Brain Hammer

I’ve posted a draft of my paper, “Transcending Zombies,” (link) which had previously been serialized as Brain Hammer posts. I’m very grateful to those of you who left comments, they will be reflected in a later draft. I’m pretty happy with how these serializations have been going, and will be doing it again soon. Stay tuned!

Previous Posts:
1. Introducing Transcending Zombies
2. Anti-Skeptical Maneuvers
3. I Know I’m Not a Zombie
4. Some Remarks on Phenomenal Knowledge
5. The Egocentricity of Phenomenal Knowledge
6. The Knowing and the Known
7. My Physical Properties Fix My Conceptualized Contents
8. My Physical Properties Fix My Egocentric Contents
9. TZ & AEI
10. Raffman’s Rainbow Unraveled
11. Over the Rainbow
12. Ending Transcending
13. Postscript on Diachronic Discrimination Failure

Escher’s shiniest bowling ball.

In this, the final post of the Transcending Zombies series, I close with some brief responses to a possible objection.

One line of resistance to the current argument will come from people who attribute phenomenal consciousness to babies and non-human animals but do not attribute concepts to them. However, such a line overlooks the evidence that lots of non-adults and non-humans have states that satisfy the criteria for conceptualized egocentric contents. I will not review that evidence here. (Although, see my “The Neural Accomplishment of Objectivity”). I turn instead to a different response.

My response is that while I grant that babies and non-humans no doubt lack the very concepts I use in my experiences of chairs and coffee mugs, I refuse to grant that babies and animals lack concepts altogether. While lacking concepts of chairs and mugs as such, they likely have, e.g., a concept of an object. And such concepts will suffice for the Allocentric portions of implementations of the Allocentric-Egocentric Interface theory.

My opponents would have a serious objection on their hands if they could show that, despite applying different concepts than the concepts that I apply in my experience, babies and non-human animals can have experiences phenomenally identical to my own. Another way they could have a serious objection would be if they could show that babies and non-human animals have absolutely no concepts whatsoever but nonetheless have phenomenally conscious states. However, I really don’t see how they could show either of these things. And if my imagined objector is simply asserting that such things are possible, then the imagined objection is simply question-begging.

Previous Posts:
1. Introducing Transcending Zombies
2. Anti-Skeptical Maneuvers
3. I Know I’m Not a Zombie
4. Some Remarks on Phenomenal Knowledge
5. The Egocentricity of Phenomenal Knowledge
6. The Knowing and the Known
7. My Physical Properties Fix My Conceptualized Contents
8. My Physical Properties Fix My Egocentric Contents
9. TZ & AEI
10. Raffman’s Rainbow Unraveled
11. Over the Rainbow

Remember these colors?

The recent dialectic has gone something like this. A crucial aspect of the Transcending Zombies argument is the identification of phenomenal character with a kind of conceptual content. I interpret Raffman’s (1995) argument as attacking such conceptualism on the grounds that there are perceptual discriminations that can be made but not across a memory delay. I have countered that such an argument makes the unwarranted assumption that a color is perceived the same way when presented in distinct contexts. It is open to the conceptualist, then, to maintain that the differences in the concepts applicable in the distinct contexts determine experiential differences. One way of describing this kind of conceptualism is as saying that experience is only as determinate as we have determinate concepts to bring to bear in experience.

Raffman (1995) presents an argument designed to block the sort of move I am here trying to make. She argues that it won’t do to say that our experience is only as determinate as we have determinate concepts for (we do have determinate concepts of the unique hues green, blue, red, and yellow), and merely determinable otherwise (we have only determinable concepts for non-unique hues like dark-reddish-orange). Raffman points out that there’s no introspectible difference between the ways in which unique and non-unique hues appear with respect to their ‘determinateness’ despite the radically different ways we have to conceptualize them. (Raffman 1995 pp. 301-302).

Raffman’s argument concerning determinateness seems to overlook a powerful resource available to the conceptualist. Raffman overlooks the possibility that the failure of seeming differences with respect to determinateness may simply be due to a failure to apply a concept of determinateness. Just as the conceptualist will model differences in apparent darkness in terms of the application of a relational concept of one color being darker than another, so may the conceptualist model differences in apparent determinateness in terms of the application of a relational concept of one hue or one experience of hue as being more determinate than another. Thus, the failures of appearance with respect to determinateness that Raffman refers to may be regarded by the conceptualist as due to normal perceivers simply failing to apply any such concept of determinateness to their experiences.

