Skywritings

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

David, I think you have misunderstood a number of things:

(1) The most important is the ontic/epistemic distinction: Distinguish been what there really is (ontic) and what we can know about what there really is (epistemic), e.g., what we can observe or measure. Although it was fashionable for a while (though one wonders how and why!), it will not do to say “I shall assume that what I can observe and measure is all there is and can be.” Not if you want to address the question of the explanatory gap, rather than simply beg it!

(2) Observation and measurement also have to be looked at much more rigorously. In the most natural sense of “observe,” only seeing creatures observe. A camera does not “observe,” it simply does physical transduction, producing a physical “image” (on the film) which, again, is simply another object that has some properties (which in turn are analogs of some of the properties of the object from which the light entering the camera originated). The seeing person who looks at the image on the film is the one who observes, not the camera.

The same is true of measurement: A thermometer does not “measure” temperature; people measure temperature. The thermometer itself simply implements a physical interaction, in which its mercury rises to a certain point on the (man-made) scale, which can then be read off by a seeing, observing, measuring human. The user is the one doing the measuring, not the thermometer.

But there is no reason to be quite this rigid: There is not much risk in talking about instruments doing the measurements, rather than the users of the instruments, just as long as we do not read too much into “measuring.” Ditto for “observing.” In particular, we must on no account make the mistake of treating this instrumental sense of measuring and observing as if it were felt measuring and observing, because then, again, we are simply begging the question of the explanatory gap and the feeling/functing problem.

In the instrumental sense of “measurement,” we can say, for example, that unattended temperature sensors in the arctic transmitted their “observations” to computers, which analyzed them and produced a result, which (correctly) predicted global warming and the destruction of the biosphere in N years. And that event would be the same event if humans were already extinct and the arctic sensors and computers were running on auto-pilot. But what would it mean?

(Remember that I have a radically deviant view, not the standard one, on the subject of the relation between feeling and meaning: I think only felt meaning is meaning; without feeling all one has is grounded robotic functing (and semantic interpretability). So even if, after the extinction of humans, the arctic sensors and the computers transmitted their data to robots that then took the requisite steps to avert the global warming and save the biosphere, that would all still just be physical transduction and nothing else — except, of course, if the robots actually did feel — but in that case it would be irrelevant that they were robots! They might as well be us; and all the observing and measuring is again being done by feeling creatures, and the feeling/function gap is as unbridged as ever!)

(3) Your third equivocation in what follows below, is in the weasel-word “experience” — which can mean felt experience, as in our case, or, used much more loosely and instrumentally (as with “observing” and “measuring”) it can merely mean an event in which there was again some sort of physical interaction. Whether the event was one billiard ball hitting another, or a camera snapping a photo after all life is gone, or a computer receiving the bits and applying an algorithm to them — these are all pretty much of a muchness. There’s no “experience” going on there, because of course it’s only really an “experience” — rather than just an event or state with certain functional properties — if it is felt (by someone/something).

And that (and only that) is what this discussion is all about, and has been, unswervingly, all along (for those who grasp what the explanatory problem at issue is).

DC: “‘telekinesis’ is abhorrent because it suggests there are nonphysical phenomena which influence the comings and goings of material things.

Ordinary (“paranormal/psychic”) telekinesis is not “abhorrent,” it is simply false, in that all evidence contradicts it. All seemingly telekinetic effects keep turning out to be either due to chance or to cheating.
And as for (what I’ve called) “telekinetic dualism” — that too is not abhorrent. It is perfectly natural, indeed universal, to believe and feel that our feelings matter, and that most of what we do, we do because we feel like doing it, and not just because functing is going on, of which our feelings are merely correlates — correlates of which we do not know the causes, and, even more important, correlates which themselves have no effects of their own, and we cannot explain how and why they are there at all. (That, yet again. is the f/f problem and the explanatory gap.)

DC: “To suggest…momentum, position and fields… might be influenced by ‘feeling’ seems ludicrous.” 

It is not ludicrous; it is simply false.

DC: “However, suggesting that momentum, position or fields can create phenomena that are not measurable by measuring the momentum, position and field is just as serious a problem as suggesting said phenomena influences those measurements”

How did we get into “measurability”? We can measure momentum today that was too minute to measure yesterday. Maybe there’s still momentum we can’t measure, or don’t even know about. This is the ontic/epistemic error: What there is (and isn’t) in the world owes nothing, absolutely nothing, to what human senses and instruments can or cannot “measure.”

