Ep. 219: The Harder Problem of Consciousness (Block & Papineau)

0:07 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 219 is how can we know if creatures who are very different from us biologically actually are conscious? And we'll be focusing on Ned Bloch's 2002 paper, the Harder Problem of Consciousness, and David Papenow's 2003 paper, Could There Be a Science of Consciousness? You should take this as a continuation from our episode where we talked about David Chalmers Consciousness and Its Place in Nature 2003, as I'm sure we'll bring that up again here. This is Mark Linsenmayer talking to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:40 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:42 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Midland, Michigan.

0:45 Gregory: And this is Gregory Miller in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, England.

0:49 Mark: All right, let's move on finally to Ned Bloch's the Harder Problem of Consciousness essay. Who wants to start? Us. I know we already, in the overview, before we talked about the Chalmers paper, I tried to summarize what this was, but that was a long time ago. People have probably forgotten already.

1:06 Gregory: The harder problem, I think, is first of all, much harder to summarize, maybe hence the name, than the hard problem itself. Right? The hard problem, you can kind of put in a nice, easy sentence, which is, why does this physical stuff correspond with this phenomenal stuff? Right. Why do these neurons give rise to these experiences? The harder problem is much harder to put into kind of a nice, easy sound bite than that. I think Ned Block distinguishes it in three important ways from the hard problem. But even then, it takes a while to get clear, I think, on what the harder problem is.

1:44 Wes: One way to put it is that we never have a good way to tell whether what is correlated to some particular phenomenal conscious state or phenomenal experience is functional or structural, or has something to do with the physical material that realizes that function in the sense of. This is the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's the difference between a mousetrap, where you might have different materials that realize it. You can make a mousetrap out of lots of different things, and it doesn't matter, perhaps if it's steel or platinum, that part of it's made of, or you can think of any number of different materials it would be made of, and it's still a mousetrap because it performs the different functions that we need it to perform.

On the other hand, diamond is the hardest thing, and that's dependent on its physical nature. It has to be a diamond to be the hardest thing. So it's the actual physical material and the properties of the physical material that's important to it being what it is and doing what it does. And some philosophers have sketched out consciousness in terms of functionalism, something like the mousetrap view. And others have suggested that, no, actually it could be. Or for Searle, for instance, I think it must be something about the actual physical material.

So the brain and the chemicals, specifically the types of chemicals that are in the brain or the types of matter it's made of, that must have an important role to play in making us conscious. So it couldn't be that we could just take silicon and make something that is functionally equivalent. There are a variety of different levels or ways that you could describe what it means for there to be a function with respect to consciousness. So it could be functionally equivalent. But we'd always wonder if the material is different, whether the material played some essential role in making us conscious, and so we'd never be certain.

So if you take the example Block uses Data in Star Trek, we could never really be sure that data is conscious because there's always the question of the importance of the physical realizer. We can't simply ask Data for reports because that begs the question, why would we trust his reports? He's so constituted functionally as to give those reports that he's feeling certain things under certain circumstances. If we assume physicalism, which block think seems to be required by naturalism, then we have no good way of deciding whether some being like Data is conscious in a way, we have no real way of saying even why brain matter rather than silicone, would be the thing that leads to consciousness.

It's clear if you're talking about functional states, why one thing might be said to be conscious rather than another. But if it's just this sort of brute correlation between a particular kind of matter and whether or not we're conscious. I think the deepest part of this is that you couldn't even say why one particular material is important rather than another. And that kind of shows how this comes out of the hard problem where you can't say why one particular brain state corresponds to one subjective experience rather than another.

4:59 Dylan: I like that example that you brought in Wes, of the mousetrap versus the diamond, because I was thinking about the functional versus the physical. And in the way you articulated, and I'm not sure if this is exactly what Block was meaning, is that once you commit yourself to the physicalist position, you Explicitly reject the functionalist position because you're making a demand of the kind of explanation you have that the functionalist position cannot satisfy. Which made me want to think more about the difference between the demand of a physical explanation versus the demand of a functional explanation and how they are exclusive of one another.

Because the only way you would make the mousetrap be the same as the diamond solution is that if you said that mousetrappiness sort of in the being of that mousetrap, even if you had underlying physical characteristics, they would be dependent upon it. And so that's why I like the example is that you could imagine a mousetrap solution that was like the diamond one, but it would be, and it would be completely dependent upon the physical constitution, and the physical constitution would somehow explain in a deep way the consequence of there being a mousetrap that it exists in the same way that the physical constitution of a diamond explains its properties and explains its existence.

If you do that, you just don't admit functional explanations as being worth a hill of beans at all. There are unsatisfactory explanations, sort of at

6:30 Wes: bottom, or they're not sufficient. You could see them as important, but not sufficient. The material you would need right there would have to be at least the functional stuff, I think, for consciousness. And then you could always say, but wait, is something about the material important too?

6:47 Dylan: Yes. And so this is what I mean by the difference between whether you accept it as an explanation comes down to your intuition or your demand for a physical explanation at all. Being a physicalist means that you don't admit that the functional explanation is an explanation at all. You just reject it as a category of explanation for the world because you want a different kind of account. If you're a functionalist, there's no such thing as a harder problem.

7:12 Wes: It's a problem if we're even open to the possibility of physicalism, actually, because we don't know whether we can rule it out. And if we don't know whether we can rule it out, then the same problems arise and we don't know. If we somehow knew functionalism were true and physicalism false, I think we wouldn't have any problem assessing data, putting him on trial and saying, oh yeah, he has all the right functional stuff going on and therefore he's conscious.

7:38 Dylan: Yeah. It wasn't clear to me why it mattered so much whether or not data was embodied in Silicon vs Not. And I understood in Block's case is that he wanted to frame the harder problem as an epistemological One in terms of other minds, do those other minds exist? And if I have a confusion about the substrate under which that mind exists, then I have some kind of confusion about whether or not that other mind exists at all. Am I interacting with silicone or not? And there becomes a kind of epistemological ambiguity which is at the heart of the harder problem. And I guess I found myself a little unsatisfied and unclear about exactly why the physical substrate for that consciousness mattered, except insofar as if I was a physicalist, that that would matter. So maybe I was finding myself just I was learning. Well, I'm more of a functionalist than a physicalist.

8:34 Wes: He says physicalism is the default for naturalism. It may not turn out to be the case, but it's just the assumption that we work under. So we should be clear that Block isn't saying, oh, physicalism must be the case, but here's the problems that come out of it. He's saying if we accept naturalism, then that's our default point of view. That's near the beginning of the paper. And we could try to say why that is. I'm not too clear on why he thinks that is necessarily the default view. Seems to me like functionalism is perfectly compatible with naturalism.

9:03 Mark: Isn't this tied, though, to Qualia? Right. That's why it's the default view. And we read Searle, who was very explicit about that, if you remember his Chinese room argument and things that he thought functional explanations, in other words, explanations based on structure, we're just not going to be sufficient to account for qualia. Now, crazily enough, according to the hard problem, and I think Searle would readily admit this, we also don't know why consciousness should appear out of brain matter either. I like this quote that Block gives right at the beginning of this paper, comparing the hard problem, the appearance of consciousness to the djinn appearing when Aladdin rubs his lamp, that Block attributes to T.H.

Huxley, that it just seems like magic. But at least according to somebody like Searle, that's a magic that we know actually happens. Whereas if we just think about a purely structural solution, it doesn't matter what the material is. You don't have to use neurons. You could just make it out of silicon. You could make it out of a bunch of people standing around waving flags to give a structural isomorphism to the human brain. And Searle just sees it as a matter of intuition that clearly those things would not result in some entity suddenly having qualia.

But it happens that A brain does. And I think Searle is rightly criticized for not having a good reason for perhaps making those distinctions the way that he does. But he is reflecting the intuitions that Block is trying to criticize here.

