrit and Tibetan traditions, although like Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, Zen and Chinese/Japanese Buddhism in general are descendants of the Mahayana tradition. In his Shobogenzo (“Treasury of the True Dharma Eye”) the solipsistic view has crystallized considerably. Here are quotations from the section “Actualizing the Fundamental Point” (written around 1230):
As all things are buddha-dharma, there is delusion and realization, practice, and birth and death, and there are buddhas and sentient beings.
As the myriad things are without an abiding self, there is no delusion, no realization, no buddha, no sentient being, no birth and death.
The buddha way is, basically, leaping clear of the many and the one.
To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.
When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body-and-mind, you grasp things directly.
To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the body and mind of others drop away.
Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.
When the fundamental truth of mind=experience=world is realized things are grasped directly. The idea that there are qualitative experiences that are distinct from the objects of experience reflects the same Cartesian duality of mind and world that underlies representational theories of mind; the Buddhist aim in criticizing this duality as a misconception is essentially spiritual. The Wittgensteinian position is clearly echoed in the Zenrin kushu, a 15th century Zen text, which describes consciousness as “Like a sword that cuts, but cannot cut itself; Like an eye that sees, but cannot see itself”: what is constitutive of the experienced world cannot be considered as part of, or as in, that world.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Wittgenstein on Qualia
Anyone who has read this far understands that Wittgenstein, for better or for worse, is the canonical philosopher who has had the most influence on the arguments that I am advancing here (even if I am merely Wittgenstein’s ape, as I rather suspect, from what I have read of him, that he would say I am). But when I started drafting this book Wittgenstein worried me. My strategy is to analyze the mind-body problem into separate problems that admit to separate solutions. But Wittgenstein seemed to be addressing both the problem of intentionality and the problem of consciousness, sometimes simultaneously. Perhaps I was mistaken to try to separate them?
Wittgenstein gives us a general treatment of language, and my method is essentially grounded in linguistic analysis as well. Metaphysics is brought down to Earth when regarded as a semantic inquiry: I don’t know, after all, what “primary being” is, or the limits of nature or anything like that. The only way to naturalize psychology is to develop a natural semantics for the psychological vocabulary. If the metaphysical theory of physicalism is right then our psychological talk has had natural, physical referents all along, and we should be able to determine what those are. Wittgenstein gives us, with his functional-role semantics, what is basically an operationalist account of meaning (“meaning is use”), and an operationalist semantic is a kind of naturalist semantic.
Now we can see the apparent problem: Wittgenstein argues that all language must have operationalist criteria of meaning, including the phenomenal vocabulary. But I have conceded that the “absent qualia” problem persuasively shows that operationalist theories of mind such as functionalism can’t handle the problem of consciousness. Isn’t there a contradiction in, on the one hand, embracing Wittgenstein’s argument that the word “blue” is meaningful (as it has intersubjectively verifiable criteria of use) while the construction “blue-for-me” is not, and on the other hand insisting that the naturalization of the phenomenal vocabulary requires a different treatment than the intentional vocabulary requires?
The tension is resolved by considering two other arguments of Wittgenstein’s, both of which are common to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations, unlike functional-role semantics (developed in the PI) which represents the major difference between the earlier and later work. A popular misconception is that there is no continuity between Wittgenstein’s two major works; this is an effect of the strikingly radical operationalist treatment of “meaning” in the PI, and a consequently radical difference in method of composition. However much is missed when one misses the common themes.
Compare these quotations, first, the famous closing sentence of the Tractatus: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Then PI 296: “’Yes, but there is something there all the same accompanying my cry of pain. And it is on account of that that I utter it. And this something is what is important – and frightful.’ – Only whom are we informing of this? And on what occasion?” (Italics in original). Granting that at the end of the Tractatus he is speaking broadly about something he calls “mystical,” it is apparent that he takes ethical, aesthetic and spiritual experiences to be varieties of qualitative experience that, like pain, cannot be expressed by language. (This was the point, regarding ethical “propositions,” that W. was making when he got into that brawl with Karl Popper.)
The explicitly operationalist account of language in the PI develops from this earlier awareness of the limits of language (but note that this is not the same argument as the one tagged by his famous dictum “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” That is the other argument, discussed below). If language is necessarily intersubjective (that is, worldly) then there must be public criteria for its use, but the insight that the quality of experience is inexpressible comes before, not after, this treatment of language. Functional-role semantics is a response to the inexpressible nature of qualitative experience.
So the great logical behaviorist turns out to acknowledge qualitative experience after all? The short answer is yes: he never denied it. At PI 296 his imaginary interlocutor is unchallenged when he says “this something is what is important.” Maybe the most important thing in life: remember that value itself is part of the inexpressible (and see Chapter Four). This does not involve him in a contradiction, although it needs some more consideration here.
One objection is that Wittgenstein is what was earlier called an “atheistic” or “philosophical” behaviorist: he denies that it makes sense to think of the mental in terms of something “inner” vs. the “outer” world. But aren’t qualitative experiences essentially “inner” in this sense? Not necessarily. The nature of qualitative experience is what is at question.
