PEL Presents Closereads: Gilbert Ryle on Self-Knowledge (Part One)

Introduction to Gilbert Ryle

0:00This is Close Reads, a philosophy podcast with Mark and Wes. I'm Wes Alwyn. And I'm Mark Linsenmeyer.

0:09And so we continue on our philosophy of mind journey. I had wanted to do something from The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle from 1949. We had only read just the introduction to this in our original Partially Examined Life, Episode 21, Philosophy of Mind, because that's the thing that is often excerpted, but it gives you nothing about what his positive view is. This intro, it's actually called Chapter One, Descartes' Myth, is just purely a critique of

0:44Descartes as over-intellectualizing everything, as putting, by dividing the world into mind and matter. Mind ends up having a quasi-material status, right? It's not a material substance, but it's still a substance. It doesn't have a material causality, but it has its own kind of causality. So this is, he says this has been so widely adopted, this is the official doctrine here. But then the rest of the book, we have chapters on the will, on emotion, knowing

1:18how and knowing that, dispositions and occurrences, self-knowledge, sensation and observation, imagination, the intellect, and psychology. And I had picked the self-knowledge chapter to get a flavor of what, really, it's ordinary language philosophy. It's not behaviorism, but it has certain things in common with behaviorism. Like being terrible. Sorry. Sorry. I should be starting out the episode with a good attitude, especially since I've been critical of bad attitude. Open-minded.

1:49So you have no other preconceptions about Ryle other than he was a behaviorist and should be totally dismissed.

1:56Yeah. I mean, I just vaguely remember my negative, my negativity about him from the past, but I might feel differently. You know, we're reading these AI papers now for the next BEL episode. And I think it's important we reconceive our typical intuitions about consciousness and what it entails because it, you know, it's connected to a lot of other complicated ideas like representation and what it means to represent and what it means to have a propositional attitude and all these things that

2:30seem to be possible or some version of them seems to be possible, even if it's not conscious, consciousness, right? And the behavior of language models. So I think, yeah, there are at least the elements of what we would call consciousness, what I would call proto-conscious elements that get taken up into consciousness that I would say are things that we often would restrict to mental states, but

3:01I'm not so, you know, conscious mental states, but I'm not so sure we should be restricting them. This is like part of the broader feeling that I have now about the logos, right? Being out there and everything and the mind just being one manifestation of them. The analytic conceptions of some of this stuff, consciousness, even Dennett, you know, it does connect in certain ways to, if you flip it to Hegel or to ancient Greek philosophy or, yeah. Yes, right. The reason I was attracted to this for doing on close reads, for just dipping into this book, he's very

3:36verbose. Given that it's ordinary language philosophy, he's going to say a lot of things that you're going to agree with because he's just saying what our linguistic practices are, what our attitudes toward these issues are as given in our linguistic practice. So it'd be very hard to, at least on a surface level, disagree. But you had been interested in some of the intellectual progenitors of Dennett's denial of qualia and things like that. I don't, yeah, well, we'll get into to what degree this is behaviorist as we encounter the text. I have listened to this whole book as an audio book

4:11very quickly, trying to do it before my class. We just, you know, I only had the students read the intro just like we did, but I wanted to get an actual idea of the positive vision here. And so I have some good idea, but it's not like I, you know, have studied this or anything. So it'll be mostly new.

The dogma of inner perception

4:33All right.

The dogma of inner perception

4:34Let us proceed. This is a PDF page 199 in the, in the document I will link folks to, or document page 136 in the, the 60th anniversary edition of this document. So chapter six, self-knowledge. Forward. A natural counterpart to the theory that minds constitute a world other than the physical world is the theory that there exist ways of discovering the contents of this other world, which are

5:08counterparts to our ways of discovering the contents of the physical world. In sense perception, we ascertain what exists and happens in space. So what exists or happens in the mind must also be ascertained in perception, but perception of a different and refined sort, one not requiring the functioning of gross bodily organs. Cause that would be gross. And I know some of those modern philosopher, right? Specifically not Aristotle, but I feel like some of

5:39them like said that there, yes, we have our five senses, but then we have inner sense. We should just call it another sense or something like that. I don't know that I can name a particular philosopher that said that, but I feel like that has been something that has come up inner sense as being comparable to the, the outer senses, the mind comparable in what, in what way in that we are scanning the contents of our minds, just like we are scanning the contents of the world. Well, yeah. Isn't it part of

6:14Reed and some of those people, but I, I, I wouldn't say it's, it's actually read. I think that's your, that's who I had in mind. Somebody that we've read in the last five years. I just, I would say, I don't think that they're naive enough to think that, right. That scanning is completely analogous to a sensory organ, taking an object in the world as its object, right? Because this is the thing that kind of gets them criticized by Dana and others, this idea that we're just

6:45replicating this subject object relationship within the mind. And then, then we'd have to do that again at infinitum. The relationship would have to be one of the immediacy, which is the way Kant describes it, right? We don't want to fall into that trap of saying that this, whatever the inner sense is, and Kant uses this phrase, inner sense as well, that whatever it is, it's this, you know,

7:15replication of a subject object relationship where the contents of inner sense are like new objects. So Kant's appearances, there's a weird, right? The domain of inner sense, there's a, there's a weird way in which subject and object are converged in those appearances. And that's something, of course, that Hegel picks up on. I mean, it runs with them more than this. It has been thought necessary to show that minds possess powers of apprehending their own states and operations superior to those they possess of apprehending facts of the external world.

