Love all the different angles we can take to interpret Nagel's essay. Your piece reminded me of the work of Luigi Pirandello, One, No one, and One Hundred Thousand. It's one of the most unsettling novellas I've ever read and it is a beautiful exploration of what it means to have a subjective experience (and who's life we're living, really).
Something in your paper caught my eye: Human eco-location. Seems this is what submarine captains do. Submarines have to defend themselves against attacking submarines. They can't see each other. All that they have is sonar. Don't want to sound militaristic but I just happen to be a philosopher interested in practice.
I used to be a sonar engineer on a submarine. I was also the guy in charge of all the sonar operators who would listen for enemy submarines and also the sailors who would plot these 'targets' in the computer. In other words, I was the human eco-locator who would tell the captain where the enemy submarines were. (fun fact — British and American submarines practically NEVER use eco-location but that's a story for another day).
I think there's a useful analogy in your observation. When we compare human consciousness to more mechanical ways of thinking about the world, there's always (according to the dualists) a special something on top of merely seeing and thinking about the world.
In the case of the human eco-locator, the computer knows everything about the locations of the targets. It builds up a picture of what's out there in the water using the inputs from its senses (sonar systems and 16-year-old boys listening on headphones). The human echo-locator then tells the captain and now the captain has this exact same picture in his head (the same as the computer and the same as the echo-locator). But now it's in the captain's consciousness and it's 'subjective' — unlike the exact same picture in the computer.
What was added to the picture between the computer and the captain to make it conscious and/or subjective? What is it like to be a captain thinking about enemy submarines?
What an incredible example - thank you for sharing!
This perfectly illustrates the issue. We have similar input through three systems: the computer's data processing, your analysis as the sonar engineer, and the captain's final understanding.
We might wonder what changed from the computer to captain's understanding. Is the difference found in how each system uses the input?
What a great example! It's amazing how us humans (and many other animals) can so easily adopt tools for input -- so when normal vision isn't an option, the brain uses whatever else it can find.
I wonder whether the ultimate question, or the real question, the question worth asking, which is not often asked so far as I know, is: Can things hidden be known in practice? Bats use different tools to find out where they are. But whatever the input, the input is not the source. If you use the input-output model, the source is forever hidden. How can the hidden be known? Can you, in practice, know anything that is hidden?
We do know in practice, things that are hidden. People use ciphers to hide secrets. Now if you are able to steal their ciphers. The ciphers and the intercepts together as input will give you their secrets as output. But is this the only way? We know in practice that it is not. We can break ciphers! And there is a perfectly rational explanation as to why we can.
Ah, yes! Your cipher example is telling. We can break codes not just by finding the correct input but by understanding the patterns and structures that make the code work.
I very much like the idea of NOT focusing on the inputs and outputs. In my view we have spent far too long thinking that way. Much of the work in neuroscience has focused on stimulus (input)-response (output). I don't think we will find the answers to the interesting questions if we keep doing it that way.
Look at this string of letters: NFNAEODNWULD. What do you see? Garbage? Not worth our attention? Fit to be thrown away?But it is actually the word NEWFOUNDLAND written in the following way.
NEW
FOU
NDL
AND
If you had thrown away the original string, you would never have found out. But if, instead, you had picked it up and start experimenting, you would have found out what it truly means.
What does this show?
Human beings are active. They pick things up and try to decipher them. We started doing this when we were babies. We are not mere receptors of inputs.
I write about stuff like this in my substack Nobody Lies to Babies. Linking ciphers to philosophy helps one see philosophy in a new light.
I love this example! It makes me wonder - what exactly is happening when we "figure out" the pattern? At first we see NFNAEODNWULD as meaningless, then suddenly it snaps into place as NEWFOUNDLAND arranged in a grid.
This reminds me of other perceptual "aha" moments.
I'm not sure if you remember them, but when I was a kid 'Magic Eye' pictures where a thing. Initially they looked like nothing, but stare at it long enough and a 3D image suddenly appears. Other illusions (like the Necker cube) are similar. They show that we're not just passively receiving information, but we actively 'figure it out'.
I wonder whether there are key moments in a baby's life when they discover how to figure it out -- when they decipher a key element of the world -- and from then on that aspect of the world 'makes sense'. What do you think?
I have this theory that we are all codebreakers since birth. It is as codebreakers that babies learn their first language. It is as codebreakers that scientists make discoveries. The thing about codebreakers is that they do everything themselves, including the authentication of the results they themselves arrive at.
Codebreaking requires effort and concentration. Babies are not passive receptors where knowledge is concerned. They are mini-Einsteins.
Excellent points Suzi! Sometimes the rest of us don't understand a philosopher's argument because it is nuanced and difficult to put into words. But there's always the possibility that their argument is actually just a muddled mess representing unclear thinking. (Of course, if it's a muddle at least superficially similar to our own, we'll think they're brilliant.) While we do owe a writer interpretational charity when considering their argument, they have to meet us half way.
I've read a number of his papers and article, but none of Nagel's books. I was actually under the impression he had accepted the panpsychist label. Although based on your description, I could see him maybe being more comfortable with "neutral monist" or something along those lines. I can, to some degree, understand the resistance to those kinds of labels, since people seem to assume too much when they hear them. Julia Galef in her book The Scout Mindset, recommends wearing them lightly. Accept the ones that make sense to you, but make clear only as a quick and dirty label for to a collection of conclusions, not as a statement of alliance to an ideological camp.
If there’s anyone who eludes labels, it’s Nagel. The View from Nowhere is one of the most intellectually honest books I’ve read from an academic philosopher, but it will give you whiplash.
There's much to sympathise with in the resistance to accept labels. Like many others, I often find myself not fitting neatly with any one stance. And Julia Galef's advice here is spot-on -- wear labels lightly. That's one worth remembering. Labels serve as useful shorthand when talking about complex ideas, but they shouldn't become pledges of allegiance to philosophical tribes.
As for Nagel, I agree with Tina. What stands out in his work, especially in "The View from Nowhere," is his intellectual honesty. Even when disagreeing with his conclusions, it's hard not to appreciate how he grapples with the tension between his intuitions, his reasoning, and the empirical evidence.
It's obviously trivially true that our universe is self-awareness-capable, either as an extra fundamental property or as an emergent property from something else, but that's not quite panpsychism.
I've just started reading Philip Goff's Why? but got bogged down with his rejection of fine-tuning - (I think there's a category error.)
I'm concerned that claiming that consciousness is either "fundamental" or "emergent" presents a false dichotomy. I'm not sure those are the only options.
Thanks for bringing up Goff's work. I share your concerns. It seems like there are some questionable assumptions there.
I didn't say consciousness was either "fundamental" or "emergent", merely that our universe's ability to support consciousness (i.e. the information processing that creates the awareness) must be either "fundamental" or "emergent". (It's the universe's equivalent of nature or nurture).
Of course the universe must equally have a means of creating the structures that actually implement awareness (like evolution creating brains, or intelligent beings building self-aware computers).
If you suggest that everything in the universe is conscious you have to explain how you, the observer, managed to beat the astronomical odds and be instantiated as a human being not a neutrino.
re consciousness is either "fundamental" or "emergent":
I guess it's better stated as consciousness (and everything else) arises from a mixture of the "fundamental" and the "emergent" (ranging from 0% to 100%). But what we think of as fundamental can only arise from the same mixture at the next level down.
So if we could show how consciousness arises from chemistry, we're still left with chemistry as a mixture.
Emergent properties are themselves a mixture of science we haven't discovered yet and science we can't discover in a Godel sense.
Another great article. I started several comments, but they ballooned into a mini-article. My apologies in advance for the naive take on the subject matter
I agree with you and Nagel on the language point -- our language about consciousness is dualistic. And because language is so tied up with how we think, our concepts in science are often also stuck in dualistic thinking.
I'll add the link to your "mini-article" here so others can find it:
H2O comes together by means of causal chemical dynamics that we also call water. So there should be both the necessary and the contingent here. It should be the same for the brain based causality that creates consciousness. Or not, in either case, should systemic causality fail. There should be no other ontological possibility as I define these terms.
Regardless I’d say that Nagel’s argument is overly tricky for my own taste. I also know however that for many philosophers, that’s exactly what marks good philosophy. If people are still trying to interpret someone’s writings after 2000 years, as in the case of Plato for example, then well done — that’s the end goal. And while I can’t fault academic philosophers for achieving exactly what they desire with philosophy such as Nagel’s, I can observe that the point of science is instead to actually figure things out. Because modern science does not yet have a respected community of professionals that provide it with accepted principles of metaphysics, epistemology, or axiology from which to work, science ought to remain unfounded in these respects and so display associated problems. Mainly this seems to mandate that the human remains too biased to grasp the human.
I believe that a respected community must rise up whose exclusive purpose would be to provide science with such accepted principles to help science function better than it has. And what metaphysical principle do I believe could help science advance regarding consciousness that ought to subvert the issues that Nagel (and Jackson) address? Observe that to the degree systemic causality fails, science itself is rendered obsolete. Therefore I think such a community would mandate that in order for a scientist to function in the mainstream, the presumption must be made that systemic causality never fails. With only non-mainstream science focused on non-causal conceptions of consciousness, I think mainstream science would be more free to make better progress. Of course that’s just one of several ways that I consider science to remain unfounded, though seems most appropriate regarding Suzi’s newest post on Nagel.
Haha, yes, I think Locke is famous for this so-tricky-it-has-to-be-brilliant phenomenon.
I'm probably not as pessimistic about the current state of science or of scientists (but I guess that's not too surprising given that I am one). It's astonishing to me how many times I read statements like 'science hasn't been able to figure it out' as if science is somewhere near complete. Science, especially the science of consciousness, is so very young. It's an infant in many regards.
That said, I strongly agree with your broader point -- if we want to understand consciousness scientifically, we need to assume it operates within natural causal systems rather than somehow floating free of them. But I wonder whether we get stuck in thinking that aligns with the popular analogies of our time. For a while there it was the telegraph. At the moment, it's the digital computer. My concern is that the currently popular analogy boxes us into thinking of the brain as causal similar to the way a digital computer is causal. But biological causation doesn't work that way.
The newness of science is one of my common observations as well! And consider how “harder” forms of science like physics have quickly transformed our species by giving it incredible abilities, and yet the development of effective models concerning human nature itself hasn’t gone nearly as well. So with great power, though not much ability to grasp how to use it effectively, I’d say that our species should now be a bit unstable. This is why I consider it so important to found science well enough for us to effectively model ourselves.
