Ep. 218: The Hard Problem of Consciousness (Chalmers, et al) (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 218 is what is consciousness? We're going to be talking about David Chalmers paper, Consciousness and its Place in Nature from 2003. We're also going to be referring to two papers that we're going to actually cover in the next episode. Ned Block's The Harder Problem of consciousness 2002 and David Papenow's Could There Be a Science of Consciousness 2003? For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsonmeier experiencing objects themselves and not merely my sensations of them, in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:34 Wes: This is Wes. I don't have anything. This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:38 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey conceding my zombiehood while noting that my zombiehood is not even probable Fied by naturalism in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:46 Gregory: And this is Gregory Miller thinking that all problems were hard, but they're just about to get harder in Hedonbridge, West Yorkshire, in England.

0:55 Mark: Well, that's very thorough. Do you want to give a zip code, too? Thank you. Yeah, people might know Mr. Miller here, Greg, from the panpsycast, and you teach. Tell us a little about what you do, where you're coming from.

1:09 Gregory: So, yeah, I joined the Panpsychast team from about episode 19 onwards. So I was about a year into the podcast, joined forces with Jack, Ollie and Andy. And I also teach at the University of Liverpool, home of the Beatles, amongst many other things there. I'm a teaching assistant and I just teach mostly undergrads and some master's students. Things like philosophy of mind, logic, epistemology, metaphysics. They're kind of staples of analytic philosophy.

1:34 Mark: So this was your specialty, issues of consciousness, Panpsychism in particular?

1:39 Gregory: Yeah. So my PhD research was on panpsychism and philosophy of mind. I looked at Chalmers mentions this problem. It's called the combination problem. It's a problem for the view of panpsychism. And in short, the problem is something like this. How can minds add up to compose a further mind? And if you take the view that Chalmers mentions, called panpsychism, then you have to address this view, because panpsychism is the view that, you know, all things have a mind or a mind like nature. And that was my PhD research, which I just finished last November 27th.

2:11 Wes: How do we aggregate the monads?

2:13 Gregory: Yeah, how do we aggregate the monads? Right. How do they sum and become more than a mere sum sort of thing.

2:18 Wes: An Uber monad.

2:20 Gregory: Yeah. But also retain that identity within the

2:23 Mark: Uber monad, that very lengthy David Chalmers paper. Consciousness and its place in nature just goes through the various positions, goes through different types of materialism, dualism, panpsychism, as you were saying, gives arguments on both sides, gives some of the typical arguments against materialism, why he thinks those can't be ignored. I think as an initial strategy going through at a high level, the various positions that are on the board might serve us well.

2:49 Gregory: Yeah, that sounds like good fun.

2:50 Mark: Before we actually dive into the paper. Wes, you had some very strong opinions as of the last time, many years ago, when we did Philosophy of Mind. Do you have an initial reaction to this experience in prepping for this, what you want to get out of today?

3:02 Wes: I've read this paper before and I have his book. And I've always thought that Chalmers made the most sense for me. Of the people I've read on Philosophy of Mind, he's got the greatest clarity. Ultimately, I sympathize with his position, which is that the hard problem, which was that we can't reduce the hard problem, we can't be deflationist about it, or we can't pretend that consciousness doesn't exist or that it's equivalent to the material or something like that, which leads maybe to a kind of monism or to a kind of dualism, as we'll discuss property dualism or dualism outright.

And I'm actually sympathetic to that. And I think that you could tell that from the first episode that we did on this. I just remember saying dualistic Y type of things and defending Descartes and so on and so forth. But I also see the appeal of panpsychism, which Chalmers is good at explaining the appeal of that in this paper

3:51 Dylan: and elsewhere, I found myself just as a short summary. I'm well in the camp of the versions of dualism that Chalmers mentions. But I have a big sympathy for emergentism and emergence in general. And this distinction between hardcore emergence that has downward causality versus I'll call it soft core emergence, which is essentially the phenomena are emergent, but they don't have downward causality. That's something that really piqued my interest. And then of course, the panpsychism, in which you have this inversion of the physical and the phenomenal, between whether they're primary or secondary, and just inverts the whole problem of saying that, well, the physical is just emergent from the phenomenal, which is a cool, interesting topic.

4:36 Mark: So Greg, you said you'd read all these papers before.

4:39 Gregory: Well, no, I'd never read the Ned Bloch one before actually. And then the Chalmers one, that consciousness in its place is nature. I have the feeling it's like on most philosophy of mind courses now because it sets the scene for everything else. It's like here's this definition, here's this term terminology. And now everyone since then doesn't call a priori physicalists a priori physicalists and a posteriori physicalists a posteriori physicalists. They call them type A or type B physicalists. And that's kind of like. Because it set the scene like that. It's kind of, it's good market and it's like the hard problem. Right. So I just really like the paper for that reason as well. It's like a foundational paper. It sets the scene and it allows lots of people to focus in on their shoes.

5:20 Wes: And zombies, of course, he makes zombies a central thought experiment for thinking about consciousness.

5:27 Dylan: Yes.

5:27 Gregory: Oh yeah, it's zombie heavy, which is what we like to see.

5:33 Mark: So the whole reason that we're doing what we're doing for the next three episodes is Block will be on with us three episodes from now. So we're going to read another more recent paper dealing specifically with the harder problem from his recent book Blockheads, which is secondary literature. People writing about past things he's written about and him responding to those responses. So in order to understand any of that, we had to set that up with quite a bit of initial reading or use that as an excuse to have three episodes in a row here of walking through the recent history of philosophy, mind literature.

