Author: Stevan Harnad

Resisted loving your cats,
feeling it would be a betrayal of my dog,
long gone,
who so loved you.

Fancied also
(oh so fatuously)
that caring for them
(like carrying on teaching Tai Chi —
another wrongful suspect)
was diminishing your diminishing life
rather than preserving it.

Now you’re gone,
only their mute daily yearning for you,
relentless, perplexed,
to be witnessed and felt,
and all resistance is dissolved.

Remorse alone,
irremediable remorse,
for having denied you
(and them)
my love for them.

Fidelity’s a false friend.
Even an instant
may become an eternity.
Feeling alone,
immanent feeling, felt,
matters.

Few the wrongs
that can ever be righted
posthumously.

2010-05-23

You can write a humorous book on laughable language laws, but not on anti-semitism, nor aboriginal rights, nor even on Franco-Canadian grievances and aspirations. Richler’s (now much-dated) book, though it contains some relevant truths and insights, and is no doubt driven by some genuine anguish on the part of the author, is, in the end, an exercise in superficial stereotyping, insensitivity and bad taste. Everything that is true in it could have been said in an uncompromising way without the gratuitous offensiveness (but then it wouldn’t have been good for laughs). But to keep it fun, most of the real core of the ethnic problems of Quebec would have had to be omitted. Perhaps a genuine outsider like Bill Bryson could have written about some of it in a detached, good-natured way. But clearly Mordechai Richler was not up to it. [And no, it does not help the book, nor the author’s understanding, that he cannot speak (only reads) French, hence can only banter with bar-buddies, one-sidedly.]

Yearning, daily,
impossibly,
to feel your presence.
Dreading the day
I can no longer feel
even your absence.

You’ve detoxified death
for me.
Your land was ever my land.
Whither you went
was where I ever meant
to follow.
Nowhere you were
was ever alien to me.
Nor, now,
is where you aren’t.
Alien now
is only here,
where you were,
without you.

All my life —
her life —
near or far
mostly far
wherever I was
I dwelt in her land
motherland
whatever I spoke
spoke in her tongue
mother tongue
my source and fulcrum
her life
gone now
stateless
speechless
jabbering poetastry
but what matters
is not that
what matters
is what is not
no
who is not
the meaning of life
you learn it
when it is no more

Verse: well-spoke banalities
sometimes animated
by heady rushes
of infectious affect

Only now,
that I’ve taken over your maternal duties
meeting your cats’ diurnal needs,
do I see how much that had been exacting
from your shrinking powers and days.
What was left was devoted
to not showing how your own daily needs
were mercilessly growing, unmet.

Nurture — less material than mental, moral —
was in your nature to give.
Not to every mortal, just a select subset:
your progeny,
your progeny’s progeny,
your proteges, your pupils,
your paramours,
your pets.
I was in this elite corps from my very beginning
till nearly your end.

My last fall from grace would perhaps have counted less,
because you had given me enough to sustain countless lifetimes
— but not the loss of yours.
That exceeded even your boundless powers.
And your sense — for once, so far from fact —
of having lost me: No number of lifetimes
could ever atone for having let you leave me
with that.

For me the mourning after
came close enough to nightfall
that I really feel no yearning
for yet another dawn.

But, had the darkness
befallen nearer daybreak,
would the photophilia
have spontaneously resumed?

Empty counterfactuals.

The answer’s in my nature
begot by
and beholden
to yours.
More to do
with meaning
and maternity
than melancholia.

And all of this I know
because I’m not the only one
who misses you so.

Everything hurts,
pleasure and pain.
Pleasure more,
because you’re not.
From my first breath,
hope meant you.
Now it’s just
ruthless awakenings.
Pain’s easier.
Already there.
But not about me.
Not about me.
To express
the ineffable:
It’s not about me.
Hope’s not a state.
It’s a mortal.
You here, I,
a fool,
thought:
It’s about me.
Now I know it’s not,
never was,
nor could have been
about me.
Nor would I ever
have wished it
otherwise.
Wishing I only now understand,
now it’s become unfulfillable,
because not about me.
The cats,
who so miss you, as I do,
knew all along,
and know it still,
that it was not about me.

Jim Stone: “Epiphenomenalism about mental properties isn’t necessarily false but I think the case against it is virtually overwhelming”

The only way to make a case against epiphenomenalism (construed as the innocent plaint that we do not seem to be able to give a causal explanation of how or why we feel) is to give a causal explanation of how and why we feel (without resorting to telekinesis, which is false).

JS: “I focus on qualia.”

I agree with you that “it’s silly to argue about words,” so allow me, for heuristic reasons, to substitute in all my quotes from you, below, my preferred, straightforward anglo-saxon term, “feelings,” understood by all, for the quaint neologism “qualia” favored by some philosophers. I think it helps forestall certain common forms of question-begging:

JS: “1. If [feelings] were black holes in causal space… we wouldn’t know they existed.”

Translation: If we didn’t feel, we wouldn’t feel. Agreed.

(Ontic variant: If there were no feelings, there would be no feelings. Agreed.)

JS: “Of course we do know [feelings] exist and it isn’t a matter of abductive reasoning or inference. We know that [feelings] exist because we are directly acquainted with them.”