7:47If I am to know, believe, guess, or even wonder anything about the things and happenings that are outside me, I must, as has been supposed, enjoy constant and mistake-proof apprehension of the self-same cognitive operations of mine. I mean, I'm not sure that that follows just merely from an analogy between the outer senses and a sixth sense, an inner sense in that, you know, your eyes could, you could be colorblind. Well, is there something comparable? Seems like if you were drunk, maybe you are having trouble apprehending your inner, I guess I'm asking the question, are,

8:25are there comparable things to being colorblind or, you know, not being sufficiently careful? Definitely not being careful, right? That was Descartes' big thing. Like we can look at these ideas in our heads, right? The idea of God, I'm not consulting the senses. I just have this thing in my inner, in my mind that I can turn over and, you know, try to gauge the origin of. Yeah. It's not that I, we can't have impairments of our senses, right? It's just that if we are to

8:59have knowledge of the external world, assuming that sometimes we do have accurate knowledge of the external world. And I think that he's just describing an argument, a position he's probably going to argue against, right? But that we must assume that we have mistake proof apprehension, incorrigible, in other words, apprehension of the representations within the mind that will correspond to the external world. So the external world knowledge is fallible. Internal world knowledge

9:30is incorrigible, but the latter seems to be a prerequisite of the former, because how would we know the external world if we didn't even know our own thoughts about the external world? But again, I think this is going to, he's going to attack this. It is often held therefore, one, that a mind cannot help being constantly aware of all the supposed occupants of its private stage. Two, that it can also deliberately scrutinize by a species of non-sensuous perception,

10:01at least some of its own states and operations. Moreover, both this constant awareness, generally called consciousness, and this non-sensuous inner perception, generally called introspection, have been supposed to be exempt from error. A mind has a two-fold privileged access to its own doings, which makes its self-knowledge superior in quality, as well as prior genesis to its grasp of other things. I made out the evidence of my senses, but not the deliverances of consciousness or

10:36introspection. All right, let's just make sure we have the two types here down.

10:43The contents of the private stage, which is, I think, what I was just describing. Yep. And then also some kind of perception of its own faculties, I guess, is the way I would put it, of its own, he says, states and operations, right? So it's not just that we see, you know, have apprehension of the ideas and representations in our own mind. It's that we can also see that we have something like judgment and something like whatever faculties. Is that right? Is that what he's doing?

11:15Yes. So the chapter after this is called Sensation and Observation. So he's really introducing this idea of consciousness, but it is the very familiar, you know, we know what the critique is going to be, that we're not witnessing and describing the doings of the private stage. We're just witnessing and describing the things that are out there, and that's actually the way we talk. And so that should indicate, you know, why. So that's very familiar. You know, it was interesting to see something in the language of ordinary philosophy making that now very familiar point to us from the John Searle book

11:48that we discussed and from Reed and from the Nyayas and other people. But yes, this introspection thing, I think this is going to be right what the focus of the chapter is about. And really just we read the purse recently who said there's no such thing as introspection. We all we perceive external things and we make conclusions about inner workings from looking at the outside. But he just kind of said that. He didn't go into a lot of examples and things. So, okay, well, here's somebody working with that

12:21same intuition who actually does give us a crap load of examples. Yeah, I think with purse, it's not that we don't have introspection. It's not unmediated. Everything is mediated, right? So we have an

Privileged access and solipsism

12:34inferential relationship. Yep. One limitation has always been conceded to the mind's power of finding mental states and operations, namely that while I can have direct knowledge of my own mental states and operations, I cannot have it of yours. I'm conscious of all my own feelings, volitions, emotions, and thinkings, and I introspectively scrutinize some of them. But I cannot introspectively observe or be conscious of the workings of your mind. I can satisfy myself that you have a mind at all only by complex and

13:05frail inferences from what your body does. This theory of the twofold privileged access has won so strong a hold on the thoughts of philosophers, psychologists, and many laymen that it is now often thought to be enough to say, on behalf of the dogma of the mind as a second theater, here we go, that its consciousness and introspection discover the scenes enacted in it. On the view for which I am arguing, consciousness and introspection cannot be what they are officially described as being, since their supposed objects are myths. But champions of the dogma, the ghost

13:40in the machine, tend to argue that the imputed objects of consciousness and introspection cannot be myths, since we are conscious of them and can introspectively observe them. The reality of these objects is guaranteed by the venerable credentials of the supposed ways of finding them. There seems to be anti-qualia here. Yep, let's just keep going. In this chapter, then, I shall try to show that the official theories of consciousness and introspection are logical muddles. But I am not, of course, trying to establish that we do not or cannot know what there is to know about ourselves.