More importantly and more to the point of this discussion, Wittgenstein’s claim is not about qualitative experience, it is about language. The quality of personal experience is not expressible because of the intersubjective, public nature of language. Here is a link with the argument as deployed in Chapter Two: language (representation in general) does not exist “in the head,” either literally or figuratively. We saw in Chapter Two that the notion of the “inner” as something representational was vacuous, explaining nothing. Language (symbols, “meaning”) is something that exists only in the “outer” world. Thus whatever we make of qualitative experience, all language use has public criteria.
The two related arguments, that language must have public criteria for use and that what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence, are sufficient to show that the problem of consciousness is not a problem for science (this point will be discussed at greater length below). But by themselves they give us only “agnostic,” methodological behaviorism, which may satisfy the empirical psychologist but will not satisfy the philosopher. The philosopher still has a question about ontology. In this discussion of Wittgenstein’s first two arguments I have been careful to use the phrase “qualitative experience,” leaving open the question of what it is of which such experience consists.
The third argument of Wittgenstein’s, one that is also common to the early and later work, goes further and demonstrates that “qualia,” understood as real properties that are non-physical properties, do not exist. It gives us the “atheistic,” philosophical behaviorism that we need to naturalize the phenomenal vocabulary. As with Hume it will turn out that there is no coherent distinction between “qualitative” experience and just plain experience. (Note also that in this section I am using the word “behaviorism” rather than the word “operationalism.” Since “behaviorism” is more the standard term in the Wittgenstein literature this makes it easier to situate the present discussion in that literature, besides being much less clunky. And anyway the arguments discussed so far are in fact about language; “behaviorism” in the sense that we can use that word to describe Wittgenstein’s view is not really a “theory of mind,” although it may be a theory of psychological talk.)
The third argument is known as the “solipsism” argument, and it is found in the Tractatus at 5.6 through 5.641. The most famous aphorism from this passage is 5.6, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (italics in original), but for the present argument 5.621, “The world and life are one,” and 5.63, “I am my world. (The microcosm)” may make the point most clearly. In fact on my view 5.6 is frequently misinterpreted in a sort of obvious way, a recognizably Kantian way: if one represents the world linguistically (this interpretation goes), then the world as one represents it will be limited as a function of the limits of ones’ language. This is backwards. “The limits of my language” (italicized) is the phrase under analysis, and it can only mean (it is defined by) the limits of my world, which are, exactly as in Hume, coextensive with the limits of my experience.
5.632: “The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.”
5.64: “Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.”
5.641: “Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way.
What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world.’
The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world – not a part of it.”
The word “qualia” is a “grammatical” (to use a word ubiquitous in the PI) reification of qualitative experience, which is constitutive of the world, “the limit of the world - not a part of it” (experience is not in the world). Naturalizing psychology does not require what cannot be done, naturalizing metaphysics. “The world and life are one.” As a living being I am constitutive of my world; my life and my world cannot be distinguished: 6.431: “So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.”
The ontological idea of a Leibnizian parallelism between properties of the world and properties of experience makes no sense and it is the assumption of such a parallelism (of the coherence of such a parallelism) on which the alleged problem of consciousness rests. Kant, to be fair, is not so far from this insight himself (and Wittgenstein professed admiration for Kant): the rational mind, for Kant, is not a part of the phenomenal world. Only Kant’s followers did not heed his epistemological warnings.
This crucial Wittgensteinian appropriation of the word “solipsism” remains intact and unchanged decades later in the Philosophical Investigations. In the discussion of the multiplicity of uses of language (the fact that there are many different “language-games”) that opens the book Wittgenstein writes at #24:
“If you do not keep the multiplicity of language-games in view you will perhaps be inclined to ask questions like: ‘What is a question?’ – Is it the statement that I do not know such-and-such, or the statement that I wish the other person would tell me…? Or is it the description of my mental state of uncertainty? – And is the cry ‘Help!’ such a description?
Think how many different kinds of things are called “description”: description of a body’s position by means of its coordinates; description of a facial expression; description of a sensation of touch; of a mood.
Of course it is possible to substitute the form of statement or description for the usual form of question: ‘I want to know whether…’ or “I am in doubt whether…” – but this does not bring the different language-games any closer together.
The significance of such possibilities of transformation, for example of turning all statements into sentences beginning “I think” or “I believe” (and thus, as it were, into descriptions of my inner life) will become clearer in another place. (Solipsism.)”
All statements can be rendered “as it were, into descriptions of my inner life,” and this shows the actual vacuity of the allegedly significant distinction between “the inner life” and “the outer world.” The sense of the parenthetical “solipsism” is the same as in the Tractatus. It is important to see that Wittgenstein is not (as he admits) using the word “solipsist” in its usual metaphysical sense. In fact he inverts the ordinary sense of the word. Ordinarily the solipsist is understood to be saying that he only knows that one mind exists, his own (this is the Cartesian skeptical sense of the word). Wittgenstein is saying, with reference to certain uses of the first-person “I,” that one’s own mind is the only one that cannot be conceived as something in the world.
