Exploring Phenomenal Consciousness: Reducibility, Variation, and Cognitive Phenomenology
Delve into the rich realm of phenomenal consciousness, dissecting the interplay between sensory and conceptual elements. Contemplate the essence of cognitive activity, sensory features, and the potential inclusion of non-sensory aspects within consciousness. As you ponder reducibility, variation, and the irreducible cognitive phenomenology, unravel intriguing arguments about subjective experiences and understanding. Challenge your perception of phenomenal sameness and the intricate facets of conscious experiences beyond mere sensory inputs.
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The Cognitive is Phenomenal Too Lecture 6 Critique of Tye & Wright Charles Siewert Rice University siewert@rice.edu
Siewert: framing the issue Conceptual Activity: is or can be expressed in language, requires capacities for voluntarily making person-level inferences, classifications and analogies. Sensory features: found in the activity of various standardly recognized perceptual modalities, along with bodily feelings of pain and pleasure, cold and warmth and kindred sensations along with whatever analogs of these there might be in imagery. Merely sensory features: sensory features whose possession at a time is insufficient for the occurrence of conceptual activity at that time.
My issue: Does phenomenal consciousness include more than what is merely sensory? Another possible issue. Does consciousness include non-sensory features? These are not the same issues, because there could be sensory features that are not merely sensory. I m interested in my issue, because I think the basic question is: how richly cognitive is phenomenal consciousness? I also suspect that the exercise of human intelligence normally involves experience that is significantly both sensory and conceptual. If so, it is a waste of time to focus on alleged non-sensory phenomenal features. But that does not mean that consciousness is exhausted by non- conceptual or representationally primitive sensory states.
Reducibility and Variation Is what it s like to occurrently think and understand entirely derivative from what it s like to have concomittant merely sensory features? The question of Reducibility? Do subjectively discernible differences in ways of thinking and understanding constitute differences in what it is like for us to have the experience we do? Variation. Irreducibility + Variation there is cognitive and not merely sensory phenomenology. Thought is phenomenal;
Yesterdays Argument #1: Re-reading (the elusive duplicate ) Contrast experience of reading a passage without comprehension, reading it with what that s like for you, how it is experienced by you. Can you in thought identify a hypothetical sensory duplicate, whose experience would be subjectively the same as yours if the interpretive/conceptual activity actually present were stripped away? Two similar arguments drawing on the experience of understanding.
Similar Arguments #2. Delayed understanding. Not getting, then suddenly getting what someone just meant (without re-reading). Is there always merely sensory feature you can identify, that will yield for you relevant judgment of phenomenal sameness? If not, then Irreducibility. And then: Is what it s like for you just the same regardless of how you understood the utterance? Can you account for why knowledge of meaning would go away if Variation is denied? If no to one or both, then Variation.
Similar Arguments #3. Interpretive switch. Suddenly changing what you take someone to be saying: what that s like for you. Is there always merely sensory feature you can identify, that will yield for you relevant judgment of phenomenal (experiential, what it s like ) sameness? No? Irreducibility. And: is what it s like for you the same regardless of how your understanding switches and in what order? Can you account for why knowledge of meaning would go away if Variation is denied? No to one or both? Then Variation.
An example of switch Distractedly, I heard on the radio the ambiguous phrase Assad s killers : interpretive switch. There was a change in what it was like for me to hear the phrase one way, then to realize it had a different meaning.
Prinzs replyyou havent ruled out the possibility of introspectively hidden imagery experience Prinz would say (?) As this switch happened, Siewert, unbeknownst to himself, may have first very quickly visually imagined some people killing a man, and then: a man ordering others to go kill someone. Or else, as Siewert heard the phrase Assad s killers , he may have unintrospectibly quickly imagined whispering to himself the words: People who killed Assad and then immediately likewise imagined the words, People Assad had kill for him .
My response to Prinz He imposes an absurd burden of proof. I should not be required to rule out the possibility that I formed such images, while introspectively oblivious to their occurrence No I just need lack of a good reason to think both: (a) That when I introspectively deny such imagery experience I am in fact mistaken, and (b) That, if I had formed the hypothesized images meaninglessly, with the interpretation stripped off, what that would have been like for me is just what it was actually like for me to experience the radio report. What Prinz needs is a good reason to think both (a) and (b) are true. As far as I can see, there isn t one.
One more argument strategy: An argument from boredom.
Consider the opening of The Jabberwocky `Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!"
An argument from boredom 1. How interesting it is to read depends on the character of the experience one has while reading. 1. Jabberized reading : this is what is approximated in an English speaker s reading of the opening stanza of Jabberwocky typographical forms, syntactical structures recognized, sometimes accompanied by visual and auditory imagery without understanding a meaning in what you are reading. 2. If Inclusivism is false, then what it s actually like for us to have our experiences of reading actually never (essentially and nonderivatively) differs from what it would be like for us to have nothing but experiences of Jabberized reading. 1. If that s what our reading experiences were always like for us, then reading would often be much more boring to us than it actually is. 1. Therefore, Inclusivism is true.