14:15On the contrary, I shall try to show how we attain such knowledge, but only after I have proved that this knowledge is not attained by consciousness or introspection, as these supposed privileged accesses are normally described. Lest any reader feels despondency at the thought of being deprived of his twofold privileged access to his supposed inner self, I may add the consolatory undertaking that on the account of self-knowledge that I shall give, knowledge of what there is to be known about other people is restored to approximate parity with self-knowledge. The sorts of things that I

14:48can find out about myself are the same sorts of things I can find out about other people and the methods of finding them out are much the same. A residual difference in the supplies of the requisite data makes some difference in degree between what I can know about myself and what I can know about you, but these differences are not all in favor of self-knowledge. In certain quite important respects, it is easier for me to find out what I want to know about you that it is for me to know the same sorts of things about myself. In certain other important respects, it is harder. But in principle, as distinct from practice, John Doe's ways of finding

15:24out about John Doe are the same as John Doe's ways of finding out about Richard Rowe. To drop the hope of privileged access is also to drop the fear of epistemological isolationism. We lose the bitters with the sweets of solipsism. So he's a Wittgensteinian, right? It's a fear of the private language. And really, if the way that we primarily knew, and this is, he already has covered in this book by this point, chapters on emotion, on the will, other things like that. So if the only way we knew

16:00about such things is just observing them in yourself, then how could you even talk about them to other people? This has to be something that we at least learn even how to observe these things in ourselves through a social practice, through being taught, through being demonstrated. Obviously, there's a lot more to say about that.

Ordinary uses of consciousness

16:19Before starting to discuss the philosophy, okay, this is section two consciousness. Before starting to discuss the philosopher's concept or concepts of consciousness, it is advisable to consider some ways in which the words conscious and consciousness are used when uncommitted to special theories in ordinary life. All right. And how are they used in ordinary life? A, people often speak in this way. They say, I was conscious that the furniture had been rearranged. Do they really say

16:51that? Or have you ever said anything like that? Right. I was conscious that he... Yeah. Well, that's a different word. We're doing ordinary language philosophy. There's got to be real phrases. Or I was conscious that he was less friendly than usual. In such context, the word conscious is used instead of words like found out, realized, and discovered to indicate a certain noteworthy nebulousness

17:22and consequent inarticulateness of apprehension. The furniture looked different somehow, but the observer could not say what the differences were, or the man's attitude was unaccommodating in a number of ways, but the speaker could not enumerate or specify them. Though there were, though there are philosophically interesting problems about vagueness as well as about the inexpressibility of the very nebulous, this use of conscious does not entail the existence of any special faculties, methods,

17:58or channels of apprehension. What we are conscious of in this sense may be a physical fact or a fact about someone else's state of mind. So we have to, I hadn't really thought about how ordinary language philosophy might misdiagnose idioms, given that he's talking 75 years ago in Britain. So I would say, yeah, I was vaguely aware that something about the furniture was different, but that's, it's probably

18:30just the idiom. But no, I mean, the idiom is still kind of in use in more formal context. I mean, I'm aware of the idiom, right? Are you conscious of this idea? I was conscious of such and such, meaning I had a vague awareness of it, but it's not very common in the way that people ordinarily speak these days. Maybe it was back then, but yeah. So the question is what conclusions can I really draw from looking at the way people speak? Well, let's, let's see if, if that wasn't helpful.

19:03What about B through E? People often use conscious and self-consciousness, self-conscious in describing the embarrassment exhibited by persons, especially youthful persons who are anxious about the opinions held by others of their qualities of character or intellect. Shyness and affectation are ways in which self-consciousness in this sense is commonly exhibited. And I actually have an anecdote around this one. That is, I was really in college, I was really into, you know, our growing up means our increasing self-consciousness. I want to, and so I use this in a letter to somebody who is my age

19:39and she just interpreted this as like, you want me to be self-conscious? You want me to, to not be able to speak comfortably to you? Like she just didn't know what the fuck I was talking about.

19:53C, go ahead. Self-consciousness is sometimes used in a more general sense to indicate that someone has reached the stage of paying heed to his own qualities of character or intellect. Here you go, Mark. Irrespective of whether or not he is embarrassed about other people's estimations of them. When a boy begins to notice that he is a, he is fonder of arithmetic or less homesick than are most of his acquaintances. He is beginning to be self-conscious in this enlarged sense.

20:26Self-conscious in this enlarged sense is, of course, the primary important, of primary importance for the conduct of life. And the concept of it is therefore of importance for ethics. But its ingenuous use entails no special doctrines about how a person makes and checks his estimates of his own qualities of character and intellect or how he compares them with those of his acquaintances. All right. So let's just make sure. So self-consciousness in the sense, I think that you were just talking about, Mark, of getting to know yourself better, right?

