Comment by bondarchuk
3 years ago
I am increasingly of the opinion that the phrases "what it is like to be a bat", or "there is something it is like to be a bat", are simply a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old dualistic standpoint. Just because these sentences make sense in our everyday language, does not mean they are suitable for technical and rigorous philosophical discussions. For one, the "something" in the 2nd formulation (or simply the answer asked after by the 1st formulation) is most readily interpreted as an object, closing the door to any process-like interpretation of consciousness. Also, "being like something" is strictly a judgment made by a single subject regarding two experiences of that same subject, so it is not at all clear that this is a relation which can be validly posited to exist between two distinct subjects' experiences. I guess my point is I can easily imagine a complete physicalist explanation of consciousness which would still not lead to a valid answer of "what is it like to be a bat" due to quite obvious limitations of language or the plain invalidity of the question.
Edit: not to mention the reliance on a dummy pronoun: what is it like to be a bat - what is what like to be a bat?
Also, you'll notice in many subsequent discussions that refer back to this paper there's a strange reliance on repeating these exact formulations. If there really was some insight here it would be possible to phrase it in different ways.
>a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old dualistic standpoint.
These terms are getting at something central to consciousness, the fact that there is a conceptual duality between how we conceive of it from the first-person and how we conceive of it from an objective standpoint. We can't disavow this conceptual duality, a theorist offering an explanation of consciousness that doesn't capture this dual nature of the phenomenon will be rightly considered eliminating the explananda.
But a conceptual duality does not imply an ontological duality. In other words, the fact that we conceive of consciousness in these seemingly opposing ways does not imply two separate phenomena. The term dualism has become a shibboleth to be avoided in serious philosophy of mind, but this is a mistake. A satisfying explanation of consciousness must offer some phenomena that carries a resemblance to our personal datum as experiencers of sensations. This must then be related to the scientific story of how electrical signals are transformed into behavior. This just is the problem of consciousness. Anything less misses the point.
>For one, the "something" in the 2nd formulation [...] is most readily interpreted as an object, closing the door to any process-like interpretation of consciousness.
I agree that the language we use in describing consciousness is unfortunate and has done real damage to what we consider as promising avenues for investigation. We are cognitively biased towards conceptualizing the world in terms of "things" and so we expect our explanations to also be in terms of things. When consciousness isn't found in thing-ness we are tempted to posit a new kind of thing that carries the conscious properties. But we've been lead off course by our initial conceptualization. I'm in favor of seeing objects as processes rather than discrete units. Consciousness is likely in the active dynamics rather than any static property.
>I can easily imagine a complete physicalist explanation of consciousness which would still not lead to a valid answer of "what is it like to be a bat" due to quite obvious limitations of language or the plain invalidity of the question.
Yeah, we will never know "what its like" to experience the existence of another living creature. But this is just a limitation of physical descriptions. This isn't a demerit of physicalism or materialism as a methodology. This is no reason to turn to alternative methodologies that can only hope to offer pseudo-explanations of consciousness at best.
> A satisfying explanation of consciousness must offer some phenomena that carries a resemblance to our personal datum as experiencers of sensations.
What, in your opinion, would make for a satisfying explanation of consciousness? I think another nontrivial piece of the puzzle is that it's hard to even know what we are looking for. There are many philosophers who argue (convincingly IMHO) that it doesn't make sense to posit a hard problem of consciousness in the first place.
Yeah, its tough to know what a good explanation would even look like. There are so many ways for one thing to resemble another, it's hard to conceive of a new class of resemblance prior to being given an example of it. Resemblance can also depends on one's prior commitments. So its a very dynamic and context dependent property. I don't think there is much hope in identifying what a satisfying explanation of consciousness will look like prior to be presented with one.
That said, I can offer what I take to be a narrowing of the target of promising avenues of investigation. We need a new way to conceptualize existence outside of "thing-based" ontologies. A process ontology would be heading in the right direction. This will perhaps give us the tools to conceptualize a recurrent information-rich dynamical system as a thing in itself (rather than as a collection of individuals with some dynamical behavior). Then we can ask how distinctions are presented to the system on which its behavior and decision-making is determined. A represented distinction is predicated on it being like something or something else to the consumer of the representation such that states can be distinguished. We wouldn't necessarily subjectively resemble this system, but we may recognize our epistemic situation regarding being the target of represented distinctions so that we are confident there is something it is like to be that system.