On the common mistaken presumption that the brain is essentially like a digital computer, I think there’s something even worse going on today. This is to say that many are even mistaken about how digital computers work. Here the presumption is made that consciousness arises by means of processed brain information that needn’t inform anything in order to exist as such. If so then consciousness ought to arise by means of the right marks on paper which are algorithmically processed to create the right other marks on paper. Fortunately this observation led me to a wonderful epiphany. Because information should only exist as such to the extent that it informs something appropriate, there must be something appropriate that processed brain information informs to exist as consciousness! If you ever come to this conclusion as well Suzi, then that’s when I’d like you to consider the possibility that processed brain information informs a neurally produced electromagnetic field to exist as each of us.
I read these types of statements often... "development of effective models concerning human nature itself hasn't gone nearly as well". But I question them. First, if we're going to compare physics with psychology, physics has had a huge head start. Psychology is a very new science and has made remarkable progress in a short time. Neuroscience wasn't even a term until the 1960s, while physics has been developing systematic models since at least Galileo in the 1600s. That's a 300-year advantage!
When we look at what psychology and neuroscience have accomplished in just a few decades - from gaining an understanding of learning and memory to figuring out how neurons work and mapping brain networks to developed effective treatments for mental illness -- the progress, I think, is actually quite impressive.
You talk about information needing to inform something appropriate. And, I understand, you think that the thing that is appropriate must be an electromagnetic field that is 'consciousness'. I have two questions -- how do you determine if something is appropriate? And how does this not just push the problem back? If it were true, wouldn't we be left having to explain how an electromagnetic field could possibility account for all the things we might want it to account for.
I don’t blame mental and behavioral scientists for the softness of their fields Suzi. Rather I applaud each of you for accepting such challenging work. I just think extra help is needed in areas that you technically aren’t responsible for, as in the case of the metaphysical principle that we agreed on above. Furthermore even Sabine Hossenfelder believes that modern physics could use strong epistemological help, and without her field enduring a vast reproducibility crisis. Beyond the extra time you mentioned however, I think the big advantage that physics has over psychology is that value does not reside under it. Without psychological agreement that feeling good/bad is what drives the conscious form of function (or a superior value theory should one exist), it seems to me that there should be a hole in the field no smaller than the one in physics before Newton’s work on gravity. (Fortunately economists have been able to accept a utility based premise, as well as boast a wide collection of models which aren’t professionally disputed.) And again, technically value should instead be sorted out under the domain of axiology rather than psychology. I also mean no disrespect to philosophers, but without a community of respected professionals who provide agreed upon principles in these three areas, science ought to have associated problems. If philosophers choose not accept the role of providing a community with agreed upon answers from which to improve science, or perhaps are even hostile to the endeavor, then I think I’d call these proposed professionals “meta scientists”.
There are many reasons that I now consider a neurally produced electromagnetic field to be an appropriate causal medium to exist as consciousness, though initially I only considered it to not obviously be false. On a bright clear day when you’re looking over a beautiful landscape, you know better than I that each element of that otherwise non-existent scene is manufactured by means of something that happens to the light information that enters your eyes. And of course there are feelings, thoughts, and so on as well. I can imagine an amazingly complex electromagnetic field to have enough fidelity to exist as you the experiencer of each element of that beautiful scene and such from moment to moment, though I don’t know of any other element of the brain that seems to have anything close to that potential bandwidth. So if processed information can only exist as such to the extent that it informs something appropriate, then I’d love someone to propose another appropriate element of the brain which isn’t magical but might have sufficient bandwidth.
I’d rather not rest my case on that however, since this theory is not only quite falsifiable, but highly verifiable. Here theoretically neurons are incited to fire with an appropriate synchrony to create all elements of EMF consciousness. So if researchers were to implant leads to various interesting parts of someone’s brain so that miniscule energies could be transmitted that are similar to the energies already produced by the brain (and potentially exist as consciousness), then there ought to be constructive and destructive interference between them. Thus if the right energies were produced in the right places, a test subject should be able to tell us about unexpected alterations to their consciousness should it exist electromagnetically. Then with reports the researchers ought to be able to modulate energies that had been successful in novel ways to produce designed alterations. But if experts were to decide that they tried a sufficient number of possibilities without verifiable reports, then the theory ought to be false.
As for your second question on this, even if validated I don’t think this would explain why consciousness exists in such a form. For this particular “hard problem”, science might get no further. Though many would probably be disappointed, I wouldn’t. I’d instead see this as a new beginning, or finally a massive paradigm shift from which to harden up one of the softest areas of science!
I want to ask more questions, but please don't feel like you have to answer them. I'm just curious.
You mention that an electromagnetic field has sufficient bandwidth to support conscious experience. This makes me wonder how rich you consider consciousness to be. Do you find examples like attentional blindness and change blindness convincing that our conscious experience might not be as rich as we think it is?
You suggest we could test the theory by creating interference patterns in the brain's electromagnetic field. What would make the results of such interference specifically evidence for consciousness being an EM field, rather than just showing another neural correlate of consciousness?
When you say you can imagine an electromagnetic field having enough fidelity to be consciousness -- if we are wanting a 'thing' to call consciousness -- I'm still unsure what makes electromagnetic fields more imaginable as that 'thing' than other physical processes in the brain? What is it about electromagnetic fields that seems to bridge the explanatory gap between physical processes and subjective experience?
Are you kidding me Suzi? I live for this stuff! And you don’t need to worry about figuring me out before I find better uses for my time. I plan to be here for just as long as you are.
It makes perfect sense to me that consciousness would seem more full than it actually is. Evolution tends to be stingy and so merely tricks us into thinking that there aren’t “gaps in the picture”. There’s no point in making consciousness more full than it actually needs to be. But even given perhaps substantial gaps, also consider that it’s more than every individual element of that beautiful scene that you actually do see on a clear day, but also every element of what you hear, smell, taste, feel, think, and so on. Given the changing consciousness that you have from moment to moment, what beyond an electromagnetic field could potentially be dynamic enough to hold all that information? Surely something like the flow of your brain’s blood isn’t dynamic enough to constitute all that, or could instantly change in appropriate ways when the lights go out (and even if such blood flow does happen to be pretty dynamic). And how might all that consciousness be bound together into one unified experience each moment given that separate parts of your brain seem to be responsible? Observe that every bit of information which resides in an electromagnetic field, will inherently be bound together into a unified whole at all points within, and no less than your consciousness itself happens to be unified. While competing theories have a fundamental binding problem, this one has a fundamental binding solution.
To effectively consider my proposed test you should first keep in mind what the theory happens to be. It’s that when light enters your eyes, for example, this input information is neurally processed in a way that causes synchronous neural firing that creates an EM field which itself exists as you the entity that sees. It’s essentially the same for all elements of your consciousness in the sense of different components of the EMF theoretically exist as you. My understanding is that neuroscientists in general mainly presume that the brain’s electromagnetic field is largely just a waste product of neural firing (perhaps except for some minor and scarcely understood EMF ephaptic coupling).
It seems to me that it should be possible to disprove EMF consciousness by adding electromagnetic energies to someone’s brain that are similar to the ones associated with standard synchronous neuron firing. Here we’d expect these exogenous energies to constructively and destructively interfere with the endogenous energies, and so the subject should be able to report weirdness to their consciousness if the theory happens to be true. After a wide assortment of testing, if as expected there’s no reproducible consciousness alteration reports, as well as professional agreement that substantial interference should have occurred in all sorts of ways, then this should be a monumental achievement — the world’s first falsified consciousness theory!
If reproducible reports of consciousness weirdness were to occur however, then that should also be interesting. Here we’d wonder why these exogenous energies that are quite similar to the energies already produced by the brain without having such an effect, do have this effect? Would testing reveal nothing more than some phosphene reports? Or perhaps other reports that are similar to what occurs with TMS? In that case there might just be some minor ephaptic coupling going on and so the theory could still be dismissed as false. But if scientists were to learn EMF parameters that cause strong reports of consciousness alteration in a host of ways, then a larger explanation ought to be more appropriate. What if scientists learn to impart intended types of smells or sounds for someone to experience? What if they could modulate these energies to impart the image of a photograph that overlays a subject’s vision? We don’t yet know exact what would be revealed, but with evidence of this sort it should be difficult to conclude that consciousness might exist as something different than a neurally produced electromagnetic field. (I don’t think I’d exactly call the situation here a neural correlate of consciousness, but rather an electromagnetic correlate of consciousness since we’re discussing direct EMF alterations.)
What about an electromagnetic field seems to bridge the explanatory gap between physical processes and subjective experience? As I said before, I don’t see this as a satisfying answer. Even if validated this answer may never make sense to us other than that causality seems to mandate its truth. Furthermore such evidence ought to eject a wide assortment of spooky proposals from mainstream science, and including the dominant view of consciousness as processed information that needn’t inform anything appropriate in order to exist as such. Thus if the right marks on paper were algorithmically processed into the right other marks on paper, nothing here should experience what you do when your thumb gets whacked. But if the second marked paper were indeed to inform something appropriate, then something here must have such an experience. Furthermore causality might mandate that the only thing appropriate to be so informed, happens to be certain specific parameters of an electromagnetic field. I think I’ve developed a good way of empirically determining whether or not this happens to be the case. It would take professionals like yourself, however, to figure out how to practically do such testing.
Another thoughtful post! I never thought that Nagel identifying subjective and objective as different forced him to metaphysical dualism. I take the basic physicalist premise to be that "there is something it is like" to be a brain. The Hard Problem -- the deep mystery -- being how that happens. The weirdness comes from consciousness having that inside/outside *physical* dualism. Everything else science studies, it studies only objectively.
Funny that I was thinking about Searle just before you mentioned him. I do think Searle and Nagel have a lot in common. I read them both as physicalists (monists), so I'm curious about why you read Nagel's position as not. Do you distinguish between physicalism and monism?
I agree understanding consciousness probably requires a new approach. Chalmers, too, seems firmly physicalist while reaching for new principles or science. The sheer complexity of the brain puts it into a unique class of study. That, too, is unlike anything else science studies.
It seems to me that someone could be forgiven for thinking that Nagel, Searle, and Chalmers all fit with property dualism. The language of irreducibility and the emphasis on the subjective being of a difference "essence" to the objective can certainly sounds dualistic to the casual reader. But you raise an important point - these thinkers wrestle with how consciousness fits into a physical world. They want it to fit. These thinkers aren't saying "consciousness doesn't fit with science, therefore it must exist in a separate realm." Instead, they're suggesting "if consciousness doesn't fit with our current science, maybe we need to expand our science."