From the Blue Book (pp. 66-69):
“There are two different cases in the use of the word ‘I’ (or ‘my’) which I might call ‘the use as object’ and ‘the use as subject.’ Examples of the first kind of use are these: ‘My arm is broken,’ ‘I have grown six inches.’…Examples of the second kind are ‘I see so-and-so,’…’I’ have a toothache’…We feel then that in the cases in which ‘I’ is used as subject, we don’t use it because we recognize a particular person by his bodily characteristics: and this creates the illusion that we use this word to refer to something bodiless, which, however, has its seat in our body. In fact this seems to be the real ego, the one of which it was said, ‘Cogito, ergo sum’.”
In fact this use of the first-person pronoun does not “refer” to anything in the world at all. PI 404:
“’When I say “I am in pain,” I do not point to a person who is in pain, since in a certain sense I have no idea who is.’ And this can be given a justification. For the main point is: I did not say that such-and-such a person was in pain, but ‘I am….’ Now in saying this I don’t name any person. Just as I don’t name anyone when I groan with pain. Though someone else sees who is in pain from the groaning.
What does it mean to know who is in pain? It means, for example, to know which man in this room is in pain: for instance, that it is the one who is sitting over there, or the one who is standing in that corner, the tall one over there with the fair hair, and so on. – What am I getting at? At the fact that there is a great variety of criteria for personal ‘identity.’
Now which of them determines my saying that ‘I’ am in pain? None.
“Personal identity theory” is a branch of metaphysics: the study of the criteria by which we identify a particular entity in the world as the “self.” But the subject, on Wittgenstein’s version of solipsism, is not an entity in the world at all, insofar as we are thinking of the subject as having qualitative experience. The experiencing subject is metaphysically identical with the experienced world.
So far I have presented two versions of this argument, Hume’s and Wittgenstein’s. I am not piling up these various demonstrations that the problem of consciousness is a pseudoproblem in order to commit the informal fallacy of the argument from authority: I have my own reservations about Hume, Wittgenstein and empiricism in general but I am persuaded by these particular arguments that the alleged metaphysical problem of phenomenal properties is a pseudoproblem. It is striking that Wittgenstein’s “solipsism” is very close, perhaps identical, to arguments found in an ancient tradition with origins very far from those of empiricism.
Wittgenstein gives us a general treatment of language, and my method is essentially grounded in linguistic analysis as well. Metaphysics is brought down to Earth when regarded as a semantic inquiry: I don’t know, after all, what “primary being” is, or the limits of nature or anything like that. The only way to naturalize psychology is to develop a natural semantics for the psychological vocabulary. If the metaphysical theory of physicalism is right then our psychological talk has had natural, physical referents all along, and we should be able to determine what those are. Wittgenstein gives us, with his functional-role semantics, what is basically an operationalist account of meaning (“meaning is use”), and an operationalist semantic is a kind of naturalist semantic.
Now we can see the apparent problem: Wittgenstein argues that all language must have operationalist criteria of meaning, including the phenomenal vocabulary. But I have conceded that the “absent qualia” problem persuasively shows that operationalist theories of mind such as functionalism can’t handle the problem of consciousness. Isn’t there a contradiction in, on the one hand, embracing Wittgenstein’s argument that the word “blue” is meaningful (as it has intersubjectively verifiable criteria of use) while the construction “blue-for-me” is not, and on the other hand insisting that the naturalization of the phenomenal vocabulary requires a different treatment than the intentional vocabulary requires?
The tension is resolved by considering two other arguments of Wittgenstein’s, both of which are common to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations, unlike functional-role semantics (developed in the PI) which represents the major difference between the earlier and later work. A popular misconception is that there is no continuity between Wittgenstein’s two major works; this is an effect of the strikingly radical operationalist treatment of “meaning” in the PI, and a consequently radical difference in method of composition. However much is missed when one misses the common themes.
Compare these quotations, first, the famous closing sentence of the Tractatus: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Then PI 296: “’Yes, but there is something there all the same accompanying my cry of pain. And it is on account of that that I utter it. And this something is what is important – and frightful.’ – Only whom are we informing of this? And on what occasion?” (Italics in original). Granting that at the end of the Tractatus he is speaking broadly about something he calls “mystical,” it is apparent that he takes ethical, aesthetic and spiritual experiences to be varieties of qualitative experience that, like pain, cannot be expressed by language. (This was the point, regarding ethical “propositions,” that W. was making when he got into that brawl with Karl Popper.)
The explicitly operationalist account of language in the PI develops from this earlier awareness of the limits of language (but note that this is not the same argument as the one tagged by his famous dictum “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” That is the other argument, discussed below). If language is necessarily intersubjective (that is, worldly) then there must be public criteria for its use, but the insight that the quality of experience is inexpressible comes before, not after, this treatment of language. Functional-role semantics is a response to the inexpressible nature of qualitative experience.
So the great logical behaviorist turns out to acknowledge qualitative experience after all? The short answer is yes: he never denied it. At PI 296 his imaginary interlocutor is unchallenged when he says “this something is what is important.” Maybe the most important thing in life: remember that value itself is part of the inexpressible (and see Chapter Four). This does not involve him in a contradiction, although it needs some more consideration here.
One objection is that Wittgenstein is what was earlier called an “atheistic” or “philosophical” behaviorist: he denies that it makes sense to think of the mental in terms of something “inner” vs. the “outer” world. But aren’t qualitative experiences essentially “inner” in this sense? Not necessarily. The nature of qualitative experience is what is at question.