>are simply a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old dualistic standpoint
Are you assuming that dualism is invalid? If so, why? There is something to the distinction between physical reality and subjective experience that so far no-one has managed to explain.
>I can easily imagine a complete physicalist explanation of consciousness which would still not lead to a valid answer of "what is it like to be a bat"
Then it would not be a complete physicalist explanation of consciousness. A complete physicalist explanation of consciousness, by definition, would have to account for subjective experience/qualia/whatever you want to call it.
I think one can salvage the distinction between physical reality and subjective experience without positing an abstract ("Cartesian") dualism. It just so happens that most experiences can be categorized as being either external or internal, so we are led to believe that every experience fits into one and only one bucket. But I think that there are plenty of experiences that are not so easily categorized (e.g. feelings).
Demanding that there must be a perfect partition (i.e. assuming dualism) is an additional requirement, but it's not obvious that it should be a good requirement for a sound philosophical theory. In fact I believe it not to be sound, and I believe many philosophical hard problems come from bending over backwards trying to impose this condition.
>Are you assuming that dualism is invalid?
I am only noting a reliance of Nagel's bat arguments on dualist assumptions. Those who reject dualism can then draw their own conclusions ;)
>Then it would not be a complete physicalist explanation of consciousness. A complete physicalist explanation of consciousness, by definition, would have to account for subjective experience/qualia/whatever you want to call it.
For sure a physicalist explanation must somehow deal with these things, but what I mean is that it could turn out that the question "what is it like to be a bat?" is simply incoherent. If a question is in principle unanswerable, self-contradictory or nonsensical, then we can't very well demand an explanation.
> phrases "what it is like to be a bat", or "there is something it is like to be a bat",
> are simply a linguistic sleight of hand masking a
> plain old dualistic standpoint
philosophers have differentiated these into three different questions
"What is it like to be?" has to do with the nature of consciousness.
"word games" has to do with any use of language, nothing to do with consciousness. You could make a word-game critique of any statement.
"dualism" comes in a number of forms, not clearly related to one another (physical body vs soul/spirit, earthly realm vs heaven; mind-body, consciousness vs quantum chemistry) but all having a similar problem. Any place there is posited a dualism, then what is the interaction between the two duals, how could one even perceive the other?
but declaring "there is no dualism", while eliminating that problem, does not eliminate the question as to why it was posited in the first place: why (or how) does it feel like anything to be conscious, feel pain, etc. Saying "that's what evolved" is just hand waving. What's the difference between being alive and dead? Do rocks have a little bit of consciousness?
My personal preference (lifelong atheist-science type) is that the "abstract" world is all that exists, there is no physical world. Everything we study in physics and chemistry we arrive at via abstract mathematical values, relationships and computation. I think that is the nature of the universe, and while it doesn't "solve" the consciousness problem, I feel like it moves the goalposts in the right direction.
>"word games" has to do with any use of language, nothing to do with consciousness.
I think philosophy of mind is especially prone to these issues because of how deeply the concept of "subjectivity" is embedded into language (not only at the level of semantics but also grammar). You can hardly say 2 words without pulling in a whole bunch of preconceived notions of what a subject is and how subjects relate to each other.
The paper is clearly asking what the difference in experience is between humans and bats. Whether a process is a "thing" or not is kind of beside the point. The core question is can we articulate how the core experience of being human is in comparison to the core experience of another creature that perceives the world in a fundamentally different way.
Even when you phrase it that way, you would seem to posit that an experience has a how it is. How something is is ultimately a judgment made by an experiencing subject. In that case, doesn't the question of comparing two "how it is"-judgments regarding experiences of different subjects become incoherent? On the one hand it implies a single experiencer who has two experiences and compares them, but on the other hand we already know that the two experiences we want to compare have different experiencers.
