This video features a guy I'd not heard of before, Vilayanur S. Ramachandra, called "The Marco Polo of neuroscience," though I prefer "the great gesticulator," a title I just invented while watching this animated performance:
Rama states the common conception of qualia (from Frank Jackson): we can know all of the neurological facts about color and yet still learn something when we actually see the color itself. Yet he's also clearly a reductionist in that he thinks that physiological research is where it's at in explaining these qualia.
Rama ties qualia to the notion of self; he follows a Higher Order Theory of consciousness: he thinks that being aware and reacting to something ("access consciousness," is Ned Block's term for this) is not sufficient for having an experience with qualia in it, and that the missing element is self-consciousness, i.e. awareness of the awareness, which is something that only comes with the ability to objectify part of ourselves, which is tied to language use.
This raises a problem regarding animals: not having language, they would have no conscious feelings of pain. Contra Nagel, there is nothing at all that it is like to be a bat. This seems counterintuitive, as lots of animals can clearly suffer, contra Descartes's view that they're just acting out clockwork with no inner life. However, there is an alternative: Some part of what we mean by qualia, what we mean by suffering, could be unconscious.
When we consider our own present experience, we're of course being self-conscious. We have no guarantee that by this operation we're not changing the phenomena we want to examine. My analyzed experience of pain involves:
1. My behavior of jerking away from a painful thing
2. My awareness of the painful thing (or the experience of looking for the cause)
3. A certain emotion
4. The qualitative feel of the pain itself as painful
5. My awareness that I am in pain
Typically, a philosopher arguing against behaviorism doesn't distinguish 3 and 4. Thus, if an animal feels pain, it has qualia, and so is conscious. A higher-order theory of consciousness (which says 5 must always go with 4) would then imply that animals can't feel pain, though they may jerk away (1) or even register that there is something to be avoided and so avoid that thing in the future (2). I suggest that 3 and 4 are separable: an animal can actually feel pain without having qualia (phenomenal consciousness) of this pain. Note that unconscious pain seems to occur in humans.
This points to a problem with the term "qualia." It involves me obtaining some actual, fine-grained information about the "feel" of what's being experienced (e.g. is this pain a sharp pain or a mind pain? Is it more of a burning or a stinging?), but also is by definition phenomenally conscious, so by just talking about qualia you're sneaking in the theory that this fine-grained information about pain that goes into "what it's like" to be in pain must be conscious.
Wes Alwan says
June 24, 2010 at 7:36 pmI think the distinction here should be not between the unconscious and self-consciousness but the unconscious and conscious attention based in the neocortex, which is sufficiently developed in bats to make this distinction; so I think there’s probably sufficient neurophysiological evidence to settle the matter, and while there is such a thing as unconscious pain I very much doubt it’s limited to this in animals. Further, there are states of pain that are severe enough that I doubt we would say there is much “self-consciousness” going on. (I’ve broken my ankle–suffice it to say that it is an ecstatic experience in the sense that at that point there is only very severe pain, not self-awareness; in fact all mental energy is drawn away from awareness of the self and other capacity). I don’t see how (3) and (4) are separable, and perhaps the use of the word “qualia” is just obscuring the issue. All that’s at issue is whether there’s a “feel,” which seems to me inherently phenomenal. If by “fine-grained” you mean some sort of putting-pain-in-words, then of course I agree–and so perhaps the better distinction here is between verbal and pre-verbal consciousness. But I don’t think it helps us to make the counter-intuitive claim that animals (or for that matter newborns) are not “conscious.”
So from Stanford (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/#currsci-pain):
“Smith & Boyd (1991) assess the evidence for the pain-sensing capabilities of animals in the categories of whether nociceptors are connected to the central nervous system, whether endogenous opioids are present, whether analgesics affect responses, and whether the ensuing behavioral responses are analogous to those of humans (see table 2.3 in Varner 1998, p. 53, which updates the one presented by Smith & Boyd). On the basis of these criteria, Varner follows Smith & Boyd in concluding tentatively that the most obvious place to draw a line between pain-conscious organisms and those not capable of feeling pain consciously is between vertebrates and invertebrates. However, Elwood & Appel (2009) conducted an experiment on hermit crabs which they interpret as providing evidence that pain is experienced and remembered by these crustaceans. Varner also expressed some hesitation about the evidence for conscious pain in “lower” vertebrates: fish, reptiles and amphibians. Allen (2004b) argues, however, that subsequent research indicates that the direction of discovery seems uniformly towards identifying more similarities among diverse species belonging to different taxonomic classes, especially in the domains of anatomy and physiology of the nociceptive and pain systems.”