More importantly and more to the point of this discussion, Wittgenstein’s claim is not about qualitative experience, it is about language. The quality of personal experience is not expressible because of the intersubjective, public nature of language. Here is a link with the argument as deployed in Chapter Two: language (representation in general) does not exist “in the head,” either literally or figuratively. We saw in Chapter Two that the notion of the “inner” as something representational was vacuous, explaining nothing. Language (symbols, “meaning”) is something that exists only in the “outer” world. Thus whatever we make of qualitative experience, all language use has public criteria.
The two related arguments, that language must have public criteria for use and that what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence, are sufficient to show that the problem of consciousness is not a problem for science (this point will be discussed at greater length below). But by themselves they give us only “agnostic,” methodological behaviorism, which may satisfy the empirical psychologist but will not satisfy the philosopher. The philosopher still has a question about ontology. In this discussion of Wittgenstein’s first two arguments I have been careful to use the phrase “qualitative experience,” leaving open the question of what it is of which such experience consists.
The third argument of Wittgenstein’s, one that is also common to the early and later work, goes further and demonstrates that “qualia,” understood as real properties that are non-physical properties, do not exist. It gives us the “atheistic,” philosophical behaviorism that we need to naturalize the phenomenal vocabulary. As with Hume it will turn out that there is no coherent distinction between “qualitative” experience and just plain experience. (Note also that in this section I am using the word “behaviorism” rather than the word “operationalism.” Since “behaviorism” is more the standard term in the Wittgenstein literature this makes it easier to situate the present discussion in that literature, besides being much less clunky. And anyway the arguments discussed so far are in fact about language; “behaviorism” in the sense that we can use that word to describe Wittgenstein’s view is not really a “theory of mind,” although it may be a theory of psychological talk.)
The third argument is known as the “solipsism” argument, and it is found in the Tractatus at 5.6 through 5.641. The most famous aphorism from this passage is 5.6, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (italics in original), but for the present argument 5.621, “The world and life are one,” and 5.63, “I am my world. (The microcosm)” may make the point most clearly. In fact on my view 5.6 is frequently misinterpreted in a sort of obvious way, a recognizably Kantian way: if one represents the world linguistically (this interpretation goes), then the world as one represents it will be limited as a function of the limits of ones’ language. This is backwards. “The limits of my language” (italicized) is the phrase under analysis, and it can only mean (it is defined by) the limits of my world, which are, exactly as in Hume, coextensive with the limits of my experience.
5.632: “The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.”
5.64: “Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.”
5.641: “Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way.
What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world.’
The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world – not a part of it.”
The word “qualia” is a “grammatical” (to use a word ubiquitous in the PI) reification of qualitative experience, which is constitutive of the world, “the limit of the world - not a part of it” (experience is not in the world). Naturalizing psychology does not require what cannot be done, naturalizing metaphysics. “The world and life are one.” As a living being I am constitutive of my world; my life and my world cannot be distinguished: 6.431: “So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.”
The ontological idea of a Leibnizian parallelism between properties of the world and properties of experience makes no sense and it is the assumption of such a parallelism (of the coherence of such a parallelism) on which the alleged problem of consciousness rests. Kant, to be fair, is not so far from this insight himself (and Wittgenstein professed admiration for Kant): the rational mind, for Kant, is not a part of the phenomenal world. Only Kant’s followers did not heed his epistemological warnings.
This crucial Wittgensteinian appropriation of the word “solipsism” remains intact and unchanged decades later in the Philosophical Investigations. In the discussion of the multiplicity of uses of language (the fact that there are many different “language-games”) that opens the book Wittgenstein writes at #24:
“If you do not keep the multiplicity of language-games in view you will perhaps be inclined to ask questions like: ‘What is a question?’ – Is it the statement that I do not know such-and-such, or the statement that I wish the other person would tell me…? Or is it the description of my mental state of uncertainty? – And is the cry ‘Help!’ such a description?
Think how many different kinds of things are called “description”: description of a body’s position by means of its coordinates; description of a facial expression; description of a sensation of touch; of a mood.
Of course it is possible to substitute the form of statement or description for the usual form of question: ‘I want to know whether…’ or “I am in doubt whether…” – but this does not bring the different language-games any closer together.
The significance of such possibilities of transformation, for example of turning all statements into sentences beginning “I think” or “I believe” (and thus, as it were, into descriptions of my inner life) will become clearer in another place. (Solipsism.)”
All statements can be rendered “as it were, into descriptions of my inner life,” and this shows the actual vacuity of the allegedly significant distinction between “the inner life” and “the outer world.” The sense of the parenthetical “solipsism” is the same as in the Tractatus. It is important to see that Wittgenstein is not (as he admits) using the word “solipsist” in its usual metaphysical sense. In fact he inverts the ordinary sense of the word. Ordinarily the solipsist is understood to be saying that he only knows that one mind exists, his own (this is the Cartesian skeptical sense of the word). Wittgenstein is saying, with reference to certain uses of the first-person “I,” that one’s own mind is the only one that cannot be conceived as something in the world.