Well, let me say before we jump into quotes from Chalmers, what the hard problem and the harder problem are just as a final high level thing before we disappear into one of these three papers, west said what the hard problem was. It seems weird that conscious experience should arise out of brain matter. Right? Every experience we have seems to have a qualitative character, so that we call those qualia. And how do qualia fit in with physics? Physics seems to be about structure, it seems to be about function, it seems to be about motion. But the mental doesn't seem to display any of those characteristics.

So that's the age old problem going back to at least Descartes, which Chalmers thinks is particularly hard as opposed to easier problems. But if you understand why that's difficult, you might think that that's a metaphysical problem, right? There's this metaphysical category of substance, of matter or matter and energy, the things described by physics. And then there are qualia. How do those things metaphysically fit together? Although as we get into it, there are a lot of epistemological issues of knowledge related in analyzing this problem and deciding which way you come down on it.

But Bloch gives what he calls the harder problem, he says is an epistemic issue on top of the hard problem. So even if we had established that in fact qualia are identical to brain states or identical to something material, there would still be the issue of how do we tell exactly what the correlate, what we, in fact, despite our intentions, mean by a word like qualia. You know, a materialist can say that despite whatever intuitions we might have about it, we actually mean the brain, or we actually mean some functional organization or something like that.

But it seems like there's an indeterminacy. Papineau is going to argue in his paper, in what we're actually referring to, if we say that it's not just the definition of the word. The definition of the word is only referring to things in the conscious sphere, things in the mental sphere. But if we're saying, well, the science of that is that it's really something material, it's really something functional, well, to figure out which of those it is, if it's material, if it's functional, we would have to find cases which have a different material substrate but still have qualia.

So Bloch uses Commander Data, an intelligent robot, in his paper. And so if we could establish we have qualia in our cases, the qualia are correlated with a particular brain state, Particular functional organization data also has qualia, but those are obviously correlated with a very different brain state, at least because he doesn't have a brain. He has silicon instead of carbon based matter. But the problem is we can't know, since we are not data, whether he is going to actually count as one of the cases that we can generalize about consciousness from.

Right. Because even if he were a zombie, as we're going to say, in other words, somebody that passes what we called the Turing Test in our previous episode, in other words, can convince us by talking to us, that they are conscious. We don't know, in fact, that they have those qualia because we're not inside their head. And so it's an issue of the problem of other minds. So we can talk about why Bloch thinks that's harder than the hard problem, or what exactly the relationship between the hard and the harder problem are. But those are the two main things that we want to hit in this discussion, what the hard problem is, which is basically a metaphysical problem.

What the harder problem is, which is basically an epistemological problem. How do we know if octopi or intelligent robots or other seemingly intelligent perhaps creatures, but that have obviously very different brains from ours, very different structures from ours, if they in fact are conscious, which would in turn tell us more about what consciousness actually is.

9:33 Wes: All right, so let's get into describing the hard problem, which Chalmers helps us do very, very well. Page two. We could just start by quoting Chalmers. The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. Human beings have subjective experience. There is something it is like to be them. We can say that a being is conscious in this sense or is phenomenally conscious as it is sometimes put. When there's something it is like to be that being, a mental state is conscious, when there is something it is like to be in that state. Conscious states include states of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, mental imagery, emotional experience, occurrent thought and more.

So we know those experiences are closely associated with brains. Brains, you could either say, give cause to our subjective feelings, or depending on your theory, you might want to say they're identical to them in some sense, but at the very least they're associated with them. And if someone has damage to their brain, it's going to affect their consciousness and so on and so forth. Every conscious state corresponds to something material in the brain. But how do we explain how physical processes give rise to experience, as Chalmers puts it? He goes on to give three examples and I want to get into them, but I'm just going to give you my own example here, which is probably flawed because it's not Chalmers.

I'm coming up with it. But here it is. If Mark is sitting on the couch daydreaming about eating ice cream and I'm sitting across from him, there's no publicly observable phenomenon of that daydream about eating ice cream. And normally when I'm coming up with scientific explanations, I'm dealing with causal connections between publicly observable phenomena, specifically spatiotemporal or even material phenomena. And I can't do that with Marx. Daydream. So there's the fact that the daydream is not publicly accessible to me. And then there's the fact that I can't even conceive of what kind of causes are going back and forth between the physical material world and what we might be prejudiced into saying that, well, clearly consciousness is non material if it's not publicly observable.

But anyway, at the very least to this private realm. Another way that I think about this is I think about a thought experiment in which an alien scientist comes to observe human beings on Earth and they have no experience of pain. The consciousness works much differently, and they have no real way to infer that pain as a qualia even exists, right? So if they observe people putting their hands on stoves and then withdrawing them and then not doing that again, and suppose they have really complete knowledge of the brain and complete knowledge of all the physical processes involved, they might conclude, well, yeah, that's really great.

This organism has a way to avoid harm to its body, such that when one of these things happen, there are changes in the brain that cause an aversion to the stimulus and then lay down a memory trace, which will mean the avoidance of the stimulus in the future. And none of that causal picture requires that we talk about the subjective feeling of pain. The causal picture is complete without it. It's no more necessary to talk about the qualia or the subjective feeling of pain in that picture than it is to talk about in the functioning of my air conditioner in my car.

