“Transcending Zombies,” available here, is the fifth chapter of The Subjective Brain as well as the basis for my talk on July 5 at the CUNY Grad Center.
Excerpt:
The argument that I will be developing in the remainder of this chapter, and referring to as the Transcending Zombies argument or simply TZ, goes as follows.
P1. If it is possible for me to know that I am not a zombie, then phenomenal character is (a certain kind of) conceptualized egocentric content.
P2. I know that I am not a zombie.
P3. Phenomenal character is (a certain kind of) conceptualized egocentric content.
P4. Fixing my physical properties fixes my conceptualized egocentric contents.
C. Fixing my physical properties fixes my phenomenal properties.
I turn now to the sections wherein I defend P1 of TZ. In §3 I defend the claim that my knowing that I’m not a zombie requires that if I have (states with) phenomenal character right now then my current conceptual repertoire is adequate for representing that phenomenal character. In §4, I defend the claim that my knowing that I’m not a zombie requires that if I have (states with) phenomenal character right now, then I have states with egocentric content. In §5 I defend the claim that if I know that I am not a zombie, then not only does my having (states with) phenomenal character require that I have states with conceptual and egocentric contents, but certain states with conceptual and egocentric contents must suffice for my having (states with) phenomenal character. Further, in §5, I begin a case (to be completed in §§7-8) that (if I know that I’m not a zombie then) certain conceptualized egocentric contents are identical to (not just necessary and sufficient for) phenomenal character.
[...]  In Ch. 5 of Pete’s book-in-progress The subjective Brain he address this concern by saying the following. [...]
Hey Pete,
That link is broken…anyway I have posted a response over at Philosophy Suchks!, which as you might suspect, argues that you are Implementing the Transitivity Principle
I don’t know why my blog has been breaking my links, but they are fixed now.
Re: your post. Of course “Rosenthal can agree that what we are conscious of is the coffee cup”. But what is at issue between him and Transitivity haters is whether one can have a conscious state while one is conscious of only the coffee cup.
But that’s not what is at issue here. What is at issue here is whether your account is or is not an implementation of transitivity and the only evidence that you offer that it is NOT an implementation is that “What I would be conscious of, on this view, is a coffee cup as being to my left.” So this is not evidence that your view doesn’t implement transitivity.
My account would be an implementation of transitivity if it was logically entailed by my account that a state is conscious only if one was conscious of it. l However, my account allows (and e.g. Rosenthal’s does not) that a state can be conscious even though all one is conscious of is a coffee cup as being to my left.
You’ve suggested that maybe if we add Lurz’s thesis to my account, then that - the conjunction of my account and Lurz’s thesis would entail that one is conscious of a mental state only if one is conscious of it. However, that still would not suffice to show that my account is an implementation of transitivity.
You are right that I have suggested that if Lurz is right then your view is an implementation of transitivity, but you seem to misunderstand the point. You seem to think that “the conjunction of [your] account and Lurz’s thesis would entail that one is conscious of a mental state only if one is conscious of it” but that is not the point at all! The point is that, if Lurz is right, and certainly he must be, then being conscious of the content of a state is being conscious of the state in some way (but not as such…I mean as he says how could you be conscious of what the state represenst without thereby being conscious of the state in some sense?) so your view is most definately an implementation of transitivity in so far as it relies on one becomming conscious of the content of the state and by doing so one becomes conscious of the state itself. THAT IS THE POINT. If that is true, then it absolutely does suffice to show that your account is an implementation of transitivity.
Now I know that you on’t think that Lurz’s thesis is true, and that is what you two are currently debating about in the other post, the point I am making here is what would be the case (for your view) if his intuitive thesis turns out to be true.
Even worse, as I argued over at Philosophy Sucks!, it doesn’t matter if Lurz’s view turns out to be correct or not as you have not distinguished the view you present here from the (pretty much) standard higher-order thought view. Let us count the ways. You agree with Rosenthal that there is a sensory state that carries information about the world (in Rosenthal’s terms there is a first-order sensation that has qualitative properties which are about/represent perceptible properties of objects in the world), you also think that this sensory state will ‘trigger’ a conceptulazation of that state in such a way that it is conceptualized as belonging to the creature in question and the qualitative properties/informationit carries is conceptualized as belonging to some physical object.
