Ep. 401: Mind/Brain Identity Theory (U.T. Place, J.J.C. Smart) (Part Two)

Scientific essentialism and brain processes

0:00Hey, you're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 401, part two. We've been talking about UT Place's article, Is Consciousness a Brain Process? We will at some point here, fairly shortly, get to JJC Smart's Sensations and Brain Processes. But I think we are just about to get to section five, the physiological explanation of introspection and the phenomenological

0:35fallacy. And Seth, you had finished us up last time by, I think, expressing some skepticism about the idea of scientific essentialism, that what somebody says lightning is, motion of electrical charges. They're not just giving a property of it. They're trying to establish what the scientific explanation of it is. And metaphysically, we might say he doesn't use this, that, you know, that's the essence, the real thing that is the lightning. Of course, we could be wrong about it. It's not like we're intuiting the essence. We're scientifically exploring the essence.

1:08But still, once we found it, and Kripke would go so far to say, once you found it, then even linguistically, like when we refer to water, we are in fact referring to H2O. We're not just referring to whatever liquid might be sloshy and clear and drinkable. So we actually are even the logic. Once you've established the essence, the logic comes to reflect the newly established essence. So there could be another world where, sorry, I'm just trying to piss off, Seth. Yeah, let's. Mark, I thought you were going to resist referring to Kripke. No, but.

1:41It was on my mind. No, but it's a good example. But the part, but to me, the more controversial thing is the

The phenomenological fallacy and perception

1:47phenomenological fallacy. That's the thing to get pissed off about. Yeah. Well, and I think the thing here is, this is not a negotiation. It's not like I'm upset with the situation. It's, and not the interlocutor. It's this. Okay. We start with lightning is a motion of electric charges. And then lightning is, we say like, oh, that makes sense. That statement, lightning is a motion of electric charges is validated because in the cases where observation

2:20and observation is made by the man in the street, as he says, of lightning, we are able to, we could in theory, scientifically measure the motion of electric charges. And thus we say the motion of electric charges is the cause of the observation by the man in the street of lightning. So we've moved from a statement of identity to a statement about causality of

2:53perception or observation. Yeah. It's proposed and it's, he doesn't justify it, but he's trying to say, he's trying to ask the question of when are we entitled to make these identity statements in these particular types of cases. And the proposal is that we can make them when the one layer is what I'm calling it, right? Explains the other. Right. So my question is just simply this, does it make sense to you to talk about a notion of

3:26causality and a notion of identity to connect the notions of causality and identity in this way? I don't know, but it's a way of distinguishing the moon tides example, right? Not all things that are correlated are identical. So it's a better candidate for identity. Well, right. So the moon is a causal one, right? The moon causes the tides. So he's not saying, so I think this is like I was saying last time about the, where smart will say, if it's correlated,

3:58then it's not identity. And likewise, if it's causal, it's not identity. You are identifying two things if you say they're in causal relation. But I think that smart just sees science as a matter of there's some fluidity in these categories, right? That correlation is the first level. Causation is a tighter level of connection and identity is the tightest of them all such that you could. I'm not, I don't know that I'm completely answering your, your objection, Seth, that. Well, the idea that you're saying it's a continuum and that identity is tighter than causality

4:31gives me a different way of looking at it. In these cases, it must include the causality. I think intuitively we would say there's something about composition going on here too, right? The things are made up of, right? And this is what he wants to call the identity of composition. So we get composition plus causality. What is it made of? Well, and we had this notion of upward causality in Avicenna, right? It was one of the sort of Aristotelian, you don't necessarily for causality have to have two events that are discontinuous in time.

5:07One is before the other. You could have the nails and the organization of the wood and the wood itself be all the causes together of the house in that sense of causality. So I think that's the sense of causality that would have to be at play here. So in the case of the brain and mind in section five, we need to be able to say that the subject's introspective reports can be explained by what occurs in the brain. That's the identity at stake here. And then we get the, you know, what he calls

5:39the physiologist worry, which I think would be something like the zombie worry that we have, you know, that Chalmers brings up today, but it's right. It's not a logical self-contradiction to think that we could have an experience that doesn't have a brain state behind it, right? Or maybe I'm characterizing this wrong. No, that's the claim that, yeah, that's Chalmers zombie argument, right? That there's no logical contradiction between these things. It might be that they're not like, it's not nomologically possible. It's not like physically possible, but there's no logical

6:11contradiction between you can have an experience without a brain state. Yeah. More narrowly, it's, we can't logic, right? There's no a priori derivation of particular experiences from what's happening in the brain. All we can do is say, oh, let's observe this brain state and then see what someone's reporting and then they give us the report and then we establish a correlation, but we can't say why it's this particular, speaking of electricity, right? It's all electricity. We can't say why it's this particular pattern of discharges that is this thought and this particular

6:42pattern of discharges, which is that thought. So I think that's in the same domain, that kind of worry. Basically, the physiologist is worried about two parallel events, right? One that's mind stuff and one that's physical, one that's physical and one that's like psychic or whatever, cyclical. They're worried about those two things. So the physicochemical and the psychical, and they interact as Sherrington's claims. And to bring in one of the examples that we used in the Dennett, when you want to describe how somebody is hearing a stereo recording that makes it sound,

7:16it makes it appear to them like that the drummer is in front of you to the left and the guitarist is in front of you to the right. The physiologist is going to understand how the music was recorded onto the, whatever the medium is and how the medium is coming out through the headphones. Give, you know, give your electronic account of that. And then physiologically how the ear is taking it in and passing it to somewhere in the brain. But then he says, vision, this is a quote from this Charles Sherrington, vision is saturated with a strength property called projection. The unargued inference that

7:49what it sees is at a distance from its seeing self. So in this case, the last steps of, well, how does the brain then convert it to the sensation of somebody hearing the drummer over there and the guitarist over there? It seems that there is, as we were discussing ad nauseum with the Dennett, a phenomenological, a phenomenal field in, you know, just, just based around this one sense, the auditory sense of some things being closer to the right and some things being closer to the left that we now see what smart and a place are going to say is like, well, the experience I'm having

8:22right now is as if the drummer were in front of me to the right, et cetera, but it's not then. So the, the phenomenological fallacy, when the subject describes his experience, when he described how things look, sound, smell, taste, or feel to him, he's describing the literal properties of objects and events on a peculiar sort of internal cinema or television screen, usually referred to in the modern psychological literature as the phenomenal field. Which is the critique Dennett has of the Cartesian theater, essentially. Yep. Maybe a little less radical, but it's, it's there. How do we feel about that?