I don't need to talk about, well, it wanted to turn off or it got to the point where it felt like it needed to turn off or something like that. I don't need subjective states to explain the functioning of the material world, whether I'm talking about cars or whether I'm talking about human beings, that prejudices me in this epiphenomenal direction. That's the way I think about it. Before we even get into the three Chalmers examples, which are also very good ways of thinking about what the hard

13:14 Gregory: problem is, where's the last thing you said there about the analogy with the car and the air conditioning? I think that's, like, the perfect way to put it, really. So Chalmer says it's the problem of experience, like, why does any of this physical stuff in my brain feel a certain way? So it seems perfectly possible, you might think, that all this stuff could happen in my head without it feeling like something, right? We think lots of physical processes happen out there in the world. I might have lilies on my desk and some sort of chemical process goes on in their leaves, but it doesn't feel like anything.

But something happens here inside my skull and things feel a certain way, but it looks like the description and everything we is, like you said, wears publicly observable. And the way we talk about and describe this thing inside my skull, right, Completely leaves out and doesn't even need the way Things feel in that description. It's like a completely coherent picture of everything inside the skull. The way it works without the feeling in there. So why does this stuff happen? Why does it give rise to it in the first place? Especially if it doesn't look like we need it in the picture anyway, like you said, you're starting to talk about epiphenomenalism.

But there's that kind of epiphenomenalist thing built in there anyway. Like, it looks like we've got an add on that we didn't ask for the add on of subjectivity just to add on there.

14:35 Wes: I could completely explain my behavior in terms of brain states and the way they interact with nerves in my body to move my limbs and all that. There would be a complete picture of all my behavior and its relation to the brain. And that's perfectly scientifically explicable. I don't need ever to talk about how I feel or its objective state or consciousness in order to explain anything I'm doing, any behavior. Unless we reject scientific naturalism, which is another problem.

15:02 Dylan: One thing I like about the examples, and I'm sure we'll talk about it more, is the role of, let's call it history in experience. And so in your example with Mark sitting on the couch daydreaming about eating ice cream, while you note that there's nothing physically externally observable about that, integral to that occurring in our account of it is thinking about his memory and how his experience relies on the processing of that history. And how our own experience and our understanding of our experience and our phenomenal experience and our concepts for them are tied up with history.

And in some sense, even just in the word experience. It's not simply a interaction that can be accounted for in experience. Experience doesn't mean an interaction. Experience also means a history of interactions that may even then become a phenomena. It result in a phenomenal experience which is more than a point interaction. And to me, that's one of the ways of understanding this disjunction that in physics we so often are able to just characterize something in terms of its state at any given moment in time. And that, combined with the laws of interaction, give us that whole history.

And one way, for me, of understanding this hard problem is we don't see how memory is embodied in that causal history.

16:26 Mark: So Bloch was describing the difference between the hard and the harder problem is that you could come up with the hard problem. Being in a world all by yourself, just reflecting on your own. Isn't it weird that I have a brain and that these experiences would come up. But clearly the way we've been talking about it, and historically, a lot of the reason that we would think that the hard problem is a problem or we would think about consciousness in the way we do, is reflecting on the difference between, as Wes was describing, my own experience of my own actions and our experience of other people's actions.

Part of what Chalmers is trying to do, or what the task this kind of philosophy is doing, is to undo problematic slipshod theorizing that has come along with scientific advances and to come up with a more conceptually consistent, more philosophically correct way of describing matters. So what Wes just said about. Well, I could describe the entirety of the decision making process and the behavior using only talking about the brain, talking about signals coming in through the nerves and processing in the brain and giving a mechanical explanation.

And that is clearly something that, though it might seem to us now to be sort of intuitive, it is a late historical advance. It is something that came up in the Enlightenment period of materialist science. And the idea that your desire for ice cream, that mental thing in your head had a causal effect, made you get up and get the ice cream, like that is the most natural thing in the world. Talking about interactions between mental and physical stuff. So this is really about getting a way of describing what is materialism, what is naturalism more broadly.

How can we describe this in a way that still allows us to give credence to our everyday explanations of things? Because when I say it's a big step conceptually to say that idea, that desire you have for ice cream is not a conscious mental thing. Of course, when we reflect on it, we reflect. A lot of times people do things. Maybe we even attributed this to animals. And we argue about whether they have consciousness the way we do. You can even describe in the language of physics, and there's a magnet. It seems like the particles want to go toward the magnet, and we're clearly not attributing to them conscious experience.

And so it's only because we first have the way of talking about each other which does attribute consciousness. We come up with the general picture of how desire and belief motivate action, this functional picture of how action takes place. We then see how that's similar to scientific explanation overall, and then project back up that maybe just in the way that we are not attributing mental qualia to particles attracted by a magnet, maybe we shouldn't. It's not part of the explanation for why somebody goes and gets Ice cream, that there's a qualia involved.

19:05 Wes: I wasn't trying to imply that in my description. So you know, you go to the fridge to get something to eat and someone asks you why you did that, and you said, because I was hungry. That's a perfectly legitimate explanation. On my view. It's just that it's also not necessary. You know, if someone else said you did that because something happened in your brain and it made your limbs move to the fridge and you never even use the word hunger, that is also a legitimate explanation and it's the only one we need. But I still think that talking about it in terms of subjective states is also legitimate.

And that's the problem. Like that is the hard problem how it is that both of those two things can be legitimate. If I'm a deflationist, then I might want to reject that desire picture as one of the legitimate explanations. But there's one possibility, which is that, look, they are the same explanation. At some low level, desire just is a brain state. And even though I don't need to refer to desire, I've done enough by referring to the brain. There are lots of ways to talk about this, but we're not prejudiced in the direction of deflationism just by the mere fact that we realize that all we need to explain behavior is the physical.