Yeah, I do distinguish between monism and physicalism. A monist could hold that everything is made of one kind of stuff without that one kind of stuff being physical (in the currently understood physics way we think about it). That's partly why Nagel's work is so interesting - he suggests we might need to revise our conception of the physical to properly account for consciousness.
What I find intriguing in all these thinkers is their refusal to either deny the feeling of the subjective experience or abandon naturalistic explanation. It seems they are trying to chart a course between reductionism and dualism. The question that fascinates me is whether that is the best path to take.
Yes, exactly. And I think Chalmers has even flirted with property dualism, IIRC, but they remain firmly committed (as far as I can tell) to physicalism.
D'oh! Again, yes, exactly. I should have been able to answer my own question there. I'm one of those who distinguish between materialism and physicalism, both of which are monist positions, so d'oh and duh. 🙄
To me, non-reductive materialism (views like neutral monism) face a problem: If consciousness is physical (as materialism claims), then why can't it be reduced or explained in physical terms? Saying "it's physical but irreducible" starts to sound like saying "it's physical but also something more than physical" -- which seems to undermine the core materialist commitment.
I guess the underlying concern I have is that these theories (and property dualism) - seem to be searching for a little observer. I understand they claim to reject such claims, but I can't shake the feeling that they're still hunting for some special 'self' that does the experiencing.
My WAG is that the whole brain is in some sense the "observer". Assuming physicalism, it must be the case that something about brains, something in their complexity, structure, and function, makes the meat self-aware. It's a hard problem because we don't have physical principles that explain how that can be.
In reply to your question to Tina, "new science" (at least for me) is shorthand for "as-yet undiscovered principles or physical laws". The canonical example is the precession of Mercury's orbit. The physical principles we knew (Newton's laws) didn't explain the precession. It was a mystery until Einstein gave us new physical laws through General Relativity. Those laws explained the precession.
Or course, Einstein's new laws *included* Newton's laws, which became the special case for when gravity and speed are low. New laws explaining consciousness would necessarily subsume existing laws.
Two points. First, the importance of keeping epistemology and ontology distinct. Despite the name of the paper, Nagel isn’t concerned with epistemology. He’s making a point about reduction, which is to say ontology. The reason the lines are blurred is that in consciousness epistemology meets ontology. Notice how Nagel points out the idea of moving from appearance (knowledge) to reality (ontology) seems to make no sense when it comes to conscious experience.
Second, I think a lot of the philosophical discussion needs to be understood in the context that its starting point is physicalism. In that sense it’s a type of apologetics, it already has its conclusion and is looking for ways to justify it. That’s the intellectual landscape the discussion takes place in. And the paper is pointing to the characteristic of the mental that creates the hard problem for the physicalist.
Notice that at the end of the paper, after pointing out the difficulties involved in any physical theory of mind accounting for the subjective character of experience, Nagel says – “It would be a mistake to conclude that physicalism must be false.” And that rather – “It would be truer to say that physicalism is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might be true.”
That distinction, that it’s not false, but we have no idea how it could be true, is the sort of thing you say to an audience already committed to physicalism.
And it’s a source of continual amazement to me that 50 years later physicalists are still saying the same things, they still have no clue how consciousness could be physical. They’re still hard at work trying to fit consciousness into their world view. Rather than abandon their world view, it’s becoming more popular to eliminate consciousness. It’s the most extreme form of fanaticism I can conceive of.
Couldn't agree more on your point about keeping epistemology and ontology distinct. While writing this one, I kept thinking, Nagel is not making an epistemological claim here -- despite all the talk about bats and what we can know. But then I read someone who claimed that Nagel is making an epistemological claim, whereas Jackson makes an ontological claim. I thought it was a strange thing to claim, so the the first draft of this article had a whole section on it. That section ended up in the dump file (the article was already far too long) but I'm glad you've raised the point here. It's an important one to make. It's interesting, I think, how easily conversations about consciousness slip from an epistemological claim to an ontological one. It's a sneaky move we need to watch out for.
You're so right about the "intellectual landscape the discussion takes place in." At the time, Nagel and Jackson were both philosophers writing at the early stages of their careers. Physicalism was (and still is) the most popular view. Your point about it being a kind of "apologetics" is fascinating - it shows how even challenges to the most popular view of the time often operate within its framework.
On your point about physicalists - I'm not sure they would claim they have 'no clue' as to how consciousness could be physical. Everyone has a theory, and everyone thinks their theory is the correct one. Just as dualists might say they can't see how consciousness could be purely physical, physicalists will say they can't see how it could be anything else.
For most of us, it's impossible to deny the physical world. There is too much evidence of the physical. Even the fact that we are separate entities with different opinions points to this -- separation is a fundamental feature of being physical. We don't get separation without dimension.
Most non-physicalist views don’t deny the physical world, the disagreement is over exactly what the “physical” consists of. For example, panpsychism is a type of physicalism, but if it’s true, the properties that physics describes is a radically incomplete conception of the physical. And the fact that physics can’t rule out panpsychism, shows us how impoverished their definition of physical is.
So, we could see this whole mind-body problem as a body problem, in the sense that we really have a very limited idea of what the physical world consists of and that is the real question at hand. Everyone’s intimately familiar with what consciousness is, the nature of the physical world is the mystery.
Rather than saying, it's impossible to deny the physical world, it would be better to understand your point as - it’s implausible to deny the reality of the external world.
The question from the idealist camp is, do we need to assume an entire substance called matter exists to explain the reality of the external world? It might be useful in scientific practice to assume everything is physical, but it’s not only metaphysically extravagant, but the hard problem also shows it’s inadequate to the task.
And just to give you a different perspective, an idealist will tell you that the reason you don’t know the true nature of the external world is your separation from God. This is the view of the realist schools of Vedanta. Moksha or salvation is to re-unite with the universal mind (brahman). The vast reaches of space we call the physical world are the outer form of your “distant” relationship with God (the absolute).
Of course, as a neuroscientist you might not be interested to hear more details about that explanation of what consciousness is, but I mention it so it’s clear that’s the real question at hand. The competing theories about consciousness aren’t between neuroscience options unless you’ve already assumed physicalism is true. But if you’ve already assumed physicalism, you’ve ignored the hard problem, not solved it.
You mention that physics being unable to rule out panpsychism shows how impoverished physics' definition of the physical is. But isn't this true of any unfalsifiable claim? Physics also can't rule out solipsism or invisible unicorns. Is the inability to disprove something really evidence of how impoverished their definition of physical is, or just a feature of how scientific methodology works?
You make an interesting point that assuming physicalism means ignoring rather than solving the hard problem. But this seems to present us with only two options - either solve the hard problem or ignore it. But, of course, there is the other possibility some physicalists will raise -- there isn't really a hard problem to solve. They might argue that even framing consciousness as a "problem" to be "solved" involves certain metaphysical commitments.
I agree that physicalism makes metaphysical assumptions. But don't all metaphysical frameworks, including idealism, require foundational assumptions? I see no theory as assumption-free. Wouldn't the question boil down to which theory's assumptions we find most justified. Descartes couldn't deny the non-physical. But that's not the only way to see it. The fact that so many disagree on which fundamental assumptions are the most justified tells us something interesting about how we think we come to 'know'.
I agree that physics definition of the physical is a consequence of how scientific methodology works. But this question of consciousness is metaphysics, not science. And non-physicalist positions aren’t denying the physical world exists, they’re denying physics has a complete conception of what the physical “is”. If your metaphysics says everything is physical, your definition of physical is pivotal.
And it’s not some minor explanatory hole if you can’t fit consciousness in your ontology. You can deny there’s a hard problem, heck, physicalists deny qualia exists so apparently you can deny the undeniable. But those are the only options for physicalists.
There is also the option to deny physicalism and admit the hard problem shows physicalism is fatally incomplete. Or as Chalmer’s says, consciousness requires an expansion of ontology.
The question here is, what “is” consciousness, which is the same as asking, what are “you”? Are you a product of brain activity that dies with the body or is your consciousness more existentially fundamental than the physical form you occupy? That’s what’s at stake here. I don’t really care what answer people choose, but I often get the impression that physicalists don't understand what the question is. They take it for granted that neuroscience will explain this. But that means they've assumed physicalism and haven't understood a serious challenge to their metaphysics.
I can just about imagine that I can imagine what it would be like to be a bat, but I'm completely lost when it comes to imagining what it would be like to be a Trump voter. What does a man have to do to be unelectable?
Is Nagel trying to have his cake and eat it, too?”
I think so. I think dual aspect monism isn’t all that different from property dualism when it comes to explanatory power. What do you think?
On the other hand, I find the call for a new science intriguing. What he describes sounds a lot like phenomenology, but surely he would just endorse that if that’s what he meant.
I think so, too. Dual aspect theory, neutral monism, property dualism, and non-reductive materialism all seem very similar to me. There's some differences in the language being used, but in the end, I think the underlying explanation is roughly the same.
The call for a new science is interesting. I do wonder what people mean by this, though. I have a very broad definition of science -- something like a systematic methodology based on evidence. I think this covers a lot. So, sure, new methods might be needed, but I question whether we need a whole new science. I'm not even sure what that would look like.
That is a broad definition! It makes me want to bring back the old fashioned phrase 'the sciences'.
I imagine Nagel has a narrower view of science as the mathematization of nature, in which case I can see how that would be problematic if you want to make sense of phenomenal consciousness and not just its correlates. This narrow definition of science might be what Nagel is thinking of when he calls for a whole new science. As to what that might look like, I'm not sure what he had in mind. He brings up phenomenology at the end, but is he talking about PHENOMENOLOGY phenomenology? If so, that would be surprising since it has been largely ignored by analytic philosophers, and he doesn't seem to have much knowledge of it judging by his remarks in that paper...though I'm probably wrong about that, and I hope I am. Anyway, I see phenomenology as a serious possibility for expanding our objective understanding of consciousness from the inside. And yes, introspectively.
But as you probably guessed, I disagree with his overall assessment of the mind-body problem:
"What moral should be drawn from these reflections, and what should be done next? It would be a mistake to conclude that physicalism must be false. Nothing is proved by the inadequacy of physicalist hypotheses that assume a faulty objective analysis of mind."
I don't agree with his understanding of objectivity, which he talks about at times as knowable and at others as not knowable, existing as some sort of realm in between Kantian noumena and knowable primary qualities...I just don't see him as being consistent or even coherent on that. And I see the physicalist assumption as a serious problem in most theories of mind, a big one. I have a post coming out soon about this, so I'll say no more here!