8:54So we're, yeah, we're up to the green after image. Wes, does that bother you? Well, it bothered me and Dennett, you know, because I don't, I never took the claim of Locke, for instance, to be that we have this right. And even as it's, is it smart? I think smart is the one who concedes this ultimately is. Yeah. They were never saying that ideas are green or something like that, or that we have the, that our experiences are simply of, right? Intentionally of the ideas. The ideas are the

9:29intentional medium and it's, they are the thing through which we grasp reality or sometimes not, you know, sometimes we're deceived. So I think it's, it seems to me to be a simplification of the view, although smart is fully aware of this. So I don't. Yeah. This is where they diverge the papers for sure. And how they deal with, we'll say, qualia, the phenomenological fallacy is one. And then of course, smart wants to say, well, we can translate this stuff into something more topic neutral. We can just, but he acknowledges, you're right, that there's something here that we should be concerned with. Whereas place just

10:02thinks they're just make a mistake that you're just done. Nothing is green on like whatever television screen you think you're watching or whatever in your head or something like that. Yeah. So it's a little, I mean, I don't know, you know, the thing is, I feel like I don't fully understand and maybe Mark can explain it. There's something here. There's something interesting about this idea that experience is a kind of process. And in a way it's as a process, it's right. What is a process? You know, it's happening in the brain. We can think of that as a process,

10:35but when we talk about at the, what's happening subjectively at the process level, well, in a way that is, there's no qualia at the process level. I'm giving a very vague intuitive, trying to get at, you know, what I think might be appealing about this, but I don't think I can do a very good job of it. I don't know. Mark, do you have?

Behaviorism and the status of qualia

10:55Well, this is, I think is very clearly not behaviorist, right? He starts place, starts this essay by saying, look, despite what the behaviorists are saying, and maybe you could say, you know, maybe we can translate you having a dispositional belief that the world is round to when it comes up in conversation, you will say things like, yeah, the world is round. You will make your travel plans. If you're going to go, you know, if you're going to visit all these places, you're not going to, you know, come back to your home. So you're going to go around the

11:28world. You're going to be okay with, you know, so maybe dispositionally we can be behaviorists, but there are certain experiences like the reporting of a pain where place says there's something going on inside us. And so he has no problem with saying, I am experiencing a green after image. That is, we're never going to get rid of your report. That the question is, is the content, is the intentional content of that, which seems to be the green after image,

11:58is that an actual thing in our ontology or not? And he wants to say it is not. He's not a behaviorist, but he is an illimitivist. So in a way, there are no such thing as qualia, I think, which are, which smart will say more. Yes. More openly and directly. And I think we, at an intuitive level, I think at least I, and I assume you guys, you know, it's hard, it's kind of hard to wrap your head around that. Maybe you got into this in the Dennett, any sort of delimitivism about consciousness or qualia. I can say that I'm beginning to maybe understand the appeal of it a little bit more, but like

12:31Chalmers, right? I don't know how you do that because if you say it's an illusion, I forget which philosopher made this point first, but, you know, to say that my, the qualia red at this given time is just a illusory. Well, I don't see the distinction between an illusory qualia and the actual qualia. I forget if Dennett responds to it, but he probably does. But yeah. Yeah. I mean, some people say qualia are seemings and Dennett does acknowledge we have seeming. So some people think that means he's wrong about whether we have qualia. That's, that's a live. Yeah. To me, the seeming just would be the qualia, but.

13:03What are they seemings of? Are the qualia the mere having of an experience? Because then why even introduce the word qualia, or are they the thing that the experience is of? And I really like that it's presenting this. You know, we had this detour into epistemology a couple of years ago where we read Reed, and then we read the Nyayas. And they had the idea that, you know, that was reiterating what was in Searle's book that we talked to him directly about, which Wes has already referred to the accusation that the modern philosophers, Descartes, et cetera, Locke were saying that because of

13:39the problem of illusion, even in the veridical case, we are never experiencing directly the external object. We are always experiencing our own filtered idea of it. And of course, physiologically, we understand that we experience via the senses and the senses are not necessarily, in some sense, they might be passing an image back, or at least there's a judgment that occurs. There's a discrimination that occurs somewhere along the way. So yes, there is, there are things that can go wrong in our perceptual system so that we are no longer,

14:13you know, we're not direct realists, you know, not the least because of this basic Hegelian thing that like, well, we're always bringing in concepts, right? This is the Kantian point. So there's always this, some mechanism that hooks us to the outside world. But that is not to say that we are always just experiencing our own idea. In fact, let's just say we're experiencing the world. And then when we do have an illusion, we're saying, I'm having an experience that is like when I was experiencing the world. And in fact, we only are able to have illusions. We're only able

14:45to diagnose them as illusions because normally our experiences are veridical, are causally connected to the world in this way. Yeah. This is why he uses the phrase literal properties of objects. They want to leave the properties out there in the world. It's not that we have, right? It's not representationalism where there's some way in which the properties are inside of us on our representational screen or whatever. And so the properties are out there. And yeah, we explain illusions by saying, yeah, we're having

15:16the sort of experience that we would have if we were experiencing the object and we were normal observers and blah, blah, blah. Yeah. I mean, this is again, I harped on this a little bit in the Denon episode, but this is why I think visual metaphors aren't as good at teasing out why you might be interested in something like qualia or felt experience because I'm totally on board with the idea that we don't see a green on some screen that we're, when we have the kind of brain process that's causing a mistaken report, it's just the type of process that normally occurs when that's happening. I get that. And so like, but I would wonder how this phenomenological fallacy applies to something like feeling exhausted