20:14 Gregory: Yeah, Wes, you put it perfect this time and last time. It's that there appears to be a type of description of the way the mind works which completely leaves out facts about the way things feel for me. And that is the essence of the problem. Things feel a certain way for me. I have subjective experience, to use Nagel's term. There's something it's like for me to exist. There's something it's like to taste coffee, to see wonderful sunsets, etc, etc, but when I describe a person's brain in third personal terms, the whole of that stuff is left out.

But it also looks like we don't need that stuff in there, and that's part of the problem. So it looks like we have on one hand a description that gives us everything we want causally, but it leaves out the way things feel to me. And on the other hand, it looks like the way things feel to me are essential. And you might think they need to somehow involve themselves in the description. I mean, maybe the best way to get a grip on the hard problem is with those three arguments that Chalmers gives, right? The explanatory argument, the knowledge argument, and the zombies.

Right?

21:20 Wes: It's not even just that we have quality and we don't want to get rid of them. They actually are. In our everyday picture of the world, thinking of things at the level of subjective explanation is actually really important. Someone would think you were a lunatic if when you said why are you going to the fridge? Oh well, my brain is doing such and such and it's moving my limbs. If you responded in that way, they would rightly think you're a lunatic. From a subjective standpoint, that is not why you're going to the fridge. From a third person point of view it is, but not from a subjective point of view. So we need those types of explanations as well. We can't do without them. We would lose a lot of what we think of as knowledge and we

21:59 Dylan: wouldn't be able to talk to one another.

22:00 Mark: I'm just not sure why you have to say that. From a third person point of view, it is like, I think equally if someone were to ask you why did Mark go get ice cream? And you said because his brain did, blah blah, blah, like you would also be regarded as a lunatic in exactly the same way. This is just the way that we talk about its different levels of explanation.

22:17 Wes: Well, only if I'm projecting onto you. Only if I'm assuming that you're a conscious being and projecting that onto you. That it becomes more interesting when we start talking about data, right? Or the. I forget what Bloch calls it, the sentient Android or.

22:30 Mark: No, you can't even say that because sentient.

22:32 Wes: Well, we don't know if he's sentient. But yeah, but yeah, let's get into what Chalmers calls the three arguments against materialism are just different ways of describing the hard problem.

22:42 Gregory: So yeah, I think what they're meant to do is pump the intuition of the hard problem or hone in on the problem, what's at the heart of it. So take the explanatory gap, right? Which is the first one that Chalmers mentions in the paper. And this is Joe Levine and Frank Jackson. That's the knowledge argument. But Joe Levine really comes up with this explanatory gap. And the way it works is simple. You kind of go, well look at the type of explanation we give of typically physical phenomena. We explain them in terms of their behavior, what things do, right?

So we explain what an electron is by the way it behaves. We explain what H2O is by the way it behaves. The chemical bonds entered into. And that's how we explain that phenomena, right? Take for instance the identity claim that water is H2O. We have this explanation of what H2O is in terms of what it does, or physical explanation, and then we have this question, is H2O water? And we can see that there is an identity between them. And that identity is transparent or clear or obvious to us, something like that. Such that if we explain wholly the functioning and workings of H2O, we get all the things we want to know, for instance, about water, a priori.

So if I want to know facts about water, I can get all the facts about H2O molecules, write them down and a priori deduce facts about water. Right. Joe Levine, what he calls a transparent explanation. And Chalmers says, well, look, the transparent explanation of water in terms of H2O is not the sort of explanation we get when it comes to the brain and experiences. So if I claim to use the typical philosopher's example that pain is identical to C fibres, it should be the case, if that's an identity, that if I explain all the facts about the way these C fibers in my brain work, then I should be able to deduce a priori all the facts about the way pain feels like, for me, the subjective feeling of it, the qualia.

Right. But that doesn't appear to be the case. When we get those facts about C fibers, we can't make that a priori deduction from those facts to facts about C fibers. Right. Whereas we can do that with facts about H2O and water are facts about heat and mean molecular velocity or whatever. And that is what is called the explanatory gap. At most, the physical explains this stuff in terms of this and it entails this, but we don't get the physical explaining this and entailing this, where this and this, for the listener, are things I'm waving at in the air that nobody can see.

Does that make sense in case this

25:37 Mark: notion of transparency is confusing to people? Because clearly, if you didn't know any chemistry, it's not transparent that water is H2O. So it's just like you just said, Greg, that you have to already know all the physical stuff about H2O molecules. And the block paper actually goes into quite a bit of detail about why does water freeze?

25:56 Wes: Well, why does it expand when it freezes, as opposed to contracts?

26:00 Gregory: Yeah.

26:00 Mark: Why does it expand when it freezes? Why does it flow the way it does? Like all the everyday stuff that we observe about water we can explain on a molecular level. So that's the sense of transparency. It's not just that, it's obvious. No, it's obvious given A lot of

26:13 Wes: scientific work, the transparency part is that knowing everything about the structure of water and the behavior at a molecular level and all that stuff, we could actually infer properties at the macro level. And each of those levels, importantly, is spatiotemporal. That's another important part of this. So we're talking in the way Chalmers puts it, about the structure and function of the spatiotemporal at two different levels, the macro and the micro and their relations. We do, by the way, of course, we make all kinds of correlations between the subjective and brain states.

Right. We know that certain parts of the brain account for certain types of feelings, but we only know that by virtue of the reports of subjects and our ability to interpret those reports, which is also an important component of that. And that's a very ad hoc thing. And by the way, if you want to think about behaviors, there's a reason why we can interpret behaviors as meaning certain subjective things as well. It's kind of like the report example. So without all that just simply looking at the brain, we can never make inferences from that spatiotemporal level, that structure to subjective feelings and qualia and consciousness.

