THE FEELING/FUNCTING PROBLEM IS INSOLUBLE

Until someone can successfully answer the question "How and why do we feel (rather than just "funct")?" there is and will remain an "explanatory gap."

Attempts to close that gap invariably boil down to answers to the question of how we do and are able to do things (computationally, neurologically, evolutionariily) -- i.e., answers about how and why we "funct," rather than answers to the question of how and why we feel (or, to put it another way, how and why it (sometimes) feels like something to funct).

Hence all the attempted answers simply beg the question.

The reason I am pretty confident that the question, when not begged, will remain unanswerable -- except, of course, if dualism is true, and feeling turns out to be an independent causal force in the universe ("I did it because I felt like it"), which it isn't, and won't -- is simply a matter of causality: 

Either feeling is an independent causal force -- in which case it can play a causal role in functing -- or it isn't. 

It isn't. 

So there's no causal role left for feeling. It's superfluous. Yet it's there. 

Some of our functions are indeed felt functions. Indeed, it feels as if feeling is what life is all about. 

But there is no room for a causal account of how or why. 

Hence the mind gap. 

Stevan Harnad

Hi Stevan,

I don't disagree with anything you've said however, suggesting there is no causal role left for feeling leaves us with a potential problem; there seems to be a reliable correlation between feeling and functing.

Feeling is no ordinary epiphenomena.  Compare to a shadow which reliably correlates to that which creates the shadow.  The outline of the shadow, the light source, and that which blocks the light are all objectively measurable and reliably correlate.

ONE EPIPHENOMENON (AND PROBLEM) IS ENOUGH: THE PROBLEM IS EXPLAINING THE CAUSAL STATUS OF FEELING

"...suggesting there is no causal role left for feeling leaves us with a potential problem..."

Indeed it does! And that problem is called the "mind/body problem" (or the "explanatory gap"). And the problem is actual, not potential. 

Explanation is causal explanation, and if there is no room for feeling as a cause in its own right (as opposed to just being a mysterious correlate of a functional cause), then there is no room for a causal explanation of feeling.

"...feeling and functing... [are] objectively measurable and reliably correlate..."

They do indeed correlate reliably; and the functional correlates of feeling are objectively measurable. Feeling itself, however, is not objectively measurable (but it is subjectively "measurable," and that's good enough). Measurability, though, is not the problem: Causality is.

"...Since feeling is not objectively measurable, it is no ordinary epiphenomenon..." 

Are there any "ordinary" epiphenomena (uncaused or noncausal phenomena)? It seems to me that feeling is the only epiphenomenon...

"...feeling pain 'shadows the functing', but there is nothing objectively measurable to suggest why this epiphenomena should correlate if it serves no purpose..."

You said it (yet again!). But repeating it does not solve the problem (which, to repeat, is causation, not "objective measurability").

"Is there a fundamental difference between our inability to provide a causal explanation for the sheer existence of consciousness and our inability to provide a causal explanation for the sheer existence of space-time?"

Yes there is, a big one:

(1) The sheer existence of space-time (and of the four fundamental forces, and of the independent natural laws) are brute facts (until/unless superstring theory or some other unifier manages to trim them down a bit), but their causal powers are as real as causality ever gets.

(2) Feeling exists as surely as gravity does (in fact, for Cartesian reasons, even more surely), but there the resemblance ends, because feelings can have no causal power (unless telekinetic dualism is true, which all evidence suggests it is not). In other words, even though the only intuition we have about causality comes from feeling (i.e., what it feels like to do something -- to cause it to happen -- because I feel like it), that is an illusion, and the real cause is the functing with which feeling is inexplicably correlated.

Some background:

Harnad, S. (1995) Why and How We Are Not Zombies. Journal of Consciousness Studies 1:164-167.  

_____ (2000)  Correlation vs. Causality: How/Why the Mind/Body Problem Is Hard. Journal of Consciousness Studies 7(4): 54-61. 

_____ (2001) No Easy Way Out. The Sciences 41(2) 36-42. 

_____ (2001) Harnad on Dennett on Chalmers on Consciousness: The Mind/Body Problem is the Feeling/Function Problem. 

_____ (2003) Can a Machine Be Conscious? How? Journal of Consciousness Studies 10(4-5): 69-75.

_____ (2005) What Is Consciousness? New York Review 52 (11)

_____ & Scherzer, P. (2007) First, Scale Up to the Robotic Turing Test, Then Worry About Feeling. In Proceedings of Proceedings of 2007 Fall Symposium on AI and Consciousness. Washington DC. 

"Is there a fundamental difference between our inability to provide a causal explanation for the sheer existence of consciousness and our inability to provide a causal explanation for the sheer existence of space-time?"

"Yes there is, a big one:

(1) The sheer existence of space-time (and of the four fundamental forces, and of the independent natural laws) are brute facts (until/unless superstring theory or some other unifier manages to trim them down a bit), but their causal powers are as real as causality ever gets."

My question doesn't address the possible causal powers of space-time or the possible causal powers of consciousness. I simply note that we are unable to provide a causal explanation for the existence of space-time, just as we are unable to provide a causal explanation for the existence of consciousness. And I wonder if philosophers have proposed a fundamental difference between these two explanatory failures.

(1) "Dark inside" is certainly a metaphor (and not a very good one, because there is something it feels like to see dark, and a "zombie" is not supposed to feel anything at all -- like a stone: a better metaphor).

(2) No "rigour and exactitude" being claimed here (and I am not a philosopher). Just claiming that everyone knows what it means to feel something (anything), and that to be conscious is just that, no more, no less.

(3) No point "knocking on the door" of consciousness, because of the "other-minds problem": the epistemic flip-side of the ontic mind/body problem (and equally insoluble, for much the same reasons): either the walks/talks/quacks-like-a-duck ("mirror neuron," or Turing) criterion (based on correlation and similarity) is trustworthy, or you're out of luck.

(4) It is not "in a vague sort of way" that being conscious is linked to being able to feel (something, anything). They're the same thing. And "experiencing" is just another synonym (which I have renounced since that first paper, sticking with "feeling" alone, instead of a string of distracting and question-begging equivocations).

(5) Yes, "feeling feelings" sounds redundant, but in fact it's just what's left of the Cogito. It comes with the territory (of feeling). (So much the worse for "unconscious thoughts," by the way: as incoherent as unfelt feelings: One mind/body problem is enough, and Freud was an even less rigorous and exact philosopher than I...)

WHAT CAUSES FEELING VS. WHAT FEELING CAUSES

JS: "I cannot know my own feelings without knowing my bodily states, and these states are theoretically measurable by others."

I can't know I have a toothache without "knowing my bodily states"??

It seems to me I can know perfectly well (and cartesianly, hence incorrigibly) that I have a toothache, regardless of whether I have a tooth, or even a mouth, let alone whether anyone else is measuring or can measure anything, on my body or anywhere else, and whether that measurement does or does not correlate with the existence or locus of my tooth (or mouth) or pain.

And the only "bodily states" I know are the ones I feel, like the toothache. 

I can also feel what it feels like to look at a nocimeter in my tooth or brain that measures and indicates that I am feeling a moderate toothache, when I'm indeed feeling a moderate toothache. That correlation is "close enough for government (scientific) work" as well as for common sense. The clear and present danger of skepticism is not the problem; it's the clear absence of the possibility of causal explanation: Why is my toothache felt (rather than just my tooth-damage just functed)?

And the problem is not really with what causes feeling, as it is with what feeling causes: nothing (even though it feels like it does). That's the "explanatory gap." 

(The correlation between feeling and brain function is close enough so I lose no sleep about whether brain function indeed causes/constitutes feeling, somehow. Of course it does. The lesser problem is with the how; the greater problem is with the why: what causal role does it play that some functions are felt and others just functed? Because the answer looks to be a clear and present: none. -- though it sure doesn't feel that way...)

JS: "How can you know that your subjective "measurements" correlate to objective measurements, if the subjective knowledge were not linked to objective knowledge in a measurable way?"

A skeptic can't know that, any more than he can know that he has a body at all, or that there is a world out there. 

But let's (respectfully) doff our skeptical hats, because the mind/body problem's a lot worse than that. 

(So far, this is just the other-minds/other-bodies problem. That's just an epistemic problem, whereas the explanatory gap's ontic.) 

The real problem is with the (nonexistent) causal role of feeling (even after we've shrugged off the lesser problem of being unable to explain quite how the brain manages to cause/constitute feeling). 

All causal/functional questions are fully answerable without the slightest allusion to the fact that some functions happen to be felt functions: so the question is: why are they felt functions, rather than just functed functions? 

The answer is a resounding silence, because "why" is a causal question too (not just "how"); and there's no room for any causal answer.

Hence the mind-gap.

JS: "When we ask, "how could these brain states produce feelings?," our intuition tells us that feelings are too mysterious, too immaterial to be produced by brain states."

Nothing of the sort; and no appeal to intuition at all. 

I ask a simple, causal question. "Why are some functions felt?" 

And I encounter either silence or a lot of incoherent hand-waving by way of reply.

JS: "Imagine asking, "how does the process whereby light enters my eyes and activates certain neurological patterns in my brain produce color vision?"  The answer is, that process is color vision."

But why does it feel like something to see color? Why is chromoception not just functed optikinetics, as in the case of an optic sensor in a bank? 

(Beware of trying to reply with a complicated functional story here, because the punchline will always be: "Yes, but why is any of that functing felt functing, rather than just functed functing? What causal role does the feeling play?)

JS: "But the advocate of an explanatory gap will say, "no, no.  That is not what I mean.  I mean, how is the phenomenal quality of color vision produced?"  Well, what is that?  Is it the color itself?"

No, no. That is not what I mean. I mean, why does it feel like something to see? 

(Never mind color in particular; it's superfluous. We could do it all in black and white, or just one JND of grayness, or just intensity, in any sensorimotor -- i.e. felt -- modality, from what it feels like to hear a faint sound to what it feels like to be in a blue funk.)

Forget about the supernumerary and superfluous terminology -- "qualia" "phenomenal quality," etc. etc. Just explain how/why some functions are felt.

JS: "Scientists already have a theoretical framework for talking about colors.  Feelings are not so easy to grasp, probably because feelings are internal perceptions, and not external."

It's exactly the same problem (and I really mean exactly) when you are asking about how/why seeing blue feels like something or you are asking about why/how going into a blue funk feels like something. 

(The advantage of focusing on affective feelings rather than sensorimotor feelings is that with affects you are less distracted by the external referent: With feeling a toothache, there's that extra distraction about whether or not there is something going on in your tooth. With feeling sad, there's less scope for changing the subject and begging the question -- though of course there is always the correlated functing in the brain's affective system...)

JS: "if we do not assume that feelings and other phenomenal experiences are distinct from bodily processes, then the question, "how do specific bodily states produce or correlate with the feelings" is easily dismissable.  Bodily states are the feelings."

Hardly. Even if we finesse the lesser unsolved problem of explaining how some functings manage to be felt functings, we are still left with the greater insoluble problem of explaining why. And that (yet again) is our old friend, the explanatory gap. The "hard" problem...

Apologies: "JS" in my earlier response should have read "JW" for Jeremy Wallace. (I don't know how to correct it retrospectively.)

FEELING, FUNCTING, AND ALAN TURING

DA: "'like a stone' would not... satisfy David Chalmers. The zombie is supposed to carry on in a normal human way... but to be lacking consciousness.  It is hard to imagine a stone carrying on in any way at all."

What we are talking about is the presence or absence of the capacity to feel. A stone cannot feel. There's lots of other things that are true of a stone too: A stone can't do anything either (except fall when dropped, or just lay there wherever it is). But the relevant thing is that it doesn't feel

Now I have no idea whether or not there can be zombies (and David Chalmers has no idea either).

But I can give you one important example of what a zombie would be, if there could be zombies: A robot that can pass the Turing Test: act and talk in the world, indistinguishably (in what it does) from any of us, for a lifetime -- but without feeling anything at all whilst doing it all (just like a stone).

The reason this example is particularly instructive is that it brings out the fact that although lifelong performance capacity that is Turing-Indistinguishable from our own is certainly no guarantor of consciousness (feeling), it is the best we can hope for, and the closest we can ever hope to an explanation of feeling (which is not very close: it just explains the functing with which feeling is apparently correlated). The rest is down to whether or not there can be Turing-scale performance capacity (functing) without feeling. (I think there cannot be, but I certainly cannot prove it; I can't even explain how or why, because no one can explain how or why any function is a felt function, even though felt functions clearly exist -- in us, and other organisms.)

DA: "Does a worm '"feel"?  Probably yes... though in a sense almost certainly incomprehensible to us. Is a worm "conscious" then?  If not why not? etc, etc"  

Probably yes, a worm can feel (no scare-quotes needed), which means exactly the same thing as that the worm is conscious. 