10:32 Wes: Just to quickly make Mark's point vivid, we can make a computer out of any materials. It doesn't have to be transistors. You can make it out of matchboxes. You could make it out of people. You could make a calculating machine mechanically, which was done before computers as we know them actually came about. There are lots of different ways to realize a computer. Now, they're not going to be fast. Obviously, if you have people playing the roles that transistors and the other parts of a computer play, but they're still computers and they still functionally perform exactly the same computational role.

I could make a calculator out of all the people on Earth, as long as they behaved correctly, knew which rules to obey, and could give the inputs and get the outputs. And that's the functional role that they would play. And if you think that consciousness works like that, suppose you thought that consciousness were also computational, then it would be pretty obvious that having all the people on Earth behave in a certain way would create a conscious entity realized in all the people of the world in the same way that a calculating machine could be.

Now, it's the intuition of that which is so objectionable to someone like Searle. It seems a little crazy, but I'm not sure that we have a good reason for ruling out that possibility. That actually seems to me to be the most attractive possibility, that in the same way it doesn't matter what material you're using for a calculator, to me, it just doesn't matter what. But anyway, I don't want to get into that yet.

11:59 Gregory: Yeah, so that's a good point. So, Mark, you mentioned that the key point is qualia, and Wes, you mentioned that part of it relies on this intuition. Like Ned Bloch's Chinese Nation example, build a brain out of humans with radio things, the transistors, and you go, well, we should just say it's conscious. And Block says, no, we shouldn't. Now, part of the issue, and maybe this is like more scene setting than criticisms, but part of the issue, and as Block says himself, is the phenomenal realist stance, right? This is that qualia are not a priori deducible from the kind of physical basis and this sort of conceptual dualism.

Right? Because if we didn't have that as part of the argument so far, and as the scene set in, then we could quite easily determine whether or not Commander Data was conscious or not. We just go, ah, he's got C fibers or, ah, he's got the thing that plays the pain role. And if he has that, then Data is certainly conscious because we can get the deduction from that thing to the next thing. But because we're realists and we think that you can't get from these functional physical facts to facts about consciousness without, like, laws of nature that would, in effect, presume the other side of the explanatory gap, right?

That Data is conscious. That's where the problem arises. So, Mark, you're completely right. It is about the qualia in the example. But now Wes raises an interesting point, right, about the kind of intuition behind it. Like, so if we build a thing that is like us, an isomorph like us, that has people four parts and realizes our functional structure, like the Chinese nation example, then we're in this position where we either have to ascribe consciousness or to something that we pre. Theoretically or based upon intuition that we wouldn't want to, and thereby it looks like that sort of functionalism is false.

Or what we do is we bite the bullet and go, no, that's just grounded in our intuition. I think the point of the Commander Data example, right, is to rule out sort of Chinese nation examples. When he characterizes Data, he does that partial physical overlapper thing. And then he also says that Data has no parts that are themselves functional isomorphs of us. In other words, he is a thing that has no other things that are basically functional, identical to us. In other words, he's not a Chinese nation brain or something like this, right? So that's the first thing, is that he kind of rules that example out.

He's trying to make Data's appearance as a functional isomorph and our conviction that he's conscious as like, intuitively plausible and forceful as possible. Second, people agree with what Wes says, right? Because there's a guy called Eric Schwitzgebel. He has a paper from 2015. It's called if Functionalism is True, then the United States is almost certainly conscious, right? In other words, things like the Chinese nation example that you mentioned, Wes, are just based on what he calls like a topological bias. So if functionalism tells us that the Chinese nation should be conscious, then it should be conscious.

15:13 Mark: So we're going to be talking about this Chinese nation example and functionalism more broadly in the next episode. So I don't want to disappear down this hole Too far. But the important thing is the ambiguity. So we added this David Papineau paper because this was recommended to me by one of the editors of Blockheads as a way of almost secondary literature to the Block paper. Right. That he sort of says what Block does, but in a much, much shorter and much simpler way. Papineau is kind of a Wittgensteinian that he thinks that everyday language is ambiguous, kind of can't stand up to the rigors that philosophers would like it to.

So if we analyze what is consciousness, then we're picking out the entire phenomenon of what happens in us. And in us, consciousness does have functional organization. It also has a neural correlate. And it seems very reasonable to Papineau as a naturalist to say that even if there's a conceptual dualism, even if the mental and the physical, we use different words to talk about them, and he has an explanation for why those different vocabularies seem so different that actually when we are saying my consciousness or my mind, we're actually referring to the whole phenomenon.

We're referring to the brain, we're referring to the functional state. And so if we're trying to determine is functionalism is correct or is physicalism correct, then we have to actually determine, well, which one of those are we really referring to? Of course, the definition, as we've just said, of my consciousness or something doesn't include the brain. You can't just, as a matter of a philosophy of language, figure out these scientific issues. It is a scientific issue what parts of the brain are going off when you're in pain, say. But there's still a question of if you acknowledged, right, just like science had to discover that water equals H2O.

Once you've discovered that, then you say, okay all the time. This is, I think, from Putnam and Kripke, which again we'll talk about in the next episode. When I use the word water, I'm in fact referring to H2O. So if you're not a dualist, if you're not a substance dualist, according to Papineau, when you use if these things are established, in other words, we've analyzed brains and consciousness enough so that we can not just be referring to a self contained mental realm with no reference to the physical. If we acknowledge that physicalism is true in some way, that there's a scientific explanation that's in there, you can ask, are we referring, when I say consciousness, am I referring to the functional organization or am I referring to the physical organization?

The only way that you could tell which you're referring to is is to separate them out. So if Commander Data is in fact conscious, then Commander Data would be able to look at his qualia and say, oh, in my case, there's this functional organization which actually, hey, that's actually the same functional organization that humans have. And physically it is identical to the silicon chips. So we would have discovered there functionalism is true. And so the harder problem is the fact that we can't use Commander Data's report on himself. Commander Dea is saying, look, I have qualia, and actually he can't do that to us either.

So as a practical matter, we have one example us, where our qualia correspond to a particular functional organization and a particular physical substance, the brain matter. And we can't know any more than that. It is inaccessible to us whether Commander Data in fact has qualia and hence is conscious and hence whether functionalism is true.

18:41 Dylan: Fundamentally, because we can't link the qualia in the two cases together, we can't establish an equality of qualia, equality or even the existence.

18:51 Mark: Right. Is that what you mean by equality? I mean we can't parcel to establishing

18:55 Dylan: existence is saying that there's another example of it, right? So you would say we can't establish the existence of it because I can't point to it by anything other than subjective experience. And I'm saying that another manifestation of that that's along the lines of Bloch's paper, and the reason you lose the connection between Commander Data and us is that it is pointing to you mentioning qualia and saying, well, there's the nub. That's where I would connect the two. I would go from my organic material manifestation of my functional attributes to my qualia experience, and then I would go from there up the chain to Commander Data. But where they would link and where I'd be able to make the decision between us both being conscious as ours not is at that link of qualia.

19:44 Mark: And you could ask the obvious rejoinder to this is, well, if we're having skepticism about the mind of Data, why wouldn't we have skepticism about the mind of other human beings which Block specifically addresses? Anybody want to take that?

19:59 Gregory: I was reading, because if I'm honest, I found the Block paper quite difficult to pass at times. So the best way for me to get to grips with it was to read Brian McLaughlin's response to Ned Block. And McLaughlin thinks that the question you just asked there, Mark, is answerable. Like, so we have the case of where we go, well, look, we have this peculiar position in which physicalism or default naturalism tells us that Data is not conscious, but functional isomorphs give us reason to think that Data is conscious, right? So we have this problem.

