Qualia and Our Access to Them

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Qualia and OurAccess to Them

• Michael Beaton
• E-Intentionality
• 17th January, 2008

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Functionalism

• Pure form
• Everything mental about a mental state depends on
  its functional role
• Belief, desire, perception,conscious experience
• Non-pure, but common, form
• The feel of a mental state depends (at least
  partly) on what it is instantiated by
• Lewis, the Churchlands, Shoemaker

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Mad Pain and Martian Pain

• Mad Pain
• Same role-filler as in us, different response
• Martian Pain
• Different role-filler, and different physical
  organisation all round but same functional
  organisation, same response

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Why Mad Pain?

• Our everyday concept of pain is
• the concept of a state that occupies a certain
  causal role a state apt for being caused in
  certain ways by stimuli plus other mental states
  and apt for combining with certain other mental
  states to jointly cause behavior. (Lewis)
• If we apply the account to humans, we will find
  that we identify pain with whatever plays that
  causal role in us
• If we apply the account to Martians, we will
  identify pain with whatever plays the causal role
  in them

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Introspecting Pain

• The Mad persons pain is meant, in some sense, to
  feel like our pain
• The Martians pain is mean to feel different
• Or just not to be comparable?
• But how can a creature know it has a human
  role-filler, not a Martian one, if the functional
  role is the same?

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The Inverted Spectrum

• Everybody who writes about this thinks the pure
  inverted spectrum is possible
• it seems intelligible to suppose that there are
  creatures who make all the colour discriminations
  we make, and are capable of using colour language
  just as we do, but who, in any given objective
  situation, are confronted with a very different
  phenomenal character than we would be in that
  same situation, and are not misperceiving the
  world (Shoemaker)
• And they all argue for this starting from the
  case of intrasubjective spectrum inversion

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C-fibres?

• Pains might be 60Hz neural spikings
  (Churchlands) in us, something else in a Martian,
  and something else again in a sentient robot
• Again, how would we know?
• The Churchlands arent ignoring this question,
  they base their reasoning on their answer to it

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Introspecting internal states?

• Part of the functional role of pain (for
  instance) is that it be introspectible
• The Churchlands argue that internal role fillers
  like this fill the causal role of pain, including
  being that which we are actually introspecting,
  when we introspect pains (and other sensations)
• Consider the various physical properties which
  in you are characteristic of the repeatable brain
  state that realizes a given sensation. Simply
  exploit whichever of those physical properties is
  accessible to your innate discriminatory
  mechanisms, and contrive a standard habit of
  conceptual response (lo, a sensation of warmth)
  to the property-evoked activation of those
  mechanisms.

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Intrasubjective Inversion

• What your introspective mechanisms have learnt
  to classify as the same, is what feels the same
• Hence intrasubjective spectrum inversion
• Hence intersubjective spectrum inversion, where
  introspective mechanisms are comparable
• Where there is no overlap, we cant really even
  answer the question of whether things feel the
  same

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Is this Introspection?

• This is all based on an account of introspection
  as detection of inner states
• Shoemaker (1986, 1990, 1994a, 1994b, etc.) has
  done much to argue that this is an incorrect
  account

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Self-Blindness 1

• The self-blind
• Are as rational as we are
• Know what the self-ascription of mental states
  means
• Lack the introspective mechanism which is
  required to let us know, non-inferentially, what
  mental states we are in
• Shoemaker argues that such an account is
  incoherent, that a creature with a) and b)
  already has an ability to know,
  non-inferentially, what mental states it is in
• This throws into doubt the supposition that there
  is such an inner directed mechanism, above and
  beyond the operations of mere rationality

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Some Arguments AgainstSelf-Blindness

• Self-ascription of belief, and co-operation
• Moores paradox
• Self-ascription of desire, to get what you want
  (learning to say I want)
• Pain and medicine cabinets

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Kind-of introspection?

• Shoemaker suggests that the detection of inner
  states is not needed for introspection
• But he at least appears to leave open the
  possibility that a Churchland mechanism could
  be used, instead of certain rational transitions
  (Kind, 2003)
• I think the right response to this is to say that
  Kind-Churchland introspection isnt
  introspection at all

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Where is Phenomenal Character?

