John Locke- Free Will Not to Carry Out What One Wills

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

LOCKE= ‘SO FAR AS A MAN HAS POWER TO THINK OR NOT TO THINK, TO MOVE OR NOT TO MOVE, ACCORDING TO THE PREFERENCES OR DIRECTION OF HIS OWN MIND, SO FAR IS A MAN FREE’

REPLY- But ‘How does the mind prefer thinking of a thing to not thinking of it? How does mind direct movement rather than the rest? Does it prefer or direct in such a wat as that it could not possibly prefer or direct otherwise?’ - to this question, ‘necessarians answer yes, and libertarians no.

‘A clock is in no way a free agent. Yet a clock might be called free when it has to power to move or not to move, according to the preference and direction of its own workings’

‘Is not this point in dispute, whether our minds are wound up like clocks, to prefer and direct us to certain motions, or whether they have a command over themselves, placed in themselves alone, which machines have not?’

LOCKE= ”wHEREVER ANY PERFORMANCE OR FORBEARANCE ARE NOT EQUALLY IN A MAN’S POWER; WHEREVER DOING OR NOT DOING WILL NOT FOLLOW EQUALLY UPON THE PREFERENCES OF HIS MIND DIRECTING IT, THERE HE IS NOT FREE, THOUGH PERHAPS THE ACTION MAY BE VOLUNTARY…SUPPOSE A MAN WERE TO BE CARRIED, WHILST FAST ASLEEP, INTO A ROOM, WHERE IS A PERSON HE LONGS TO SEE AND SPEAK WITH, AND BE THERE LOCKED FAST IN, BEYOND HIS POWER TO GET OUT; HE AWAKES AND IS GLAD TO FIND HIMSELF IN SO DESIRABLE COMPANY, WHICH HE STAYS WILLINGLY IN, I.E., PREFERS TO STAY TO GOING AWAY. I ASK, IS THIS NOT VOLUNTARY? I THINK NOBODY WILL DOUBT IT; AND YET, BEING LOCKED FAST IN, ‘TIS EVIDENT HE IS NOT AT LIBERTY NOT TO STAY; HE HAS NOT FREEDOM TO BE GONE.”

Reply- It is not so much the action as the act that is wrong.The mental act by which he approves of the marking is an approval which me might have withheld, which he freely bestows, and for which God holds him culpable.

‘Voluntart, because he wills what he does; free, because he need not have willed it; and guilty because he freely wills to do a fraudulent thing’

LOCKE= ‘THE QUESTION ITSELF IS ALLTOGETHER IMPROPER, AND IT IS AS INSIGNIFICANT TO ASK WHETHER A MAN’S WILL BE FREE, AS TO ASK WHETHER HIS SLEEP BE SWIFT, OR HIS VIRTUES SQUARE; LIBERTY BEING AS LITTLE APPLICABLE TO THE WILL AS SWIFTNESS OF MOTION IS TO SLEEP, OR SQUARENESS TO VIRTUE…AND WHEN ANYONE CONSIDERS IT, I THINK HE WILL PLAINLY PERCEIVE THAT LIBERTY, WHICH IS BUT A POWER, BELONGS ONLY TO AGENTS AND CANNOT BE AN ATTRIBUTE OR MODIFICATION OF THE WILL, WHICH IS ALSO BUT A POWER…[WILL IS NOTHING BUT A POWER TO DESIRE TO DO SOMETHING ELSE]…LIBERTY ON THE OTHER HAND, IS THE POWER A MAN HAS TO DO OR FOREBARE DOING ANY PARTICULAR ACTION…ACCORDING AS HE HIMSELF WILLS.

Reply- Lockes argument is shallow. It is something like this

- Will is power of choosing

- Liberty is power of acting accoring to choice

Which leads to ‘The Will is Free’ and ‘The power of choosing has the power of acting according to choice’, this this is absurd as one power cannot have another power, so the proposition ‘the will is free’ is absurd and meaningless.

The author wants to attribute meaning to ‘the will is free’ again. So he says

‘Will is power of consciously rejecting evil and choosing good.

‘Freedim is the not being under constraint to reject any but sheer evil, or choose any but sheer good’.

This apparantly shows that the will is free.

‘Free will is a power, the same power as the will, as St Thomas shows, but the liberty or freedom of the will is not a power but an incident of a power.

David Chalmers- ‘The Puzzle of Conscious Experience’

‘Conscious experience is the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious…why does it exist? what does it do? how could it possibly arise from neural processes in the brain? These questions are among the most intriguing in all of science.’

‘Conscious: the subjective, inner life of the mind.’

‘Over the past several years an increasing number of neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers have been rejecting the idea that consciousness cannot be studies and are attempting to delve into its secrets. To help unsnarl the tangles, philosophical reasoning is vital.’

