We just recorded our discussion of the philosophy of mind last Sunday, though it'll be a while before it gets all mixed and edited and posted. The discussion was very wide-ranging and covered a number of colorful personalities in not very much detail at all, so I'm going to post a series of videos to introduce you to these folks.
So, here, first, is apparently a member of Whitesnake, i.e. David Chalmers:
Now, a lot of what he says seems obvious, and it should: it is obvious to us that we are conscious, and this recognition is something different than knowing anything about neurology, and our experience has a certain "feel" to us (he calls these feelings "qualia").
He argues (using an example from Frank Jackson; most of the ideas from this interview are from the literature and not specific to Chalmers) that the fact that we could know all there is to know about the physicality of seeing a color, and still learn something when we at last see it ourselves, and this suggests to him that there is something over and above the physical to consciousness, i.e. he argues from an observation about our epistemic access to the world (how we know things) to an ontological point (i.e. what kind of stuff there is in the world).
One weird point, that we actually don't discuss in the podcast is the possibility of "zombie," i.e. beings that act just like we do, including claiming that they're conscious, yet they have no inner lives. He doesn't argue that such beings actually exist, but only that they are conceivable, and hence metaphysically possible. Now, it sounds here like he's just saying that there could be beings that cleverly imitate the behavior of conscious beings that aren't conscious. This I can buy as as possibility. What he means, though (and he says this elsewhere) is the stronger claim that it's possible for someone to have all the same brain states that I do, yet still not be conscious, which to me is not at all intuitively obvious, and arguably begs the question against physicalism (the view that, ontologically, everything is physical, and thus mental states are physical... most likely brain states).
There's an equivocation to watch out for here. His interviewer claims that lots of people deny the existence of consciousness. Well, there are some that do that, but that sort of behaviorism is for the most part dead; we can't actually deny the obvious. What a greater number of people do deny is that a complete theory that explains our experience has to have any "mental terms" like believe, desire, qualia, etc. in it. So no one (well, almost no one) is saying that consciousness doesn't exist as phenomenon-to-be-explained; they're just saying that talk of consciousness won't be part of the theory that does the explaining. Chalmers's ultimate claim is that it is impossible to conceive of how physical accounts can "explain" to our intuitive satisfaction the appearance that our experience has to each of us, while his opponents' position is that it's not impossible, just very very hard.
For more on how Chalmers responds to arguments against the conceivability of zombies and other matters, you can read his article "Consciousness and its Place in Nature."
Yes! My main man Chalmers, and defending Descartes to boot. Who’s the interviewer?
Here he is singing “The Zombie Blues,” true to the Whitesnake appearance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiEVkDdmIF8&feature=related
“that sort of behaviorism is for the most part dead”. Dennett actually holds this kind of view. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYYFQiN052c&feature=related
However as Ned Block points out (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6SbPPL8tOI&feature=related) Dennett overlooks the distinction between “access” consciousness and “phenomenal” consciousness. What Dennett takes to be consciousness (and which is supposedly an illusion) is actually Block’s access consciousness. Dennett’s point does not apply to phenomenal consciousness.
Hi, David,
I think that’s a misreading of Dennett, and the clip you point to doesn’t support that; in that clip, he’s arguing that we’re not aware of as much as we think we are, not that there is no consciousness at all. Saying that the mind is just at bottom material is not the same as saying that it’s an illusion.
Block is saying that Dennett’s explanation of consciousness in Consciousness Explained only accounts for access consciousness, i.e. the availability of something for global control of the organism, and that Dennett ignores phenomenal consciousness. I think Block’s distinction is a good one and am not comfortable enough with Consciousness Explained to say whether Block’s criticism is valid there. I do know that Chalmers too makes something like that distinction, but posits that we have to assume that in general phenomenal consciousness (which Chalmers just calls consciousness) in general corresponds to this availability for global control (which I think Chalmers just calls “awareness,” though I may be misremembering this. As I say in different words in my Dennett video post, the fact that (according to Chalmers) in order to make headway in explaining consciousness you have to make the jump from phenomenal to access consciousness (i.e. “what’s really going on” as opposed to what you say is going on) is entirely Dennett’s point: he acknowledges the raw fact of phenomenal consciousness (“there is a sensation now”) but denies that it gives us any facts, i.e. anything that can be stated as part of a description or theory about what’s going on in the mind. In other words, he believes in phenomenal consciousness as something there to be explained, but not as part of the explanation, and he thinks he explains it. This is not to say I agree with Dennett or don’t think he’s overreacting in trying to “deflate consciousness,” but he’s not actually a behaviorist, I’ll claim, though he seemingly goes out of his way to sound more radical than he is.
