WHAT CONSCIOUS STATES ARE LIKE

Transcription

1 WHAT CONSCIOUS STATES ARE LIKE Thomas Nagel: Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable [F]undamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism something it is like for the organism. We may call this the subjective character of experience. ( What is it Like to be a Bat?, p. 166) Joseph Levine: [W]hat is at issue is the ability to explain qualitative character itself; why it is like what it is like to see red or feel pain. ( The Explanatory Gap, p. 128) David Chalmers: We can say that a being is conscious if there is something it is like to be that being. Similarly, a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that mental state. To put it another way, we can say that a mental state is conscious if it has a qualitative feel an associated quality of experience. These qualitative feels are also known as phenomenal qualities, or qualia for short. The problem of explaining these phenomenal qualities is just the problem of explaining consciousness. This is the really hard part of the mind-body problem. (The Conscious Mind, p. 4)

2 JARGON If there is something it is like to be a creature, then there is something it is like for the creature to have certain of its mental states. Call these states experiences. The literature also calls them, equivalently, experiential, phenomenal or qualitative. Having what it is like features is one way for a state to be conscious what we might call experientially or phenomenally or qualitatively conscious. In that sense, the phrase conscious experience is redundant, and the phrase experientially unconscious simply means nonexperiential. For any particular experience, there is not merely something it is like to have the experience but some particular thing or things it is like. We sometimes try to describe these specific features, for example, by saying that an experienced pain is sharp or throbbing to some degree, or that an experienced visual image is blurry or moving. There is little uniformity in the philosophical terminology; these specific features are, more or less interchangeably, described as phenomenal or qualitative, or occasionally called sensational qualities or raw feels, and most frequently called qualia. I will tend to use the first and last of these terms, speaking of the phenomenal qualia of experiences.

3 THE ONLY NONCONTROVERSIAL EXPERIENCERS Human: vs. nonbiological beings such as laptops, robots, deities, and ghosts, regardless of their intelligence or status as persons, and vs. nonhuman biological beings such as plants, animals, and extraterrestrial life, regardless of their outward behavior. Old-enough: vs. human beings far from adulthood, such as fetuses, infants, and small children. Minimally-healthy: vs. human beings of age but under extreme medical duress, such as comas, brain trauma, or anesthetic drugs, and vs. medically healthy human beings whose minds have undergone extremely limited developmental paths, such as people extremely mentally impaired or people raised by wolves. Incarnate: vs. apparently nonactual beings culled from philosophical thought experiments, such as alleged zombies, group minds, and homunculi or allegedly sentient subsystems within minds. ExperiencerS Or Homies, for short.

4 HOMIE STATES TOO CONTROVERSIAL TO START WITH Intuitively nonmental states, including both outer states such as one s location and hair color, and internal states that contribute to behavior, such as the conditions of one s digestive system, one s atomic particles, and one s brain chemicals Aspects of our minds that are merely dispositional and nonrepresentational, such as forgetfulness, cleverness, and skills. Sensory-deprivation states such as those during sleep (including dreams and sleepwalking and sleeptalking), hypnosis, or deep meditation. Individual states that persist through sleep, even if they also manifest themselves during wakefulness, such as beliefs (or, interchangeably, judgments), desires, and other propositional attitudes. Emotions such as fear and hope are in the category of attitudes that persist during sleep, and moods such as depression and happiness are in the category of nonrepresentational dispositions. States that are deeply hidden from introspection, such as Freud s repressed unconscious, blind sight states, and retinal maps in the early stages of vision. Introspectible states that aren t clearly introspected, such as the fuzzy boundaries at the edges of our visual fields, the faint pressures around our bodies a moment before we attend to them, and fleeting, subliminal perceptions.

5 THE QUALITATIVE QUARTET The least controversial cases of experiences, when introspected by human, old-enough, minimally-healthy, incarnate experiencers: (i) experiences in perception (a) normal cases tastings, seeings of environmental objects (b) degraded cases afterimages, ringing-in-the-ears (ii) experiences in bodily sensation (a) diffuse cases warmth, fatigue (b) pointlike cases pains, tickles, itches (iii) experiences in imagining (a) normal cases of one s own actions or perceptions (b) upgraded cases nonlucid hallucinations (iv) experiences in thought (a) verbal cases talking to oneself, reading with the mind s eye (b) nonverbal cases predicting with mental scale models What do all these states (the Qualitative Quartet ) have distinctively in common that might explain their being (least controversially) phenomenally conscious? Introspectibility? No some states are introspectible but not themselves (least controversially) phenomenally conscious: (v) introspectible dispositions moods, character traits, mental skills (vi) introspectible attitudes beliefs, desires Instead, these are accompanied by (least controversially) phenomenally conscious Quartet states.