And McLaughlin says, well, no, we don't really have the problem, right? I think Papineau, you might see as one way of trying to avoid the problem. But McLaughlin says, well, no, look, the problem doesn't really occur with things like Commander Data. We recognize that it is a functional isomorph. But the things, the material underlayers, the realizer. Sorry, of the functionally isomorphic roles give us grounds to think that he is, in fact, not conscious. That isn't, in fact, a tension in the first place. So McLaughlin says, and I think Block addresses this in the paper, but I'm not sure if people are convinced by his response.

But he says, for instance, when I see a person, another human person, I do have good reasons to think that they are conscious, but it's not because they're functional isomorphs. It's because they're human persons. And usually what we think is that functional isomorphism is good reason for the assumption of consciousness because it has the same material realizer. So McLaughlin in effect, says, well, look, as Block tells us, Commander Data is a defeasible kind of example. We could have reason not to believe it, and the reason not to believe it is precisely because it's not a human, right?

So that's his response. So you might think that we have this problem, like, oh, if we can't apply it to Data and things like that, then can we still apply it to others? And McLaughlin just says, well, of course we can. And the reason we thought we were going about it in the first place in the correct way is because we recognize the isomorph. But really the thing that justified us in recognizing the isomorph is that we recognize or have the intuition of that isomorph being instantiated in things like us. So I think he gives this example of like a baby, an Alzheimer's patient, to kind of cash this idea out.

22:19 Mark: I think, bringing up, hey, I recognize that you're a functional isomorph of me. That's going to be really weird to listeners, I think. It's really weird to me. I mean, if you go back to our discussion that we reposted of the Turing Test, right? That is an example of, in other words, being a functional isomorph of us is giving the outputs that we would expect giving particular inputs, Right. That's at least part of it. That would be straight up behaviorism. When you get into the what makes it a functional organization as opposed to just a black box with inputs and outputs, is because when you analyze why it would give us the outputs we expect when we give it inputs, in other words, we ask it questions and it answers in a way that is convincing, that it seems like it's intelligent is because when we're doing a functional analysis, we create these little boxes where we are like, oh, okay, well, here's the belief center and here's all the knowledge that the organism has stored.

And when you ask it something, the language center pumps something into the belief center and probes around there. So you have the idea of a functional isomorph. It's like you have a flowchart in the head. It's not just a black box, it's a box with a bunch of distinguishable modules with arrows between them. And hey, if you ask a question, then it'll the knowledge base. And if the answer is in there, then it'll output the answer.

23:35 Gregory: Yeah. So Commander Data is this functional isomorph. And as Block calls it a superficial functional isomorph, things in which all the causal roles that the mental states in my mind play, they also play the same in Commander Data's potential mind. According Block says to folk psychology, so what my pain is, it's the pain roll. And that's the thing that makes me pull my hand away from hot fires, scream aloud. Data's pain is the exact same thing as that, right? And then we just iterate that process over all types of mental states. But McLaughlin says, okay, yeah, that gives us a defeasible reason. And as Block himself says, it's defeasible. And then McLaughlin says, let's just not think that Data is contraries in the first place. And why not think that? Because it isn't the same sort of thing as we are. Right.

24:27 Dylan: When we were talking before, one of the things that we said about the hard problem was that always applied already to humans and animals in such a way that to distinguish conscious beings from unconscious beings. And what we meant by having experience was something that would apply equally well to a dog as well as to a person, as well as to a bat or a worm. In that way, what we meant by consciousness applied to all those cases. And so that would mean, on the basis of this Data argument, that we have no problem with the consciousness of a dog or a Worm.

But we have a problem with the consciousness of data. And in that there are two things going on. One is everything you just said, Greg, about the characteristic of that functional isomorphism. But it also would mean that we have a functional isomorphism to all these other entities, like dogs and worms and spiders, because of the substrate under which we have that manifestation of consciousness. And we're content with that. And I wonder, why would we stop with silicon? Why would we stop with some kind of higher order atom like that? Why wouldn't we just say, well, of course data is a functional isomorph to us because the manifestation is just lower.

His manifestation is made up in silicon, mine's made up in carbon based atoms and cells. But you know what they're all made of? Electrons, protons and neutrons that obey field wave equations. And, you know, it's all isomorphic in that way. One of the confusing things I found about it is that, well, I've picked a particular substrate that seems to be kind of arbitrary. I have a plethora of different manifestations of materials in the universe that have different properties on a macroscopic level. But I'm perfectly content to say that they're all the same, especially if I'm a physicalist, that they're all the same as one another in terms of they're just different arrangements of lower orders of material.

So why stop at a particular level of material?

26:28 Mark: You seem to be pointing out that the characterization of the difference between physicalism and functionalism really is not one between matter and structure. It seems on the surface that that would be the case. But clearly if you say, like Searle does that, oh, it's only neural tissue that would give rise to consciousness. That's not just because it's a particular kind of stuff. It's because as a particular kind of stuff, it has a structure. Neurons have a way of relating to each other. So actually saying that it's neural is referring to both material and ultimately structural.

I think we were saying earlier in our discussion of Chalmers that when you give a scientific conception at all, when you talk about matter, Right. When we define a proton, when we define anything physically, we are talking about structure and motion and things. So when we're pointing to the quote, unquote, material of neural tissue, we're actually still talking about structural properties.

27:23 Dylan: Yeah. So part of this depends upon whether or not you think that the higher order properties, structural properties of materials, is latent in the lower order ones and therefore fully accounted by them, or if something importantly decisive happens in the bringing together at higher order levels, that isn't merely accounted for in the lower order interactions. So whether or not the higher order structural characteristics are emergent out of the lower ones in a way that is not simply caused by the lower order

27:59 Gregory: ones, maybe the physicalists would say something like this. So the problem you're asking, in effect, Dylan, is why are we stopping at the organic level, not going to deeper, more fundamental constituents, and thereby we and Data have those in common, and thereby we can say Data is conscious. Now, this is my intuition, and I don't know whether physicalists would say this, so apologies to all the physicalists in the world, but I guess they'd say something like, well, look, we know in our case something special about us, that we're organic. So when we notice in other things, we're looking out for that potential property in addition to functional isomorphs.

And then when we notice functional isomorphs and we think, well, they don't seem to intuitively be conscious, we must then go to one of the properties we know that in ourselves, we at least have good reason to think they might say guarantees the consciousness. So in other words, physicalists who would say, well, we need some deep physical property rather than some functional property would say, well, we take ourselves as the prime case and we're taking things we know about our mind and our physical matter and trying to apply that to other things.

So it seems like two of the things we have are that we have mental states and that we are this organic thing, and that our mental states are kind of functional as well. So we have to take those two things forward. And they might then say, well, look, when those other things we might think are conscious or not don't have both of them, then our intuition tells us they aren't conscious, or that it gives us good reason not to think they are conscious rather than our intuition. So then we can say to them, well, why have you stopped there? Why aren't you going down to more fundamental things at the bottom of everything?

Everything's made of all the particles within the Standard model. But they might say, but being made of things within the Standard Model doesn't seem to be a special feature of us in conjunction with phenomenal experience.

29:55 Wes: And it doesn't distinguish anything from anything, right?

29:58 Gregory: Precisely. Yeah.

29:59 Wes: We're trying to start from the case in which we know there's consciousness, so precisely our material and structure and function, and then vary things and say, okay, can we still have consciousness if we change X, but if the physical stuff has a role to play, then it's at the level of, say, a neurotransmitter or this particular living cell that is the neuron, something like that. So in a way, the question is, well, can we do that without neurotransmitters? Can we do that without cells? Sense neurons in the sense that we know them? I think there's a good chance that we can imitate.

And this is the allure of the idea that computers might do this, which maybe is not such a hot idea anymore, but that we might get an artificial intelligence through the use of what we're already using on a daily basis. That we could realize it in a computer. And of course, so there'd be no neurotransmitters and no neurons and none of that stuff. But there may be, like, neural networks and there may be a way to do all that functionally without actual neurons. It's almost like a simulation of a neuron. Can we do that? Can we make things just work out in the way they would have if a neuron were doing the trick, as opposed to the right hardware software combinations that give us the right inputs and outputs?

