Science and Sensibilia or How I Spent My Summer Vocation

It shews a fundamental misunderstanding, if I am inclined to study the headache I have now in order to get clear about the philosophical problem of sensation.  (Wittgenstein 1958: §314)

Dramatis SubPersonae
[C]onfusion was at once facilitated and complicated by the curious neglect of many generations of philosophers and psychologists, following Descartes' example, to distinguish sharply in their terminology between the –ings and the –eds (to adopt an expression of Professor S. Alexander's) – between the terms “sensation," “perception," or “though” as signifying the event, function, or act of sensing, perceving, thinking, etc., and the same terms as signifying the items sensed, perceived or thought. (Lovejoy 1930: 6)

• Perception (e.g., vision): indirect (mediate) and cognitive
• ing: the process; perception as a process (retinal transduction … visual cortical representation)
• ed: the distal item perceived (e.g., my hand)
• Sensation, or experience (e.g., pain): direct (immediate) and precognitive
• ing: the process (e.g., c-fibers firing)
• ed: the putative object – “sensibilium,” “sense-datum” or “percept” --  sensed, e.g., a particular twinge
• Sense & Perception
• “Sensations are a part of the mechanism I perceive with.  This mechanism also includes light rays, retina, ...   and various parts of the brain.” (Smythies 77)
• different senses (e.g., vision & hearing) have different sensory qualia or phenomenal feels: contrast, e.g visually sensing (“seeing”) the roundness of the ball tactually sensing (“feeling”) the roundness of the ball.
• Qualia: “raw feels” or felt subjective (private) qualities of experiences
• Privacy v. publicity: contrast
• the privately sensed afterimage
• the publically visible picture
• Essential v. accidental privacy: contrast
• Essential (in principle): insensible by others in principle (e.g., the afterimage)
• Accidental (in fact): imperceptible to others in only in fact
• e.g., the stone in my shoe, or the floater in my eye
• compare accidental anti-privacy (so to speak) of the back of your head
• Qualia & sense-data
• qualia are properties of experience: universals
• sensibilia – if there are such -- are particular items experienced: individuals
• the bearers of qualia
• or bundles of qualia-instances (“tropes”)
• Introspection (Locke’s “reflection”, Leibniz “apperception”)
• ing: cognitive apprehension of (often described as being a matter of directing the attention at)
• ed: an(other) sensation, perception, or cognition
• A distinction among objective properties
• Primary: “ideas of primary qualities of bodies are resemblances of them, and their patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves,” e.g., shapes {direct/precognitive &  elite}
• Secondary: “ideas produced in us by these secondary qualities have no resemblance of them at all,” e.g., colors {direct/precognitive & gruesome}
• “Complex” (Locke)  {indirect/cognitive}
• Elite: cat, gold, oak, etc.: having, in Locke’s terms, “real essences”
• Gruesome: pet, dirt, weed, etc.: having, in Locke’s terms, only “nominal essences”.

Oh Behave

Dualism: “A picture held us captive.  And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”  (Wittgenstein 1958: §115)

• Metaphysical dualism (or idealism): bifurcation of a private subjective mental realm of "inward" experience  from the public objective physical realm (including, n.b., "inner" neurophysiological phenomena).
• Methodological introspectionism: the mind being "a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, and glide away" (Hume 1739: I:4:vi), introspection of such “perceptions” is the psychological method of choice. 

The Revolt Against Dualism:
“The last quarter-century, it may fairly confidently be predicted, will have for future historians of philosophy a distinctive interest and instructiveness as the Age of the Great Revolt against Dualism.” (Lovejoy 1930: 1)

• Metaphysical materialism: the objective physical realm being all there is, and the “inward” is a province thereof

• Methodological behaviorism: an approach that led, scientifically, "to the ignoring of consciousness" and the illegitimacy of "making consciousness a special object of observation" an proposed, instead, that psychology should "take as a starting point, first the observable fact that organisms, man and animal alike, do adjust themselves to their environment" and "secondly, that certain stimuli lead the organisms to make responses" (Watson 1912).