15:49or if I don't see it as having the same kind of, because now we're not talking about properties of things out there. I'm talking about what I actually, the property of feeling tired, which doesn't seem to be anywhere but my own experience. Does that make sense? And so I always color is an easy one to say, well, no color is actually that object is red. We're not seeing a screen where the red is located in our experience. We're seeing the red apple. But if I'm talking about my experience of feeling exhausted, that where is that? That's in my experience. Does that make

16:20sense? Yeah. But I think, I think even with color, if we're talking about dreaming, for instance, right, where we know that we're hallucinating or dreaming or something like that, we know we can, or you can put someone in a chair and like Penrose did and give electrical shocks to their brain and make them experience green or red or whatever. So we know like that the brain and the VAT scenario is theoretically possible. We don't need real world inputs to give us all of those experiences, which inclines us to think, okay, well, there is this separate representational realm of ideas,

16:51but I think we can all agree that, right, he's, there's no green thing in the brain. The brain is not green. And likewise, there really isn't any green thing in the mind. And this, this I think is important and true. Even if we're representationalists, we know that the ideas can't be green. Ideas don't have color properties. They can give us the experience of color, but they don't themselves have color properties. So I think to get it where these guys are coming from, I think that would be the, the line of thought to go down and give some, you know, think about it further.

17:24First off, you know, Chris, to your point about feeling tired, there's no seeming, you can't say it seems to me, I'm having the experience of being tired that I do when I'm actually tired, veridically verifiable in the real world. You're tired or you're not, you're feeling tired or you're not. So that type of, if you want to call that an experience, but of course it's not the, you know, it's like, okay, now we're talking about experiences that are not linked to sensations that we would

17:54typically associate with like seeing, hearing, smelling, so forth. Although there is definitely sensations, bodily sensations that are driving that. But I think this is why I keep coming back to this analogy, you know, around the difference between we're talking like that ultimately this is supposed to be an ontological problem. Is there a non-material essence or object or thing in the brain that is different and separate from experience, but we keep talking about observation and verification.

18:25And so if you want to restate the question, it's not, are there qualia? It's, is there a possibility that we would ever be able to externally verify internal subjective experience? Yeah. No, because if we could, then ultimately we're like, oh, well, it's just like, we can explain electrical charges and that's why you, we can explain why you have the experience that you have in virtue of the phenomena, your sensory apparatus, the way, you know, the history and all that kind of thing. So yes, we can explain why you have the experiences that you do, but that's not explaining

19:00what the experience actually is. And then I guess the question would be, okay, if you move down that chain, like we've established electrical charges, we've established light hitting the visual, blah, we've established thunder and all that kind of stuff. Now, can we have the same scientific explanation of the brain processes, like get the, move the explanation left towards or right towards the actual experience? Then if we could explain the brain processes, would we get any closer to explaining

19:33the experience than we are when we say electrical charges happening in the air, blah, blah, blah, light hitting the eye, et cetera, et cetera. And that's why I'm saying, I'm not sure it's an ontological question. It may be epistemological that we're thinking it's ontological because we're struggling with locating where it's happening and figuring out how to validate it or verify it

Epistemological versus ontological questions

19:55or explain it. I was going to say, I agree with you that it's, that both of them, I think are important questions. Like I'm, I'm someone who's very sympathetic to the idea that there is an epistemological gap between these things. There's no amount of third person description is going to get you first person. I believe that, but the separate question of, does that mean that these things are ontologically distinct is another question you might be interested in. Whereas I'm less sympathetic to that. Whether you think they're qualia depends precisely on what you mean by qualia. And there was some reference in the, uh, the Stanford article that made me think that

20:25actually Chalmers has a very weird transcendent version of qualia that like you do not exhaust the qualia by your experience of it. It's actually something that has proto-conscious. Anyway, we need to go back and read some more Chalmers about this. He does not just mean, is there an object in the, I'm just going to say phenomenal field that corresponds, that is what you are being aware of that is different than right. Smart is actually going to say when you make, you don't know that you're referring to a brain state when you say I'm exhausted, but you are in fact referring to a

21:00brain state, just like you might not know that water is H2O. But when you refer to water, you are in fact, because of the identity referring to H2O. So I think exhaustion is a great one. It's even better than pain because pain, we sort of think is there's a, just an, a feeling of pain. And the question, like, could you have an illusion about pain? It seems like you are either in pain or you're not in pain. I was thinking of in Dune, the gum jabbar that makes you feel like you're, you know, you put your hand, Paul Atreides puts his hand in the thing and he feels this overwhelming pain and he feels

21:33like his hand is being destroyed. And as soon as he takes his hand out, he realized that his hand was not being destroyed. It was in a sense, we would want to call that an illusion of pain and illusory pain. Like, yes, he was definitely feeling it, but pain is supposed to be an indicator of some sort of harm. And he actually wasn't experiencing the harm. So exhaustion, likewise, even more clearly, it's about depletion. You might finish this podcast and say, wow, I feel so exhausted. But actually then immediately you go and go for a bike ride and like, well, I was not exhausted. I just was kind of tired

22:07of this particular activity so we can misunderstand our own qualia. We can misunderstand our own experiences. So like, okay, that actually wasn't exhaustion after all. Tiredness, more clearly, tiredness should be, I want to go to sleep, but there are many ways in which this is why there's a distinction between exhaustion and tiredness because exhaustion is sort of more subjective. Oh, I could just feel exhausted. I feel tired with my life. No amount of sleep will make me feel less tired with my life. It's an existential, you know, an angsty.

