Ep. 223: Guest Ned Block on Consciousness (Part Two)

0:00 Ned: Yeah, right.

0:01 Mark: So in the second half here, we wanted to talk about Michael Tye's essay, Homunculi Heads and Silicon Chips, the importance of history to phenomenology, and Ned's substantial fading qualia. A response to Michael Tye. And really, we're talking about Chalmers absent qualia, fading qualia, dancing qualia paper, which we did, troubles with functionalism, and then we immediately did the Chalmers paper. So we really tried to hash through what Chalmers argument is, but there seemed to be, in Tye's presentation In your response, some substantial steps forward in that argument, you can probably most quickly summarize where you are at with this final step here.

0:36 Ned: Ned? Yeah, so the issue is, could there be a zombie who's functionally like us, but has nobody home, no phenomenal consciousness? So Chalmers, who is not a functionalist, but who has a certain affinity to functionalism, he's what is sometimes called a nomological functionalist. He thinks that it's part of the set of laws in the actual world that there's a perfect correspondence between functional states and phenomenal consciousness. So he produced this really interesting argument. It's meant to be a broadly empirical argument that functionalism is true in the actual world.

Assume, for the sake of argument, there could be a zombie in particular. Let's suppose you could take a person, a conscious person, he calls him Conscious Dave, and slowly replace bits and pieces in the head and end up with an unconscious zombie called, he calls him, I think, robot. And the clever thing about how he does it is the way the slow replacement is supposed to go. People had earlier discussed various kinds of replacement scenarios, but his is cooler. So the idea is that first you replace every cell body with a silicon chip that has exactly the same inputs and outputs, and then one at a time, you replace all the axons and dendrites that make the neurons work with other silicon chips.

And at the end of this process, you've gone from Conscious Dave to zombie robot and ex hypothesi. We're assuming that the robot genuinely is a zombie. And then the idea is supposed to show that the. That leads to something that can't be true. And so we can reject the possibility that the robot is a zombie by

2:20 Mark: saying the harder problem really is harder. We're saying it is conceivable that Data is a zombie, that he is a functional isomorph of us. So that was your claim in Troubles with Functionalism. One of your claims was that that is at least conceivable. We don't really know, although you seemed a little more insistent in that essay that there's evidence for that in Troubles with Functionalism.

2:40 Ned: I said it was conceivable and possible.

2:42 Mark: Okay.

2:42 Ned: What I now think is it's conceivable, but probably not possible. Chalmers thinks it's both conceivable and possible, but not nomologically possible. That is, there are laws in the actual world that rule out the nomological possibility of the zombie robot. The fading qualia argument is an attempt to show that the idea is supposed to Be if the scenario I laid out about gradual replacement is the way I said leading to the zombie robot, then there will be an intermediate stage where the being Chalmers calls him Joe, is dramatically wrong about his own conscious states.

So Chalmers imagines, well, maybe he's looking at a bright red thing and he's saying it's bright red, but actually the experience he has is tepid pink. So that doesn't really make much sense. And he's aware it doesn't make much sense. But the idea is maybe we can't easily describe how Joe is wrong about his experience, but since Joe keeps saying the same kind of thing throughout, there will have to be a stage where he's dramatically wrong about his experience. The idea is that being dramatically wrong about your experience according to what Chalmers says, according to somebody being dramatically wrong about their experience, when that person reasons just like a normal person and isn't what Chalmers calls does not have any functional pathology.

That is what he says nomologically impossible. Well, he doesn't really put it quite so strongly. He says, in our experience with the world, nothing like that ever happens. And so it's something that doesn't make any empirical sense, which I didn't know

4:18 Mark: when we were reading that paper that him. That he was actually responding to Searle, who apparently originally came up with this, according to Tye, at least came up with this picture of gradations. And that Searle specifically said, yes, when you were halfway and your consciousness is fading out because he really did think, it's not that we don't know, but yes, that a data type would be a zombie if you replace everything, because it really is the biology that makes for phenomenal consciousness. And so that we would, if we imagine again that zombies are actually possible and you could display the complex behavior that a phenomenally conscious being has without being phenomenally conscious.

That's just what a zombie is. Then they should answer questions. This is what you're saying that, you know, not having a functional pathology according to Chalmers, that they're looking at the bright sky and you ask them about the bright sky, they should still answer, oh, yes, it's so bright. It's. It's so very blue. It's so the things they would normally say, but yet something, according to Searle, inside them would be crying out, no, actually it's faded to, you know, that our actual experience as opposed to what we would report would be different.

Our actual behavior would be different. And Chalmers doesn't see any room for there to be that distinction.

5:26 Ned: If you think the silicon Chip replacement doesn't affect thought processes, then it can't be that the thought processes are crying out, help, somebody save me. In fact, I think really the right thing to say about the intermediate stages is that we can't describe them using ordinary mentalistic terminology. There just isn't any way to make sense of those intermediate stages using our ordinary ideas. That's why I think Chalmers has so much trouble coming up with an example. He uses the tepid pink example, which makes no sense because if the person really is seeing tepid pink, then that would have to come out in behavior in some way.

