Abstract
The Nagel inspired “something-it-is-like” (SIL) conception of conscious experience remains a dominant approach in philosophy. In this paper I criticize a prevalent philosophical construal of SIL consciousness, one that understands SIL as a property of mental states rather than entities as a whole. I argue against thinking of SIL as a property of states, showing how such a view is in fact prevalent, under-warranted, and philosophically pernicious in that it often leads to an implausible reduction of conscious experience to qualia. I then develop a holistic conception of SIL for entities (not states) and argue that it has at least equal pre-empirical warrant, is more conservative philosophically in that it decides less from the a priori “armchair,” and enjoys a fruitful two-way relationship with empirical work.
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Notes
Key components of Nagel’s seminal paper and its concerns and its framing of the problem are present very clearly in a largely unacknowledged paper almost 25 years older by Farrell (1950), entitled “Experience.” Farrell even asks what it would be like to be or to hear like a bat (p. 183). And roughly three years prior to Nagel, Timothy Sprigge (Sprigge and Montefiore 1971, Sec. VIII) writes that if an entity is conscious, “then being that organism will have a certain definite complex quality at every waking moment ...” (p. 168, italics in the original).
In order to distinguish conscious states from conscious entities, one variously finds alternate terms for “entity,” for example, “creature” (as in creature consciousness) or “subject” (as in the experiential subject). I will use “entity” and “entity consciousness.”
As Nagel made clear, “something it is like” must be understood in the sense of something it is like to be the entity for the entity itself, thus ruling out cases like “there is something it is like for Nixon to be dead,” which of course there is, but there is nothing it like for Nixon to be dead for Nixon himself, thus it is (presently) false that there is something it is like to be Nixon in the SIL sense.
It seems that it is in fact the uninitiated who find SIL most illuminating in pinning down what philosophers are getting at with the problem of subjective experience: when introducing this material philosophers almost always use the “what is is like” locution to pick out the qualitative aspect of a pain or seeing red, as Kriegel himself does (2009, Ch. 1, Sec. 1 and Ch. 2, Sec. 3). What is more, there is preliminary experimental reason to think that non-philosophers employ something like a SIL concept in attributing experience (Peressini 2014). Kriegel’s second and primary consideration, that SIL is of no help because disputants disagree as to which states have SIL, is not telling in this context either, since I will be focusing on its application to entities not states. And I could not agree more: an attempt to characterize definitively which states have SIL is an exercise in “armchair philosophy” futility, and this is precisely what I seek to avoid here.
Of course in the end Kriegel’s rigidified definite description and Nagel’s SIL are quite likely to be co-extensive. However, for the purpose here of pre-theoretically picking out the phenomenon under investigation, SIL is more helpful, if not inevitable, and also without cost in this context, since the question of precisely which states have SIL is not at issue. A kind of compromise might be to understand the problem of subjective experience using the rigidified definite description “whatever it is that allows some physical systems to have SIL.”
The question of what the “minimal entity” is with SIL naturally arises—presumably losing one’s arm would not eliminate SIL for the person. But would parts of a person’s brain themselves have SIL, distinct from the person’s SIL? Quite possibility, but this would seem to be an empirical question; see Tononi (2008).
As an historical note, an argument for this explanatory gap appears much earlier in the neurophysiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond’s 1872 public lecture in Leipzig entitled “Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens” (“On the Limits of Our Knowledge of Nature”). See Finkelstein (2013, Ch. 12, esp. pp. 213–14) for details. Thanks to a reviewer for pointing this out.
This should be taken to be equivalent to explaining why for an entity there is experience at all, not necessarily why the entity’s experience is X as opposed to Y.
There is also a natural way of reading Nagel (1974) as ultimately endorsing roughly this kind of gap.
One might object, saying that in terms of investigation, working on questions like SG’s is legitimate and actually happens even before PG has been answered and therefore shows that they are as primary as PG. But this is a best a methodological primacy, not a conceptual one. One might similarly point out that one has more clarity and certainty about whether an entity has experience at all than about of what the entity’s particular experience consists. But again this observation, while plausible, is not germane to the conceptual priority that is the target here. McClelland (2017) very helpfully carves the explanatory terrain up in much the same way, defending at length the separability of the “consciousness question” and the “character question” and the possibility of one being “hard” and the other “easy.” My point of departure from McClelland concerns his apparent willingness to go along with what I call “qualia reductionism” (Sect. 3.1 below), namely that the consciousness (SIL) of the entity can be thought of as nothing more than its having states with (qualitative) character; see McClelland (2017, esp. Sec. 3.1, paragraph 2).