Previous Posts:
1. Introducing Transcending Zombies
2. Anti-Skeptical Maneuvers
3. I Know I’m Not a Zombie
4. Some Remarks on Phenomenal Knowledge
5. The Egocentricity of Phenomenal Knowledge
6. The Knowing and the Known
7. My Physical Properties Fix My Conceptualized Contents
8. My Physical Properties Fix My Egocentric Contents
9. TZ & AEI
10. Raffman’s Rainbow Unraveled

Egocentric contents conceptualized.

In my previous post I suggested that it wasn’t essential to spell out which conceptualized egocentric contents constitute phenomenal character since the physical will fix all of them. It may nonetheless serve to enhance both the intelligibility and the plausibility of the offered argument to provide further detail concerning which conceptualized egocentric contents fix phenomenal character and under what conditions they do so. To sketch such an account, it will be useful to begin by noting that the knowledge in question involves the occurrent deployment of concepts. It cannot just be, e.g., the kind of knowledge—like my knowledge that dogs are mammals—that I have even when I’m knocked out or distracted and not currently thinking about or perceiving any mammals.

A similar sort of point applies to the egocentric representations involved. Such representations, if they are to help underwrite knowledge claims like I am currently having conscious experiences, cannot have the kind of detached status that non-occurrent autobiographical knowledge has. Compare my standing belief that my phone number is 555-5555. It entails that my phone number is currently 555-5555. But the egocentric content of experience cannot be assimilated to such standing or abeyant representations.

According to the Allocentric-Egocentric Interface theory of consciousness (AEI) (Mandik, 2005), conscious states are states of activation in relatively intermediate levels of sensory processing hierarchies. More specifically, conscious states decompose into pairs of states wherein one member of the pair is a state of activation at a relatively low level of the hierarchy, the other member of the pair is a state of activation at a relatively high level of the hierarchy, and both members are reciprocally interacting with each other meaning that the higher-level member of the pair is triggered by the feed-forward flow of information from the lower member of the pair and the lower member’s activation is sustained in part by the feedback or recurrent flow of information from the higher level. This pair of reciprocally interacting states of activation constitute an “allocentric-egocentric” interface insofar as states lower in the hierarchy constitute relatively egocentric representations and representations found at progressively higher levels have increasingly allocentric contents. The phenomenal character of conscious states is identical to the contents of the hybrid allocentric-egocentric states. Such states have the conceptualized egocentric contents that figure in this paper’s central argument.

I will not here review the empirical evidence for AEI, will make do with the brief sketch just supplied. My aim here is to provide enough detail to convey the gist of the kind of explanatory burden a theory of this sort can bear.

I turn, in the next post, to begin showing how conceptual contents can bear explanatory burdens oft thought to require construing phenomenal character as non-conceptual. The thought I develop is designed to deal with the claim that there is a kind of appearance that cannot be explained in terms of conceptual states. More specifically, I will be examining the claim that there are certain patterns of success and failure in perceptual discrimination that cannot be explained in terms of conceptual states.

Previous Posts:
1. Introducing Transcending Zombies
2. Anti-Skeptical Maneuvers
3. I Know I’m Not a Zombie
4. Some Remarks on Phenomenal Knowledge
5. The Egocentricity of Phenomenal Knowledge
6. The Knowing and the Known
7. My Physical Properties Fix My Conceptualized Contents
8. My Physical Properties Fix My Egocentric Contents

Egocentric.

I turn now to consider egocentric contents. Unlike the points made in the previous post concerning conceptualized contents, the relevant points about egocentric contents cannot be made in terms of my similarities to any numerically distinct entities. I assume that whatever egocentric contents are, numerically distinct entities capable of having egocentric contents, have contents concerning different entities. Thus no matter how similar to me a being is that is nonetheless numerically distinct from me, it will still be thinking about itself, not me, when it thinks the thoughts it expresses with the first-person pronoun. Thus the relevant question to ask is not whether my physical doppelganger must have the same egocentric contents as me (it can’t) but whether fixing my physical properties fixes my egocentric contents.