(We can't be sure about anyone/anything else either, because of the other-minds problem, but a worm is almost as good a bet as another person.)

Whether or not the worm feels what I feel, whether or not I can understand what it feels like to be a worm, and indeed what and how much a worm feels is all completely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether the worm feels anything at all. If it does, it's conscious (because that's what it means to be conscious), and the fact that it feels is as utterly inexplicable as the fact that I feel.

DA: "consciousness... is so seldom - if ever - carefully defined.  There is an apparent assumption that we "just know" what we mean by it." 

Consciousness does not need to be "defined": it just needs to be pointed to. (That's sometimes called an "ostensive definition".) Something is conscious if it feels. And "feels" does not need to be defined either. Anyone who can speak already understands what it means to feel (with the possible exception of the Turing-Indistinguishable robot, if there can be zombies!). The meaning of our elementary words -- see, hear, touch, smell, taste -- are all grounded in our shared sensorimotor capacity to feel.

DA: "talk about zombies as beings minus consciousness seems so futile... Minus what exactly?"  

Minus feeling (like a stone, if, that is, there can be zombies -- i.e., entities that have our doing capacities but without feeling -- at all).

SH

SENTIO ERGO SENTITUR

DA: "How could a being... be "indistinguishable" from any of us yet not feel - if what we do includes feeling?"  

I was referring explicitly to Turing Indistinguishability, which means objective indistinguishability from a conscious person, to a conscious person. (The Turing Test boils down to performance indistinguishability, but it could in principle be scaled all the way up to empirical indistinguishability. This is still just an epistemic test (hence vulnerable to the other-minds problem); it is not a metaphysical identity condition. Please let us not begin a debate about the "identity of indiscernibles"! That will just leave the explanatory-gap question far behind, begging it, by conflating the epistemic and the ontic...)

DA: "do we humans 'feel' in the same way?... is human consciousness the same as worm consciousness?" 

I can only repeat: This is not about what is being felt, but about whether anything is being felt at all.

DA: "how does one point to something if one doesn't know what it is?  Could I point to a bird if I didn't know what a bird was?"

We all know what it feels like to feel. We are not pointing to an (empirically risky) external object but to what it feels like to feel: a cartesian certainty all feeling functors share (if there exist any other feeling functors than me!). 

SH

DA: "to say that a zombie would be indistinguishable from a human but not be able to 'feel' is... surely self contradictory"

Not self-contradictory in the least! But I was referring to a Turing-Test-passing robot, not a "zombie" (about which I am skeptical).

For a robot to pass the Turing Test it has to be able to behave (for a lifetime) in a way that is indistinguishable from a human, to a human. (Humans are very good mind-readers, but they are all subject to the other-minds problem).

All I said about zombies was (1) that I have no idea whether they are possible (but, if not, I have even less idea about how/why not), (2) that an unfeeling robot that successfully passed the Turing Test would indeed be a zombie, and (3) that I doubt that a robot that could successfully pass the Turing Test would be unfeeling -- but no one can or will ever know for sure (except perhaps the robot).

DA: "I don't [know what it feels like to feel]. Feeling to me 'feels like' feeling" 

This is not a point that can be debated further. But I do suggest that you ask a colleague to pinch you. That's an example of what it feels like to feel. And the very same is true for everything else you experience in your waking world: everything you see, hear, taste, smell, touch, if your senses are normal and intact. That's what it feels like to see, hear, taste, smell, touch, etc. 

None of the specific qualitative details matter in the least for the mind/body problem or the explanatory gap: If/when you feel anything at all, whatever it happens to feel like, then you feel (then). And that entails the full weight of the mind/body problem (and the full vacancy in the "explanatory gap" -- a gap in the scope of causal explanation.)

SH

DA: "To feel feels like nothing - except to feel"

That's good enough, and that was all I was looking for all along. 

You had said earlier: "how does one point to something if one doesn't know what it is?"

Well now you've confirmed that you do know what it's like to feel. So it was enough to just point to it after all.

It's the presence or absence of that (in stones, worms, people, robots, zombies) that we're talking about. Explaining the how and why of being able to do that is the mind/body problem.

And the inability to explain the existence and especially the causal role of that is the explanatory gap.

-- SH

DA: "But it is simply a tautology; it tells us nothing at all."

UNCOMPLEMENTED CATEGORIES, OR, WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BACHELOR?

DA: "If, as you claim, we all know 'what it feels like to feel', then presumably we would all know what it feels like not to feel?"

Harnad, S. (1987) Uncomplemented Categories, or, What is it Like to be a Bachelor? 1987 Presidential Address: Society for Philosophy and Psychology. 

ABSTRACT: To learn and to use a category one must be able to sample both what is in it and what is not in it (i.e., what is in its complement), in order to pick out which invariant features distinguish members from nonmembers. Categories without complements may be responsible for certain conceptual and philosophical problems. Examples are experiential categories such as what it feels like to "be awake," "be alive," be aware," and "be." Providing a complement by analogy or extrapolation is a solution in some cases (such as what it feels like to be a bachelor), but only because the complement can in princible be sampled in the future, and because the analogy could in principle be correct. Where the complement is empty in principle, the "category" is intrinsically problematic. Other examples may include self-denial paradoxes (such as "this sentence is false") and problems with the predicate "exists."

consciousness, awareness, qualia, subjective states, conscious states, mental states, phenomenal states, qualitative states, intentional states, intentionality, subjectivity, mentality, private states, 1st-person states, contentful states, reflexive states, representational states, sentient states, experiential states, reflexivity, self-awareness, self-consciousness, sentience, raw feels, experience, soul, spirit, mind... 

ON NOT BLAMING THE MESSENGER 

SC:  "we're just the people whose job to it is to probe the differences/relations between all these terms you list (and the others), and I don't think it's so straightforwardly all lumped under any one of them (or any single other term of any interest)."

Yes, it is philosophers into whose unfortunate laps the mind/body falls (although the explanatory gap is really cognitive science's -- i.e., reverse bioengineerings': no point blaming the messenger). 

But in fussing with all these trivial variants and differences (real and notional), the messengers are just toying with the envelope instead of reading out the message, loud and clear

SC:  "http://cogprints.org/231/0/199712004.html - that's Block on the very subject here at PhilPapers." 

I know: that's why I posted the URL (as well as the BBS Call for Commentators that I posted in 1994, when I was editing BBS, the journal that published it!).

SC:  "I think awareness and feeling are pretty readily distinguishable"

Are you aware of anything that it does not feel like something to be aware of?  Do you feel (as opposed to just funct) anything your are not aware of?

If it didn't feel like something to be aware of it, what would be left of the "awareness"? 

What does it add to "I feel sad" or "I feel warm" or "I feel a rough surface" or (to change the arbitrary sensory verb) "I hear a voice or smell a smell" to say, respectively, "I am aware I feel sad" or "I am aware I feel warm" or "I am aware I feel a rough surface" or "I am aware I hear a voice or smell a smell"? or, for that matter "I am aware of my sadness" or "I am aware of the warmth" or "I am aware of the roughness of the surface" or "I am aware of the sound of a voice or the smell of the smell"?

To me this is all massaging and permuting just one thing: That there is feeling going on (and the only variation is its content, i.e., what you happen to be feeling). (Hence that you are feeling at all, and only that, is the real mystery: How/why is there feeling rather than just functing when an organism feels (say, pain)?)

Ditto for all the "2nd-order" stuff everyone loves to get excited about and to treat as if it were something substantively different -- rather than just another form of content that comes with the territory (of being able to feel at all): The rest is just about what and how much one can feel (which is how sensation grades into perception and cognition; the functional know-how increases, and with it, mysteriously, the accompanying feeling):

The monkey certainly feels what it feels like to look at a mirror: that just feels like what it feels like to look at another monkey. 

The chimp can feel more: Both monkey and chimp are able to feel the difference between what it feels like to touch their own arm versus touching someone else's arm; but only the chimp (and not the monkey) can feel what it feels like to see his own face, as opposed to someone else's face. 

The underlying functing in both cases -- i.e. the reverse-engineering of the causal system that gives both monkey and chimp the know-how to do all the things they can [or can't] do with images of faces in mirrors, whether their own or someone else's -- is fully within cognitive science's reach. 

But not how/why it feels like something to be able to do all that. 

And that, again, is why feeling -- and nothing else -- is at the heart of the M/B problem and the "explanatory gap."

Yes, there is the possibility of a certain recursivity, such as feeling what it feels like to see my own face in the mirror, or feeling what it feels like to see a monkey see his own face in the mirror, or, if there is a mirror behind the monkey, feeling what it feels like to see the monkey see the monkey seeing himself in the mirror, and so on, for an infinity of trivially higher "orders," given sufficient mirrors. (You can do all this if you have the "mirror neurons" to mind-read with.)

By the very same token (no less trivial, though interestingly instantiated in language), I can feel blue [sad]; I can feel "I am feeling blue"; and I can feel "I am feeling that I am feeling blue" etc. etc.

All of these niceties may be nice to fiddle with, but the question raised in this thread was: How to explain it? And the "it" is the fact that we feel at all. Solve that (insoluble) problem and all the niceties come with the territory, and are a piece of cake. But if the gap persists, reveling instead in the (trivial) niceties alone gets us nowhere fast (in what is basically just a hermeneutical hall of mirrors).

What is distinguishable is feeling this vs. feeling that: There is something it feels like to feel sad, to touch velvet, to see red, to feel "blue", to feel thirsty, to hear Mozart, to want attention, to recognize yourself in the mirror, to understand the meaning of "justice" (or "qualia"!)...

The usual mistake that is made is to conflate consciousness itself (feeling) with (1) consciousness of something in particular ("the worm can feel something, but can it feel what we feel?"), (2) "degree of consciousness" ("how much can the worm feel?"), (3) "self"-consciousness ("can the worm feel what it feels like to do a cartesian cogito?"), (4) "higher-order consciousness" ("can the worm feel that it feels that it feels?"). These are all cases of feeling, but they all feel different (sometimes subtly -- just a JND in feeling space). Forget the differences. What we are trying to explain is how/why they are felt at all (rather than just functed, dynamically, adaptively, but feelinglessly).

SC:  "Blindsight, anyone?"

Blindsight is optokinetic functing without felt seeing. As such, our underlying question could be reforumulated as "how/why is seeing seeing rather than just blindsighted optical functing?

This again confirms that it is the presence/absence of feeling that is (and always was) the real "hard" problem.

(But since blind-sighted people are not Zombies, it is not true that they feel nothing at all; hence when they successfully "blind-see" something it is not that they are able to do it entirely unfeelingly; it is just that their accompanying feeling is not visual. Sometimes it takes the form of a felt sensorimotor inclination to point in this direction rather than that; or a felt shaping of one's hands in preparation for reaching for something small and round, rather than large and flat; or just a hunch that the thing is green rather than blue, even though one cannot see a thing.)

So blind-seers still feel; it feels like something to blind-see; it is just that the quality of what they blind-see -- what it feels like -- is not visual.

Moreover, there is a lot that blind-seers cannot do that seers can. So their functing (know-how) is not equivalent to that of seers (and in that respect they are just plain blind).

Subtle point: Before we start to feel too triumphant about what separates us seers from blind-seers, let us recall that most of our know-how is likewise delivered to us on a platter by our brains, just as the blind-seer's inclination to point here rather than there is. We take all of this for granted, and take the accompanying feeling to be some sort of proof of the fact that we are the ones doing the underlying work, whereas all it is is passive feeling, absent the underlying functing. (And that's a lot closer to what it looks like when we attempt a causal explanation: The real work is the functing, and the accompanying feeling is just floating there, a sop...)

In sum, blindsight simply reaffirms the preplexing role played by the presence or absence of feeling alongside our functing, and our inability to explain what independent causal role it plays (because it doesn't).

-- SH

In posing the "hard problem", it is customary to plunge immediately into the realm of the ineffable --- the smell of a rose, the experience of red, the feel of a toothache. I think this is a mistake. There are many kinds of subjective experiences that are decomposable, that lend themselves to overt representation, and are measurable. The phenomenal experience of a triangular shape is just as much an instance of feeling as is the smell of a rose. But, unlike the smell of a rose, the elementary properties and detailed spatial relationships in our feeling of a triangle can be displayed in an external expression which others can observe and examine. It is instructive to reflect that although the 2-D images on our retinas constrain our perceptions, the structured content of consciousness is significantly different than our proximal retinal stimuli. It is this gap between measurable sensory excitation and vivid phenomenal experience that provides our best opportunity to understand the biological machinery of the human brain that creates conscious content. For more on these issues, see:

http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/355/

http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/468/

We can say that what we feel is what we really are.  I say that the consciousness in the body is hardwired or "hard-pathed" for constant feeling.  True we feel pain, hot, cold and a touch, but as you sit in this chair your feet can feel the floor, your body can feel the chair and your forehead can feel the light overhead. These may be mild feelings but feelings none the less.

