{"id":1205,"date":"2019-01-21T16:17:46","date_gmt":"2019-01-21T16:17:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/?p=1205"},"modified":"2019-01-21T16:17:46","modified_gmt":"2019-01-21T16:17:46","slug":"explaining-feeling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2019\/01\/21\/explaining-feeling\/","title":{"rendered":"Explaining Feeling"},"content":{"rendered":"

All we have to do… is to define \u2018consciousness\u2019 explicitly to mean what you call \u2018feeling\u2019 (I usually use the word \u2018experience\u2019 to avoid \u2018conscious\u2019, and define \u2018experience\u2019 accordingly). We know what we mean!<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A conscious\/mental\/experiential\/phenomenological\/subjective state is a state that it feels like something to be in<\/i>. Hence I prefer to stick to feeling: its much the simplest, most direct and face-valid descriptor.<\/p>\n

I think [stones] may be constituted of experientiality. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It feels like something to be a stone? (Or a part of a stone?)<\/p>\n

I can even accept \u2018decorative\u2019. I understand this to mean that classical zombies are logically possible even though Kirk zombies aren\u2019t.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think leptons, stones, toasters — and probably also microbes and plants — are zombies. But I can\u2019t explain how and why we (sometimes) aren’t. (It never feels like anything to be them, but it [sometimes] feels like something to be us.) (\u201cDecorative\u201d because we cannot explain feeling\u2019s function.)<\/p>\n

Mistake to think [feeling] is a theoretical \u2018cost\u2019, for [1] radical emergence is a greater theoretical cost, [2] non-feeling reality is already a cost, because it\u2019s a unwarranted theoretical posit.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have no problem with molecules and stones and toasters and microbes and plants being zombies. Nothing to explain. Their states are unfelt. I have enormous problems explaining how or why other organisms are not zombies too. But they\u2019re not. Having (genetically coded) traits is surely more costly than not having them.<\/p>\n

the biologist doesn\u2019t need an explanation for the very existence of feeling, and has an excellent explanation for the existence of feeling tuned to serve adaptive purposes.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have yet to hear that adaptive explanation; if (as I believe) feeling is a biological trait, it does need a causal (adaptive) explanation.<\/p>\n

One useful terminological option here is to define \u2018mind\u2019 in such a way that feeling doesn\u2019t entail mind (see e.g. Russell, perhaps also Damasio) \u2026 feeling is v low-level, mind is essentially useful in some way<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hi or lo, I see no causal explanation of this \u201cusefulness.\u201d It\u2019s doings, and the capacity for doing them, that are useful. And if a state is not felt, I have no idea what is meant by calling it mental (and vice versa).<\/p>\n

[feeling is physicists\u2019] problem insofar as they propose to offer a general theory of concrete reality<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems to me feeling’s just biologists\u2019 problem, just as, say, digestion or photosynthesis is. No new physics there.<\/p>\n

[functing, ordinary causal explanation, whether in physics or in biology] doesn\u2019t explain the existence of non-feeling matter \u2026 to explain that, one would need to answer the question \u2018Why is there something rather than nothing\u2019? <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here I show my non-metaphysicians\u2019 pedestrianism: Try as I might, I can\u2019t help but feel that that sort of onticism is otiose.<\/p>\n

the view that consciousness is everywhere but isn\u2019t all there is) is [1] independently motivated and [2] explains this for free. Biological evolution sometimes produces an organism O that is not simply made of feeling stuff, in such a way that it (O) isn\u2019t itself a subject of experience, but is also itself a subject of experience, be it is adaptive.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Unfortunately, to my naive realists\u2019 ears this sounds more speculative (and complicated) than explicative. Shouldn’t the explanans<\/i> be simpler than the explanandum<\/i>? All I wanted was to know how and why (some) organisms (sometimes) feel rather than just funct!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All we have to do… is to define \u2018consciousness\u2019 explicitly to mean what you call \u2018feeling\u2019 (I usually use the word \u2018experience\u2019 to avoid \u2018conscious\u2019, and define \u2018experience\u2019 accordingly). We know what we mean! A conscious\/mental\/experiential\/phenomenological\/subjective state is a state that it feels like something to be in. Hence I prefer to stick to feeling: … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Explaining Feeling”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3074,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3074"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1206,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1205\/revisions\/1206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}