A positive response to this question is quite natural. Further, it is not one that should ignite much controversy. Even people who think that phenomenal consciousness is non-physical can grant that fixing my physical properties fixes my egocentric contents since egocentric contents seem not to alone suffice for phenomenal consciousness. Consider, in connection with this, that visual form agnosics can fail to be phenomenally conscious of the shape and orientation of objects, yet still, based on unconscious visual information, orient their body parts appropriately to, e.g use their hand to insert a card into a slot (Milner & Goodale, 1995). Arguably the unconscious information relied on concerns egocentric spatial contents. Additionally, while the neural activations in LGN mentioned previously have egocentric content, few take seriously the proposal that such sub-cortical neural activations suffice for phenomenal consciousness. Fewer still take seriously the thought that neural activations in LGN would be non-physical.

Now, dualists might object along lines discussed in the previous post that at least some egocentric content is non-physical insofar as direct phenomenal concepts have egocentric contents concerning non-physical qualia. But as this is essentially the same objection as already discussed, it will receive the same treatment as previously mentioned. I’ll say nothing further on the matter here.

The question naturally arises of which conceptualized egocentric contents fix phenomenal character. Do all of them? If only some of them do, which ones? It is worth noting that nothing particularly precise need be spelled out for the argument to go through. This is because, whatever conceptualized egocentric contents are the ones that constitute phenomenal character, if the remarks from earlier in this section are correct, then the appropriate conceptualized egocentric contents will be fixed by my physical properties because all of my conceptualized egocentric contents will be fixed by my physical properties.

Previous Posts:
1. Introducing Transcending Zombies
2. Anti-Skeptical Maneuvers
3. I Know I’m Not a Zombie
4. Some Remarks on Phenomenal Knowledge
5. The Egocentricity of Phenomenal Knowledge
6. The Knowing and the Known
7. My Physical Properties Fix My Conceptualized Contents

Physically fixed.

In this and the next two posts on the Transcending Zombies argument, I discuss Premise 4 (My Physical Properties Fix My Conceptualized and Egocentric Contents). In the current post, I concentrate on conceptualized contents.

Prima facie, it looks like physical similarity would entail conceptual similarity, that my physical doppelganger is my conceptual doppelganger. He and I have all of the same sorting and discriminatory abilities. We have all the same problem-solving capabilities. We can process all of the same information and do so in virtue of the same information-processing computational/functional architecture. We would perform exactly as well in conversation. On the face of it, such similarities entail conceptual similarity.

While the nature of concepts is far from a settled matter we can sketch some details about them that help to further show that my physical doppelganger would be my conceptual doppelganger.

First, having a concept is having a representation that is general, abstract, or allocentric. Second, concepts are mental dispositions (or the categorical bases thereof). Concepts are abeyant (as opposed to occurrent) representations that allow the possessor to satisfy the re-identifiability criterion, the requirement on possessing concept C that the possessor is able to re-identify objects falling under C as such. Thus, George has the concept of dogs only if George is able to identify dogs as such on multiple occasions.

Third, concepts are endogenously triggerable (Weiskopf, 2007); their deployment is not strictly stimulus-bound or conditioned to current environmental conditions but may be deployed in various “off-line” mental processes such as inference and imagination.

We may summarize these three features by saying that concepts are allocentric, abeyant, endogenously triggerable representations. It seems clear that my physical doppleganger would duplicate all of my allocentric, abeyant, endogenously triggerable representations.

It is worth mentioning that the current argument does not depend on construing my physical doppelganger as being only intrinsically similar, we may allow various environmental and historical similarities as well. Thus the argument in this paper is consistent with semantic externalism. This is not to say, however, that I’m a great fan of semantic externalism. The key to note about what counts as my physical doppelganger is that we are careful to not simply assume phenomenal similarity.

There should be no objection to the claim that physical properties fix my concepts since neither possessing nor applying a concept by itself entails phenomenal consciousness. Regarding possession, I have been in possession of the concept of cats for a long time, including all day today. However, as I look up and see my cat for the first time today, this is the first time today that my cat concept has had anything to do with my conscious experience. Regarding application, arguably, blind-sight patients who identify objects in their blind field under forced-choice guessing conditions (Weiskrantz, 1996) are applying concepts without thereby having phenomenally conscious experiences of the objects thereby identified.