We can say that autonomic feeling is the hardwired thought in all of us: "I"


"What does it add to "I feel sad" or "I feel warm" or "I feel a rough surface" or (to change the arbitrary sensory verb) " I hear a voice or smell a smell" to say, respectively, "I am aware I feel sad" or "I am aware I feel warm" or "I am aware I feel a rough surface" or "I am aware I hear a voice or smell a smell"? or, for that matter "I am aware of my sadness" or "I am aware of the warmth" or "I am aware of the roughness of the surface" or "I am aware of the sound of a voice or the smell of the smell"?"


We seem to be baffled that hardwired phenomenol consciousness or feeling is outside of brain consciousness which is configurably wired but there is really no mystery at all.

The painful feelings we feel in the body we call "bad" and the pleasurable feelings we call "good".

Our own ego or sense of pride restricts us from understanding that every form of nerve activity in the body is also an idea or thought.

Like an old coffee percolator, the central hardwired idea from the body bubbles up into the brain like a fountain and we call this thought "I Know"

The view from everywhere

FC: "many spurious and unhelpful distinctions have been drawn in the literature [but]  'feeling' can[not] cover for all of them. My phenomenological world of experience is big, rich..."

AT: "a fruitful theoretical path would be to accept (at least initially) the existence of consciousness as an unexplained fundamental concept" 

AT: "much of the content of consciousness/feeling can be distinguished, described, compared, publically represented, and analyzed"

AT: "The key question [is] "How does the brain create the gloriously varied content of consciousness?"  

AT: "specifying putative neuronal mechanisms that can be demonstrated to generate activities in the brain that are analogous [to] feelings"

That is unfortunately just correlates again.

AT: "unlike the smell of a rose, the elementary properties and detailed spatial relationships in our feeling of a triangle can be displayed in an external expression which others can observe and examine" 

I'm afraid I can't agree: The geometric properties of detecting and manipulating triangles are functing, and unproblematic. What it feels like to see or imagine or manipulate a triangle, in contrast, is every bit as problematic as what it feels like to see red. (Lockean primary and secondary properties don't help here.)

-- SH

RF: "I don't believe non-functions necessarily need reasons to be"

RF: "Consciousness is nothing more nor less than a point of view"

RF: "'consciousness' and 'free will' are meaningless" 

JS: "you can know that you have a toothache, but not if you don't have a tooth"

JS: "what are feelings?"

JS: "How do you know they exist?"

JS: "How do you know they don't cause anything?"

JS: "And how do you know they correlate with brain functions?"  

JS: "to the broad question, why are some functions felt?, I would answer, what are you talking about?"  

JS: "I would not say that these functions are felt.  That would imply that there is something else apart from the functions which is feeling them." 

JS: "I see nothing problematic about regarding feelings as neurological functions interacting with other neurological functions, just as I see nothing problematic about regarding colors as wavelengths of light interacting with neurological functions.  The idea that these functions could occur without the feeling of color vision implies a notion of feeling which I do not understand."

SH: You are not surprised that organisms are not just the Darwinian adaptive machines (functors) that they ought to be (based on everything else we know and can explain)?

SH: And you are not bothered that this cannot be explained in the usual (functional) way everything else in the universe can be?

SH: Isn't viewing a felt function? Assuming that you would not say that a camera has a "point of view," does our having one not deserve an explanation?

SH: The fact that we feel (i.e., are conscious) is not only not meaningless, but it is perfectly true.

AT: "The key question [is] "How does the brain create the gloriously varied content of consciousness?"  

AT: "specifying putative neuronal mechanisms that can be demonstrated to generate activities in the brain that are analogous [to] feelings"

          SH: That is unfortunately just correlates again.

I don't agree. Brain analogs of feelings (conscious content) are much more than simple correlates of feelings, The significant distinction is that correlates which are not also analogs of feelings have only the relationship of systematic co-occurrence with the feelings, while analogs of the feelings have at least some properties that are similar to salient aspects of the feelings. The difference is illustrated in these experimental findings:

1. In binocular rivalry experiments it has been found that a particular neuron in the visual system fires above threshold when one of the competing stimuli is perceived, and stops firing when the other stimulus is perceived. This is an example of a simple correlation between a feeling and a brain event.

2. In studies of the perception of equal sized objects in 2D perspective drawings it has been found that the "distant" object in the perspective drawing is judged to be larger than its equal sized "nearer" object. Brain scans (fMRI) taken at the same time show an enlargement of the area of neuronal activity in the primary visual cortex which corresponds to the ratio of the judged/perceived size of the far object compared to the near object. This is an example of an analog relationship between a feeling and a brain event.

My contention is that brain analogs of this kind are much more informative than mere correlates and provide powerful empirical data that we can use to test our theoretical models. 

AT: "unlike the smell of a rose, the elementary properties and detailed spatial relationships in our feeling of a triangle can be displayed in an external expression which others can observe and examine" 

         SH: I'm afraid I can't agree: The geometric properties of detecting and manipulating triangles are functing, and unproblematic. What it feels like            to see or imagine or manipulate a triangle, in contrast, is every bit as problematic as what it feels like to see red. (Lockean primary and                      secondary properties don't help here.)

I'm not talking here about detecting and manipulating a triangle. I'm talking about our external expression (e.g., in a verbal report or drawing) of our internal phenomenal representation (feeling) of a triangle. The problem of getting a good external expression of what it feels like to see red is much harder. 

ON PSYCHOPHYSICAL INCOMMENSURABILITY AND SENSORY-SEMANTIC DUALS

AT: "brain analogs... are much more informative than mere correlates"

I am going to think out loud about "duals" now, because I am not really sure yet what implication I want to draw from it 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 he 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 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 intensity ratings. 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 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 their grounding: 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 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 is all 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 outpu (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.

I'd agree with Chalmers (post #2 above) that a poll would be interesting.  I would guess for example that Derek falls into category #1 and Stevan falls into category #3. 

The suggestion as to why we should feel at all is often used to aid in getting across the concept of an explanatory gap.  However, the following might also have been suggested in the literature - though I've not seen it personally and would be interested in feedback.

One can either claim phenomenal consciousness is epiphenomenal or not.  Certainly, a transistor for example changes state because of a voltage/current applied to the base.  It will never change state otherwise making downward causation impossible and p-consciousness epiphenomenal as Stevan Harnad suggests.*  We might make a similar claim of neurons though I'm aware of at least 2 reasonable objections** to this perspective in the literature and there may be others. 

If consciousness is epiphenomenal, we might claim the experience reliably corresponds to behavior as Stevan suggests.  Assuming it is epiphenomenal however, means that the phenomenon can have absolutely no influence whatsoever on behavior.  The experience can be anything, meaning it can be pain, color, auditory experience, or any category of experience as suggested for example by Chalmers (pg 6, "The Conscious Mind").  It could also be any experience NOT categorized, ones we have no subjective knowledge of whatsoever!  Note also that if it is epiphenomenal, we can't assume the phenomenon will be reported reliably.

In other words, forget about why we should experience anything at all.  If p-consciousness is epiphenomenal, we might ask for example:  Why shouldn't I experience only a whistling noise, a photism, or just pure euphoria as I drive to work, stopping at intersections and avoiding other traffic?  I could experience anything but I would still tell you that I see the car approaching in the distance and I'd still report all spatial and auditory information such as distances to oncoming traffic and sounds from horns and broken mufflers exactly as if my phenomenal experience reliably corresponded to the actual, physical information my brain was able to receive through visual and auditory sensors.  But I wouldn't experience any of that.  I might only experience something utterly uncorrelated to the actual environment.

If p-consciousness is epiphenomenal, the explanatory gap can be viewed from the perspective of, "Why should the experience produced correspond to reality instead of simply being a phenomenal experience which has no correlation whatsoever?"  If p-consciousness can't influence behavior, then this phenomenon can not make itself known by adjusting behavior nor reporting the actual phenomenon that occurs upon penalty of telekenisis as Stevan points out.

In addition to providing personal opinions, I'd be very interested if you would be so kind as to suggest papers or literature that might address this perspective.

*I'm sure there are those who would disagree with this and allow for some kind of downward causation in a conventional computer system, but it really doesn't matter.  The point regards epiphenomenal p-consciousness.

**The 2 I'm aware of:  1. The argument that nonlinear physical systems are in some way holistic/non separable (esp. Alwyn Scott) and therefore capable of downward causation and 2. quantum mechanical systems. 

DC: "One can either claim phenomenal consciousness is epiphenomenal or not"  

DC: "forget about why we should experience anything at all.  If p-consciousness is epiphenomenal...'Why should the experience produced correspond to reality instead of simply... [having] no correlation whatsoever?'"  

"forget about why we should feel anything at all.  If feelings are noncausal... 'Why should they correspond to reality instead of simply... [having] no correlation whatsoever?'" 

DC: "I'd be very interested if you... suggest papers or literature that might address this perspective."

DC: "The argument that [1] nonlinear physical systems are in some way holistic/non separable... and... [2] quantum mechanical systems" 

DC: "I'd agree with Chalmers (post #2 above) that a poll would be interesting.  I would guess for example that Derek falls into category #1 and Stevan falls into category #3."

No. The closest for me, I think, would be #4 although it is really too categorical for my liking. Basically I am an agnostic in this field.

I am not sure by the way what purpose a poll would serve. Democracy is a great thing but not for solving philosophical problems.

DA

DC:

(1) There's no explanatory gap, or one that's fairly easily closable.

(2) There's a deep explanatory gap for now, but we might someday close it.

(3) There's a permanent explanatory gap, but not an ontological gap (so materialism is true).

(4) There's a permanent explanatory gap, and a corresponding ontological gap (so materialism is false).

DA: "For the unlettered outsider like me, what is 'telekinetic dualism' exactly?"

Hi Stevan, I appreciate your responses, esp. correlates vs. analogs in psychophysics.  Because I'm not 'pro' status, my posts may lag by 24 hours or more.  I'd unfortunately already submitted my post when you responded regarding correlates vs. analogs in psychophysics.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the concept of 'telekinesis' is abhorrent because it suggests there are non physical phenomena which influence the comings and goings of material things.  Whether we're talking about classical or quantum phenomenon, such things as momentum, position and fields are measurable in some way.  To suggest these things might be influenced by 'feeling' seems ludicrous.  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.

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?  Call this "materialkenesis" or m-kinesis for short if you'd like.  If you can't measure it, don't accept it.  Unfortunately, that brings us back to #1, and neither you nor I are happy about that.

Earlier you suggested that experience/qualia/feeling are measurable by the subject and reportable, but are not causal or perhaps are epiphenomenal.  Could you be so kind as to clarify this?  I'll explain what I think you mean and what I think you don't mean.  By so doing, hopefully you can clear up my confusion.

I believe this gets back to telekinesis.  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.  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.  Computers are made up of electric circuits, so the computer's (epiphenomenal) causal influence over the launch is dependent on those circuits.  Similarly, the circuits are made up of bits of wire, capacitors, resistors and transistors that are integrated onto a chip.  So the launch is caused by the computer is caused by the circuit is caused by the chips is caused by the transistors is caused by the molecules/atoms making up the transistors.  One might take the position that everything above the molecular level is epiphenomenal, and certainly philosophers have suggested exactly this.  But I don't think anyone is suggesting that computers, circuits or transistors are not causal.  They are all part of a causal chain from atomic and molecular interactions to rocket launch.  To conclude, I believe 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.  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 on the circuits and transistors since this would put feelings into the causal chain of events.

If this is backwards, my apologies.  Now, let's suggest that the experience of the color red can be reliably measured by a person.  In contrast, 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.  However, 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.  The measurement is entirely internal, but let's assume for now that this internal measurement is reliable.

Now, if this internal measurement is reliable, then let's assume we can similarly produce this experience computationally.  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 is no different in principal from a multitester.  It has physically measured the phenomenon in question and produced a physical report.  This much is m-kinesis. 

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 as suggested by the rocket launching example above.  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. 

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. 

One might still claim this influence is epiphenomenal as I've defined epiphenomenal above using the rocket launch example.  If it is epiphenomenal, then we have a slightly different problem to resolve.  The thing about this measuring instrument is that it can essentially measure the entire phase space of some portion of a system, and for it to do this, the system must be non separable.  Computers are separable however.  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.  Experience can not be proven to reliably correlate inside a computer, and in fact, experience is never needed to explain anything a computer does. 

SH: “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 intensity ratings. 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?”

I’ll start with your statement above to suggest that there is a crucial factor that is almost always overlooked in arguments of this kind. The critical point is that while you could build a robot that has all three of those correlations, you are NOT able to build a robot that has another capacity --- one that I claim is essential for the existence of your feeling the intensity of a 440 hz sound. This missing capacity is the internal representation of the sound and its location within a space-time analog of the volumetric world from a privileged egocentric perspective. My central claim is that you cannot be conscious without a brain representation of something somewhere in your egocentric space. In my theoretical model of the cognitive brain, this analog representation is the minimal condition for consciousness to exist.  Why this should be the case, I do not know. But while I can’t explain the sheer existence of consciousness, I believe that I can explain many important aspects of the content of consciousness (feelings) by the neuronal structure and dynamics of putative brain mechanisms that I call the retinoid system.

