JS: “You may be right about the four fundamental forces accounting for all brain activity, but I do not see why we should think feelings can’t be manifestations of these forces. Thus, to rephrase my question, how do you know that feelings are not as causally efficacious as anything else in nature?”
“Manifestations” is a weasel-word!
I’m pretty sure feelings are caused by the usual four FFs (i.e., I’m not a “dualist,” for what my beliefs are worth!).
But I am pretty sure no one has explained how feelings are caused by the usual four FFs. And I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to explain how they are caused. As usual, the attempted explanations will turn out to be explanations of doings, and doing capacity (i.e., functing), not feeling.
As for the fact that feelings have no (independent) effects (i.e., apart from the unproblematic direct effects of the same four FFs on which the feelings are piggy-backing causally): I’m as sure of that as I am that telekinetic dualism is false. (For that is what it would take for feelings to have effects.)
JS: “a correlation… does not answer my question. How do you know that your anxiety level goes up when your GSR goes up?”
I think I made it clear I was not invoking a cartesian “know” (i.e., certainty) for the correlations between feeling and functing, just for the fact that I feel. For the correlations I am no surer than I am that, say, night follows day, or that there’s an external world…
JS: “why you think that you know about your feelings in an indubitable and inexplicable way.”
I am as certain I feel (when I feel) as Descartes was of his cogito — indeed, it is the cogito, which should have been “ sentio ergo sentitur“.
And I’m as sure that it’s inexplicable as I am that the 4 FFs are all there are, and all that’s needed to cause all that’s caused. Thus, whereas there’s room for feelings as effects, there’s no room for them as causes.
And explanation (here) means causal explanation (of how and why feel rather than just funct).
JS: “a slightly different interpretation of Wittgenstein… It is not only that a wholly private language lacks the possibility of error correction; it is that the very notion of error makes no sense here. [so] you can… use the word “feeling” to refer to something… private, but you cannot claim that this usage is correct, and so it cannot indicate knowledge”
I do interpret Wittgenstein on private language much the same way you do, and that is the problem of error:
I can’t nonarbitrarily name what I’m feeling, even with public correction: I could be calling what it feels like to feel sad “sad” one day and “happy” another day, without the possibility of anyone — including me — being any the wiser, as long as my public sayings about feelings were reliably correlated with my public doings and sayings, and it all kept feeling fine to me.
(I could of course do the same thing if Zombies were possible and “I” were a Zombie: “My” sayings [including my sayings about feelings] and my doings [of which my sayings are of course just a particular case] would be reliably correlated in that case (i.e., if “I” were a Zombie) too, again with the help of public corrective feedback on my doings and sayings — except that instead of random feelings that just fooled me each time into feeling as if they were familiar recurrent feelings, there would simply be no feelings at all: just the functings that subserve the doing and the saying, which are of course likewise functings.)
In a fundamental sense, all of this is true about every feeling: even with public corrective feedback, there could be a reliable correlation between whenever I’m feeling F and what I refer to publicly as “F”, but that correlation could be just as reliable if it were just a correlation with the inclination to call F “F” publicly, plus the feeling that I’m feeling that old familiar F at the time, when in reality I am feeling something randomly different every time. But that’s really just about the reliability of public naming (and the correlation plus external feedback takes care of that); it’s not about the reliability of the recurrence and identification of the self-same feeling every time it feels as if it’s recurring. (It’s not for nothing that “feeling” and “seeming” are fully interchangeable in all of this!)
But none of that touches on the fact of (ongoing) feeling itself, about which I have cartesian certainty every time it happens. Not only do I know that I’m feeling, whenever I’m feeling, but even if I’m not feeling what I called F the last time, and instead only feeling-as-if-I’m-feeling what I called F the last time, the fact that I am nevertheless feeling something remains a cartesian certainty there too.
The best way to see this is to forget about the naming of the feeling; in fact, assume we are talking about a species that has no language. An alligator can have a headache (that feels much like our headache feels) without knowing he has a head, and without calling the feeling anything, nor even remembering ever having felt that feeling before. Whatever the alligator is feeling at the time, it is a certainty that it is feeling, and that it is feeling that (though that poor precartesian alligator may not be feeling that certainty!) And if an alligator were capable of cartesian doubt, he would be incapable of doubting he was feeling a headache (when he was indeed feeling a headache), exactly as I would be incapable of doubting I was feeling a headache — i.e., doubting that I was feeling whatever I was feeling — when I was feeling a headache (though I would be perfectly capable of doubting I had a head). (I repeat, the current feeling need not be the same feeling as the feeling I had the last time I felt I had a headache; it could just be déjà vu. This one could feel hot and that one could have felt cold, and I could simply have forgotten that. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I can be sure I am feeling something (or other) now, and that whatever that something (or other) feels like now is what it feels like (and not something else). (Again, the synonymy of “feeling” and “seeming”.)