It's that kind of question.

31:23 Mark: I'm wondering if we should hit this superficialism and disjunctivism in Ned Block. Greg, you were saying, what's the difference between being a functional isomorph and a superficial functional isomorphic? Was anybody really clear on that?

31:34 Gregory: Yeah. So Block uses the example of a superficial functional isomorph. He says a superficial functional isomorph is a functional isomorph of us according to

31:45 Mark: folk psychology, which is how we just defined functional isomorph.

31:50 Wes: So on page 403, I would be making use of the notion of a superficial functional isomorph, a creature that is isomorphic to us with respect to those causal relations among mental states, inputs and outputs that are specified by common sense, or if you like, folk psychology. So it sounds like we're just evaluating behavior and looking for the same sorts of behaviors. But maybe it's more than that in the sense that if we include reports in those behaviors, because those reports and behaviors are all we have as far as observations go. And you can't prejudice this in the way of he's conscious or not. So you can't say functional isomorphism means certain actual relations among Data's mental states because we don't know what his mental states are.

32:41 Gregory: You might try to think of it like this, like a degree of fine grainedness. You might think a really fine grained functional isomorph could be down to the neuronal level. Right. Your point earlier was like, if we define physical in terms of structure, that is function, then, hey, a sufficiently fine grained functional isomorph of X will be just another thing that is X. Right. It's just another proton or whatever. If it's got sufficiently fine grained. Now, the one he wants here, not particularly fine grained, but it appeals to folk psychology and common sense. And that's the degree of fine grainedness we need. So that it presses our intuition that we think Data is conscious. It just means to be fine grained enough to. That if we were to look at it, we'd go, right, Data's on trial, don't kill him because he's conscious. Right?

33:31 Wes: Yeah. So it could be the case that his sensory systems don't obey the power function. Right. This is the finer level of finer grain of detail. And the power function is the fact that subjective intensity is exponentially related to stimulus intensity. But that's at a finer grain than what we are talking about. As long as he is reporting the right subjective intensity under the right circumstances, or at least when it comes to his. Yeah, you know, I start to get confused again.

34:02 Mark: That example you gave was great. The power function, it just goes back to dividing up functionalism and physicalism by form and matter. Well, that seems like it captures some of the intuition, but really doesn't because again, matter is defined also by structure, also by form. And so the example of the power function is something that's a structural property. If you were really doing a functional analysis of an organism, and we're trying to write all the boxes and write a computer program, you would probably want to mimic the power function or something. But clearly that is not required for something to pass the Turing test, which is, I think what being a superficial functional analog of us amounts to.

34:39 Wes: Yeah. Or at least it's an open question. I'm not sure. Maybe it's possible that maybe we would need it, but maybe it's just open, being open to the possibility that in order to get all the superficial isomorphism, we wouldn't necessarily need that, or there's something like that that we wouldn't. Are we saying it's just his behavior and reports or it's Turing Test stuff? Is that what we mean by superficial?

35:01 Dylan: When you bring up the power function, wouldn't that mean that if you had an entity that was conscious that did not have its senses correlated with the power function, then what you meant by redness. If we agreed they were conscious and we agreed that they both had an experience of redness. My experience of redness would be different than that entity's experience because my experience would be based upon a sensory experience that obeyed the power function. And so even if we agreed that this light is emitting red or this reflection is red on the basis of independent physical measurements of wavelength of light, all kinds of other devices, the experience that we were having, we would also agree, was different in that mine was mediated by a sensory apparatus that was dependent upon the power spectrum, and that entity was not.

35:52 Wes: Yeah, yeah, that's what's confusing about that example.

35:56 Gregory: So think of it like this. You might think there are three types of isomorph, right? And Block only mentions two of them. You might think there's a perfect isomorph, right? And if Commander Data is a perfect isomorph, then his sensory experiences obey the Weber Fechner Power Law.

36:12 Unknown speaker: Right?

36:13 Gregory: The perfect one would obey that. Now, the superficial isomorphic only is an isomorph with respect to folk psychological concepts or folk psychology or common sense or something like this. So things like, well, we run when we're scared, or maybe like, just touching on certain intuitive bits of cognitive science, like, well, you know, people always do X when they feel Y, that sort of thing. That leaves open, according to Block, the possibility still that Commander Data and the example he gives does obey the power Law. Now, he gives another example which is called a mere superficial functional isomorph. And the mere superficial functional isomorph is one that is only isomorphic with respect to folk psychology.

37:00 Wes: Okay, good point.

37:02 Gregory: But the point of the data is that he's not a mere one, right? So we can't put out these nice examples like the Weber-Fechner Power Law, and go, ah, look, he doesn't obey this, therefore he's not conscious. Because the point is that we're just meant to be presented with something that basically appears to us to be conscious, something that, in effect, appears to pass the Turing test and passes it just as well as another person on the street would appear to pass it.

37:30 Dylan: This whole thing is a little bit like, walks like a duck, talks like a duck, quacks like a duck.

37:34 Gregory: Yeah.

37:35 Dylan: Is it a duck problem? Right, yeah. How many of those things do I have to have in a line before I say it's a duck, has the

37:43 Mark: same quality as a duck. That's what you have to.

37:46 Dylan: You'd have to say it experiences life like a duck. That's what I'd have to be able to say. It has duck like, experiences yeah, no, not duck like, it has ducky experiences. Right. It can't be just duck like.

37:58 Mark: Papenow's view, I think, leaves open the idea that it could be indeterminate whether Commander Data is conscious or not, because if he's different enough, he's not a perfect functional isomorph. He's a partial functional isomorph. So it could be a matter of terminological fiat whether he ends up counting as conscious or not. And that is something that Block simply wants to rule out. Like, of course, either he has qualia or he doesn't have qualia.

38:30 Dylan: You're making me think of Section 6 of the Papineau. What's so special about humans? Why we consider human beings as a kind, at least in terms of consciousness, because we have empirical reasons to suppose that normal humans are alike in relevant physical details, like they look at ripe tomatoes. And we can conclude that ripe tomatoes occasion the same experience in normal humans. So, to me, this is like a communication argument, and a little bit leans on the folk psychology thing that I have by experience, that when I talk to other human beings, they relate the same kinds of experiences I have about things like ripe tomatoes. We agree that the tomatoes are ripe, and then they're ready to be made into a pasta sauce, that kind of thing. And that is sort of the empirical ground for that. And Mark's point about Papineau being a little bit more not ambiguous, not vague,

39:19 Mark: but he's stating that language is vague.

39:22 Dylan: Yeah, he's saying that language is vague, but that Papineau is more open to the functionalist versus physicalist question made me think that for him, the empirical experience weighed a lot more. And so, therefore, with someone like Commander Data, if Commander Data agreed on all these sorts of things about these tomatoes are ripe and stuff like that, that it would fall well within the notion of it being much, much harder to say that he wasn't conscious.

39:50 Gregory: Dylan, it sounds like your concern with Papineau is that he is saying that, yes, when it comes to our silicone doppelganger, we don't know how to apply this concept or whether it does in fact apply, that is, whether they are phenomenally conscious. But when it comes to other human beings, we do have good reasons to think they are conscious, and we can apply the concept. You're saying it seems weird that he's saying that, right?

40:15 Dylan: I guess so. And the answer would be that Papineau is saying that our empirical experience is reinforcing something we already know to be true, that these people are made of flesh and blood. I guess what's weird about it is why doesn't it go the other way? Which is sort of the fundamental argument right now is how far do you have to go the other way in terms of functional things before you acknowledge that that entity is a conscious human being?

40:40 Gregory: That's a really great way to put it. Maybe that highlights the extra thing that you might think that Papineau is doing, right? Because Papineau is going, look, our silicone isomorph, we're not sure if we're justified in applying the concept to it because it is sufficiently different to us by virtue of being silicone. So we can't apply our concept of is conscious to it. Now when it comes to other humans, we go, oh, it's just a bag of flesh that's a conscious thing, like I am. Because it is similar to us in certain physical respects, as Papineau says.