‘The myriad views within the field range from reductionist theories accrding to which consciousness can be explained by the standard methods of neuroscience and psychology, to the position of the mysterians, who saw we will never understand consciousness at all…Both of these views can be seen to be mistaken…Truth lies somewhere in the middle’.

‘Against reductionism I will argue that the tools of neuroscience cannot provide a full account of conscious experience…Against mysterianism I will hold that consciousness might be explained by a new kind of theory. The full details of such a theory are still out of reach’.

THE HARD PROBLEM

‘The hard problem is the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiene: the way things feel for the subject’.

‘There are facts about conscious experience that cannot be deduced from physical facts about the functioning of the brain’ (Ie. black and white room example).

Why do we have any experience at all? Could not an unconscious automaton have performed the same tasks just as well?

I am not denying that consciousness arises from the brain. It is the link itself that perplexes, however. Remarkably, subjective experience seems to emerge from a physical process. But we have no idea how or why this is.

IS NEUROSCIENCE ENOUGH?

[Most work in neuroscience today focuses on the easy problems. They can explain some of what is happening when we see a colour, but they do not explain anything of the subjective experiences.]

‘Once neurobiology specifies appropriate neural mechanisms, showing how the functions are performed the easy problems are solved. The hard problem of consciousness goes beyond problems about how functions are performed…Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by this conscious experience?’

THE EXPLANATORY GAP

The trouble is that physical theories are best suited to explaining why systems have a certain physical structure and how they perform various functions. Most problems in science have this form…But consciousness is a different sort of problem entirely, as it goes beyond the explanation of structure and function.

Until we know why these processes give rise to conscious experience at all, we will not have crossed what philosopher Joseph Levine has called the explanatory gap between physical processes and consciousness. Making that leap will demand a new kind of theory.

A TRUE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

‘It is widely believed that physics provides a complete catalogue of the universe’s fundamental features and laws. As physicist Steven Weinberg puts it a ”Theory of everything”. But Weinberg concedes that there is a problem with consciousness.

If the existence of consciousness cannot be derived from physical laws, a theory of physics is not a theory of everything. So a final theory must contain an additional fundamental component.’ [more fundemental than space, time, mass etc].

Toward this end, I propose that conscious experience be considered a fundemental feature, irreducible to anything more basic…In the nineteenth century it turned out that electromagnetic phenomena could not be explained in terms of previously known principles….[so] Scientists introduced electromagnetic charge as a new fundemental entity…Similar reasoning should be applied to consciousness. If existing fundemental theories cannot encompass it, then something new is required.’

A complete theory will have two components: physical laws, and what we might call psychophysical laws, telling us how some of those systems are associated with conscious experience. These two components will constitute a true theory of everything.

SEARCHING FOR A THEORY

‘How might we uncover such psychophysical laws? Consciousness is subjective, so there is no direct way to monitor it in others. But this difficulty is an obstacle, not a dead end’.

‘If we find a theory that fits the data better than any other theory of equal simplicity, we will have good reason to accept it. Right now we do not even have a single theory that fits the data, so worries about testability are premature’.

‘Awareness is objective and physical, whereas consciousness is not…where there is awareness, there is consciousness and vice versa’

‘If the precise interactions between our neurons could be duplicated with silicon chips, the same conscious experience would arise…The remarkable implication is that consciousness might someday be achieved in machines.’

INFORMATION: PHYSICAL AND EXPERIENTAL

…’I don’t mind speculating…that the promary phsychophysical laws may centrally involve the concept of information…We can think of a 10-bit binary code as an information state, for example. Such information states can be embodied in the physical world…the differences between them can be transmitted along some pathway, such as a telephone line.’

‘We can also find information embodied in conscious experience…The three-dimensional encoding of colour spaces, for example, suggests that the information state in a colour experience corresponds directly to an information state in the brain’

‘Perhaps information, or at least some information, has two basic aspects: a physical one and an experiental one…Wherever we find consciousness, it exists as one aspect of an information state. This proposal needs to be fleshed out to make a satisfying theory’.

‘It may even be that a theory of physics and a theory of consciousness could eventually be consolidated into a single, grander theory’.

Disjunctivism Lecture Notes

There are 3 thesis about perception

1. Phenomenal Principle: S perceives a –> a exists
2. Common Kind assumptions: all perceptions are of the same kind, whether they be hallucinations, veridical perceptions etc. They are all fundementally the same.
3. Mind Independence- We are directly aware of mind-independent physical objects.

Phenomenal Principle             Common Kind             Mind-Independence

Sense Datum                                 Y                                         Y                                     N

Intentionalism                              N                                         Y                                     Y

Disjunctivism                               Y                                         N                                     Y

Disjunctivism

• We perceive EITHER veridical perceptions, OR hallucinations - the 2 are different
• Perception is a relation between perceiving subjects and mind independent physical objects
• 2 Percetual experiences can be indiscriminable, yet different

Criteria for assessing theories of perception

• Phenomenology
• Metaphysics
• Epistemology

John Searle- ‘Minds, Brains and Programs’

‘According to Strong AI, the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the appropriatelyprogrammed computer really is a mind…said to understand and have other cognitive states’.