See (http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/355/)

As for Shepard’s rotation experiments, I would say that the rotation and matching “functings” are unconscious processes. It isn’t until the result of the matching test is signaled as a neuronal event that is projected into egocentric space that it is consciously sensed. Then it is linked to an appropriate lexical pattern (inner speech), and reported verbally or by key press. Not all analog representations are felt, but all felt representations are analogs of something somewhere in our egocentric space.

SH: (3') “There's a permanent explanatory gap (because feelings are noncausal), but not an ontological gap (because telekinetic dualism is false)”

I think the distinction between the sheer existence of feelings and the particular contents of feelings must be clarified before we address the question of an explanatory gap. I argue that while the existence of consciousness (feelings) may be beyond our ability to explain, the contents of consciousness can be explained. Moreover, since particular feelings are patterns of neuronal excitation in our retinoid representation of egocentric space that are projected upstream for higher cognitive processing, I claim that feelings must be causal. These matters deserve some extended discussion.

Stevan, earlier in this thread I asked you this question: “Suppose the functing of a particular kind of brain mechanism was theoretically specified, and on the basis of its putative operating principles, one predicted the occurrence of a particular kind of feeling never experienced before. Suppose the prediction was successful and repeatable. Would you then be inclined to accept the idea that the functing of the specified brain mechanism was the biophysical aspect of the predicted feeling?”

What is your answer?

AT: "Not all analog representations are felt, but all felt representations are analogs of something somewhere in our egocentric space"

AT: "while the existence of consciousness (feelings) may be beyond our ability to explain, the contents of consciousness can be explained"

AT: “Suppose the functing of a particular kind of brain mechanism was theoretically specified, and on the basis of its putative operating principles, one predicted the occurrence of a particular kind of feeling never experienced before. Suppose the prediction was successful and repeatable. Would you then be inclined to accept the idea that the functing of the specified brain mechanism was the biophysical aspect of the predicted feeling?”

JS: "what are feelings?"

When I asked you how you know feelings existed, you said you pinch yourself occasionally.  Yet, If you did ever have occasion to doubt that feelings existed, I do not see how a pinch could have changed your mind.  To put it another way:  I do not see how this answer is supposed to help me understand what feelings are or how it is that we know they exist.

I asked how you know that feelings don't cause anything.  You answered:  "I know they feel as if they cause things (e.g., when I move my finger because I feel like it). But I notice that there are 4 fundamental forces in the universe, and that they cover my brain's every move, with no remaining degrees of freedom."

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?

I asked how you know there is a correlation between brain states and feelings.  You said, "as my anxiety level goes up, my GSR goes up, and vice versa."

That is an example of a correlation, and as such does not answer my question.  How do you know that your anxiety level goes up when your GSR goes up?

I'm looking for some explanation of your use of the term "know" here:  how it is that the rise in anxiety can be known, and how the rise in GSR can be known, and how the correlation between the two can be known.  The issue here is why you think that you know about your feelings in an indubitable and inexplicable way.

I have a slightly different interpretation of Wittgenstein on that point about private languages you mentioned earlier, and it is relevant here.  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.  There is no criterion for correctness, and so there is no sense in which a word can be used wrong (and thus correctly) to refer to private sensations.  The implication is that you can (in theory) use the word "feeling" to refer to something which is absolutely private, but you cannot claim that this usage is correct, and so it cannot indicate knowledge of such sensations.  So, when you say, "I know with absolute certainty what red is, because it is my feeling alone and I experience it directly" (or something similar), we should conclude that you aren't saying anything.  As W. says, "a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said" (Philosophical Investigations, section 304).

I stated that I cannot know I have a toothache without observing my bodily states, and that I could not know I had a toothache without having a tooth.  You replied:  "No? What about referred pain, or phantom limb pain, or hysterical pain, or hallucinated pain?"

Arnold,

In reading your paper on the retinoid system, http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/355/:

"A particularly striking finding of hemispatial neglect in patients with brain lesions involving the right temporal-parietal-occipital junction (Bisiach and Luzzati, 1978) also lends support to the retinoid model of spatial representation. In this study, patients were asked to imagine that they were standing in the main square in Milan which was a very familiar setting for them. They were first instructed to imagine themselves facing the cathedral and to describe what they could see in their “mind’s eye.” They reported a greater number of details to the right than to the left of their imaginary line of sight, often neglecting prominent features on the left side. When they were asked to perform the same imagery task, facing away from the cathedral, they were able to report previously neglected details within the right half of the imaginal perspective but ignored items in the left half that they had reported just a few moments before."

What's interesting is that recognition of details to the left affirms a principle of retail marketing, namely when retailers design a store, they base it on the principle that when customers enter a store, they tend to walk to the left.  Case in point is my local pharmacy/retail store. When you enter the store, the high profit cosmetic items are immediately to the left with the pharmacy counter in the extreme rear of the store and the necessity food items like milk, eggs, bread etc on the extreme right side of the store.  When my teenage daughter and friends enter the store they immediately go to the cosmetics area where they can easily spend $20 on lip gloss and eyeliner.

Our vision and the left side of our being is wired to the right brain lobe and the right side to the left lobe of course. The left side of our mind is wired for logicality and speech which is our dominant hemisphere for normal experience. When a person (especially a young person) enters a store (or Disneyland), the right side of the brain which seeks experience causes them to go left while the parent may go right to buy milk and bread.

ON MEASURING, FEELING, AND COMMENSURABILITY: (AND MIND THE ONTIC/EPISTEMIC GAP!)

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.)

AT: 1. If we ask how/why some functions are felt, we seem to grant that some functions are not felt, and we can ask if there is a systematic biophysical  difference between felt functions and unfelt functions. 

AT: 2. We can also ask why any felt function is felt. -- It seems to me that question 2 is equivalent to asking why anything like feeling (consciousness) exists at all. Would you agree, Stevan?

UNTOWARD CONSEQUENCES OF UNCOMPLEMENTED CATEGORIES

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."  

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"

JS: "There is no practical difference between epiphenomenalism and dualism that I can see." 

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" 

PREDICTING WHAT WE FEEL IS NOT EXPLAINING THAT WE FEEL

AT: What, in your opinion, might count as a causal explanation of a feeling rather than a mere correlate or an analog of a feeling?

"FUNCTING" IS ALL OF PHYSICAL, BIOLOGICAL AND ENGINEERING CAUSAL DYNAMICS

DC: Could someone define the term 'functing' for me please?

Hi Stevan.  I enjoyed your response. We're actually much closer in our views than you realize.  I've read your papers on the symbol grounding problem (years ago) and agree with your view.  In fact, I've reformulated that concept just slightly (from my engineering perspective) and plan on referencing the symbol grounding problem in a paper I'm working on.  

We talk a different language - philosophy versus engineering, and I think that difference is what may be confusing.  The only real difference we seem to have as far as I can tell, is that you feel there is no fundamental problem with there being a reliable correlation plus no mental causation.  I'm not suggesting there is no reliable correlation, nor am I suggesting there is mental causation.  I'm only suggesting that the two are incompatible.  I don't really care which one gets discarded, but I don't see any way we can have both reliable correlation AND no mental causation.  In contrast, you seem to be claiming that there is both a reliable correlation AND mental causation.

To your points.

SH: (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! 

Agreed.  Just to clarify however when you quote others, "I shall assume that what I can observe and measure is all there is and can be." I agree this begs the question regarding the explanatory gap.  Just to be sure we agree, I would claim there is no way to come up with a measure (or to impliment a physical interaction as you put it) that can discern feeling.  Looking at all the possible methods of physical interaction, I can't think of a single one that might for example, interact with feeling matter while not interacting in an identical mannor with matter that is not feeling.  Putting a chunk of matter into a physical machine that can test for feeling and report it is not possible because there is no physical interaction that can tell us that feeling exists and what the feeling is like.  If there was, there would be no explanatory gap.  I believe this is what you mean by incommensurable, is that correct?  If so, I agree.

SH: (2) Observation and measurement . . .

SH: (3) Your third equivocation . . .

I fully agree with 2 and 3.  I think we're on the same page.  The arctic sensors have no feeling (and no meaning), nor the computer that records them.  We obviously agree there is an explanatory gap.  Physical interactions don't explain feeling, and the arctic sensors are not capable of meaning. 

SH: 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.)

Yes, I agree there is a correlate.  The issue I have is only that it seems inconsistent to suggest that feelings correlate AND are not part of any causal chain.  I don't have the answer to how mental causation might influence physical phenomena, and I have no solution to the explanatory gap.  I only want to explore the possibility that; if feelings correlate then they must be in some sense, part of the causal chain.  By "causal chain" I mean there is a series of causal influences, whether they be classical or quantum scale. 

Just one note on what is meant by causal chain.  A causal chain can:
(1) be all on one physical level.  Transistors on a chip represent a causal chain at a single level in which one transistor influences another. 
(2) move up or down levels such as transistors and transducers causing computers to change state.  The computer's change of state causes valves and pumps to operate which causes fluid to flow in a predetermined mannor, eventually leading to a rocket being launched. 

It seems to me we're much closer to agreement than you realize from the remainder of your response.  I would also like to point out that your symbol grounding problem is perfectly acceptable to me.  However, I might have a slightly different perspective.  In my view, there is a meaning in my head that must be converted to symbolic form in order for there to be a physical transmission of that meaning.  Neurons in my brain convert the meaning into a symbolic vocalization.  That vocalization has no meaning itself, it is simply a symbolic representation of the meaning I had in my head.  There is a transmission of symbolic acoustic pulsations in the air that travel out away from my mouth in a spherical wave front.  A pair of ears converts these pressure waves in the listener's ear to neuron interactions and then back into meaning in someone else's head.  However, if one claims mental causation is not part of the causal chain, I will claim that the above interpretation is unacceptable.  For anyone who refuses mental causation, they must deny the above is true because feeling has no causal influence and thus can not make itself known.  I can not reliably report my feelings! 

Perhaps using Kim's framework for a causal chain, and how mental causation is problematic, might help ground the conversation.  Here is my very brief overview as I understand the salient points:
We will assume a physical basis P at time t produces mental state M (or any higher level property) at that time (mind-body supervenience).  Any identical physical basis P should have an identical mental state M. 

Similarly, at time t + dt, physical basis P* causes mental state M*. 

Kim says, "M* is instantiated on this occasion: (a) because, ex hypothesi, M caused M* to be instantiated; (b) because P*, the physical supervenience base of M*, is instantiated on this occasion. "

In other words, if we want to claim that M causes M* we have two causes for M*.  We have P causing P* on which M* supervenes and we have M causing M* directly.  We can't have 2 causes, so we rule out mental causation.  Similarly, we might suggest M* causes P* (downward causation) which again results in 2 causes for M*.

If we refuse mental causation, we can't accept that M causes M* nor can we accept that M* causes P*.  All we can accept is for P to cause M and P* to cause M*.  Nothing more, right?  No wait, there's one more thing you want but you don't say it.  You've hidden it behind the 'telekenisis' door.  ;) 

You want M to correspond to P AND do so reliably.  You want there to be a purely functed report of M by P. 

The problem as I see it isn't that you refuse M causing M*.  That much is fine, I agree.  That is one mental state causing another.  We don't need that since the supervenience base P is sufficient to produce M.

The problem as I see it is that in order for there to be a RELIABLE report of M (or M*) by P (or P*), P must not only have knowledge of P, it must ALSO have knowledge of M.  However as soon as you allow that P can reliably report M, you've admitted to M being part of the causal chain.  M is being acted upon when reported by P.  In order for P to reliably report M, P must funct a description of M in some way.  How does P create this description of M?  How can P funct a description of M if P can't implement a physical interaction - a physical interaction that is able to correlate that functed description with M? 

It's no good saying P reports M because P is reporting about itself because M can not be physically measured.  If you want to now claim that if we measure the momentum or pressure or some other physical property closely enough then we'll be able to measure feeling, I disagree.  M can not be found out about by observing physical interactions, so P can't find out about M by monitoring it's own physical interactions, P can only (at best) report it's own physical interactions.  Also, there is no meaning associated with those physical interactions, and when I say meaning here I mean that the physical interactions are not meaningful per your symbol grounding problem (which I agree with).

One might contest that by monitoring neural interactions we can determine what felt experience is occuring, but to do this we need emperical correlations.  We need to know that when certain neurons fire, this firing of neurons correlates to reported feelings, so this is no help for us.  We are not measuring feeling, we are measuring something physical and we are making the assumption there is a reliable correlation.  If there were any way of monitoring neural interactions and determining what feeling those neurons were experiencing, there would be no explanatory gap and we could stop arguing about feelings and explanatory gaps.