As Jered Janes rightly points out, one might well question whether the above is a realistic description of what one actually experiences in a moment—that perhaps it is too rich and complex to be consciously experienced in a moment. Indeed it seems an open question (ultimately decidable only with empirical detail) as to what constitutes a conscious “moment” in terms of its the temporal expanse and depth of SIL detail. While it is clear that “individual” aspects of SIL are never experienced in isolation (e.g., having a red quale), still one may “experience” an aspect as more or less isolated or clear or focussed depending on whether one is attending to or reflecting on the particular aspect. This rough idea is captured in the phenomenological tradition’s distinction between pre-reflective/natural/normal experience and reflective/theoretical/philosophical experience. The precise expanse of a conscious “moment” seems to depend on the level and kind of focus of attention at play and also upon global and background features of consciousness (e.g., level of agitation or being fully awake). Such considerations raise many important questions—ones I will not take a stand on here—including whether reflecting on (or judgments about) an aspect of experience intrinsically involves the original phenomenality associated with that aspect of experience, merely a derivative (representational) version of the original phenomenality, or no version of it at all (Bayne and Montague 2011). Perhaps some of the detail that we can extract from a moment of consciousness is only present in the moment latently, or upon reflection. So in this sense, depending on how we construe “a moment” and the liminal boundary conditions, it may well be that we are not always aware at that moment of all of the aspects of our SIL at that moment. I certainly would not want to rule on that pre-empirically. For purposes here, I need only an example of a “moment” of SIL that has enough to it to illustrate its complex relational and structural aspects in addition to its qualitative.
While this of course (as per Kriegel’s point above) is contentious, nothing in what I will say depends on whether or not there are (cognitive) states that lack qualitative aspects.
The occurrent mental “states” that are part of my SIL at the moment can no doubt be overlaid with all sorts of dispositional states like beliefs, desires, fears, etc., some of which may be themselves part of my SIL, either immediately or via an occurrent thought with them as its object.
In addition to these structural and relational features of SIL, there may be further non-qualitative aspects, e.g., semantic or intentional. It is sufficient for purposes here, however, to focus on the less contentious ones listed above.
Of course, Wittgenstein (1953, §53) and representationalists who endorse the transparency of perceptual experience would deny this.
An advocate of Kriegel’s approach might suggest that the structural and relational aspects of SIL are built into the s-character of a state. Again, this will come up below, but the structural features of experience as I develop them go well beyond the “for-me” character. I will argue further that such state-based properties cannot adequately capture the complex and holistic (deeply relational) nature of SIL in a way similar to how a study of the properties of a neuron cannot capture the meso- and macro-level properties of ensembles of neurons.
As an anonymous reviewer points out, an organism might be understood as a “state of matter,” that is as a relational property of a set of physical components and in this sense, SIL, even understood as a property of organisms, would also be a property of a “state of matter.” I will assume here that the “state of matter” that is an organism can be distinguished (ontologically, teleologically, or otherwise) from the component states that compose it.
Note that it is a philosophical analysis I am discussing here and it is to be distinguished from the empirical research program, which might well be able to accomplish such a reduction.
The “appropriate” sense in this context is (at least) that the SIL of the state (at least in part) accounts for (e.g., explanatorily, causally, determinatively) the SIL of the entity.
One vein of such evidence comes from “top-down” influences on perception, of which the work of classical Gestalt psychologists are an early potential example (Wertheimer 1938). More contemporary studies have stressed that in addition to the sensory context, the nature of visual experience depends on a “behavioral” context as well, which includes “attention, expectation, perceptual task, and hypothesis testing” (Gilbert and Sigman 2007, p. 686). Consider also the bouba/kiki effect (Ramachandran and Hubbard 2001), which reveals the relatedness of the subjective experience of visual (objects) and sounds. The relationship between fear and perception is another such case on which there is clear evidence that the phenomenal appearance of experience may be a function of emotions like fear (Vasey et al. 2012; Witt and Sugovic 2013). Our identification and processing of emotion in faces has been shown to have perceptual “aftereffects” in the processing of emotion in voices (Pye and Bestelmeyer 2015). Finally, in pain studies that have actually targeted the subjective experience of pain (Coghill et al. 2003; Nielsen et al. 2009), results have suggested that the bulk of individual differences in the subjective experience of pain are likely due to cognitive factors like expectations about pain in concert with the subject’s emotional state at the time pain is experienced.
Note too the difference between a property being a function of a wider swath and being a property of a wider swath. My personality is a function of my upbringing, but it is still a property of me, not my upbringing. The dependence of aspects of SIL not only on other aspects (at the same level) but also on sub-experiential and on global properties is a more pervasive dependence than can be countenanced by understanding such an aspect of SIL as a property of single mental state but a function of a wider swath. As I will argue below, such pervasive and complex dependence is better understood as a property of the wider swath as opposed to merely a function of it.