But now the problem is, like you said, well, how do we apply that other way? And this is the real note of the problem. You might think, well, we can't apply it the other way because even in our bag of flesh examples like us, right, by virtue of the vagueness of our phenomenal concepts, we can't determine between physicalism or functionalism or whether phenomenal properties are some structural property or some deep material property. So we can distinguish ourselves from Commander Data instances just by virtue of the fact we go, yeah, it's a thing like I am, right?

It's a big fleshy lump. And that makes me think it's conscious, at least on the face of it. But I'm still presented with the problem of like, but I can't get the science thing behind that. And thereby, if I can't get the science thing behind that, as you say to I can't take it further away now and go, yeah, data's conscious yet. My iPhone is conscious yet. You know, Chinese nation is conscious. Something like that.

42:05 Mark: Let me give another quote from Papineau from that Same section, section 6. Consider a brain damaged human who's had its cerebral pain mechanisms replaced by some structurally equivalent but silicon based prosthesis. Even though this is unequivocally a human being, it will count with the silicon doppelganger. As far as consciousness research goes, it is no good asking this person whether it feels pain when it is pricked in the hope of discovering whether the structural functional isomorphism or the physical basis is the material basis of pain, for its structural equivalence with normal humans ensures that it will respond yes, whether or not it feels Pain.

Papenow's strategy throughout this whole thing is not to talk about consciousness in general, but about particular qualia. And then at the end of the paper, he says, if you buy my argument about particular qualia, then you buy it about consciousness as a whole. And so it makes a little more sense on the surface to ask, just like in the inverted spectrum question, you know, is my red the same as your red? Is my pain the same as your pain? And so for me and Data, we've said he has the same behavioral reaction to pain. In other words, it serves the same functional role.

So in that sense, my pain functionally is the same as his pain functionally. But we don't know whether my pain phenomenally is gonna be the same as his pain phenomenally because we don't have the added brute correlation that we already use in our normal everyday situation of I assume my pain is the same as your pain because we have the same underlying matter. So he's saying, even with a human being, if you replace the pain mechanism in particular with a different kind of matter, we would no longer be justified in saying my pain and person with the prosthetic pain generator, you know, that that's actually pain in the same sense.

It's introduced something comparable to the inverted spectrum question of how do we know my green isn't your yellow, etc. I find these inverted spectrum kind of things easier to think about. That's not the same as zombie dumb. Right?

43:57 Wes: But I think he is drawing doubt whether there's pain at all, though, as well. Papineau is saying, yeah, what do you think of that?

44:03 Mark: Like, am I really wondering if somebody has this pain prosthetic that you're no longer able to feel pain, You've suffered a brain injury. Well, we add something to your brain and now you react like you're in pain. Wouldn't we obviously say that even though you have the prosthetic, oh, now you can feel pain. Again, not that now you're simulating pain, or I have just no way of telling whether there's a quality of pain in you or not.

44:26 Wes: And you can imagine the person saying, look, guys, yes, I'm in pain. I swear I'm in pain. So question answered. And you would have to say, but you're just programmed to say that we don't know if. And you think they're conscious in all other respects, right? Because we assume they're conscious in all other respects. We just assume that with the silicon prosthesis, they might just be rigged to say that in a way that they're not even aware that they're not feeling pain. They could believe they're feeling pain when they're not because of the way that's rigged.

44:57 Dylan: I completely agree with the way that could happen, Wes. But it's just calling to mind a kind of hideous interpretation of the world in which you have somebody who's rigged like this, who is writhing in pain, somebody who's utterly convinced that they can't possibly be actually experiencing the pain. Like, say, for instance, continuing to operate on them like, you know, they're going to fix them, go fix their prosthesis, and they're just ignoring that subjective vocalized experience that they're having that they're testifying to.

45:28 Mark: This is making me want to like, write a sci fi story about capital punishment or something, or we don't in capital punishment for it to not be cruel and unusual punishment. You want to deliver an anesthetic because you don't want the person to actually be in pain, but you also want to satisfy the onlookers who this person has, you know, murdered their relatives. So you want the person to not feel pain, but you want them to writhe as if they're in pain.

45:50 Dylan: Oh, my God, that's just hideous.

45:51 Gregory: Writhing's what you're there for, right?

45:55 Wes: I'm actually sympathetic to the idea that in order to create a Commander Data who passes our Turing test, but a much more robust version, right, to sit down and talk to him and interact with him. And I'm sympathetic to the idea that if he seems conscious after prolonged interaction, then he must be conscious, that we couldn't actually simulate it to a credible degree without him actually being conscious. But the problem is I could never prove that intuition. I could never justify it. But it's possible. It's definitely possible that that's the case.

46:32 Dylan: No, I think that's a nice way of putting the harder problem is that an entity that passes the Turing test but is made of silicon, and let's just grant that we wouldn't be able to tell on Bloch's case of the harder problem, we still wouldn't admit that that entity was conscious.

46:48 Wes: At an intuitive level, I think most people would actually just say he's conscious. If it looks and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. And I think that would be the end of it. I don't think on a practical level, most people would suffer from these theoretical problems, but at a theoretical level, I think Block is right. We can't know. We can't simply Rely on those reports and we can't rely on the Turing test or their behaviors if we think that physicalism is true or physicalism is a possibility.

47:14 Mark: I want to make sure we talk about disjunctivism here because this is kind of a crazy sounding thing. So disjunction means or so what about the physicalist disjunctivist? In other words, what consciousness is equivalent to is not a particular functional organization. It is equivalent to something at the physical level, but it could be multiply realized, which is usually how you characterize functionalism. So this is a weird version of physicalism, right? That what consciousness is is brain matter doing the thing that it does to create consciousness, or it is silicon matter creating the thing that it might do to create consciousness. Or and perhaps there's an open ended set of other things.

47:54 Wes: So you're saying look like the material is really, really important, but it could be brain matter or it could be silicon and then not any other material.

48:02 Mark: Yeah, well you could see why like Plato would not like that because he would like be. Well, why, why these things? Why are these options the only ones that count as consciousness? There must be something that they all have in common. Let's call it a functional organization, you know, or something else but that you have not actually defined through disjunctivism. What makes consciousness consciousness.

48:23 Wes: Right. You don't specify some commonality between the materials that makes them suitable for their constituting role.

48:32 Dylan: You also link deeply materials to specific functions. Where you end up on this side of this argument depends upon whether or not you really want to always ground functions in materials, or whether or not there are functions that can be multiply manifest by different materials.

48:52 Mark: So the role of this plays in the article is that even though it seems kind of silly that there's just a form of physicalism that is disjunctive by the standards of physics. There's nothing that we can do to rule it out a priori that that really is what consciousness amounts to. Because again, there's no way we can test it for the same reason. We can't say, oh well, in our case, we look at our qualia, we look at the brain state, okay, that's one of the disjuncts. So for the same reason we've been talking about, we could not prove that disjunctivism is true and we can't prove that it's false.

49:25 Dylan: Can we think of for a second about examples that are disjunctive in other realms where we have let's call it a functional behavior or a phenomena that is multiply manifest by different materials. The thing that came to mind immediately, maybe because I'm a physicist, is something like reflection, that I get the manifestation of things getting reflected with multiple materials and multiple wavelengths and multiple kinds of light and sound, stuff like that. And that the manifestation of reflection is multiply manifest in all kinds of different phenomena. But I would recognize them all as reflection. I would say all of those things are reflection. So why couldn't I say the same thing about consciousness? Why is it so strange? Unless I'm really disposed to the physicalist argument, there has to be one way of that happening that it couldn't be multiply manifest.