An important further point I made earlier in another posting: If I am to have a well-defined category, it must have both positive and negative instances (i.e., members and nonmembers), and I must have sampled enough of both to be able to pick out what distinguishes them, reliably. Only then can I really “know” (this is not the cartesian know, just a quotidian cognitive capacity to distinguish reliably) what’s in the category and what’s not in it.
But the category “feeling” is one of a family of special cases (each of them causing conceptual and philosophical problems) because they are “ uncomplemented categories” — a kind of “ poverty of the stimulus” problem arising from the fact that they are based (and can only be based) exclusively on positive instances: In contrast, the category “redness” is perfectly well-complemented: I can sample what it feels like to see red things and non-red things, no problem. But not so with the category “feeling”: I can sample what it feels like to feel: I do that every time I feel anything. And I can sample what it feels like to feel X and to feel not-X. So through feeling X and feeling not-X (if there’s no evil demon playing random scrambling tricks of the kind I mentioned above on the recurrence of my X and not-X feelings), “X” and “not-X” (or, if you prefer external negation, not-feeling X [when feeling Y instead]) are perfectly well instantiated and complemented, hence reliably identifiable categories (insofar as ordinary, noncartesian cognition is concerned).
But feeling itself is not; for I can never feel what it feels like to not-feel (as opposed to merely not-feeling X, in virtue of feeling Y instead). All I have is positive evidence for what it feels like to feel.
But I do have evidence. So although the category “feeling” is uncomplemented, hence pathological in some ways, it is nevertheless a category. It leaves me with some indeterminacy about what to call what I’m actually feeling, and about whether or not I’ve actually felt it before (as it seems). It will also leave me with a lot of puzzles about what “feeling” is (including, notably, the mind/body problem!). But it will still leave no cartesian doubt as to the fact that feeling is indeed going on, when it is: sentitur. (Of course “sentio ergo sum” would be far too strong a conclusion to draw from such evidence: What is this “I” that I supposedly am? (It’s almost — but just almost — as uncertain as the existence of my head, when all I have to go on, by way of evidence, is my headache.) The best we can say is that it feels as if there is an “I” — but that’s hardly more certain or cartesian than that it feels as if there’s an outside world, or a “you”. (Life could have been just one isolated, amnesic “ouch” after another, with no “ego” — yet that would already be enough to create the explanatory gap.)
So sentitur is all we can be certain about, regarding feeling; but that’s quite enough to generate the full-blown mind/body (feeling/function) problem.
(All this is by way of my sketching my update on Wittgenstein’s private-language argument and problem-of-error, plus a minor tweak of Descartes’ cogito.)
JS: “so, when you say, “I know with absolute certainty what red is, because it is my feeling alone and I experience it directly”… we should conclude that you aren’t saying anything.”
No, as I’ve just argued, I cannot have Cartesian certainty about the coupling between my feeling and the world, nor about the recurrent identity of my feeling (what it’s called, and whether it’s the same thing I felt before under that name) but I can have cartesian certainty about the fact that I am feeling, when I’m feeling (and despite the fact that feeling is an uncomplemented category).
JS: “As W. says, ‘a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said’ ”
It’s a subtle point, but I am not talking here about what can be said; I am talking about about what can be known, with the same certainty as “if P then P” — and even by an alligator, who cannot think “if P then P” but is just as bound by it…
JS: “Perhaps you only mean to say that you can know you feel like you have a toothache without observing your body in any way.”
Yes: I am talking exclusively about what and when one feels, not about any coupling between the feeling and the world (of bodies, etc.). That has exactly the same scope as the cogito — indeed it is the cogito, properly put (sentitur).
JS: “In your view, feelings do not inform us about our bodies at all–for, if they so informed us, then they would play a causal role in our ability to learn about and function within the world. And if observations of our bodies could inform us of our feelings, then there would be no ”hard problem'”
Correct. It is the functing (on which feelings piggy-back, inexplicably) that takes care of our doings and sayings about bodies, including, mysteriously, the correlation between bodily functings and feelings. And there is no cartesian certainty about functings (though of course they are largely reliable, adaptive and veridical); there is certainty only about the fact of ongoing feeling (and about “if P then P”).