From the Blue Book (pp. 66-69):
“There are two different cases in the use of the word ‘I’ (or ‘my’) which I might call ‘the use as object’ and ‘the use as subject.’ Examples of the first kind of use are these: ‘My arm is broken,’ ‘I have grown six inches.’…Examples of the second kind are ‘I see so-and-so,’…’I’ have a toothache’…We feel then that in the cases in which ‘I’ is used as subject, we don’t use it because we recognize a particular person by his bodily characteristics: and this creates the illusion that we use this word to refer to something bodiless, which, however, has its seat in our body. In fact this seems to be the real ego, the one of which it was said, ‘Cogito, ergo sum’.”
In fact this use of the first-person pronoun does not “refer” to anything in the world at all. PI 404:
“’When I say “I am in pain,” I do not point to a person who is in pain, since in a certain sense I have no idea who is.’ And this can be given a justification. For the main point is: I did not say that such-and-such a person was in pain, but ‘I am….’ Now in saying this I don’t name any person. Just as I don’t name anyone when I groan with pain. Though someone else sees who is in pain from the groaning.
What does it mean to know who is in pain? It means, for example, to know which man in this room is in pain: for instance, that it is the one who is sitting over there, or the one who is standing in that corner, the tall one over there with the fair hair, and so on. – What am I getting at? At the fact that there is a great variety of criteria for personal ‘identity.’
Now which of them determines my saying that ‘I’ am in pain? None.
“Personal identity theory” is a branch of metaphysics: the study of the criteria by which we identify a particular entity in the world as the “self.” But the subject, on Wittgenstein’s version of solipsism, is not an entity in the world at all, insofar as we are thinking of the subject as having qualitative experience. The experiencing subject is metaphysically identical with the experienced world.
So far I have presented two versions of this argument, Hume’s and Wittgenstein’s. I am not piling up these various demonstrations that the problem of consciousness is a pseudoproblem in order to commit the informal fallacy of the argument from authority: I have my own reservations about Hume, Wittgenstein and empiricism in general but I am persuaded by these particular arguments that the alleged metaphysical problem of phenomenal properties is a pseudoproblem. It is striking that Wittgenstein’s “solipsism” is very close, perhaps identical, to arguments found in an ancient tradition with origins very far from those of empiricism.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Consciousness: the other horn of the dilemma in philosophy of mind
I take Turing’s thought experiment to be entirely persuasive, with the radical and happy outcome that, among other things, it reveals the old epistemological chestnut “the problem of other minds” to be a pseudoproblem (Wittgenstein emphasizes this). There is another famous gedanken-style argument in the philosophy of mind that I find equally persuasive, owing to John Searle: the Chinese Room Argument. I found both the Turing Test and the Chinese Room Argument to be rather fast and baffling at first, and then I went through a period of doubt and resistance, but I cannot find any argument that shows either of them to be fallacious or misapplied (and many, many have tried). I now feel certain that they are both correct. The only problem is that they are mutually contradictory.
Imagine, Searle asks, a person in a room. The room has a slot where people outside the room can enter printed notes and another slot where he can put out notes in response. This person cannot read or speak Chinese. He has two things: a large cache of Chinese characters (maybe he has a Chinese-character typewriter), and a set of instructions. The instructions are purely formal: for each Chinese character or set of characters that comes in to the room, there is specified a character or set of characters to be put out. Chinese-speakers write notes and put them into the room: “What is the capital of France?” say, or “What is your favorite food? Mine is chocolate.” or “I plan to vote for Obama, but my brother disagrees.” The person in the Chinese Room examines the characters, finds them in the instruction manual, and prints out the responding characters that are specified there. The instructions are such that the Chinese-speakers are satisfied that they are conversing with an intelligent being, one that knows something about geography and any number of other topics and can converse about food, politics, relatives and so on.
According to Turing, the Chinese-speakers (and everyone else outside the room) would have to conclude that the Chinese Room was intelligent. In fact the Chinese Room just is intelligent (no inference is necessary) since, on the operationalist view, “intelligence” consists of nothing more nor less than this kind of intelligent behavior; there is no question of being wrong here. On the contrary, Searle argues that the Chinese Room knows nothing. Neither the person in the Room nor the Room as a whole has any idea what the topic is, or even that there is a topic: not even that the characters mean anything at all. The Chinese Room is, according to Searle, a formal rule-governed symbol-manipulating device and nothing more, and as such it knows nothing at all, and nothing that knows nothing can be considered “intelligent.” A thing lacking all awareness is not an intelligent thing.
Searle’s specific target is computationalism, the view that (human) cognition is a form of computation, in other words that intelligent humans are formal rule-governed symbol-manipulating systems. He doesn’t think that an intelligent artifact is impossible, because he’s a materialist: he accepts that an artifact with the same relevant causal properties as a human body would have the same kind of intelligence. It’s just that a computer is not that artifact. A computer can have a data-base as full of symbolic representations (words, pictures) about Paris as you like, but it is only the human user who can grasp what the symbols represent. And what is that? Cheese shops full of hard parmesan and soft camembert, well-dressed people whizzing by on motor scooters, cigarette butts stuck in the metal grid floors of the Metro: a specific place full of sounds, smells, textures, tastes and scenes.
