I don’t much care about commonsense when it comes to psychology, but I admit it’s an empirical question (though it would be nearly miraculous if the folk are right, given that they aren’t even right about a lot of basic physical mechanics, and that minds/brains are a hell of a lot more complicated than basic mechanics).

As for scientists using definitions to even start their science: yes, I said that above, but they are used in a much less reverent way and simply as useful heuristics to get the experiments started. It is a very different approach in practice. It is a minor part of what they do. The conceptual clarity comes one you understand the system, not before. The best philosophy comes after the science is done, not before. (I’m stealing all this basically from Quine and Pat Churchland). While many philosophers realize this, they still keep yapping on about minds even though the science is nowhere near “done.”

It isn’t like I didn’t give philosophy a chance: I got my MA with the Churchlands, and then realized I really just want to understand how brains work. In practice (and we have discussed this before over at Brains I think before you were in the fray: unfortunately I can’t find the flibbin’ post) philosophy isn’t the best thing to study if you want to understand brains. So, given that interest, philosophy would have been a bad choice. It wasn’t just conceptual analytic philosophy (I didn’t go to UCSD to do that) but the general toolbox used by philosophers is wrong (logic and ordinary language rather than probability/calculus/circuit/nonlinear dynamics/statistics) is wrong, the courses you have to teach undergrads are useless diversions (from the perspective of wanting to understand brains), and you have to waste time with other philosophers explaining why you are looking at data, why neuroscience might be relevant. I went through all this, it was a time sink (like arguing with creationists when you just want to do evolutionary biology), and left the professional philosophy career track. So while the main reason I left was because the whole focus on ideas rather than data is not the way to go with understanding brains, the above other stuff all contributed. Given my interests, philosophy was a bad choice. Not to mention the ridiculous job insecurity you guys have to suffer through.

But you are right that I am still very interested in philosophy, and have a strong love for it. I think more so now that I am not obligated to do it. I can ignore the bullshit and try to focus on the work that maintains contact with science (e.g., Dretske, Grush, Mandik, Churchlands, Chalmers, etc.) and lightly skim the purely conceptual stuff for anything useful (e.g., Kim, apparently Rosenthal, a lot of early Mandik chapters are purely conceptual (and hence admittedly sort of boring to me: no offense Pete)). Such conceptual clarifications are OK as far as they go, but the best ideas, the most exciting concepts, will come from pounding our minds against the data provided by real brains (and not just C-fibers). By ‘data’ I don’t mean opinion polls of the folk (even though that is an interesting bit of philosophical anthropology).

I really don’t hink that that is a good reason to ‘get out of philosophy’ (which, by the way, you don’t seem to have done at all!) since both methods are used in both philosophy and science. Even Aristotle, who is perhaps the originator of the idea that one starts with necessary definitional truths about the nature of reality that are just self-evident to the faculty of reason and then deduces via syllogism all of the physical truths about the world (this is what led him to think that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter bodies), did lots of empirical work in what we would call biology and even endocrinology…he studied things empirically to discover their essences…This method of starting from a priori self-evident truths took heavy critisism from the likes of Newton, and Gallieo, and the new philosophers that were influenced by them (e.g. Locke, and Hume, and even Kant! claim to be following the model proposed by these new scientists)…of course we all know the problems that pop up when we think that we can DISCOVER truths about the nature of reality, ranging from the problem of induction (do we have any rational reason to think that the future will resemble the past? Hume’s answer: there is no rational reason at all to think that one thing will happen next as oppesed to some other thing. When I drop my pen it is just as likely that it will turn into a dove and fly away as it is that it will move towards the ground at 9.8 m/s/s) to Idealism (do we have any reason to think that there is substance (i.e. something that ’stands under’ appearances, Kant’s ‘noumena’, our ‘matter’)?)…but leave all of these well known problems with Empiricism and the experimental method aside for the moment, it is absolutely the case that science starts with definitions (sometimes called ‘operationalizing a variable’)…it is not as though scientists just go out and start randomly poking at things. They go out armed with a theory (which includes a bunch of definitions of theoretical terms, presumably) and their aim is to test that theory; to support it to undermine it, etc. They need the theory (and the definitions) before they can even identify a phenomenon to ’study the hell out of’, needless to say said studying will feed back on the theory and cause it to be reformulted or thrown out all together, or whatever…so I think what is more acurate is that you were turned off by a style of philosophy that claims that the job of philoosphy is a priori conceptual analysis, but not liking a style of philosophy is not a reason to ‘get out’ of philosophy. It is a reason to look to a different ‘definition’ of what the job of philosophy is…

I guess I don’t take folk psychology that seriously. The folk notions can (and do) help get the science started, but beyond that if anything I tend to distrust folk psychology. Just because there is some grammatical construction that we can get people on the street to agree with about consciousness doesn’t convince me that it is true. The experiments will reveal the referents. We don’t define the referents other than as a first-pass, rough-and-ready way to get experiments started, to help us choose some model systems to study. (Perhaps the main reason I left philosophy, incidentally, was that there was too much of the definitions first approach, not enough of the ‘Study the hell out of this phenomenon experimentally to discover what it is’ approach).