JS: “This is a form of dualism. Whatever feelings are and whatever functions are, information about one cannot be gained from the other. You prefer to call your position “epiphenomenalism,” because you wish to maintain some notion of causal dependence between bodily states and feelings, even if that dependence is only one-way. But such a causal dependence is unknowable–a something about which nothing could be said.”
(1) For what it’s worth, I fully believe the brain causes feelings (about as fully as I believe that gravity causes apples to fall); hence I am not a “dualist.”
(2) But gravity is one of the four fundamental forces (FFs), hence it calls for no further causal explanation. Feeling is not, hence it does.
(3) And hence I note that although the brain causes feelings, no one has explained how the brain causes feelings.
(4) Worse, no one has explained why the brain causes feelings, given that the four FFs unproblematically cause and constitute all causal function (functing).
(5) So feeling remains a causal/functional dangler: caused (somehow) by the brain, but not itself having any causal power of its own, over and above the functing that it is correlated with, and that accounts causally — and fully — for everything we do and say, without the need or room for any extra causal help.
(6) I don’t find it particularly useful or informative to call this “epiphenomenalism”: it is simply a failure of causal explanation, an “explanatory gap” (one might as well call it “exceptionalism,” equally unilluminatingly) — but I suppose one is free to call an unsolved and insoluble explanatory problem whatever one likes…
JS: “When you ask “why are some functions felt?,” what is it that you suppose is feeling the functions? What sort of entity can feel? I do not see how you can answer this question without explicitly embracing dualism; and if you do not answer it, then your usage of the term “feel” becomes highly suspect”
The trouble with uncomplemented categories is that they do raise a host of puzzles:
(a) I know (cartesianly) that feeling is going on (sentitur).
(b) I have evidence (noncartesian) that there is a world, that I have a body, that others have bodies, and that my feelings (seemings) are very closely correlated with what seems to be going on (doings, functing) in that outside world.
(c) It is part of the nature of feeling that feelings are felt. “Unfelt feelings” are self-contradictory (and meaningless), and the notion of unfelt feelings has given rise to a lot of incoherent hocus-pocus (such as the notion of unconscious thoughts and an unconscious mind — rather than the [mostly] unfelt functing plus the [minority of] felt functing that is all there really is).
(d) It also seems to be part of the nature of feeling that a feeler feels the feelings and that it feels-as-if I am the feeler. Insofar as cartesian certainty is concerned, all I can say is that it is certain that feeling is going on (when it is), and that it feels like I am the feeler. In certain disordered states, that’s not so clear; but from a sober (but noncartesian) standpoint, it is very likely that my brain causes my feelings, and also causes me, as a continuous identity, feeling and remembering the feelings I’ve felt.
(e) No one know how or why the brain causes feelings; the brain (like everything else, including Darwinian evolution) is a functor. It is natural to ask how and why some brain functions are felt, but there is no causal room for a causal answer.
I think I’ve answered your question as well as one can, and without “explicitly embracing dualism”.
JS: “There is no practical difference between epiphenomenalism and dualism that I can see.”
Rather than talking ontics (on which I am a monist), I prefer to talk epistemics (on which I prefer to call an explanatory failure by its proper name).
JS: “Your position cannot be established a posteriori. Appeals to common knowledge and ostensive definitions can only beg the question. You do indicate something like Chalmers’ conceivability argument when you talk about robots, and that is an a priori argument; however, I am not convinced”
I take the cogito (or sentitur, rather) to be based on evidence we have from experience (hence a posteriori) — indeed it is the paradigmatic case of evidence from experience (i.e., feeling). But it is experiential evidence only of the indubitable (incorrigible) fact of experience, not more — and it is certainly not an explanation of the causes or effects of experience.
No, I have no use whatsoever for “conceivability” arguments. I have no idea whether or not there can be Zombies (i.e., unfeeling Turing-scale robots, indistinguishable in their doing/saying capacities from ourselves), but what I happen to believe is that if a T-scale robot is possible, it will feel.
Nor is the argument that there is no causal room over and above the 4 FFs an a priori argument. It’s contingent on the evidence that there are only the 4 FFs. Telekinetic dualism seems a perfectly conceivable, indeed plausible, alternative. It just happens to be false.
REFERENCES
Harnad, S. (1987) Uncomplemented Categories, or, What is it Like to be a Bachelor? 1987 Presidential Address: Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
Harnad, S. (2005) To Cognize is to Categorize: Cognition is Categorization, in Lefebvre, C. and Cohen, H., Eds. Handbook of Categorization. Elsevier