Qualia, First-Person Experience, and the Missing Black Hole

Defenders of reductionism have a tendency to make the following argument, to which I referred in my last post: Science has made all sorts of progress that was previously thought impossible. We therefore have good historical grounds for thinking that, with further progress, science will eventually resolve the remaining problems. At the very least, we have solid grounds for being skeptical about any a priori arguments to the effect that there is some domain of human experience that remains inexplicable from the standpoint of the sciences. There are two candidates commonly presented for such irreducibility: the raw-feels, or qualia, in our experience, and normativity. (In a later post I will discuss a third candidate, introduced by hermeneutics, which is in principle clearly irreducible, i.e., the horizon within which any scientific enterprise takes place.) Both candidates are sometimes grouped under the heading of first-personal experience, which is taken to be in principle irreducible. I want to question this grouping.

One common response to this line of thought is concisely stated by Richard, over at Philosophy, Etc, who argues that we cannot argue for the likelihood of successful reductionism on the basis of past scientific success because, “there are principled reasons to think these cases different. All those examples [that the reductionists] point to are instances of third-personal empirical phenomena. I grant that science is supreme in that domain. But, to turn the tables, it's never had any success outside of it. So there's no general reason to think that normativity or first-personal subjective experience are susceptible to purely scientific explanation.” (Similar arguments abound: Ricoeur points to something very much like it in the first conversation of What Makes Us Think? where he appeals to the first-personal lived body experience as irreducible to a third-personal one.) I absolutely grant that there is no reason to think that scientific cognition can fully grasp normativity. In fact, I seriously doubt that it can, since normativity governs the operation of scientific research. I am not sure the same goes for phenomenal properties.

It strikes me that one reason qualia are so mysterious and so dubious is precisely that they are not subject to any normative constraints whatsoever. Whether my mental state is one of jealousy or envy, fantasy or belief, malice or gratitude, is a question that might involve some normative factors. But I am tempted to think that qualia are entirely dissociated from such considerations. That I have a raw feel of some sort just tells me that I am having some sort of mental experience; what that experience is, on the other hand, will be determined by all sorts of other considerations, including normative ones. So I have trouble with questions such as “what is it like to have a belief,” or “what is it like to be outraged,” insofar as they are looking for a phenomenal description of these mental states. My problem is that I am not at all sure that there is anything “it is like” to be in such mental states. What there is, rather, is some sort of awareness that, within a normative framework of my psyche as a whole, becomes a mental state of a particular sort. But what makes that mental state a state of a certain sort, in turn, is normative.

So what do we do about something like the inverted spectrum argument, which would insist that there is also a first-personal raw feel that in turn is incorporated into a normative framework? For example, there is something it is like to see red, and it is only when I have that experience that I know that I am having an experience that falls under the concept of red experience. But Michael might, whenever he sees a fire hydrant, have a very different qualia—a qualia like the one I have whenever I see grass. And it is possible that, even when our brains are functioning in roughly similar ways, and we have roughly similar normative frameworks, my red and green experiences are completely reversed for him. The conceivability of such a scenario is supposed to show that something—qualia—is missing from whatever account of the world we have, even once normative factors are incorporated into the picture. But is it?

Here is what is suggested: you could have all the physical and normative conditions necessary for my seeing red, apply them to Michael, and, while he would be perceiving the same wavelength and processing it in the same way, something would be different. Does this make sense? Or does it make exactly the same sense as the following: We know all the necessary and sufficient conditions for creating a black hole. We reproduce these conditions. But it is conceivable that, although we now have a mass sucking up all forms of energy around it, behaving exactly like a black hole, yet we do not really have a black hole. I would submit that the two cases are virtually identical, and the second—the black hole case—makes no sense; nothing is missing, we have a black hole, not something identical to a black hole. The first seems to make sense, however. What has gone wrong? Could it be that the first case seems to make sense not because there is something over and above the physical and normative properties, but simply because we are still overly wedded to a view of the soul as a substance of an entirely heterogeneous kind?

What is the role of the first-person here? Well, I don’t think normativity is first personal: the entire point of norms is that they must apply intersubjectively. What about the supposed qualia? The first-personal aspect is supposed to be this: whatever third-personal knowledge we have about seeing red or feeling pain, there is a first-personal aspect we are missing. Is this irreducible? The idea is that when we know all the conditions for seeing red, we still don’t have the experience of seeing red. Similarly, if we know all the conditions for a black hole, we still don’t have the black hole. When we reproduce those conditions, on the other hand, we will have a black hole, and it is just odd to say that something—e.g., a real black hole—is still missing. Similarly, when we reproduce all the conditions for seeing red, we should be hard pressed to say that something is still missing from seeing red—because if we say that something is still missing, what we are saying is just that we haven’t produced all the conditions. What is inherently first-personal is just the result of reproducing all the conditions, just as the black hole is the result of reproducing all the conditions necessary for the existence of a black hole.

When we have all the natural (and normative) pieces needed for first-personal experience, we have first-personal experience. When we have all the natural pieces needed for a black hole, we have a black hole. The objection is: No, no! That’s just where you’re missing the point! When we have all the pieces needed for a black hole, we just have a black hole. But when we have all the pieces needed for first-personal experience, the experience is something superimposed on the pieces. What can this mean, I wonder?

