Thursday 3/8

Thursday 3/8

Consciousness I: The (Hard) Problem

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Synopsis

Before highlighting themes from our discussion today, I would like to draw your attention to a problem that has struck me as rather more acute than usual and one we considered at some length today: Excessive absences.

Missing Class

I've been disappointed to see so many missing class lately. To be sure, if you happen to be sick--and the flu clearly taken its toll this semester--I much prefer you not come to class. You pose a bio-hazard to the rest of us when you insist on attending while ill. Stay home, get rest, be miserable, and get well soon knowing that we are wishing you a speedy recovery. Be sure to notify me by email or text, however, that you've got the creeping funk and have chosen to miss class so as to rest-up and avoid passing the funk on to the rest of us.

Missing class to study for a test or work on a paper for another course (or even this course) is another matter altogether.

Now, I understand the inclination to skip class to study for a test, because I've done it myself. Unfortunately the data do not bear this strategy out. That is, last minute cramming has been repeatedly shown to be mostly ineffective in improving test performance. Worse, youmiss classdoing so. You take a double hit. Realistically you won't do much if any better on the test, and you get behind on the material in the class you're skipping.

To be sure, it is possible to miss some classes without getting behind, whether because the content of the course is shallow or the pace of the course glacial. Our pace is rarely slow even when we get behind, and no one would describe this material as shallow. You can't, in other words, miss this course without getting well behind in it. Think of it this way: We have scarcely 28 meetings all semester long. Each meeting is accordingly precious as their supply is so short. Indeed, this is one of those courses I always regret for want of more time. Two-hour classes would much better suit these investigations, if only to permit more in-depth discussion, questions, and arguments.

But I digress: My point is that in missing class to attend to other classes, you make a common mistake. You get yourself behind in a course for the sake of an additional one and one-quarter hour additional studying for an examwhich will have almost no affect on your actual test performance.

Need I also mention how spectacularly galling it is to have students attempt to split the difference by studying for an exam in another class while in class? Your studying is ineffectual, your attention split, and your understanding of our discussion inevitably lackluster.

The upshot is that you need to come to class even if you are frantic about an upcoming exam, but you need to set the exam aside to focus on class. If it all gets to be too much for you to control, come see me. I can direct you to people who can help you learn time and stress management skills, which is all this comes to in the end.

Our discussion about excessive absences today came down to how to manipulate people into attending. It seems that this is pretty much a universal problem on this campus, so there are lots of schemes out there for improving attendance. I figure if you want to do well in a course you should attend. Evidently there are lots of examples where that is not the case: Students do well without attending. I don't know how that works, exactly. I suppose if this is the drift of the university, we should just put up degree vending machines on campus. Insert however many tens-of-thousands of dollars, and get your degree. No fuss, no need to worry about attendance, or assignments, or reading, or discussions, or lectures, or, really, anything that makes college a challenging, transformative experience. There aren't too many downsides here. Faculty could focus on their own research to the exclusion of nearly everything else, campus would be uncrowded and uncluttered, and birds would sing--the birds, at least, that manage to escape the cats. Maybe I'm on to something here...

Today's Class

Although not in this essay, David Chalmers elsewhere draws a useful distinction it is important for us to bear in mind. Thus far we have been concerned with the problem of original intentionality, which bears on mental states insofar as they are functional states--that is, insofar as they play roles in the mental economy or how the mind does what it does. For example, my belief that it is raining today, along with my desire to stay dry, explain my grabbing an umbrella on the way out the door. Beliefs, desires, and intentions play specific roles in the mental economy, just as dollars and euros do in the international economy.

There is, however, another side to mental states: There is something it is like to have them. To want a glass of red wine is, on the one hand, to have a desire for the glass, and, on the other hand, to feel the pull, if you will, of the red wine. There is further something it is like to actually drink the red wine and satisfy the desire for it. These raw feels or qualitative experiences associated with mental states collectively fall under the problem of phenomenal consciousness. Why, in a nutshell, should there be anything it is like to be in a mental state of any sort?

The problem of phenomenal consciousness is usually cast as a problem for physicalism: At least some mental facts--facts about phenomenal consciousness, in particular--are not physical facts; hence no version of physicalism, including machine functionalism, is true. Thus phenomenal consciousness is opaque to science, since science only trades in physical facts. Put another way, science cannot explain how phenomenal consciousness emerges in a purely physical universe.

The problem phenomenal consciousness presents is as simple as it is devastating. As Nagel points out, no study of bats can ever reveal what it is like to be a bat. As much as we might learn about echo-location and nocturnal navigation, a bat's phenomenal consciousness is intrinsically perspectival: We can never know what it is like without already having that perspective, which we would have only if we were already bats ourselves.

It is no surprise to find that the problem is equally pressing for our project of understanding the mind 'vis a vis' Dretske's Dictum. Roughly put, there is nothing it is like to be a Turing Machine. If phenomenal consciousness is not physically accessible, then it's not computationally accessible, either. Searle's response to the Robot Reply to the Chinese Room Thought Experiment anticipates this point, for it is clear that Searle-in-the-Robot sees nothing the Robot's video cameras record, hears nothing the Robot's microphones pick up, and feels nothing the Robot's tactile sensors contact. Searle sees, hears, and feels nothing in the Robot's environment because all he is doing in the Robot is transforming strings of symbols (data-streams) as they are generated by the Robot's cameras, microphones, and tactile sensors. So even though there is something it is like to be Searle himself as he sits there in the Robot furiously transforming strings of symbols into other strings of symbols according to specific rules, there is nothing it is like to be Searle-in-the-Robot inasmuch as he is necessarily blind, deaf, and numb to the Robot's environment.

If this is an appropriate extension of the Chinese Room Thought Experiment to the problem of phenomenal consciousness, then it follows that robots are necessarily philosophical zombies. That is, regardless of the variety and sophistication of its behavior, there cannot be anything it is like to be a robot.

This is the hard problem of consciousness: For creatures like us there is something it is like to be, just how is there something it is like to be them? How does a squishy lump of greyish/whitish matter have phenomenal consciousness insofar as it is not merely aware of things in its environment, it has experiences of them as having various qualities?

Over the next few weeks we will underscore the seriousness of these questions by examining in some detail three kinds of arguments which appear to show that there is a fundamental gap between the physical (or the computational) and the phenomenal:

  1. The Knowledge Gap
  2. The Modal Gap
  3. The Explanatory Gap

Each set of arguments start from wholly distinct assumptions but disconcertingly converge on the conclusion that phenomenal consciousness, a capacity we all take for granted even as we value it more highly than anything else in the Universe, is not itself a physical process of any sort. We begin after Spring Break with The Knowledge Gap.