Moreover, the f/f problem and the explanatory gap have nothing to do with the limits of human senses or measuring instruments. They have to do with the fact that we feel, yet we cannot explain how or why, because all evidence is that feelings, though they are there alright, have no independent causal power. They are just inexplicable correlates of the things that really do have causal power (functing). Hence the mystery about why everything is not all just unfelt functing: Why are some functions felt?

DC: “If you don’t want to accept telekinesis, then why accept the corollary which is that objectively measureable properties produce phenomena that are not objectively measurable?“

I have no problems whatsoever with the very real possibility that measurable properties may also have unmeasurable effects. The problem is that that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem of explaining how and why some functions are felt. It is not immeasurable effects of functing that are the problem; it is the fact that some functing is felt. (And although feeling is not, strictly speaking “measurable,” it is certainly observable — indeed, it is the only thing that is unproblematically observable! (It is no wonder that — in struggling with their own “explanatory gap” — philosophers of quantum mechanics have made something of a cult out of human observation, as being the mysterious cause of the “collapse of the wave packet” that separates our punctate world from the continuously superimposed smear it would be if there were no people to read off the outcome of a geiger-counter experiment! But, alas, this is just piling mystery atop mystery…)

DC: “If you can’t measure it, don’t accept it.”

There’s the barefoot operationalism, again. This may be useful advice to an experimental physicist — if not to a superstring theorist — because all they deal with is functing anyway, whether measurable or unmeasurable. But it is just question-begging if you are trying to explain how/why organisms feel rather than just funct.

DC: “Earlier you suggested that experience/qualia/feeling are measurable by the subject and reportable, but are not causal or perhaps are epiphenomenal.  Could you…clarify this?”

(First, why the needless synonyms “experience/qualia/feeling” when feeling covers them all and is problem enough?)

Second, I did not say feelings are measurable. (I think physical properties and feelings are incommensurable, and that measurement itself is physical, functional.) I said our feelings correlate with functing. We say (and feel) “ouch” when our skin is injured, not when it is stroked, or randomly; we say (and feel) a sound is louder when an acoustic amplitude increases, not when it decreases (or randomly). So the correlation is definitely there.

But this does not help explain why (or how) tissue damage and acoustic amplitude change is felt, rather than functed. If our neurons simply fired faster when we were hurt, or when a sound got louder, and caused our muscles to act accordingly, but we did not feel, then we’d still have the psychophysical correlation (stimulus/response) — including, if you like, JND by JND psychophysical scaling — but no correlated feeling. So the question naturally arises: what’s the point of the feeling?

I also don’t think I am measuring anything when I feel, or report my feeling. I am simply feeling. When I say “more” or “less,” I am saying this feels like more and that feels like less. The psychophysicist is doing the measuring (not I): He is measuring what I do (R) and comparing it to the stimulus (S) and noting that they are tightly correlated. I am just saying how it feels. As I said in my reply to Arnold Trehub: apart from the S/R correlation, there is not a separate “sentometer” to measure the feeling itself; it’s not even clear what “measuring a feeling” would mean. Nor, as I said, am *I* “measuring” what I’m feeling, in feeling it, and acting upon it. I’m just feeling it, and acting on it. And there is a tight correlation between what happens outside me (S), what I feel, and what I do (R). There better be, otherwise I would come from a long line of extinct ancestors. But the co-measurement is only between S and R, which are both functing and unproblematic. It feels as if I am drawing on feelings in order to generate my R, but how I do that is rather too problematic to be called “co-measurement” in any non-question-begging sense of measurement. So although the feeling is correlated with S and R, they are not commensurable, because the feeling is neither being measured, nor is it itself a measure, or measurement.

You also seem to be misunderstanding “epiphenomenal”: Epiphenomenal does not just mean “unimportant or unmeasurable side-effects.” It means (1) an effect that is uncaused, or (2) an effect that has no effects. I am a “materialist” in that I am sure enough that feelings are caused by the brain, somehow (i.e., they are not uncaused effects (1)); I simply point out that we have no idea how feelings are caused by the brain (and we never will). But the real puzzle is not that: the real puzzle is why feelings are caused by the brain, since feelings themselves have no effects (2). They are functional danglers, which means that they are gaps in any causal explanation.

