Greg Detre
Thursday, 18 May, 2000
Royal Institute of Philosophy
annual lecture, given in London on February 18, 1998
published in Philosophy vol. 73 no. 285, July 1998, pp 337-352
I
functionalism doesn�t account for the phenomenological nature of conscious experience
it will one day be possible to see from the outside, what the taste of chocolate looks like in terms of the squishy brain
need for new concepts
at this stage, we can only lay down the conditions
II
if a concept refers to something that takes up room in the spatiotemporal world, it provides a handle for all kinds of empirical discoveries about the inner constitution of that thing
on the other hand, sometimes a
familiar concept clearly excludes the possibility that what it designates has
certain features
mental events, unlike
numbers, can be roughly located in space and time, and are causally related to
physical events, in both directions. The causal facts are strong evidence that
mental events have physical properties, if only we could make sense of the idea
e.g. sound
one might say that in advance of the development of a physical theory of sound, the hypothesis that sounds have a physical microstructure would not have a clear meaning.
but identifying
sounds with waves in the air does not require that we ascribe phenomenological
qualities and subjectivity to anything physical, because those are features of
the perception of sound, not of sound itself. By contrast, the identification
of mental events with physical events requires the unification of these two
types of properties in a single thing, and that remains resistant to
understanding.
Kant: the subjective
identity of the consciousness of myself at different times is not sufficient to
establish the objective identity of a subject or soul
that is not to say that I understand just how the first person and the third form two logically inseparable aspects of a single concept -- only that they do.
The problem, then, is how something that is an aspect or element of an individual's subjective point of view could also be a physiologically describable event in the brain -- the kind of thing which, considered under that description, involves no point of view and no distinctively immediate first-person attribution at all.
it is an illusion that: it
is conceivable that an intact and normally functioning physical human organism
could be a completely unconscious zombie is an illusion -- due to the
limitations of our understanding
we
do not at present possess the conceptual equipment to understand how subjective
and physical features could both be essential aspects of a single entity or
process.
III
what
gets in the way of the thought that the experiential state of which I am
introspectively aware is the physical state? The problem lies in the lack of
any conceivable internal connection between a modification of my subjective
point of view and a modification of the physico-chemical activity of my brain.
The two may correspond extensionally as exactly as you like, but identity
requires more than that. If they are the same state, it must be impossible for
the one to exist without the other.
in the case of conscious states and physiological states, it isn't just that we don't see such a necessary connection: it seems in advance that a necessary connection between two such different things is unimaginable. They seem logically unrelated.
we need an expansionist (expanded) non-dualist concept of the mental
seems like Williams� idea of one concept subsuming another older one, as happens often in science, e.g. Newtonian mechanics and relativity
if it became possible for us to think of experiences as essentially what it is like subjectively for a physical organism to be in some physiological state, the way would be open for the discovery of a posteriori necessary truths about what physiological state a particular kind of experience is
the ordinary concept of water = unsaturated (leaves room for the explanatory discovery of its real/essential chemical composition)
saturated = the manifest properties exhaust its nature
we can open the possibility of an a posteriori answer to the mind-body
problem by denying that the manifest properties of experience exhaust its
nature
consciousness is not saturated � needs a posteriori explanation
experiences = events whose full nature is not revealed to experience
i.e. anti-perfect transparency of mind
our present mental + physical concepts admit no transparently necessary connection between physical brain processes and sensory experience (e.g. in the same way that we can explain other natural processes by analysisng their physico-chemical constituents)
we can�t understand mental events purely by reference to our introspected knowledge/experience of them � we need to know more about their inner constitution
yes, the mental supervenes on the physical
i.e. that there is no mental difference without a physical difference.