22:40So I think in these cases, yeah, I mean, it's a very good point. We've talked about this on Close Reads too, Mark, but the current feeling can be a mismatch to the overall effective state. So you think at any given time, well, I'm exhausted. And currently, yeah, you can't be wrong about that in a way, but you could be wrong about the overall state and be done with the podcast and realize, oh yeah, I'm not actually exhausted. I was something else. So yeah, I think it gets very interesting and complicated about what qualia mean and what level of generality we're talking

23:16about them at. You know, we could definitely drill down into that, but maybe we should, should we just say a little bit more about what he says about the phenomenological fallacy? I could just read from this paragraph before we move on. The phenomenological fallacy in which this argument is based depends on the mistaken assumption that because our ability to describe things in our environment depends on our consciousness of them, our descriptions of things are primarily descriptions of a conscious experience and only secondarily, indirectly, and inferentially descriptions of the objects and events in our environments. So I think this is a

23:49way of describing representationalism. It is assumed that because we recognize things in our environment by the look, sound, smell, taste, and feel, we begin by describing their phenomenal properties, which they produce in us, and infer their real properties from their phenomenal properties. In fact, the reverse is the case. We begin by learning to recognize the real properties of things in our environment. It is only after we have learned to describe the things in our environment that we can learn to describe our consciousness of them. And we do that by reference to the actual physical properties of the concrete physical objects. So the conclusion here, when we describe the

24:25after image is green, we are not saying that there is something, the after image, which is green. We are saying that we are having the sort of experience which we normally have when, and which we have learned to describe as looking at a patch, a green patch of light. So I just wanted to read that to get listeners to up to this conclusion, this, you know, the experience we normally have conclusion, because it's going to play a big role also in SMART. And can I ask Chris then, after just hearing that quote, I am feeling exhausted equals I'm having

24:55the sort of experience I normally have when I am exhausted. So being exhausted is an objective behavioral even thing, but maybe I could be wrong right now because, but I'm still feeling, you know, but we don't have to say there is an exhaustion that I'm detecting in my phenomenal field. We can just say exhaustion is a way of saying something about the state of your mind and body. And in this case, I don't know if I really am exhausted, but I have this feeling that I normally get when I am

25:28exhausted, when I'm objectively exhausted. I mean, I have to think about that a little bit, but maybe this would come back to the seeming point that Wes was making about then it, if it seems, I mean, like if there's a felt experience of exhaustion, then they're just, that is a real thing. And it doesn't connect to any object outside of my brain. I mean, you could say it's identical with the processes in my brain, you know, interacting a particular way that they interact when I actually am physiologically exhausted or something like that. And that produces a kind of phenomenal experience of the organism being exhausted or not being able to think clearly about something,

26:00not being able to stay awake, not being, I mean, these sorts of, yeah, I don't know. I think these guys would admit that we are having the experience of the green patch, even when it's not there. Yeah. I might be talking about Dennett too much. I might be, yeah, fine. And you are having the experience of being exhausted. It's just, what is the content of that experience? Yes. It's not in our ontology, right? Yeah. It's not that the green patch is, right, is this thing, is this entity. I mean, I wouldn't call it an entity, but I'll call it a biological phenomenon, the experience

26:30of being exhausted. Yeah. So as long as we're okay with that, but is the experience an object? I mean, I guess not, but I, you know. So the experience is a process. Yeah. And it's specifically a brain process. And it gives us the experience of greenness without greenness being itself an entity in any ontology. And that does remind me a little bit of Sartre and this idea that right consciousness is a nothingness in a sense. Do we really want to say the ideas in the mind are entities in our ontology? This is where I begin to see the

27:03appeal of this. It's kind of a weird thing to say. So it's just, in the end, it's just mysterious, right? Should we try to do a little bit of Sartre? Yeah. I don't think we want to have a separate second episode to cover this Sartre one because he really is, it's almost like he's doing secondary literature and tweaks of the place. The place was the important one. Again, he's bringing in some things, some stuff from this Feigl, and we've already talked about a lot of how they are different. But a lot of it is he just goes through a bunch of objections, Sartre, to the is of strict identity, right? That he's

27:39Sartre wants to, again, say, not just that brain processes are correlated or temporally continuous, spatially and temporally continuous with mental processes, but that there is strict identity between them. And we can say a little more about that. Should we just jump to three?

Strict identity and smart's thesis

27:55Yeah. I mean, objection one and two are the same kind of logical arguments about meaning in reference, essentially, where he kind of goes over versions of that. But objection three is when he starts, wants to introduce his, like, his way of dealing with qualia, that... Well, I'm just thinking of section three here, the statement of the thesis. Stating it precisely. Sure, sure. Yeah. It's not that by after image or ache, he means that it means brain process. This kind of just repeats, but I just wanted to touch on it real quick. It's not that sensation statements can be translated into brain process statements, nor is it the logic that a sensation statement,

28:29right? Nor is it that the logic of those is the same. The thesis is just that when I report something, that something is, in fact, a brain process. And sensations are nothing over and above brain processes. And then he gives that nations, citizens example. Nations are nothing over and above. Citizens. That's the point. And then he goes into remarks on identity, his identity in the strict sense. Yeah. I want to add something about that. So you might want to, is the old man the little

29:02boy that he used to be? And you don't want to really say that. So this is sort of like morning star and evening star. Like, well, the old man is old. Just to throw in a little historical bit, Leibniz's law says, if things have different properties, they have to be different things. So Descartes used this before Leibniz came up with it, of course, to say the mind can't be the brain because, you know, just think of all the mental properties that I have direct access to the mental. Even just, this is sort of the refutation of Leibniz's law, that if I don't know that the

29:38morning star is the evening star, then one of the properties that the morning star could have could be like, well, I'm looking at it right now. I'm out in the morning. I'm not looking at the evening star. So therefore, but no, clearly we want to say the morning star and the evening, they are one in the same object. So the fact that, so the way this smart puts it in terms of the old man, well, there's a 4d object that is the human being that throughout its life. And yes, the old man is a time slice of that 4d object. And the, and the little boy is a time slice of that 4d