6:02 Seth: Yeah, I agree. And the way that Tye characterizes it, you know, talking about mental states versus phenomenal consciousness, and I feel like that it almost breaks down because you say, well, is it phenomenal consciousness of experiencing pink instead of red, or is it a mental state of experiencing? It's very hard to maintain that distinction. In that gradation example, the terminology they

6:23 Ned: should have used is a cognitive state. So we can certainly imagine, and maybe it's true that our cognitive states are somewhat independent of our phenomenal states and that you could vary the phenomenal states while keeping the cognitive states the same. That I think is the underlying thought that Chalmers was having. That would make sense. Maybe it doesn't make any sense really, but that's the way the thought experiment is set up. So what I argue is that the way he sets it up is question begging. Because the principle that functional pathology of this sort can't exist is a principle that the way he uses it favors functionalism.

Because there is a kind of functional pathology, namely that the Joe case is introspectively pathological. I mean, what you're imagining is he has the experience of tepid pink, but he's saying he has the experience of bright red. So that is functionally pathological. If you also include some non functional elements like the ability to properly introspect

7:24 Mark: your phenomenal states, how is that a non functional element? Wouldn't that be part of your functional scheme of introspection?

7:31 Ned: I shouldn't have said non functional element. I mean, it's a different kind of functional element. It's the kind of functional state that involves introspecting your phenomenology properly. So that's why he begs the question by only talking about the functionality pathology that an orthodox functionalist would consider.

7:48 Mark: And you give more actual neurological cases of people whose experiences seem, I guess, are those cases. Maybe we can talk about some of them individually. Where as Chalmers is describing it, the access consciousness and the phenomenal consciousness are pulled apart.

8:04 Ned: The case I mention is a case of anosognosia. And this is a common neurological deficit usually caused by strokes, in which people have some neurological problem that they can't admit to themselves. The case that is most useful for this purpose, some of them, like for example, anosognosia for blindness where people claim that they can see when they can't. That may be hallucination, but anosognosia for hemiplegia, paralysis of one side does look to be not a case of hallucination of the movement. And so these people claim that they're moving their arms when they're not moving their arms.

In fact, they claim they're not moving their arms when they must be conscious of moving their arms because they can see. Conscious of not moving their arms because they can see that their arm isn't moving. I use this case to try to soften up the reader that it does actually make sense for people to be completely wrong about their own experience. They are functionally pathological in Chalmers sense, that they fall down when they get out of bed. That's a kind of softening up move. Because, you know, really the basic disagreement is I think the Joe case is conceivable and nomologically possible.

I think it makes sense to think that somebody could be completely wrong about their experience. And I think there is a real nomological possibility of it. So I don't take Chalmers to have shown that that's not nomologically possible by talking about what happens in our experience where people can reason properly but still make this kind of mistake. So Tye thinks it's not either nomologically possible or conceivable. So Chalmers and I both disagree with Tye on the conceivability part.

9:48 Mark: Yeah, let's get a little into that. So he has a different analysis of what's wrong with your analysis of the case. And then he has a different solution which you didn't seem to give a lot of credence to. That he's focusing on the history involved, the fact that it's a gradual change, that this is different than say the China Body system example that you had given, which we've also outlined in the Relevant Place in talking about the Trouble with Functionalism paper that Tye agrees that in that case the system would not be conscious. In other words, it's a homunculi headed robot.

Instead of neurons, there are people that are connected by wires or by looking at signals in the sky to produce the same outputs that the neurons or functional units or however you're doing the functional analysis turns out, and we want to say clearly, even though there are the conditions of the thought experiment, there are individuals who have intelligence and who have phenomenal consciousness working the dials behind the scenes. The system which they are contributing to, the entire nation of China working together is certainly obviously not conscious.

And Tye agrees with that, but yet doesn't agree in this other case. And he says the difference is because this gradual change makes sort of a consistent history. Are you sympathetic enough with his take to even articulate what it is?

11:05 Ned: He thinks that the concept of consciousness is a history based or really evolutionary history based? Here's a historical concept, the concept of a Rembrandt. We say that a picture, a painting is a Rembrandt. What we're saying is that it has a certain history painted hundreds of years ago by a certain guy. So that is a historically based concept. Something that was a molecule for a molecule, duplicate of a Rembrandt wouldn't be a Rembrandt because it has the wrong history. So he has a view a bit like that for the concept of consciousness. He thinks it's an evolutionarily historical concept and that something that was created just now with molecular molecule duplicate of you, the famous Swampman thought experiment, would not be conscious because it doesn't have the right history.

Whereas what I think is that the concept of consciousness is a natural kind concept, a non historical, natural kind concept of the sort that exists in all of science. And science, by and large, has no truck with these historical concepts. So I think he's just got the concept wrong.

12:17 Seth: It's a little confusing. I mean, in some sense, I'm actually sympathetic. I like the idea of historicity, you know, as factoring into the way which we conceive of beings being conscious or not. In the same way that I think moral agency is a really great litmus test. And I struggle to abstract from that.

12:34 Ned: What do you say about the Swamp man example?

12:36 Seth: I am not familiar with the Swamp man example.