But pure, unexplained supervenience is not a solution but a sign that there is
something fundamental we don't know
IV
conceiving zombies = imagining the physical system from the outside, then imagining it from the inside as having no experiential sense
but there may be an undiscovered deeper conception relating these seemingly unrelated concepts
there is no hidden verbal contradiction in the description of a zombie, then
private language + public criteria???
conceivability/inconceivability (especially of relations between 1st/3rd person) can be misleading evidence
the conceivability of zombies = reveals something about our present concepts but not about what is really possible
we conceive the body from outside and the mind from inside, and see no internal connection, only an external one of correlation or perhaps causation. But in spite of the vividness of the intuition, I believe that it reflects our conceptual limitations rather than the truth
V
physicalist-functionalist = an attempt at the sort of analysis/revisionism necessary to form the new conceptual framework, but is too conservative
it has tried to reinterpret mental concepts into tractable parts of the framework of physical science
we need something more unfamiliar, that starts from the current conceptual unintelligibility of the subjective/objective link
wants a necessary connection between mind + body (unlike the identity theorists� contingent connection, e.g. Smart, Armstrong & Lewis)
we can adopt a reference-fixing model (rather than the reductionist model) for the relation between functional states and mental states provided we do not think of the functional states as contingent reference-fixers
being a pain entails (nonanalytically) all three features --
functional, phenomenological, and physiological � the apparent conceivability
of their separation is an illusion � -- but that only the latter two entail
pain.
VI
suppose I think about the taste of the cigar I am now smoking. What I must do first is to regard the experience as a state of myself of whose subjective qualities I am immediately aware, and which has certain publicly observable functional relations to stimuli and discriminatory capacities.
�???
To imagine a mental state from the inside would be what I have called an act of sympathetic imagination -- putting myself in a conscious state resembling the thing imagined -- and it would be impossible to do this without putting my brain in a corresponding physical state
is his point that I can�t imagine being a bat, I can only imagine what it would be like for me to be a bat �
ostensive =
manifestly or directly
demonstrative; declarative, denotative; spec. in Logic, (of a
proof, method, etc.) direct, proceeding by the processes of conversion,
permutation, and transposition, (opp. indirect)
Of a definition:
indicating by direct demonstration that which is signified by a term. e20.
The idea would have to
be, then, that there is a single event to which I can refer in two ways, both
of them via concepts that apply to it noncontingently.
The idea would have to be, then, that there is a single event to which I can refer in two ways, both of them via concepts that apply to it noncontingently. One is the mental concept that I am able to acquire in both first and third person applications because I am a subject of this state, which has the special character of consciousness and introspective accessibility -- the state of tasting a cigar. The other is a (so far unspecified) physiological concept that describes the relevant physical state of the brain. To admit the possibility of a necessary connection here, we have to recognize that the mental concept as it now operates has nothing to say about the physiological conditions for its own operation, and then consider the hypothesis of a successor concept that leaves a place for such a condition -- a place that can be filled only a posteriori, by a theory of the third type of event that admits these two types of access, internal and external.
VII
The right point of view would be one which, contrary to present conceptual possibilities, included both subjectivity and spatiotemporal structure from the outset, all its descriptions implying both these things at once, so that it would describe inner states and their functional relations to behavior and to one another from the phenomenological inside and the physiological outside simultaneously -- not in parallel
To summarize. The conjecture is essentially this: that even though no transparent and direct explanatory connection is possible between the physiological and the phenomenological, but only an empirically established extensional correlation, we may hope and ought to try as part of a scientific theory of mind to form a third conception that does directly entail both the mental and the physical, and through which their actual necessary connection with one another can therefore become transparent to us. Such a conception will have to be created; we won't just find it lying around. All the great reductive successes in the history of science have depended on theoretical concepts, not natural ones -- concepts whose whole justification is that they permit us to replace brute correlations with reductive explanations. At present such a solution to the mind-body problem is literally unimaginable, but it may not be impossible
reference of the concept
nagel is right that there is something missing from our conceptual understanding of the mental, but what could it be? does it require further empirical work, or is it just an open-minded freedom from current viewpoints and a moment of inspiration