30:12object. So the same way you could say, yes, it's one in the same object that is visible in the evening, visible in the morning, but you know, you're just referring to a different time slice of it or something like that. Just the fact that your, the relational properties to you are not real intrinsic properties of the thing. They're not essential properties such that you could say, well, because I'm looking at the morning star and I don't even know about anything about the evening star. I've never even seen the evening star that therefore they're different, that this is just another way of saying, you know, if you say every property has to be the same,

30:44that's another way of saying these definitional and logic things that have already been ruled out. So let's jump to objection three, which I think is the most important. Mark is the one you're describing by Max plaque. Yep. But before that, I just want to say this contrast he's making between the number example and the time slice example, he wants to say the brain process identity is more like the former and not like the latter. So it's identity in the strict sense. The strict sense is the number example. The non-strict sense is this. Say the number example again. Seven is identical with the smallest prime number greater than five. That's the brain process type

31:18of identity, not spatial or temporal continuity, and not to say that, you know, so-and-so is the same person at different ages. Those are more complicated examples. But anyway, objection three,

Max Black and the third objection

31:31Max Black, this to me is the most important and difficult, right? He acknowledges this is the most difficult objection. He calls it the most subtle objection and the one that he's least confident in having met because, and this is kind of the way I started out with my opening statement. The objection is that the identification, right? This whole morning star, the evening star thing that Mark was bringing up again requires properties on each side of the identification. There is a property being the morning star. There is a property being the evening star. And likewise, there is a property

32:05of being a yellow flash. And just because you say it's identical to a brain process, just like the morning and evening star are identical, doesn't mean you've gotten rid of it. It's still a real property. So to reply to that kind of objection, he has to get into all kinds of gymnastics. Wes, you're such a property dualist about the planet Venus. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm very sympathetic to this as well, that I agree with Wes that I don't know if his solution of just being topic neutral about like, hey, we can re-describe this in a way that doesn't

32:37commit us to, oh yeah. Well, let's, yeah, let's describe this in detail though, because this is confusing. Yeah. Say what he's, explain how he's going to reply to these objections. There's two parts to this, but the first one involves the normal percipient, but go ahead. Go ahead, Chris. Basically, yeah, he's going to talk, he wants to talk about colors. He wants to talk about what a normal percipient is, a person who's more able to make certain color discriminations than another. And he argues that color words function by reference to how a person's discriminatory responses compare to a normal percipient's, not by reference to some intrinsic phenomenal quality.

33:13Right. So we want to, and this, this is reminiscent of the place, right? We want to say this is red means a normal percipient would not easily pick it out of a clump of geranium petals. So you'd pick it out of a clump of lettuce petals, something like that. So it does sound like we get a kind of behaviorist reduction because in this identity, we want to make sure that on one side of the identity, there aren't qualia. I don't think you need this. One person is a more normal percipient than another. If he can make color discriminations that the other cannot. So normality is a matter of ability to discriminate.

33:48Why is it? Wouldn't normal be somewhere in the middle and you could be a more discriminating percipient or a less discriminating percipient? It just, this is just fucking doesn't make sense. It's stupid. But the other thing is he doesn't even need to say it. Yes. Just leave it out. Say normal percipient. We do need the word normal, but like, can't you just say we understand what it is? The word normal is very important here. Do you know why the word normal is important? Why is the word normal important here? Because if we didn't have that word, we would have to start talking about all the variations,

34:19the varying conditions and under which people perceive things and the differences in their cognitive apparatus and how things actually look different to them at different times and circumstances and with different sorts of eyes and things like that. So we're not going to get anywhere. If we reduce, if we want to do a reduction and get rid of the qualia, we're not going to get anywhere if we don't acknowledge that fact implicitly that there are going to be these differences. Have you ever walked into a paint store and looked at the samples? Yeah. It's a, there's, it's a glorious experience. I would never want to reduce that to a brain

34:54process.

34:5650 different versions of some kind of white or off white that have names like verdant snow, eggshell, you know, eggshell, you know, mountain green. And they change the names every year to make it look, being able to discriminate those things does not make you more normal. No, I agree with that part. Being confused by them as me. So all he had to say was the part that shows up in the next paragraph, which is I therefore elucidate colors as powers in Locke's sense to evoke certain sorts of discriminatory responses in human beings. They are also of course, powers to cause sensations in human

35:31beings, but these sensations I'm arguing are identifiable with brain processes. So just rewind back the totally unnecessary, completely unnecessary point. Did I not just explain why it's necessary? It's a necessary part of this argument. What do you like the word normal or not? Okay. You don't get anywhere without giving ourselves a standard subject because we're trying to get away from qualia. Right. But he's, this, is this a throwback here to his reference to Wittgenstein or is this the Denet move where he's saying, you know, is this a behavior, is this, is he tying this into

36:04the behavioralist, you know, slash Wittgensteinian thing that he references at the beginning, or is this the evolutionary biological thing that Denet brings up? Ultimately there's, he says a bit more after this, this is where the seeming comes along. This then is how I would reply to objection three. This is page 150. The strength of my reply depends on the possibility of our being able to report that one thing is like another without being able to state the respect in which it is like. I am not sure whether this is so or not. And that's why I regard objection three

36:35is the strongest with which I have to deal. Now, my interpretation of that was he's saying, if we are able to report having a sensation that is like a sensation we have when certain conditions obtain in the world, except the conditions are not currently obtaining, then it means we can compare sensations without reference to their properties or causal properties. Is that? Well, without reference to the qualia, to the subjective experience. So I see a yellowish orange after image is there is something going on, which is like what is going

37:11on when I have my eyes open, I'm awake, and there's an orange in, in good light in front of me, which, um, the only reason they don't put that in the paint store is it's too long to stick on the, um, on the labels, but that's the paint that I want, that there is something going on, which, so when you say something going on, which is like all these like bleached out non-qualitative words, he's going to say, these are quasi logical and they're topic neutral. If I use that kind of language, I'm not committing myself to dualism or materialism. I'm not committed to qualia,