Now this ‘conceptualized egocentric’ state sounds JUST LIKE a higher-order thought, which represents the creature itself (egocentric content) as seeing a coffe cup to the left (conceptual content)…When one points out that you seem to just be giving a slightly modified version of higher-order theory (modified because you think that the two states ‘causally interact’ and possibly that they at that point constitute a single state) you say,
but you have NOT argued that a state can be conscious without our being conscious of the state which represents the cup; in fact you have not argued that your view allows it! You can assert it all you want but that doesn’t make it true. In fact the only evidence that you give as to why your view doen’t implement transitivity is that the creature will be conscious of the coffe cup not of the experience of the coffe cup (so, an appeal to (”deflated”) transparency)… but this doesn’t help you, because, again as I have argued, this is exactly what the transitivity principle predicts (that the creature will only be conscious of what the experience represents) and so is not evidence against it.
Well, I guess we can talk about this at your talk later today…:)
The transitivity principle is simply the statement that a state is conscious only if one is conscious of it. Or, if you like, that a state is conscious only if one is conscious of oneself as being in it. How does that predict that a creature will be conscious only of what the experience represents? Suppose that what the experience represents is simply dog here. According to Transitivity, if it is a conscious experience, one must also be conscious of the experience itself. Now, as I’ve argued, this would require that one additionally be conscious of vehicular properties of the experience. You and Lurz seem to be convinced that some questionable analogy between mental states and paintings undermines this. But I’ve also presented arguments against that supposed analogy.
Bottom line: don’t tell me that I’ve given no argument for my denial that my account implements transitivity.
HOW TO GET BANNED: Tell me that I have not given an argument. If you want to explain how an argument that I’ve given is invalid or unsound, then you are welcome to do so. If, however, you want to say that I’ve given no argument, then you are welcome to do it on someone else’s blog but not mine.
[...] A similar lack of clarity attaches to the postponed question of qualia. Whatever painful qualia set in as a result, either directly or indirectly, from a bout of star kicking, the qualia aren’t obviously independent of one’s conceptualizations. Indeed, insofar as it will be obvious to one that one has painful qualia, one will have concepts adequate to forming the thought that one has painful qualia. (This latter point is further developed in the discussion of the first premise of my Transcending Zombies argument [link].) Fig. 1. …and Johnson’s all, like, WTF!?!? [...]
Pete-
If phenomenal character is a certain kind of conceptualized egocentric content, then shouldn’t it be impossible to be mistaken about one’s phenomenal experiences? Consider the case of a young child just learning her colors. Suppose the child, when presented with an apple, asserts that the apple is blue. There are two possible conclusions one can draw from the child’s utterance:
1) the child had a blue phenomenal experience when presented with the apple
2) the child is mistaken in her claim about her phenomenal experience ie. her conceptualized egocentric content does not correspond properly with her phenomenal experience
Even if I know that I am not a zombie, and I believe that the child is not a zombie, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious way I could know whether the same correspondence between conceptualized egocentric content and phenomenal character exists in the child as exists in myself. Doesn’t the inverted spectrum problem make it impossible to know whether a particular conceptualized egocentric content is uniquely related to a particular phenomenal character? If this is so, then how can phenomenal character be equated with conceptualized egocentric content?
Thanks, Paul. You raise some tough problems and good questions.
Regarding the questions of error, on my view, yes, there’s a sense in which certain judgments can’t fail to capture what it’s like: what it’s like to be you at a particular time just is how (certain of your) judgments portray the world at that time. There’s another sense, however, in which errors about what it’s like are easy and relatively unproblematic. One particularly uninteresting kind of case would be a slip of the tongue. So, to relate this to your example of the child saying “blue†on sight of a red apple, she may very well have judged the apple to be red and misspoke.
A more interesting case of error would involve mistaken unconscious meta-judgments. It’s theoretically possible, on my view, for a person to consciously judge the apple to be red and unconsciously judge that they judge the apple to be blue. In such a case, what it’s like is seeing a red apple as red and the content of the unconscious judgment, though mistaken, doesn’t enter into phenomenal character.
Now, an especially interesting case, and not one that I would regard as an error, is when a person currently consciously both judges that the apple is red and judges that they judge the apple to be blue. In such a case, what it’s like is seeing an apple as simultaneously blue and red. It may, of course, be impossible for any apple to simultaneously be both blue and red. But it’s not impossible for mental states to represent the impossible and such mental states may be illustrated by phenomena such as the motion after-effect wherein something looks to be both moving and stationary at the same time.