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Joining the Herd by Bleating About Zombies

The philosophy blogosphere has been abuzz with zombie talk recently (Siris helpfully compiles some of the recent discussions here; and here are some I especially like), so I’ve finally decided to conform and throw a couple of thoughts out there, though I can’t promise they’ll be coherent. For those who don’t know, zombies are imaginary beings exactly like us in every physical respect, but lacking our phenomenal consciousness. And the zombie argument is supposed to go from the alleged conceivability of such beings to evidence that the phenomenal cannot be reduced to the physical. My own stance is roughly that zombie thought experiments are silly, as well as seriously problematic. They are problematic, on my view, not simply because (like too many thought experiments) they are set up to pump our intuitions about imaginary cases about which we don’t really have clear intuitions, but also because, by giving the illusion of clarity, they are designed to convince us that we really do have intuitions, reliable ones, about things we in principle cannot have reliable intuitions about. So here are a couple of thoughts.

I. Zombie arguments seem to me to presume that we have intuitions about what counts as physical. Atoms, apparently, do. The experience of redness or pain, on the other hand, does not. But what is the physical? Presumably, the physical domain is just the domain of that which can be studied by the physical sciences. If we grant that, however, then it turns out that our intuitions about what counts as physical are entirely dependent on which sciences we consider physical sciences, and what our understanding is of what those sciences do. In other words, the intuition that the domain of the physical cannot accommodate phenomenal properties seems to rest on the idea that the physical world is composed of little particles bouncing around in accordance with laws. Since physics has moved a bit beyond Newton, however, I wonder whether those intuitions really make sense.

Importantly: the counter-intuitiveness of quantum mechanics is frequently mentioned. At the very very micro level, physical entities don’t behave the way we would expect them to. So we know that our intuitions about how physical things behave are just wrong, according to what the physical sciences tell us. And it isn’t like there are no unresolved questions. Given this, it isn’t clear that we can or should trust any intuitions about whether or not the phenomenal is or is not reducible to the physical, because we cannot trust our intuitions about the physical. And this thought seems to me to undermine a basic presupposition of the zombie argument: that zombies are conceivable in some more robust way than square circles. Quite possibly, zombies seem conceivable to us just because we have no idea what it is we are conceiving. And the zombie argument, by pushing the possibility of this conceivability, makes its point by making us further confused about what it is we are conceiving.

II. Even if we do grant that zombies are possible—that the physical as we now understand it (again, assuming that we do understand it)—does not include phenomenal properties, this is hardly an argument against reductionism as such. That is: what it gives us is an argument that phenomenal properties (if they exist) are irreducible to the current subject matter of the physical sciences. But this point can just as easily be turned around. The point of the physical sciences is to provide confirmable theories with predictive power that apply to whatever sorts of things we encounter in reality. If our current physical theories cannot do this for phenomenal properties, that can only be taken to show that our current physical theories are still a far way off from giving us absolute knowledge. But we already know that, and it doesn’t give us grounds for a priori arguments that they cannot go beyond their present boundaries.

I once heard Chomsky make a remark that went something like this: At the end of the 19th century, scientists were convinced that chemistry was entirely irreducible to physics. Today, it is more or less common sense that this view is false, because a paradigm shift in the physical sciences made the move from physics to chemistry possible. Why, then, should we think that the same cannot be done for phenomenal properties and physics? There is one answer, which has to do with distinguishing between the third-personal methods of science and the first-personal features of qualia. I will save discussion of that thought for my next post.

III. As I understand it, the phenomenal realist’s claim is that there are two sets of laws in our world. First, there are laws that govern the behavior of physical entities. Second, there are laws that govern the relation of physical and phenomenal entities. The zombie world looks the same as ours from the outside because the first set of laws is the same there. But they don’t have the second set of laws. Implied is a metaphysical view according to which the universe is composed of some substances, like elementary particles, together with a bunch of natural laws. But I am not sure that is right. Speaking of substances and laws implies that both are contingent. One might have the exact same laws, but completely different substances. Alternatively, one could have exactly the same substances but different laws. This may be useful as a shorthand way of speaking about reality, but I doubt it makes much sense. Instead, it seems more likely that substances and laws are co-constitutive. Here is what I mean:

How do we know anything about fundamental particles? Well, we know what they are like because of the effects they have on other things: other particles, our instruments, and our brains. And it is not clear that there is anything else to these particles than their effects, or dispositions to bring about certain effects, with a marked regularity. My point is not the idealist one, that since we can only know anything about reality through our perception of it, there is nothing to reality aside from our perceptions. Rather, the point is that we have no grounds for attributing any properties to substances other than causal ones, and these causal properties are nomological. We know what a particle is like because of the law-like effects it produces, and we have no warrant to say anything about it other than that it produces such effects. (That the laws are sometimes probabilistic ones does not change this picture.) And the reverse is true as well. Our knowledge of natural laws depends on the actions of particles (or macro-phenomena composed of particles). Again, I am not trying to argue that laws are nothing apart from the behavior of substances. My point is that we have no warrant to speak of laws as literally something apart from substance. From the standpoint of the sciences, it seems to me, laws just are the formulae according to which substances behave, whereas substances just are what behaves in accordance with laws.

And this is why it seems strange to me to think that the very same substances could exist in two universes with radically different sets of laws. If qualia stand in nomological relations to matter, we have three options. (1) Qualia are different substances, and the second set of laws is missing from zombie world because there is nothing for physical substances to stand in relation to. (2) Something about the physical entities in zombie world really is different, since the entities don’t have the same effects. (3) There are no nomological relations between physical substance and qualia. I doubt anyone would accept the third option these days; the parallel clock argument has had its day. The first option is also not very tempting—once we start talking about two heterogeneous substances, we run into all sorts of problems about how nomological relations between them could be possible at all. So that leaves option two: zombie world is not composed of the same physical substances as our world. And this, of course, is what almost everyone (aside from the few hardcore zombie-philes) has been saying.

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