Hmmm, that's true. When Nagel calls for an "objective phenomenology," he seems to be suggesting something different to phenomenology - trying to develop methods to study subjective experience that don't rely on first-person reports (or as Nagel puts it empathy or the imagination), but he wants this method to capture consciousness in an objective way. He seems to be proposing something different from the traditional philosophical phenomenology of Husserl and others. If I understand traditional phenomenology correctly, it embraces the first-person perspective as fundamental, while Nagel seems to want to transcend it. Perhaps this isn't all that strange given that Nagel thinks the subjective (phenomenology) and objective are two sides of the same thing.
Just to add on to my last comment, I came across a paper that seems to be making the same point I am about Nagel and Husserl. No need to read it, but I left a link here in case someone is interested.
"(In a footnote) Although I cannot deal with this problem here, one can point out another point of convergence. Both Nagel and Husserl insist on the scientific character of dealing with the first person perspective. Nagel calls it an “objective phenomenology,” Husserl an “eidetic science” of transcendental subjectivity. The crucial difference, however, is that Nagel believes this science to be a matter of the far future, that we at this point have no idea what this science would be like because we do not dispose over the conceptual tools to even thematize it. It seems to me, however, that Husserl’s entire philosophical project is about nothing else than to show how such a science would be possible and how it would look like concretely.”
—Sebastian Luft “Real-Idealism”: An Unorthodox Husserlian Response to the Question of Transcendental Idealism
There is a critical difference between “what it feels like to be X” and “what it is like to be X”. The former is a presupposition of subjective experience (which is not normative, therefore not truth-apt, therefore not knowledge-apt); the latter is plausibly a normative concept that tells us what X’s are like (as a type of things we ‘mean’ when we speak of X). Both of these logical forms are crucial to experience, but the latter is more fundamental, as it engages with the concept itself, or what it MEANS to be a particular something, or simply, WHAT anything is ‘to us’ (where ‘us’ is a language community or society that has evolved and reflexively sustains the said meaning).
By making this distinction we can dispense with the notion of “subjective knowledge” (which is trivially true of everything we perceive, including delusions and illusions), and we are left with knowledge proper, in the normative sense of proven beliefs about objective reality. Nevertheless, the ‘what it is likeness’ (as a normative property of thought/meaning), which is systemically integrated according to the laws of sense, determines the identity, structure and relations of everything ‘we’ (our ontological type) perceive about the objective reality, and therefore it still does not constitute knowledge proper, but a narrative convention, a kind of social ritual that continuously evolves towards greater systemic consistency. We are thus left with only two forms of knowledge proper: 1) knowledge of the record (we can verify what was recorded in the past, insofar as the record exists); 2) logical truths that can be known a priori, which are the structure of meaning/sense. Evidently, the integrity of 1 depends on 2.
What if I'm not convinced that this distinction solves the issues Nagel raises? Even if we focus on "what it is like" as a normative concept about types rather than tokens of experience, couldn't someone claim that we still face the question of how these types 'emerge' and become 'meaningful'. The bat's way of being in the world through echolocation shapes its type of experience in ways that might be fundamentally inaccessible to us, regardless of whether we're talking about subjective feelings or normative meanings.
You hit the nail on the head. This is indeed the fundamental question, and evidently not easy to answer. Nevertheless, I believe i have answered it adequately here (formally outlining the bare/minimal principle according to which the meaningful content of consciousness is generated): https://philpapers.org/rec/KOWODO
A question like this is virtually impossible to do justice to in a comment. I spent good 10 years working on it.
One fun point I can drop here is that the concept of echolocation and the concept of bats (as a type) is still an element of human consciousness, an item of human meaning, even if it signifies something external to human consciousness (which is indeed an intrinsic aspect of meaning, that it signifies something other than itself).
What a great article. I definitely need to read more Nagel. The idea of the continuum and the "two aspect monism" is great. I'm trying to wrap my head around Chalmers counter-countarguments in https://consc.net/papers/nature.pdf and I feel like his forced understanding that subjective experience must be different from physical processes is his problem. Then on the other side if you consider physicalism in an extreme form where you reduce it to the physical facts one can know he (or actually Jackson) has a valid point: You still need to explain experience... Very though-provoking again 🧠
The experience of a bat doesn't happen without the body of a bat - its wings, eyes, and ears - or a comfy place to sleep with its friends in a cave during the day. The "something that it is like to be a bat" doesn't happen without the body and world of the bat. To create it in a vat with a brain would require a perfect emulation of the body and world of the bat. The "something that it is like to be a bat" is a feeling of the world from the perspective of the bat.
Ah! Embodied cognition -- yes, this idea does come up with Nagel's bats, doesn't it.
I'm curious about your point that creating bat consciousness would require emulating its whole world. I immediately thought of AI -- does this suggest there's something wrong with the idea of a disembodied conscious AI? Can conscious experience be separated from the physical and social context in which it occurs?
I think Mike Smith, who comments here, once posed the question of consciousness of a brain in a vat. For a bat brain by itself to feel like it lives in the world of the bat there would need to be perfect inputs and responses to and from all of the connections to it from a super VR. It would need to be like the Matrix.
When we look at the human brain almost all of it is allocated to body control or processing of sensory inputs from the body. Conscious experience in organisms, if it serves any function at all (I believe it does), must be primarily be about body control, processing sensory inputs, and reacting adaptively.
Functionalists, of course, could argue we could in effect provide a "body" to an artificial intelligence to achieve the same "consciousness." But the issue to me isn't whether the same end result is arrived at. It is how it is arrived at. I don't think abstract symbol manipulations does it. The implementation needs to be realized concretely in the chemistry and physics of physical material, not in a simulation of physical material. When it comes to consciousness, it isn't real unless it is physically real.
Your ideas resonate with my own thinking about embodiment and consciousness. I'm curious though - when you say that consciousness must be realised in 'the chemistry and physics of physical material', what do you think makes physical implementation fundamentally different from a detailed simulation? Is there something special about chemical and physical material? If we could simulate every quantum interaction, every neurotransmitter release, every action potential in perfect detail, would there be anything missing?
These aren't easy questions, of course! But I'm curious about what you think.
A physical model of an airplane in a wind tunnel can provide better information with less computational requirements than a simulation of the airflow on the plane with a computer. In fact, only recently have increased computing power and understanding made it possible for some of what was gathered with physical models to be done with algorithms and computation. Fluid dynamics and the phenomenon of turbulence has some of big unsolved problems in physics.
And the brain is turbulent.
Deco G, Kringelbach ML. Turbulent-like Dynamics in the Human Brain. Cell Rep. 2020 Dec 8;33(10):108471. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2020.108471. PMID: 33296654; PMCID: PMC7725672.
Functionally the cortex is laid out like a model of the body contralaterally (eyes are at the back). The physical organization is critical to the functional organization. The homuncular representation of the body matches the body, but with disproportionately huge hands, lips, and face. The layout of the retina is physically reproduced in the visual cortex. Grid and place cells have a physical organization that maps to movement and places.
This looks much more like a model where the physical organization is a critical part of the computation than it looks like an abstract simulation with a computer. Plasticity and learning require rewiring physical connections. It only requires flipping bits in a computer simulation.
When I read the bat article, I didn't associate his use of the term 'dualism' with the tradition mind-body dualism but with the objective-subjective dichotomy. Since the time of the ancient Greeks (and probably before), the idea was that truth (objectivity) existed somewhere apart from our bodies. Objective truth was perfect, immutable, and disembodied unlike our imperfect perceptually-derived subjective knowledge--like knowing what it is like to be me.
If you believe in objective truth, you are also likely to embrace mind-body dualism, pansychism, spirits, and divine intervention. If you disavow the objective-subjective dichotomy, you embrace embodied cognition and scientific materialism. Nagel never comes out and says this but I suspect he wanted to.
Intriguing! I like how you linked Nagel's ideas with the historical roots of the objective-subjective divide.
There's something that puzzles me about your point here though -- are you suggesting that believing in objective truth somehow pushes us toward accepting less empirical ideas like panpsychism and divine intervention? I want to make sure I'm understanding your argument correctly here.
I find this fascinating because it seems to challenge my intuitions -- I would have thought that believing in objective truth would align more naturally with scientific materialism. What am I missing here?
You are correct in detecting an irony because all scientists seek Objective Truth. I consider myself a scientific materialist but I disavow the idea of immutable, irrevocable, universal, or absolute truth. I see Objectivism as a way for dualism and spiritualism to creep in the back door of scientific materialism...which is truly ironic. Embodied Cognition and Scientific Materialism are not mutually incompatible. In fact, Embodied Cognition provides a more materialistic explaination of what Truth, knowledge, and meaning are than Objectivism.
Though, I will admit that Objectivism appeals to our emotional needs (see Panksepp's SEEKING). Objectivists may not have access to Objective Truth today but they believe it exists. This makes it a goal worth seeking and feeling of closure even when we have not yet reached it (which we can never do). In this way, science is propelled forward, it replaces old theories with new theories, and it never becomes disheartened by the number of previous theories that were wrong!
Call my alternative position Stablism. I trust stable theories and laws in a skeptical, scientific community...until they aren't stable anymore. Getting to a stable theory or law requires a lot of theory churn. In that world, the best scientists are revolutionaries and not owners and defenders of a claim on Objective Truth.
Interesting! I'm not sure your idea of Stablism is all that different from how science works.
The scientific method is built on the principle of falsification -- we can never prove a theory is absolutely true; we can only prove theories wrong. Scientists hold theories tentatively, always looking for evidence that might disprove them. When theories withstand repeated attempts at falsification, we gain confidence in them -- but we never consider them absolute truths. To me, this seems very similar to your idea of trusting stable theories until they aren't stable anymore. What am I missing?
Love all the different angles we can take to interpret Nagel's essay. Your piece reminded me of the work of Luigi Pirandello, One, No one, and One Hundred Thousand. It's one of the most unsettling novellas I've ever read and it is a beautiful exploration of what it means to have a subjective experience (and who's life we're living, really).
Link: https://www.google.nl/books/edition/One_No_One_and_One_Hundred_Thousand/D0hvDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover
Thanks, Jurgen!
Something in your paper caught my eye: Human eco-location. Seems this is what submarine captains do. Submarines have to defend themselves against attacking submarines. They can't see each other. All that they have is sonar. Don't want to sound militaristic but I just happen to be a philosopher interested in practice.