It should be noted that this holistic dependence (or its possibility) does not entail that it is impossible for a seeing red aspect of experience to occur across a range of total experiences. One needs only that the various total states having a red aspect of the relevant kind enjoy similarity relationships in various ways, and then this same red aspect of experience can be associated with a similarity class of the various total states. Thus two distinct total states could embody the same red experience (because they belong to the same “seeing red” similarity class), despite the red experience’s depending on the total state and the total state (almost) never being identical across time. I owe thanks to an anonymous reviewer for help with this point.
Here Bayne understands entity consciousness as being a determinable that takes two kinds of determinates: background conscious states and specific conscious states” (p. 8).
Bayne’s (2010, pp. 7–8) later understanding of entity consciousness as having two kinds of determinates (background and specific conscious states) does come closer to accommodating the point I am making here. He conceives of the background state (normal wakefulness, dreaming, hypnotized, etc.)“as best thought of as regions in a complex state-space, the parameters of which determine both the selection and functional roles of the subject’s specific conscious states (or ‘contents’)” (p. 7). This seems quite right as far as it goes—it nicely captures how “specific conscious states” are deeply relational (dependent upon the background state) for their “content.” But again, I am arguing that this construal is not relational enough: aspects of our SIL (its “states”) are not just dependent upon a (single) background state like wakefulness, but rather upon many, many other aspects (“states” both background and specific) and other subpersonal and experiential states. One might object to this, arguing that while one’s SIL may be constitutively dependent on (e.g.) various modes of (sensory) experience, SIL seems only causally dependent on subpersonal states. And while this may or may not be clearly the case (i.e., SIL, if an “emergent” phenomenon, may well cut across this distinction), this distinction is less relevant to the issue of SIL’s holism than it is to the unity of SIL. This is because holism questions, which in the sense here are especially concerned with decomposability, may well be constrained by causal dependencies. Bayne, of course, is more focussed on the unity question; his examples seem fine for that purpose.
As suggested by both this comparison and Bayne’s astute description of entity (creature) SIL consciousness as involving “regions in a complex state-space,” SIL consciousness might well be best thought of along the lines of complex dynamical systems theory (Varela 1995; Freeman 2000; Thompson et al. 2005; Silberstein and Chemero 2012; Olivares et al. 2015). One of the more compelling aspects of such approaches is how complex dynamical systems theory captures dynamical features of both the third person brain/body system and first-person phenomenological experience. On this view there is a rich, complex, dynamical structure to one’s SIL: it is not merely a heap-like assemblage of qualia, nor is it a “space” that neatly decomposes exhaustively and exclusively into subspaces (perceptual, cognitive, conative, affective, etc.) that in turn further decompose into states neatly tagged with their qualitative property(ies). Nor of course, is it plausible at our current juncture even to think of SIL as neatly divided between qualitative aspects and structural or relational ones, since it seems very unlikely that the deep interconnections between “levels” (micro, meso, macro, among others) of organization of the brain and its dynamical nature afford any such “neat” characterizations of SIL, even at the subjective, first-person, phenomenological level. On this approach, any “carving up” of SIL must be done in a conversation with empirical theory so that the conceptual and empirical work reciprocally inform and revise each other. And so any “hard” metaphysical problems that depend on a priori ways of “carving up” of SIL space (e.g., psychological states with second order qualitative properties) cannot be taken as anything more than a temporary scientific lacuna, a philosophical non-problem, or some combination of both.
In particular, this second claim cries out for clarification as to why one should think SIL requires discrete mental states in all experiencers; whether we really have such discrete states ourselves; why, even if we do have precisely the states of folk psychology, the property of “what it is like to be” neatly breaks along just these lines; why SIL should be a property of the mental state itself as opposed to a property of the “system”; what justifies the reductive or decomposable assumptions it depends on; what sort of truth is it—metaphysical? Empirical?
Such an entity might even have at least some of the structural features of a SIL conscious experiencer (unity, aspects/parts, temporal progression, etc.) and perhaps even perceptual, affective, and conative states and yet fail to have qualitative aspects at all.
Alternatively, Koksvik (2014, p. 110) understands experiential holism modally as asserting that “local conscious experiences would not be conscious if they were not components of a global experience.” See Lee (2014) for discussion of further kinds of holism and atomism regarding experience. Also, I take it that whether “seeing red” can in the end be fully attributed to a subsystem, like visual system, is an empirical question. Again my case here is for resisting the a priori carving of the explanandum into the standard mental states with second-order phenomenal properties.
For a detailed account of a kind of irreducibility (or emergence) as non-aggregativity see Wimsatt (2007, Ch. 12).