• Counterrevolutionary zingers

o        “What does one behaviorist say to another?” jokes (see Ziff 1958 for discussion).

o        Behaviorists accused of  "affecting general anesthesia" (Ogden & Richards 1926: 23)

o        Behaviorism “likened to Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.”  (Ryle 1949: 328)

• Behaviorism laughs last (sort of rules): "the extruded hero soon came to seem so bloodless and spineless a being that even the opponents of these [behaviorist] theories began to feel shy of imposing heavy burdens upon his spectral shoulders" (Ryle 1949: 328)

The Counter Revolt against Behaviorism

§         Sensation the unconquered territory:

·         “Imagery from Galton on has been the inner stronghold of a psychology based on introspection" (Watson 1913: 421).  "I may have to grant a few sporadic cases of imagery to him who will not be otherwise convinced, but I insist that the images of such a one are as sporadic and as unnecessary to his well-being and well-thinking as a few hairs more or less on his head" (Watson 1913: 423n.3)  if there are sensibilia they’re epiphenomena.

·         “[T]here is something seriously amiss with the discussions occupying this [Sensation and Observation] chapter” (Ryle 1949: 240)   “I do not know the right idioms to discuss these matters, but I hope that my discussion of them in the official idioms may have at least some internal Fifth Column efficacy" (Ryle 1949: 201). 

·         “And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a nothing.” -- Not at all.  It is not a something but not a nothing either!  The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve as well as a something of which nothing could be said.  We have only rejected the grammar that tries to force itself upon us.”  (Wittgenstein 1958: §304)

·         It may be urged that the hero (experience) was never wholly extruded but has been lurking all along in the caves of psychophysics (e.g., in correlations of physical stimulus variations with noticed differences in sensation).

§         The Cognitivism Schism

·         Watsonian/Skinnerian hedge around the law: bar talk of inner (neurophysiological) processes no less than hypotheses about inward (experiential) ones: strong  reading of Watson’s second clause.

·         Cognitivism (softening the Watsonian S-R clause)

o        Identifies cognition, perception, and sensation with inner computational processes.

o        Continues to disallow recourse to inward experiential processes.

·         Cogntivism rules … sort of

o        Mandates talk of inner processes

o        Sheds no more light on their inwardness than Behaviorism

§         Inverted qualia problems: possibly same computation & different qualia.

§         Absent qualia problems: possibly same computation & no qualia.

Back to the Future?
“Now, however, that no one accepts the behaviourist doctrine any more the introspectionist psychologist is free to come out of the shadows.”  (Smythies 1994: 116)

·         Dualistic Metaphysical Revival: John Searle's (1992) brief in favor of "ontological subjectivity" and David Chalmers' (1996) defense of "property dualism" represent recent major philosophical attempts to revive dualistic metaphysical bifurcation and the "Cartesian theater" picture. 

·         Consciousness Gold Rush: would-be scientific approaches to consciousness (Smythies 1994, Crick 1994, Edelman 1989, 1992, Edelman & Tononi 2000, Penrose 1989, 1994, and others [see Horgan 1994]).   Research programme of choice:

o        Correlations between (observed) brain variables and (introspected) experiential variables a la classical Wundtian Introspectionism.

o        Psychology as psychophysics: scientific gold (another Nobel prize?) in them thar psychophysical hills?

·         Cartesian Theatrics: send in the sensibilia (Smythies 1956, Jackson 1977, MacLachlan 1989, Robinson 1994) again?

o       “My general opinion about this doctrine is that it is a typically scholastic view, attributable, first, to an obsession with a few particular words, the uses of which  are over-simplified, not really understood or carefully studied or correctly described; and second, to an obsession with a few (and nearly always the same) half-studied 'facts'.” (Austin 1962, p.3)

o       Its intrepidness is what makes Smythies’ attempt so instructive a would-be scientific expedition into those very "fields" of consciousness some philosophers (notably, Searle and Chalmers) have urged reopening for scientific investigation, and Nobel Prize laureates (Crick and Edelman) have recently rushed into.