Searle is here going to object to claims that an ‘appropriately programmed computer’ can have cognitive states and can explain human cognition by refering to Roger Schank’s projects.

‘One can describe Schank’s program as follows: The aim of the program is to simulate the human ability to understand stories. It is characteristic of human beings [that they can] answer questions about the story even though the information that they give was never explicitly stated in the story.

‘Schank’s machines can similarly answer questions… in this fashion. To do this they have a ‘representation’ of the sort of information that human beings have about restaurants…the machine will print out answers of the sort that we would expect human beings to give if told similar storis’.

Partisans of Strong AI claim that  [in this situation] the machine…’can literally be said to understand the story…and…that what the machine and its program do explains the human ability to understand the story and answer questions about it’

Both claims to Searle seem ‘to be totally unsupported by Schank’s work’. (That is not to say that Schank himself is totally commited to these claims.)

‘One way to test any theory of the mind is to ask oneself what it would be like if my mind actually worked on the principles that the theory says all minds work on. Let us apply this test to the Schank program.’

…’Suppose I am locked in a room and given a large batch of Chinese writing…I know no Chinese…Now suppose that after this first batch of Chinese writing I am given a second batch together with a set of rules for correlating the second batch with the first batch…I can [now] identify the symbols entirely by their shapes. Now suppose also that I am given a third batch together with some instructions that enable me to correlate elements of this third batch with the first two batches.

…Unknown to me, the people who are giving me all these symbols call the first batch a ‘Script’, the second batch a ’story’ and the third batch ‘questions’. They call the symbols I give them back in response to the third batch ‘answers to the questions’ and the set of ruls in English that they gave me, they call the ‘program’.

…Nobody just looking at my answers can tell that I don’t speak a word of Chinese. As far as the Chinese is concerned, I simply behave like a computer’.

In light of the claims above…

1. ‘Quite obvious in the example that I do not understand a word of Chinese. I have inputs and outputs that are indistinguishable from those of the native Chinese speaker…I still understand nothing. For the same reasons, Schank’s computer understands nothing of any stories’

2. The claim that the program explains human understanding is false because the ‘the computer and its program do not provide sufficient conditions of understanding since the computer and the program are funtioning and there is no understanding’.

‘No reason whatever has been offered to suppose that such principles are necessary or even contributory, since no reason has been given to suppose that whe I understand english I am operating with any formal profram at all’.

Before looking at replies to this example, I ‘first want to block some common misundertandings about ”understanding”. There are clear cases in which ‘understanding’ literally applies, and clear cases in which it does not apply: and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument.

‘If the sense in which Schank’s programmed computers understand stories is supposed to be the metaphorical sense in which the door understands, and not the sense in which I understand English’.

‘Newell and Simon write that the kind of cognition they claim for computers is exactly the same as for human beings, and it is the sort of claim I will be considering’. ‘I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing. The computer understanding is not just partial or incomplete; it is zero.’

Now to the replies:

1. The Systems Reply (Berkeley)- This reply is basically that, in the room example, ‘understanding is not be ascribed to the mere individual; rather it is being ascribed to this whole system of which he is part’

‘MY RESPONSE to the systems theory is quite simple:Let the individual internalize all of these elements of the system…We can even get rid of the room and suppose he works outdoors. All the same, he understands nothing of the Chinese, and a fortiori neither does the system, because there isn’t anything in the system that isn’t him. If he doesn’t unerstand, then there is no way the system could understand because the system is just a part of him.’

A counter to this could be that ”the man as a formal symbol manipulation system” really does understand Chinese.’ But, this can’t be true because ‘the Chinese subsystem knows only that ‘’squiggle squiggle” is followed by ‘’squoggle squoggle”. ‘The whole point of the original example was to argue that such symbol manipulation by itself couldn’t be sufficient for understanding Chinese in any literal sense

‘The only motivation for saying there must be a subsystem in me that understands Chinese is that I have a program and I can pass the Turing test; I can fool native Chinese speakers. But precisely one of the points at issue is the adequacy of the Turing test. The example shows that there could be two ‘’systems”, both of which pass the Turing test, but only one of which understands’.

Furthermore, the systems reply woud appear to lead to consequences that are independantly absurd…it looks like all sorts of noncognitive subsystems are going to turn out to be cognitive’ (ie. the heart, stomach etc). ‘If we accept the systems reply, then it is hard to see how we avoid saying [that these subsystems] are all understanding subsystems’.

‘If Strong AI is to be a branch of Psychology, then it must be able to distinguish those systems that are genuinely mental from those that are not… Anyone who thinks strong AI has a chance as a theory of the mind ought to ponder the implications of that remark’.

