Skywritings

“Never again.”

I’ve never before felt or understood or believed the full finality of what that really means.
Now I understand.

There’s nothing more terrible.

I’m ashamed
I’m unable
to dam the tears
but had all this
no place to go
nor would I

Anticipating pleasure
— counting, banking, trading, surviving
on what’s to come —
sets our breed apart, they say,
from brutes for whom all’s ever
now or never.

But there’s a diabolic downside
to this being
forever ahead of the game:

<i>My enemy’s enemy
is my friend.</i>

Just so, despite ourselves,
to spite ourselves,
we fast-forward
to the sequel’s sequel
and know then that there’s no
pleasure in’t,
just pain,
an incommensurable currency,
as both now and then
pick up speed
and the whole pre-emptive pyramid
forecloses on itself.

 

Why do I diminish
your pure essence,
dearer to me
than anything there is or was,
into poor verse?
for shelter or for show?

Again for me, and not for you.

Prose falls shorter still
and who’s its addressee?

Deeds, vain too.
Now you are no more
no more are they for you
than if, when you still were,
done adiabatically
so you would never know.

What is not imposture, then?
If words can’t in good faith
embody what I feel
is feeling itself
any more true?
Or just another go
for shelter or for show?

<i>Vuelve, o, vuelve!</i>

 

 

Istenveled anyukám. Bocsáss meg. Bocsáss meg.

Appeared in: Képes Figyelő 1945 November 17 (originally June 1945)

Why Did You Let Them?
by Nelly Kotányi

It was six years ago that I saw her first, on a warm summer afternoon in a flowering schoolyard in Szekszard. The municipal music school had invited me to serve as an outside examiner that year. We were hearing the well-prepared pupils in the auditorium of the renowned Garay Gimnazium. A diminutive little girl was announced: seven years old, but hardly looking even that.

She began to play music. And it was indeed music she was playing, not just piano — music immemorial, her miniature fingers sculpting Bach and Mozart out of that oversize keyboard. She even played us a few little pieces she herself had written. A great gift, first spreading its wings. No one was surprised to hear that we awarded her the prize book. In the fullness of her 7 years she was already well-known in that town; many were predicting she would one day be the pride of Szekszard.

Four years pass. Now eleven, she plays Beethoven’s C-minor piano concerto in the student concert. By now everyone recognizes that hers is no ordinary talent. She is brought up to Budapest. The Music Academy Director receives her with tokens of his admiration and respect: He “would admit her immediately to the Academy, but the Jewish-Laws forbid it.” He adds that he hopes the regime will soon fall; till then he would still like to follow her development closely. The little girl is happy. A radiantly bright autumn day. Anny can come up to Budapest two more times, so the Music Academy’s celebrated piano maestro can hear her. Then comes March 19, 1944, and the maelstrom of deportation.

After the siege’s end, I hear nothing about them. Just two weeks ago, I learned from the deathlist of the Muhldorf Camp, that Anny’s father had perished there. Last week I met some people from Szekszard. My first question is about Anny. They tell me. It was in Auschwitz on a December day that they saw her last. The executioners came for Anny, to separate her from her mother. The little child with the God-given gift had been found unable to labour hard enough. Her mother, Rozsi, would not leave her, so she was taken to the gas chamber too. Never seen again.

Little Anny Engel! This is the first article about you, and it will have no successors, because the little artist is no more.

Yet what an endless joy it would have been for me, if you had played the first movement of the C-Minor concerto once again. You know, that last trill, at the end of the cadenza, the one for which you need bigger hands — I would leave it as you played it for the time being.

Women, mothers, you whom the star of fortune spared from the horror and who are happily embracing your children now: don’t you hear them sometimes, on calm nights, the muted moans?

Why did you let them?

(Translated May 20 2000)

---

Anny Engel was my cousin; her mother, Rozsika, from Kalocsa, my mother‘s sister. Nelly Kotanyi was Anny’s piano teacher.

My mother learned what became of them in June 1945, the month of my birth, from a slightly earlier and longer (but suppressed and apparently lost) version of this article.

This version was retrieved for me after some searching (at my request) by a friend in Hungary in May 2000.