50:18 Gregory: Yeah, Bloch's argument here, he says, in the paper at least, he says that, look, although disjunctivism is epistemically possible, it's just going to be an inelegant view, right? And it doesn't fit with our epistemology of theoretical identity. So you said. Then, Dylan, can we have another example where this sort of genuine disjunctivism works? And Block says, well, he gives this example of liquid and super cooling. And to conclude his point, he says, we have an important, though vague, notion of fundamentally different that governs our willingness to regard some differences in realization as variants of the same basic type and others as fundamentally different.

Without going into the difficult issue of what it is that makes two realizations fundamentally different, we can stipulate that our physical realizations of our conscious states are fundamentally different from Commander Data's physical realizations of hidden analogues of those states. And this fundamental difference precludes an argument to the best explanation that I've been considering. So in other words, he's saying, look, the stuff is fundamentally different. And because that fundamental difference exists, you can't give an argument to the best explanation that certain mental state is identical to these disjunctive properties precisely because the two properties that flank the disjunction are fundamentally different.

51:40 Wes: So he'll go on to say on 413, but we do not take the disjunctive explanation seriously. And so we regard glass, strictly speaking, as a supercooled liquid rather than a solid. And we do not regard amorphous hardening as freezing. We prefer two non disjunctive entities. Freezing equals lattice formation, and hardening equals formation of an amorphous supercooled liquid to one disjunctive identity. Overall, I think in this section he's just saying we would never develop a disjunctive theory of consciousness left around devices we can say, oh, it must be. It's the same thing, but it's this material or this material, which is not to think it couldn't be multiple realized in different materials, which in functionalism would say it's just that this sort of multiple realizability has something to do with the material itself.

52:26 Dylan: Just to clarify. So that would mean that freezing and hardening. So in one case we would have. Human beings are conscious, like freezing. And data, whatever he is, isn't conscious, he's more like hardening.

52:41 Mark: Or you could say that. So he also mentions the idea of jade. Jade is actually a nominal category. It refers to nephrite or jadeite. So in other words, it's pre scientific. So I think this is what Papineau would maybe say in the way that you're saying there is. We use the word conscious, you know, to refer really to functional isomorphism. And in interacting with data, we would refer to him as conscious. But that's really just because the term conscious, like the term jade, is not scientific enough that if we drill in we would find like, oh, no, they are separate things. There's human consciousness and data consciousness. And we don't know whether data consciousness actually has qualia or not. We should scientifically call them different concepts. Like you were just saying freezing and hardening. How those are separate in physics.

53:26 Wes: Yeah. So the example is that, you know, for freezing, we're not saying freezing is X or Y, where it's the glass coming about or the ice coming about. Because that's a weird thing to do. Right. It's weird to say we just have this overall concept of freezing and it can be this substance or it could be this substance. The analogy is consciousness. Why would we ever develop a theory in which we're just sort of listing off the substances it would apply to or that would be relevant material substrates. It's an ad hoc way to go about things. And it leaves us with doubts about why it's these materials.

Right. It says nothing about what's common to those materials or what role they can play that they both constitute consciousness. You know, if it's silicone or brain matter. So this disjunctive explanation, I think, is not a deep enough explanation in that sense simply to list off the right materials and not say something deeper about

54:24 Dylan: why isn't his example meant to undermine the notion of there being genuine disjunctive identities, where he's saying, in these two cases, I have two liquids and then they become solids, and I would superficially say the water freezes and the liquid Silicone freezes into glass. But if I'm more precise about it and I actually look at them, I'll find out, actually those are two different processes in deeply important ways. One's a form of crystalline structure, one is a form of amorphous solid. And if I'm going to be precise in my language, to have it line up with that physical reality, I'll call one freezing and one hardening. And so therefore, what appears to be a disjunctive identity is actually not real.

55:16 Wes: Yeah, yeah. When we get into the deeper explanatory structure of things, we have no longer just to leave it at a disjunctive identity. Right. If our science didn't go very far, we might think, oh, look, we have this general category, freezing, and these different sorts of things do that. But that's not a very deep layer of explanation. And we expect that to be undermined if we go very deep.

55:39 Mark: All right, let's devote our last however many minutes here to Papineau exclusively. Did you want to start us, Greg?

55:45 Gregory: As Dylan mentioned earlier, the way we've been discussing the whole thing is like, well, look, what if Commander Data is conscious and. Which is an intrinsically interesting question, right? But Papanau's point when he's mentioning Commander Data, I mean, when he's mentioning silicone doppelgangers and stuff, is to say, look, that would be the limit case for deciding whether or not something is conscious. If we had a worked out theory, we could say whether Data is conscious or not, or the silicon doppelganger is not. But Papenau's point is like, even in ourselves, even if we limit it to ourselves, where we are human beings, Homo sapiens, if we limit to Homo sapiens, right, we still are not going to get a scientific account of consciousness precisely because our phenomenal concepts are vague and do not refer to the physical or functional properties that realize them or underlie them.

So you might think we're even more pernicious or tricky situation, right? So we're hard, harder, and now the hardest, or something like this. Why? Because looks like we don't even need to think about data, we just need to think about things like us. And we're left with the position like, well, is my conscious experience of pain the C fiber or is it the C fiber role? Forget Data for a second. What is going on here? And that's tricky, right? You might think that's extra problematic.

57:09 Dylan: So when I read the end of this paper, the point that you just articulated, Greg, there's a paragraph, the third to the last paragraph in the section before the conclusion. I do not take this to show that we are trapped in ignorance about the true material nature of consciousness as such. Rather, the fault lies with our phenomenal concept of this property, which is vague in the crucial dimensions. We somehow construct this concept by taking exemplars of human conscious states and use the resulting concept to classify humans depending on whether or not they are in some such conscious state or not.

There's no reason to suppose the concept so constituted is precisely enough focused to discriminate between the physical and structural properties shared by conscious humans, or between the broad and narrow properties, or between the higher order and attentional properties. When I read that, it made me think that Papineau is either calling for or pointing out that we're missing the kind of precision that came with mathematizing physics. So that you develop a mathematical physics and then you have this very disciplined one to one relationship between the math and the thing you're talking about.

Yes, you get all of these questions that become philosophy of science or philosophy of mathematical physics where you're wondering, well, is a point really what you're talking about and stuff like that. You get those. But what you've gained is you've gained a precision about what you're talking about. At least you've pushed it off significantly off to the side. And what I was wondering is if, as you refine and particularize these concepts, if you then end up purging them of the potency to describe what you're talking about, I guess that would be an open question for Papineau.

He's just saying that it doesn't exist. That's what he's pointing to is his vagueness. And then there would be the question of when you made a particular solution that added that specificity. If you lost potency in describing it, the way people argue that you lose potency in describing the world with mathematical physics.

59:10 Gregory: I think that's a really good point. So, yeah, look, our phenomenal concepts, according to Papineau at least, just aren't that precise, right? So we can't determine those properties. But I think you're right. If we wanted the precision that our science of consciousness is going to get us, he's going to say, or at least I think he'd have to be forced to say, and maybe everyone else would agree with, is that we would have to abandon the phenomenal concept, right? And we'd have to use a non phenomenal concept that would accommodate and be sharp in this way that he thinks phenomenal concepts aren't.

But if that was the case. Right. Then the science of consciousness can never have phenomenal concepts in it. It's never going to do justice to the phenomena. Right. And that's the predicament. The science of consciousness will never then do justice to the phenomena because some of the concepts that do justice to the phenomena are inherently vague. Right. And if that's the case, we can't have it or we just don't do justice to the phenomena. And that's tricky. And that's when the kind of harder problem then reemerges.