And I think one of the key things there is that under that description, even if you're an identity person and you want to say it is the brain, ultimately consciousness is the brain. It's non spatiotemporal under the way we describe it. It's non spatiotempor temporal. And so that's the problem.

27:37 Dylan: Tell me if this makes sense. One way I would put it is that we can describe in the brain what parts of your brain get activated when you get wet. But talking about how you account for the feeling of wetness by H2O isn't clear.

27:54 Gregory: Yeah. To push the two examples together, if you try to explain the subjective feeling of being wet in terms of the movement of molecules on skin and the subsequent firing of neurons in the brain, something will be left out. And the reason Joe Levine and Chalmers say this is because, as Dylan said, the type of description we give in physics is what Chalmers called at most, structure and function. And structure and function cannot entail facts about things that are not structure and function. So Chalmers thinks, the taste of coffee in my mouth doesn't appear to be a structural or functional fact. And if we explain A in terms of structure and function, and that doesn't entail B, well, it doesn't look like B can be A. And thereby we have this explanatory gap, and it looks like then no physical account of consciousness is going to work. That's the first argument.

28:50 Mark: I want to dwell just on the structure and function thing for a second because it does sound. If you just throw that out, doesn't that leave out a lot of what science is saying, like the fact that it is the brain, something made of carbon, you know, as opposed to silicon. How is that structure or function? It's matter. But the way you were describing it earlier, Greg, that even in physics, we describe what makes something a carbon atom in terms of its structure and function. So whenever you're giving a material explanation, strangely for Aristotle, those would be very different things.

A material versus a formal explanation. But no, the way we think about physics now is all material. Explanation comes down to formal explanation comes down to material. Likewise, it might seem very strange that if we have a Commander Data, we have an intelligent seeming robot who you ask, are you in pain? And it says, ouch, ouch, ouch. Yes, I'm in pain. What is it to try to describe that in terms of structure and function? Well, that is behaviorism.

29:42 Wes: One version of functionalism is behaviorism. Not all functionalism, but.

29:46 Mark: Yeah, right, right. But yes, of course, if you're trying to, in a video game program one of the characters to respond so that when you hit it, it goes, ouch, ouch, ouch. And maybe you can ask it, are you hurt? And it will say, yes, I'm hurt. But clearly that behavior, if you understand computer programming at all, you can see how give output of, say, this thing or play the voice file or whatever the video game is doing. And that's all a matter of you're setting up certain structures through the programming code.

30:14 Dylan: Right. And in fact, in that case, the structure is that character in the program will have an element in the account of his structure that is in pain or not in pain. That's what'll happen. That's the way that's done.

30:27 Mark: Yeah. So defining pain in terms of its. We're going to talk much more about this next episode. So I don't want to dwell on this, but it is important for if we're going to talk about function here, to have a functionalist account of a mental state is to define it in terms of other mental states. So to have a belief or to have a desire to have a feeling, these are all defined in terms of inputs and outputs and relations to other mental states. So being in pain is. Well, I'm actually having a harder time feeling, figuring out what exactly the functional description of that is.

31:00 Wes: I mean, there are various versions. Right. So some of them are just behaviorists. So they're reducing all these things in terms of dispositions to certain types of behavior. But anyway, we're jumping into block.

31:12 Gregory: Yeah.

31:12 Dylan: And we're also really diving in and avoiding the higher order categorization that is so helpful in Chalmers.

31:19 Mark: The reason I felt like I wanted to bring this up now is because if we're going to say the hard problem as opposed to the easy problem, this is one thing that we skipped over in the Chalmers paper so far is that it might seem very difficult to figure out how to make a computer pass the Turing Test. But according to Chalmers, that is all part of the easy problem. All the stuff I was just talking about in terms of functions, in terms of how you would program a computer to simulate certain behaviors and in turn, how we think the brain is structured.

Or maybe it's the mind taken at a functional level, which could be instantiated in a brain or could be instantiated in a robot. If we want to say that there's a. A functional way of talking about the mind apart from talking about brain structures in particular. That's like the whole program of artificial intelligence research, and that's the advance here, is that philosophers are saying you could do all that, and you still haven't told us what consciousness is.

32:07 Wes: I would put it a different way, because developing an artificially intelligent creature might be enormously difficult. And the point of calling something the easy problem is just that. What's easy in principle, all of it's easy in principle, is to establish what brain states correspond to which internal subjective states or which sorts of behaviors. We can map all of that out ultimately, and there's nothing in principle difficult. It might be scientifically difficult, it might involve a long project, but independently of whether we even get to the point of creating an artificial creature, we can map all that stuff out.

We can create all these correlations between brain states and internal states. And there's no mystery to that because we can rely on reports and other sorts of inferences from behavior. But the hard problem isn't about simply mapping the correlations between the physical states and the subjective states. It's about saying how the physical can give rise to the subjective.

33:06 Gregory: Yeah, precisely. The easy problems are all problems that will be answered and explained in the type of reductive, functionalist, physical way that we already have. The hard problem is precisely the thing that stands outside of that mode of explanation. Action, cognition, things like that all appear to be able to be functionally explained. Right? That subjective feel of experience lies past that boundary of Functional explicability. And that's what constitutes the difference. So if you think about it again in terms of the kind of three arguments, and you think about defining the distinction between easy and hard in terms of that, you might think, well, look, structure and function suffices to address all the easy problems. The hard problem is precisely that problem where structure and function fails.

33:57 Wes: All right, so the conceivability argument.

33:59 Mark: Zombies.