During my mother‘s pregnancy my parents had been hiding under false identities in Rimaszécs helplessly witnessing the brutal deportation and destruction of the local Jewry by the local gendarmerie. (Rimaszécs is now in Slovakia, partly by my father‘s doing when he was consulted by the commanding officer of the Russian liberating army (who happened to also be a Jew) as to whether it should be accorded to Hungary or Czechoslovakia; he was also able to dispatch the head of the local gendarmerie to Siberia with a pofon.)

As far as I know, there are no Jews left in Kalocsa.

---

Miert engedtetek?
Kotányi Nelly

Hat ev elott lattam eloszor, meleg nyari delelotton a szekszardi gimnazium viragos udvaran. Abban az evben vizsgabiztosnak hivott meg az ottani varosi zeneiskola. A nagyhiru Garay-gimnazium tantermeben hallgattuk a novendekek szepen betanult jatekat. Beszolitottak egy pottomnyi kisleanyt. Het eves volt de annyinak sem latszott.

Muzsikalni kezdett! Nem zongorazott mert muzsika volt, ahitatos zene, ahogy kicsiny ujjai Bachot es Mozartot megszolaltattak! Meghallgattuk nehany apro darabjat amit o komponalt! Egy nagy tehetseg elso szarnyprobalgatasa. Senki sem csodalkozott, hogy o nyerte meg a jutalomkonyvet. A varosban ismertek mar 7 eves koraban es sokan mondogattak, hogy egyszer meg buszkesege lesz Szekszardnak.

Elmulik negy ev. A 11 eves gyermek Beethoven C-moll koncertjet jatsza a novendekhangversenyen. Most mar mindenki elismeri, hogy nem mindennapi tehetseg. Felhozzak Pestre. A Zenemuveszeti Foiskola muvesztanara elragadtatassal es a legnagyobb elismeressel fogadja. Azonnal felvenne a foiskolara, de a zsidotorveny nem engedi. Remeli azonban, hogy a rendszer megbukik hamarosan. Addig is figyelemmel akaja kiserni a gyermek fejlodeset. A kisleany boldog. Verofenyes oszi nap. Anny meg ketszer feljohet Pestre, hogy a Zenemuveszeti Foiskola kivallo tanara meghallgassa. Aztan jon 1944 marcius 19.es jon a deportalas infernoja.

Az ostrom utan sokaig nem tudok roluk semmit. Most ket het elott olvastam a muhldorfi tabor halallistajan, hogy Anny edesapja szivbenulasban elhalt. Mult heten szekszardiakkal talalkoztam. Elso kerdesem, mi hir Annyrol. Elmondjak. Auschwitzban egy decemberi napon lattak utoljara. A gyilkos pribekek jottek Annyert, hogy szetvalasszak edesanyjatol. Az istenaldotta kis muzsikustehetseg nem tudott eleget dolgozni. Vittek a gazkamraba. Edesanyja nem hagyta, vele ment. Azota nem lattak oket.

Kicsi Engel Anny! Ez az elso cikk rolad, melyet nem fog mas kovetni, mert a kis muveszno – halott…

Pedig milyen vegtelen orom lett volna nekem, ha meg egyszer eljatszanad a C-moll koncert elso tetelet. Azt az utolso trillat tudod, ott a kadencia vegen, amihez nagyobb kez kell, meg egyenlore elengednem!…

Asszonyok, anyak, kiket szerencsecsillagotok megvedett a borzalmaktol es boldogan olelitek gyermekeiteket, nem halljatok neha csendes ejjeleken a halk sohajtasokat: Miert engedtetek?

My mother’s mother, the year before my birth
dispatched the gentle gendarme
of Kalocsa
to Budapest
with the yellow star
to fetch my mother
and bring her home safely

My mother declined

and so I am

but had she summoned me
I know if I know aught
I would have flown to her
unhesitatingly

and ever would

Biztonságos Áthaladás

Édesanyám édesannya
egy évvel a születésem előtt
el küldte Pestre a Kalocsai csendőrt
sárga csillaggal
édesanyámat biztonságossan haza hozni

Édesanyám viszautasitotta

és ennélfogva létezem

de ha engem hivot volna
tudom biztosan
ha barmit tudok
haza jöttem volna hozzá
habozás nélkül

mindörökké

meaning of martyr
innocent victim
just cause – not
monster
or moron
murdering innocents
with bullet
or bomb belt

 

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)?

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