2. The Robot Reply (Yale)- This argument goes; ”Suppose we wrote a different kind of program from Schank’s program. Suppose we put a computer inside a robot. This computer would not just take formal symbols as input and give out formal symbols as output, but would operate in such a way that the robot does something very much like perceiving, walking, moving about- anything you like. All of this would be controlled by its computer ‘brain’.  Such a robot would, unlike Schank’s computer, have genuine understanding and other mental states.”

REPLY- The addition of such ‘perceptual’ and ‘motor’ capacities adds nothing by way of understanding to Schank’s original program. The robot receives input via it’s ‘perceptual’ apparatus, and instructions are given to its ‘motor’ apparatus without the motor knowing any of these facts. All the robot does is follow formal instructions about manipulating formal symbols.

3. The Brain Simulator Reply (Berkeley and M.I.T)- This argument goes; ”Suppose we design a program that doesn’t represent information that we have about the world, but simulates the actual sequence of neuron firings at the synapses of the brain of a native Chinese speaker when he understands stories in Chinese and gives answers to them…Surely in such a case we would have to say that the machine understood the stories; and if we refuse to say that, wouldn’t we also have to deny that native Chinese speakers understood the stories?”

REPLY- I thought the whole idea of strong AI is that we don’t need to know how the brain works to know how the mind works…On the assumptios of strong AI, the mind is to the brain as the program is to the hardware, and thus we can understand the mind without doing neurophysiology. It we had to know how the brain worked to do AI, we wouldn’t do AI.

Even so, if we input into the man Chinese, fire neurons and consequently, the man replies in Chinese, this doesn’t mean he understands. Again, instructions are merely being followed.

4. The Combination Reply (Berkeley and Stanford)- This argument goes; ”While each of the previous three replies might not be completely convincing by itself, it you take all three, they are collectively more convincing. Imagine a robot with a brain shaped computer lodged in its cranial cavity, imagine the computer programmed with all the synapses of a human brain, imagine the whole behaviour of the robot is indistinguishable from human behaviour, and nw think of the whole thing as a unified system and not just a computer with inputs and outputs. Surely in such a case, we would have to ascribe intentionality to the system’

REPLY- ‘I agree that in such a case we would find it rational to accept that the robot had intentionality, as long as we knew nothing more about it’. ‘If we knew independantly how to account for its behavious without such assumptions we would not attribute intentionality to it, especially if we knew it had a formal program’.

‘We would regard the robot as an ingenious mechanical dummy. The hypothesis that the dummy has a mind would now be unwarranted and unnecessary…He doesn’t see what comes into the robot’s eyes, he doesn’t intend to move the robots arm, and he doesn’t understand any of the remarks made to or by the robot.

5. Other Minds Reply- ”How do you know that other people understand Chinese or anything else? Only by their behaviour. The computer can pass behavioural tests, so if you are going to attribute cognition to other people, you must in principle also attribute it to computers”

REPLY- This objection is only worth a short reply. It is not about how I know that other people have cognitive states, but rather what it is that I am attributing to them when I attribute cognitive states to them.

‘In cognitive sciences one presupposes the reality and knowability of the mental in the same way that in physical sciences one has to presuppose the reality and knowbility of physical objects’

6. The Many Mansions Reply (Berkeley)- ”Your whole argument presupposes that AI is only about analog and digital computers. But that just happens to be the present state of technology…eventually we will be able to build devices that have these causal processes, and that will be AI. So your arguments are in no way directed at the ability of AI to produce and explain cognition”

REPLY- I really have no objection to this reply save to say that it in effect trivializes the project of Strong AI by redefining it as whatever artificially produces and explains cognition

Back to the question:

‘There must be something about me that makes it the case that I understand English and a corresponding something lacking in me that makes it the case that I fail to understand Chinese. Now why couldn’t we give those somethings, whatever they are, to a machine?

The main point of the present argument is that no purely formal model will ever be sufficient by itself for intentionality because the formal properties are not by themselves constitutive of intentionality.

Mental states and events are literally a product of the operation of the brain, but the program is not in that way a product of the computer.

No one supposes that computer simulations of a rainstorm will leave us all drenched. Why on earth would anyone suppose that a computer simulation of understanding actually understand anything?

Unless you believe that the mind is separable from the brain both conceptually and empirically- dualism in a strong form- you cannot hope to reproduce the mental by writing and running programs since programs must be independant of brains. [So anyone that holds intentionality can be produced via a computer program, must therefore be a dualist- not a substance dualist- but a mind/body dualist].

‘Could a machine think? My own view is that only a machine could think…AI, by its own definition, is about programs, and programs are not machines’

THOUGHTS

Searle seems to have good arguments here. I agree with most of what he says.  When we try to create intentionality in a program, something is missing. You cannot create consciousness this way. it’s like trying to make an omlette without any eggs.

Intentionality is a chemical-biological thing, that can only be replicated biologically, not mechanically.