21:01Your own character, your own intellect, your own proclivities, dispositions. And then he goes on to talk about its importance in ethics, which seems to follow directly from that. I think there's a pretty extensive analysis of paying heed in the previous chapter, just that it's not a separate mental act that if you're doing something carefully, you're paying heed to how you are doing it. But it doesn't mean that you're in fact, if, if it were a separate thing, like you're

21:31carefully playing the violin, if you had the mental act of playing, playing, and then the mental act of paying heed, then this would actually distract you from your playing. Like it has to be one in the same. So this is just against an overly intellectualist, which he, you know, he attributes to Descartes, a picture of mental activity that you don't write the first chapter in this whole thing, or maybe it's chapter three is on volition. It's not the case, as we have often said, that every time you're going to do anything, you're going to talk, that you have a separate thinking and planning

22:06about what you're going to do, a volition. Like this is not like, that's just not the way it could be experienced. So I think this ordinary language philosophy ends up being a lot like phenomenology, a lot. It's just a slightly different way of getting at it. Phenomena being observed or sentences. I would say volition, you know, again, I just think this is a straw man. I don't think advocates of the concept of volition are saying we have a planning room where we produce the volition or something like that. It's very close to the act itself. It goes

22:42along with the act, right? So intending to do something is different from willing it. So the concept of volition is trying to get at a mental state that accompanies action. And I don't know how you explain that away, but this, this last sentence, ingenuous use entails no special doctrines about how a person makes or checks his estimates of his own qualities. I don't know what that, what does that mean? He said it's important to ethics. Well, yeah, I was interpreting it just along the lines of that comparison to volition and paying

23:15heed more generally. What is it to notice that you are fond of arithmetic as he says, right? Is that okay? So special, special doctrines being, meaning incorrigible introspection. All right. Yes. You just sort of know, I mean, it does, you are noticing your own enjoyment, I would think, but I guess other people could notice your enjoyment too, right? If you're really getting into the activity, it's just evident to all who are present. If I notice that I'm not as homesick as my acquaintances, do I not need a special doctrine

23:50of how I notice my own homesickness versus how I would notice that of an acquaintance? It seems right. The view that seems obvious to me, the one that he's going to critique, it sounds like is, yes, the way I feel my homesickness and have self-knowledge of that is much different than the way I would be aware of yours. I think we just ran into the same issue exactly in the Davidson that we just read, right? Which is, I mean, I have more opportunities to witness my own behavior.

24:25How do I know that I'm homesick? Somebody might have to point it out to me. Anyway, we're going to, he's now going to introduce the Freud. Freud always comes up here. People are vaguely aware of Freud. They're conscious of Freud. It's a big part of the culture at this point. The Freudian idioms of the unconscious and the subconscious are closely connected with this use of conscious. For at least part of what is meant by describing jealousy, phobias, or erotic impulses as unconscious is that the victim of them not only does not recognize their

24:56strength or even existence in himself, but in a certain way will not recognize them. It's funny because I just reread Freud's account of the, he wrote something called the unconscious and it's not clear that he thinks anything effective can be unconscious because affect is something kind of inherently conscious. If we have a feeling, what does it mean to say we have an unconscious feeling? Freud is skeptical of that. He thinks thoughts can be unconscious because they can perform these certain functional relationships to other conscious thoughts

25:32feelings. It's their, they're called thoughts simply by their, you know, functional role. Even if they're kind of desiccated, they're not active. And then phobias are certainly not unconscious. The reasons for them are, you know, are unconscious. So I'm a little bit, I'm just trying to, I'm not trying to nitpick. I'm just trying to see what he's going to do with this. I'm not sure he's going to make good, good use of Freud here, but we'll see. Continuing the paragraph, he shirks part of the task of appreciating what sort of person he is

26:04or else he systematically biases his appreciations. The epistemological question, how a person makes his estimates or misestimates of his own dispositions is not, or need not be begged by the Freudian account of the etiology diagnosis, prognosis, and cure of the tendencies to shirk and bias such estimates. He shirks part of the task of self-knowledge or is biased. Shirking is an interesting word for him to use as if it's, he's being lazy or something or, right?

26:40Right. Part of the reason that he doesn't think that there's this incorrigible part of the mind versus seeing in the outer world, uh, is because clearly seeing in the outer world, like is you are subject to whether you're shirking or not, whether you're, how carefully you're looking all these different impairments that you can have. But this myth of the inner theater that he is looking at, at least on his, the target of his wrath is an idea that everything is just incorrigible

27:15and there is no shirking to be done. Right. Cause you just see it that you can't help, but see it. It's just there. Yeah. I don't know that that's a good, you know, if you're Sartre, I'm not sure how he's going to score on, on this, you know, he's often accused by Heideggerians or whatever of being too focused on consciousness and the inner world. But he certainly says, it's a very prime thing that you are absolutely conscious of this thing, but yet you are shirking

27:46of it. That that's the basic human condition of bad faith. He says in this last sentence, whatever we, whatever Freud's theory of how it is, we come to shirk or have bias. This is not, right. Freud's theory of the unconscious goes much farther than this, but so I think he's already characterizing it, but epistemologically, but he wants to say that whatever the Freud's theory, we shouldn't read that as settling some sort of epistemological question about how that happens.