There is one and only one epiphenomenon (unless QM has a few more of its own), and that is feeling: Caused (inexplicably) by the brain, feelings themselves (even more inexplicably) cause nothing — even though it feels as if they do.

DC: “You don’t want experience to influence anything physical.  You don’t want there to be an unmeasurable influence on any material comings and goings.”  

First, this has nothing to do with what I do or don’t want!

Second, rather than equivocate on “experience,” can we please stick to calling it feeling!

Feelings have no independent causal power, not because I don’t want them to, but because telekinetic dualism is false: there is no evidence for feelings having any causal power, and endless evidence against it.

And whereas there can certainly be unmeasurable effects, one cannot invoke them by way of an explanation of something without evidence. Besides, the problem with feeling has nothing to do with measurability; it’s their very existence that is the problem. And even if they were completely uncorrelated with anything else (the way our moods sometimes are), they would still defy causal explanation.

DC: “As an example, we might consider a computer being used to control some process such as the launching of a rocket.  One might say the computer has a causal influence over this process, albeit an epiphenomenal one.”  

Why on earth would you want to say the influence was epiphenomenal? This is a perfectly garden-variety example of causal influence!

DC: “One might take the position that everything above the molecular level is epiphenomenal, and certainly philosophers have suggested exactly this.”  

Philosophers say the strangest things. If everything about the molecular level is “epiphenomenal,” we have lost the meaning of “epiphenomenon” altogether.

And that’s just fine. I get not an epsilon more leverage on the inexplicability of how and why some functions are felt if I add that they are “epiphenomenal”!

DC: “computers, circuits or transistors are… all part of a causal chain from atomic and molecular interactions to rocket launch.”  

Indeed they are. No causal gaps there. It’s with feelings that you get the causal gap that lies at the heart of the explanatory gap.

DC: “you’re suggesting that experience is not part of that causal chain.  Experience/qualia/feeling can not play a part in any way in this causal chain.”

First, can we just stick with the one term “feeling”? The proliferation of synonyms just creates a distraction, and what we need is focus, and to eliminate everything that is irrelevant.

The evidence (not I) says that feelings have no independent power to cause anything. All the causal chains on which they piggy-back mysteriously are carried entirely by (unproblematic) functing.

DC: “What I don’t think you’re suggesting is that feelings are epiphenomenal in the same sense as the computer’s causal influence is epiphenomenal”

(1) I don’t for a minute think a computer’s causal influence is epiphenomenal. It’s causal influence is causal!

(2) I would suggest forgetting about “epiphenomena” and just sticking with doing, causing and feeling.

(3) All evidence is that feelings do not cause anything, even though they feel as if they do. All the causation is being done by the functing, on which the correlated feeling piggy-backs inexplicably.

(4) The inability to explain feeling causally is the explanatory gap.

DC: “let’s suggest that the experience of the color red can be reliably measured by a person.”

Alas we are back into ambiguity and equivocation.

It feels like something to see red.

The feeling is correlated with wave length (and brightness and luminosity), as psychophysics has confirmed.

Persons don’t measure. They feel, and respond (R). Psychophysicists measure (S and R).

S and R are reliably correlated, and since R is based on feelings, we can say feelings are reliably correlated with S too (even though, strictly speaking, S and R are commensurable, but neither is commensurable with feelings).
The human subject, however, is not measuring, but feeling, and doing.

DC: “a digital camera can take light and convert it to a digital pattern which can be reconverted to wavelength using just three pixels on a computer screen.  The intensity we observe from each pixel is interpreted and converted to color inside the brain.  I doubt anyone would say that the experience of color exists at any step of the process between recording the color red using the camera and the reproducing of the color at a computer screen.”

No, the feeling (sic) of seeing color occurs in the brain of the feeling subject. Not before or after in the causal (or temporal) chain.

(And why the computer? Let the stimulus be color. No need for it to be computer-generated color. If the digital-camera/computer is used instead as an analogy for the seeing subject, rather than the stimulus, the answer is that there is no feeling in the camera or the computer.)

DC: “let’s say we had a device which could reliably measure the experience of red.  A human is just such a device if experience reliably correlates to function/behavior.”