1:00:12 Mark: Yeah. I found this paper sort of a much easier way to explain the underlying intuitions of somebody like Dan Dennett in Quining qualia paper we discussed before or the Churchlands in wanting to get rid of common sense folk psychological terms that I think Papineau is really trying to do justice to both sides. He's trying to acknowledge with Chalmers that qualia are undeniable. Right. You can't get rid of them yet. Taken as having any informational content whatsoever, as opposed to just there is a something if you try to use words at all and say my concept of red or something like that, my experience of red or my experience of pain, if you characterize then there's going to be something imprecise in those words that you're using.

He says if you're doing consciousness research, you will inevitably fail to pinpoint a unique material referent for any phenomenal concept. That there's something that really is self contained about the world of phenomenal concepts. That you could talk about how my concept of red is similar to my concept of orange and how those are both more similar than to the concept of blue and how those are the same category as opposed to the concept of hardness. Like there's a lot of things you can say within the phenomenal realm. But if you buy that materialism means ultimately when you're using a phenomenal concept, you are also, again, not as a matter of the definition of the words, but as a matter of scientific fact.

You are referring to something out in the world. You're referring to, you know, a whole thing that happens where your brain is put in contact with light waves coming in through your eyes. Right. This is what we think a science is actually supposed to do is to get into these bases. He says that there are going to be limits to how you can actually connect those phenomenal concepts with the physical world in this way. And so I feel like he's essentially acknowledging the same thing that Chalmers wants to acknowledge. In pointing out the hard problem of consciousness, but is just kind of giving it a different spin.

Whereas I think Chalmers really does think that we can have a science that does involve these phenomenal terms. Papineau was skeptical about that.

1:02:27 Gregory: You might be able to have a science that involved these phenomenal terms if that science was a broader concept of science such that it allowed for the reference of phenomenal properties to be non physical properties. Right. So if you were a dualist, you might think my experience of pain refers to this irreducible pain quality. Right. And if then you could map out some other stuff, you might think, well, look, I've got two sets of concepts and they refer to things. And you know, maybe I don't have a problem here. I'm not sure if there's legs in that idea. Because part of what Papineau's argument relies on is the fact that we assume materialism is true. So we assume the reference of phenomenal properties, physical things. Right. But then that doesn't show us that phenomenal concepts are. That's as well.

1:03:15 Mark: Right. So what we're missing in Papineau is Papineau in this paper does not give us his argument for why materialism is true. We did point at that in our previous discussion, as Chalmers quotes it. Just the idea of the causal closure of physics. That that really is the knockdown argument for Papineau in his longer Thinking About Consciousness book. The whole first chapter, if you take a look at that, is trying to really analyze this. Why would we think that the causal closure of physics means that dualism is impossible, that there's just no room in a scientific picture of reality for danglers.

The way that Papineau puts it is we have a different concept. Phenomenal concepts are not the same as physical concepts, but nonetheless, just like the difference between sense and reference, nonetheless the referent of those phenomenal concept is still going to be a physical concept. That's what is going to have to be the case for there to be a unified physics based science. And so as you're saying, Chalmers is going to say that's just a bad conception of science. We have to expand it. Consciousness is a challenge to that. Whereas Papineau was saying, no, it doesn't actually challenge science, it just challenges what among our actual experience we can pour into science, right?

That he has an explanation. He thinks that we need to actually give a psychological explanation then why we feel like these phenomenal concepts can't refer to physical things. And his story about that has to do with that. There are something about Phenomenal concepts that connote that reenact. Like if you think of the experience of red, then in your mind, as you think of phenomenal concept red, you'll recreate that experience. Red will jump to your mind. Or when you think about pain, well, you're not physically feeling pain just by thinking about the concept of pain, but your memory of feeling of that.

Like there's a way in which your brain gets activated by these concepts. Whereas even if the concept of pain is identical to a thing that happens in the brain, when we're talking about the thing that happens in the brain, you do not undergo a similar reenactment of the concept. That is at least Papenow's analysis in the material that we did not read as a group. So I'm merely pointing at it, not arguing for it.

1:05:34 Dylan: Yeah.

1:05:34 Gregory: So I have a question for you all then. Okay, so Papineau is telling us that our phenomenal concepts are vague. So my phenomenal concept of is conscious is the same as the concept is bald. Now, if you put materialism aside, the kind of theoretical assumptions that would ground because Papineau's claim is if materialism is true, then phenomenal concepts turn out to kind of under determine things. But just reflect on your phenomenal concepts for a minute. Do you really feel that your concept of consciousness or redness is a vague concept?

1:06:12 Wes: Well, he's going to say, right, so the point of the bald comparison is just that it's a matter of degree and there's no sharp cutoff points. So we could think about the many different types of creatures and we could think of consciousness as a spectrum from the rock, nothing going on all the way up to human beings. So when we talk about consciousness, we talk about this whole range. He starts off the paper talking about the fact that when we want to talk about these phenomenal states, we can never say there's so many different properties correlated, right?

There's so many different things going on in the brain and the materials involved and the activities and structures involved or functions. We could never say which one or ones is the essential one for consciousness. And that's not because there's some fundamental epistemic gap, but because consciousness is this big, big concept which includes a lot of other things. It includes every degree of consciousness that's on that spectrum that we talk about. And we'd have to talk about something much more fine grained, like the consciousness of a fish, for instance.

But even then, maybe that's not fine grained enough. Maybe we'd have to talk about things that there's just no way. We don't have the language to. We can't be specific enough to talk about in order to talk about the correlating materials and functions. I don't know if that's a clear way of putting it, but. So then we get to the question of, well, do we think in our personal experience, it's vague? And I think Papineau will say, well, I'm not saying the experience is vague. I'm not saying that there isn't a very distinct what it's like to be you.

I'm just saying that the concept is vague.

1:08:03 Gregory: He's going to say the property isn't vague, but the concept is vague. Now, what I want to know from you three is materialism aside, right? Because his claim is really, if materialism is true, then it's vague because it doesn't reveal the referent. But I want to say you is just reflect on your phenomenal concepts for a moment. The way in which you think about your own experiences, does that seem to be a vague concept in the same way that baldness is vague? Right.

1:08:31 Wes: Maybe this is going to help, maybe it isn't. Because now I'm just thinking about more volition and intention. If I get up in the morning and I'm headed out and I grab my keys from the coffee table or whatever on the way out, but I'm not paying attention, I do all that more or less unconsciously. And then I think back about it and I'm like, yeah, oh, yeah. I intended. I meant to get my keys and that's what I did. Well, did I intend to or didn't I? Was I conscious of doing it? I might even be able to think back and remember getting my keys. Did I vaguely have the intent?

Was it completely unconscious? There are lots of things that go on. You know, the way the seat feels on your leg right now, the way your chair is up against your leg. If you pay attention to that, well, you don't have this experience of something that's entirely new. You know, you've been feeling that all along, right? It's just that you weren't paying attention to it. So you have lots and lots of states where they're in some sense conscious, but they're not part of our attentive awareness. So there are these really weird borderline states, and where do we put them?

And so are we asking whether Data is capable of attending to his experiences in that way? Could we say that all his experiences are just like the feeling under my leg that I'M not paying attention to. So does that make sense? We could talk about all these degrees to consciousness and say that's vague.

1:10:05 Mark: I think that's one of the many ways in which it's vague. I think when we say imagine equality of red, first you're conjuring a memory right there. And just like any memory, like, well, what exact. Obviously there are many, many shades of red, but you kind of picked one. So whenever you talk about a concept versus an actual experience, then, yes, I think the concept. So phenomenal concepts, insofar as they are concepts, I think inevitably are going to be vague, that concepts are part of a conceptual scheme. To bring up that whole horrible quine discussion that we had a while ago about this imagining red as a field of color.

Does the color include infrareds? Does it? You know, there's so many things that are sort of even external to our particular experience that go into what you want to say the content of a concept is. And especially if you allow these Kripkean, that, oh, you know, you thought when you were imagining water that you were just imagining something phenomenal, this sloshy thing. But no, actually water, once it's been established by science, is H2O. In other words, what the concept is actually, it pierces through to the material substrate. Whereas in an alternate world where water does not equal H2O equals XYZ, then their phenomenal concept, you know, they're having.