Regarding inverted spectra, just as I know that I’m not a zombie, I know that my spectra aren’t inverted. My knowing that I’m not a zombie requires me having a set of qualia and a set of concepts that accurately represent those qualia. So, if my current color quale is green, not red, then my current conceptualization of them must be as green, not red. Now, if conceptual contents are fixed by physical properties and qualia are not, then it not only would it be possible for my own spectra to be inverted, it would be possible for my own spectra to be inverted without my knowing. However, if I do know that my own qualia are un-inverted, and conceptual contents are fixed by physical properties, then my qualia are also fixed by my physical properties.
Now, what’s the problem posed concerning possible inverted spectra in other people? If I get to know the sort of stuff in the above paragraph, including stuff like that there are other people, that they have physical properties, that their physical properties are similar to mine, that they solve problems like I do, then there’s no special problem in ascertaining what it’s like to be them. If, on the other hand, one wants to raise skeptical doubts about the qualia of others, one needs to do it in such a way that doubts aren’t also raised about whether there exists an external world populated by, e.g., rocks and trees or else, again, the problem of ascertaining what it’s like to be someone else doesn’t constitute any special problem. I have a difficult time seeing, then, how one could claim to know that qualia are the sorts of things such that it’s possible that other people have qualia inverted with respect to their conceptualizations. Insofar as I’m justified in believing that there are other people, and that they have conceptualizations like mine, I would be likewise justified in believing that, like me, they know they have un-inverted qualia.
I think it might be useful to ask how we would know when one of your three classes of errors had been committed and what might constitute an example of each sort of error. The first type of error, a slip of the tongue, is unproblematic because when someone commits a slip of the tongue, their verbal utterance is not in accord with what they intended to say. It is easy for the person who committed the slip of the tongue to detect the mismatch, and correct it by a subsequent utterance. If the child in our example reported that an apple was blue, but then said, “no, wait, I meant red”, we could reasonably conclude that a slip of the tongue had occurred.
I’m not sure I fully understand your second case. What is an ‘unconscious metajudgement’? I suppose that the sort of mental state you are envisioning might occur in a person with a severed corpus callosum. Suppose that such a person was presented tachistoscopically with a picture of a red apple in their right visual hemifield, and a picture of a blue apple in their left visual hemifield. When asked verbally to report the color of the apple, such a person would respond “red” using their verbal left hemisphere. When asked to point with their left hand at a color chip of the same color as the apple, such a person would point towards a blue color chip. If we equate the conscious judgment with the verbal left hemisphere and the unconscious judgment with the right hemisphere, then I suppose that this might be an example of the sort of state you are envisioning for case 2.
I understand your third case least of all. What is an example of when such a mental state might occur in a normal or neurologically impaired person? What perceptual or psychological experiment might be used to reveal such a state?
It’s much easier to know that you aren’t a zombie than it is for you to know whether or not your perceptual color spectrum is inverted. You can know that you aren’t a zombie by introspection. If you experience phenomenal conscious states, then you know you aren’t a zombie. There is no absolute “correct orientation” of the perceptual color spectrum. It’s only meaningful to talk about whether or not your perceptual color spectrum is inverted relative to that of some other person, such as me. You can’t directly compare my phenomenal color experiences with your own, because phenomenal experiences are private. The only way that you can know about my phenomenal experiences is by what you can infer about them from my verbal utterances and other voluntary behavior. If I were color-blind then there are certain perceptual tests that you could do to reveal the difference between our phenomenal color experiences. A color-blind person can learn the full range of color concepts, but has an impoverished set of phenomenal color experiences to map them onto. While a non-color blind person has a one-to-one mapping between color concepts and distinct phenomenal color experiences, a color blind person has a many-to-one mapping. For example, a person with deuteranopia (red-yellow-green colorblindness) has the same phenomenal color experience for the stop light on a traffic signal as for the go light on a traffic signal. Non-color blind people have distinct phenomenal color experiences in these two cases, and thus seldom confuse the ’stop’ with the ‘go’ signal. Because of the many-to-one mapping, color blind people make errors in verbal reports about color under certain well defined circumstances which can be detected in appropriate perceptual tests. The situation of an inverted spectrum person would be quite different. An inverted spectrum person, like a ‘normal’ person has a one-to-one mapping of unique phenomenal color experiences with color concepts. The mapping is just different. It doesn’t seem obvious that there is any perceptual test that could distinguish an inverted spectrum person from a ‘normal’ person. Thus, you can’t know whether or not your color spectrum is inverted relative to someone else’s. Therefore you can’t know whether or not there is a unique relationship between conceptualized egocentric content and phenomenal character that holds both for you and for other people. Thus, you can’t equate phenomenal character with conceptualized egocentric content.