So here’s an argument from neuroanatomy against fish feeling pain based on the role of the neocortex: http://www.link.vet.ed.ac.uk/animalwelfare/fish%20pain/Pain.htm
But of course the flip side of that is we expect the neocortex-based ability to attend to input from the limbic system, present in rats and bats and so on, to be a basis for consciousness of pain. Here’s an article on the way
And of course, recent research shows that mice even have pained facial expressions similar to ours: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100509/full/news.2010.228.html?s=news_rss
Erik says
June 25, 2010 at 7:07 amI am inclined to agree with Wes here, it does seem there are states of experience that preclude much self. I mean, there may be self there, but I am not aware of any self as such (thus begging the semantic nature of “self” in such contexts).
However, the interesting aspect of Ramachandran is to try to address the question differently. Crick and Koch were moved to separate the self and qualia issues not in a small a part because there were a lot of philosophically minded people 10 years ago demanding we do such (mine was one of several voices doing this then… just peeps mind you). However, making the semantic distinction doesn’t preclude then applying diverse methodologies to its continued study, and as most instants of experience about which we can acquire verbal reports do find a self in operation, there is surely much to be milked here.
But what I find most helpful is the synthetic approach of relating different sorts of objects of study. What I mean by this is that the tendency has been to distill the “essence” of our study – in this case “qualia” from that more coarse stuff, “consciousness”, and then try to make sense of what it is. And what I think is also needed is more synthetic thinking the finds and maps out the relevant associations. S
So for example, it may be that QUALIA are not dependent on SELF, but perhaps a case can be made that SELF is dependent on QUALIA. Okay, that is interesting and may tell us something important about both. In particular, it points to what might be a legitimate property of QUALIA, namely that they are holistic or integral or individual or atomic in some sense.
Anyhow, somewhere early on after the floodgates were opened and it became first acceptable and then cool to talk about consciousness, even if you didn’t have a Nobel Prize, some effort was made it sort out the basic properties of what it was we were talking about. QUALIA and SELF were high on the list, but not the only features. There were several (TIME being the big one that comes to mind for me), but not enough workd was ever done figuring out what their relationships might or could be. So in this sense I am kind of happy Rama is pushing for this sort of study, even if he is not quite right…
Mark Linsenmayer says
June 26, 2010 at 6:46 pmI’m actually more interested here in seeing whether a higher order theory could be coherent than whether it’s actually true. I’m thinking it would be fun to read some of these H.O.T. papers for a future episode… (David M. Armstrong is the big name in this; I also very briefly skimmed something by William Lycan (http://www.unc.edu/~ujanel/HOPHOT.htm), who interestingly makes a point of saying that he only means HOP to distinguish which states are conscious and which aren’t, not to provide an explanation for consciousness (he thinks he does this elsewhere, in a “theory of perception”).
Mathieu Fantonelle says
January 10, 2013 at 4:18 amI don’t understand why something like the “I” in “I see that I see” would be a necessity. “There is a seeing that there is seeing” seems to me to work just as well.
Or even “There is seeing that there is an I that claims to be seeing”
Or “There is a seeing that there is a seeing that there is an I that claims to be seeing” and so on,
ad infinitum.
That “I” is an agent seeing is presumed, but “I” could be just some of the content of seeing without an agent to see apart from seeing alone.
Seeing, it seems to me, is presumed to be only possible by an “I”. But it seems just as possible to say
that “there is seeing”– without involving an “I”. Again, that an “I” claims to see, could be part of what seeing sees, and no agent involved in seeing.
I see no necessity to the “I”. So I say the “I” involved in seeing Qualia is there by definition, and without necessity. For one may argue that in fact there is only seeing: appearances and thoughts and sounds etc. arising and that there is no “I” that sees, and that any “I” or “me” is part of the content of what arises.
And seeing itself is not separate from the arising–seein is arising, one may argue, as there is no seeing if nothing arises, and so we may say there is no seeing, only arising and what arises.
is this whole scheme , and any scheme, part of content?- and isn’t then that previous phrase , that scheme just a part of content of arising? Is it all just self referencing like circles within circles?
Is there no way to find out what causes all this? –wait, that’s a scheme too, and so is saying “that’s a scheme! Help, where am I?
Is the lesson, just to give up all this imaging and speculating and face the unknown?
HA! —Oh wait, where did I go?