1:11:29 Wes: These are for natural kind concepts work this way, by the way.

1:11:32 Mark: Exactly. They're having a comparable qualia, but it pierces through through a natural kind concept to a different chemical formula. So, yes, in that sense, as soon as we stop talking about qualia and talking about phenomenal concepts, yes, they are vague.

1:11:48 Gregory: Dylan, do you think they're vague?

1:11:51 Dylan: I do think that the concepts are vague.

1:11:53 Wes: Mark is saying that's just a feature of concepts. So that is an interesting point. Yeah.

1:11:57 Gregory: Can I give you another example? Then here's an example for you all. Papineau says that we think that, you know, given this other human being, it must either be conscious or not be conscious. But that concept doesn't allow us to know that either way. Right? It's vague. We just don't know. So either the human being is conscious or is not conscious. Well, we just don't know. But then if we get another example of a vague concept like baldness, we don't go, oh, that man must be bald, or he must not be bald. We just don't know. Feels like there is a bit of a difference there between what the Concept of consciousness is. And the concept of baldness being vague is.

1:12:39 Dylan: But you're pointing to the demand that we're making about it so that we have more baggage with the concept of consciousness where we want to make it be a category, a kind of metaphysical category of being. So we're very uncomfortable with having it having shades, whereas we're perfectly comfortable with there being degrees of baldness and where we would. Okay, well, on this one hand, Greg's definitely not bald. Okay. Dylan, if you go look at him from behind, maybe he's sort of bald, but not completely bald. And then if you go get Patrick Stewart, you say, well, he's mainly bald, but he's not completely bald. And then you go get like the rock.

1:13:21 Mark: He has eyebrows.

1:13:22 Gregory: Yeah.

1:13:22 Dylan: So I mean, we're perfectly comfortable with that spectrum. And we very quickly get to say, well, there's this concept of being bald and. And there's degrees of it, but with consciousness, we want it to be either or. And that's because, like I said, I think that we think of it as a category of our being, that things are conscious or are not conscious.

1:13:42 Wes: It could be both a spectrum and either or. So it could be.

1:13:46 Dylan: Well, it's part of the argument. Right.

1:13:48 Wes: I'm saying it could be both in the sense that. And maybe I'm getting at Gregory's intuition here. Yeah, okay, maybe there's fish consciousness and there's dog consciousness and there's human consciousness, which is much different even in our every day seeing red. That's informed by lots more conceptual apparatus by self consciousness. So that could be a totally different experience than some animal seeing red. Okay, so grant that spectrum, but there's definitely a strict dividing line between the rock and all the beings who have some sort of awareness. Right. You might say, yeah, there's a spectrum within awareness, but there's definitely some sort of sharp dividing line at some point. I don't know if that gets at what you're saying, Gregory, but yeah, that

1:14:34 Gregory: does get at what I'm saying, because in a way, like Papineau's claim is that our concept of consciousness is vague. So I can understand his claim that my phenomenal concepts can't decide theoretically they might under determine empirical science or whatever. But that doesn't seem to me to tell me that they're vague in the same way that like they admit precisifications or have borderline cases. What I'm trying to say is phenomenal concepts considered by themselves don't seem to be vague. Phenomenal concepts, plus some extra metaphysics about what the true nature of consciousness is leads to something about them being vague.

But if you just think about your concepts of your experiences before you do any metaphysics, they don't seem to be vague. My concept of the general property of being conscious doesn't seem to be like baldness. So like you said, Wes. Yeah, I can understand a spectrum within consciousness, but I don't see that my concept of consciousness itself allows for there to be a borderline case where something could be properly described as being conscious and both not being conscious.

1:15:42 Dylan: We're not going to confuse baldness with wetness.

1:15:47 Gregory: Yeah, I don't know what you go on.

1:15:48 Dylan: I was just trying to give another example of a conceptual difference that is completely disjunctive to baldness. Whereas we admit baldness has a spectrum. So baldness has a spectrum, but it has a clarity to it.

1:16:00 Wes: Correct.

1:16:01 Mark: Wetness has a spectrum too, but it's not baldness. Yes. Just because something has a spectrum does not mean it's entirely indeterminate. Is that your point?

1:16:09 Dylan: Yep.

1:16:09 Mark: Okay, but that seems a weaker claim than Gregory was just making.

1:16:14 Dylan: No, Gregory's making the claim that consciousness is stronger than baldness.

1:16:18 Gregory: Yeah. I have the intuition that my phenomenal concepts are sharp. Now I can bring some metaphysics to bear in conjunction with that. And then it looks like they theoretically indeterminate. Right. They're not going to tell me what my underlying substrate of my experience is. But that my concept of my experience doesn't seem to leave it open to the question of could something be like half conscious and half not? Seems to be sharp. In the same way that my concept of a million sided shape is sharp, it precisifies exactly a million.

1:16:49 Mark: Sure. I kind of bring this back to comparing this to Wittgenstein that, you know, if you're engaged in the very minimal slab game at the beginning of Wittgenstein's philosophical investigation, it's absolutely clear what the word slab means, because it means go get a slab. Like it has a particular. But yet when you say, well, what does it mean apart from a particular language game? Well, then you've said actually all concepts are vague concepts because they mean different things in different language games. And what's specific about phenomenal concepts is that, well, they're so clear because they're not participating in any language games because they're private.

Well, remember what Wittgenstein says about private languages like that those actually can't be concepts at all. That I think gives a Wittgensteinian version of why Dennett would want to Quine qualia away. Want to say that these things just can't be concepts. You could use them as concepts, but insofar as they are concepts at all, they will be vague. Just don't use the term phenomenal concept. There's something contradictory maybe in that phrase self contradicting. Either it's phenomenal or it's a concept, not both. Well, thank you so much, Gregory for joining us on here.

I mean, we could obviously just have, you know, a whole spin off podcast in this area and do paper after paper after paper after paper. So I will just have to refer folks to the Panpsycast to hear more of you since we will be done with this before too long ourselves.

1:18:19 Dylan: Thanks for being on, Greg.

1:18:20 Gregory: Thanks for having me guys. It was really good fun.

1:18:22 Wes: Great.

1:18:23 Dylan: Cool.

1:18:23 Mark: Next time we're going to be getting into functionalism, we're going to be reading Hilary Putnam's the Nature of Mental States, 1973. David Armstrong's The Causal Theory of the Mind, 1981 Ned Block's Troubles with Functionalism, 1978. Today's closing song is called Mind Reader. It's by Phil Judd, who used to be the prime songwriter of a band called Split Enz from New Zealand. I was very excited to interview him on Nakedly Examined Music, episode 98. Check that out at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com so folks should follow us on Facebook. They should go to partiallyexaminedlife.com make comments on how you thought we treated this topic. What else in this area and other areas you would like to cover? Email us@pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com There are so many ways to reach out. Thank you. Good night, everybody.

1:19:06 Unknown speaker: Good night.

1:19:07 Dylan: Good night.

1:19:25 Unknown speaker: Sometimes I wish I knew just what tomorrow homes buy Was A soothsayer, a fortune teller, a bone Will I be dancing all the way the next Tuesday or laughing all the way to the bank? Will I be dazzled by love and good fortune Wondering which one of the gods to thank. You Tea leaves and tarot cards Put on a lovely show Clairvoyant crystal ball how could anybody know? Will I be singing all your praises or laughing at my own jokes? Will I be pushing the golden from a silver dream awoke? Are you better? Better, better believe it. You're making it all up as you go. A master of prediction my. Will I be dancing all the way to next Tuesday or laughing all the way to the band? Well, I'll be hanging with the perfect woman or pulling my hair right by the hand so why don't you make it all up make it all up make it all out. I wish I was my leader. I wish I knew what you were thinking. Jesus, Sam.