I used to be a sonar engineer on a submarine. I was also the guy in charge of all the sonar operators who would listen for enemy submarines and also the sailors who would plot these 'targets' in the computer. In other words, I was the human eco-locator who would tell the captain where the enemy submarines were. (fun fact — British and American submarines practically NEVER use eco-location but that's a story for another day).
I think there's a useful analogy in your observation. When we compare human consciousness to more mechanical ways of thinking about the world, there's always (according to the dualists) a special something on top of merely seeing and thinking about the world.
In the case of the human eco-locator, the computer knows everything about the locations of the targets. It builds up a picture of what's out there in the water using the inputs from its senses (sonar systems and 16-year-old boys listening on headphones). The human echo-locator then tells the captain and now the captain has this exact same picture in his head (the same as the computer and the same as the echo-locator). But now it's in the captain's consciousness and it's 'subjective' — unlike the exact same picture in the computer.
What was added to the picture between the computer and the captain to make it conscious and/or subjective? What is it like to be a captain thinking about enemy submarines?
What an incredible example - thank you for sharing!
This perfectly illustrates the issue. We have similar input through three systems: the computer's data processing, your analysis as the sonar engineer, and the captain's final understanding.
We might wonder what changed from the computer to captain's understanding. Is the difference found in how each system uses the input?
What a great example! It's amazing how us humans (and many other animals) can so easily adopt tools for input -- so when normal vision isn't an option, the brain uses whatever else it can find.
I wonder whether the ultimate question, or the real question, the question worth asking, which is not often asked so far as I know, is: Can things hidden be known in practice? Bats use different tools to find out where they are. But whatever the input, the input is not the source. If you use the input-output model, the source is forever hidden. How can the hidden be known? Can you, in practice, know anything that is hidden?
We do know in practice, things that are hidden. People use ciphers to hide secrets. Now if you are able to steal their ciphers. The ciphers and the intercepts together as input will give you their secrets as output. But is this the only way? We know in practice that it is not. We can break ciphers! And there is a perfectly rational explanation as to why we can.
Ah, yes! Your cipher example is telling. We can break codes not just by finding the correct input but by understanding the patterns and structures that make the code work.
I very much like the idea of NOT focusing on the inputs and outputs. In my view we have spent far too long thinking that way. Much of the work in neuroscience has focused on stimulus (input)-response (output). I don't think we will find the answers to the interesting questions if we keep doing it that way.
Look at this string of letters: NFNAEODNWULD. What do you see? Garbage? Not worth our attention? Fit to be thrown away?But it is actually the word NEWFOUNDLAND written in the following way.
NEW
FOU
NDL
AND
If you had thrown away the original string, you would never have found out. But if, instead, you had picked it up and start experimenting, you would have found out what it truly means.
What does this show?
Human beings are active. They pick things up and try to decipher them. We started doing this when we were babies. We are not mere receptors of inputs.
I write about stuff like this in my substack Nobody Lies to Babies. Linking ciphers to philosophy helps one see philosophy in a new light.
I love this example! It makes me wonder - what exactly is happening when we "figure out" the pattern? At first we see NFNAEODNWULD as meaningless, then suddenly it snaps into place as NEWFOUNDLAND arranged in a grid.
This reminds me of other perceptual "aha" moments.
I'm not sure if you remember them, but when I was a kid 'Magic Eye' pictures where a thing. Initially they looked like nothing, but stare at it long enough and a 3D image suddenly appears. Other illusions (like the Necker cube) are similar. They show that we're not just passively receiving information, but we actively 'figure it out'.
I wonder whether there are key moments in a baby's life when they discover how to figure it out -- when they decipher a key element of the world -- and from then on that aspect of the world 'makes sense'. What do you think?
I have this theory that we are all codebreakers since birth. It is as codebreakers that babies learn their first language. It is as codebreakers that scientists make discoveries. The thing about codebreakers is that they do everything themselves, including the authentication of the results they themselves arrive at.
Codebreaking requires effort and concentration. Babies are not passive receptors where knowledge is concerned. They are mini-Einsteins.
Excellent points Suzi! Sometimes the rest of us don't understand a philosopher's argument because it is nuanced and difficult to put into words. But there's always the possibility that their argument is actually just a muddled mess representing unclear thinking. (Of course, if it's a muddle at least superficially similar to our own, we'll think they're brilliant.) While we do owe a writer interpretational charity when considering their argument, they have to meet us half way.
I've read a number of his papers and article, but none of Nagel's books. I was actually under the impression he had accepted the panpsychist label. Although based on your description, I could see him maybe being more comfortable with "neutral monist" or something along those lines. I can, to some degree, understand the resistance to those kinds of labels, since people seem to assume too much when they hear them. Julia Galef in her book The Scout Mindset, recommends wearing them lightly. Accept the ones that make sense to you, but make clear only as a quick and dirty label for to a collection of conclusions, not as a statement of alliance to an ideological camp.
If there’s anyone who eludes labels, it’s Nagel. The View from Nowhere is one of the most intellectually honest books I’ve read from an academic philosopher, but it will give you whiplash.
Interesting. I only know it through you and AJOwen's posts. Sounds like something I'd find frustrating.
Haha...maybe. I actually enjoyed it, despite the whiplash, and despite disagreeing with him about many things, which is rare.
I'm much the same way with David Chalmers. There's a lot to be said for just being an enjoyable writer. Maybe I should add Nagel to my list.
Honest is a great word to describe The View from Nowhere! And whiplash is exactly how I felt reading it.
Thanks, Mike.
There's much to sympathise with in the resistance to accept labels. Like many others, I often find myself not fitting neatly with any one stance. And Julia Galef's advice here is spot-on -- wear labels lightly. That's one worth remembering. Labels serve as useful shorthand when talking about complex ideas, but they shouldn't become pledges of allegiance to philosophical tribes.
As for Nagel, I agree with Tina. What stands out in his work, especially in "The View from Nowhere," is his intellectual honesty. Even when disagreeing with his conclusions, it's hard not to appreciate how he grapples with the tension between his intuitions, his reasoning, and the empirical evidence.
It's obviously trivially true that our universe is self-awareness-capable, either as an extra fundamental property or as an emergent property from something else, but that's not quite panpsychism.
I've just started reading Philip Goff's Why? but got bogged down with his rejection of fine-tuning - (I think there's a category error.)
I'm concerned that claiming that consciousness is either "fundamental" or "emergent" presents a false dichotomy. I'm not sure those are the only options.
Thanks for bringing up Goff's work. I share your concerns. It seems like there are some questionable assumptions there.
I didn't say consciousness was either "fundamental" or "emergent", merely that our universe's ability to support consciousness (i.e. the information processing that creates the awareness) must be either "fundamental" or "emergent". (It's the universe's equivalent of nature or nurture).
Of course the universe must equally have a means of creating the structures that actually implement awareness (like evolution creating brains, or intelligent beings building self-aware computers).
If you suggest that everything in the universe is conscious you have to explain how you, the observer, managed to beat the astronomical odds and be instantiated as a human being not a neutrino.
Oh! I'm sorry for misunderstanding. Thanks for clearing that up!
re consciousness is either "fundamental" or "emergent":
I guess it's better stated as consciousness (and everything else) arises from a mixture of the "fundamental" and the "emergent" (ranging from 0% to 100%). But what we think of as fundamental can only arise from the same mixture at the next level down.
So if we could show how consciousness arises from chemistry, we're still left with chemistry as a mixture.
Emergent properties are themselves a mixture of science we haven't discovered yet and science we can't discover in a Godel sense.
Another great article. I started several comments, but they ballooned into a mini-article. My apologies in advance for the naive take on the subject matter
Thanks so much for the great 'response' article.
I agree with you and Nagel on the language point -- our language about consciousness is dualistic. And because language is so tied up with how we think, our concepts in science are often also stuck in dualistic thinking.
I'll add the link to your "mini-article" here so others can find it:
https://substack.com/@johnnieburger/p-151213295
H2O comes together by means of causal chemical dynamics that we also call water. So there should be both the necessary and the contingent here. It should be the same for the brain based causality that creates consciousness. Or not, in either case, should systemic causality fail. There should be no other ontological possibility as I define these terms.
Regardless I’d say that Nagel’s argument is overly tricky for my own taste. I also know however that for many philosophers, that’s exactly what marks good philosophy. If people are still trying to interpret someone’s writings after 2000 years, as in the case of Plato for example, then well done — that’s the end goal. And while I can’t fault academic philosophers for achieving exactly what they desire with philosophy such as Nagel’s, I can observe that the point of science is instead to actually figure things out. Because modern science does not yet have a respected community of professionals that provide it with accepted principles of metaphysics, epistemology, or axiology from which to work, science ought to remain unfounded in these respects and so display associated problems. Mainly this seems to mandate that the human remains too biased to grasp the human.
I believe that a respected community must rise up whose exclusive purpose would be to provide science with such accepted principles to help science function better than it has. And what metaphysical principle do I believe could help science advance regarding consciousness that ought to subvert the issues that Nagel (and Jackson) address? Observe that to the degree systemic causality fails, science itself is rendered obsolete. Therefore I think such a community would mandate that in order for a scientist to function in the mainstream, the presumption must be made that systemic causality never fails. With only non-mainstream science focused on non-causal conceptions of consciousness, I think mainstream science would be more free to make better progress. Of course that’s just one of several ways that I consider science to remain unfounded, though seems most appropriate regarding Suzi’s newest post on Nagel.
Haha, yes, I think Locke is famous for this so-tricky-it-has-to-be-brilliant phenomenon.
I'm probably not as pessimistic about the current state of science or of scientists (but I guess that's not too surprising given that I am one). It's astonishing to me how many times I read statements like 'science hasn't been able to figure it out' as if science is somewhere near complete. Science, especially the science of consciousness, is so very young. It's an infant in many regards.
That said, I strongly agree with your broader point -- if we want to understand consciousness scientifically, we need to assume it operates within natural causal systems rather than somehow floating free of them. But I wonder whether we get stuck in thinking that aligns with the popular analogies of our time. For a while there it was the telegraph. At the moment, it's the digital computer. My concern is that the currently popular analogy boxes us into thinking of the brain as causal similar to the way a digital computer is causal. But biological causation doesn't work that way.
The newness of science is one of my common observations as well! And consider how “harder” forms of science like physics have quickly transformed our species by giving it incredible abilities, and yet the development of effective models concerning human nature itself hasn’t gone nearly as well. So with great power, though not much ability to grasp how to use it effectively, I’d say that our species should now be a bit unstable. This is why I consider it so important to found science well enough for us to effectively model ourselves.