28:21So, right. The epistemological question of how a person makes his estimates or missed estimates of his own dispositions. It sounds like there could be a number of different epistemologies consistent with some sort of Freudian account of the unconscious. It's typically one of these introspective accounts, but I think he thinks his non-introspective account can be made consistent even with someone like Freud. Sure. Okay. Meaning D, quite different from the foregoing uses of

28:52conscious, self-conscious, and unconscious is the use in which a numbed or anesthetized person is says to have lost consciousness from his feet up to his knees. In this use, conscious means sensitive or sentient and unconscious means anesthetized or insensitive. We see that a person has lost consciousness when he ceased to be sensitive to any slaps, noises, pricks, or smells.

29:18Slaps, noises, pricks, or smells. It does seem like a ragtag group of stimuli.

29:28Different from, though closely connected with this last use, there is a sense in which a person can be said to be unconscious of a sensation when he pays no heed to it. Okay. We've talked a lot about this, right? The feeling on your leg from the chair that you don't pay attention to. You could call it pre-conscious. I don't know. Did Dennett have a word for that? It's a little information packet that hasn't reached global workspace or something. Right. Yeah. A walker engaged in a

29:59heated dispute may be unconscious in this sense of the sensations in his blistered heel. And the reader of these words was, when he began this sentence, probably unconscious of the muscular skin sensations on the back of his neck. Oh, I thought he was going to go for the leg. That would have been great. Or in his left knee. All right. Close. A person may also be unconscious or unaware that he is frowning, beating time to the music, or muttering. Or I just noticed I have my

30:32hand on my neck, which is obvious, of course, to anyone viewing the video. But I've spent the entire time being not conscious of that. And I, as body language expert, know that that means that you're you're seeking refuge from the attacks that Ryle is making upon your Cartesian. Is that really? Is this like a... I don't know what the hell of that. Okay. All right. Page 140. Conscious in this sense means heeding. And it makes sense to say a sensation is hardly noticed, even when the sensation is

31:06moderately acute. Namely, when the victim's attention is fixed strongly enough on something else. Conversely, a person may pay sharp heed to very faint sensations. When, for instance, he is scared of appendicitis, he will be acutely conscious in this sense of stomach twinges, which are not at all acute. In this sense, too, a person may be keenly conscious, hardly conscious, or quite unconscious of feelings like twinges of anxiety or qualms of doubt. The fact that a person takes heed of his organic sensations and feelings does not entail that he's exempt from error about them. He can make mistakes

31:39about their causes and he can make mistakes about their locations. Furthermore, he can make mistakes about whether they are real or fancied as hypochondriacs do. Heeding does not denote a particular conduit of cognitive certainties. Okay. That'll sound okay. We can be in error about our organic sensations. So, yeah, famously in Freud, right? We can even, we could have conversion symptoms. We could think that we're itching when we're not. We could think that our arm is paralyzed when it's not.

32:14This part of what got Freud really interested in the possibility of the unconscious is that as a physician, he was seeing people who had these physical ailments, which weren't really explainable in physical, organic terms, completely psychological. So, yeah, we can certainly be in error, but I, you know, that's an old story, right? We can have illusions and dreams and hallucinations and things like that. But the question is, what do we attribute the error to, right? Descartes famously

32:46talks about phantom limb and things like that. But it's not that the error is in the brain. It's that the way that the signal gets to the mind is through something like the pulley system. So, even if the end point of the pulley, if the limb is gone, something still could be tugging at the part of the nerve of the pulley that will then indicate to the mind that, you know, something was going on in the foot. So, of course, he's wrong about the foot, but Descartes is just going to say,

33:17like, well, be really careful. What is it that you're actually, oh, I am having an inerrant image feeling of the twinge and I should just leave it at that. And what caused the twinge, even if I feel that it's in my foot, that is actually a separate judgment beyond, you know, the inerrant thing that I am. But that's the kind of gymnastics that you have to do to support the Cartesian idea, according to Ryle and folks like that. All right.

Self-intimating mental states

33:49Philosophers, chiefly since Descartes, have been having their theories of knowledge and conduct operated with a concept of consciousness, which has relatively little affinity with any of the concepts described above. Working with the notion of the mind as a second theater, the episodes enacted in which enjoy the supposed status of the mental and correspondingly lack the supposed status of the physical, thinkers of many sorts have laid it down as the cardinal positive property of these episodes that when they occur, they occur consciously. The states and operations of a mind

34:21are states and operations of which it is necessarily aware in some sense of aware. And this awareness is incapable of being delusive. The things that a mind does or experiences are self-intimating. And this is supposed to be a feature which characterizes these acts and feelings, not just sometimes, but always. It is part of the definition of their being mental that their occurrence entails that they are self-intimating. If I think, hope, remember, will, regret, hear a noise, or feel a pain, I must ipso facto

34:51know that I do so. Even if I dream I see a dragon, I must be appraised of my dragon seeing. Though it is often conceded, I may not know that I am dreaming. Appraised of my dragon seeing. That's right. Nobody was setting a dollar value on my dragon seeing. Yes, appraised. But, yeah. So, I think he could have been clearer in this paragraph, right? So, and especially that last sentence. So, even in a dream, if I'm seeing a dragon, the dragon isn't really there. I'm wrong