David, with this “assumption” you have effectively begged the question and given up (or rather smuggled in) the ghost (in the machine): Until further notice, the only devices that have experiences (feeling) to “measure” are biological organisms. If you declare some other device to feel by fiat, you’re headed toward panpsychism (everything and every part and combination of everything feels) which is not only arbitrary and as improbable as telekinesis, but is probably incoherent too.

No device can measure a feeling (sic); it can only measure a functional correlate of a feeling. And a human subject feels the feeling; he does not measure it.

DC: “Now, if this internal measurement is reliable, then let’s assume we can similarly produce this experience computationally.”

You’ve lost me. There is no internal measurement going on, just feeling. And it is “reliable” inasmuch as it correlates with S and R.

It is of course the easiest thing in the world to replace a human — feeling, say, sound intensity — by a computer, transducing sound intensity, in such a way as to reproduce the human S/R function.

Trouble is that in so doing you have not solved the f/f problem but simply begged the question — which is, let me remind you: How and why are we not also like that unfeeling device, transducing the input, producing a perfect S/R function, but feeling nothing whatsoever in the process?

DC: “Let’s assume our computer’s transistors can produce this reliable correlation and report dutifully the experience has been accomplished. If this is possible, then that computer… has physically measured the phenomenon in question and produced a physical report.”  

You seem to think that the f/f problem is getting a device to produce a reliable psychophysical detection (S/R) function: It’s not. The problem is to explain how and why we are not just devices that produce a psychophysical detection (S/R) function: how and why we feel whilst we funct.

(And this is not about measurement, but about explaining the causal role of feeling in human functing.)

DC: “If the measurement of the experience is reliable, then that measurement can be (must be) converted to a physical signal so that it is reportable, else it is not reliable.  So if the measurement of experience is reliably reported, then something can be done with that signal.  The signal can be interjected into a causal chain…”

I’m afraid you have left the real problem long behind as you head off into this measurement operationalism that begs the question at issue, which is not about reliable “measurement” but about felt functing.

DC: “We can have an if/then statement in our computer which says, If Xperience = RED then “SCRUB LAUNCH”.  In this way, qualia/experience/feeling is interjected into the causal chain.”  

You really think feeling is just a matter of an if/then statement in a computer program? Would a problem with a solution as trivial as that really have survived this long? If the physical substrate of feeling were (mirabile dictu) if/then statements in a computation, there would still be (as with the perpetuum mobile) that niggling little problem about why the if/then statements were felt rather than just functed…

DC: “Unless I’ve screwed up somewhere, which is entirely possible, the bottom line is that experience/feeling can be a part of the causal chain if it is internally measurable (subjectively measurable) and as long as that measurement is reliable.”

I regret to say that you have indeed screwed up at a number of points, big time! I’ve tried to point them out. They begin with your operationalism about “measurability,” they continue with the equivocation on “experience” (felt experience? how/why felt, then, rather than just functed?), and your (arbitrary) equation of feeling with “measuring,”

DC: “One might still claim this influence is epiphenomenal as I’ve defined epiphenomenal above using the rocket launch example.”  

As you’ve defined epiphenomenal, epiphenomenality is so common that it casts no light at all on the special case of the causal status of feeling.

DC: “We can explain everything a computer does by examining the function of each transistor and circuit.  The experience for a computer  therefore is merely functing.

Here the equivocal word “experience” has even led you to saying something that is transparently false or absurd if stated in unequivocal language: “The feeling for a computer is merely function” i.e., the computer does not feel, it merely functs. (And our problem — remember? — was not computers, but *us*, ’cause we really do feel, rather than just funct, like the computer…

DC:  “Experience can not be proven to reliably correlate inside a computer, and in fact, experience is never needed to explain anything a computer does.”

For the simple reason that (replacing the weasel-word “experience”) the computer does not feel. (Hence we are not just computers, or like computers in that crucial respect.)

Arnold Trehub wrote: “brain analogs… are much more informative than mere correlates”

I am going to think out loud about the possibility of “duals” here, because I am not really sure yet what implication I want to draw from them for the question of psychophysical “analogs” vs “correlates.”