On the common mistaken presumption that the brain is essentially like a digital computer, I think there’s something even worse going on today. This is to say that many are even mistaken about how digital computers work. Here the presumption is made that consciousness arises by means of processed brain information that needn’t inform anything in order to exist as such. If so then consciousness ought to arise by means of the right marks on paper which are algorithmically processed to create the right other marks on paper. Fortunately this observation led me to a wonderful epiphany. Because information should only exist as such to the extent that it informs something appropriate, there must be something appropriate that processed brain information informs to exist as consciousness! If you ever come to this conclusion as well Suzi, then that’s when I’d like you to consider the possibility that processed brain information informs a neurally produced electromagnetic field to exist as each of us.
I read these types of statements often... "development of effective models concerning human nature itself hasn't gone nearly as well". But I question them. First, if we're going to compare physics with psychology, physics has had a huge head start. Psychology is a very new science and has made remarkable progress in a short time. Neuroscience wasn't even a term until the 1960s, while physics has been developing systematic models since at least Galileo in the 1600s. That's a 300-year advantage!
When we look at what psychology and neuroscience have accomplished in just a few decades - from gaining an understanding of learning and memory to figuring out how neurons work and mapping brain networks to developed effective treatments for mental illness -- the progress, I think, is actually quite impressive.
You talk about information needing to inform something appropriate. And, I understand, you think that the thing that is appropriate must be an electromagnetic field that is 'consciousness'. I have two questions -- how do you determine if something is appropriate? And how does this not just push the problem back? If it were true, wouldn't we be left having to explain how an electromagnetic field could possibility account for all the things we might want it to account for.
I don’t blame mental and behavioral scientists for the softness of their fields Suzi. Rather I applaud each of you for accepting such challenging work. I just think extra help is needed in areas that you technically aren’t responsible for, as in the case of the metaphysical principle that we agreed on above. Furthermore even Sabine Hossenfelder believes that modern physics could use strong epistemological help, and without her field enduring a vast reproducibility crisis. Beyond the extra time you mentioned however, I think the big advantage that physics has over psychology is that value does not reside under it. Without psychological agreement that feeling good/bad is what drives the conscious form of function (or a superior value theory should one exist), it seems to me that there should be a hole in the field no smaller than the one in physics before Newton’s work on gravity. (Fortunately economists have been able to accept a utility based premise, as well as boast a wide collection of models which aren’t professionally disputed.) And again, technically value should instead be sorted out under the domain of axiology rather than psychology. I also mean no disrespect to philosophers, but without a community of respected professionals who provide agreed upon principles in these three areas, science ought to have associated problems. If philosophers choose not accept the role of providing a community with agreed upon answers from which to improve science, or perhaps are even hostile to the endeavor, then I think I’d call these proposed professionals “meta scientists”.
There are many reasons that I now consider a neurally produced electromagnetic field to be an appropriate causal medium to exist as consciousness, though initially I only considered it to not obviously be false. On a bright clear day when you’re looking over a beautiful landscape, you know better than I that each element of that otherwise non-existent scene is manufactured by means of something that happens to the light information that enters your eyes. And of course there are feelings, thoughts, and so on as well. I can imagine an amazingly complex electromagnetic field to have enough fidelity to exist as you the experiencer of each element of that beautiful scene and such from moment to moment, though I don’t know of any other element of the brain that seems to have anything close to that potential bandwidth. So if processed information can only exist as such to the extent that it informs something appropriate, then I’d love someone to propose another appropriate element of the brain which isn’t magical but might have sufficient bandwidth.
I’d rather not rest my case on that however, since this theory is not only quite falsifiable, but highly verifiable. Here theoretically neurons are incited to fire with an appropriate synchrony to create all elements of EMF consciousness. So if researchers were to implant leads to various interesting parts of someone’s brain so that miniscule energies could be transmitted that are similar to the energies already produced by the brain (and potentially exist as consciousness), then there ought to be constructive and destructive interference between them. Thus if the right energies were produced in the right places, a test subject should be able to tell us about unexpected alterations to their consciousness should it exist electromagnetically. Then with reports the researchers ought to be able to modulate energies that had been successful in novel ways to produce designed alterations. But if experts were to decide that they tried a sufficient number of possibilities without verifiable reports, then the theory ought to be false.
As for your second question on this, even if validated I don’t think this would explain why consciousness exists in such a form. For this particular “hard problem”, science might get no further. Though many would probably be disappointed, I wouldn’t. I’d instead see this as a new beginning, or finally a massive paradigm shift from which to harden up one of the softest areas of science!
I want to ask more questions, but please don't feel like you have to answer them. I'm just curious.
You mention that an electromagnetic field has sufficient bandwidth to support conscious experience. This makes me wonder how rich you consider consciousness to be. Do you find examples like attentional blindness and change blindness convincing that our conscious experience might not be as rich as we think it is?
You suggest we could test the theory by creating interference patterns in the brain's electromagnetic field. What would make the results of such interference specifically evidence for consciousness being an EM field, rather than just showing another neural correlate of consciousness?
When you say you can imagine an electromagnetic field having enough fidelity to be consciousness -- if we are wanting a 'thing' to call consciousness -- I'm still unsure what makes electromagnetic fields more imaginable as that 'thing' than other physical processes in the brain? What is it about electromagnetic fields that seems to bridge the explanatory gap between physical processes and subjective experience?
Are you kidding me Suzi? I live for this stuff! And you don’t need to worry about figuring me out before I find better uses for my time. I plan to be here for just as long as you are.
It makes perfect sense to me that consciousness would seem more full than it actually is. Evolution tends to be stingy and so merely tricks us into thinking that there aren’t “gaps in the picture”. There’s no point in making consciousness more full than it actually needs to be. But even given perhaps substantial gaps, also consider that it’s more than every individual element of that beautiful scene that you actually do see on a clear day, but also every element of what you hear, smell, taste, feel, think, and so on. Given the changing consciousness that you have from moment to moment, what beyond an electromagnetic field could potentially be dynamic enough to hold all that information? Surely something like the flow of your brain’s blood isn’t dynamic enough to constitute all that, or could instantly change in appropriate ways when the lights go out (and even if such blood flow does happen to be pretty dynamic). And how might all that consciousness be bound together into one unified experience each moment given that separate parts of your brain seem to be responsible? Observe that every bit of information which resides in an electromagnetic field, will inherently be bound together into a unified whole at all points within, and no less than your consciousness itself happens to be unified. While competing theories have a fundamental binding problem, this one has a fundamental binding solution.
To effectively consider my proposed test you should first keep in mind what the theory happens to be. It’s that when light enters your eyes, for example, this input information is neurally processed in a way that causes synchronous neural firing that creates an EM field which itself exists as you the entity that sees. It’s essentially the same for all elements of your consciousness in the sense of different components of the EMF theoretically exist as you. My understanding is that neuroscientists in general mainly presume that the brain’s electromagnetic field is largely just a waste product of neural firing (perhaps except for some minor and scarcely understood EMF ephaptic coupling).
It seems to me that it should be possible to disprove EMF consciousness by adding electromagnetic energies to someone’s brain that are similar to the ones associated with standard synchronous neuron firing. Here we’d expect these exogenous energies to constructively and destructively interfere with the endogenous energies, and so the subject should be able to report weirdness to their consciousness if the theory happens to be true. After a wide assortment of testing, if as expected there’s no reproducible consciousness alteration reports, as well as professional agreement that substantial interference should have occurred in all sorts of ways, then this should be a monumental achievement — the world’s first falsified consciousness theory!
If reproducible reports of consciousness weirdness were to occur however, then that should also be interesting. Here we’d wonder why these exogenous energies that are quite similar to the energies already produced by the brain without having such an effect, do have this effect? Would testing reveal nothing more than some phosphene reports? Or perhaps other reports that are similar to what occurs with TMS? In that case there might just be some minor ephaptic coupling going on and so the theory could still be dismissed as false. But if scientists were to learn EMF parameters that cause strong reports of consciousness alteration in a host of ways, then a larger explanation ought to be more appropriate. What if scientists learn to impart intended types of smells or sounds for someone to experience? What if they could modulate these energies to impart the image of a photograph that overlays a subject’s vision? We don’t yet know exact what would be revealed, but with evidence of this sort it should be difficult to conclude that consciousness might exist as something different than a neurally produced electromagnetic field. (I don’t think I’d exactly call the situation here a neural correlate of consciousness, but rather an electromagnetic correlate of consciousness since we’re discussing direct EMF alterations.)
What about an electromagnetic field seems to bridge the explanatory gap between physical processes and subjective experience? As I said before, I don’t see this as a satisfying answer. Even if validated this answer may never make sense to us other than that causality seems to mandate its truth. Furthermore such evidence ought to eject a wide assortment of spooky proposals from mainstream science, and including the dominant view of consciousness as processed information that needn’t inform anything appropriate in order to exist as such. Thus if the right marks on paper were algorithmically processed into the right other marks on paper, nothing here should experience what you do when your thumb gets whacked. But if the second marked paper were indeed to inform something appropriate, then something here must have such an experience. Furthermore causality might mandate that the only thing appropriate to be so informed, happens to be certain specific parameters of an electromagnetic field. I think I’ve developed a good way of empirically determining whether or not this happens to be the case. It would take professionals like yourself, however, to figure out how to practically do such testing.
Another thoughtful post! I never thought that Nagel identifying subjective and objective as different forced him to metaphysical dualism. I take the basic physicalist premise to be that "there is something it is like" to be a brain. The Hard Problem -- the deep mystery -- being how that happens. The weirdness comes from consciousness having that inside/outside *physical* dualism. Everything else science studies, it studies only objectively.
Funny that I was thinking about Searle just before you mentioned him. I do think Searle and Nagel have a lot in common. I read them both as physicalists (monists), so I'm curious about why you read Nagel's position as not. Do you distinguish between physicalism and monism?
I agree understanding consciousness probably requires a new approach. Chalmers, too, seems firmly physicalist while reaching for new principles or science. The sheer complexity of the brain puts it into a unique class of study. That, too, is unlike anything else science studies.
It seems to me that someone could be forgiven for thinking that Nagel, Searle, and Chalmers all fit with property dualism. The language of irreducibility and the emphasis on the subjective being of a difference "essence" to the objective can certainly sounds dualistic to the casual reader. But you raise an important point - these thinkers wrestle with how consciousness fits into a physical world. They want it to fit. These thinkers aren't saying "consciousness doesn't fit with science, therefore it must exist in a separate realm." Instead, they're suggesting "if consciousness doesn't fit with our current science, maybe we need to expand our science."