Don’t Go There

This conclusion [of the physico-physiological argument], moreover, is arrived at on the ground that events between the intended object and the percipient determine the character of what is given; but these intervenient events could, by the same reasoning, be shown to be themselves similarly conditioned, and therefore to be not directly or infallibly disclosed in perception – and so on, until the physiologically immediate is finally pursued to its lair in some cortical event which, unfortunately is not disclosed by perception at all. But the question whether the argument is in fact finally self-destructive belongs to a later stage of our inquiry. (Lovejoy 1930: 24-5)

Admissions

1. Existence of qualia: There is "something that it's like" (pace Nagel, 1974) to have a visual experience.  There are conscious experiences (e.g., of seeing) with distinct phenomenal "feels" (contrast, e.g., visual and tactual shape recognition). 
2. Seeing v. “seeing”: disallowing The Sinful Inference:

I see a blue star.

Being seen entails being.

 :. There is this blue star.

3. Scientific Authority re the facts

The Direct Question:

• Classic representationalism, as I'll style it, proposes to give perception a three-stage analysis in terms of

1.        distal stimulus (objective reflection or radiation) and optical-nervous transmission-transduction (to take the case of seeing);

2.        direct-experiencing of something besides the distal object, a sense-datum or percept or quale-instance;

3.        inference to the existence and properties of the distal object from the direct-experienced evidence.

• Relative v. absolute directness

Naïve Dualism

• naïve dualism (as I'll call it) takes qualia and their characteristics simply to be as they experientially appear, entailing what David Lewis calls "the identification principle": that "when I have an experience with quale Q, the knowledge I thereby gain reveals the essence of Q" (Lewis, 1995, p. 142).

Location, Location, "Location"

Out-There: Physical Space

·         Crooks: “we cannot actually see into physical space, or directly observe distal stimuli" (original italics) because all perception must be transpiring within the CNS, though what this perception is of is external objects.  No sense-mode has left the CNS to do any observing out-there (in physical space)" (original italics)

·         Absent sensibilium argument:

1.        the same experience can occur in the absence of the distal object

2.        ING(p,t) => ED(p,t)

3.        :.  ED <> distal object

In the Head: Physical Space Too

• application with a vengeance
• the same experience can occur in the absence of the neurally preceding & adjoining processes
• ING(p,t) => ED(p,t)
• :. ED <> any neurally preceding & adjoining processes
• “A further, and perhaps most deeply puzzling, aspect of the distinctive cognitive relation subjects of experience bear to their conscious contents is that the qualitative contents themselves… seem to have a dual character as both act and object.  …  Awareness certainly seems to be a relation, which would entail that one can distinguish the act from the object of awareness.  Yet when it comes to qualia, to the contents of conscious experience, the two don’t come apart so easiliy.  It does seem possible to really separate the reddishness from the awareness of it, yet it also seems impossible to tell a coherent story about how this could be so.” (Levine 2001: 9)
• empirical stumbling block
• probably the neural processing of round things doesn’t inscribe circles {primary}
• plausibly we don’t want to say the neural processing of red things is itself, literally, red. {secondary}
• certainly we don’t want to say there is really a dagger in MacBeth’s brain when he hallucinates a dagger. {ternary}
• Smythies concludes: “a physical object, which is ... the causal ancestor of your sensation of it, is a square, but its correlated brain disturbance is not.  ...  If you gaze at the little square again, you may be naïvely convinced that you are confronted with a small entity at the center of you visual field, but actually you are not, for your visual sensation of a square cannot be the physical square ... nor is the square in the brain, except in the form of coded information in the nerve net.  Thus the little square has literally nowhere to be.” (Smythies, 1989, p. 87)

“In” Consciousness

• “A ray of light leaves an object and strikes the retina of the eye.  This starts a complex series of electrochemical events in the brain, culminating in a particular spatiotemporal pattern of excitation in the visual and paravisual cortex.  Only these events in the cortex are necessary for perception to occur.  If the impulses are interrupted before they reach the cortex, nothing is perceived.  If the impulses are set up set up artificially by stimulating the surface of the [paravisual] cortex, for example, if the right pattern is set up, the object is perceived normally even though there is really no object [nor neural cortex] there." (Smythies, 1989, p. 84: my emphasis)
• “the new theory could be interpreted as suggesting that the brain possesses an extra lobe -- the `cryptic' lobe -- hidden from exteroception by its location in hyperspace (relative to the space of the rest of the brain), but whose interior is freely observable in the form of the phenomena of consciousness portrayed by the TV-like representative mechanisms of perception on the walls of Plato's cave" (Smythies 1994: 6)
• “The neuroscientist examining the brain cannot observe the postulated material parts of the human organism that actually construct conscious experience because they lie on the farther side of a dimensional interface. “(Smythies, 1989, p. 96: my emphasis)