So (forgive me if I'm projecting too much on your particular phrasing :)) here we are still subtly relying on an implied "thing"-ness of an experience, namely as an object which can be extracted out of its original subject and transposed onto another subject.
I feel like you're being purposefully obtuse to not be able to say the human experience is fundamentally different than a bat's experience, even if it's difficult to articulate a bat's unique experience in a human language.
Edit: let me expound on that, as I'm not just being difficult. What does this questioning actually get you? The question of how a bat experiences the world vice a human gives me a meaningful thought experiment about what is consciousness and what the limits of our perceptions are. Asking whether or not the words are meaningful gives me nothing because the meaning of the article is so intuitively clear. In other words, questioning whether the words have meaning leads to a less meaningful experience vice using my intuition to understand the meaning to my interpretation.
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When I have had conversations with my philosophically oriented friends, I like to talk about what it be like to be a starfish--to experience the whole world in 5-way symmetry.
Bats possess a sensory organ we do not. "What it's like" is just a way of saying they may be conscious of a sonar sensation which we utterly lack, similar to a person blind from birth lacking color sensation. To use technical philosophical jargon, bats have sonar qualia that humans do not, assuming bats are conscious. We cannot say what that sensation is, since we don't have it. This places a limit on our knowledge. Don't let "what it's like" trip you up.
It's a legitimate philosophical problem which is spelled out in Nagel's paper. It's not a problem with language, it's rather a limitation on our experience, which also highlights a limitation of our epistemology.
I don't understand what you mean by sleight of hand. It seems a very straightforward question that makes sense in our everyday use of language, as you admit. Just because it's difficult to rigorously analyze this statement into scientific concepts, it doesn't follow that the question is invalid. In fact the point of the question is to show shortcomings in our current science.
Also, I would dispute the assertion that there is something unique or special about this formulation. There are many synonymous ways of phrasing the question: e.g., describe the subjective experience of a bat.
> I don't understand what you mean by sleight of hand.
He means that it implicitly smuggles in a certain conclusion. For instance, "I think therefore I am" seems logically sound, but actually begs the question in presupposing "I" to then conclude that "I" exists.
Or ask an innocent person a question like, "when did you stop beating your wife?"
> There are many synonymous ways of phrasing the question: e.g., describe the subjective experience of a bat.
If you can describe a subjective experience in a way that is not circularly tied to experiencing it, is it really subjective experience? If you can formulate an objective description, then the subjective experience was an illusion all along, because "subjective" doesn't mean what we think it means, ie. "non-objective".
This is the linguistic game the OP is referring to. Natural language can lead you into all sorts of traps like, thinking there's something there but it's really just a conceptual mirage we've sort of invented.
> He means that it implicitly smuggles in a certain conclusion. For instance, "I think therefore I am" seems logically sound, but actually begs the question in presupposing "I" to then conclude that "I" exists.
That's not correct.
It means if something-- anything-- is in the act of reflecting about thinking-- that is, reflecting about thinking about anything at all, including questioning existence-- then that thing exists only in that it is an entity capable of reflecting upon its own existence. And only during the act of reflecting on thinking is this true. And, most importantly, this notion is ineluctably cordoned off from any and all evidence-based logic which requires potentially illusory sensory input.
The part in italics came from others who read and critiqued Descartes. In any case, his basic logic is sound. Hume did the clearest job of critiquing it, and even he didn't claim Descartes had made a logical fallacy here.
It's been awhile since I've read it, but Descartes probably implied his notion was more powerful than it turns out to be-- i.e., that he could build an epistemology on it. Nevertheless, the basic notion is certainly not a logical fallacy.
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I'm afraid this is far too clever for me to understand. I know what I mean by subjective experience, and no amount of linguistic hair-splitting will convince me it doesn't exist.
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“ Just because these sentences make sense in our everyday language, does not mean they are suitable for technical and rigorous philosophical discussions. ”
Where would one find the authority to say what is suitable or not for philosophic discussions then? This is where schools of thought arise from, because some are less afraid of the unknowns that arise under various axiomatic constraints.
Every axiom is a mystery of existence itself in any manner.