Yeah, I do distinguish between monism and physicalism. A monist could hold that everything is made of one kind of stuff without that one kind of stuff being physical (in the currently understood physics way we think about it). That's partly why Nagel's work is so interesting - he suggests we might need to revise our conception of the physical to properly account for consciousness.
What I find intriguing in all these thinkers is their refusal to either deny the feeling of the subjective experience or abandon naturalistic explanation. It seems they are trying to chart a course between reductionism and dualism. The question that fascinates me is whether that is the best path to take.
Yes, exactly. And I think Chalmers has even flirted with property dualism, IIRC, but they remain firmly committed (as far as I can tell) to physicalism.
D'oh! Again, yes, exactly. I should have been able to answer my own question there. I'm one of those who distinguish between materialism and physicalism, both of which are monist positions, so d'oh and duh. 🙄
Do you have thoughts on better paths to take?
To me, non-reductive materialism (views like neutral monism) face a problem: If consciousness is physical (as materialism claims), then why can't it be reduced or explained in physical terms? Saying "it's physical but irreducible" starts to sound like saying "it's physical but also something more than physical" -- which seems to undermine the core materialist commitment.
I guess the underlying concern I have is that these theories (and property dualism) - seem to be searching for a little observer. I understand they claim to reject such claims, but I can't shake the feeling that they're still hunting for some special 'self' that does the experiencing.
My WAG is that the whole brain is in some sense the "observer". Assuming physicalism, it must be the case that something about brains, something in their complexity, structure, and function, makes the meat self-aware. It's a hard problem because we don't have physical principles that explain how that can be.
In reply to your question to Tina, "new science" (at least for me) is shorthand for "as-yet undiscovered principles or physical laws". The canonical example is the precession of Mercury's orbit. The physical principles we knew (Newton's laws) didn't explain the precession. It was a mystery until Einstein gave us new physical laws through General Relativity. Those laws explained the precession.
Or course, Einstein's new laws *included* Newton's laws, which became the special case for when gravity and speed are low. New laws explaining consciousness would necessarily subsume existing laws.
Great article Suzi.
Two points. First, the importance of keeping epistemology and ontology distinct. Despite the name of the paper, Nagel isn’t concerned with epistemology. He’s making a point about reduction, which is to say ontology. The reason the lines are blurred is that in consciousness epistemology meets ontology. Notice how Nagel points out the idea of moving from appearance (knowledge) to reality (ontology) seems to make no sense when it comes to conscious experience.
Second, I think a lot of the philosophical discussion needs to be understood in the context that its starting point is physicalism. In that sense it’s a type of apologetics, it already has its conclusion and is looking for ways to justify it. That’s the intellectual landscape the discussion takes place in. And the paper is pointing to the characteristic of the mental that creates the hard problem for the physicalist.
Notice that at the end of the paper, after pointing out the difficulties involved in any physical theory of mind accounting for the subjective character of experience, Nagel says – “It would be a mistake to conclude that physicalism must be false.” And that rather – “It would be truer to say that physicalism is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might be true.”
That distinction, that it’s not false, but we have no idea how it could be true, is the sort of thing you say to an audience already committed to physicalism.
And it’s a source of continual amazement to me that 50 years later physicalists are still saying the same things, they still have no clue how consciousness could be physical. They’re still hard at work trying to fit consciousness into their world view. Rather than abandon their world view, it’s becoming more popular to eliminate consciousness. It’s the most extreme form of fanaticism I can conceive of.
Hi Prudence!
Couldn't agree more on your point about keeping epistemology and ontology distinct. While writing this one, I kept thinking, Nagel is not making an epistemological claim here -- despite all the talk about bats and what we can know. But then I read someone who claimed that Nagel is making an epistemological claim, whereas Jackson makes an ontological claim. I thought it was a strange thing to claim, so the the first draft of this article had a whole section on it. That section ended up in the dump file (the article was already far too long) but I'm glad you've raised the point here. It's an important one to make. It's interesting, I think, how easily conversations about consciousness slip from an epistemological claim to an ontological one. It's a sneaky move we need to watch out for.
You're so right about the "intellectual landscape the discussion takes place in." At the time, Nagel and Jackson were both philosophers writing at the early stages of their careers. Physicalism was (and still is) the most popular view. Your point about it being a kind of "apologetics" is fascinating - it shows how even challenges to the most popular view of the time often operate within its framework.
On your point about physicalists - I'm not sure they would claim they have 'no clue' as to how consciousness could be physical. Everyone has a theory, and everyone thinks their theory is the correct one. Just as dualists might say they can't see how consciousness could be purely physical, physicalists will say they can't see how it could be anything else.
For most of us, it's impossible to deny the physical world. There is too much evidence of the physical. Even the fact that we are separate entities with different opinions points to this -- separation is a fundamental feature of being physical. We don't get separation without dimension.
Most non-physicalist views don’t deny the physical world, the disagreement is over exactly what the “physical” consists of. For example, panpsychism is a type of physicalism, but if it’s true, the properties that physics describes is a radically incomplete conception of the physical. And the fact that physics can’t rule out panpsychism, shows us how impoverished their definition of physical is.
So, we could see this whole mind-body problem as a body problem, in the sense that we really have a very limited idea of what the physical world consists of and that is the real question at hand. Everyone’s intimately familiar with what consciousness is, the nature of the physical world is the mystery.
Rather than saying, it's impossible to deny the physical world, it would be better to understand your point as - it’s implausible to deny the reality of the external world.
The question from the idealist camp is, do we need to assume an entire substance called matter exists to explain the reality of the external world? It might be useful in scientific practice to assume everything is physical, but it’s not only metaphysically extravagant, but the hard problem also shows it’s inadequate to the task.
And just to give you a different perspective, an idealist will tell you that the reason you don’t know the true nature of the external world is your separation from God. This is the view of the realist schools of Vedanta. Moksha or salvation is to re-unite with the universal mind (brahman). The vast reaches of space we call the physical world are the outer form of your “distant” relationship with God (the absolute).
Of course, as a neuroscientist you might not be interested to hear more details about that explanation of what consciousness is, but I mention it so it’s clear that’s the real question at hand. The competing theories about consciousness aren’t between neuroscience options unless you’ve already assumed physicalism is true. But if you’ve already assumed physicalism, you’ve ignored the hard problem, not solved it.
Thanks Prudence!
I'm curious about a few things.
You mention that physics being unable to rule out panpsychism shows how impoverished physics' definition of the physical is. But isn't this true of any unfalsifiable claim? Physics also can't rule out solipsism or invisible unicorns. Is the inability to disprove something really evidence of how impoverished their definition of physical is, or just a feature of how scientific methodology works?
You make an interesting point that assuming physicalism means ignoring rather than solving the hard problem. But this seems to present us with only two options - either solve the hard problem or ignore it. But, of course, there is the other possibility some physicalists will raise -- there isn't really a hard problem to solve. They might argue that even framing consciousness as a "problem" to be "solved" involves certain metaphysical commitments.
I agree that physicalism makes metaphysical assumptions. But don't all metaphysical frameworks, including idealism, require foundational assumptions? I see no theory as assumption-free. Wouldn't the question boil down to which theory's assumptions we find most justified. Descartes couldn't deny the non-physical. But that's not the only way to see it. The fact that so many disagree on which fundamental assumptions are the most justified tells us something interesting about how we think we come to 'know'.
I agree that physics definition of the physical is a consequence of how scientific methodology works. But this question of consciousness is metaphysics, not science. And non-physicalist positions aren’t denying the physical world exists, they’re denying physics has a complete conception of what the physical “is”. If your metaphysics says everything is physical, your definition of physical is pivotal.
And it’s not some minor explanatory hole if you can’t fit consciousness in your ontology. You can deny there’s a hard problem, heck, physicalists deny qualia exists so apparently you can deny the undeniable. But those are the only options for physicalists.
There is also the option to deny physicalism and admit the hard problem shows physicalism is fatally incomplete. Or as Chalmer’s says, consciousness requires an expansion of ontology.
The question here is, what “is” consciousness, which is the same as asking, what are “you”? Are you a product of brain activity that dies with the body or is your consciousness more existentially fundamental than the physical form you occupy? That’s what’s at stake here. I don’t really care what answer people choose, but I often get the impression that physicalists don't understand what the question is. They take it for granted that neuroscience will explain this. But that means they've assumed physicalism and haven't understood a serious challenge to their metaphysics.
I can just about imagine that I can imagine what it would be like to be a bat, but I'm completely lost when it comes to imagining what it would be like to be a Trump voter. What does a man have to do to be unelectable?
EDIT: my wife answered this: be a woman.
Is Nagel trying to have his cake and eat it, too?”
I think so. I think dual aspect monism isn’t all that different from property dualism when it comes to explanatory power. What do you think?
On the other hand, I find the call for a new science intriguing. What he describes sounds a lot like phenomenology, but surely he would just endorse that if that’s what he meant.
I think so, too. Dual aspect theory, neutral monism, property dualism, and non-reductive materialism all seem very similar to me. There's some differences in the language being used, but in the end, I think the underlying explanation is roughly the same.
The call for a new science is interesting. I do wonder what people mean by this, though. I have a very broad definition of science -- something like a systematic methodology based on evidence. I think this covers a lot. So, sure, new methods might be needed, but I question whether we need a whole new science. I'm not even sure what that would look like.
That is a broad definition! It makes me want to bring back the old fashioned phrase 'the sciences'.
I imagine Nagel has a narrower view of science as the mathematization of nature, in which case I can see how that would be problematic if you want to make sense of phenomenal consciousness and not just its correlates. This narrow definition of science might be what Nagel is thinking of when he calls for a whole new science. As to what that might look like, I'm not sure what he had in mind. He brings up phenomenology at the end, but is he talking about PHENOMENOLOGY phenomenology? If so, that would be surprising since it has been largely ignored by analytic philosophers, and he doesn't seem to have much knowledge of it judging by his remarks in that paper...though I'm probably wrong about that, and I hope I am. Anyway, I see phenomenology as a serious possibility for expanding our objective understanding of consciousness from the inside. And yes, introspectively.
But as you probably guessed, I disagree with his overall assessment of the mind-body problem:
"What moral should be drawn from these reflections, and what should be done next? It would be a mistake to conclude that physicalism must be false. Nothing is proved by the inadequacy of physicalist hypotheses that assume a faulty objective analysis of mind."
I don't agree with his understanding of objectivity, which he talks about at times as knowable and at others as not knowable, existing as some sort of realm in between Kantian noumena and knowable primary qualities...I just don't see him as being consistent or even coherent on that. And I see the physicalist assumption as a serious problem in most theories of mind, a big one. I have a post coming out soon about this, so I'll say no more here!