Frank Jackson- ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’

‘I am what is sometimes known as a qualia freak. I think that there are certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences which no amount of purely physical information includes. Tell me everything physical there is to tell about what is going on in a living brain, the kind of states, and so on and so forth…and you won’t have told me about the hurtfulness of pain, the itchiness of itches, pangs of jealousy…smalling a rose, hearing a loud noise of seeing the sky’.

Qualia Freaks have the following argument ‘Nothing you could tell of a physical sort captures the smell of a rose. Therefore physicalism is false’.

Unfortunately, many people do not find the premise intuitively obvious. ‘The task then is to present an argument whose premises are obvious to all, or at least to as many as possible’…’The major factor in stopping people from admitting qualia is the belief that they would have to be given a causal role with respect to the physical world, and especially the brain; and it is hard to do this without sounding like someone who believes in fairies’. ‘I seek to turn this objection by arguing that the view that qualia are epiphenomenal [that the world can effect them, but they cannot effect the world] is a perfectly possible one’.

1. THE KNOWLEDGE ARGUMENT FOR QUALIA

‘Fred Explains that all ripe tomatoes do not look the same colour to him’. He says that ‘it would be quite wrong to think that because ‘red’ appears in red 1 and red 2, that the two colours are shades of the one colour…to hom, red1 and red2 are as different from each other as yellow is from blue’.

‘We should admit that Fred can see at lease one more colour that we can’.

H G Wells’ story, he country of the blimd, is about a sighted person in a totally blind community. This person never manages to convince them that he can see, that he has an extra sense’…’We would be making their mistake is we refused to allow that Fred can see one more colour than we can’.

‘What kind of experience does Fred have when he sees red1 and red2? It seems that no amount of physical information about Fred’s brain or optical system tells us’.

‘We have all the physical information. Therefore, knowing all this is not knowing everything about Fred. Physicalism leaves something out’. ‘Qualia are left out of the physicalist story.

2. THE MODAL ARGUMENT

‘No amount of physical information about another logically entails that he or she is conscious or feels anything at all. Consequently there is a possible world with organisms exactly like us in every pysical respect…but which differ from us profoundly in that they have no conscious mental life at all…What is it that we have and they lack?

‘In all physical regards, we are exactly alike. Consequently, there is more to us than the purely physical. Thus, physicalism is false’.

3. THE ‘WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE’ ARGUMENT

‘Thomas Nagel argues that no amount of physical information can tell us what it is like to be a bat’, because’ what this is like can onl be understood from a bat’s point of view, which is not our point of view and is not something capturable in physical terms which are essentially terms understandable equally from many points of view’.

‘It is imporrtant to distinguish this argument from the Knowledge Argument.’ ‘I was not complaining that we weren’t finding out what it is like to be Fred. I was complaining that there is something about his experience, of which we are left ignorant’.

‘It is hard to see an objection to physicalism here. Physicalism makes no special claims about the imaginative or extrapolative powers of human beings, and it is hard to see why it need do so’.

4. THE BOGEY OF EPIPHENOMENALISM

‘Is there any really good reason for refusing to countenance the idea that qualia are causally impotent with respect to the phyical world? I will argue for the answer no’.

‘All I will be concerned to defend is that it is possible to hold that certain properties of certain mental states, namely those I’ve called qualia, are such that their posession or absence makes no difference to the physical world [and] that the mental is totally inefficacious’.

OBJECTIONS TO EPIPHENOMENALISM AND REPLIES

1. It is supposed to be just obvious that the hurtfulness of pain is partly responsible for the subject seeking to avoid pain…but, to reverse Hume, anything can fail to cause anything…The hypothesis that A causes B can be overturned by an over-arching theory which shows the two as distinct effects of a common undrlying causal process.

The epiphenomenalist can say exactly the same about the commection between, for example, hurtfulness and behaviour. It is simply a consequence of the fact that certain happenings in the brain cause both’.

2. Darwin;s theory of evolution holds ‘the traits that evolve over time are those conductive to physical survival. We may assume that qualia evolved over time- we have them, the earliest forms of life do not- so we should expect qualia to be conductive to survival. The objection is that they could hardly help us to survive if they do nothing to the physical world’

‘The appeal of this argument is undeliable, but there is a good reply to it’

‘The advantages for survival of having a warm coat outweighed  the disadvantages of having a heavy one…all we can extract from Darwin’s theory is that we should expect any evolved characteristic to be eithe conductive to survival or a by-product of one that is so conducive. The Epiphenomenalists hold that qualia fall into the latter category’.

3. ‘How can a person’s behaviour provide any reason for believing he has qualia like mine, or indeed any qualia at all, unless this behavious can be regarded as the outcome of qualia?’

‘The epiphenomenalist allows that qualia are effects of what goes on in the brain. Qualia cause nothing physical but are caused by something physical. Hence, the epiphenomenalist can argue from the behaviour of others back to its causes in the brains of others, and out again to their qualia’.