Tye and Wrights attack on cognitive phenomenolology Specifically on David Pitt s views (in The Phenomenology of Cognition (2004)). Proprietary: what it s like consciously to think a particular thought is different from what it is like consciously to be in any other sort of mental state (327) Distinctive: what it s like consciously to think a particular thought is different from what it s like to think any other thought Individuative/Unique: Pitt says the phenomenology of a thought constitutes its representational content. Tye glosses this as any [conscious] thoughts with the same content must have the same phenomenology (331) From this last Tye infers Pitt is committed to saying that what it s like to think a thought expressed in English must be the same as what it s like to think the thought a Mandarin speaker expresses in a sentence which translates the English one)
Tyes prima facie case against The quintet: perceptual experiences; bodily sensations; non-linguistic imagery; linguistic imagery; emotional experience (conceived of as not essentially involving anything cognitive/conceptual) the alleged cognitive phenomenology of thought is to be accounted for in terms of the phenomenology of our quintet (329) the only phenomenology that is to be found when a thought is introspected is the phenomenology of these and other such states [the quintet] introspection just does not make readily available any phenomenal character that conforms to the phenomenology of thought thesis
Against Hurlburts evidence Subjects report they were just thinking something, but can offer no consistent description of the content of the thought. T&W: they really didn t think the thought they claim just subsequently say they did because this explains their behavior (it s confabulation ) Or else the beeper sound masks their verbal imagery from recollection. Or else they had nonverbal imagery they ve forgotten.
Put up or shut up and the incredulous request If the experience of thinking a certain thought has a phenomenology of the special kind charted above, then what is it? Put up or shut up! Time flies example. Take away all associated images, all the relevant perceptual experiences, all the experienced bodily reactions, all the emotional responses. Do you really think that there is any phenomenal difference left? (337)
Tye and Wrights temporal argument 1. Thinking the thought that claret is delightful does not unfold over time. ( it s not as though one first grasps the noun claret and then the copula is and finally the adjective delightful as a successive process. (342) 1. If thinking that claret is delightful has its own distinctive phenomenal character then the thinking does unfold over time. 1. Thinking that claret is delightful does not have its own distinctive phenomenal character
My responses. First, The uniqueness/individuative claim, as Tye interprets it, is non- essential to the core thesis, a distraction. It s no consequence of Irreducibility and Variation that (eg) there is some separable identifiable bit of phenomenal character common to English and Mandarin expressions of the thought that p. (It is also unnecessary to read it as an implication of Pitt s 2004 statement of the thesis.) Maybe what it s like to think a verbally expressed thought is experientially fused with its expression and/or inseparable from the surrounding context of one s thought experience. That s compatible with irreducibility + variation.
For still (in the Mandarin/English case): the phenomenal character of neither speaker s experience is reducible to (eg) that of sound experience that could occur in the absence of thought/understanding, and the phenomenal character of each speaker s experience would be sufficient to make it the case that they were exercising conceptual capacities sufficient for thought. However, it is open that we should concede something to externalism: phenomenal character yields the thought content (sometimes? usually? always?) that is expressed in ordinary language, only in conjunction with context. (Maybe: A two factor view of thought content is advisable)
The key idea It s NOT (as Tye seems to think): take away everything sensory from an experience of verbally expressed thought then you will find a conceptual thought component that is experienced in just the same same way, no matter how it s expressed, or whether it s expressed at all. No. Rather the idea is: if you take away everything conceptual/interpretive from an experience of verbally expressed thought, you won t find a merely sensory component that is experienced in the same way all on its own.
Tyes Put up or shut up! demand This demand is either reasonable but easy to meet, or impossible but unreasonable. And it is a demand that can be turned with greater justice on Tye.
Response to a reasonable but easy demand What it s like to think a certain thought is, for example: what it s like for me to think on an occasion that claret is delightful when what this is like for me is irreducible to merely sensory features and is sufficient to make it the case that I then and there understand claret is delightful as I do distinct from the way I would understand expressions of other thoughts eg., Riesling is wretched .
What is it like for one to think claret is delightful? An impossible but unreasonable demand: Say what that is like which will convey it to me even if I myself don t entertain the thought that claret is delightful. This is an absurd request: you could frame it only if you already grasped the thought the claret is delightful, and hence knew what it was like to think it. Much more unreasonable that asking me to try to convey to you what it s like to taste pineapple, if you haven t ever tried it.
Tyes prima facie case against cognitive phenomenology Really is not a case : just consists in asserting that the experiential character of thought is exhausted by that of his quintet. There is no attempt to confirm this by considering what it s like for him to understand, and then trying to find some merely sensory features such that having just these in the complete absence of understanding would be experientially just the same. But without finding these, there s no reason to accept Tye s claim. To put it less politely: the reductionist needs to put up or shut up! When I try to discover the sensory features to which my experience of thought is reducible, I find (to again borrow a phrase from Tye) that introspection just does not make readily available any phenomenal character that conforms to his Reducibility thesis.
Tyes temporal argument is fallacious It can take (a little) time to think that claret is delightful (that can be a temporally extended episode) even if one does not successively think bits of the content. Why not say this? The content clause characterizes a temporally extended experiential episode, but is not partitioned among its temporal parts in series of events. Plus, no reason to think that instantaneous, temporally unextended occurrences can t have phenomenal character.
Conclusion Examination of Tye confirms what was said about Prinz: lack of agreement over cognitive phenomenology is NOT due to the fact that introspection returns conflicting answers to the very same questions. It s not even due only to differing proposed explanations of agreed- upon data. It has a lot to do with a significant lack of shared assumptions about: what each side is committed to, what questions are crucial to addressing the issues, and what the burdens of proof are. (Common in philosophical disagreements?)
Conclusion A strong case can be made in favor of including the experience of thinking/understanding irreducibly and variably in what it s like for you to have experience This case is based on phenomenological arguments + a clarification and defense of my assumptions + a critique of those of Prinz, Tye, et al. Professional consensus may be unlikely here but what do you expect? It s philosophy. And why assume philosophy stands or falls with institutionalized consensus building? It s enough for it to be provide rational self- understanding. Consensus is a bonus.