37:45although I'm not committed to the other point of view either. It's all topic neutral. And analogously, right. When we say someone in the room, you know, even if there's a doctor in the room corresponding to the qualia or actually the brain process, I think actually someone will have to explain that example better than me, but yes, but the idea is that we can get out of talking about the qualia and translate it into this version of secondary qualities, lock secondary qualities,

38:15which are defined in terms of brain processes at a logical level in terms of this general analysis, where you compare a, what is going on to what would be going on if you were sitting in front of an actual object with the actual property. So let's leave the properties in the world. Let's not try and put them in our heads as qualia. So if you say I'm having an experience right now, that is like when I'm seeing something orange, it does seem like you are comparing. How would you know? You're not

38:48saying there's a brain process that's going, I know a lot about brain processes when I normally see orange. And I'm pretty confident that this is that same brain process. What you mean is I have a private language. I have some way of tracking over time memories of my own experiences. And I remember seeing orange in the past and I'm connecting this experience of orange with that experience of orange. Even if I'm using these topic neutral world words, like there's something going on. What I mean when I say that I feel like is a reference to the qualia, to the orange, this orange qualia is like

39:24the previous orange qualia. And I know that Dennett had these complaints about memory and stuff that I don't want to reiterate, but. Wait, so you said it doesn't work, Mark? You're saying that you think it's still references, even when we use this topic neutral language, you're still talking about. I feel like I was launching off something that one of you guys said that at least to question Smart's account here. Yes. Yeah. Well, he acknowledges this, right? I think it's in here. I don't think it's just in the Stanford article. This word like is a big problem. Yeah. Like in what

39:55respect? This is, I think, Mark, you're just giving the objection that Smart himself acknowledges in this paper and that may not be overcomable. He admits that because like, what does that mean? It seems like we have to refer in the end to the subjective feel, to the quality in order to establish likenesses between those two experiences. All right. I'm going to make this very specific example because I don't like this. I'm having this. It seems like I'm having an experience of an orange or whatever. Like, okay, you're sitting in a room. There's an orange on a table. You're staring at it. You have an

40:26image of it. Great. I come in, I take the orange away. Maybe I turn off the lights. I'd say, close your eyes. Now picture that orange, picture that scene. So you do. And you say, yeah, I have it in my head. It seems to me that I'm having the same experience that I did by virtue of picturing this. I go, great. Right? So we know the orange isn't there, but you're having the experience before the orange was there. So we have two different sets of causal situations. Right? And when I was talking about

40:57moving the verifiable observational element to the left, suppose I monitor your brain first in the one case where you're actually seeing, there's seeing going on. And second in the case where you're imagining or visualizing it in your head. Right? So if we have a way to measure quote unquote brain processes, not just simply an MRI scan, if the brain processes are the same, that would be interesting.

41:28But what if the brain processes there are different? They are, I think, just to clarify. Yeah. I mean,

Token-token identity and functionalism

41:34I think they're probably the same in some respect in that the visual cortex, when you were explicitly internally imagining something, the visual cortex, I would expect to light up in some way. But as I'm sure you're pointing at Chris, not in exactly the same way. No. And humans just say, well, it's because it's fainter. Well, well, you're also accessing memory that you wouldn't be accessing things like that. But yeah, there'd be different. And not accessing. Yeah. So wouldn't that kind of say something about this notion of reference that you're, you know, that you're trying to say like, oh, the experience

42:05just is the brain process. Well, no, the experience just is two different brain processes. Or it's two different experiences of two different brain processes. They are two different. This sort of gets into the token type identity issue, technically, because you might think that, yeah, look, there aren't literally one-to-one, like identical. But you might think that the visual, you know, having experience of an orange or whatever is realizable in different ways. Different processes can realize the same sort of experience. So you might say, well, you're still having the experience of the red-orange.

42:37They're just realizable in different ways in the brain. And so you might say, they're still identical to a process, just not one-to-one. That would be like the difference between. When did the orange become red in this example? Anyway. Did I say red? Yeah. The red-orange. I let it go. They can be a blood-red-orange. Yeah, sure. Does that make sense though, Seth, that they could, I mean, someone might just sidestep that and say, in terms of them still being identical, I agree with you that that might be a knock against type identity. Well, it's just, yeah. Well, but Seth, you defined it in terms of memory versus perception. What about,

43:09I see an orange at time A, I see an orange at time B. Wouldn't you expect that the same brain process is involved, even though it's not guaranteed? Maybe the brain is so neurally plastic that maybe you had a stroke in between those. And in that part that was seeing the orange the first time is now not available, but other neurons have rushed in to pick up. But it seems like then you give a functionalist analysis. You don't give, so this is getting beyond the scope of this paper into the stuff that was talked about in the Stanford. But we've read some about this in our discussions of

43:42functionalism and how functionalism connects to materialism. Some people think that they are opposed because a materialist, a brain, again, it's easiest if you think about computer brains, like, well, if a computer can think about an orange or perceive an orange, it clearly is not doing so with neurons. Therefore, there can't be a type type every time somebody sees an orange, this part of the brain. But it could be, I think, Smart points out, one of the two points out in their more recent papers, whether it was the more recent UT Place or the Smart Stanford article, that it could be a

44:17matter of degree, that you would expect, you know, your instantiation of pain over time and your instantiation compared with your mother's instantiation and other human beings to be closer than the aliens or whatever. Like, maybe we just don't have any. So, token token and token type are not mutually exclusive. There could be, you know, a range of possibilities. Ultimately, we can give a functionalist account and as the Stanford article claims or Smart claims in the Stanford article, you might see these as precursors to functionalism. And the functions can

44:49be instantiated maybe in silicon just as much as the brain. It can be instantiated in different ways. I don't know. Did we want to touch on any other objections? I think this was the most important one and the one that he says, I'm not sure whether he's met. I've met it. The strength of my reply depends on the possibility of being able to report that one thing is like another without being able to state the respect in which it is like. That's a very serious problem. And it really is really, really just restates the problem of the hard problem of consciousness. Can we really get rid of