‘Epiphenomenal qualia are totally irrelevant to survival.’

‘It is not sufficiently appreciated that physicalism is an extremely optimistic view of our powers’…’One must admit that it is very unlikely that there is a part of the whole scheme of things…which no amount of evolution will ever bring us near to knowledge about or understanding. For the simple reason that such knowledge and understanding is irrelevant to survival’.

Intentionalism Notes

Just some quick notes…

• Intentionalism rejects the phenomenal principle
• Perceptions have cognititve intentional (representational) content- they represent the world as being in a certain way (veridical, not illusory)
• We can perceive more things than we have content of (too much data for us to comprehend)
• We can have the same intentional content, but different phenomenal character (ie. 2 colours, both called red)….Can intentional content explain phenomenal character?

Intentional = Representationalism. Perception produces intentional/representional events within us.

Sense Data Theory          Vs          Intentionalism

(Sense data is perceived)               (Actual world is perceived. Experience is representation of object)

We can have experience without an external object.

ARMSTRONGS VERSION OF INTENTIONALISM

• Beliefs = experiences based on the world
• He is only talking about perceptions, not a priori beliefs
• Can have perception without belief (ie. looking into a mirror), as these are overridden by stronger beliefs.

OBJECTIONS TO SENSE DATA THEORY

• 3 cloths example- a and b look the same, b and c look the same, but a and c look different- something is not right with sense data here.
• Speckled hen- our sense data doesnt tell us a definite number of spots, but the actual hen does have a definite number of spots. Sense data is mistaken.

OBJECTION TO ARMSTRONG

There are perceptions that have no capacity for belief because too much information is received.

J Smart, Sensations and Brain Processes (The Identity Thesis)

Aim of Paper is to Defend Place’s position: that all states of consciousness are nothing more than mental processes.

‘When I ”report” a pain, I am not really reporting anything…[this is the] suggestion I wish if possible to avoid’. He believes that ‘I am in pain is a genuine report…what it reports it an irredcibly physical something’. ‘It seems that even the behavious of man himself will one day be explicable in mechanistic terms’.

‘States of consciousness, do seem to be the one sort of thing left outside the physicalist picture, and for various reasons I just cannot believe this to be so’.

‘It is the object of this paper to show that there are no philosophical arguments which compel us to be dualists’… ‘On this view, a man is a vast arrangement of physical particles, but there are not, over and above this sensations or states of consciousness…why should not sensations just be brain processes of a certain sort?’.

REMARKS ON IDENTITY

Objections to the view that ‘the proess reported in sensation statements are in fact processes in the brain’

1. ‘The things we are talking about when we describe our sensations cannot be processes in the brain because…any illiterate peasant can talk perfectly well about his after images, or how things look and feel to him’- he is basically talking about neurophysiology when he knows nothing about the subject.

REPLY- ‘An illiterate peasant might well be able to talk about his sensations without knowing about his brain processes, just as he can talk about lightning though he knows nothing of electricity’.

2. ‘It is only a contingent fact that when we have a certain kind of sensation there is a certain kind of process in our brain…It is possible that our present physiological theories will be as out of date as the ancient theory connecting mental processes with goings on in the heart. It follows that when we report a sensation we are not reporting a brain process’

REPLY- This objection ‘does not show that what we report is not in fact a brain process’

3. If 1and 2 do not succeed in showing that ’sensations are over and above brain processes, they do prove that the qualities of sensations are something over and above the qualities of brain-processes’…’A sensation can be identified with a brain process only if it has some phenomenal property, not posessed by brain processes, whereby one-half of the identification may be, so to speak, pinned down’

REPLY- When we explain what we are experiencing, we are merely describing what something is like….’There is something going on which is like what is going on when…’. We explain things abstractly, without resorting to neurophysiology or mentioning brain processes. All sensations can be explained in terms of complex neurological properties, but we need not mention these properties to speak of the sensations. (??)

4. ‘The after-image is not in physical space. The brain process is. So the after image is not a brain process’.

REPLY- ‘I am not arguing that the after-image is a brain process, but that the experience of having an after-image is a brain process’…’There is, in a sense, no such thing as an after-image or a sense datum, though there is such a thing as the experience of having an image’…’We describe the experience by saying, in effect, that is it like the experience we have when, for example, we see a yellowy-orange parth on the wall. Trees and wallpaper can be green, but not the experience of seeing or imagining a tree or wallpaper’.