Hmmm, that's true. When Nagel calls for an "objective phenomenology," he seems to be suggesting something different to phenomenology - trying to develop methods to study subjective experience that don't rely on first-person reports (or as Nagel puts it empathy or the imagination), but he wants this method to capture consciousness in an objective way. He seems to be proposing something different from the traditional philosophical phenomenology of Husserl and others. If I understand traditional phenomenology correctly, it embraces the first-person perspective as fundamental, while Nagel seems to want to transcend it. Perhaps this isn't all that strange given that Nagel thinks the subjective (phenomenology) and objective are two sides of the same thing.
Looking forward to your upcoming post!
Just to add on to my last comment, I came across a paper that seems to be making the same point I am about Nagel and Husserl. No need to read it, but I left a link here in case someone is interested.
"(In a footnote) Although I cannot deal with this problem here, one can point out another point of convergence. Both Nagel and Husserl insist on the scientific character of dealing with the first person perspective. Nagel calls it an “objective phenomenology,” Husserl an “eidetic science” of transcendental subjectivity. The crucial difference, however, is that Nagel believes this science to be a matter of the far future, that we at this point have no idea what this science would be like because we do not dispose over the conceptual tools to even thematize it. It seems to me, however, that Husserl’s entire philosophical project is about nothing else than to show how such a science would be possible and how it would look like concretely.”
—Sebastian Luft “Real-Idealism”: An Unorthodox Husserlian Response to the Question of Transcendental Idealism
https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1268&context=phil_fac
Thanks for the link, it looks interesting.
There is a critical difference between “what it feels like to be X” and “what it is like to be X”. The former is a presupposition of subjective experience (which is not normative, therefore not truth-apt, therefore not knowledge-apt); the latter is plausibly a normative concept that tells us what X’s are like (as a type of things we ‘mean’ when we speak of X). Both of these logical forms are crucial to experience, but the latter is more fundamental, as it engages with the concept itself, or what it MEANS to be a particular something, or simply, WHAT anything is ‘to us’ (where ‘us’ is a language community or society that has evolved and reflexively sustains the said meaning).
By making this distinction we can dispense with the notion of “subjective knowledge” (which is trivially true of everything we perceive, including delusions and illusions), and we are left with knowledge proper, in the normative sense of proven beliefs about objective reality. Nevertheless, the ‘what it is likeness’ (as a normative property of thought/meaning), which is systemically integrated according to the laws of sense, determines the identity, structure and relations of everything ‘we’ (our ontological type) perceive about the objective reality, and therefore it still does not constitute knowledge proper, but a narrative convention, a kind of social ritual that continuously evolves towards greater systemic consistency. We are thus left with only two forms of knowledge proper: 1) knowledge of the record (we can verify what was recorded in the past, insofar as the record exists); 2) logical truths that can be known a priori, which are the structure of meaning/sense. Evidently, the integrity of 1 depends on 2.
Wonderful comment, thank you!
I'll play devil's advocate, for some fun...
What if I'm not convinced that this distinction solves the issues Nagel raises? Even if we focus on "what it is like" as a normative concept about types rather than tokens of experience, couldn't someone claim that we still face the question of how these types 'emerge' and become 'meaningful'. The bat's way of being in the world through echolocation shapes its type of experience in ways that might be fundamentally inaccessible to us, regardless of whether we're talking about subjective feelings or normative meanings.
You hit the nail on the head. This is indeed the fundamental question, and evidently not easy to answer. Nevertheless, I believe i have answered it adequately here (formally outlining the bare/minimal principle according to which the meaningful content of consciousness is generated): https://philpapers.org/rec/KOWODO
And more informally but hopefully more accessibly here: https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Ontology-thesis-interdependence-integrity/dp/1763717224
A question like this is virtually impossible to do justice to in a comment. I spent good 10 years working on it.
One fun point I can drop here is that the concept of echolocation and the concept of bats (as a type) is still an element of human consciousness, an item of human meaning, even if it signifies something external to human consciousness (which is indeed an intrinsic aspect of meaning, that it signifies something other than itself).
All the best questions can't be answered easily in a comment!
Thanks for the links!
What a great article. I definitely need to read more Nagel. The idea of the continuum and the "two aspect monism" is great. I'm trying to wrap my head around Chalmers counter-countarguments in https://consc.net/papers/nature.pdf and I feel like his forced understanding that subjective experience must be different from physical processes is his problem. Then on the other side if you consider physicalism in an extreme form where you reduce it to the physical facts one can know he (or actually Jackson) has a valid point: You still need to explain experience... Very though-provoking again 🧠
Thanks so much, Nicolas.
Ah! the mind-body problem! It still keeps us wondering.
That's a great paper of Chalmers -- I like how clearly he outlines the different views.
The experience of a bat doesn't happen without the body of a bat - its wings, eyes, and ears - or a comfy place to sleep with its friends in a cave during the day. The "something that it is like to be a bat" doesn't happen without the body and world of the bat. To create it in a vat with a brain would require a perfect emulation of the body and world of the bat. The "something that it is like to be a bat" is a feeling of the world from the perspective of the bat.
Ah! Embodied cognition -- yes, this idea does come up with Nagel's bats, doesn't it.
I'm curious about your point that creating bat consciousness would require emulating its whole world. I immediately thought of AI -- does this suggest there's something wrong with the idea of a disembodied conscious AI? Can conscious experience be separated from the physical and social context in which it occurs?
I think Mike Smith, who comments here, once posed the question of consciousness of a brain in a vat. For a bat brain by itself to feel like it lives in the world of the bat there would need to be perfect inputs and responses to and from all of the connections to it from a super VR. It would need to be like the Matrix.
When we look at the human brain almost all of it is allocated to body control or processing of sensory inputs from the body. Conscious experience in organisms, if it serves any function at all (I believe it does), must be primarily be about body control, processing sensory inputs, and reacting adaptively.
Functionalists, of course, could argue we could in effect provide a "body" to an artificial intelligence to achieve the same "consciousness." But the issue to me isn't whether the same end result is arrived at. It is how it is arrived at. I don't think abstract symbol manipulations does it. The implementation needs to be realized concretely in the chemistry and physics of physical material, not in a simulation of physical material. When it comes to consciousness, it isn't real unless it is physically real.
Your ideas resonate with my own thinking about embodiment and consciousness. I'm curious though - when you say that consciousness must be realised in 'the chemistry and physics of physical material', what do you think makes physical implementation fundamentally different from a detailed simulation? Is there something special about chemical and physical material? If we could simulate every quantum interaction, every neurotransmitter release, every action potential in perfect detail, would there be anything missing?
These aren't easy questions, of course! But I'm curious about what you think.
A physical model of an airplane in a wind tunnel can provide better information with less computational requirements than a simulation of the airflow on the plane with a computer. In fact, only recently have increased computing power and understanding made it possible for some of what was gathered with physical models to be done with algorithms and computation. Fluid dynamics and the phenomenon of turbulence has some of big unsolved problems in physics.
And the brain is turbulent.
Deco G, Kringelbach ML. Turbulent-like Dynamics in the Human Brain. Cell Rep. 2020 Dec 8;33(10):108471. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2020.108471. PMID: 33296654; PMCID: PMC7725672.
Functionally the cortex is laid out like a model of the body contralaterally (eyes are at the back). The physical organization is critical to the functional organization. The homuncular representation of the body matches the body, but with disproportionately huge hands, lips, and face. The layout of the retina is physically reproduced in the visual cortex. Grid and place cells have a physical organization that maps to movement and places.
This looks much more like a model where the physical organization is a critical part of the computation than it looks like an abstract simulation with a computer. Plasticity and learning require rewiring physical connections. It only requires flipping bits in a computer simulation.
Thanks so much for these Nagel bat pieces.
When I read the bat article, I didn't associate his use of the term 'dualism' with the tradition mind-body dualism but with the objective-subjective dichotomy. Since the time of the ancient Greeks (and probably before), the idea was that truth (objectivity) existed somewhere apart from our bodies. Objective truth was perfect, immutable, and disembodied unlike our imperfect perceptually-derived subjective knowledge--like knowing what it is like to be me.
If you believe in objective truth, you are also likely to embrace mind-body dualism, pansychism, spirits, and divine intervention. If you disavow the objective-subjective dichotomy, you embrace embodied cognition and scientific materialism. Nagel never comes out and says this but I suspect he wanted to.
To learn more about what it is like to be a bat, see https://tomrearick.substack.com/p/bat-decline-increases-human-infant
Intriguing! I like how you linked Nagel's ideas with the historical roots of the objective-subjective divide.
There's something that puzzles me about your point here though -- are you suggesting that believing in objective truth somehow pushes us toward accepting less empirical ideas like panpsychism and divine intervention? I want to make sure I'm understanding your argument correctly here.
I find this fascinating because it seems to challenge my intuitions -- I would have thought that believing in objective truth would align more naturally with scientific materialism. What am I missing here?
You are correct in detecting an irony because all scientists seek Objective Truth. I consider myself a scientific materialist but I disavow the idea of immutable, irrevocable, universal, or absolute truth. I see Objectivism as a way for dualism and spiritualism to creep in the back door of scientific materialism...which is truly ironic. Embodied Cognition and Scientific Materialism are not mutually incompatible. In fact, Embodied Cognition provides a more materialistic explaination of what Truth, knowledge, and meaning are than Objectivism.
Though, I will admit that Objectivism appeals to our emotional needs (see Panksepp's SEEKING). Objectivists may not have access to Objective Truth today but they believe it exists. This makes it a goal worth seeking and feeling of closure even when we have not yet reached it (which we can never do). In this way, science is propelled forward, it replaces old theories with new theories, and it never becomes disheartened by the number of previous theories that were wrong!
Call my alternative position Stablism. I trust stable theories and laws in a skeptical, scientific community...until they aren't stable anymore. Getting to a stable theory or law requires a lot of theory churn. In that world, the best scientists are revolutionaries and not owners and defenders of a claim on Objective Truth.
Interesting! I'm not sure your idea of Stablism is all that different from how science works.
The scientific method is built on the principle of falsification -- we can never prove a theory is absolutely true; we can only prove theories wrong. Scientists hold theories tentatively, always looking for evidence that might disprove them. When theories withstand repeated attempts at falsification, we gain confidence in them -- but we never consider them absolute truths. To me, this seems very similar to your idea of trusting stable theories until they aren't stable anymore. What am I missing?