Don’t Go There

• Why do I wish to resist this suggestion [of dualism]?  Mainly because of Occam's razor.  It seems to me that science is increasingly giving us a viewpoint whereby organisms are able to be seen as physiochemical mechanisms: it seems that even the behavior of man himself will one day be explicable in mechanistic terms.  There does seem to be, so far as science is concerned, nothing in the world but increasingly complex arrangements of physical constituents. (Smart, 1959, p. 142)
• Modern physics and cosmology state that the universe consists of a matter-energy system extended in a four-dimensional space-time continuum.  This system comprises the sum total of reality.  Nothing else whatsoever exists outside, beyond, or in addition to it in any way whatsoever. (Smythies 1989, p. 93)
• it is very widely believed by most scientists and philosophers that science, and in particular neuroscience, has conclusively proved, beyond any reasonable doubt, that all mental events are ... wholly dependent upon brain events." (Smythies 1989, p. 101)

·          Contrary to Levine, it doesnot “seem possible to really separate the reddishness from the awareness of it,” not really yet it also seems impossible to tell a coherent story about how this could be so.” (Levine 2001: 9)

Go Adverbial

Your criticism of Crooks seems right on target to me. The only qualm I have is with the positive alternative you suggest. Not the direct realism, which seems to me right as the general direction to try to go in, but the Adverbialism version of it you suggest several places. I think there are troubles with adverbialism which probably make it unacceptable. I think those troubles are pressed by Frank Jackson, in his 1977 book Perception (or something like that). See if you can get that and look up his discussion of adverbialism ….  Of course if the direct realist gives up Adverbialism, that leaves him with the problem of explaining what's common or shared between MacBeth and somebody who's really seeing a dagger. So direct realism isn't obvious -- a direct realist story remains to be told. And maybe it can't be. But surely Crooks' story isn't the way to go, as you criticism shows. Ah, Philosophy. Its so hard. (Rich Hall)

Wouldn’t it be Lover-ly
Contrary to Levine, it doesnot “seem possible to really separate the reddishness from the awareness of it,” not really , since “ it also seems impossible to tell a coherent story about how this could be so.” (Levine 2001: 9)  Adverbialism is the story of how ED might not be a distinct existence, apart from ING, but how it might nevertheless seem so. 

• Cognate v. objective accusatives
• “I shall lay the basis for my argument by calling attention to a certain distinction mentioned and used by S. Alexander [1921: Vol. 1, 9]. It is the distinction between what is expressed in language by, respectively, the cognate accusative and the objective accusative – between, for instance, striking a stroke and striking a man, or waving a farewell and waving a flag.”  (Ducasse 1952: 228)
• “[T]his [cognate] accusative cannot exist independently of existence, i.e., of occurrence, of the activity: a jump exists only in the jumping, a stroke in the striking, a dance in the dancing, etc.” (Ducasse 1952: 230)
• The story
• Representationalist story: “I visually experience a blue star.”
• Adverbialist story: “You visually experience blue-ly, star-ly.”
• The sinful inference revisited
• 1. I see a blue star.
  2. Being seen entails being.
   :.  3. There is this blue star.
• For premise 1 to be true, “see,” must be used in the “sensed” sense.
• For the argument to be valid, in premise 2, “seen” must mean the same as in premise 1.
• So, the question of soundness, comes down whether the “sensed” sense of ‘see’ is factive, as premise 2 asserts.
• But that’s what’s at issue between the proponent and opponent of sensibilia.
• prima facie grounds for doubting the “sensed” sense is factive, e.g., in the case of the dagger MacBeth “saw”
• construed as valid (while holding to the “sensed” sense) the argument begs the question.
• Factive or not?: Processes and Successes
• Visual sensation is to visual perception as process to success
• as jumping is to jumping a fence, or walking to walking a mile.
• “Sensations are a part of the mechanism I perceive with ” (Smythies 77)
• “Success verbs” like “see,” and “know,” are factive: process verbs, like “sense” and “believe” are not.
• Diagnosis of the “psychological dualist” (Lovejoy) mistake
• In the first place: reification of the (cognate) manner of sensing into a distinct object sensed.
• In physico-physiological argumentation: mistaking the logical interdependence of the cognate “object” and the process for a (peculiarly infallible) causal relation between separate existents
• The physico-physiological argument recast:

1.        (ING => ED) & (ING <> ED)

2.        Possibly (ING & -ED) for any would-be distal ED.

3.        Possibly (ING & -ED) for any would-be neural ED.

4.        If physical then ED is either neural or distal.

5.        :. ED is not physical.