12:39 Ned: Okay. The idea is that statistical mechanics tells us that. Well, we all have heard the idea that the molecules of air in the room might all move to one side, creating a vacuum on the other side. So the same kind of Boltzmann reasoning tells us that it is possible for particles in the swamp to come together and form a molecular duplicate of you. Then the question is, if there is a molecule for a molecule. That's the swamp man, right? A molecule for molecule, duplicate of you formed in that way, would that be conscious? So I think anybody who takes a normal scientific approach would say yes.

If it's a molecule for molecule duplicate, it is conscious. What Tye says is no. It has the wrong history. And it becomes really implausible when you start thinking, well, look, what if all four of my grandparents were swamp people and they lived their lives? They had children, my parents, and then those people had me. So I am completely descended from swamp people just a generation or two ago. According to Tye, I have no conscious states because I have no evolutionary history or minimal evolutionary history.

13:51 Seth: I guess if I was a swamp person, it would explain my love for creole food.

13:57 Ned: Maybe.

13:57 Seth: So, yeah, I feel like he's smuggling in Aristotle. I don't think he's talking about history in the sense that, like, you think of evolutionary. It sounds like he's bringing in teleology. So let me just read real quick from his essay.

14:11 Ned: Yeah, that's right.

14:12 Seth: This final thesis does not attempt to say in representational terms what makes an experience an experience. For present purposes, we need not take sides. Instead, I want to focus initially on a further claim accepted by many representationalists, Namely, that necessarily experiences are systemic representations. A systemic representation is a representation in a system, states of which are designed to provide information about some entity or quantity. So he uses the example of mercury, says blobs of mercury on the table that move in response to temperatures are not designed to show a change in temperature.

You have to actually have a thermostat. And his complaint about, you know, he says the China example, it's not designed. It's not designed to mimic or to create phenomenal consciousness. That's not what the China example is designed to do. It's almost like a Turing machine. But in the silicon case, the silicon transition case, not only does it have a history, but there's a design element to it that gives it systemic representation, which is a kind of order, just like you talked about, that somehow gives it credence and makes it a legitimate contender for phenomenal consciousness.

15:24 Dylan: The problem to me with that example is that once I have a design, whether it be by natural selection or whatever other design, it seems implausible that once I have the design that I can't then replace everything and have something functioning in exactly the same way, including having consciousness.

15:45 Ned: That's what Tye thinks. He thinks that as long as it has the right history, it gets the teleological juice from its history of evolution. But what I was pointing out was it lands him with the ridiculous consequence that if your grandparents were swamp people, you have no consciousness.

16:01 Wes: He also brings up the example of the pressure gauge, which you could make a copy of the pressure gauge and have that copy not be a pressure gauge because it may not represent anything. That depends on me, the designer. It's difficult for me to take that seriously.

16:16 Ned: We could use the example of a swamp pressure gauge. The molecules in the swamp happen to come together as a molecule for molecule duplicate of your pressure gauge. And I think in a certain sense that's not a pressure gauge. Right. It is not something designed to measure pressure. So I think you could say it's not a pressure gauge. But the fact that it works for a functional concept like pressure gauge, but it doesn't work for consciousness shows that our concept of consciousness is not a concept like pressure gauge.

16:47 Wes: Right. And the appeal to natural design, I mean, is an appeal to a metaphor where obviously there's no design evolutionarily, it's blind forces. So it happens much in the same way that copying the manufacture of pressure gauges would happen. It doesn't rely on any intent or design in any literal sense. I find it hard to smuggle in this concept of design to explain anything.

17:11 Ned: So I find it pretty implausible too.

17:14 Seth: Yeah, I think it's. Well, I mean, and this gets back. We've had this discussion many, many times over the years. If I take Blockheads the book and I use it to prop my door open instead of reading it, does that mean it's not a doorstop because it wasn't designed?

17:29 Ned: These functional terms are ambiguous. A doorstop can mean anything I now use as a doorstop or it can mean something designed to be a doorstop. So in the more stricter definition, you could say, oh, well, I'm using it as a doorstop, but it's not really a doorstop.

17:43 Seth: I'm having a conversation with it, but it's not actually phenomenally conscious.

17:49 Ned: Well, that's what he would say about the swamp people.

17:54 Mark: Any particular last questions we want to launch at Ned? Give him the chance to take on here serious conceptual issues. Michael Tye is welcome to write something on our blog responding to Ned, given that we all just laughed at one of his claims is implausible.

18:09 Ned: So have you ever interviewed him?

18:12 Mark: No, no, we only do about one of these academics visiting us about every six months because we do. We do a lot of reading of historical things. And you know, when we do something modern. Well, you saw how over prepared, not necessarily that that was evident in our discussion here, but in terms of what our past episodes have been on to get to this point that we felt like we could ask you intelligent enough questions.

18:33 Ned: So, huh.

18:35 Seth: What's the book that you're working on right now going to be about?

18:39 Ned: It's about the border between perception and cognition. It's called the border between seeing and thinking. It's an argument that, contrary to what a lot of people have been saying recently, there is a sharp border between seeing and thinking. It mainly consists in format and content. The idea is that perceptual states have an iconic format as opposed to a discursive format like language, and that they have non conceptual and non propositional content, and that there are some other architectural differences too. So it's spelling out what's different about seeing and thinking.