The taste of the wine, the smell of the cigarettes, the feeling that the well-dressed people don’t admire your ensemble: these are conscious experiences. Humans have them, computers do not. Only beings who have conscious experiences (who are, that is, conscious) can know what a symbol stands for, because “knowing” consists of an appreciation of the quality of the relevant experiences. A human doesn’t even have to have been to Paris to get some feel for the place; they can read about it on their computer screen! No amount of increase in the computational power of a mere formal rule-governed symbol-manipulating device will be sufficient for understanding absent this capacity for qualitative experience. This capacity is consciousness.
But how is it that consciousness is a metaphysical problem? Here is another famous gedanken-style argument, this one owed to Frank Jackson, which makes the metaphysical nature of the problem clear. Imagine Mary, a color-blind color-vision specialist. Mary is an expert on the science of color perception. This involves a great deal of scientific expertise: Mary knows about the physics of light, for example about how red light has a spiky amplitude and blue light a flat one; she knows about the light-absorbent and –reflective properties of surfaces; she understands the way the rods and cones on the back of the retina measure the amplitude of light and accordingly stimulate the optic nerve; she knows about the visual cortex and how the cells are arranged and connected there. Let’s say Mary is the world’s foremost color-vision specialist. Let’s even idealize Mary a little bit: let’s say that she is in possession of the complete and correct physical description and explanation of color vision, from the physics of light to the neurophysiology of perception. She knows all there is to know, and she’s got it all right.
Mary is color-blind. She has never seen a blue or red surface, only blacks, grays and whites. That is, she doesn’t know what colors look like. Sadly, she does not have the capacity for the relevant qualitative experience (I’ve always suspected that Mary has over-compensated for her disability in the pursuit of her chosen career). If this is right, then a complete and correct physical description and explanation of experience is lacking some information: what it is like to see colors (to use a phrase made famous by yet another exponent of the problem, Thomas Nagel). Now we have another putative mental “property,” and like the semantic property it appears to be unanalyzable into physical properties. There is even a noun, quale (singular of qualia), that denotes these qualitative feelings: the quale of this bite of chocolate I’m taking is this particular taste-sensation that constitutes my being conscious of the chocolate in my mouth. Conscious experience consists of qualia and qualia are not analyzable into, identifiable as, or reducible to physical properties.
Thus psychology cannot be naturalized. There is something called phenomenal description (the description of the quality of experience) that necessarily is always distinct from physical description. The study of experience qua experience is called phenomenology, but I will call the metaphysical problem, following the usage in contemporary philosophy of mind, “the problem of consciousness.” This is the subject of Chapter Three. There is a close connection between this problem as it is framed by contemporary philosophy of mind and the much older philosophical problem of the possibility of a radical difference between our experience of the world and the world as it actually is. In modern philosophy it is more common to put this as an epistemological problem (for example in the literature of skepticism). Both the English-language phenomenalists and the Continental phenomenologists of the early 20th century wanted to put metaphysics behind them, but I will maintain that progress here can only be made in the context of an explicitly metaphysical discussion. Nor would my conclusions be congenial to philosophers of that era: I will argue that the phenomenalists were in the grip of a disastrous misinterpretation of Hume and that phenomenology is impossible.
Like most people I tend to be drawn towards symmetry. Alas, Chapters Two and Three do not have symmetrical arguments. Whereas I break the problem of intentionality down into two constituent problems, the problem of representation and the problem of rationality, and offer positive theories to handle both, I will argue that the problem of consciousness is in fact a pseudoproblem and thus not amenable to (or in need of) any “theory” at all. Nonetheless even if one is persuaded, as I am, by the argument that the problem of consciousness is a pseudoproblem it turns out that there still remains something to say about metaphysics and consciousness and that discussion forms the second part of Chapter Three.
Philosophy of mind finds itself, at the beginning of the 21st century, to be at something of an impasse. For much of the 20th century operationalists had an agenda stable enough and productive enough that they were able to basically ignore the challenge of the phenomenologists, although the rejection of behaviorism as a popular psychology, after a long battle from Aldous Huxley’s iconic Brave New World through B. F. Skinner’s incendiary Beyond Freedom and Dignity, made the problem clear enough. (A crucial exception was Wittgenstein, but I will save that discussion for Chapter Three.) Gradually the dam broke and by the end of the 1980s thanks to Searle, Jackson, Nagel and others the post-“Analytic,” English-language philosophy of mind community acknowledged the problem of qualia as a central problem, and today one of the most thriving branches of the field, quite at home with the scientific neighbors in the area of “cognitive studies,” is “consciousness studies.” I will call those who take the problem seriously the “phenomenologists” although no doubt some will think that term comes with too much baggage; I ask the reader’s indulgence for the sake of exposition.
These new phenomenologists quickly set about demonstrating the inadequacy of functionalism and operationalist approaches in general as comprehensive theories of mind. For any qualitative experience (any quale) that appears to have a causal role in the production of behavior, the argument goes, one can conceive of a being with the functionally equivalent behavior but not the quale (a number of these “absent qualia” arguments, while mostly to the same point, are important enough to get their own discussion in Chapter Three). This might seem to be more of a problem for the advocates of phenomenology than it is for the advocates of operationalism but the opposite is true: if a functionally complete description and explanation of a person lacks any description or explanation of consciousness then functionalism is in the same position as Jackson’s Mary gedanken appears to put physicalism in general: it is not a complete theory of mind. In the literature this is often tagged as the “zombie” problem: the zombie is the allegedly conceivable functionally-complete but consciousness-lacking person.