The question is interesting (and Saul Kripke gave it some thought in the ’70s when he expressed some skepticism about the coherence, hence the very possibility, of the notion of “spectrum inversion“: Could you and I really use exactly the same language, indistinguishably, and live and interact indistinguishably in the world, while (unbeknownst to us) green looks (i.e., feels) to me the way red does to you, and vice versa?

Kripke thought the answer was no, because with that simple swap would come an infinity of other associated similarity relations, all of which would likewise have to be systematically adjusted to preserve the coherence of what we say as well as do in the world. (“Green” looks more like blue, “red” looks more like purple, etc.)

At the time, I agreed, because I had come to much the same conclusion about semantic swapping: Would a book still be systematically interpretable if every token of “less” were interpreted to mean “more” and vice versa? (I don’t mean just making a swap between the two arbitrary terms we use, but between their intended meanings, while preserving the usage of the terms exactly as they are used now.)

I was pretty sure that the swap would run into detectable trouble quickly for the simple reason that “less” and “more” are not formal “duals” the way some terms and operations are in mathematics and logic. My intuition — though I could not prove it — was that almost all seemingly local pairwise swaps like less/more would eventually require systematic swaps of countless other opposing or contradictory or dependent terms (“I prefer/disprefer having less/more money…”), eventually even true/false, and that standard English could not bear the weight of such a pervasive semantic swap and still yield a coherent systematic interpretation of all of our verbal discourse. And that’s even before we ask whether the semantic swap could also preserve the coherence between our verbal discourse and our actions in the world.

But since then I’ve come to a more radical view about meaning itself, according to which the only difference between a text (a string of symbols P instantiated in a static book or a dynamic computer) that is systematically interpretable as meaning something, but has no “intrinsic intentionality” (in Searle‘s sense) and a text (say, a string of symbols P instantiated in the brain of a conscious person thinking the thought that P) is that it feels like something to be the person thinking the thought that P, whereas it feels like nothing to be the book or the computer instantiating the symbols string. Systematic interpretability (“meaningfulness”) in both cases, but (intrinsic) meaning only in the (felt) one.

I further distinguish meaning, in this felt sense, from mere grounding, which is yet another property that a mere book or computer lacks: Only a robot that could pass the robotic Turing Test (TT; the capacity to speak and act in the real world, indistinguishably from a person to a person, for a lifetime) would have grounded symbols. But if the robot did not feel, it still would not have symbols with intrinsic “intentionality”; it would still be more like a book or computer, whose sentences are systematically interpretable but mean nothing except in the mind of a conscious (i.e., feeling) user. (It is of course an open and completely undecidable question whether a TT-passing robot would or would not actually feel, because of the other-minds problem. I think it would — but I have no idea how or why!)

But this radical equation of intrinsic meaning (as opposed to mere systematic interpretability) with feeling would make Kripke’s observations about color-swapping (i.e., feeling-swapping) and my observations about meaning-swapping into one and the same thing.

It is not only that verbal descriptions fall short of feelings in the way that verbal descriptions fall short of pictures, but that feelings (say, feelings of greater or lesser intensity) and whatever the feelings are “about” (in the sense that they are caused by them and they somehow appertain to them) are incommensurable: The relation between an increase in a physical property and its felt quality (e.g., an increase in physical intensity and a felt increase in intensity) is a systematic (and potentially very elaborate and complicated) correlation (more with more and less with less), but does it even make sense to say it is a “resemblance”?

For this reason, brain “analogs” too are just systematic correlates insofar as felt quality is concerned. I may have (1) a neuron in my brain whose intensity (or frequency) of firing is in direct proportion to (2) the intensity of an external stimulus (say, the amplitude of a sinusoid at 440 hz). In addition, there is the usual log-linear psychophysical relationship between the stimulus intensity (2) and (3) my ratings of (felt) intensity. The stimulus intensity (2) and the neuronal intensity (1) are clearly in an analog relationship. So are the stimulus intensity (2) and my intensity ratings (3) (as rated on a 1-10 scale, say). And so are the neuronal intensity (1) and my intensity ratings (3). But you could get all three of those measurements, hence all three of those correlations, out of an unfeeling robot. (I could build one already today.) How does (4) the actual feeling of the intensity figure in all this?