19:18 Mark: Is that coincident with the phenomenal versus access consciousness distinction, that thinking is the access consciousness? Ah, yeah.

19:25 Ned: Well, that does come into it, because the idea is that access consciousness is a form of cognition. Mm. It's a wedge into the access versus phenomenal issue.

19:35 Mark: Okay. I just didn't know if the seeing in there corresponded to a part of phenomenal consciousness or whether it seems like you could have. Commander Data sees things just fine, even though there's no. Potentially no phenomenal consciousness.

19:48 Ned: Well, I don't discuss Commander Data in it, but I do discuss unconscious perception.

19:52 Mark: Okay.

19:52 Ned: So seeing doesn't have to be conscious, but the border between conscious seeing and cognition is pretty much the same as the border between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness.

20:04 Mark: Gotcha. I'd love to see the new book when it comes out. And we'll refer. Folks, I know you've already given some talks on YouTube about that, so if people want to hear more about that, they can hear you talk about that at great length already. Thank you so much for joining us, Ned.

20:17 Ned: Well, thank you. A very stimulating discussion. And now that I know about your podcast, I'll go back and listen to it.

20:25 Seth: We would love for you to do that and give us some feedback.

20:27 Mark: There's so many points in Blockheads that I want to grab on and pull harder that maybe we should get Frank Jackson or somebody on here just to talk more about, you know, whether it be representationalism or more about this. A priori identities and mental paint, direct realism. This was a thing that came up mostly in our Armstrong discussion that is begging for us to have a further discussion on.

20:49 Ned: You know, somebody you might want to interview on this is Susanna Siegel. So she's recently written. I think she calls it a tetralogue, but actually I think there's four people involved. So it's her and three direct realists. One of them is John McDowell and I forget who the others are. And they each wrote a position paper and then a description and then comment on each other's position papers. I haven't read this yet, but I'm sure it'll be very interesting.

21:20 Mark: Yep, we are overdue for something. We've certainly brought up direct realism in lots of different contexts, whether you're talking about Hegel or the myth of the given or other things like this. We talked to Searle about his most recent book on epistemology. It's very hard to bridge together. We read historical sources on some of these things, but it doesn't necessarily catch up to what are the debates like now. So this sounds like a great resource for that.

21:44 Ned: Well, I think the Siegel thing would be a good way of getting into that topic.

21:49 Wes: Great.

21:49 Ned: So nice talking to you guys.

21:51 Seth: Pleasure. Thank you. Yeah, it's a pleasure. Thank you.

21:56 Mark: So were you surprised that given what we'd read by Block, where he doesn't really take positions for things so much as take positions against things, that he actually is an identity? He's a materialist that even though he sees the point of the hard problem, he does not follow Chalmers in saying, well, if you recognize the hard problem, you'll see that Type A materialism doesn't work and Type B materialism doesn't work. In fact, he's a Type B materialist with a lot of subtlety to his views, I guess.

22:28 Seth: Is he a materialist because the materialist collapses the distinction between the phenomenal and the physical? All he's saying is the phenomenal that we have is unique to our physical. It's unique to our biology. And that anything that doesn't have our biology won't have the same phenomenal states.

22:46 Dylan: That's what Block is saying.

22:48 Seth: That's what I thought he said.

22:49 Dylan: I thought Block was saying that we don't have the way to know. That was the first paper.

22:54 Seth: I see what you're saying. We don't have a way to even assess, much less conceptualize, whether something that is not biologically identical to us could have the same phenomenal.

23:07 Dylan: He's very sympathetic to the functional isomorph argument that that is sufficient reason to understand Commander Data as being phenomenally conscious. He thinks that there's legs to that. But he maintains a skepticism that we don't have the way of talking about phenomenal consciousness such that we could actually know.

23:30 Ned: Yes.

23:31 Dylan: He wants to have his cake and eat it, too, here.

23:33 Seth: Right. Well, but then he says something when he's responding to Tye to The effect of, I think it's biological, not historical.

23:42 Mark: Yes. He thinks that if it's the case that replacing the neurons with silicon chips does in fact retain consciousness, and he doesn't think that it has to in a way that Chalmers and Tye thinks, but he thinks that it could. It's just that it's not a given. Right. Given the harder problem, we just don't know. And so it's not inconceivable that there is an erasure of consciousness as we go. If it is the case that phenomenal consciousness is retained during this transition, then it must be because whatever it is about the material that gives rise to phenomenal consciousness is suitably duplicated when you make that transition, when you dig down.

He still thinks that it is something that needs to be discovered, what that material characteristic is. And he considers this quantum approach to consciousness that we talked about in our first episode talking with Gregory, which he doesn't take seriously. So this is page 576 he's talking about. Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose have proposed that consciousness depends on quantum processes inside of tiny microtubules that are part of the skeleton of cells and are located inside neuronal cell bodies, axons and dendrites. Microtubules are part of the cytoskeleton of the cell that maintains the shape of the cell.