The phenomenologists, for their part, have often accepted that the problem of consciousness does indeed thwart the naturalization of psychology, just as their older Continental namesakes did (although with considerably less enthusiasm). For example there is a well-developed line that a “property” dualism is inevitable, a kind of epistemological dualism that does not commit one to actual metaphysical dualism. I don’t think so: I think that metaphysical physicalism entails epistemological physicalism, on the grounds that that is the only possible significance of such a metaphysical assertion. There is a group that calls itself the “mysterians,” who argue that we just have to concede that there is no accounting for the relationship between the physical and the phenomenal. And one of the most noted writers on the topic in recent years, David Chalmers, had considerable success with his suggestion that metaphysical dualism is the right theory after all (admittedly the suggestion is made in a Berkelean spirit: we should just concede metaphysical dualism and move on). An exception to these various consuls of despair is Searle, and that is another discussion elaborated in Chapter Three. But with exceptions the phenomenologists find themselves with an apparent refutation of operationalist theories but without a coherent theory of their own.
The book you are reading is titled The Mind/Body Problems; the aim of the title is to draw your attention to the plural. The next section is, I think, straightforward, but it is one of the most important sections of the book.
Imagine, Searle asks, a person in a room. The room has a slot where people outside the room can enter printed notes and another slot where he can put out notes in response. This person cannot read or speak Chinese. He has two things: a large cache of Chinese characters (maybe he has a Chinese-character typewriter), and a set of instructions. The instructions are purely formal: for each Chinese character or set of characters that comes in to the room, there is specified a character or set of characters to be put out. Chinese-speakers write notes and put them into the room: “What is the capital of France?” say, or “What is your favorite food? Mine is chocolate.” or “I plan to vote for Obama, but my brother disagrees.” The person in the Chinese Room examines the characters, finds them in the instruction manual, and prints out the responding characters that are specified there. The instructions are such that the Chinese-speakers are satisfied that they are conversing with an intelligent being, one that knows something about geography and any number of other topics and can converse about food, politics, relatives and so on.
According to Turing, the Chinese-speakers (and everyone else outside the room) would have to conclude that the Chinese Room was intelligent. In fact the Chinese Room just is intelligent (no inference is necessary) since, on the operationalist view, “intelligence” consists of nothing more nor less than this kind of intelligent behavior; there is no question of being wrong here. On the contrary, Searle argues that the Chinese Room knows nothing. Neither the person in the Room nor the Room as a whole has any idea what the topic is, or even that there is a topic: not even that the characters mean anything at all. The Chinese Room is, according to Searle, a formal rule-governed symbol-manipulating device and nothing more, and as such it knows nothing at all, and nothing that knows nothing can be considered “intelligent.” A thing lacking all awareness is not an intelligent thing.
Searle’s specific target is computationalism, the view that (human) cognition is a form of computation, in other words that intelligent humans are formal rule-governed symbol-manipulating systems. He doesn’t think that an intelligent artifact is impossible, because he’s a materialist: he accepts that an artifact with the same relevant causal properties as a human body would have the same kind of intelligence. It’s just that a computer is not that artifact. A computer can have a data-base as full of symbolic representations (words, pictures) about Paris as you like, but it is only the human user who can grasp what the symbols represent. And what is that? Cheese shops full of hard parmesan and soft camembert, well-dressed people whizzing by on motor scooters, cigarette butts stuck in the metal grid floors of the Metro: a specific place full of sounds, smells, textures, tastes and scenes.
The taste of the wine, the smell of the cigarettes, the feeling that the well-dressed people don’t admire your ensemble: these are conscious experiences. Humans have them, computers do not. Only beings who have conscious experiences (who are, that is, conscious) can know what a symbol stands for, because “knowing” consists of an appreciation of the quality of the relevant experiences. A human doesn’t even have to have been to Paris to get some feel for the place; they can read about it on their computer screen! No amount of increase in the computational power of a mere formal rule-governed symbol-manipulating device will be sufficient for understanding absent this capacity for qualitative experience. This capacity is consciousness.
But how is it that consciousness is a metaphysical problem? Here is another famous gedanken-style argument, this one owed to Frank Jackson, which makes the metaphysical nature of the problem clear. Imagine Mary, a color-blind color-vision specialist. Mary is an expert on the science of color perception. This involves a great deal of scientific expertise: Mary knows about the physics of light, for example about how red light has a spiky amplitude and blue light a flat one; she knows about the light-absorbent and –reflective properties of surfaces; she understands the way the rods and cones on the back of the retina measure the amplitude of light and accordingly stimulate the optic nerve; she knows about the visual cortex and how the cells are arranged and connected there. Let’s say Mary is the world’s foremost color-vision specialist. Let’s even idealize Mary a little bit: let’s say that she is in possession of the complete and correct physical description and explanation of color vision, from the physics of light to the neurophysiology of perception. She knows all there is to know, and she’s got it all right.