34:01 Dylan: My short version is zombies can exist, but they're obviously not conscious. So consciousness isn't physical, that is the characteristic of consciousness is not manifest in zombies.

34:13 Wes: So just to say what a zombie is a being that is physically identical to us behaviourally. Yeah, behaviourally, but also in the brain everything is identical.

34:22 Gregory: It's what Bloch calls in that paper, essentially a functional isomorph, but maybe more fine grained. It's just like you in every way, shape or form, down to the smallest detail. But it lacks inner light.

34:34 Wes: It's not realized in a different material substrate. So just think of Wes prime on a different world, exactly identical to me, but has no conscious states. It's not obvious that that could even be the case in this universe. There may be things about the laws of the universe that make that impossible. So it's not that, but it is logically conceivable. All we need is for it to not be self contradictory as conceived. Could be physically impossible, but logically possible or metaphysically possible, as he puts it here.

35:05 Gregory: Yeah, it seems conceivable. And if it's conceivable, that is, there's no inherent contradiction to it, then it seems like it's possible. And Chalmers says, well, if it is possible, zombies are possible when I say it, then there can't be the sort of entailment between facts about the physical structure of your brain or facts about zombies to facts about experiences. In the same way as the explanatory gap just a moment ago highlighted.

35:31 Dylan: The thing about the conceivability argument is it seems to be a kind of truism, I guess because you say the definition of a zombie is it's like you in every way, except it doesn't have consciousness and therefore consciousness is not physical. And so there's a way in which you've excluded it. You've made consciousness different and separate and special with respect to the physical from the beginning. But point taken. It's the idea that we can't conceive of this. It just seems very related to the explanatory argument.

36:00 Gregory: Yeah, so we can define what a zombie is. It's you without the inner light. Right, but that doesn't mean that by defining it we're already conceding ground to the anti materialist.

36:10 Dylan: How is that not possible? If I define a zombie as me without the inner light, I'm defining it as me without consciousness. And so therefore the fact that I don't have consciousness, the fact that my consciousness is not physical, just seems to be like, well, you just defined it that way.

36:22 Gregory: Yeah, so I see what you mean, I see what you mean. But you can define a thing without then saying that we can conceive of that definition, the defined object or something like that. You can define a zombie. The zombie is just a tool to put the argument into place. And then the first premise of the argument is this tool, that is the zombie is a conceivable thing. Some people, like Dennett, they deny that first premise.

36:44 Wes: You posit this in thought, right? This hypothetical. And it might turn out to be contradictory. In fact, as Chalmers says, zombies are probably not naturally possible. They probably cannot exist in our world with its laws of nature. So they're probably not physically or naturally possible. But what we're looking for, we examine that idea for metaphysical impossibility or logical self contradiction. Is there something self contradictory in imagining that this zombie thing. And it would be interesting, right, if there were. I mean, in fact it would solve the hard problem if there were, because then we could start looking for a priori entailments from brain states to subjective states, but it does not seem to be conceptually impossible, which implies there are not such entailments.

37:32 Gregory: Yeah, precisely. If we did find an incoherence in the idea, right, such that they weren't conceivable, then you would have something that looked like a solution to the hard problem. And this is precisely what, as we'll go on to talk about in a few minutes, what type a physicalists or a priori physicalists do say they think zombies are inconceivable. So I might define this thing that is physically identical but lacks consciousness. But that's an incoherent definition. There's no such thing. It can't exist, because if it is exactly like me, then it has consciousness to me.

38:04 Dylan: One way of understanding the conceivability argument is that you work through granting the part of the explanatory argument that you found unsatisfying. You say that yes, there is structure and function that can conceivably result in a entity that operates behaviorally just like me, but it's lacking that inner light. So therefore consciousness is separate. So it's another prong of the explanatory argument. I understand why it's a separate one.

38:31 Wes: I think the knowledge, the third one, in a way, is the most powerful intuitively.

38:36 Gregory: This is Frank Jackson, Mary in black and white room.

38:40 Dylan: The thing I like about the knowledge argument, which is basically that there are facts about consciousness that aren't deducible from physical facts. That is, there are phenomenal facts that are not physical facts. And it separates the world into these categories. One which is accessible by the physical world. And one which says, well, there's a such thing as my experience. And there are facts of experience which are not physical facts. And you can see immediately when I say that why you end up with a dualist argument in some kind of dualist camp.

39:12 Wes: So the example is by Frank Jackson, and it's a very famous argument. Seems to come up in every philosophy paper at some point. But Mary, who has been brought up in a black and white room and never see color, or she's colorblind, and so she's never experienced red. But she's someone who knows everything that there is scientifically and neuroscientifically to know about color vision. She knows all the theories of how people see red, but she doesn't know what it's like herself. She's never experienced it. So the argument is, well, she knows all the physical facts, but she doesn't know all the facts.

Because she doesn't know the fact of what it's like to actually experience red. Which means the physical facts do not exhaust all the facts. And so there's this added thing to the world that consciousness itself cannot be explained by simply exhausting all the physical facts. There are truths about consciousness that are not deducible from physical truths.

40:05 Gregory: Yeah, because then she breaks out of her black and white prison, right? And she goes into the world and comes across a red rose and goes, aha, I've learned something new. And that new thing she learns, she gets new knowledge about a new fact, both of those things. And that new fact is a phenomenal fact. And I mean, if there is a phenomenal fact, then the intuition goes that maybe phenomenal stuff is non physical stuff. Because it looked like it was out of the picture in the first place.

40:32 Dylan: So I had a question when I read this example, which I guess the fact that it's famous and that I had not heard of it before is a reflection of the fact that I haven't read very many philosophy of mind papers.