45:23the qualia side of the equation? And I think what I liked about this paper is, is he admits there's some modesty here, right? That it may not be possible, but if we're going to do it, we're going to do it in this way. And this way involves these incredible gymnastics jumping through hoops to talk about what it is like when something is going on and all that stuff. The topic neutral sentences being the gymnastics. Yeah, both of them. They acknowledge the hard problem and they fail to respond to it in a satisfying way. And you found it. Well, they say, look, you know, if we're going

45:58to do this, if science suggests that we ought to try to do this, this identity thing, if we're going to do it, this is the way we're going to have to do it. And yeah, I'm not sure it works, but it's good to know what happens when you follow this path to its logical conclusion. And I do think it gives us some insights because it's hard to get rid of qualia, but it's hard to keep them. I do think a lot of paradoxes arise when you start thinking about it. Yeah, I get what you mean. I guess I just,

46:29I want to carve out a place where we can not take the hard problem as serious, but also think there's a kind of non-reducible physicalism going on, I guess. Yeah. That sounds kind of weird, but that's where I find myself a lot. Like I'm okay with things being certain parts of phenomenal felt experience being not the same thing as the processes in almost Davidsonian way, right? They're identical in some sense, but they're not reducible.

Private sensations and public brain processes

46:57And any other objections that you want to touch on? I did like objection six. Sensations are private, but brain processes are public. It gets back to this theme of observation and verification. He says, all this shows is the language of introspective reports has a different logic from the language of material processes, which is another way of saying like, yeah, my experiences might be brain processes, but I don't have experiences. I can't describe them in the language of brain processes. My experiences are described in a different language. And it's obvious that until brain process theory is much improved, there's no criteria for saying

47:29that Smith has an experience of such and such, except for relying on Smith's introspective reports. And this is my note saying brain processes can be observed by more than just the haver or the person having the sensations, but not sensations is another way of phrasing the problem, not an objection so much as a restatement. But if we say that until sensations are externally observable or verifiable, they must be treated differently from observable physical processes. That's something. So this is almost like compatibilism. Like as long as we can't

48:00actually verify this fact, it's as if we have qualia or it's as if we have, you know, it's like free will, even if we don't, our experience of it is this way, even if we can't cash it out in terms of some other language. Yeah. He seems to think that it might be solvable someday. Like we might eventually have a way to, but you might just reject that and think that there will always be this sort of like epistemological gap between the two. Like there's no, like I said, there's no amount of third person description that's ever going to get you or magically transform into first person descriptions. And that just might

48:33be the structure of those two. And I agree with that. I think that that's a kind of, that's a view that I I'm totally down with that. There, there is an epistemological gap between those two things. They're just not, they're not the same thing. Obviously having an experience and knowing an experience are not the same thing. Whether or not there's an ontological gap though, I back off from that. Well, and the epistemic issue is not reducible to the logic of the relevant sentences, you know, which seems to be where smart keeps moving toward to just say, well, of course, you know, as Davidson also acknowledge when we are making statements about our own internal states, that those have

49:10a different, what do we consider as Davidson put it, you know, when I say this motivated me, that the language of motivation and the logic of motivation is different than the logic of brain causality. But yeah, the epistemic axis is not just that. Exactly. That's why I find, I was going to say something similar, Mark. I think you're saying something similar to what I was, you're saying something that is like what it would be for me if I had said no, but, but yeah, I, this is why I find this answer to objection six on

49:42satisfying. I feel like I don't fully understand it. This movement to distinctions between the logic of different projects and different types of language. It's just seems to me like an evasion of the epistemological issue. But yeah, I agree. I don't think we're going to resolve it by figuring out or somehow making the languages or the logic between the two ideas commensurable or something like that. Like we're not, I think that there really is structurally a gap there between the two, like, you know, scientific descriptions of what things do versus what things are kind of thing.

50:15So I don't think it's resolvable. All right. So we're getting to our sort of concluding statements. I think there is still room. I had suggested another reading by C.D. Broad that is about emergentism that I think Dylan would be excited about, because I feel like we haven't really read anybody that's talked about the mental as something over and beyond. Like, even if you think that it has causal antecedents, you know, and that the brain is necessary for creating mentality, maybe there is something metaphysical and not just logical, not just epistemological. We can say that, no, no, the

50:48mental is something over and beyond that. Wes and I discussed a Galen Strawson article on Close Reads that simply denied that. But I feel like let's read Broad or somebody else. Everyone is crazy for thinking anything other than what I believe. Yeah. That was Strawson's attitude, I imagine. Yeah. There's also a dangler for me in the idea of zombies. And here in Objective 7, we get sort

Zombies and the dualist hypothesis

51:13of inverse zombies. So the idea of zombies is, could some creature have all the same behaviors that we do, including their own reporting of their own experiences, but yet the lights are not on. They don't have qualia. They don't have consciousness. Here, it's just, couldn't I imagine that you do have states, internal states and consciousness, but yet there is nothing going on in your brain, right? This is sort of an initial logical point that if it meant, if saying I have this desire, I have this pain meant something that's going on in the brain, then we would not have that

51:48distinction. Yeah. So, I mean, did you think, it seems like his response to Objection 7 here would also rule out zombies, right? To say that, you know, yeah, you could imagine this, but you can imagine lots of dumb stuff. You could imagine rocks that talk. You could imagine immaterial souls. In fact, when you imagine that nothing is going on in the brain, what you're really imagining is like, well, there's like a ghostly soul. There's still a substance that is having, that is serving as the foundation. You just think it's, you know, a Cartesian soul or something like that.

52:19Yeah. I'm sympathetic to the idea that this aren't just because it's an issue of imagination. We talked about this a little bit in the Denet, but I don't, I don't think philosophical zombies are conceivable in the sense that Chalmers wants to talk about, but you know. No, I think they're conceivable, but yeah, I think the objection here, right? So I can imagine myself turned to stone and yet having images and pains. Smart's response is that when you imagine that, you're imagining experience as this ghostly entity and that's composed of ghost stuff.

