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Function and feeling machines: a defense of the philosophical conception of subjective experience

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Abstract

Philosophers of mind typically group experiential states together and distinguish these from intentional states on the basis of their purportedly obvious phenomenal character. Sytsma and Machery (Phil Stud 151(2): 299–327, 2010) challenge this dichotomy by presenting evidence that non-philosophers do not classify subjective experiences relative to a state’s phenomenological character, but rather by its valence. However we argue that S&M’s results do not speak to folk beliefs about the nature of experiential states, but rather to folk beliefs about the entity to which those experiential states are attributed. In two experiments, we demonstrate that ordinary attributions of subjective experiences (of smell and felt emotions) to a simple robot are not sensitive to valence, but instead respond to functional assumptions about the entity to which the states are (or are not) attributed.

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Notes

  1. Vignettes used in S&M’s experiments, as well as in our own studies appear in the electronic supplementary materials.

  2. While there is some disagreement among professional philosophers about phenomenal consciousness, here we refer to the large consensus that thinks subjectively experienced mental states have phenomenal properties (as found in Nagel 1974; Searle 1994; Block 1995; Chalmers 1995).

  3. Both studies we report were run online using Amazon Mturk and Qualtrics. Because Huebner et al. (2010) found cross-cultural differences in mental state attribution in prior work; the country of origin for participants in both studies was restricted to the United States and native language to English.

  4. Post hoc testing reveals that distributions in these two groups differed significantly (Mann–Whitney U(40) = 94.0, Z = 3.342, p < 0.001).

  5. An interaction effect was detected for the factors Function and Object: F (2, 241) = 5.02, p < 0.01. Further descriptive statistics are available in the supplementary materials.

  6. This difference is much smaller for banana than for chemical between conditions, though this may be explained by the fact that bananas, unlike chemicals and vomit, seem to naturally fit into both fruit and biological categories.

  7. Though it does not bear on our hypothesis directly, we also detected an incredibly complicated three-way interaction between Function, Complexity, and Object, F (2, 241) = 4.67, p < 0.01. This result suggests that complexity did have some impact on participants’ attribution of smell to Jimmy, but that this impact of complexity depended on both the function and the type of object with which Jimmy interacted.

  8. Participants responded to the valence question on a seven-point scale, anchored with 1-very bad, 2-bad, 3-poor, 4-neither good nor bad, 5-fair, 6-good, 7-very good. Responses were then recoded into an “affect measure” relative to the neutral point on the scale (all responses of 4 = 0, 3/5 = 1, 2/6 = 2, and 1/7 = 3). According to the resulting affect measure, higher numbers meant a stronger valence judgment (of either positive or negative value). The strength of valence ratings were as follows: Banana (M = 1.62, SD = 0.913), Chemical (M = 0.92, SD = 1.04), and Vomit (M = 2.51, SD = 0.61). A one-way between subjects ANOVA was conducted, F (2, 550) = 70.93, p < 0.01, and post hoc comparisons using the Tukey HSD test indicated that the mean scores between each of these groups were significantly different (p < 0.01).

  9. We were not able to detect a correlation between affect (see above) and subjective experiences of smelling banana, chemical or vomit, r (251) = 0.066, p = 0.30.

  10. Means and standard deviations for Non-complex conditions: lifting (M = 3.13, SD = 2.20), friend (M = 3.91, SD = 2.10). For complex conditions: lifting (M = 3.96, SD = 2.00), friend (M = 4.73, SD = 1.80).

  11. A two-way between-subjects analysis of variance was conducted to evaluate the effect of function and complexity on participants’ attributions of guilt to Jimmy. We found a main effect for function, F (1,115) = 4.19, p < 0.05, and a main effect for complexity F (1, 115) = 4.80, p < 0.05.

  12. Participants responded to the valence question on the same seven-point scale as in Experiment 1 (see fn 7). They judged guilt to be moderately negatively valenced (M = 3.39, SD = 1.58, significantly less than the midpoint on the scale indicating negative valence, t (118) = −4.22, p < 0.01). Responses were then recoded into an “affect measure” relative to the neutral point on the scale (all responses of 4 = 0, 3/5 = 1, 2/6 = 2, and 1/7 = 3). According to the resulting affect measure, higher numbers meant a stronger valence judgment (of either positive or negative value). There was no correlation detected between either the positive or negative valence associated with guilt on the affect scale (M = 1.35, SD = 1.02) and their attribution of feeling guilt to Jimmy, r (118) = 0.09, p = 0.29.

  13. Mean valence rating for guilt in friend conditions (M = 3.34, SD = 1.58); mean guilt attribution rating in friend conditions (M = 4.32, SD = 2.01).

  14. Rosenthal (2011) suggests a different explanation for Sytsma and Machery’s findings, which he calls the equivocation hypothesis. On this view, philosophers and the folk have at their disposal both a detection reading and an experiential reading for sensory ascriptions. Philosophers are comfortable using the experiential reading and use it in all of S&M’s studies, whereas the folk tend to use the detection reading, opting for the experiential reading only when valence considerations push them to use it. See Sytsma and Machery (2010) for more discussion of this challenge.

  15. This explanation suggests that despite our attempts to control for the robot’s level of general complexity across our experiments, specifying functions may have also increased people’s assumptions about the complexity of the robot relative to those functions.

  16. Related arguments have been given in this emerging discussion of the differences between philosophers and non-philosophers (see Williamson 2007; Devitt 2011; Nagel, forthcoming).

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Acknowledgments

Our thanks to Richard Brown, Bryce Huebner, Joshua Knobe, Edouard Machery, Jesse Prinz, David Rosenthal, Hagop Sarkissian, Justin Sytsma, and Josh Weisberg, as well as audiences at the 2012 meetings of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology and The Online Consciousness Conference for detailed and helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

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  1. The City University of New York-Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave., New York, NY, 10016, USA

    Wesley Buckwalter

  2. Lawrence University, Appleton, WI, USA

    Mark Phelan

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  1. Wesley Buckwalter
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Correspondence to Wesley Buckwalter.

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Buckwalter, W., Phelan, M. Function and feeling machines: a defense of the philosophical conception of subjective experience. Philos Stud 166, 349–361 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0039-9

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