35:24about that. I can't be wrong that I'm seeing a dragon or that I'm dreaming about a dragon. That's supposed to be the incorrigible part. So, we can certainly have illusions and misheatings and things like that. But that's the, right? The Cartesian point is not that that such thing, such things don't occur. Of course, they do. And Descartes makes good use of dreaming. It's just that the access to the representation itself, whether it's veridical or not,

35:54is something that must be without error. The things that a mind does or experiences are self-intimating. What does that mean? That it means you're intimate with yourself. So, I think it means that there's a accompanying every perception according to this, and this is similar to Sartre's criticism, is not just, you know, there is a red splotch, but I am seeing a red splotch, that there is some. So, this is what we're going to try to get is how much self-consciousness is he

36:30attributing, right? Because he's already made a distinction between consciousness and introspection and has not claimed that whenever some, you know, whenever a Cartesian says that there's consciousness, that there's also introspection. But I think by saying every time I see it, I dream, I see a dragon, I must be apprised of my dragon seeming, though I may not know that I'm dreaming. So, that there is some awareness of awareness that's built into awareness. Yep. I think that's the clearer way to put it. Awareness of awareness is what he means by

37:02our experience as being self-intimating. To have that meta level or that self-referential level.

37:12It is naturally difficult if one denies the existence of the second theater to elucidate what is meant by describing the episodes which are supposed to take place in it as self-intimating. But some points are clear enough. It is not supposed that when I am wondering, say, what is the answer to a puzzle and am ipso facto consciously doing so, that I am synchronously performing two acts of attention. One to the puzzle and the other to my wondering about it. Nor, to generalize this point, is it supposed that my act of wondering and its self-intimation

37:48to me are two distinct acts or processes and dissolubly welded together. Rather, to relapse perforce and dissimile, it is supposed that mental processes are phosphorescent, like tropical seawater, which makes itself visible by light, which it itself emits. Or, to use another simile, mental processes are overheard by the mind, whose processes they are. Someone as a speaker overhears the words he is himself uttering. All right, let's just, I need to go back to the

38:22beginning here. But so the beginning supposition of the paragraph is that we deny the existence of the second theater, which then makes it difficult to describe the episodes of self-intimating. The phenomenology, right? This is clearly phenomenology. It is not just looking at sentences here. Sure. Okay. I'll grant you that. But then, so what's unclear to me here is if he wants to preserve some sense of self-intimating, put in his new proper terms, or if he's getting rid of it, right? So he's,

38:58certainly the premise of the paragraph is that we deny the existence of the second theater. This makes it difficult to elucidate self-intimation. So I don't know if he wants to elucidate it or get rid of it. All right. But it sounds like he wants to just elucidate it in new terms. And that's what this metaphor of the phosphorescent becomes. So on his assumption of no second theater, it's not that we have two acts of attention, one to the puzzle and one to the wondering.

39:29That would be the thing that he has dismissed time and time again in this book, that if you, and might be a straw man as far as like the Cartesian idea, because he thinks that it's just immediately silly, right? That's how I was characterizing volition. If every time you acted, this has to be caused by a distinct mental event that is a volition, then it would sort of follow that there would have to be a volition before that volition, right? That you would instantly get into an infinite regress. So likewise, if there was two mental acts, when I'm trying to pay attention

40:01to something, you know, or just I'm aware of my hand, and then I'm aware of the awareness of my hand. Well, am I also then, if that second, if that first awareness of the awareness were itself a mental act, would it not also have to be cognizant of itself? So you would instantly get in an infinite regress. So yeah, I don't really understand that. I don't buy that critique, but right. So there's something called proprioception for the body. When I touch the table, I'm aware of the table,

40:32but I'm also aware of my own hand and its position and space and the quote unquote, you know, the feeling on my hand and all these other things. And for consciousness, I think apperception is just the word that's used for the version of that that goes with consciousness. It's really about self-consciousness. So when I'm having a thought or I'm aware of something on the table, I don't completely lose my sense of self or sense of some other polarity that is on the other side of the

41:09table. Even if I'm, you know, even though I'm lost in thought and not thinking that right explicitly, about it, there's some sense in which there's an implicit feeling of my existence and separateness from the table. And I think this is well accepted by philosophers and cognitive scientists today. We'll see if he tries to deal with that fact here, but he is going to give us that like, it looks like

41:39he's not rejecting self-intimation in this paragraph. So he may not be rejecting this form of apperception that I'm talking about. He just wants to give it a new metaphor, which is the phosphorescence. If I'm right here, I'm a little unclear of this, but, but I think what he's embracing is this metaphor of phosphorescence where something makes itself visible by the light, which it emits. So, right? The self-intimation of an experience would not be my attention to not to,

42:17you know, my kind of meta attention or my meta experience of the experiencing. It would be more like something that comes from the experience. And then the other metaphor is, or simile is the idea of the mental processes being overheard, right? It does seem that these are what, these are the metaphors he's embracing, right? I'm again, not completely sure whether he is, right? It's difficult, if not impossible to maintain these, but if I'm going to try, here's my,

42:50you know, so I don't, I don't know what the gesture is. If he's about to flick these away further. Yeah. When the epistemologists first became popular, it seems to have been, in part, a transformed application of the Protestant notion of conscience. Protestants had to hold that a man could know the moral state of his soul and the wishes of God without the aid of confessors and scholars. They spoke, therefore, of the God-given light of private conscience. When Galileo's and Descartes' representations of the mechanical world seems to require that mind should be salved from

