Arnold Trehub [AT]: “you assert that feelings are caused by the brain“
I said that (for what it’s worth) I believe that feelings are caused by the brain almost as confidently as I believe that apples are caused to fall by gravity. The difference in confidence is because we can explain causally how apples fall (we understand universal gravitation) but we cannot explain causally how the brain causes feelings.
I also said that I do not believe it is possible to explain causally how the brain causes feelings (but all I gave to support that belief was negative evidence [that telekinetic dualism is false] plus a methodological argument [incommensurability].
AT: “you assert that feelings have no causal consequences”
I asserted that in the form of the empirical fact that telekinetic dualism is false: All causal consequences of brain activity are causal consequences of the four known fundamental forces. There is no fifth force (feeling).
It is a fact — an unexplained fact but a fact — that we feel, and it is almost certain that our feelings are caused (mysteriously) by our brains. But as feeling is not an independent fifth force, whatever feels as if it it is caused by feelings is actually caused by the brain (which also [mysteriously] causes feelings).
The paradigmatic example is the feeling that my finger moved because I willed it. It does indeed feel that way, but all evidence is that it moved because of activity in my brain — perhaps the same activity that (mysteriously) caused the feeling that my finger moved because I willed it.
Feelings have no causal consequences; it is only what (mysteriously) causes feelings that has causal consequences. It only feels as if the feelings are the causes.
It is for this reason that although it is a mystery — and I think an unresolvable mystery — how we feel, it is an even bigger mystery why we feel. For it looks as if everything that we do that is accompanied by feelings — including the feeling that the doing is happening because of those feelings — can be done without feelings: Indeed, the fact that the doing is accompanied by feeling is not an explanatory aid (apart from the fact that it squares with how we feel when we do): Rather, it is an overwhelming explanatory burden, because we cannot explain either how feeling is caused by the brain or what feeling itself causes that is not already caused by whatever (mysteriously) causes feeling.
This might help set intuitions: I don’t think anyone will deny that if the human species were able to do all it can do — talk, learn, teach, socialize, invent, do science and engineering, write history, biography and fiction, etc. — but it did not feel, then there would be no mind/body problem or explanatory gap. Things would be much more straightforward: Cognitive neuroscience would only need to explain the (formidable) capacity of this hypothetical insentient species to do and to say all that our own species can do and say, but not the fact that they feel (because they do not feel).
(I am not here suggesting that Zombies are possible: I am just trying to highlight the extra explanatory burden that the undeniable fact of feeling imposes on causal explanation. It should be clear that the existence of feelings is a liability rather than an asset for causal, functional explanation.)
Now I said things would be a lot more straightforward, explanatorily speaking, if there were no feeling, just doing — if all “functing,” nonbiological and biological, were just unfelt functing. There would, however, be an unresolved puzzle even then — though it would not be a causal puzzle: Why would such an insentient species speak of feeling at all? Why would they say “I am feeling tired” rather than just “I am tired” (meaning my body is fatigued)? (I don’t think there would be any problem with the use of the indexical “I” by such a species, by the way, despite all the fuss some make about the concept of “self” and “self-consciousness”: the trouble, as usual, is with the felt aspect and not the functional aspects of “selfhood.”)
Possibly the feeling vocabulary would be useful as a shorthand for speaking of internal states in the speaker and others. After all, internal states are just as invisible as mental (i.e., felt) states. “Feeling happy” and “feeling sad” may all have internal functional counterparts in the sort of “mind-reading” that this twin species would still have to be able to do, if it were to have the same adaptive social and verbal capacities as our own species. (To “feel happy” might for them be an internal state that was relatively free of processes correlated with actual or impending tissue damage, or free of data predictive of other current or future untoward adaptive consequences, and/or correlated with the attainment, or the impending attainment, of a functional goal, perhaps related to survival, reproduction, competition, or social success: all of these make sense as purely adaptive, functional categories, in a Darwinian survival machine, irrespective of whether it just functs them, or also feels them as it functs them.)
Maybe even the locution “I am sincerely sorry,” uttered in its pragmatic social context, has a purely functional role to play, even for a Darwinianly successful Zombie; and the only reason we find that counterintuitive is that we do feel, and find it difficult even to imagine what it would be like not to — with good reason, because “be like” means “feel like,” and of course it would feel like nothing, “feeling” being an uncomplemented category.
Thus does the fact of feeling not only create the mind/body [feeling/function] problem and the gap in causal explanation, but the anomalous nature of “feeling” as a category adds a further sense of “mystery” to the explanatory gap:
A tougher distinction in such a Zombie species would be the distinction between Zombie psychopaths (who, like our psychopaths, purportedly do not feel guilt or remorse) and Zombie normals, who purportedly do. But I think that it only takes a little reflection to see that there are behavioral and functional distinctions between our psychopaths and normals that could, in Zombie psychopaths and normals, be based on responsiveness to certain internal states, without the internal states having to be felt states. (These behavioral and strategic distinctions might even be relevant to explaining functionally why the psychopath genotype exists at all, in our sentient species.)