Some, like Chalmers (2003), may object that fixing my physical properties does not fix all of my concepts, since phenomenal character is non-physical and there are some concepts, so-called direct phenomenal concepts, which can be possessed only if one has had or is having a state with phenomenal character. My main complaint against this response is that I don’t think there are such concepts as concepts one can only have if one has had or is having a state with phenomenal character. I address this issue at greater elsewhere (Mandik, 2009b). One brief point to make here, though, is that really direct phenomenal concepts, concepts had only while one is currently having a state with phenomenal character seem not to be concepts at all for their violation of both the re-identifiability criterion and the criterion of endogenous triggering (Prinz 2007 pp.207-208 makes a similar point).

Previous Posts:
1. Introducing Transcending Zombies
2. Anti-Skeptical Maneuvers
3. I Know I’m Not a Zombie
4. Some Remarks on Phenomenal Knowledge
5. The Egocentricity of Phenomenal Knowledge
6. The Knowing and the Known

I turn now to the third key way in which K* falls short of P1.

Recall that P1 and K* are as follows:
P1: If I know that I am not a zombie, then phenomenal character is (a certain kind of) conceptualized egocentric content.
K*: Smith knows that Smith has qualia –> (Smith believes that Smith has qualia & Smith has qualia))

When I first introduced this key way, I described it in terms of requiring an identity of the relevant representations and their being true. Now that I’ve made the relevant remarks about the conceptual and egocentric requirements on phenomenal knowledge, I am in a position to formulate the third way in which K* falls short of P1, namely that it leaves out the identification of phenomenal character with certain kinds of conceptualized egocentric contents.

If we modified K* to accommodate only the points made so far concerning the first two of the three ways in which K* falls short of P1, we would have only spelled out as a requirement on phenomenal knowledge that there is an isomorphism between the relevant representations and what it is that they represent. However, the remarks so far do not suffice to show that phenomenal character must be identical to certain conceptualized egocentric contents. Consider an analogous point made about George and the facts he’s able to know about rocks. There must be an isomorphism between facts George is able to know about rocks and conceptual contents that George is able to have. But this alone doesn’t suffice to establish that rocks are made of concepts or conceptualized contents. Concepts and their contents are mental. Rocks are extra-mental.

I want to argue that, unlike rock facts, which are not reducible to any set of conceptual contents, phenomenal character is so reducible. There are four general lines of thought in favor of viewing phenomenal character and rocks as disanalogous with respect to the question of reduction to conceptual content. The first is that we have reason to believe that at least some phenomenal character is constituted by conceptual contents, while we have no such analogous reasons for believing in the conceptual constitution of rocks. The second is that attributing concept-independence to rocks is needed to explain and organize our conceptualizations about rocks in a way that attributing concept-independence to phenomenal character is not. The third is that the very concept of a rock is a concept of a thing that has a reality that outstrips its appearance, whereas the concept of phenomenal character is an appearance concept. The fourth is that with respect to rocks, we have mere knowledge but not certainty. The certainty that we have with respect to qualia could not be achieved if the representations were distinct from what they represent.

Regarding the first point, there are relatively clear cases in which the acquisition and then subsequent application of a concept to experiences contributes to what it’s like to have that experience. One relatively familiar case concerns the way wine may taste quite differently to a novice and to an expert in virtue of the differential between the concepts each can bring to bear on their respective tasting experiences. Such cases lend at least prima facie support to the claim that at least some phenomenal character is conceptually constituted. An analogous case cannot be made for rocks: there’s no prima facie reason for believing that rocks are conceptually constituted.

Of course, one might pursue a plausible case that the pet rocks of the short-lived 1970’s fad were partially conceptually constituted on the grounds that no rock may be anyone’s pet without the rock being conceived of as a pet. So rocks qua pets may admit of partial conceptual constitution. But I hope to be granted the scientific-realistic presumption that rocks, qua geological kind, are in no way conceptually constituted.

Regarding the second point, the reason we believe that rocks exist independently of our rock judgments is that it helps to explain certain patterns in our judgments. The problem of how we know the external world is genuinely external is a huge problem and I certainly do not pretend to have a solution to it. However, I’m aware of no good reason for being a realist about rocks that doesn’t appeal to the explanatory or other theoretical utility of positing them as existing independent of our conceptualizations (see Mandik and Weisberg 2008 esp pp. 225-227). In contrast, there is no explanatory burden that phenomenal character bears that cannot be borne by a reduction of phenomenal character to a certain kind of conceptual content. This sort of point will be developed further in future posts.