• With Shoemakers view of introspection, how are
  you going to deal with qualia?
• the phenomenal character we are confronted with
  in color experience is due not simply to what
  there is in the environment but also, in part, to
  our nature
• this leaves it unspecified what is supposed to
  have this phenomenal character the external
  objects perceived, or our subjective experiences
  of them
• But locating the phenomenal character in the
  experiences seems to fly in the face of the
  phenomenology

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What Can We Introspect?

• Shoemaker also suggests that
• If one is asked to focus on the experience
  without focusing on its intentional object, or
  its representational content, one simply has no
  idea of what to do

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The Representation of Colour

• Shoemaker wants a view which is
• Non-sense data
• Representational
• Where the only thing we find in introspection
  (other then that we have the introspected states)
  is their representational content
• And with spectrum inversion

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The Solution?

• Qualia
• Representational properties of experience
• Phenomenal properties
• Real (but relational) properties of external
  objects
• Then
• My experience represents a red object as having
  the phenomenal property R, the property it has
  just in case it is producing experiences with
  (representational) property R

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But, are there core realizers?

• But who says there are such core states?
• It doesnt come for free from the functional
  definition
• The functional states (pain, belief, perception,
  all of them) are whole-agent states

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What do we reallyknow about realizers?

• Given an intentional state, in a physical system,
  what do we know
• We know it must be possible to achieve ersatz
  states, by direct modification of the system. As,
  for instance, causing someone to feel pain by
  direct stimulation of their amygdala (or direct
  stimulation of their real, distal, c-fibres)
• What we dont know is whether these internal
  states have to be separable from the rest of the
  rationality of the creature in the way relied
  upon by a certain brand of RTM (and these
  theories of qualia)

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What Does RTM Say?

• Intentional states dont have to be shown by
  behaviour
• But they do have to be at-least-counterfactually
  shown, i.e. showable
• So, these states are covert, but that doesnt
  mean there have to be the representational states
  required by RTM
• I believe X in virtue of treating a
  representation of X in a way such as to lead to
  belief behaviour (etc., mutatis mutandis, for
  desire, perceptual experience, etc. etc.)
• Those are metaphorically internal to the very
  rationality of the creature
• Features which can be changed, whilst leaving
  everything physical which instantiates the
  rationality of the creature alone

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The Problem

• I believe we have no guarantee that these states,
  internal to the very rationality of the creature
  (in the way just described), must exist in every
  given instantiation of a mental state
• Unless this is true has to be true, in all
  cases then no analysis of a mental feature of a
  mental state can rely on their presence

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Another solution?

• Pains are things which are perceived painfully
• Perceiving painfully is a modification of a
  space of reasons
• If I have only objects in my space of reasons, I
  have no reason to do anything
• To perceive something painfully to be so
  motivated as to react towards it, within ones
  space of reasons, as to pain

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Accessing Pain

• Accessing anything is a revisable, flexible
  locking-on to the thing itself, qua
  whatever-it-is a bringing of that thing (qua
  that thing) into a space of reasons)
• A tiger (qua tiger, not qua its stripes)
• A pain (qua pain, not qua its realizer)
• So this view has the advantage (not, on its own,
  a knock-down one, but still, an advantage!) that
  in introspecting pain, we introspect something
  which must be pain, not something which only
  contingently is

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True Blue?

• On this account, when I perceive blue, I really
  perceive blue (I have taken the actual blueness
  of the object, out there, into my space of
  reasons)
• But of course, I have lots of high and low-level
  associations, and innate and/or acquired
  affective motivations, as regards blue (or
  anything else)
• These can all vary, even as between two agents
  whose categorisation and language behaviour is
  the same

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What I See What I Introspect

• The modifications of my space of reasons (i.e. of
  me, as literal agent) which blue makes in me, are
  as introspectible as any other property of a
  space of reasons qua space of reasons
• Thus
• In perceiving blue, I perceive blue itself
• In introspecting blue, I can introspect its
  quale the particular modifications blue makes,
  in me

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Thank you!