Consciousness Knowledge and Reality: Mind and Body, Lecture 4

Today’s Lecture: the plan Introduction: Nagel and his Bat. Functional analysis, … problems, inverted and absent qualia. Intrinsic/Extrinsic. Mary Responses/consequences

Consciousness: Examples Consider: stubbing your toe, the smell of roses, the taste of liquorice, the feeling of silk. Also: dizziness, nausea. Also, emotions: regret, fear, moods. Love? Often these states are said to pose a problem for materialism, identity theories or functionalism.

Thomas Nagel’s “What is it Like to be a Bat?” ‘There is something that it is like’ The subjective character of experience. The first-personal point of view. Imagine licking my brain while I eat Ben and Jerry’ Chunky Monkey ice-cream! Bats have sonar experiences. What is it like for them? We cannot know. But it seems that there is a fact about what it is like, a subjective fact. (Sometimes called ‘qualia’)

Nagel argues that materialists and functionalist leave out this crucial aspect of our mental life. Do they? Is Nagel right? Consider the possibility of inverted and absent qualia. Two functionally equivalent systems that differ qualitatively. It seems that we imagine this. Can there be zombies? (There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.) Surely yes!

Inverted Spectrum

But! Possible problems for this way of arguing … Does imagination imply possibility? It is unverifiable whether others experience colours as we do. So maybe it makes no sense to suppose they do?

But We can imagine being kidnapped, having an operation, and waking up and seeing colours differently. So it seems coherent and possible.

Shoemaker’s reply Pain gives rise to the awareness of pain, beliefs about it. So, there cannot be inverted or absent qualia. And he argues that if these were possibilities, we couldn’t know about qualia. But we do.

Smith and Jones A posible response… in favour of qualia … the ‘PP’ theory, as they call it… pains have intrinsic essences. Thus they cannot have functional (relational) essences.

The knowledge argument against physicalism (F. Jackson)‏ Mary - brilliant vision scientist (knows everything about color vision) but has never experiences colors (lived all life in monochrom)‏. One day Mary goes out of monochrome environment and for the first time experiences a red-flower

Jackson’s Mary example Mary the goth-scientist. Does she lack know of (non-black-and- white) colour experiences? It seems.. Yes! Hence materialism and functionalism cannot account for qualia.

Replies? Some say she has knowledge of the facts, but not knowledge-how. (Don’t worry about this.) Some say she knows the same facts in a different way… after release from the room, she knows colour in a direct way. There is no difference in the object of her knowledge. Others deny that there are any qualia at all.

1 st /3 rd personal issue One fact First- personal way of knowing Third- personal way of knowing

Are there facts graspable both in a first- and in the third-personal way? Materialists say ‘yes’, Nagel&Jackson say ‘no’. There are different facts here, they say, not one fact known in different ways. Comparison with ‘indexicals’, like ‘I’, ‘now’ and ‘here’.

There are large issues here… Can we unify both our objective and subjective ways of thinking? Is there one world that we represent, that can be represented subjectively and objectively? Or is the subjective mode of thought ineliminable….?

Next week…. Are we ineliminable?