40:42 Wes: So you never heard about Mary. Sorry, we've Let you out of your room. And now you've discovered a new.

40:54 Dylan: There we go. I'm having the phenomenal experience of understanding about Mary seeing red.

40:59 Wes: There's something about Mary. Sorry.

41:02 Dylan: Yes, exactly. There's something about Mary. Okay. So I started thinking about other ways in which you have. I mean, this is a particular kind of first person experience. It has the advantage of it being tied into a physical characteristic that people have that you may or may not have. You might be colorblind, but it's very common for people to see color. And it has to do with our physical substrate that is connected directly to our brain by other physical objects. But it made me think about all the ways in which we have phenomenal experience that are mediated by other kinds of tools.

That is a way of translating that physical phenomena into a region of experience that we can have. So, for instance, I have infrared goggles. I can't see infrared light, but I can put on goggles and I can see it. And the reason I can see it is I can get it translated into a spectrum that my optical instrumentation can process. There are other kinds of animals that see in frequency spectrum that are very different, much wider than this physical spectrum that we're available to. They can see deep into the infrared. They can see way higher, into higher frequencies.

Right. And it's back to the conceivability. It's completely conceivable that I could have an entity that could visualize X rays, visualize all kinds of other electromagnetic spectra, and therefore have a set of phenomenal experiences like seeing things that I know about in the way that Mary knows about things. Diffraction, edges of edge effects on things that there are physical phenomena that I have names for. Like I have names for snowflakes. But if I had a lot of visualization of very, very small frequencies, I would have names like snowflakes for all kinds of diffractive observations that I can only see right now, mediated by other tools.

And I translate them, I transpose them into, in this case, a visual field that I can experience. So to me, then, that means that this point being made of what it's like to see red is saying that a phenomenal fact is different than that kind of translational experience that I would have. That I would have to exclude that as a possibility. I'd have to say phenomenal facts are different. That what it's like to see red is not the same thing as what it's like to see red. When, say, my visual spectrum Is shifted by 800nm and so I just move it down. Right.

We have to say that that's a different experience and that's not clear to me.

43:29 Mark: So you're saying that what it's like to see infrared for an animal that can naturally see infrared is going to be different. It's going to be still an inaccessible experience to us, even if you put on the infrared goggles. And so now you know for you what it's like for a human to see infrared using this translator apparatus. So then you can like look around and use heat vision or whatever it is that seeing infrared lets you see. So in a sense, you do have something like the experience of what a being that naturally can see infrared can see, and that you can now detect heat or detect whatever they can detect. But you're not seeing it in the same way that they do because you're using this translator. You can only ever see things in the way you do.

44:08 Wes: You're arguing that Mary's knowledge about all the facts of color vision could be a kind of translation.

44:13 Dylan: I'm asking the question about that.

44:16 Wes: Can I give another example? Because I think it's clearer and it's. The example is that they can take. So for blind people, you can actually set up an apparatus on the skin and usually do it on the back that's hooked up to a camera. And the camera translates visual imagery into tactile sensations on the back. And what happens is it's not only that they start seeing and it's not as fine grained as actual eye vision, but you know that they are seeing because exactly the sort of stuff that happens in the occipital lobe that when you see through your eyes, starts happening through those connections to the back.

So in other words, you can accomplish the same thing in many different ways. And it's sort of the. There's something structural about what's happening. It doesn't have to be the eye in particular that sees, as long as you get the right input patterns. And I would completely agree. If you could hook up something outside of the room that we're somehow taking in information about red and setting up something where it's still assumed that Mary is colorblind, setting up some situation where she receives those inputs in a way that creates the right brain states, then I would completely concede that she's seeing color.

But I think it would be a real stretch to say that knowing all the neuroscientific and scientific facts about color vision creates that same translating situation. I think that would be a stretch.

45:41 Dylan: Are you saying that that Blind person in that case is not seeing red. Not having the experience of seeing red.

45:47 Wes: No, I'm saying I would concede that if you could set up the right translating apparatus, I would. But you would need that for Mary as well. It couldn't just be all the.

45:55 Mark: I don't agree with that. But yeah.

45:57 Dylan: Yeah. So it sounds to me like we have either the case that my example or your example, Wes, is that if you grant you can have this kind of translation and then say that, yes, that's the same thing as seeing red in the case of Mary, then you are providing an avenue for which to decide the subjective versus objective problem. You are providing an avenue and essentially denying ultimately Block's harder problem that there's no way to do it. But if you deny it, then you're maintaining the harder problem, that there isn't a way to answer the subjectivity problem.

46:28 Wes: We understand the same thing by the harder problem.

46:31 Dylan: Let me not invoke the harder problem. It seems to be that the nub of the question here is how separate is subjective experience? So how radical is Mary's experience of seeing red? And is that accessible in any way in this kind of translational mode? Or is there any way of translating subjective experience at all? We both gave different kinds of examples that are trying to account for a way of translating that subjective experience so that it was, let's call it, authentic, and therefore denies that there are uniquely phenomenal facts that are inherently subjective.

47:08 Wes: All I'm saying is that that translation may be possible. Mark might be right in denying that that particular case of seeing red could be translated. But it seems possible. But that even if it seems possible, it's certainly not the case that knowing scientific facts about color vision counts as translation. You're not going to see color. You're not going to see vision behavior in the occipital lobe in someone just because they have a textbook out and they're studying color vision. That certainly knowing all the facts about color vision does not create any kind of translation that would give you a phenomenal experience of red.