Mary is color-blind. She has never seen a blue or red surface, only blacks, grays and whites. That is, she doesn’t know what colors look like. Sadly, she does not have the capacity for the relevant qualitative experience (I’ve always suspected that Mary has over-compensated for her disability in the pursuit of her chosen career). If this is right, then a complete and correct physical description and explanation of experience is lacking some information: what it is like to see colors (to use a phrase made famous by yet another exponent of the problem, Thomas Nagel). Now we have another putative mental “property,” and like the semantic property it appears to be unanalyzable into physical properties. There is even a noun, quale (singular of qualia), that denotes these qualitative feelings: the quale of this bite of chocolate I’m taking is this particular taste-sensation that constitutes my being conscious of the chocolate in my mouth. Conscious experience consists of qualia and qualia are not analyzable into, identifiable as, or reducible to physical properties.
Thus psychology cannot be naturalized. There is something called phenomenal description (the description of the quality of experience) that necessarily is always distinct from physical description. The study of experience qua experience is called phenomenology, but I will call the metaphysical problem, following the usage in contemporary philosophy of mind, “the problem of consciousness.” This is the subject of Chapter Three. There is a close connection between this problem as it is framed by contemporary philosophy of mind and the much older philosophical problem of the possibility of a radical difference between our experience of the world and the world as it actually is. In modern philosophy it is more common to put this as an epistemological problem (for example in the literature of skepticism). Both the English-language phenomenalists and the Continental phenomenologists of the early 20th century wanted to put metaphysics behind them, but I will maintain that progress here can only be made in the context of an explicitly metaphysical discussion. Nor would my conclusions be congenial to philosophers of that era: I will argue that the phenomenalists were in the grip of a disastrous misinterpretation of Hume and that phenomenology is impossible.
Like most people I tend to be drawn towards symmetry. Alas, Chapters Two and Three do not have symmetrical arguments. Whereas I break the problem of intentionality down into two constituent problems, the problem of representation and the problem of rationality, and offer positive theories to handle both, I will argue that the problem of consciousness is in fact a pseudoproblem and thus not amenable to (or in need of) any “theory” at all. Nonetheless even if one is persuaded, as I am, by the argument that the problem of consciousness is a pseudoproblem it turns out that there still remains something to say about metaphysics and consciousness and that discussion forms the second part of Chapter Three.
Philosophy of mind finds itself, at the beginning of the 21st century, to be at something of an impasse. For much of the 20th century operationalists had an agenda stable enough and productive enough that they were able to basically ignore the challenge of the phenomenologists, although the rejection of behaviorism as a popular psychology, after a long battle from Aldous Huxley’s iconic Brave New World through B. F. Skinner’s incendiary Beyond Freedom and Dignity, made the problem clear enough. (A crucial exception was Wittgenstein, but I will save that discussion for Chapter Three.) Gradually the dam broke and by the end of the 1980s thanks to Searle, Jackson, Nagel and others the post-“Analytic,” English-language philosophy of mind community acknowledged the problem of qualia as a central problem, and today one of the most thriving branches of the field, quite at home with the scientific neighbors in the area of “cognitive studies,” is “consciousness studies.” I will call those who take the problem seriously the “phenomenologists” although no doubt some will think that term comes with too much baggage; I ask the reader’s indulgence for the sake of exposition.
These new phenomenologists quickly set about demonstrating the inadequacy of functionalism and operationalist approaches in general as comprehensive theories of mind. For any qualitative experience (any quale) that appears to have a causal role in the production of behavior, the argument goes, one can conceive of a being with the functionally equivalent behavior but not the quale (a number of these “absent qualia” arguments, while mostly to the same point, are important enough to get their own discussion in Chapter Three). This might seem to be more of a problem for the advocates of phenomenology than it is for the advocates of operationalism but the opposite is true: if a functionally complete description and explanation of a person lacks any description or explanation of consciousness then functionalism is in the same position as Jackson’s Mary gedanken appears to put physicalism in general: it is not a complete theory of mind. In the literature this is often tagged as the “zombie” problem: the zombie is the allegedly conceivable functionally-complete but consciousness-lacking person.
The phenomenologists, for their part, have often accepted that the problem of consciousness does indeed thwart the naturalization of psychology, just as their older Continental namesakes did (although with considerably less enthusiasm). For example there is a well-developed line that a “property” dualism is inevitable, a kind of epistemological dualism that does not commit one to actual metaphysical dualism. I don’t think so: I think that metaphysical physicalism entails epistemological physicalism, on the grounds that that is the only possible significance of such a metaphysical assertion. There is a group that calls itself the “mysterians,” who argue that we just have to concede that there is no accounting for the relationship between the physical and the phenomenal. And one of the most noted writers on the topic in recent years, David Chalmers, had considerable success with his suggestion that metaphysical dualism is the right theory after all (admittedly the suggestion is made in a Berkelean spirit: we should just concede metaphysical dualism and move on). An exception to these various consuls of despair is Searle, and that is another discussion elaborated in Chapter Three. But with exceptions the phenomenologists find themselves with an apparent refutation of operationalist theories but without a coherent theory of their own.
The book you are reading is titled The Mind/Body Problems; the aim of the title is to draw your attention to the plural. The next section is, I think, straightforward, but it is one of the most important sections of the book.
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