What everyone thinks of this theory, it is not refuted by Chalmers Thought Experiment robot as Chalmers described, it would lack consciousness, according to Hameroff Penrose account, because of the lack of microtubules in the silicon chips. So similarly, even though he doesn't buy this microtubule specific thing, or we could say midichlorian specific thing if we want to give the Star wars version. If you think that it's the biology, it just depends how the biology creates phenomenal consciousness. Is that duplicated or not? He said when he was talking about functionalism that there's different levels of depth that you could give your functional account at.

You know, it could be a very high level, like the simple flowcharts that we were talking about in explaining what functionalism is. Or it could go quite a bit deeper. So that you're actually talking about, for instance, let's consider every single neuron and the various ways in which they communicate functional steps here. If we can duplicate those in silicon, if that was sufficient to give rise to phenomenal consciousness, then duplicating all those things in silicon, including, you know, it's not just that they shoot electrical signals to each other, but they let off hormones and you know, there's these other, other ways that he brings up biologically.

So it's. There may be multiple dimensions of connection between the neurons, but if you get all those right, then it seems like you've captured, you know, if you're not Hameroff and Penrose and it's something really small within the neurons, the microtubules. No, it's something still at the level of structure of neurons. Then it seems like you're a functionalist, but you're a. I'm having trouble about the distinction between materialism and functionalism. Ultimately, if you allow functionalism to go all the way down to that level,

26:32 Dylan: sure, it seems like you are right, because you're saying that the material is coexistent with the functional. You're decreasing the distance. I mean, one of the advantages of the functional argument is that you're not requiring anything in particular about the underlying material that manifests the function. And so you might be able to say, well, it's a functional argument insofar as I'm going to demonstrate that I have multiple instances of the material manifestation of that function. So that's sort of the argument going through with the silicon replacement process, right?

Is I have a manifestation of consciousness of the sort that I want to talk about here in flesh. And that's where I'm going to start with. And now I'm going to, at some sufficiently low level, replace piece by piece, that entity while maintaining the same functionality. Now, I'm going to put aside how I test that I've maintained that same functionality, right? So for instance, one thing I'd want to know is I maintain all the functionality, so I have to have tests for all of that functionality. But let's say I have all those tests and then I replace it piece by piece by piece.

And then at the end I end up with some. Something that has exactly the same functionality but manifest in silicon alongside what I had manifest in flesh. So there I've demonstrated by fiat that consciousness is a functional characteristic, not a material characteristic, because I have two instances of it.

27:54 Mark: So it's a deep functional analog. And Ed was saying that it actually would be evidence that he is conscious. You know, this seems to be contra the radical indeterminacy of the whole issue in the harder problem paper that we do have reason to say positively that data is conscious. And the more, the tighter the functional isomorphism, the more reason we have.

28:16 Dylan: Sure, you reduce the gap of what you don't understand to be smaller and smaller that you have to make between saying this is like Me, and this is not like me. The kind of thing that I kept on coming back to in reading this is that what I say is conscious or not has everything to do with what I say is like me or not. And the whole question comes down to, is data sufficiently like me or not? And I recoil from it because he is made of material that's not like me. So I say, well, of course he's not like me. And so then I, you know, I have all the problems that just what is consciousness?

Right? How is it manifest and stuff like that. And I doubt that data is like me. So then I go through, through these experiments where I use the functional argument. I progressively replace bit by bit by bit so I can accrete data out of something that was that. I started with me. And I piece by piece replace until I get to data. And then I ask, well, when does the transition happen? If a transition did happen, that seems pretty useful. But I still think that along the way we're going to be left with either it does everything just like the way I do, so it manifests itself just the way I do to everybody else.

But the only reason that I'm going to say that it has a consciousness like me is if I, in the end, agree that it's like me, because I don't have any way to say what the sign of being conscious is. Which is Ned's original paper that we read.

29:43 Seth: It is the original paper. Yeah. That we don't have a way of talking about phenomenal consciousness such that we could even conceptually create criteria or a test for judging whether something. We only have our own subjective experience, and we don't have a way to conceptually articulate it, such that we could contrast ourselves with beings who aren't biologically like us.

30:09 Wes: We'd have to go about it in one of two ways. If data is having a phenomenal experience, that's not something that's publicly observable to us. And so we can't do an experiment. We can't say, okay, yeah, work on this part of the silicone brain and see if it produces an actual experience of red. Got it. Okay. Keep tweaking it until. And then everyone, oh, look, he's experiencing red. You can't do that. So that's the peculiar nature of what we're trying to do here. And obviously we can't rely on that. So that was my a posteriori scientific experiment example.

The other way would be a priori, just to be able to derive it, to say, oh, look, if I have Such and such brain states or such and such functional organization I can a priori derive, demonstrate in a way that I might do something mathematically. Oh, this just flows out of it. Consciousness just flows a priori if I just work out the math out of these particular functional states. So neither of those is available to us. And that's why there's no good way to say whether or not data is conscious. You know, as Ned said, the strongest case we have is just other human beings where they're physiologically exactly alike.

So you'd have to be an extreme skeptic not to project from the case of one's own experience to others to say, oh, well, you know, their brains are exactly like mine, but they still might not be producing consciousness.