Just to point out where IMHO Kim goes wrong on all this, Kim said:

KIM: Suppose that pain could be given a functional definition -- something like this: being in pain is being in some state (or instantiating some property) caused by tissue damage and causing winces and groans.  Why are you experiencing pain?  Because being in pain is being in a state caused by tissue damage and causing winces and groans, and you are in neural state N, which is one of those states (in you, or in systems like you) that are caused by tissue damage and that cause winces and groans.  Why do people experience pain when they are in neural state N?  Because N is implicated in these causal/nomic relations, and being in pain is being in some state with just these causal/nomic relations.  It is clear that in this way all our explanatory demands can be met.  There is nothing further to be explained about why pain occurs, or why pain occurs when neural condition N is present.

Just as Kim tries to convince us that pain correlates with tissue damage, winces and groans, our intuition tells us this is true.  However, we need to stop thinking our intuition is leading us only to true conclusions.  If we can't logically support this intuitive deduction, we must stop using our intuition. 

Best regards,
Dave.

(Posted 5/3/09, 9:30 PM EST)

I wanted to summarize my last post for clarity:

Summary:  In order for P to reliably funct a description of M, there must be an interaction between P and M.  For P to report anything truthful whatsoever about M, even to report the presence of M, there must be a way for the physical supervenience base P to obtain information about the existance of M. 

For M to be non-causal, P can be the supervenience base but there can not be any flow of information about M to P or else M has entered the causal chain.  If there is no way to obtain information about M then there is no reliable correlation and what P reports about M is unreliable and M becomes non-causal.

Conclusion: For M to be non-causal, M can not be reliably reported by P.  If M is reliably reported, M is causal in the sense that it enters the causal chain.

I’d be interested in exploring possible arguments which avoid this conclusion.  (Posted May 4, 2:30 pm est)

THE EXPLANATORY GAP IS EPISTEMIC, NOT ONTIC

AT: "is feeling a physical brain event or a non-physical event?"

AT: "what exactly is your reason for asserting that feeling is a causally inexplicable brain event? (You might say unexplained, but inexplicable?!)"

WHY WOULD TURING-INDISTINGUISHABLE ZOMBIES TALK ABOUT FEELINGS (AND WHAT, IF ANYTHING, WOULD THEY MEAN)?

AT: "you assert that feelings are caused by the brain"

AT: "you assert that feelings have no causal consequences"

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?"

AT: "[You say] that in order to explain why we feel we would have to show that feelings have causal consequences." 

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?

Hi Stevan.  I've read through a number of your papers but I can't find an explanation of why feelings are inexplicable.  If I'm wrong on that, I apologize, perhaps you can point out where you provide this explanation.  Consider that someone in DJC's (1) category above might claim that once science has explained how and why all the neurons and glia cells in our brains interact, once an explanation of every molecular interaction has been provided, there is nothing left to explain.  So why do you think feeling inexplicable?

I've tried to answer this one myself above, but will attempt a summary here.  First, I'd define feeling (or experience or qualia) to be a phenomena.  It is something that happens.  It is an event which occurs at a specific time.  In addition, we know this event is supervenient on the brain so at least we can know in general terms - where this event is happening.  However, I'd agree with Leibniz who says, "Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds, that is to say, by means of figures and motions."  We can determine what causes physical interactions, and we can use mathematics to describe the motions of things, but this method of describing things is utterly useless in defining feelings.  Feelings do not give way to mathematics, it would appear that only the physical substrate can be defined using mathematics.  So feelings are not explicable on mechanical grounds, otherwise we could define feelings in mathematical terms. 

Physical phenomena in comparison, are explicable on mechanical grounds and mathematics has proven to be applicable to those phenomena without exception.  Any physical phenomenon is an easy problem.  Any mental phenomenon is a hard problem.  Feelings are mental phenomena, which are separate and distinct from physical phenomena.  A mental event is not a physical event, although it is reasonable to conclude that mental events supervene on physical events. 

I think the Turing test (TT) is an excellent way of viewing this difficulty.  Normally, scientists and engineers such as myself will "measure" something by determining how that thing physically interacts with another thing.  When a correlation is found, and a mathematical explanation provided, we can say we have explained the phenomenon.  Models that use mathematics may not be perfectly accurate, such as Newton's laws, but any more accurate theorem will always need to explain the less accurate model when constructing a more accurate one.  In comparison, the TT isn't a test like that at all.  The TT isn't even a test!  It does not check for the motion of parts and there is no mathematical treatment that can be associated with it.  It simply isn't a test in any scientific or engineering way.  The TT is a non-starter for that reason.  It doesn't test anything.  I would however agree with what you've said here:

SH: 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 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.

I like the way you put that: the robot has grounded symbols, but we still have a symbol grounding problem because we haven't provided a test to see if those symbols are in some way intrinsic and can therefore have meaning and produce feeling.  So I conclude that the TT isn't a test at all.  We're stuck with mental events being distinct from physical events and untestable, and that is why IMHO the explanatory gap is so difficult and feelings are inexplicable. 

I'd be interested in understanding why you say that feelings are inexplicable.

Best Regards,

Dave.

HOW AND WHY FEELINGS ARE INEXPLICABLE

DC: "I've read through a number of your papers but I can't find an explanation of why feelings are inexplicable." 

They are inexplicable because explanation is causal (functional) explanation, and we cannot explain (1) how (functionally) the brain causes feelings (even though it undoubtedly does), because feelings are incommensurable with function, and we cannot explain (2) why (functionally) the brain causes feelings, because there is no causal room for feelings themselves to have any effects (hence any function) apart from the effects and function of whatever (mysteriously) causes feelings.

Apart from that, all I can give is examples of the way functional/causal explanation of both how and why is always destined to fail:

Example 1: The reason tissue damage is felt (as pain) rather than just processed (as stimulus avoidance, etc.) is that the felt pain signals the organism to avoid the stimulus. (Explanatory Gap: Why is the signal to avoid the stimulus (etc.) felt, rather than just functed? And how is it felt, rather than just functed?)

Example 2: The reason we hear sounds rather than just process acoustic signals is that we have to select which sounds are relevant. (Explanatory Gap: Why is the selection felt, rather than just functed? And how is it felt, rather than just functed?)

Example 3: The reason it is important that we understand what sentences mean, is that we have to be able to act in accordance with what they mean. (Explanatory Gap:  Why is the understanding felt, rather than just functed? And how is it felt, rather than just functed?)

Etc. You will find that if the goal is to explain how or why a function is a felt function rather than just a "functed" function (with exactly the same functionality), it will always turn out that there is no independent functional role that can be attributed to the fact that it is felt: The same thing, unfelt, would be functionally equivalent. And it is not an explanation to insist that it is just some sort of "brute fact" about certain functions that they just are felt functions. That may well be the case. But we were looking for a causal/functional explanation of how and why, not merely a mysterious assertion that!

That's the explanatory gap: It's an epistemic gap, not an ontic one.

DC: "...someone in DJC's (1) category above might claim that once science has explained how and why all the neurons and glia cells in our brains interact... every molecular interaction... there is nothing left to explain."  

They can claim that. But it does not answer our how/why question, hence it leaves the explanatory gap fully agape.

There are two ways to construe the claim than there is "nothing left to explain." 

One is that we cannot explain any further. That, I think, is quite correct (because feeling and function are incommensurable and because there is no room for feelings to have causal power of their own, over and above the causal power of the functions that [mysteriously] cause them). 

The other is to say that therefore everything has been fully explained. That, I think, is obviously false, since we have not explained how or why some functions are felt. Yet it is a fact that they are felt. And it is as natural as can be to ask "how and why?". To reply that it is simply a (mysterious) brute fact of nature is not to reply at all, hence to leave it unexplained. 

Hence the explanatory gap.

DC: "First.. feeling... is something that happens... at a specific time...supervenient on the brain so... we... know... where..."

I find the weasel-word "supervenience" as vacuous and ineffectual as all the synonyms and paranyms of "feeling" ("consciousness," "qualia," "mind," etc. etc.) that we love to fall back upon when we have nothing substantive or new on offer: We feel. That's a cartesian certainty. Hence there are feelings. Sentitur. Based on everything else we know about the world, it's of course the brain that causes feelings. The question is: how? and why? 

Replying that feelings "supervene" on brain function adds absolutely nothing.

DC: "I'd agree with Leibniz... [that it is] inexplicable on mechanical grounds... in mathematical terms..."  

David, I wonder why -- if you agree with Leibniz that feeling is inexplicable -- you are asking me to explain how/why feeling is inexplicable! But I hope I have by now explained it: Because we cannot say how or why we feel rather than just funct; how/why are functional questions.

DC: "Physical phenomena in comparison, are explicable... an easy problem. [Explaining feeling is] a hard problem.. not a physical event, although it... supervene[s] on physical events."  

Yes, a functional/causal explanation of everything other than feeling is (in principle) an "easy" problem: normal science and engineering. Explaining how and why we feel is not just "a" hard problem, but the hard problem (and, in my opinion, insoluble). 

(On the other prominent candidate for being a "hard" problem -- "duality" in quantum mechanics -- I can only plead nolo contendere, for want of the technical expertise even to judge how much of a problem it is, whether or not it is soluble, and if so, how and why.)

But the only thing that is being said in saying that the feeling/function problem is "hard" is that all other scientific and engineering problems are functional (and often also mathematical), but that those resources are ineffectual for explaining how and why some functions are felt -- for the (simple!) reason that "how/why" are functional, causal questions, and (except on pain of telekinetic dualism), feeling has no causal (hence no functional) power.

DC: "[T]he TT isn't a test... in any scientific or engineering way... [it] does not check for the motion of parts... no mathematical treatment... a non-starter..."  

I think you are profoundly wrong about that. Candidates for passing the TT will be designed by human beings; the candidates will have moving parts, and both dynamic and computational processes, known to the designer. 

What the TT tests is performance capacity. It of course cannot test whether the successful candidate feels. But that's part of the point of the TT. It is an embodiment of the explanatory gap: We will never know whether or not a successful candidate feels (only the candidate can know); and if it does, we will never know how or why.

DC: "I like the way you put that: the robot has grounded symbols, but we still have a symbol grounding problem because we haven't provided a test to see if those symbols are in some way intrinsic and can therefore have meaning and produce feeling."    

Alas, you misunderstood me. A TT-passing robot certainly has grounded symbols, which certainly solves the symbol grounding problem. But grounding is not meaning, And only a TT-passing robot that feels would have intrinsic meaning. 

In other words, not only is systematic interpretability insufficient for grounding, but robotic grounding (even TT-scale) is not sufficient for (intrinsic) meaning, unless it generates feeling. But we have no way of knowing -- let alone explaining -- whether, how or why a TT-robot (or any functional system) feels rather than just functs.

DC: "So I conclude that the TT isn't a test at all."    

Of course it's a test: a test for having functionally explained our total performance capacity. It is not, however, either a test or an explanation for your feeling capacity.

DC: "We're stuck with mental events being distinct from physical events and untestable, and that is why... the explanatory gap is so difficult and feelings are inexplicable."    

You're back into the verificationist observationalism I pointed out before: The problem is not the untestability. (The TT robot might feel, after all.) The problem is with inexplicability. And that problem arises from causality and causal explanation, not from some sort of physical/mental "dualism" (which explains nothing, but merely gives yet another name to the explanatory gap.)

DC: "I'd be interested in understanding why you say that feelings are inexplicable."   

I hope this time I have succeeded in conveying an understanding!

-- SH

AT: "Isn't this mysterious inexplicability of feelings a direct consequence of an incoherent argument?"

DA: Could someone remind me please what the 'hard problem' and the 'easy problem' are?

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO FEEL: APPLYING OCCAM'S RAZOR TO THE MIND/BODY (FEELING/FUNCTION) PROBLEM  

DA: "But If I recall, that is not the 'hard problem' or the 'easy problem' as Chalmers defines them?"

DC: The really hard problem of CONSCIOUSNESS is the problem of EXPERIENCE. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a SUBJECTIVE aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it IS like to be a CONSCIOUS organism. This SUBJECTIVE aspect is EXPERIENCE. When we see, for example, we EXPERIENCE visual sensations: the FELT QUALITY of redness, the EXPERIENCE of dark and light, the QUALITY of depth in a visual field. Other EXPERIENCES go along with perception in different modalities: the *X* sound of a clarinet, the *X* smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily SENSATIONS, from pains to orgasms; MENTAL images that are conjured up internally; the FELT QUALITY of emotion, and the EXPERIENCE of a stream of CONSCIOUS thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it IS like to be in them. All of them are states of EXPERIENCE.

AT: "Isn't this mysterious inexplicability of feelings a direct consequence of an incoherent argument?"

