Devils_Advocate
2020-06-12, 10:41 PM
I recall once seeing an observation that about 90% of philosophical debates are really debates about the meanings of words, with the participants acknowledging this in maybe 10% of cases. I suspect that those numbers are overly optimistic. While words in general are vague, some words are much vaguer than others, and to the extent that philosophy deals exclusively with the vague*, one should expect it to be positively packed with particularly vague words. I've intended for a while to get around to a discussion of just what it means for something to mean something, which seems like it could shed light on a lot of issues. This is not me finally starting that discussion, but I do hope that this preamble will encourage respondents to bear the aforementioned considerations in mind.
*I cannot recall ever having seen "philosophy" defined as "the study of the vague", but this strikes me as a succinct definition of, at least, one sense of the word.
One vague word that comes up in a lot of discussions is "consciousness". Sometimes "sentience" or perhaps "awareness" might be used instead. Let us begin by noting that defining one of these words in terms of another does little to clarify meaning. Often a group of interrelated words have well-established relationships to each other, but far less clear relationships to anything else. The problems with this should be obvious. In this case, we cannot say whether e.g. an organism is sentient if we only know how the concepts of sentience and consciousness and awareness relate to each other, and not to the concept of an organism. For that matter, speaking of three concepts here seems overly generous; these words are almost if not entirely synonymous, with different senses of any one of them differing from each other more than do the words themselves.
I would like for this thread to serve as a place for us to explain some of the things that we understand these vague terms to mean. To clarify, I am looking for more than definitions like "awareness is the property of being aware". We can talk about how these words relate to each other, and about what different connotations we see them as having, but the goal here is to explain how these words relate to other things. It is not my intent for us to establish a single consensus definition of any term. When a word has multiple different commonly used senses, it creates confusion to try to clarify "its meaning" as if it only has one meaning. If one's goal is to understand how language is used in practice, one should acknowledge and attempt to explain such a word's various different meanings.
But I would also like for us to explore and to evaluate the merits of the various philosophical stances that these words are used to describe. In fact, this thread started out as a criticism of a particular concept of "consciousness". I thought that it would be nice to get some feedback, and also to have a reasonably well-constructed argument to link back to whenever I see a certain variety of nonsense (in my view) crop up. However, I'm unclear on how often the particular idea I'll argue against is the one that someone else is trying to express. So in cases in which it isn't, perhaps others can try to clarify here what they really mean, and then I can argue against, or perhaps even agree with, that. And having a repository of various ideas on the subject seems like it could be useful for anyone who wants to understand those ideas better.
So, with all of that out of the way, let me try to kick things off with some of my own musings.
On the Subject of Qualia and the Quining Thereof
People sometimes talk about "what it's like" to have some manner of subjective experience. There's an idea that there's a core, essential, ineffable component to a perception that makes that perception what it is. That while, for example, perceiving the color red may be associated with memories of various red objects, emotional responses, and so on -- may have various other mental correlates -- there is a core subjective experience of redness which is independent of all of the other things related to it.
And my perceptions certainly seem to have that manner of core essential element to them. Indeed, my perceptions seeming to have such core components is very much a part of how I experience them. My considered opinion on the matter, however, is that not only is there no incommunicable essential quality to subjective experience, but that such a thing is not possible; that there quite simply is "no room left over" for such a thing to exist in addition to everything else when everything has been accounted for. I realize that this is a counterintuitive stance. I hope that my readers can grant that our intuitions, even strong intuitions, can run counter to the truth.
The assumption that fundamental units of personal experience can't be shared with others leads to the conclusion that none of us can ever know whether someone else's personal experience is the same as our own. One might imagine that one could get around that through direct telepathic transmission of subjective experience; but the problem is, how can one ever know whether what is received is the same as what is transmitted?
Suppose that a purported channel of direct experience-sharing were opened between you and another person, only for you to find that that individual's perception of every image was the negative of your own, with white replaced with black, red with cyan, and so on; and the other person reported the same. You could conclude "Wow, this person has exactly the opposite perceptions that I have in response to the same external stimuli!" But you could also conclude "Woah, this person's perceptions of color are stored in the opposite way from how mine are, and whatever is transferring stuff between our minds isn't accounting for the difference."
But that's not just an issue with comparing the internal experiences of two different minds. Imagine that your own subjective impressions of color were somehow inverted, but that all of their associations were inverted as well. I'm positing a scenario in which your current perception of white is replaced with your current perception of black, but all of your memories of white are also instead of black, your feelings towards white become feelings towards black, and so on and so forth, with the same happening with each color and its complement. So you'd remember bright black light hurting your eyes, but of course you'd use the word "white" for it, because you remember the word "white" being the word for that color.
If the essential subjective nature of an experience really is separate from everything else about it, it's hard to see how the above-described scenario isn't internally consistent, whether or not it's possible in practice. In which case, you could hypothetically have your essential subjective impressions swapped around without being aware of it. Even if a complete scan of your brain showed no change, how could you know that the opposite perceptions weren't being stored in the opposite way? One might respond that the form in which it is stored is not a separate thing from the perception's essential nature. But even then, it would be impossible to tell the difference through mere introspection.
But that in turn undermines the definitive nature of our personal subjective experiences as something of which we have direct knowledge. If we can't tell whether perceptions were been swapped around, then there doesn't seem to be any particular sense in which we're aware that one of them is one thing and not something else. But even more than that, if the essential component of an experience doesn't interact with anything else, then it's not part of the same system of cause and effect. The metaphorical box that supposedly contains subjective redness could have anything or nothing in it, and that would play no role whatsoever in the construction of the abstract concept of subjective redness. So not only do we not know what's in that box in the sense of having justified beliefs about it, but its contents can't be subjective redness, because they don't play the relevant role, nor any role at all. A gear which turns no others is not part of the mechanism.