31:36 Seth: I think that the argument subjects itself to the extreme skeptical position because ultimately any of the mechanisms that you use to try to determine your functional isomorph, your silicon based replacement or your commander data, are essentially the same ones you would use on any other human being.

31:54 Wes: Yeah, we can't demonstrate obviously that anyone else is conscious. We can't scientifically demonstrate it, and we can't a priori derive it. But there is something compelling about the fact that there's the same physiology at work.

32:07 Dylan: What did you guys think of the absent qualia cases that McLaughlin was talking about when I was reading through them? Especially these cases in the section 10 about perception without phenomenal consciousness. So he talks about these insects that they're getting eaten in one part of their body, but they're continuing on with their lives as if nothing was happening to them. Ned brought up the solitary wasp as another example. The implication being that the presence of interior experience is often manifest in other creatures by the way in which they are reacting to their environment and the things that happen in their body.

So I guess the simple example is the pain case, that when a creature reacts in pain that there's an interior experience. And the road we end up going down in those cases is I can imagine manufacturing something that is a ruse. You know, it reminds me of the argument in Descartes metaphor metaphysics that you know, you could have the devilish God who is tweaking everything wrong and so that you can't rely on your perceptions. And I guess it falls to that. We'd have to say that something about the exterior manifestation of activity of the creature really is a reflection of the interior character.

33:23 Wes: There's actually been a lot of research on pain in insects. Obviously you don't just have to observe behavior like insects. I don't know if it's all insects, but just that the stuff that I looked at, they have opioid receptors and they have endorphins and all these other things related to this stuff. And so they can do experiments. If you put something hot next to them, they're going to retract their leg. But now let's give them some pain medication that works on those endorphins the same way that they work on our brains, that works on their brains and see if they will retract it.

And they don't, or they don't as quickly or whatever. And I only bring this up because there are actually good experimental ways to ask whether or not a creature who's sufficiently like us physiologically is in pain. Because you can do all these analogous experiments. Yes, we take the retraction of a leg that might not involve phenomenal pain. That could just be completely automatic. And so that's the problem. We don't know. But if we can take the further step of giving them pain medication and them not retracting it, there are ways to explain that away too.

It's not entirely convincing, but of course it gets us closer. And I think if you got fine grained enough experimentally, I think you could convince yourself that there's some sort of pain in some particular insect. It sounds like it varies. You know, Ned Block gave the zombie wasp example. It sounds like there are lots of insects who are not going to like disfavor a leg that's hurt. Right. They just walk on it as usual.

34:48 Mark: Yeah, McLaughlin gets into that. Like insects that just keep on with their normal behavior even as they're being eaten.

34:54 Wes: Yeah, yeah, but I, it sounds like it probably varies a lot from insect to insect. And then what does it mean that they're continuing on with their behavior? Does that mean they're not in pain? You know, there's, there are all sorts of really difficult fine grained questions you'd have to ask and.

35:08 Dylan: But yeah, yeah, well, McLaughlin is using it as an example of like he'll say there's nothing to what it's like to be a butterfly.

35:17 Wes: I think that's bullshit, but go ahead.

35:19 Dylan: Okay, so to me the kind of discussion is putting aside whether or not we agree with them. It was a way to try to parse out how we can see exterior manifestations of phenomenal experience. And what I hear you saying, Wes, is that those aren't sufficient to do

35:37 Wes: so I think more data would be needed. But yeah, the whole idea of the like a butterfly is an automaton. Or it has, you know, I guess you guys are calling it access consciousness, but not phenomenal consciousness.

35:51 Dylan: He says it perception versus phenomenal consciousness.

35:54 Wes: Yeah, you could call it perception. So you have perceptions that are cognitive but not phenomenal.

36:00 Mark: That was my mistake at the beginning, is I thought access consciousness just means you can use the data in some way, but it's using it specifically for reasoning.

36:07 Wes: Yeah. So you just. I would call it cognitive, I guess in the same way that many philosophers would say judgments, for instance, are. They're not phenomenal, but they are cognitive. I don't know. I mean, I think it's hard to say what the fact of the matter is in these cases. But my prejudice, my intuition is that there would have to be something that it's like to be a butterfly.

36:29 Dylan: Is there something like what it is to be a tree? And is there something like what it is to be a rock? And is there something like what it is to be a river? If I add the butterfly and I add the person in there, those seems to be like, five different cases of things that have to me inputs and outputs and react and states of existence that. It's not clear to me where the line is. Maybe that takes me down, panpsychism, but I don't know.

36:57 Mark: Yeah, none of the guys we read today take those panpsychist views that we. With Gregory, who's read quite a lot about it, and Chalmers, take seriously. None of these guys had any sympathy for those at all. Tye or McLaughlin or Block himself.

37:09 Dylan: Well, I didn't hear them even talking about it.

37:11 Mark: So it was raised in the articles a little bit, that's all. Let's wrap up here. There's obviously a lot more we could chase down on here. I was very interested, not only in this direct realism thing that I brought up at the end with him. So you're not interested in this?

37:25 Seth: No, no, no. It's just the typical Mark thing. I'm very interested in something that you guys haven't read. And then I'm gonna bring up, like.