PUTATIVE FUNCTIONAL EXPLANATIONS OF FEELING: A CHALLENGE

AT:  "Why, exactly, do you believe that the brain states that constitute our feelings can't ever be explained?"

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO FEEL SOMETHING

DA: "Chalmers relies heavily on the Nagel idea that 'there is something that it is like to be a conscious organism'."  

He's right to rely on it: Nagel's was an apt insight.

But, to expose the redundancy and root out the equivocation, it's "There's something it feels like to be a feeling organism."

DA: "there is no attempt to distinguish between human consciousness and any kind of animal 'consciousness'."

No need to distinguish: The feeling/function problem is about the fact that we feel (something), not about what we feel -- whether this or that. 

DA: "there is surely nothing it is 'like' to be conscious other than being conscious - which tell us absolutely nothing." 

First, to expose the redundancy and root out the equivocation, it's "there is surely nothing it feels 'like' to feel other than to feel."

Yup: And your point is...?

DA: "'I know what it is like to have a broken finger'... I would compare - in memory - my present painless state with the sharp throb I felt at the time)."  

"I know what it feels like to feel like I have a broken finger."

But as for comparing your present painless state with the sharp throb you felt the last time: (Strictly [indeed, Wittgenstrictly] speaking, you are now feeling what it seems to feel like to feel no pain and to be feeling a memory of what seems to feel like it once felt like to feel a pain.)

Yup, and your point is...?

DA: "But suppose someone says to me. "I am conscious", and I reply "I know what it is like to be conscious".  It's an absurd conversation, is it not?" 

A: "I am feeling something." B: "I know what it feels like to feel something."

Not absurd in the least (spoken betwixt cognoscenti -- or, rather, sentienti). (Rather more puzzling spoken between Zombies -- however, as noted in a previous posting, it might be functionally adaptive as a way of referring to internal states unobservable to one's interlocutor, even when those internal states are not felt states).

DA: "And for good reason. I haven't anything to compare (human) consciousness with - any more than the person I'm speaking to has."

You are alluding here to the fact that feeling is an uncomplemented category: it is both impossible and self-contradictory to feel what it's like to not feel anything at all -- though it's perfectly possible to feel what it's like not to feel something in particular: to not feel this, but to feel that.

Well, yes, that -- i.e., the "poverty of the stimulus": the fact that we can only sample positive instances of feeling -- does make the category "feeling" all the more problematic, puzzling and troublesome, But it definitely does not make it empty or meaningless.

DA: "being asleep, in a coma etc, is not that state: they are simply states in which human consciousness is not operating" 

Yes, when you are not feeling, you are not feeling. In that sense, "you" are not "there," you're gone. (If Descartes over-reached with his "cogito," in concluding that he existed [sum] rather than just that feeling was going on [sentitur], we can safely, though not cartesianly, say that where [and while] there is no feeling going on, there is nobody home.)

Fortunately, you are reconstituted when you wake up. (A stone is not.)

DA: "I don't really think that your change of 'consciousness' and 'experience' to 'feeling' makes any material difference. Whatever we call it, we are still left with essentially the same problems."

We are indeed. But calling them by one name highlights that they are all one and the same problem...

REFERENCE

Harnad, S. (1987) Uncomplemented Categories, or, What is it Like to be a Bachelor? 1987 Presidential Address: Society for Philosophy and Psychology. 

ABSTRACT: To learn and to use a category one must be able to sample both what is in it and what is not in it (i.e., what is in its complement), in order to pick out which invariant features distinguish members from nonmembers. Categories without complements may be responsible for certain conceptual and philosophical problems. Examples are experiential categories such as what it feels like to "be awake," "be alive," be aware," and "be." Providing a complement by analogy or extrapolation is a solution in some cases (such as what it feels like to be a bachelor), but only because the complement can in princible be sampled in the future, and because the analogy could in principle be correct. Where the complement is empty in principle, the "category" is intrinsically problematic. Other examples may include self-denial paradoxes (such as "this sentence is false") and problems with the predicate "exists."

-- SH

I'd like to commend this line of thinking generally as bearing low hanging fruit. Equations (1) and (2) can be constructed literally into a (very very huge) set of quantum electrodynamics equations - so the formulation has a mathematical basis (as a massive 'projection operator' / 'observable' which reveals a state trajectory which traversed in the act of revealing the new knowledge). Also note that the above "knowledge" dynamics can be generalised to all belief using dynamic doxastics thus:

dBELIEF(t)
----------------   ...   (2)a
  dt

It's just that scientific belief is objectively testable (a test for acquisition of a 'law of nature'), so (2)a is not empirically useful because all they predict is a holder of a belief. NOTE: philosophical 'isms are beliefs of kind (2)a. All you need to do is act scientifically.I commend the knowledge dynamics idea to you. Note there is also a possible formulation for the 2nd derviative....

d^2KNOWLEDGE(t)
---------------- (3)
  dt^2

I leave you to ponder what (3) might be an indicator of....I have my own ideas! Q. What kind of cognitive agency results from (3) = 0?

Thus I find I cannot dismiss the causal efficacy of P-consciousness as easily as you do (not without denying my P-consciousness, and yours, and then demanding it be used for all scientific observation on pain of scientific suicide!). The self-referential application (an act of doing science directed at how we do science) seems to be the key to it. It changes the explanatory domain to one of "what perspective must I adopt in order that what exists (which is described through the P-consciousness of scientists, and is causally efficacious) might be seen to have a 1st person perspective". Which has been rather helpful ... for me, anyway.

regards,

Colin Hales

Mind the Mind-Fields

Stevan, part of our exchange was:

DA: "there is no attempt to distinguish between human consciousness and any kind of animal 'consciousness'."

SH:  No need to distinguish: The feeling/function problem is about the fact that we feel (something), not about what we feel -- whether this or that. 

My reply:  But precisely. I am talking simply about being conscious (or 'feeling' if you like). Nothing in what I said alluded to what might happen to be the object of consciousness.  My point is that there seems to be an assumption (eg in Chalmers - and I gather you agree) that there is no important difference between being conscious as a human and being "conscious" (can we even use the same word?) as an animal. What on earth could justify this huge assumption?

Also, I'm afraid you're missing the point of my criticism of the Nagel 'insight'. I wrote:

"DA: "there is surely nothing it is 'like' to be conscious other than being conscious - which tell us absolutely nothing."

You replied: SH: First, to expose the redundancy and root out the equivocation, it's "there is surely nothing it feels 'like' to feel other than to feel." Yup: And your point is...?"

Your change of vocabulary doesn't make any material difference so I will leave that aside. My 'point' is simply, as earlier explained, that to say that something is like itself (which is what this effectively amounts to) is mere verbiage. 

I am frankly amazed.  Can this Nagel 'insight' really be the basis of analytic philosophy's definition of consciousness? I am reluctantly led to think so because I notice that it keeps getting referred to as if it were holy writ...

DA

WHEREOF ONE CANNOT SPEAK...

DA: "Nothing in what I said alluded to what might happen to be [THE OBJECT OF CONSCIOUSNESS].  My point is that there seems to be an assumption... that there is no important difference between [BEING CONSCIOUS AS] a human and [BEING "CONSCIOUS"] (can we even use the same word?) [AS] an animal. What on earth could justify this huge assumption? Your change of vocabulary doesn't make any material difference so I will leave that aside." 

DA: "to say that something is like itself (which is what this effectively amounts to) is mere verbiage."

EXTRACTING CATEGORY INVARIANCE FROM POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE INSTANCES

DA: "Not sure I'm happy with you changing everything to 'feels' etc. We are, after all, talking about consciousness and that's the term that the mainstream of this debate seems to use." 

DA: "one cannot assume that human and animal CONSCIOUSNESS are the same... Issues about 'OBJECTS' or 'WHATS' have nothing to do with it."

DA: "I'm simply suggesting that comparing something to itself (as in the Nagel 'insight') is not likely to prove a very informative step." 

1) ... I understand the intent of this collapse of A-/P- distinction. Just replace all instances of "P-consciousness" with the "feeling" and there we are .. on the same page.
2).... You are talking to someone up to their armpits in the standard particle model and U1  quantum electrodynamics. I was using the term 'fields' ambiguously ...In cog sci and psychophysics "visual", "auditory" or in general - perceptual fields...are their common parlance. Sorry about the confusion.

The 'dynamics' posting was about a causal role of "feeling" in brain adaptation (learning)  dynamics, specifically in the brain of a scientist undergoing change in "knowledge", where you can objectively relate the result with "feeling" in an empirically cogent way no lesser supported, as a claim, than any other science claim. Denying it puts all scientists in a logically invalid place and no amount of abstract speculation and philosophical muddlement (BTW all mediated by "feeling"!) can make it go away. 

As a scientist I cannot deceive myself into acting as if the causality of knowledge change in scientists does not directly use the "feeling" that literally is scientific observation to constrain knowledge change. Absolutely every scientific act bar none is evidence in support of a claim about causal efficacy of the kind I make. Absolutely zero evidence exists for a valid original authentic empirical science done without “feeling” (=scientific observation) supporting it.  To deny this claim is to construct, using the same causal mechanism of “feeling”, a claim (a change in knowledge of the denier) to the contrary, thus implicitly invalidating the denial and placing the denier  in a logically inconsistent place.

All I can do is bring this approach to your attention and advise that it acts against claims of the causal inertness of “feeling” in ways that force a denier to become logically inconsistent in an empirically testable way. 

None of this has anything to do with explaining the origins of any “feeling” or the particulars of any specific kind of “feeling”. It has to do with scientists waking up to our own special role-relationship with “feeling” and what it tells us about ourselves. It tells us that “feeling is causally inert” is merely a mantra which is very suspect.

This process is rather odd... Here I am , in effect, claiming that "feeling", is literally the brain's solution to the (your!) symbol grounding problem. The act of "grounding" is an act of causal constraint on knowledge change consistent with the "feeling" involved in the representation of the external natural world in a scientist. It's an indirect (2nd order)  causal link, but it's real and testable.

Guess I'll leave it there for your ponderings. 

cheers
colin hales

DA: In relying on the Nagel dictum that "There is something that it is like to be a conscious organism", one is in effect comparing something to itself, as I explained earlier, because there is surely nothing it is 'like' to be conscious other than being conscious.

"To feel or not to feel, that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to — 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life,
For who would feel the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus (nonfeel) make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels feel,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather feel those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience-nous does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of cogito,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action."

HOW/WHY IS OBSERVATION FELT OBSERVATION, AND KNOWLEDGE FELT KNOWLEDGE? (NO QUANTUM-COLLAPSE REPLIES, PLEASE!)

CH: "[I (CH) am immersed] in... quantum electrodynamics..." 

I became a little apprehensive when I read this, Colin, because I was afraid you were going to invoke the alleged causal role of "consciousness" (human [felt] observation) in the collapse of the quantum wave packet. (That would have been a non-starter, for one cannot solve the unsolved puzzles of one field with the unsolved puzzles of another field! But fortunately, I think, you are not taking quite that route here -- though you are coming close!)"

CH: "The 'dynamics' posting was about a causal role of 'feeling' in brain adaptation (learning) dynamics, specifically in the brain of a scientist undergoing change in "knowledge", where you can objectively relate the result with 'feeling'... [T]he causality of knowledge change in scientists... use[s] the 'feeling' that... is [inherent in] scientific observation to constrain knowledge change..." 

There is no doubt that science is based on observations. There is no doubt that observations are felt. There is also no doubt that knowing is felt. But the question was: "How/why are observations (or anything else) felt? What is the causal role of the feeling?" 

(You have not answered that question; you have simply noted the fact that needs to be explained: that observations -- which play a crucial causal role in science -- also happen to be felt observations. Well, yes. And so too are observations that play a crucial causal role in everyday survival and reproduction. But how/why are any of them felt observations rather than just functed observations?

A meter-reading, after all, is a meter-reading (even if it seems to be mysteriously insufficient to collapse a wave-packet unless the meter is read by a feeling observer!). Observations are simply data in computational or dynamic (robotic) processes. Why do the data need to be "felt"?

[I wonder, by the way, why you keep putting "feeling" in scare-quotes: They're real enough, you know! I can safely say "I feel hot." No need for me to say "I 'feel' hot"...]

CH: "[No] empirical science [is] done without “feeling” (=scientific observation) supporting it... [and] abstract speculation and philosophical muddlement [are] BTW all mediated by "feeling"!..."

All true. Feelings are a fact. The correlations are a fact. But now we are waiting for a causal explanation: what causal role does the fact that observations are felt rather than just functed play? (Ditto for knowing.) ("Mediating" is just renaming the mystery: mediating how, why?)

CH: "[The claim of a causal role for feeling in scientific observation and knowledge-change is] empirically cogent [and] no less supported... than any other science claim..." 

So far, the "claim" is only about a correlation between feelings and observations (measurements, data). We have yet to hear what causal (rather than mere -- and mysterious -- correlative) role they play.