Hi Paul,
Before I present an overly-long response that doesn’t really address you concerns, would you please clarify a few things concerning where it is that you are coming from?
I gathered from our discussion about computation on an earlier thread that you aren’t a dualist, but I’m scratching my head about why you would say something like
If physicalism is true, and your brain is sufficiently similar to mine, then couldn’t I just bypass your verbal and other voluntary behaviors and go right for the brain scan? I would have assumed you’d answer “yes”. If, however, you are assuming dualism, or at least attempting to remain neutral re: physicalism vs. dualism, then I’ll need to rethink exactly what your objections are supposed to amount to.
Your answer to the above diagnostic questions will help me customize my response to your earlier remarks regarding inverted spectra.
Thanks in advance!
Pete-
We know about our phenomenal conscious states by very different means (ie. introspection) than we know about our brain states (ie. the various techniques of neuroscience). I think that the available evidence (effects of brain lesions, correlation between conscious states and electroencephalographic states, neuroimaging results, effects of drugs on brain and conscious states etc.) nevertheless clearly demonstrates that a very close relationship exists between phenomenal conscious states and brain states. I’m agnostic about the exact nature of this relationship. It seems to me that both Dave Chalmers style property dualism and the various forms of physicalism are plausible contenders, but both also have unresolved problems. In my last post, I was taking a neutral stance about physicalism. It may well be the case that phenomenal qualia will turn out to be identical with brain states or processes. However, this remains to be demonstrated, and the precise nature of the brain states or processes that are identical with phenomenal qualia remain to be identified. Your brain scanner example presumes the thing that you are trying to prove ie. that physicalism is true. Even if we had a brain scanner that could simultaneously non-invasively record from every neuron in the human brain, we would still need to do experiments in which we asked people about their phenomenal conscious states in order to establish the nature of the relationship between the observed neural activity and reported conscious experiences.
Hi Paul,
Thanks for clarifying your position regarding physicalism. Note that if, as you grant, you know that you have phenomenal states by introspection, then you know them only via your conceptualizations of them. And if, as you say, we need to ask people about their conscious states to know anything about them, then we must rely on their own conceptualizations as well. It looks like it would be exceedingly difficult to show that phenomenal consciousness isn’t a kind of conceptual content.
My positive case that it is a kind of conceptual content, as well as a case that inverted spectra are impossible, depends on something that you grant, namely that you know that you are not a zombie. I interpret this as meaning that you know that you now have states with phenomenal character or qualia. It is useful to compare this kind of knowledge to more ordinary cases of knowing that something is the case. Take for example, my knowing that there is a dog in the room. In order for me to know this, there must be some set of properties that the dog has and that I am able to conceptualize. I can be relatively neutral on exactly which conceptualizations will get the job done. Maybe my conceptualization is that there’s a four-legged furry barker in the room. Maybe my conceptualization is that there’s a domesticated wolf-descendant in the room. Maybe my conceptualization is simply that there’s a dog in the room. But however it goes, there must be some set of properties of the dog (e.g. being domesticated, being wolfish) and I must have some set of concepts adequate for the accurate representation of those properties (e.g. the concept of domestication, the concept of wolves).
Now, my knowledge that I now have states with phenomenal character is seldom if ever analogous to the case in which I simply conceive of the dog as a dog. I am not now simply conceiving of myself as having phenomenal states. There are specific phenomenal states that I conceive myself as having. As I type this note and take breaks to sip coffee there’s a whole slew of qualia that I conceive my states as having. In particular, I conceive myself as seeing my coffee mug as being blue. I have a blue quale and am able to conceptualize it as such. I reject, then, your statement that there is no absolute correct orientation of the color spectrum. I think there is. It involves conceptualizing a blue quale as blue and a yellow quale as yellow and so forth.
Now, if qualia are distinct from my conceptualizations, as they would need to be if inverted spectra are possible, then it would be theoretically possible for my qualia to become inverted without my noticing. My quale that I currently conceptualize as blue would actually be yellow and vice versa. My current conceptualization as having a blue quale would be false, then. And it would be false without my noticing. Further, if qualia are distinct from my conceptualizations, I could have all the same conceptualizations without having any qualia at all, and my belief that I’m not a zombie would be false. If it’s possible for my belief that I’m not a zombie to be false, then I can’t know that I’m not a zombie. But that I know that I’m not a zombie is something that you’re granting. It’s for the above sorts of reasons that I think that self-knowledge of non-zombie hood leads to the impossibility of inverted spectra.