43:24mechanism by being represented as constituting a duplicate world, the need was felt to explain how the contents of this ghostly world could be ascertained, again, without the help of schooling, but also without the help of sense perception. The metaphor of light seemed particularly appropriate since Galilean science dealt so largely with the optically discovered world. Consciousness was imported to play in the mental world, play in the mental world, the part played by light in the mechanical world. In this metaphorical sense, the contents of the mental world were thought of as

43:57being self-luminous or refulgent. Yeah. So we have a genealogical explanation. I don't buy this. This is very far-fetched with Protestantism. I mean, this goes with Nietzsche exactly. It allows him to hang the albatross of religion around this epistemology, but the neck of this kind epistemology. I think it much, right, the mention of Galileo is apt. It much more straightforwardly follows from the new science and early modern scientific developments where people started

44:34to get the idea that appearance and reality are sharply divergent in ways, you know, that had always been around, but in ways that are scientifically explicable so that, right, red isn't really out there. It's explained by primary qualities. That's the, you know, spatiotemporal stuff. That's the new science in a nutshell, right? And today it's, you know, water isn't, what is water? Well, it's H2O. It's this structure that we can't even see. This divergence between appearance and reality,

45:04which suggests that there's a strong divergence between mental representations and the actual world, which is not, right, which is similar in some ways to hallucination or delusion or dreaming. If we're dreaming everything that is a secondary quality. And so that, right, it reintroduces, right, for the skeptics, error, mental error was always a problem, but this makes it sort of ubiquitous at the level of consciousness so that representations get their own little domain

45:41and container by virtue of the fact that they are always separated, have some significant separation from the world or not the same thing as the world or not representing the world as it is in itself, so to speak. So I think just, just whether or not that's clear or not to listeners, I think the motives for the epistemology actually flow much more from science and from religion, as he seems to be claiming here. Well, I think his next paragraph is in line with what you're saying. This model was employed again by Locke when he described the deliberate observational

46:13scrutiny, which a mind can from time to time turn upon its current states and processes. He called this supposed inner perception, reflection with an X, reflection or introspection. Barring the word reflection from the familiar optical phenomenon of the reflections of faces in mirrors. The mind can quote unquote see or quote unquote look at its own operations in the quote unquote light given off by themselves. The myth of consciousness is a piece of paraoptics. These similes of overhearing

46:44phosphorescence or self-luminousness suggest another distinction which needs to be made. It is certainly true that when I do feel or witness something, I usually could and frequently do pay swift retrospective heed to what I have just done, felt or witnessed. I keep thinking of this book that he should have written called On Heating. That'd be a great name for a book on heating. I keep much of the time some sort of log or score of what occupies me in such a way that

47:20if asked what I had just been hearing or picturing or saying, I could usually give a correct answer. Of course, I cannot always be actually harking back to the immediate past. Heating and harking. Or else, within a few seconds of being called in the morning, I should be recalling that I had just been recalling that I had just been recalling dot dot dot. Hearing the knock on the door, one event would generate an endless series of recollections of recollections, dot dot dot, of it leaving no

47:54room for me to pay heed to any subsequent happening. There is, however, a proper sense in which I can be said generally to know what has just been engaging my notice or half notice, namely that I generally could give a memory report of it if there was occasion to do so. This does not exclude the possibility that I might sometimes get give a misreport for even short term reminiscence is not exempt from carelessness or bias. All right. I think he likes these similes of overhearing or phosphorescence.

48:30But now he's going to explain this in terms of quickly recalling swift retrospective heed. Well, so right, the chapter right before this is dispositions and occurrences. And I think dispositions are a big thing here that a lot of what, right, if you think if you want to explain your action by a volition, a distinct act of mental act that happens before you do anything, well, that's not actually how we experience things. We don't experience that act of volition.

49:02There are plenty of things that you do that you don't think about in any way before. You don't have the consciousness of a separate mental act beforehand. Instead, just say there was a disposition to do that. So don't say I had a desire and that desire caused me to reach out for the food there. Because then you could ask like, well, how many times did you have the desire? Is the desire in a current thought? No, let's just look at it as a disposition, which doesn't really say anything about a current thoughts or inner mental states at all. So in this case, whenever something

49:34happens, you have a disposition such that if asked, you could immediately recite it. Does that mean you were conscious of it? You were aware of it? I mean, you were interested in it or even these, you know, things that you were peripherally conscious of that like we were saying that your position on the chair or whatever. So I don't know if this really helps. It certainly doesn't help with the phenomenology, right? Because you don't phenomenologically say that I had a, you know, where you, when I'm momentarily aware of something or, you know, was it the

50:06periphery of my consciousness? I don't self-describe myself as having a disposition to report when asked. Was that chair comfortable? I mean, it is something, yeah, but that's not a good piece of phenomenology. Yeah. Phosphorescence, Swift retrospective heed, or really could, you know, there's a, and frequently do, but not always. It sounds like, right, capable of being accompanied