CH: "To deny this claim [of a causal role for feeling in observation-based knowledge-change] is to construct, using the same causal mechanism of “feeling”, a claim (a change in knowledge of the denier) to the contrary... that force[s] a denier to become logically inconsistent in an empirically testable way..." 

It sounds like you may be imagining you have some sort of a Cartesian argument there, but I am afraid you do not. 

Feelings (though they are undeniably, cartesianly, there, being felt) have yet to reveal their causal role.  Neither correlating with functional causes, nor feeling as if they're causal will do. (It matters not whether their causal role is discovered, somehow, via empirical observation and causal inference, in the usual scientific way, or their causal role somehow turn out to be a matter of logical necessity or cartesian certainty, via mathematics or the cogito. What's missing, still, is a coherent, viable hypothesis as to what their causal role is -- a hypothesis that cannot be immediately rejected by showing that it is either functionally superfluous on its own terms or draws on an extra telekinetic power that is contrary to all known evidence to date.)

CH: "This... is rather odd [for] I am... claiming that "feeling", is literally the brain's solution to the (your!) symbol grounding problem..." 

I hate to seem ungrateful, but the solution to the symbol grounding problem is sensorimotor grounding: The symbols in a Turing-scale robot -- a robot whose symbols are not only systematically interpretable as being about X (in the way the symbols in a book, computer or toy robot are) but a robot that also has the sensorimotor capacity to interact (behaviorally and verbally) with whatever the symbols are systematically interpretable as denoting, and to discourse about whatever the symbols are systematically interpretable as denoting, Turing-indistinguishably from the way we do -- are grounded. Their semantic interpretability (derived intentionality) is congruent with the robot's interactions with what its symbols are about.

But grounding is not meaning! And, a fortiori, it is not felt meaning, or feeling. So Turing-scale robotic grounding is enough to solve the (easy) symbol-grounding problem, but not to solve the (hard) feeling/function (mind/body) problem.

(By the way, it is not at all evident why Turing-scale robots could not do empirical observation or causal explanation even if they don't feel [i.e., even if their observing is not felt observing]. Grounding sounds like all they need.)

CH: "The act of "grounding" is an act of causal constraint on knowledge change consistent with the "feeling" involved in the representation of the external natural world in a scientist. It's an indirect (2nd order)  causal link, but it's real and testable..."

Sensorimotor grounding is certainly a causal constraint on a symbol system, and if it is Turing-scale grounding it is probably as much as cognitive science (including cognitive neuroscience) can tell us about cognition.

But, alas, it still leaves a gaping explanatory gap.

("Consistent with the feeling" is not the same as "caused by the feeling," any more than "correlated with the feeling" is. And "representations" per se are no help; moreover, if they are felt representations, then they are part of the problem, not the solution: How and why are they felt representations, rather than just functed representations? And I have no idea at all what an "indirect" or "2nd order" causal link means...)

-- SH

Wow. I post a brief aside and I am sucked into the explanatory gap! The epistemic vortex from hell. OK. I’ll try to align the dialogue with the explanatory gap (EG) theme and to avoid talking past each other from our different vantage points. I’ll use the word feeling as the most general expression directed specifically at the ‘what it is like’ subjective qualities.

Scientists.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

When discussing the EG I like to be very specific and refer everything to the scientist and scientific behaviour as a very useful, unique behaviour with which to specifically calibrate the discussion. The scientist is charged with acquisition of objectively testable ‘laws of nature’ (LON). Empirical corroboration of a LON’s predictions puts a scientist in a state of feeling that is scientific observation (eg occipital lobe/visual-‘field’). Contrary to what might have been the impression in my earlier posts: All LON are devoid of causality (this includes QM). LON in the form of the traditional currency of science  are (statistical) descriptions, not explanation. The LON are descriptions (predictive) of how the natural world/scientist combined system feels to the scientist (private, subjectively presented) in the act of scientific observation. Or , in the parlance of the 19^th century LON merely ‘organise appearances’. Viable empirical science results when a LON describes (symbolically captures)  the outward (observed) signs of a critical dependency through infallibly concomitant appearances. It is the term critical dependency which is key.

OK.

LON, Standard Particle Model view of brain material

There is nothing to a brain but (a) nucleons and (b) electrons and (c) space. This (effectively) exhausts the members of the standard particle model involved (do I have to elaborate the nucleons? Nope). There is mass and charge associated with each. They express EM fields in space as a result of the charge carried. Those fields propagate and vortex and have angular momentum (are/can emit radiation). The 2 short acting forces and the gravitational force contribute nothing to the origins of the layered organisation (atom, molecule, cell, syncytia) that are actively involved in the function that gives rise to cognition. Stablisation of the structure results from a multitude of constraints on the motion of these particles in space (chemical bonds etc).

Now the meat:

1) ALL of the descriptions of particles and fields and forces was constructed by scientists inside the described system, made of it, using ‘feeling’. The LON that is the standard particle model, QM, electrodynamics etc captures the critical dependencies involved in the organisation of a scientist’s brain.

2) All these specialised LON are constructed presupposing the existence of the scientist and the ability (feeling) that is scientific observation. The scientist is implicitly built into the LON

I now confine comments to the scientist’s brain. Here’s the EG laid bare:

3) NONE of the above LON predict the existence of the feeling that is scientific observation. Let’s call these applicable (condensed matter) particles and forces and fields LON_X.  NONE of LON_X predict a scientist or observing/feeling. All presuppose both or exist in a context of the assumed existence of both. Thus the standard LON have –NIL- content in respect to the existence of 1^st person ‘feeling’ in its context of scientific observation. I think you well and truly 'get' that!

Which leads me to the final point in the form of a question designed to point to the place where the answer to the explanatory gap actually is.

“Q1. What kind of universe must we inhabit in which LON_X describes what a brain looks like in the act of delivering feeling to a scientist?”

Answer?   NOT the universe indicated by LON_X.

Or, put another way:

Describing a universe in which an embedded observer exists who will describe that universe LON_X-ly is not the description LON_X. This unavoidable logic tells us that we have not even begun to describe the universe in the fashion needed to predict a scientific observer of the kind we are, who sees the observation mechanism behaving LON-X-ly.

Or, put yet another way:

The universe is NOT made of atoms or molecules or cells or subatomic particles. These are the things we perceive it to be made of when we look (feel it) as scientists.

Or, put yet another way:

The universe is made of organised ‘something’, say Planck_Scale_Thing, which exists PRIOR to an observer, but delivers an observer that reveals the universe to behave LON_X-ly because the observer is inside the universe, made of  Planck_Scale_Thing

Or, put yet another rather more pointed way:

LON_X in brain material essentially describes electromagnetic fields in space. Q … What perspective must I adopt on the universe such that electromagnetism behaving in certain specific ways (like a brain) makes it acquire a 1^st person perspective (from the point of view of BEING the electromagnetic fields that ARE the brain), when elsewhere in the body (such as in the peripheral nerves) it fails to do that?

This rather awkward non-explanation of ‘feeling’ is as far as I need go for now. What the above tells me is that I can blather on forever about LON_X and I will NEVER leap the explanatory gap. It is a-priori meaningless and any expectation that it can is misguided. This deoes not mean the gap cannot be leapt. It means we haven’t leapt it yet.

To leap the explanatory gap is to construct descriptions of  organised Planck_Scale_Thing in such a way as to show how an observer might function. I know I have the right Planck_Scale_Thing when my descriptions start to produce observations consistent with LON_X, such that it reveals itself as the brain material of the (scientific) observer.

Because

(1)   no amount of LON_X discussion will ever leap the explanatory gap

(2)   inventing work arounds like “emergence” and “function” and “organisation” and “representation” and “mind-stuff” and “computation”  and “complexity” blah blah blah……is nonsensical magical thinnking: there is literally no such “Thing”. There are nucleons and electrons and space and EM Fields. That’s it. The fact that they are arranged in specific ways and behave dynamically in specific ways adds nothing tangible. If you count the mass, the charge, the numbers of particles and the angular momentum (energies) of the EM field dynamics – it’s all there is (yes it’s lossy! – propagates energy all over the place…a detail).

(3)   Believing that the universe is literally made of LON_X is as bad as (2). It’s made of SOMETHING, though, and that SOMETHING is cannot be mathematical abstractions of the LON_X type because the explanatory gap exists.

……..This is as far as I can go. I have been exploring the potential ‘other sides’ of the explanatory gap for a while now. But because the kinds of description involved are totally foreign, to go into it will just look like a whole lot of mumbojumbo no more convincing than (2) or (3) …. I merely bring a perspective on the explanatory gap and a way over it. We’ve been stuck on one side of the gap for 2000 years – since Aristotle because we keep believing extra things about our laws of nature, when indeed the truly explanatory laws of nature are not even in the LON we know and we haven't even started to compile that set (yet), nor are we explicitly (mainstream) aware of the status of our LON as 100% a-causal descriptions pressuposing scientists, with the scientist built into them. 
 

That’s my take on the explanatory gap.
 I’ll leave the causality/grounding issue aside for now. WHEW!

I’m away for a few days out of reach of mail. There’s not much I can add to the above.
Carry on!

Regards,

Colin Hales

AT:  "Why, exactly, do you believe that the brain states that constitute our feelings can't ever be explained?"

GAP INTACT UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE...

CH: "Wow. I post a brief aside and I am sucked into the explanatory gap!" 

Well, "The Explanatory Gap" is the theme of this thread...

CH: "Empirical corroboration of...  predictions  [from Laws of Nature (LON)] puts a scientist in a state of feeling that is scientific observation..." 

So does empirical falsification of predictions from LON. So does just about everything else we say and do whilst awake and compos mentis...

CH: "LON... are (statistical) descriptions... (predictive) of how the natural world/scientist combined system feels to the scientist... in the act of scientific observation..." 

Translation: "Making a 'scientific observation' and making and understanding a scientific explanation feel like something, and those feelings are tightly correlated with the data of the observation and the explanation."

But we already knew that. We are now talking about explaining how and why making an observation, and making and understanding an explanation -- and just about everything else we do whilst alive, awake, and compos mentis --  feels like something and correlates tightly with what is going on in the world.

You are not touching the question of how and why at all. You are just reformulating what you take to be the nature of scientific observation and scientific explanation (and presupposing feeling as somehow part of the package). In other words, you are, I'm afraid, begging the question (underlying this topic thread, which is about the explanatory gap), completely.

CH: "There is nothing to a brain but (a) nucleons and (b) electrons and (c) space..." 

Fine. Now how and why do they sometimes generate feeling? 

CH: "Now the meat:... ALL of the descriptions of particles and fields and forces [were] constructed by scientists inside the described system, made of it, using ‘feeling’..." 

"Using" feeling, or whilst feeling? This is where you beg the question, by presupposing (without explanation) that feeling is causal, rather than just correlated with brain processes that are causal (and mysteriously generate correlated feelings too).

(Keep it simple, Colin. Your complicated and somewhat idiosyncratic way of putting things is fooling you into thinking you are making inroads on the explanatory gap, when you are not.)

CH: "LON are constructed presupposing the existence of the scientist and the ability (feeling) that is scientific observation. The scientist is implicitly built into the LON..."

You said that already:  Now, how/why are scientists' (and laymens') observations and explanations felt rather than just brain-functed?"

CH: "NONE of the above LON predict the existence of the feeling that is scientific observation...All presuppose both..."

Quite right. And that is the explanatory gap: Now let's hear how you propose to bridge it...

CH: "[W]e have not even begun to describe the universe in the fashion needed to predict a scientific observer of the kind we are, who sees the observation mechanism behaving [lawfully]...

Indeed; but your point is...?

CH: "The universe is NOT made of atoms or molecules or cells or subatomic particles. These are the things we perceive it to be made of when we look (feel it) as scientists..."

We feel when we do things; scientists do too. But we knew that. (I'm not sure whether you are also telling us that current scientific theory is wrong, and if so, why; but I am pretty sure you are not making any inroads on the explanatory gap: just re-describing it.)

Or perhaps you are alluding here to the fact that although feelings are correlated with the way things are in the world, they are nevertheless incommensurable with them (so it is erroneous to think of feelings as somehow "resembling" the things that correlate with the feelings: red with felt-red, round with felt-round, etc.). -- That's true too, but likewise does not help to bridge the explanatory gap; it's part of the gap.

CH: "What perspective must I adopt on the universe such that electromagnetism behaving in certain specific ways (like a brain) makes it acquire a 1^st person perspective (from the point of view of BEING the electromagnetic fields that ARE the brain), when elsewhere in the body (such as in the peripheral nerves) it fails to do that?..."

Translation: "What is the explanation of how and why (some) brain function is felt, whereas (say) kidney function is not?"

That's the question, alright: But what's the answer? 