*I cannot recall ever having seen "philosophy" defined as "the study of the vague", but this strikes me as a succinct definition of, at least, one sense of the word.
One vague word that comes up in a lot of discussions is "consciousness". Sometimes "sentience" or perhaps "awareness" might be used instead. Let us begin by noting that defining one of these words in terms of another does little to clarify meaning. Often a group of interrelated words have well-established relationships to each other, but far less clear relationships to anything else. The problems with this should be obvious. In this case, we cannot say whether e.g. an organism is sentient if we only know how the concepts of sentience and consciousness and awareness relate to each other, and not to the concept of an organism. For that matter, speaking of three concepts here seems overly generous; these words are almost if not entirely synonymous, with different senses of any one of them differing from each other more than do the words themselves.
I would like for this thread to serve as a place for us to explain some of the things that we understand these vague terms to mean. To clarify, I am looking for more than definitions like "awareness is the property of being aware". We can talk about how these words relate to each other, and about what different connotations we see them as having, but the goal here is to explain how these words relate to other things. It is not my intent for us to establish a single consensus definition of any term. When a word has multiple different commonly used senses, it creates confusion to try to clarify "its meaning" as if it only has one meaning. If one's goal is to understand how language is used in practice, one should acknowledge and attempt to explain such a word's various different meanings.
But I would also like for us to explore and to evaluate the merits of the various philosophical stances that these words are used to describe. In fact, this thread started out as a criticism of a particular concept of "consciousness". I thought that it would be nice to get some feedback, and also to have a reasonably well-constructed argument to link back to whenever I see a certain variety of nonsense (in my view) crop up. However, I'm unclear on how often the particular idea I'll argue against is the one that someone else is trying to express. So in cases in which it isn't, perhaps others can try to clarify here what they really mean, and then I can argue against, or perhaps even agree with, that. And having a repository of various ideas on the subject seems like it could be useful for anyone who wants to understand those ideas better.
So, with all of that out of the way, let me try to kick things off with some of my own musings.
On the Subject of Qualia and the Quining Thereof
People sometimes talk about "what it's like" to have some manner of subjective experience. There's an idea that there's a core, essential, ineffable component to a perception that makes that perception what it is. That while, for example, perceiving the color red may be associated with memories of various red objects, emotional responses, and so on -- may have various other mental correlates -- there is a core subjective experience of redness which is independent of all of the other things related to it.
And my perceptions certainly seem to have that manner of core essential element to them. Indeed, my perceptions seeming to have such core components is very much a part of how I experience them. My considered opinion on the matter, however, is that not only is there no incommunicable essential quality to subjective experience, but that such a thing is not possible; that there quite simply is "no room left over" for such a thing to exist in addition to everything else when everything has been accounted for. I realize that this is a counterintuitive stance. I hope that my readers can grant that our intuitions, even strong intuitions, can run counter to the truth.
The assumption that fundamental units of personal experience can't be shared with others leads to the conclusion that none of us can ever know whether someone else's personal experience is the same as our own. One might imagine that one could get around that through direct telepathic transmission of subjective experience; but the problem is, how can one ever know whether what is received is the same as what is transmitted?
Suppose that a purported channel of direct experience-sharing were opened between you and another person, only for you to find that that individual's perception of every image was the negative of your own, with white replaced with black, red with cyan, and so on; and the other person reported the same. You could conclude "Wow, this person has exactly the opposite perceptions that I have in response to the same external stimuli!" But you could also conclude "Woah, this person's perceptions of color are stored in the opposite way from how mine are, and whatever is transferring stuff between our minds isn't accounting for the difference."
But that's not just an issue with comparing the internal experiences of two different minds. Imagine that your own subjective impressions of color were somehow inverted, but that all of their associations were inverted as well. I'm positing a scenario in which your current perception of white is replaced with your current perception of black, but all of your memories of white are also instead of black, your feelings towards white become feelings towards black, and so on and so forth, with the same happening with each color and its complement. So you'd remember bright black light hurting your eyes, but of course you'd use the word "white" for it, because you remember the word "white" being the word for that color.
If the essential subjective nature of an experience really is separate from everything else about it, it's hard to see how the above-described scenario isn't internally consistent, whether or not it's possible in practice. In which case, you could hypothetically have your essential subjective impressions swapped around without being aware of it. Even if a complete scan of your brain showed no change, how could you know that the opposite perceptions weren't being stored in the opposite way? One might respond that the form in which it is stored is not a separate thing from the perception's essential nature. But even then, it would be impossible to tell the difference through mere introspection.
But that in turn undermines the definitive nature of our personal subjective experiences as something of which we have direct knowledge. If we can't tell whether perceptions were been swapped around, then there doesn't seem to be any particular sense in which we're aware that one of them is one thing and not something else. But even more than that, if the essential component of an experience doesn't interact with anything else, then it's not part of the same system of cause and effect. The metaphorical box that supposedly contains subjective redness could have anything or nothing in it, and that would play no role whatsoever in the construction of the abstract concept of subjective redness. So not only do we not know what's in that box in the sense of having justified beliefs about it, but its contents can't be subjective redness, because they don't play the relevant role, nor any role at all. A gear which turns no others is not part of the mechanism.