Regarding the third point, consider the following. If phenomenal character outstrips conceptual content, then phenomenal consciousness would be noumenal for the person who has them. But if anything should be phenomenal as opposed to noumenal, it should be phenomenal consciousness. Phenomenal properties are appearance properties. Perhaps, one might object, there are two senses of appearance, an epistemic sense and a phenomenal sense. I address this suggestion later in a future post wherein I discuss the question in terms of whether the way e.g. colors appear to us in experience outstrips our ability to conceptualize them.

Regarding the fourth point, there is a degree of certainty that attaches to our knowledge of our own phenomenal states that does not attach to our knowledge of rocks. If, however, our representations of phenomenal character were non-identical to what they are representations of, then it would be possible to have the representations without their being true. But as long as that is a possibility, then I cannot be certain that I have accurate phenomenal representations.

Previous Posts:
1. Introducing Transcending Zombies
2. Anti-Skeptical Maneuvers
3. I Know I’m Not a Zombie
4. Some Remarks on Phenomenal Knowledge
5. The Egocentricity of Phenomenal Knowledge

Hey, good lookin’!

I here continue my elaboration of the first premise (P1) of the Transcending Zombies argument by spelling out another way in which K* falls short of capturing P1.

Recall that P1 and K* are as follows:

P1: If I know that I am not a zombie, then phenomenal character is (a certain kind of) conceptualized egocentric content.

K*: Smith knows that Smith has qualia –> (Smith believes that Smith has qualia & Smith has qualia)

In the previous post I discussed the first of three ways in which K* falls short of P1. I turn now to the second key way in which K* falls short of capturing P1. In K* it is insufficiently spelled out how it is that Smith’s belief comes to be a belief about Smith. Not just any representation of Smith by Smith will do. The representation needs to be egocentric.

Egocentric representations are distinctive not only in that they represent the creature that has them but also in how they do so. The most frequently discussed kind of egocentric representations are egocentric spatial representations, representations of the spatial location of objects and features in a frame of reference defining locations relative to the representing subject. Egocentric representations do not only represent the representing subject but do always represent things in relation to the representing subject.

There are non-spatial examples of egocentric representations as well, including egocentric representations of time (R. Grush, 2009) and temperature (Mandik, 2001). Egocentric representations are oft found at low levels of sensory processing hierarchies and Prinz (2005, pp. 384-385) urges that such representations may be found in audition, touch, taste, olfaction, and interoceptive perception, including the interoceptive perception of bodily states forming the basis for emotional experience.

Several authors, the current one included, suggest that egocentric representations are action-oriented representations (Rick Grush, 2001; R. Grush, 2009; Hurley, 1998; Mandik, 1999; Noe, 2004). In contrast to abstract conceptual representations which are detached from action, the “here and “now” aspects of egocentric representation have immediate connections to the motor abilities of the representing subject. Unlike a conceptual representation of the representing subject, like when Pete Mandik thinks “Pete Mandik’s pants are on fire” my egocentric representation of my pants being on fire is connected to a host of pants-extinguishing action dispositions that do not require for their triggering a mediating step of identification along the lines of the italicized middle step in the inference “Pete Mandik’s pants are on fire. I am Pete Mandik. Therefore, I ought to go jump in a lake” (Kaplan, 1989).

We are now in a position to appreciate what’s being required of phenomenal knowledge in requiring that it have egocentric content. Without egocentric content, zombie-related skeptical hypotheses become live options for me. If my experience has any aspect that is not egocentric then even if I have an experience with that aspect and I know that someone or other has an experience with that aspect, then I still wouldn’t know whether I am the one that has an experience with that aspect. I may know that someone or other was a non-zombie, but I wouldn’t know whether the non-zombie was me. Relatedly, I might, while gazing at a red rose and enjoying a red quale, know that someone or other is having a red quale, but be in the dark about whether that someone was me.

Previous Posts:
1. Introducing Transcending Zombies
2. Anti-Skeptical Maneuvers
3. I Know I’m Not a Zombie
4. Some Remarks on Phenomenal Knowledge