(The equivocation on "perspectives" won't help; it just milks the mystery. And the fact that you are focussing on scientific observations and scientific explanations about what there is in the world is not relevant; the same problem would be there if you were just focusing on a layman's "ouch.")

CH: "This rather awkward non-explanation of ‘feeling’ is as far as I need go for now. What the above tells me is that I can blather on forever about LON_X and I will NEVER leap the explanatory gap. It is a-priori meaningless and any expectation that it can is misguided. This does not mean the gap cannot be leapt. It means we haven’t leapt it yet."

OK, I'll wait till you've leapt it, or at least give a principled account of how it could be leapt...

CH: "To leap the explanatory gap is to construct descriptions... in such a way as to show how an observer might function. I know I have the right... descriptions [when they] start to produce observations consistent with [Laws of Nature] such that it reveals itself as the brain material of the (scientific) observer."

This unfortunately sounds as if it is going in circles, without substantive content, just a hope.

 "Consistent with" just means "correlated with" here, and the gap is about causation...

-- SH

AT: "I have the feeling that the very way in which you propose the notion of a feeling-function divide implicitly precludes any possibility of a causal role for feeling."

AT: Because of this feeling on my part, I am writing this response to you. Would you claim that this feeling on my part plays no causal role in my typing the post that you are now reading?

DETECTING CATEGORY INVARIANTS FROM POSITIVE INSTANCES ALONE

DA: "the Nagel 'insight'...that 'There is something that it is like to be a conscious organism'... is in effect comparing something to itself... [This] is philosophically vacuous. If you (or anyone) can produce an argument to show why I am wrong... I would be very happy to consider it."

AT: Because of this feeling on my part, I am writing this response to you. Would you claim that this feeling on my part plays no causal role in my typing the post that you are now reading?

RF: Even if, for some of us, Nagel's insight does, indeed, say more about analytic philosophy at a particular stage of its development than about consciousness, that's no justification for such blatant disrespect between fellow professionals.

DA: The problem with your reply, as I see it, is that it criticizes me, not my argument.  I am here for philosophical exchanges not ad hominem stuff.

KNOWING SOMETHING WHEN YOU FEEL IT

DA: "[No] problem with your example [of a child recognizing the category red from positive instances alone]... [But]... how precisely does [this] refute my argument that...Nagel['s] ''There is something that it is like to be a conscious organism"... is comparing something to itself?"

consciousness, awareness, qualia, subjective states, conscious states, mental states, phenomenal states, qualitative states, intentional states, intentionality, subjectivity, mentality, private states, 1st-person states, contentful states, reflexive states, representational states, sentient states, experiential states, reflexivity, self-awareness, self-consciousness, sentience, raw feels, experience, soul, spirit, mind..., viewpoint, ...

ON UNFELT EGOCENTRISM

AT: "May I assume, Stevan, that even though you feel that my feeling played no causal role in my posting, you also feel that your feeling about this might be wrong?" 

AT: If I were...(without feeling) I would be unable to post! 

AT: "I have shown how a biologically credible system of egocentric brain mechanisms might constitute the brain state that is the feeling causing the selection of the unfelt biological processes which execute the posting. Can you show the brain mechanisms that can do a similar selection without an egocentric representation of the salient world?"

DA:  "'Feels' in this context obviously means much the same as 'experiences' and 'be conscious of'....  It doesn't give us any leverage on the idea of consciousness at all i.e. it's not an explanation..."

SH: What red looks (feels) like is a recognizable category; so what feeling feels like is likewise a recognizable category. We know it when we see (feel) it...

ON WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BELIEVE, THINK, AND KNOW

RF: "I don't believe that we feel feeling... We think that we feel"

DA: "[I]s there an 'easy' problem, by the way?"

DA: "I would have thought the 'hard problem'... is... to explain what... feeling -is."

DA: "[M]y point was that... one... is on the completely wrong track... I hope all that is plain enough?"

OF COURSE THE BRAIN'S THE CULPRIT: BUT HOW, AND WHY?

AT: "If we can agree... that feeling is a particular state of the brain... then... we can discuss what... state of the brain might constitute feeling [and] make progress on the how and why of feeling..."

DA: "Is that a common analytic viewpoint...?"

AT: "If we can agree... that feeling is a particular state of the brain... then... we can discuss what... state of the brain might constitute feeling [and] make progress on the how and why of feeling..."

AT: "...you have claimed that explaining how and why is not merely hard, but impossible because feelings have no causal consequences..."

AT: "It seems to me that you contradict your own argument when you acknowledge that feelings are states of the brain..."

AT:  "...if one grants that feelings are constituted by particular brain states one is not justified in claiming that feelings cannot have causal consequences."

BELIEVING IS FEELING: CORRELATION, CAUSATION AND INFORMATION

JS: "you are wrongly assuming that the "problem" generated by uncomplemented categories... exists outside of the grammar in which those categories are defined..."

I do not see that anything I have said has anything to do with grammar! I am not speaking of grammatical categories but sensorimotor and verbal categories: kinds of things (objects, events, actions, states, properties) that we are able to recognize, call by their names, and to an extent describe. Many of these categories -- especially the first ones we acquire -- are not derived from definitions or descriptions, but grounded in sensorimotor experience (which also happens to be felt). (And those categories that we do acquire via definition are recombinations of categories we have acquired through sensorimotor experience, likewise felt. It also feels like something to understand what a word means.)

JS: "To feel is to feel some X, so that any knowledge of feeling is knowledge of feeling some X.  Knowledge of feeling cannot be separated from knowledge of X."

To feel something is to feel something. We all know that. The way we know is by feeling this (e.g., a headache) and by feeling that (e.g., a toothache), and noticing that they feel different, but that they both feel like something. We all know that too. There is no point mystifying it. (And "something" is a perfectly serviceable -- if rather abstract -- generic category too, though it too might have some complementation problems of its own!)

Feeling a headache is something we can recognize and call by its name. So is feeling a toothache. And so is generic feeling; that means feeling something; and feeling something is something that all feelings of X or Y or Z have in common.

JS: "There is thus no uncomplemented (and no "Cartesian") knowledge of feeling, just as [there] is no uncomplemented (and no Cartesian) knowledge of thinking..."

One thing at a time. Feeling this (e.g., a headache) is a complemented category. We can all recognize and call it by its name. Feeling that, a toothache (part of the complement of feeling a headache), is not feeling a headache. Hence the category "what it feels like to feel a headache" (aka "what a headache feels like") is a perfectly well-complemented category.

In contrast, the category "feeling something" (where "something" can be anything at all) is likewise a category ("what it feels like to feel anything at all, be it headache or toothache) -- a category that we can all recognize and call by its name. 

But "feeling something" is not a complemented category, because we do not and cannot know what it feels like to feel nothing at all. (We can know what it feels like to feel this and not-that, but that's not the complement of feeling itself, but only the complement of feeling this, or that.)

So neither the recognizability and identifiability of the category "feeling (something)" nor its uncomplementedness is in doubt. We do have the category even though we can only sample positive instances of it. 

We have other categories based on positive instances alone -- for example, what it feels like to be a bachelor, if one is and always has been a bachelor. There we flesh out the complement, and the invariant features of what it feels like to be a bachelor, from guessing what it would feel like to be married. Of course, once one gets married, one may discover that being married does not feel like what one had expected at all -- in which case one did not fully know what it feels like to be a bachelor either, having only experienced positive instances of it. 

The difference in the case of the category "feeling" itself is that its complement cannot be filled in by proxy hypothesis or analogy, as in the case of imagining what it would feel like to be married, because in the case of feeling, the category "what it would feel like not to feel" is both empty and self-contradictory. So we may be off (somewhat) about what, exactly, it feels like to feel, in the way we could be off about what it feels like to be a bachelor; and that may (and indeed does) create conceptual problems. But it does not mean the category "what it feels like to feel (something)" is either empty or incoherent; just a bit pathological, cognitively.

You also seem to be denying that I can have cartesian certainty that I am feeling ("[t]here is no... "Cartesian"... knowledge of feeling") when I'm feeling (sentio ergo sentitur) -- and that's a rather bold denial. I wonder if you have an argument to support it? And unless I'm misunderstanding, you even seem to be tilting against the cogito itself, in its original formulation by Descartes, in claiming that "[there] is no... Cartesian... knowledge of thinking.˘

I'd say your chances are better if you just attack my notion of uncomplemented categories, rather than trying to take on Descartes too!

JS: "Feeling is not an object of knowledge, but rather a way of knowing..."

I would say feeling's the only way of knowing, since unfelt "knowledge" (as in the case of an encyclopedia, computer, or one of today's robots) is no knowledge at all. And that includes things that Freud (no philosopher) lulled us into calling "unconscious knowledge": In a feeling creature like me, there's knowledge, namely, the things I know, and know that I know, and feel that I know, whilst I'm busy feeling that I know them. All the same things. These are not cartesian (certain) knowledge; they're just beliefs I have, some of which might even be true. But all the beliefs are felt (whilst they're being believed, which of course feels like something). 

(The same data, including verbal, propositional data, implemented inside a feelingless robot, would not be beliefs or knowledge, but merely data and states, along with the functional capacity that the data and states subserve; in other words, all just functing. Even in a feeling, hence true-believer/knower like me, those of my brain states that are not being felt are not beliefs but merely functional capacity plus the [mysterious] potential to be felt, hence to become beliefs while being felt.)

I also have know-how -- sensorimotor and even cognitive skills that I am able to perform without knowing how I manage to perform them. (Most of cognition and behavior is like that. You can do it, but you have no idea how: you're waiting for cognitive science to discover how you do it, and then tell you.) Some like to call that "unconscious" or "implicit knowledge," but I think it's more accurate to say that it's the functional basis of my know-how, of my performance capacity. (It's also the explanatory target of cognitive science in general, and the Turing Test in particular.)

Another way of thinking of the "explanatory gap" is to ask why feelings accompany any of this -- whether my explicit knowledge or the exercise of my implicit know-how: Why is it all not just functed? Until that question is answered, feeling cannot be said to be a "way of knowing," but merely a passive (and apparently superfluous) correlate of some forms of know-how. (Don't forget that, functionally speaking, explicit, declarative knowledge is just a form of know-how too -- let's call it "know-that" -- a form of know-how in which we happen to be able to verbalize and describe some of the underlying functional algorithms or dynamics.)

Harnad, S. (2007) From Knowing How To Knowing That: Acquiring Categories By Word of Mouth. Presented at Kaziemierz Naturalized Epistemology Workshop (KNEW), Kaziemierz, Poland, 2 September 2007. 

JS: "The problem you have been discussing is not a "hard problem"... but a simple problem... with your categorizing "feelings" as objects of knowledge, and not ways of knowing.

I'll settle for your solution to the simple problem of how and why feeling (rather than just functing) is a way of knowing -- as soon as you explain it...

JS: "This error underlies your... incoherent distinctions between Cartesian and non-Cartesian knowing and between functing and feeling."

You've remembered to call them incoherent but you've forgotten to explain how and why... 

JS: "It also explains the contradiction between your allegiance to physicalism and your insistance that feelings are somehow non-causal."

No contradiction at all (as I've just got done explaining to Arnold Trehub). I have not said feelings both are and are-not causal. I have said that we cannot explain how or why. That's called the explanatory gap.  

JS: "the term "physical" implies functional/causal congruity with respect to predictive models, and... this is a property which you deny feelings..."

I am denying nothing except what one can only affirm if one can explain how and why (and one hasn't).  

JS: "...your argument... is motivated by the existence of feelings [but] if feelings cannot causally influence behavior, how could they motivate it?

Did I say anything about motivation? (What is motivation, anyway, apart from yet another set of feelings correlated with yet another set of functions?)

But, to answer your question: feelings can correlate with behavior if the feelings and behavior are caused by the same functing. The trouble is, we don't know how or why the brain would bother to funct feelings as well as behavior, rather than just go ahead and funct the behavior, without any sentimentaliy...

JS: "Perhaps you wish to claim that one can feel without feeling some X, or that one could know that one was feeling without knowing that one was feeling some X..."

No I don't wish to claim that, since it's not true. And why would I wish or need it to be true? (Please, before you pounce on "wish" or "need" as selt-contradicting, read again what I said above about correlates and common causes above.)

JS: "...the only support you have provided is... that feeling could be separated from feeling some X and... that [to] den[y] this... is... [to] beg... the question.  These tactics are no more persuasive than the theistic arguments they resemble..."

I think you have not understood the argument. I said that from feeling A, feeling B and feeling Z, we could abstract the invariant feeling X (where X is something, anything). And that was perfectly ordinary categorization (except that "feeling" is uncomplemented.)

And what I said was question-begging was assigning a causal role to feeling without explaining how and why.

(Theistic??? I have inferred (by abstracting the common invariant across many postings) that NA has some sort of thing about "analytic philosophers." Do you perhaps have some sort of bugaboo too -- with "theists"?)

-- SH