47:41 Mark: But I like the fact that we're talking about. Wes is talking about behavior in the occipital lobe as having something to do with the experience of color vision. Whereas the whole point of Zombies is that you could have experience in the occipital lobe theoretically and yet not have that conceptually the qualia is different than even experiencing the occipital lobe. And also the idea that you still don't. In Wes's example of I'm now Seeing in quotes, through pressures on my back, I'm still not seeing qualia. I'm not getting that experience of what it's like to see red, what it's like to.

But I am getting a lot of the facts that you typically only know if you can see red, if you can see things. The hard problem has to do with just qualia being distinguished from any facts, any informational content of any sort, and any particular brain activity of any sort. Whereas once we actually start trying to get into the details and talking about translation here, we inevitably think that, okay, well, I don't have the experience of the animal that naturally can see in infrared, but I kind of have something like that by using the infrared goggles.

I don't have the experience, the actual quality that go with seeing what is actually out in the real world with eyes when I have pressure on my back. But the experiences I have seem like they're seeing. And if we then see that there is activity in the occipital lobe normally associated with vision in both these cases, that corresponds to normally seeing things infrared or normally being able to see things, period. In Wes's example, what do you think we should take to that? Does that have any effect on. I would think Chalmers would just say neither of those has anything to do with qualia being distinguishable from all informational content.

Whereas that's exactly the kind of thing that Papineau, when we get to, that is going to point to as there are no distinct facts that Mary is learning when she leaves, but she gets a new concept of a fact. So both Bloch and Papineau are going to have some version about concepts being different from facts.

49:39 Gregory: So to borrow an example, right, And I quite like this example. And you earlier mentioned you were listening to the Panpsychist episode where we talked to Philip Gough and David Papana, right? And this is Philip Gough's example and he uses it in that episode, just something like 25 or something. And it comes down to this, right? Imagine a congenitally blind neuroscientist, right? If you think listening on audiobook to facts about colour vision or vision science would entail facts about what it's like to see, then you would think that listening to those audiobooks would allow you to see again, but that isn't the case, right?

We think that those type of facts don't entail those. So it looks like there is really this gap between the two types of things, right? And as we'll talk about in a minute, that epistemic gap Chalmers thinks goes on to entail an ontological gap. Dylan, to come about, back to your thing about the translation device. So if the kind of a priori physicalist or someone who didn't think the knowledge argument had any force is in the position in which what they have to say is, as soon as I read the textbook in enough detail about infrared vision or maybe sonar experiences of bats, then I know what it's like to have those experiences.

And that just doesn't seem to be the case. Right.

50:59 Dylan: Yeah, well, so I guess intrinsic to my example is what kind of translation we're talking about. So you just gave, and Wes emphasizes as well a kind of translation that for lack of a better term, crosses media or reading a mathematical account versus denying that it can be an experiential account. My example of that translation maintained the experience of it. In the case of a telescope or an infrared goggles, you are still plugged into the experience of it. What you've done is you've translated the inputs into a range that are accessible by the mechanism that you normally would experience them by. And so the gap there is in the case of reading about sonar doesn't plug into the experiential receptors for sonar. Right. So in that way, it's a different kind of translation.

51:53 Wes: Yeah, it's like the difference between know how and knowledge about something. And by the way, I'm willing to take a very strong stance on translation. There are blind people who use echolocation by clicking and they will say they actually do see, and you can verify that they're having the right activity in the occipital lobe. And by the way, Chalmers does agree that that's a good evidence in this world with these natural laws for them seeing. So I'm willing to concede the most, you know, like the strongest version that you could get of translation. I believe those people really do see and that the only difference is in resolution. But that translation is nothing like. So audio works is what I'm saying, but not audiobooks, because audiobooks are just about.

52:37 Dylan: How about that?

52:40 Mark: Rather than.

52:41 Gregory: Yeah, but if you think the knowledge argument doesn't have any force, right. You are in the position in which you have to say having the knowledge derived from audiobooks about any given experience would entail knowledge of what it's like to undergo that experience. And that just again, that just doesn't seem to be like something we have to actually see.

53:02 Wes: You need those audiobooks to be a bunch of clicks patterned in a certain way. That's what you need them to be. They can't be language about seeing.

53:11 Dylan: That word you mentioned just now, Wes, is language, is that you have to maintain it as an experience rather than having it be processed through as you or Mark said, knowledge about.

53:25 Mark: So let me just say, before we wrap up the first half here, so I think, Wes, this is a great example. You are giving us something that the harder problem is designed to deal with because we have. The harder problem is, yeah, of course, we would assume that other people have qualia like ours if a blind person reports seeing. Or maybe we have evidence like we look at the part of the brain and we say the blind person who's receiving these clicks is having occipital lobe activity. Normally we would say, yeah, why not say seeing? But there could be counterbalancing information.

Just the fact that we know that they're not using their eyes like that is prima facie evidence against them potentially having the same quality that we do. And according to this harder problem, you might think that there's just no way we can know that we can have strong enough evidence either way to say, do they actually see? Do they not actually see? Maybe for practical purposes it doesn't matter that much. They're the clear ways in which they can see. And we can judge them as seeing if they can perform the requisite behaviors. But if their resolution is so much lower, we don't expect them to see traffic lights and let them drive and stuff based on that.

So there are other practical reasons why we would not allow them. But the actual principle that Chalmers is concerned with here of is the qualia present of the requisite kind or not, according to Block's harder problem, we just. We can't know.

54:41 Wes: Yeah, I think. I'm not so sure he's saying that, but we'll discuss that. Under certain circumstances, we can't know. But if we see it realized in a brain that's made exactly like our brain, then yeah, we can know the