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