(Note that, because we do feel, we have trouble imagining a species saying and doing the same things we say and do, but without feeling. But the real trouble is in the other direction! It is the Zombified version of feeling-talk and feeling-action that has the straightforward functional explanation, and the feeling that is the a-functional dangler, not the other way round!)
So what about “the mind/body problem” itself? Would philosophers in this hypothetical insentient species still ponder and argue over the causal power of feeling when they in fact have no feeling, and the only referent for “feeling” in their discourse is “internal functional state”? Would Zombie philosophers “know” that for them, there was no distinction between felt and unfelt functing? Would they really have any knowledge at all, as opposed to mere know-how, given that they are incapable of more than lip-service to the Cartesian “sentio ergo sentitur“? The cogito does not work, after all, for inferred states: It only works for felt states. (That’s the quintessence of Descartes’ method of doubt.)
Some may want to conclude that this puzzle is in fact evidence for the causal power of feeling after all, for only a species that actually felt could engage in discourse about the feeling/function problem coherently!
I’m inclined to conclude otherwise. I happen to doubt that there could be a feelingless (“Zombie”) species (natural or artificial) that was nevertheless Turing-Indistinguishable from ourselves. If they were really feelingless, there would be other differences in what they did and said. And what squares our own species’ discourse with our feelings is whatever it is in our brains that keeps our feelings so correlated with our functing: It is not an independent causal consequence of the fact that we feel, but a consequence of the common (functional) cause of both our doings/sayings and the feelings that they (mysteriously) generate as a lockstep accompaniment.
So the question of how and why we feel (which is exactly the same as the question of how and why we are not just Darwinian Zombies) also leads to the question of how and why there could not be Zombies that were Turing-Indistinguishable from us — if there could not be. For if there could, then the mystery could be just due to some (colossal) evolutionary quirk or coincidence in the case of the terrestrial biosphere. If there could not be Zombies, then the mystery could be a fundamental principle of functional organization that we will never know or understand, because the felt component will always be functionally superfluous under any causal explanation that does not cheat or beg the question.
AT: “you are claiming feelings are either (a) non-physical events caused by the brain in a dualistic universe and naturally have no causal consequences for subsequent brain activity, or (b) they are physical events cause by the brain but have no causal consequences for subsequent brain activity. Which case (a or b) do you endorse?”
I hope it is clear by now that I endorse (b) and add only that I think that how the brain causes feelings is also inexplicable, because of the incommensurability of function and feeling, despite their correlation. (I invite others to attack me on this, and force me to defend it more rigorously: Is it coherent to say “correlated yet incommensurable”?)
AT: “[You say] that in order to explain why we feel we would have to show that feelings have causal consequences.”
Indeed we do, otherwise feelings remain the mysterious, unexplained dangler they are — and the explanatory gap gapes.
AT: “Am I correct in assuming… you believe we can explain how the brain causes feelings, but we are unable to explain why the brain causes feelings?
No, I don’t believe we can explain how the brain causes feelings either (but I do believe the brain causes feelings). I do not, however, believe that feelings cause anything else: As I said, there’s no causal room. Hence here it is not a matter of an actual causation that we cannot explain (the way we cannot explain how the brain causes feelings, even though it undoubtedly does) but an inexplicable lack of causation, making it inexplicable why we feel.
Prior Postings:
— THE FEELING/FUNCTING PROBLEM IS INSOLUBLE
— ONE EPIPHENOMENON (AND PROBLEM) IS ENOUGH: THE PROBLEM IS EXPLAINING THE CAUSAL STATUS OF FEELING
— (untitled 633)
— (untitled 642)
— FEELING, FUNCTING, AND ALAN TURING
— SENTIO ERGO SENTITUR
— WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO FEEL
— (untitled 676)
— ACHILLES AND THE TORTOISE ON FEELING
— UNCOMPLEMENTED CATEGORIES, OR, WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BACHELOR?
— “ACCESS” CONSCIOUSNESS – “PHENOMENAL” CONSCIOUSNESS = ZERO
— ON NOT BLAMING THE MESSENGER
— (untitled 716)
— (untitled 717)
— (untitled 718)
— (untitled 719)
— ON PSYCHOPHYSICAL INCOMMENSURABILITY AND SENSORY-SEMANTIC DUALS
— CORRELATION, CORRESPONDENCE AND INCOMMENSURABILITY
— (untitled 750)
— TELEKINETIC DUALISM: MIND OVER MATTER
— ON PREDICTING WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE A BAT…
— ON MEASURING, FEELING, AND COMMENSURABILITY: (AND MIND THE ONTIC/EPISTEMIC GAP!)
— (untitled 801)
— UNTOWARD CONSEQUENCES OF UNCOMPLEMENTED CATEGORIES
— PREDICTING WHAT WE FEEL IS NOT EXPLAINING THAT WE FEEL
— FUNCTING” IS ALL OF PHYSICAL, BIOLOGICAL AND ENGINEERING CAUSAL DYNAMICS
— (untitled 838)
— THE EXPLANATORY GAP IS EPISTEMIC, NOT ONTIC
— (untitled 857)
— WHY WOULD TURING-INDISTINGUISHABLE ZOMBIES TALK ABOUT FEELINGS (AND WHAT, IF ANYTHING, WOULD THEY MEAN)?