37:33 Mark: Okay, no, this was brought up in Armstrong.

37:36 Ned: Right.

37:36 Mark: So the Armstrong paper said that the content of a mental state is exhausted, or let's say a perception is exhausted by what it is a perception of. So we don't have to worry about qualia so much, because what the experience of a circle is, is that circle in the world. And so they're obvious. Like, well, what about illusions? Obviously, if there's. You could have the experience of a circle in the presence of a circle, or you could have the experience of a circle as a brain in a vat, and those would be identical experiences, then there's something wrong with that externalist picture.

So this is some of the other essays that in here. But also, I think the Armstrong gave rise to this entire line of thinking about it in this way. You know, it's begging us to look further at internalism about mental states. In other words, is what a mental state is entirely captured by just analyzing it right now. Like this historical view that Tye brings up is in a form of externalism. It's saying no actually matters. The history, too. Or if you say, as Putnam says, in this world versus the world in which water is XYZ as opposed to H2O, you might have exactly the same belief about water, but in one case it's true, and in the other case it's false because, you know, the reference of the word water or something.

Those are all externalist views. I don't know. I find something interesting in this, but maybe this is getting at exactly. What about analytic philosophy bugs some of you guys?

39:02 Seth: So I think there's a methodological consideration that frustrates me here where I'm not sure how much stuff is getting argued for and how much is people trying to make conceptual distinctions and then using metaphors to, and quote, unquote, examples and thought experiments to appeal to intuition about whether these concepts and these conceptual distinctions make sense. So my eyes kind of glazed over when we were getting into the like. Well, you know, there's examples of people who have a brain injury and then, you know, they feel pain, but they don't have pain, or they.

They have a pain and they don't feel pain, or they see something and they don't see something. And it's like, okay, the brain is a complicated and mysterious and wondrous thing. And because somewhere in the world there's seven people who claim to have the experience of sight but can't actually see, that means that so and so's conceptual distinction is lacking. And I just feel like we take a step back and say, like, does the mere existence of person with symptom X invalidate a particular point of view? Or is it really helping us refine our conceptual apparatus?

Or are we just counting the number of angels in the head of a pin or what have you? I'm not. So I just. That's the part that concerns me is it's like. I feel like philosophers talking about very complicated medical and neurobiological and neurophysical things is knowing just enough to be Dangerous. It also points to maybe the idea that there's. We talk about consciousness as different things as opposed to an interconnected historical phenomenon, an event as opposed to a thing. Maybe that's part of the problem too.

40:42 Mark: So I think Ned's been a great point of connection. I think we need more of these between armchair philosophy and what is actually going on in science. I'm not saying I want to do that. I'm not saying I want to read all these scientific papers. But in doing this for so many years, and in fact, some of the articles even in Blockheads are like, there's at least one by a neurobiologist. Like, that's not philosophy at all. And his response to it is like, yeah, I use this person's research all the time. So it's great that those connections are being made.

And I don't think it's merely the philosophers reading the neuroscientists and drawing their own conclusions. It's like engaging with the neuroscientific and the cognitive science community to make philosophical sense of the stuff that they are discovering. Like, that is completely what needs to happen with every science, that there need to be philosophers perched on their shoulders telling them not to conclude things that are unwarranted.

41:41 Dylan: Did you guys see the article about the guy who's building a brain in a vat?

41:48 Mark: No.

41:48 Seth: No.

41:49 Dylan: It's in New York Times. When an actual human brain or mammalian

41:54 Wes: brain, they still don't know how C. Elegans works. The worm. That's 840 neurons, and that's the only system that's completely mapped and still not understood.

42:05 Dylan: I am willfully overstating it a little bit, but what it is is that he is taking a brain and hooking it up physiologically so that it continues to operate.

42:19 Wes: That's disgusting.

42:20 Dylan: By diffusion, right? So it's.

42:22 Wes: How can that be ethical? Where is he getting the brain? Is it like a mouse brain?

42:27 Seth: I think the person's name was Abby. That'd be normal.

42:34 Mark: So I think Block overall is trying to thread the needle in terms of respecting that the hard problem is so hard and using that to try to school the neurobiologists and others that are actually looking for what in the brain represents consciousness. So, for instance, I looked at this a little bit just at the beginning of this 2009 paper, comparing the major theories of consciousness, which is something that is aimed at neuroscience. It says, this article compares three frameworks for theories of consciousness taken most seriously by neuroscience.

And the reason I want to bring this up, because these are actually things that we've brought up in other articles. So one of them is the executive theory. So we brought this up in the Robert Wright Buddhism episode. The idea that there are different systems that are competing at any time. And when one claims global control of the brain, and this is a phrase that Ned did bring up in our discussion with him a couple times just now, then that one becomes conscious. But clearly, like that doesn't solve the hard problem. Like you haven't said why global control means consciousness.

Global control could just be access consciousness for a wasp. That's probably what's going on. The thing is, Dean, global control, it is controlling behavior. But it, you know, that doesn't explain phenomenal consciousness. And then the other one that we raised, Ned brought up himself right at the beginning is this higher order theory of consciousness. I saw this even in the Douglas Hofstadter book on consciousness, which I tried to get him on the show with us to talk about. He was not interested. But it was some form of. He would use an analogy like take a video camera, hook it to a tv.