52:51And for Smart, the ghost stuff is, it's really just brain stuff. Well, isn't he also saying it's, yeah, just, it's invoking sort of parsimony here where he's saying like you're, you're positing another stuff that doesn't do anything for us almost. He's Occam's razor ring it, right? Where does he do that? Composed of ghost stuff. It's saying, he's saying it's coherent, but it's needlessly extravagant as a rival hypothesis to just identifying as brain stuff. Let me see if I can find them. 153. Yeah. So the counter experience. Okay. So it is composed of something, not of nothing after all. And on his

53:23view, it'll be composed of ghost stuff. And in mind, it is composed of brain stuff. And then the person comes back at him and says, you know, well, actually I don't need to use this idea of composition because experience is just simple. It's a simple, it's not compounded of anything. It's not composed of anything. That's Descartes. Yep. And yeah. And this, he calls a quibble. So for if it were taken seriously, the remark, what can be composed of nothing can be composed of anything could be recast as an a priori argument against Democritus and animism, et cetera.

53:58We must therefore construe the word composed in a very weak sense, which would allow us to say that even an indivisible atom is composed of something, namely itself. The dualist cannot really say that an experience can be composed of nothing. For he holds that experiences are something over and above material processes. That is that they are a sort of ghost stuff. I say that the dualist hypothesis is a perfectly intelligible one, but I say that experiences are not to be identified with ghost stuff, but with brain stuff. That's what I mean.

54:31I think this is actually, this is actually a strong point. I think that he's making.

54:36Yeah. What happens when we start to say, you want to say qualia or entities? Well, what are they made of? What are they composed of? What kind of entity are they? That becomes a problem. So I think this takes us to his final point in the paper after he's considered these objection,

Occam's razor and scientific simplicity

54:52which is the difference between him and Place. That again, Place saw this as a scientific hypothesis and you would go and test it. But Smart points out that the issue between materialism and epiphenomenalism, right? The idea that there is something over and above that is the mental, but yet that it doesn't actually have any causal, it's not involved in the causal chain. The issue is not empirical, right? There is no conceivable experiment which could decide between materialism and epiphenomenalism. And that he just ends by giving the sort of comparison

55:23to a certain kind of creationist. They're saying, I accept the fossil record as it is. I just think that God created the universe 5,000 years ago with all those fossils in it. And there's no scientific way that you can rule against the person. Again, it's just questions of scientific simplicity, just what makes sense. So it ends up... Inference to the best possible explanation is what he's getting. Yeah. This is where he brings up Occam's razor. Yeah. Yeah. He's basically just saying like, it costs too much to buy Philip Goss' idea that,

55:54you know, 4,004 BC was in the world. Yeah. And this for me is weak. Invocations of Occam's razor are weak. It's not like there's trying to add epicycles, right? It's just one thing or two things. Occam's razor doesn't mean you have to go from two things to one thing. So if there were epicycles and it were convoluted, Occam's razor is about preventing ad hoc additions to your theory. It's not clear that the second thing is necessarily ad hoc. And they do this, Philip Goss does this for panpsychism. I think it's a very weak argument to say, well, we got to get

56:25rid of the mind part because of, sorry, in Goss' case, it's different, but you know, we got to get rid of something because it's a second thing and we need one thing. I don't think it works.

Concluding thoughts on consciousness

56:35All right. Any final thoughts, Seth, do you feel better about these articles now that we've talked about them? No, you know, this seems to be a running theme, but it's just like, okay, this is part of a discourse. And it's like, when we read them, we have to fall into that discourse and use those terms and agree. And when you try to say like these two sentences you just wrote, do not follow. There's a convention that nobody's questioned or, you know, like they're using language that makes it seem like they're connected, but the reality is

57:07it doesn't even make sense. Or if it does make sense, it's so convoluted that you need to do a lot more work to explain it. And we just sort of like, okay, well, let's just keep rolling. I find it frustrating and irritating, but, you know, I brought up the issues that I thought that I, you know, like, is this actually an ontological question or is it an epistemological question? Why do we keep bouncing back between, you know, statements of observation, talking about our experience of things, but then also talking about, quote unquote, you

57:37know, facts and a scientific viewpoint, which is not an experiential viewpoint. Like, I think there's, you know, a lot of, it's very confusing. It's a very difficult thing and it's perplexing. It's the greatest mystery that we have is like, what is this thing that we call consciousness? Like, what actually is it? And I don't know that ultimately saying, reifying it and trying to find a place in our ontology for something called consciousness or conscious experiences is worth all the pain. It definitely seems to be something that physicalists and materialists

58:11are desperate to do because God forbid, we should have something unexplained in the world that we can't somehow find a way to, you know, manage, quantize, and then ultimately monetize control. You, you and I are on the same side in this, but the thing is like, for the sake of reading the paper, I just want to try to understand where they're coming from. That's the main task for me. All right. I'm going to just claim baselessly that Chris and I are on the other side. We're on the other side, man. You guys are crazy. We can, we should be using, we should have our capitalist instincts to exploit consciousness

58:45and monetize it. These, we should be endorsing this view and we should try and do what we can to make money off of it. Yeah. All right. Let us say goodbye for the moment. Thank you, listeners for listening. Thank you, supporters for supporting. Reach out to us. Tell us what you want us to cover next. We are at least taking a detour from here. We're going to do a platonic dialogue. The lesser hippias that Chris will not join us for. Nah, yeah, I'm busy.

59:13So we will, and it compares like the virtue of Odysseus to the virtue of Achilles, I believe. Brave. Anyway, so if you're, if you've been watching the, uh, the Odyssey or whatever. Brave versus cunning, I guess. Yes. I think something like that. So it seemed like we need a break from this, whether we go back to it or not, we'll, we'll discuss, we'll figure it out. Good night, everybody. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night.