5. It makes no sense to say the experience of something yellow is to say that the ‘molecular movement in the brain…is swift or slow, straight or circular’

REPLY- ‘I am not claiming that ”experience” and ”brain process” mean the same thing, or even that they have the same logic’…’The ordinary man, when he reports an experience is reporting that something is going on, but he leaves it open as to what sort of thing is going on’…’We may easily adopt a convention whereby it would make sense to talk of an experience in terms appropriate to physical processes’

6. ‘Sensations are private, brain processes are public’…’It makes sense to say that two or more people are obverving the same brain process, but not that two or more people are reporting the same inner experience’

REPLY- ‘This shows that language of introspective reports has a different logic from the language of material processes’

7. ‘I can imagine myself turned to stone and yet having images, aches, pains and so on’

REPLY- ‘I can imagine that lightning is not an electrical discharge…But it is. All the objection shows is that experience and brain-process do not have the same meaning. It does not show that an experience is not in fact a brain process’.

8. ‘How could descriptions of experiences, if these are genuine reports, get a foodhold in language? Forany rule of language must have public criteria for its correct application’

REPLY- languge about experience ‘differs from the corresponding perception statement in so far as it withdraws any claim about what is actually going on in the external world’…’To say that something looks green to me is simply to say that my experience is like the experience I get when I see something that really is green’.

In conclusion, what is being put forward here is replies to common arguments that experiences are NOT brain processes, while J Smart is arguing that they ARE

McDowell, ‘Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge’

READING NOTES

‘On any question about the world independent of oneself to which one can ascertain the answer by say, looking, the way things look can be deceptive: it can look to one exactly as if things were a certain way when they are not…It follows that any capacity to tell by looking how things are in the world independent of oneself can at best be fallible.’

Even though we seem to have ‘deceptive cases experientially indistinguishable from non-deceptive cases…in a deceptive case one’s experiental intake must, ex hypothsei fall short of the fact itself, in the sense of being consistent with there being no such fact’. But becaue both deceptive and non-deceptive cases are experientally indistinguishable, we must admit that both are fallible because we cannot know about the external matters of fact.

McDowell then turns to show how we can resist this unwelcome result (that nothing we can perceive can be truly knowable, because deceptive and non-deceptive perceptions appear indistinguishable). Ie. He is resisting the argument from illusion (that all we know is sense-data).

‘Even in the non-deceptive cases we have to picture something that falls short of the fact ascertained…as interposing itself between the experiencing subject and the fact itself’ - what is being said here is that when we experience an illusion or a fact, all we are perceiving is an apearance. This appearance lies between oneself, and true fact. This is all we have access to.

‘But we are not to accept that in the non-deceptive cases too the object of experience is a mere appearance, and hence something that falls short of the fact itself…We are to insist that the appearance that is presented to one in those cases is a matter of fact’. This is saying that although we are always perceiving mere appearances, this is not to say that appearance of the deceptive and non-deceptive things are the same. An appearance of a fact, is a fact that is being disclosed to the experiencer, as opposed to a mere illusion, which is just an appearance.

‘One acquires criterial knowledge by confrontation with appearance whose content is, or includes, the content of knowledge aquired’ - we gain knowledge via appearances. But…

‘If the object of experience is in general a mere appearance, as the ‘highest common factor’ model makes it, then it is not clear how, by appealing to the idea that is has the content of the knowledge that one acquires by confrontation with it, we could save ourselves from having to picture it as getting in the way between the subject and the world’  - So, If factual experience is mere appearance, it’s hard to see how this appearance does anything more than get in the way of our view of the real world. What is its point?

The phenomenological argument is: ‘The occurance of deceptive cases experientially indistinguishable from non-deceptive cases’. This can be shown to be inconclusive by McDowell. He says ‘In one kind of case what is given to experience is a mere appearance, in the other it is the fact itself made manifest’. He is attempting to show that there is a difference between deceptive and non-deceptive appearance.

The objection to this would be ‘a mere appearance can be indistinguishable from what you describe as a fact made manifest. So in a given case one cannot tell for certain whether what confronts one is one or the other of those’. (This is internalism: what is being experience internally is the same. It is only the unreachable external in which something is different).

‘The disjunctive conception of appearances shows a way to detach this ”internalist” intuition from the requirement of non-question-begging demonstration’…. ‘The obtaining of the fact is precsely not blankly external to his subjectivity’ (ie. the internalist thinks external fact can only be found externally. But McDowell is showing that mixing the external with the internal will give is knowledge, and will differentiate the deceptive from the non-deceptive).

Wikipedia says:

‘McDowell’s realism, in which it is denied that the argument from illusion supports an indirect or representative theory of perception as that argument presuspposes that there is “highest common factor” shared by veridical and illusory (or, more accurately, delusive) experiences. (There is clearly a distinction between perceiving and acquiring a belief: you can see a stick bent in the water but not believe that it is bent as you know that your experience is illusory. In illusions, you need not believe that things are as the illusory experiences represent them as being; in delusions, a person believes what their experience represents to them. So the argument from illusion is better described as an argument from delusion if it is to make its central point.)