As a reviewer points out, a possible objection to this might be to argue that our global conscious state does have definite color experience components, auditory components, etc. But notice that the (putative) fact that our global SIL state has modal aspects (e.g., auditory, visual, etc), each with perhaps its own (apparently) distinctive contributions to the global SIL does not entail that SIL experience is actually comprised of these distinct SIL components—any such SIL aspect cannot be known (pre-empirically) to belong (as a property) to the particular mode alone—it may well be a property of multiple modes and/or more global aspects like emotions, expectations, cognitions, etc.
As I argued above, this view about the analytic decomposability of entity SIL in terms of state SIL often leads rather directly to a more orthodox form of reductionism, namely, the reduction of entity SIL to qualia when one adds the additional assumption that SIL for a state is simply its qualitative properties.
I am happy here to understand “intrinsic” in the weaker, relative sense of some thinkers in the qualia discussion in which something need only be non-relational at the particular level under discussion to be intrinsic. In this context, the psychological and other personality characteristics of the individual actors in the play would be intrinsic relative to the level of the play itself.
Recall that not only is the ultimate physical/metaphysical status of “qualitative aspects” being left open and sensitive to scientific progress, but so too is the notion of SIL itself, which on this account may turn out to refer to something radically different from what we might guess from our pre-theoretical acquaintance with it.
Again, the point of the mass vs. fitness comparison is that the mass of a composite body is simply the sum of the masses of it components, but the fitness of an organism is decidedly different in that (1) the fitness of an organism is in all ways prior to the fitness of any of its components (traits), and (2) the fitness of an organism cannot be analytically (or otherwise, e.g., methodologically) decomposed into or reduced to the fitness of it components (traits) because of the deeply (and widely) relational nature of fitness.
A qualia advocate might attempt to mitigate this advantage by moving away from traditional philosophical qualia as private, (effectively) ineffable, and (relatively) intrinsic, but to do so is to move to that extent toward holistic qualitative aspects, and while it is an interesting question as to precisely at what point one’s conception ceases to be “qualia” and becomes “qualitative aspect,” it is sufficient for the purposes here that there be clear examples at both ends.
This conception of p-qualia is not unlike Dennett’s (1988) replacement for the m-qualia he attempted to “quine.” Dennett proposes PIP (phenomenal information property) detectors, following Peter Bieri. His provocative suggestion meshes rather well with a recent prominent scientific account of consciousness and qualia, the integrated information account (Tononi 2008); see Peressini (2013) for philosophical discussion.
The qualitative aspect of experience understood as part of SIL holism and along the lines of p-qualia may or may not end up being representational. It could be that the qualitative aspects of SIL supervene on integrated information (Tononi 2008) in which case it will be an essential part of a representational aspect of experience, though not representational itself, which fits with this holism, since accordingly it is not proper parts (states) of SIL experience that represent, but rather that experience as a whole has representational aspects.
That is, folk mental states may well not turn out to be the “joints” at which a scientific account of experience “carves things.” See Bayne (2010, Ch. 10) for compelling reasons to think that empirical considerations and the unity of consciousness strongly favor such holistic or “quilted” accounts.
While he does explore possibilities, Kriegel (2009, Ch. 2, Sec. 3) officially leaves open the precise relationship between the s- and q-character, allowing (perhaps) for aspects of it to have empirical resolution. Nonetheless, Kriegel does in an appendix offer a standard (a priori) philosophical argument that SIL cannot merely be q-character in a way that separates it from s-character. And further, his framing and carving of the problem into s- and q-characters that are “psychologically real” and “conceptually distinct components of phenomenal consciousness” (p. 52) does not seem based in or open to revision via empirical results.
And again, if the dynamical systems approach to the brain/body system turns out to be correct, then the deep interconnections between dynamical “levels” (micro, meso, macro, etc.) of organization of the brain will undercut any such “neat” philosophical characterizations of SIL—even at the subjective, first-person, phenomenological level, that is, it will if the philosophical characterization takes empirical theory to be in any germane to such discussions.
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Acknowledgements
My thanks go out to the anonymous reviewers for this journal—the paper is much improved because of their comments. A much earlier version of this paper was presented at the Eastern APA Meeting 2012; I am grateful for the comments and suggestions I received from participants there. Also, key parts of this work were done on sabbatical in Berlin 2012–2013; I thank Michael Pauen and the Berlin School of Mind and Brain for support and comments. Finally, I thank members of my graduate seminar at Marquette University (Spring, 2014), Jered Janes, my RA, Clark Wolf, and Jodi Melamed for helpful comments and other assistance.
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Peressini, A.F. There is nothing it is like to see red: holism and subjective experience. Synthese 195, 4637–4666 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1425-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1425-9