50:40by the, I think, with God. Not that we always do it, but we could do it. And here we could pay Swift's retrospective heed. This does sound like a version of that perception, except he's not really talking about the self explicitly here. And then the infinite regress, which I don't really understand. I cannot always be harking back. Yes, that's true. Or else you'd have to hark back to what's harked back and then hark back to that ad infinitum. But that's a different, right? There's

51:13always harking back in the sense that every perception, anyway, I don't want to get into that, but. Well, that's, the phenomenologists are going to have to say, it's like, oh, it's like each thing has the penumbra that leaks into the next act or something like that. So, you know, that it gives meaning to the next, you know, that they have to use just like he is using poetry to describe the inner world. And for Peirce, right? We do get this infinite, what might be an infinite regress. But Peirce wants to explain that away by saying, well, yes, but it's actually, there's an infinite

51:47number of points, but it's actually like the infinite number of points on a line, which is itself finite. So, I might always be harking back, but towards a limit, right? Towards an asymptote. But for Peirce, the pointing out of an infinitude does not settle the question here. But I should be recalling, yeah, okay, endless series, proper sense, there is a proper sense in which I could be said generally a no, because I can give a memory report of it. Okay, so yeah, I guess it's the,

52:22yeah, the possibility of accompanying something with a memory report.

Log keeping versus consciousness

52:25The point of mentioning this fact that we generally could, if required, report what had just been engaging our notice, is that consciousness, as the prevalent view describes it, differs from this log keeping in one or two important respects. First, according to the theory, mental processes are conscious, not in the sense that we do or could report on them post-mortem, but in the sense that their intimations of their own occurrences are properties of those occurrences, and so are not posterior to them. The supposed deliverances of consciousness, if verbally expressible

52:57at all, would be expressed in the present, not in the past tense. Next is supposed that in being conscious of my present mental states and acts, I know what I am experiencing and doing in a non-dispositional sense of no. That is to say, it is not merely the case that I could, if occasion demanded, tell myself or you what I am experiencing and doing, but that I am actively cognizant of it. Though a double act of attention does not occur, yet when I discover that my watch has stopped, I am synchronously discovering that I am discovering that my watch has stopped. A truth about myself is

53:31flashed or shown upon me at the same moment as a truth about my watch is ascertained by me. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think this is the way it's supposed to work though. Right? Again, there's a more, for Kant, apperception is just, I could accompany this by an I think. So I could pay attention to my own experience of the watch stopping, but I usually don't do that, but I always could. And I am in some implicit sense experiencing it in such a way that I could turn my

54:05attention to the experiencing, something like that. So the meta, in other words, the meta experience of the experiencing for these people that he's arguing against, isn't this explicit thing that he's talking about. It is more like the penumbra. And then maybe, maybe that's to say that their account is actually closer to the one that he's advocating here. Maybe, maybe it's more like the phosphorescence. I'm not sure that there's, he's at, at, as, at loggerheads with them as he thinks he

54:36is. I, I just don't know if Kant is the best example of the position that he's attacking. I think we'd have to review our lock specifically or, you know, Descartes of course, doesn't write extensively about the phenomenology of action or anything like that. Um, so I think that folks like lock are in broadening their scope through all of epistemology and even moral psychology. We had a episode on

55:07the, uh, essay, uh, where he discusses that is. Yeah. So I, I don't know if this is an accurate description of lock. Okay. Should we wrap for the moment? Yep. Are you excited enough about this to do one more and get to, I'm enjoying this. I just wish I could, um, could grok it, you know what I mean? To fully, I, to see where, where he's coming from. I mean, again, it's that feeling that, okay, there's something intriguing here, the same thing with smart and place and that I need to understand.

55:42And I just, I don't feel, I don't know if I'm doing a bad job or they're doing a bad job of explaining it, but the burden does seem to be on them because it runs against our intuition so strongly. And I think they would agree with that. So I need someone to fix my intuitions if I'm to grasp this. Yeah. I mean, he's not, he's, he's arguing that it's actually Descartes that's running against your intuitions. It's this Cartesian Lockean thing that if you look at the way that we use language, that actually reflects our intuitions and I'm just trying to stay. I'm just a caveman.

56:17Yana, I'm just a plain spoken. I don't know your fancy epistemological Cartesian ways. All right. All right. Well, thanks for hanging out. People should know per usual that if you want to hear part two, that you actually have to support us financially. So you can do that at patreon.com slash close reads philosophy, or you can go to a partially examined life, Patreon, patreon.com slash partially examine life and sign up for the bundle support so that you get all the PEL stuff, including the extra episodes there. And also mention the social media.

56:53Oh yeah. We have new close read specific Instagram. So you can, uh, as of, and Twitter and Twitter. So you can actually, uh, we are auto posting clips of the conversations, even the ones that are behind the paywall. Uh, so you can get some good idea if you're monitoring that, if you don't want to pay us anything, but you just want to hear us talk in little, uh, minute long chunks, you can get some sense of what is being said in parts two and three, or however many we do with this. And thank

57:27Wes for setting that up. Yep. All right. Bye everybody. Bye.