In the classic argument from illusion (delusion) you are asked to compare a case where you succeed in perceiving, say, a cat on a mat, to the case where a trick of light deceives you and form the belief that the cat is on the mat, when it is not. The proponent of the argument then says that the two states of mind in these contrasting cases share something important in common, and to characterise this we need to introduce an idea like that of “sense data”. Acquaintance with such data is the “highest common factor” across the two cases. That seems to force us into a concession that our knowledge of the external world is indirect and mediated via such sense data. McDowell strongly resists this argument: he does not deny that there is something psychologically in common between the subject who really sees the cat and the one that fails to do so. But that psychological commonality has no bearing on the status of the judger’s state of mind from the point of view of assessing whether she is in a position to acquire knowledge. In favourable conditions, experience can be such as to make manifest the presence of objects to observers - that is perceptual knowledge. When we succeed in knowing something by perceiving it, experience does not fall short of the fact known. But this just shows that a successful and a failed perceptual thought have nothing interesting in common from the point of view of appraising them as knowledge.’

TO BE UPDATED

The Argument from Illusion

The argument from illusion is an argument for the existence of sense-data.

When we observe a straight stick half submerged in water, it appears bent. This is an illusion.  Seems the stick is not in fact bent, the bent stick that we are seeing is an illusion. It is examples like this that have lead some philosophers to argue that what we see (the bent stick), is not what actually exists in reality (a straight stick).

Therefore, all we really perceive is said to be non-physical ’sense-data’. This is all we can be sure of. We do not know how much, if at all, this sense-data represents the real world. All that we are really aware of is this non-physical experience in our own personal theatre.

In other words, what we are perceiving is not the stick, but mere sense-datum of a stick.

This is what the argument from illusion sugests.

David Chalmer’s ‘Consciousness and its place in nature’

5.10 Type-E Dualism (Epiphenomenalism)

This is the view that ‘phenomenal properties’ are different from physical properties. That phenomenal properties can have no effect on the physical. In other words, there are two properties, the physical and the mental.

‘Physical states cause phenomenal states, but not vice versa’. So the psychophysical laws run only from phenomenal to physical, not vice versa. So the causal chain can only move in one direction- form the physical to the ‘mental’. Our mind cannot have a direct effect on the physical world.

Type-E dualism is compatible with substance AND property dualism, and is supposed to respect both consciousness and science. Many people think this theory is counterintuitive. If the theory is true, then phenomenal states can have no direct effect on our actions. For example, when I feel pain, this does not CAUSE me to move my hand away from the flame. The phenomenal state is not the cause of a physical action.

Even though this view is often seen to be false, there is no evidence to show it to be so. Evidence only shows a connection between a mental state and a physical state. I.e. certain experiences are typically followed by a certain action. There is no causation here, just a common coincidence, which leads us to a belief that it will always happen- that there is a causal connection. (Hume on causation)

So, if epiphenomenalism were true, it would point to the same situation. It APPEARS that consciousness has a causal relationship to out physical actions, where really it is just coincidences that have lead to strong beliefs that there is a causal connection.

Another objection to Type-E Dualism is that if consciousness is epiphenomenal then it’s evolution via natural selection would not have been possible as the consciousness could have no effect on the choices of the body. The reply to this is that there are psychophysical laws that surround the physical and phenomenal. It evolution selects physical properties, then these laws will will ensure that phenomenal properties are brought forward too. As the physical improves, so does the phenomenal.

Another objection is that ‘If consciousness does not affect physical states, and if beliefs are physically constituted then consciousness cannot cause belief’, because the phenomenal cannot cause anything physical. Even if this is not the case, it is still unclear how the theory can ‘accommodate a causal connection between consciousness and belief’.

To respond, it would be said that knowledge does not require a causal connection from belief. There is an immediate connection, not a cause, between experience and belief. The experience does not cause the belief.

Another objection- My zombie twin reports the same things as me. I am justified, he is not. This is what appears to happen with Type-E dualism, as we have said these reports are caused physically, not phenomenally, so their should be no difference in them. If this is the case, the belief is the bearer of justification, something that the Type-E dualist previously went against.

Chalmers thinks there is no difficulty here, even though it does seem counterintuitive. Again, he turns to his ‘lucky coincidence’ theory.

He thinks epiphenomenalism is a coherent view with no fatal flaws, but does produce a fragmented picture of nature, where physical and phenomenal properties are only weakly integrated into the natural world. It is a counterintuitive theory, but its counterintuitiveness and inelegance are better than incoherence. If arguments point us to this view, then it should be taken seriously, while still looking at other theories.

THOUGHTS

So, epiphenomenalism is the view that there are two properties- the physical and the phenomenal. The physical can affect the phenomenal, but not vice versa, They are loosely connected with the natural world, which leads to problems, and causation is denied in favour of some harmonious view of nature, and crazy coincidences.

I’m not sure. If this is the case, then what is the point of consciousness? why has it evolved if it has no real purpose other than make us self-aware?