Obviously Dretske’s analog digital distinction explains everything anyway.

I am not sure what your critisism is…we do just say we have conscious beliefs, but the claim is that it is part of our common sense folk psychology that we also have unconscious beliefs and a theory of consciousness is primarily a theory of the difference between these two kinds of states. At the level of folk psychology T is an intuitive platitude about conscious states. According to Rosenthal’s view the way that we define the theoretical terms of folk-psychology is by gathering up these kinds of platittudes (a la David Lewis if you know his work on this area). They (the platitudes) in effect ‘fix the reference’ of the terms. We then use some science and logic and try to find out what those states are (i.e. those states that we are conscious of). It is at that point that T suggests itself as an account of the nature of conscious states and if then we can begin to try and spell out how to implement T, which gives us the various versions of higher-order theories (e.g. Carrathurs, Rosenthal, Lycan, Armstrong, etc)…So I don’t know why you say we have to be careful not to reify what the folk say…This is one promising strategy for giving an account of what a conscious state is, perhaps the only one that can in principle do the job that we want done…

Drestske’s claims are not consistent with T, he has a completely different conception of what a consciou state is (on his view it is a state that we are conscious WITH not conscious OF). I think it would be very bad news for Dretske to find out that his theory is consistent with T as that would mean that he doesn’t understand what he himself means by ‘conscious state’ (by the by, I actually think that this might be right…but the point is that Dretske would be bummed to find this out).

Oh and I like ‘FORheads’ as well

thanks for the suggestion. My current plan is to say a whole bunch more about this in later chapters, especially 2 and 3. I’d be curious to see what you think of the following question after they are posted: will more foreshadowing in ch. 0 be beneficial?

Let’s assume for argument that an individual belief can be in the ‘on’ state (occurrent) (call this occurrent token ‘X’) but either conscious or unconscious. X is the content of our state-consciousness if we are conscious of X. That is basically T’, with an instance substituted in.

This seems reasonable. It is not a substantive theory of consciousness, but a reasonable claim about consciousness that can be one of many claims used to build a hypothesis about consciousness. It doesn’t imply HOT. It seems consistent with everything I have seen from Dretske (he just needs some functional difference such that in the conscious case X has different consequences than in the unconscious case). Or, X is sometimes sent to the global workspace, sometimes not (perhaps the global workspace is a special instance of HOT, I don’t know).

Pete: depending on your audience you might give a wee bit more exposition of T (I’m sure your publisher has given you infinite space :)). I have shown this chapter to another friend who knows quite a bit of philosophy of mind but who was similarly taken aback by T.

I think I now understand it. Richard: thanks for your patience. Sometimes I err on the side of being prematurely critical, especially when it comes to philosophy.

T and T’ say exactly the same things! A conscious state is a state that we are conscious of…I really do not know wy you are so obsessed with substituting equivelent terms…

As for the last part, I really don’t know what you are talking about. Ask any undergraduate what an unconscious belief is and 9/10 they will say ‘a belief I don’t know that I have’…there is NO WAY in which T is a CONSEQUENCE of a sophisticated theory, it is the progenitor of several sophisticated theories.

I agree that content is more important than style. The problem with the style of his analysis of ‘transitive consciousness’ is that it makes it hard to divine the content. I’m still not clear what transitive consciousness is other than consciousness of something, e.g., being consciously aware of a dog running down the street. But if that is the case we are once again left again with T and the recursive well.

To be fair, I think he does go on and try to explicate the notion further. This is like those undergrad philosophy papers you hate to grade because they are smart enough that they might be saying something significant, but it is convoluted so you have to spend a ton of time trying to figure it out to even tell them what they need to change. I realize, of course, that this isn’t a critique of his positive theory, but a jab at his style. It’s fun to jab at philosophers’ often convoluted style (one danger of such stylistic problems is that they hide conceptual confusions, but it takes a long time for other philosophers poring over the text to realize this: hence the popularity of Heidegger).

At any rate, perhaps T is true, but as a platitude, or something obvious, or something the folk would agree with, no way. It isn’t an analysis but a consequence of a sophisticated theory of consciousness. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact that’s a Good Thing.