You want to say that my intensity ratings are based upon an “analog” of that felt intensity. Higher rated intensity is systematically correlated with higher felt intensity, and lower rated intensity is correlated with lower felt intensity. But in what way does a higher intensity rating RESEMBLE a higher intensity feeling? Is the rating not just a notational convention I use, like saying that “higher” sound-frequencies are “higher”? (They’re not really higher, like higher in the sky, are they?) (Same thing is true if I instead use the “analog” convention of matching the felt frequency with how high I raise my hand. And if it’s instead an involuntary reflex rather than a voluntary convention that is causing the analog response — say, light pupillary dilation in response to increased light intensity — then the correlated feeling is even more side-lined!)

The members of our species (almost certainly) all share roughly the same feelings. So we can agree upon, share and understand naming conventions that correlate systematically with those shared feelings. I use “hot” for feeling hot and “cold” for feeling cold, because we have both felt those feelings and we share the convention on what we jointly agree to call what.

That external corrective constraint gets us out of another kind of incorrigibility: Wittgenstein pointed out in his “private-language argument” that there could not be a purely private language because then there could be no error-correction, hence there would be no way for me to know whether (i) I was indeed using the same word systematically to refer to the same feeling on every occasion or (ii) it merely felt as if I was doing so, whereas I was actually using the words arbitrarily, and my memories were simply deceiving me.

So feelings are clearly deceiving if we are trying to “name” them systematically all on our own. But the only thing that social conventions can correct is the sensorimotor grounding of those names: What we call (and do with) what, when. I can’t know for sure what you are feeling, but if you described yourself as feeling “hot” when the temperature had gone down, and as feeling “happy” when you had just received some bad news, I would suspect something was amiss.

Those are clearly just correlations, however. Words are not analogs of feelings, they are just arbitrary labels for them. And although a verbal description of a picture can describe the picture as minutely as we like, it is still not an analog of the picture, just a symbolic description that can be given a systematic and coherent interpretation, both in words and actions (if it is TT-grounded).

Yet we all know it can’t be symbolic descriptions all the way down: Some of our words have to have been learned from (grounded in) direct sensorimotor (i.e., robotic) experience. How/why did that experience have to be felt experience? That’s the question we can’t answer; the explanatory gap. And a lemma to that unanswered question is: How/why did that felt experience have to resemble what is was about — as opposed to merely feeling like it resembles what it is about? Why isn’t grounding just “functing” (e.g., the cerebral substrate that enables us to do and say whatever needs to be done and said in order to survive, succeed and reproduce, TT-scale)? And why is there anything more to meaning than just that?

To close with a famous example of analogs: Roger Shepard showed psychophysically that the time it takes to detect whether two shapes are different shapes or just the same shape, rotated, is proportional to the degree of rotation. This suggests that the brain is encoding the shapes in some analog form, and then doing some real-time analog rotation to test whether they match. This may all be true, but as it happens, the rotation occurs too fast for the subject to feel that it is happening! So here we have the same three-way correlation ( internal neural process (1) external stimulus (2), subject’s output (3)) as in intensity judgments), but without any correlated feeling.

So is the neural “analog” still to count as an analog of feeling, even when there is no feeling?

By the very same token, how is one to determine whether psychophysical data are analogs of feeling, rather than merely systematic functional correlates (especially when the explanation of how and why the correlated functions are felt at all remains a complete mystery, causally, hence functionally)? (This is the public counterpart of Wittgenstein’s private problem of error.)

All this, but I still think that global systematic duals do not in general work, so neither sensory nor semantic pairwise swapping is possible (except perhaps in some local special cases) while preserving the coherence of either actions in the world or the interpretability of verbal discourse. I don’t think, however, that the fact that coherent global duals are impossible, even if it is true, entails that feelings are analogs of physical properties, rather than merely systematic correlates.

Stevan Harnad

Olgachka,

So much still left unsaid
A sequel ne’er to be
A life left poised on pause
For all eternity

You taught us how to live,
To give, unstintingly
Till life itself dealt cause
To end that revelry

Those fatal cards — you chose
To lay down, not to play
To not reverse the roles
That yours were till that day

Your mother’s guardian angel,
Inspiration to us all
You need not have feared that phone call:
Ya Uzse Vsë Ponimal.

Dorogoyka, pri vsekh moikh liubvi,

Stëpa

There are probably neither gods nor tooth fairies.

So stop worrying, enjoy life, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you — not because it is Writ, but because it is right.