I think the cases you raise concerning color-blindness are terrific for spelling out where our views on these matters overlap and where they diverge. I agree with you that the color-blind can have the full range of color concepts. I also agree with you that the color-blind diverge from normals in terms of phenomenal experiences. But I disagree that this divergence is to be explained in terms of mappings between concepts and concept-independent phenomenal experiences. On my view, the concept-independent things that concepts are mapped on to are information-bearing states in low levels of sensory processing that are not, all by themselves, conscious. These states, which may be states of the retina, LGN, or V1, are not by themselves states with phenomenal character. States with phenomenal character arise only when certain mutual causal interactions take place between these low-level states and high-level conceptual states. The deuteranopic and the normal may both have the concept of green, but only the normal has their concept enter into reciprocal interaction with low-level states carrying spectral information of the green-ness of the traffic signal.
Now, of course, the above view is physicalistic. And if you are going to pose challenges to it, the challenges should not presuppose dualism. So, for instance, you shouldn’t assert the privacy of phenomenal character, since, if one is to remain neutral regarding physicalism, one should be open to the possibility that qualia are identical to neural properties and as such, not essentially private. Likewise, it begs the question against conceptualism to assume that inverted spectra are possible. Now, I haven’t assumed that they are impossible. I have attempted to argue for their impossibility based on premises that I assume you grant me, such as that I know that I’m not a zombie.
I turn now to address some of your other questions concerning varieties of mental state and under what conditions phenomenal error occurs. The second case, the one involving unconscious meta-judgment, would involve a judgment about a judgment (that’s what a meta-judgment is) and it would also be unconscious, meaning it would have no phenomenal character. The case you describe with the callosumectomy patient would come pretty close to illustrating this insofar as one of the judgments is unconscious, but doesn’t give us an instance of phenomenal error since the unconscious judgment is not a judgment about the other judgment.
Regarding what would count as an instance of the third kind of case, one involving mental states with contradictory contents, I already gave one sort of example, namely the motion after-effect. Also known as the waterfall illusion, this may be described as simultaneously seeing an object as both stationary and moving. Other sorts of examples would include alternations of a color patch between green and red at a sufficiently high rate that it, paradoxically, looks simultaneously green and red.
Hi Pete-
I’m back. Your last post, way back in July, was long, so I think I’ll comment on just part of it for now. You write:
“Note that if, as you grant, you know that you have phenomenal states by introspection, then you know them only via your conceptualizations of them. And if, as you say, we need to ask people about their conscious states to know anything about them, then we must rely on their own conceptualizations as well. It looks like it would be exceedingly difficult to show that phenomenal consciousness isn’t a kind of conceptual content.”
In the case of another person, the only reliable information we have about their phenomenal experiences is their verbal reports about them. These are, necessarily, reports of their conceptualizations of their phenomenal experiences. I agree with you that in this third person case it would be difficult or impossible to tease apart phenomenal experiences and their conceptualizations. However, in the first person case, it certainly seems as though my phenomenal experiences exist apart from my conceptualizations of them. This seems especially to be the case, for example, when I’m in an unusual visual circumstance and am not sure what I’m seeing. I still see something, even if I can’t conceptualize it. I allow that an argument based solely on what *seems* to be the case may not be a very strong one. I can think of an experiment that might better address the issue. Suppose it was possible to reversibly inactivate Wernicke’s area in a human subject. Doing so would presumably render the subject incapable of conceptualizing their phenomenal experiences. If A) phenomenal experiences are identical with their conceptualizations, then the subject should be rendered incapable of phenomenal experience. If, on the other hand, B) phenomenal experiences exist apart from their conceptualizations (perhaps in mid or high level sensory cortical areas), subjects should still have phenomenal experiences that they are unable to conceptualize. Suppose that during inactivation, we show the subject a red square. We then allow the subject to recover from Wernicke inactivation and question them about their experience. Under A, the subject should report having experienced nothing. Under B, the subject should report having seen a red square. Note that, if the subject does report a red square, the report could not be due to mutual causal interactions between low level sensory information bearing states and high level conceptual states, since the sensory activation took place at an earlier time than the conceptualization. I don’t know whether this proposed experiment is technically feasible. It might be feasible using transcranial magnetic stimulation to temporarily inactivate Wernicke’s area. Do you see it as, in principle, a reasonable way of testing/falsifying your claim A? If not, what sort of observation or experiment could open your claim to the possibility of falsification?
Hi Paul,
Welcome back. I enjoy your remarks. My response will be longish, and may even turn into a post. I hope to complete it soon. Stay tuned!