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