From the first time I heard it misused by computer scientists, the term “ontology,” used in their intended sense, has rankled, since it is virtually the opposite of its normal meaning. (And although terms are arbitrary, and their meanings do change, if you’re going to coin a term for “X,” it is a bit perverse to co-opt for it the term that currently means “not-X”!)

Ontology is that branch of philosophy that studies what exists, what there is. (Ontology is not science, which likewise studies what there is; ontology is <i>metaphysics</i>: It studies what goes beyond physics, or what underlies it.)

Some have rejected metaphysics and some have defended it. (In “Appearance and Reality,” <a href=”http://www.elea.org/Bradley/”>Bradley</a> (1897/2002) wrote (of Ayer) that ‘the man who is ready to prove that metaphysics is wholly impossible … is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory.”)

Be that as it may, there is no dispute about the fact that “ontology,” whatever its merits, is distinct from — indeed the complement of — “epistemology,” which is the study of how and what we <i>know</i> about what exists. In fact, one of the most common philosophical errors — a special favorite of undertutored novices and overconfident amateurs dabbling in philosophy — is the tendency to confuse or conflate the ontic with the epistemic, talking about what we do and can <i>know</i> as if it somehow constrained what there is and can <i>be</i> (rather than just what we can know about what there can be).

Well, knowledge engineering’s misappropriation of “ontology” — to denote (in the wiseling words of <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(computer_science)”>Wikipedia</a>) “a ‘<a href=”http://tomgruber.org/writing/ontolingua-kaj-1993.pdf”>formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation</a>’… <a href=”http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tm-vs-thesauri.html#N773″>provid[ing] a shared vocabulary</a>, which can be used to model a domain… that is, the type of objects and/or concepts that exist, and their properties and relations’ — is a paradigmatic example of that very confusion.

What knowledge engineers mean is not ontology at all, but “epistemonomy” (although the credit for the coinage must alas go to <a href=”http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a739409602~db=all”>Foucault</a>).

 

Isn’t public deficit financing a Ponzi Pyramid, doomed to collapse sooner or later as surely as the Madoff meltdown? (Is Environmental Hedging not much the same thing?) Our species is reputed special for being uniquely able to “delay gratification” (short-term pain for long-term gain) — but with it seems to have come an appetite for the opposite: Short-term personal gain for others’ long-term pain.

All the fuss about the arrest of someone for electronic breaking-and-entering in order to off an avatar in an interactive virtual soap opera!

But virtual life really began with the birth of language itself — our transition from the “real” sensorimotor world to the symbolic world of verbal hearsay. With that, it was no longer just sticks and stones that could hurt us. The sensorimotor/symbolic boundary was permeable (hence no boundary) from the very outset. And not long thereafter, the pen became mightier than the sword, daggers drawn, ready to impose writ or dictum. Nor was there ever anything anaesthetic, anhedonic or anodyne about the world of words. People have been living affect-filled virtual lives through conversation, correspondence, and fiction for millennia (Cyrano de Bergerac, Misery Chastain, perhaps even Stephen Hawking are among its avatars). Even the Turing Test is predicated on it. Perhaps only our capacity for memory, imagery and “mind-reading” (via our mirror neurons) predate it.

“… the kind of person that will patiently explain the facts of death to a child…”

— István Hesslein

Eszter Hagyatéka. A good portrait of a psychopath (con-man) and how their manipulative charm does not wear off even when their falseness and emptiness is transparent. The only thing that is not perfectly repulsive about them (for those who, unlike Eszter, are not otherwise in their thrall) is their almost touchingly naive conviction that everyone else is a psychopath too, “righteousness” being just another con. In this film, Lajos even effects to want to co-opt Eszter’s haplessly unvindictive righteousness to complement his own “insufficiently talented” M.O.

Eszter’s Lajos is unlike Mann’s Felix Krull, whose manipulative skills are grounded in a capacity for empathic mind-reading that is then used for exploitation. But there is still the same sense of an inescapable superficiality always yearning (but only, of course, superficially) for depth, while addicted only to the allures of the surface. Perhaps it’s a mistake to say that psychopaths have no feelings: They do, but they are faint and fleeting. They need to use method acting to simulate a soul — a soul that they know so well to be false, that they cannot conceive it to be otherwise in anyone else.