The Many-Property Problem

• If “having an F, G after image” is analysed such that “we have a new compound mode [sensing] F-G-ly,” this fails at “explaining the entailment from 'I have a red, square after-image' to 'I have a red after-image'” (Jackson 1977: 64)
• If having “having an F, G after-image is analysed as sensing F-ly and G-ly” this “has the advantage of explaining the entailment …  for it will correspond to the entailment from 'I sense red-ly and square-ly' to `I sense red-ly'.  But if this answer is adopted, it will be impossible for the adverbial theorist to distinguish the two very different states of affairs of having a red, square after-image at the same time as having a green, round one, from that of having a green, square after-image at he same time as having a red, round one; because both will have to be accounted the same, namely, as sensing red-ly and round-ly and square-ly and green-ly.  In essence, the point is that we must be able to distinguish the statement: 'I have an F and a G after-image', and 'I have a F, G after-image', and the conjunctive answer does not appear to be able to do this. (Jackson 1977: 64)
  
  

+

+

 

• Contrary properties problem: “to have an after-image which is F cannot be to sense F-ly; for it is manifestly possible to have an after-image which is F at the same time as one which is non-F: I may have a red and a green afterimage at the same time, or a square and a round one at the same time; while it is not possible to sense F-ly and non-F-ly at the same time.” (Jackson 1977: 69)

The Right-hand Hand, Left-hand hand Reply

·         “lines of objection to the arguments just given might be thought to arise from Terence Parsons' 'Some Problems Concerning the Logic of Grammatical Modifiers'” (Jackson 1977: 69) in particular from his scenario in which Parsons envisages a case in which an individual “on one and the same occasion … wrote painstakingly with one hand and illegibly with the other” (Parsons 1979: 331)

·         Solution: quantify over subagencies (instead of objects)

·         Compare seeing left-eyedly (or x-brainedly) and right-eyedly (or y-brainedly) to writing left-handedly and right-handedly. 

o        Suppose I am writing painstakingly and illegibly on the one hand and painstakingly and illegibly on the other.

§         conjunctive answer: I am writing slowly and legibly and quickly and illegibly cannot distinguish

·         slowly, legibly and quickly, illegibly

·         slowly, illegibly and quickly, legibly

§         disability due to the erroneous assumption that one can only write once at a time

o        disallowing this assumption, we reinstate the distinction:

§         I am, right-handedly, writing slowly and legibly

§         I am, left-handedly, writing quickly and illegibly

o        Similarly – disallowing the assumption that a person can only see once at a time

§         I am, left-eyedly (or x-brainedly) sensing yellowly, roundly.

§         I am right-eyedly (or y-brainedly) sensing pinkly, squarely.

Ghostly machinations?

• Reply to Abbott: Qualia go to qualya – so I have not denied qualia.
• Reply to my materialistic conscience: Qualya are only accidentally private (The John Ashcroft Reply).  --  I haven’t merely substituted ghostly (essentially private) machinations for the (essentially private) apparitions of the ghost in the machine, ghostly deeds for ghostly data.

Bibliography

• Alexander, S. (1921).  Space, Time, and Deity.  London: MacMillan.
• Austin, J.L.  (1962).  Sense and Sensibilia.  London: Oxford University Press.
• Chalmers, D. (1996).  The Conscious Mind: In search of a Fundamental Theory.  New York: Oxford University Press.
• Churchland, P.M. (1985).  Reduction, qualia, and the direct introspection of brain states. Journal of Philosophy 82, 8-28.
• Crick, F. (1994). The astonishing hypothesis: The scientific search for the soul.  Simon and Schuster.
• Crooks, M. (2002).  Intertheoretic Identification and Mind-Brain Reductionism.  Mind and Behavior (forthcoming).
• Descarte