I feel (when I’m feeling) therefore I feel (when I’m feeling). Agreed. We owe as much to Descartes (“sentio ergo sentitur“).

JS: “Direct acquaintance, on any plausible account, involves causal powers to affect the mind by the object with which we are so acquainted”

Agreed. I’m just waiting for the “plausible account” of how and why.

(I will let the more equivocal phrase “affect the mind” slip by, though it really just means that gazing at things makes me feel something, namely, what it feels like to see them. In other words, it is just the restatement of the unexplained correlation between functing and feeling. I have no problem with accepting the fact — since it’s obviously true — that the cause of my feeling is something that happens to, and happens in, my brain. But the explanatory gap is in explaining how and why that something that happens is a felt something, rather than just a functed something. The fact that the felt something does happen is not in dispute. Nor is it really in doubt that it is the brain that causes what would otherwise just be optical transduction to become, instead, or in addition, felt seeing, somehow. The part that is not only in doubt but certain is that no one has explained that “somehow” — i.e., how or why the optical transduction is caused to become felt seeing. Moreover, perhaps going a bit beyond what is certain, I add that there are good reasons to believe that it is not even possible to explain it, in the usual causal/functional way that everything else is explained, without resorting to telekinetic causation, which does not exist. The problem is already there in trying to explain how the brain causes feeling, and even more pressingly there in trying to explain how feeling causes doing. There would be no problem at all if all doing and doing-power remained exactly what they are, functionally, but there were no feeling, just unfelt functing.)

JS: “2. It seems perfectly evident that [feelings] play a substantial causal role in our lives.”

Feelings certainly play a substantial felt causal role in our lives. But I hope you will agree that a felt cause is not necessarily the same as a real cause.

It is also true that the (unproblematic) external objects and internal functional states that appear to be the (unexplained) causes of our feelings (via the brain) play a substantial causal role in our lives (felt and unfelt).

But it is the causal status and role of feelings qua feelings — rather than just as the side-effects and correlates of unproblematic external objects and internal functional states — that is under scrutiny here: How and why are they felt? Not whether they are felt to be causal (they are). Not even whether they are caused (they no doubt are, somehow). But how and why they are felt rather than just functed (to the same functional effect)?

JS: “on the face of things the causal role of [feelings] in our lives is is one of the phenomena an account of the mind ought to preserve.”

Indisputably.

But alas, this welcome account is faced with an awkward explanatory gap…

JS: “3. If [feelings] have no causal powers, they couldn’t have been selected for by evolution”.

So one would think.

So explain to me how the Blind Watchmaker (a pure functionalist, if there ever was one!) was able to select the Darwinian survival machines that felt, and reject the ones that only functed: Was he reading their minds? How? Why? (Evolution is surely as non-telepahic as it is non-telekinetic…)

Harnad, S. (2002) Turing Indistinguishability and the Blind Watchmaker. In: J. Fetzer (ed.) Evolving Consciousness. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp 3-18.

JS: “Still [feelings] could’ve been produced by evolution as a side effect of physical features that were selected for. But if that were so… we should expect [feelings] to be a hodgepodge…”

Feelings are reliably and systematically correlated with some adaptive functions. But it is not this correlation that is missing; it is its causal explanation.

Apples fall down, not up, reliably and systematically. Gravitation explains the correlation, causally. No such luck with feelings (without telekinesis).

JS: “Obviously what we get instead is… enormously informative about what’s going on in the world.”

Data are informative. But the burden is to explain why and how data should need to be felt, rather than just functed, in order to be informative. (Information is not a mental phenomenon; it is just data that reduce uncertainty, as in the input and processing of an adaptive robot that needs to do things in order to survive and reproduce. Hence in calling felt data “informative” we are usually just unwittingly smuggling in, unexplained, the felt component that we were supposed to be explaining!)

JS: “As this is what you would expect if [feelings] were selected for, and what you would not expect if they were not selected for, it’s probable that [feelings] were selected for. So they probably have causal powers.”

Probably indeed. (But we are not talking about their probability of being causal, but the probability of explaining their causality!)

So the only thing that’s left to do is to explain how and why feelings were selected for (and distinguished from unfelt functings): What was the functional advantage of felt functing over unfelt functing?

(You will notice that every functional advantage you name will come in two varieties, one felt and one unfelt. And you will never be able to say why the felt one was more adaptive than the unfelt one. And the reason you will be unable to do it is also clear. Because, without telekinesis, there is no purely functional advantage of a felt function over the very same function, minus the feeling.)

JS: “This isn’t meant to be a mathematical proof, but I take the causal efficacy of [feelings] to be as certain as anything there is in the philosophy of mind.”

The felt (i.e., subjective) causal efficacy of feelings, and their close correlation with objective functional efficacy is undisputed within and without philosophy of mind. What is in dispute is the efficacy of attempts to explain how and why we feel rather than just funct.

JS: “Certainly if an account of the mind entails epiphenomenalism, that is a pretty good reason to reject it.”

True or false, “epiphenomenalism” is empty, explanatorily. The “explanatory gap” is epistemic, not ontic: How and why do we feel rather than just funct?