So right, whatever the video camera is filming, showing on the tv, pointed at the tv. So his book is called I am a Strange Loop. And like, this is kind of what consciousness is. Like basically consciousness is self consciousness. Again, this is something that Ned brought up right at the beginning. He said, clearly demanding, as these higher order theorists do, that if it isn't self conscious, then it isn't conscious at all. That's just misguided. You haven't explained why having, you know, I'm both seeing red and I am aware that I'm seeing red.

You haven't explained why the awareness itself is phenomenally conscious. Like you're completely sidestepping the hard problem. And he sees these are the two competitors to what he takes to be the most promising, let's say, response to the easy problem, which is actually locating what is going off in the brain when people report conscious activity. And he says we can pretty clearly figure out kind of like what Wes was referring to, that we should be able to work out the correlations when phenomenal of consciousness is occurring. So yeah, Ned is actually presenting mind brain identity theory as a more promising, this older theory as a more promising way to at least solve the easy problem in a way that respects the hard problem than these more recent, innovative, interesting sounding alternatives.

I really enjoyed browsing through this blockheads book. There's so many. We actually didn't even talk about how Putnam was Block's thesis advisor.

45:33 Dylan: I didn't know That I learned that this morning when I was looking through stuff.

45:37 Mark: Yeah. So he probably had a good idea why Putnam himself rejected functionalism. Later, Block, I think, was saying a little bit about just the fact that we could have functional analyses at different levels. That's definitely related. Putnam thought it was somehow problematic to say what the functional organization of something was. And so that's the one that is, you know, the same as the mental. If you. If there's so many different functional organizations of the same system, there seems something very problematic about being a functionalist as identification.

It was also interesting that he said that Chalmers was not a functionalist, that he was a mere nomological functionalist. In other words, the laws of nature in the world right now are such that functions and mental states hook up. But apparently being a functionalist without further addendum requires being a reductionist functionalist.

46:27 Ned: Right.

46:27 Mark: Maybe he's just using the words differently than we were using.

46:29 Dylan: Yeah, I don't know what that means exactly, because if you were a nomological functionalist, that seems to me like a stronger claim than being a mere functionalist. Because it seems to me you're saying that the way the world is built and the way it works is a law like functionalism. So it's like a Carnapian thing, right? That you have a way of structurally or law like behavior, even if you don't know exactly where you've sort of stopped in your description at that point.

46:57 Mark: I hear what you're saying and it seems like that should follow. But then, you know, from our talk with Chalmers, like he specifically this whole bit about, oh yeah, to know all the basic facts of the world from which we can then deduce the rest of the facts of the world, we need the physical facts and the phenomenal facts, like neither is reducible to the other. And if you are a nomological functionalist, it seems like those would be reducible.

47:21 Unknown speaker: But.

47:21 Mark: But maybe reduction is stronger than nomological reduction. It has to do with like all possible worlds, which is exactly what Chalmers is denying. If you say that there is a possible world in which there are functional zombies, in which data is not conscious, then you're saying that no, you can't actually derive, as you were just saying, mental facts from physical and functional facts are just type of physical fact.

47:46 Dylan: I don't know.

47:49 Mark: All right, folks should weigh in on what else they want us to study. Next time we're going to be switching gears completely and talking about Kierkegaard. People have wanted us to get back to Kierkegaard in a long time it's social commentary. His 1846 essay The Present Age, which was published just after he had some kind of public shaming in the Press, and Hubert Dreyfuss's 2004 essay Nihilism on the Information Anonymity versus Commitment in the Present Age. So Dreyfus connecting this old essay by Kierkegaard directly to the Internet, at least as it was in 2004 before it got that much worse.

So we're gonna be done with the hardcore analytic philosophy for a while, but we welcome your recommendations for what else we should cover in this area. If you want to hear more here, our closing song is called you'd're so Dark Sleepgoodbye by the Black watch from their 2018 Paper Boats album. I enjoyed listening to this through the lens of the idea of gradually fading qualia as a form of death or potential transformation. Anyway, I just posted my interview with John Andrew Frederick from the Blackwatch on Nakedly Examined Music Episode 102. He's an English professor, super bright, might be on Pel as a guest at some point.

Check that out@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com and if you haven't yet subscribed to my new podcast, Pretty much Pop. We've got some great interviews and discussions coming out on that as well. We just recorded one with indigenous American actor Jonathan Joss from the Magnificent Seven Parks and Recreation King of the Hill. He was definitely a blast, so keep a lookout for that. People should follow us on Facebook. They should follow us on Twitter. They should go to our blog, partiallyexaminedlife.com and weigh in on this and other episodes. They should email us@pelchtexaminedlife.com thank you so much.

So long everybody.

49:38 Wes: Good night, Good night, Good night.

49:40 Unknown speaker: Sa. To no one else be alive there's no life useless truth even try try. The same makes no difference any way why only rise. Every every time that we breath brings us near when we're not good and gone. So d. Sam. Again has made it all sweeter Hardening matters to you now you won't miss it anyhow Goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye. Sa.