Block seems to think it’s deflationary (and I’ve tended to agree, although I have to look at Mark’s argument more carefully). From his review of Consciousness Explained: “At the same time, the book is exasperatingly elusive, even self-contradictory. Dennett rejects the naive notion of consciousness in favor of some sort of reductionist or deflationary view. But which one? Many different, even conflicting, views appear to be endorsed without any signal that they are distinct. Further, he has lost the kind of touch with the opposition which is needed to mount a convincing refutation. He tilts at caricatures, advocates of total determinacy in matters of phenomenal consciousness, those who believe that there must be a single place in the brain where experience happens, a Cartesian theater. By ignoring the real opposition, he passes up the chance to clarify his own position in contrast to it. The mushiness of Dennett’s characterizations of both positions is responsible for the fact that the main argument of the book limps and limps painfully, or so I shall argue.” And in his review, Nagel claims that he exhibits a “strong behaviorist streak,” e.g. in his account of pain. Dennet states: “Could any sense be made of the supposition that a person might hit his thumb with a hammer and be suddenly and overwhelmingly compelled to drop the hammer, suck the thumb, dance about, shriek, moan, cry, etc., and still not be experiencing pain? … Positing some horrible (but otherwise indescribable) quality or phenomenon to accompany such a compelled performance is entirely gratuitous.” According to Nagel, Dennet cannot back up his claim that “pain” does not refer until he has “more plausibly exausted the conditions for the truth of statements about pain ….” Nagel then goes on to talk of Dennet’s “similar assault on the phenomenon of consciousness,” where Dennet really sets about explaining behaviors instead of consciousness in the what-it’s-like-to-be sense. In his review, McGinn claims that “conscious states are being erased not explained” and excoriates him for the straw man of the Cartesian Theater (which I’ll quote on the Dennet video post); and gets at the self-contradiction of saying “that there are no seemings but that it seems there are. That’s like saying there are no feelings such as the feeling of pain but there are feelings of feelings of pain; or that there are no beliefs just beliefs in beliefs.”
Some of these points are addressed in my new post: http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2010/06/24/mind-video-7-v-s-ramachandran/.
Pain behavior (your Dennett quote above), assuming you’re not just play-acting on purpose, means you’re in pain, even if you then deny that you were. In that (presumably rare) case, either your memory is faulty or your pain was unconscious. Does admitting unconscious pain (and hence that consciousness is not part of the essence of pain) make one a behaviorist? No, but it does suggest that what Block calls “access consciousness” (unconscious consciousness? the behaviorist’s consciousness?) accounts for much of what we might normally attribute to phenomenal consciousness. In this case, it makes methodological sense to focus on the former, even if the latter does still require additional explanation.
Re. McGinn’s quote at the end of your post, this is just a play on words exploiting the insight: “That’s like saying there are no feelings such as the feeling of pain but there are feelings of feelings of pain.” If a higher order theory of consciousness is correct, then the only feelings of pain that are phenomenally conscious (i.e. REALLY conscious) are feelings of feelings of pain, or rather that the conscious feeling of pain involves self-reflexivity, whereas animals’ pain does not (and so it is not felt in the sense of its being phenomenally conscious, though it may be felt in some other, equally real, sense). Yes, it sounds paradoxical, but that’s kind of the point: consciousness is not what we think it is pre-philosophically.
See my other post on this — I doubt that the best evidence we have (based in both behavioral similarities and neuroscience) suggests that linguistic self-consciousness is required for phenomenal consciousness of pain in animals. There’s a clear neurophysiological basis for a distinction between the unconscious and conscious attention even in animals (as in limbic vs. cortical systems).